Mark W. Shead

A week ago I sat down and decided to see what type of traffic is generated by having a link from John Chow.  I posted a bunch of comments and made it to the top commentator’s list where I remained for a week.  At the end of the week, I had a total of 48 visitors from JohnChow.com.  Most of them came from the main page.  47 came to my front page.  The other probably followed a deep link from the review John did of www.productivity501.com.

I was actually surprised at how low the numbers were.  With a paid review and a sitewide link in the sidebar and a link on a bunch of comments, there were only 48 clicks.  I’m curious how many unique visitors John gets in a week.  I haven’t been able to find it in any of his posts, so I’m guessing it isn’t very high.

John is doing an excellent job of marketing his blog and revealing just the information that will help him become more popular.  It will be very interesting to see if he can keep this up to the point that the blogs popularity becomes on par with the image he is projecting.

There is quite a bit to learn from watching his site and most of it isn’t showing up in the posts.

Leadership501 is a site full of articles about leadership. I created it to be a reference for people looking to improve their leadership skills.  I have found that much of the current leadership writing either focuses on being inspirational or very theoretical, so my goal is to try to create something that is practical and useful.  Something along the lines of “Here is how to handle situation X and why you should handle it that way.”

Today I ran across a blog with a post that was linking to the site with some good things to say about one of my articles.  Jason says he liked my article enough that he read the entire thing.  I’m glad he liked it because when I was writing that particular article I remember thinking, “This is pretty long.  I wonder if anyone will actually read the whole thing?”  I decided that even if no one read it I need to write it for myself.

In his post he makes some good points about setting goals and walks the reader through his goal setting process.  It is worth reading.  I like where he said that in the initial stage the only “rule” is that if he thinks it, he writes it down. Anyway it is worth a read and his blog is one I’ll be adding to my RSS feeder.

Gary Lee (www.mrgarylee.com) is running a workstation contest for people who work from home, so I thought I’d enter my photo of the work area I had setup in Mexico. (My current desk is undergoing the tax season and newborn baby insurance bill attack, so it will probably be a few weeks before I see my entire desktop again).

Anyway if you click on the photo you’ll get a bigger version and a longer description. Basically this was the setup I used when we were in Mexico. There is a cable modem behind the monitor and all of our voice and data ran through that connection. On the desk are two cell phones. One is a Blackberry with the voice part forwarded to our Vonage phone line. I used it for email. The second is a phone our friends loaned us that had a local Mexican number.

I don’t know that my workstation on the little plastic table will win any awards in the US, but for a place to work full time in our bedroom, it worked out great.  I’m a big fan of large monitors so the 24 inch flatpanel was almost a necessity. I was a little worried about being able to take it into Mexico.  If the custom’s officials thought it was a flat panel TV, I could of had a problem.  I had it packed in a large monitor bag that was designed for carrying around the big iMac.  It worked out well because the officials didn’t even try to look in the bag.

One problem I had with this setup was the folding chair I was using.  It was slightly bend so three or four times a day it would just collapse.  I’d generally catch myself before I ended up on the floor, but it kept me on my toes.  I must say that my trusty leather desk chair that I’m back to using in the US is very welcome.

Amazon has launched an open beta of their contextual ads.  You install a piece of javascript at the bottom of your HTML page and it  will create links from words in your text to amazon products.  When you mouse over the links it shows you a preview of the product.  Clicking on the link takes you to the product page.

Here are a few initial thoughts:

1. The links look like regular links.  They aren’t the double underlines that other inline ad links use. This might cause some confusion because users can’t tell what ads are actually in your text and which ones came from Amazon (until they are moused over).
2. You have the ability to determine the maximum number of ads per page to tailor things for your audience.
3. The ads don’t show up immediately.  You Amazon has to scan your page first kind of like the Google Adsense Bot.
4. Some of the ads don’t seem particularly well targeted. They match the word, but not necessarily the meaning.  For example a page about cell phone batteries had an ad linking to a fiction book with the words batteries in the title.

All in all it looks like a decent way to monetize some content, but I’m concerned about the confusion for the users.  They may not look at any of your links once they have  clicked on a few and discovered that they are links to Amazon.

I have been reading John Chow for awhile. I can’t even remember how I originally found his site, but he is quite good at generating a community.

In February ReviewMe was having a 50% off sale. Normally they split their revenue with the blogger, but for February they were giving up their half. I had a contest I was running at www.productivity501.com to try to get some feedback, more readers and some inbound links. Since I was specifically targeting bloggers, I though John’s site would be a good place to advertise. After all, many of his readers were there because they reviewed John’s site in exchange for a linkback. I decided to go ahead and pay the $125 review fee and see what would happen.

The day the review went live, I got a modest spike in traffic as shown below:

So I got an extra 500 visitors which wasn’t anything too dramatic. A nice boost to be sure, but very temporary. However there was something else going on:

Notice that while the JohnChow post sent me 12.24% of my traffic, in the same period downloadsquad.com sent 19.51%. The DownloadSquad traffic was from a comment I left on one of their pages just as it was getting popular in Digg. My comment went live 3 to 5 hours after John’s review. The DownloadSquad post ended up getting about 600 Diggs, so it was popular, but not one of the bigger stories of the day.

Now another question is which site gave the most value over the long term. So if we look at Visits by Source from Feb 28 thorugh March 22:

So in the period of almost a month, John Chow sent me 284 visitors and DownloadSquad sent 418. The 284 visitors from John Chow cost $125. The DownloadSquad traffic was free.

Oh and the traffic from JohnChow was probably overstated slightly because I also comment on his site, so some of the visitors could have been from my comments. (Right now I’m listed in his top commentators links because on a whim I decided to see what type of traffic that would produce–not much.)

Now there were some differences in the traffic, John’s readers visited an average of 2.5 pages each visit. DownloadSquad readers only visited 1.3. However the real thing that would matter is conversions–how many people decided to review my site and enter the contest. I don’t know exactly where everyone came from, but it wasn’t many.
The contest hasn’t taken off as I had hoped, but that is ok because I’m using the data to help me refine the way I do contests. I was hoping for John’s review to spark a bunch of reviews in his readers. I think I made a mistake in matching my contest to my audience. John Chow readers do have blogs, but are focused on making money online. They are not necessarily writers, so a contest that is based on their writing skills isn’t necessarily appealing to them. They think “others can write better reviews than me, I shouldn’t even try.” A contest that targets their linking “skills” would probably be more appealing and attract a larger audience.

I am considering modifying the contest to try to make it rely less on quality writing to see if that helps. (The contest lets me change the terms if we haven’t reached 150 reviews by the end of the month.) I’m also working on getting some traffic from a larger blog that seems to cater more to people who like to write.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about John’s review. He did a good job. I’ve just learned a little more about how to refine my audience targeting and I’d rather do that with a $125 investment than a $5000 one.
John is very good at marketing. He is pushing the fact that he is in the top 100 of Technorati as making a link from his blog very valuable. I guess it might be if you have a brand new PR 0 site, but even with a link on his sidebar today sent me only 14 visitors (so far it is 9pm). This is the same number of visitors I received from a small blog I’ve never heard of that happened (and definitely isn’t in the Technorati 100) to linked to one of my stories this morning.

John’s expertise is at trading people something that costs him very little in exchange for something that is worth a lot to him. For example, putting the top commentators on his blog is pretty inexpensive. He markets it as something that really helps the bloggers promote their own blogs. For him, it keeps people rabidly commenting on his posts. (I know because I sat down and wrote about 75 comments yesterday evening just to see how much traffic it would send.)

Basically what John has done is created all the impressions of where he wants to be:

• Reviews and links from a bunch of different blogs - by offering a “valuable” link back in one of his posts.
• Massive amounts of comments - by offering a “valuable” link in the sidebar.
• Being listed as a top 100 blog - by getting incoming links and manipulating Technorati. I would expect a top 100 blog to have more than 3779 RSS readers.

By creating an image of what he wants his blog to be, he will probably achieve it. He likes to call this “being evil”, I would call it “being smart”. I see people on his blog moaning that they don’t have the money to pay John for a review ($500 as we speak) because they think it would really help their blog take off. It probably wouldn’t. They can get more traffic just by being quick to comment on Dugg stories.

So what do I think of my $125 investment in a John Chow review? From a traffic standpoint it was a flop. From a conversion standpoint it was a flop. From an educational standpoint, it was a bargain.

By the way, if you are interested in an iPod Shuffle, you should consider entering the contest.

Michael Gray has an interesting, but very un-informative post about how to change your thumbnail on You Tube.  Basically he tells everyone that it can be changed, you need a stopwatch, but he doesn’t tell anyone how.  In the comments he specifically says that he doesn’t want to tell anyone how to do it because he wants to “teach a man to fish”.

I subscribed to he blog the other day because I thought he might have something to say that might be useful and actually save me some time.

For anyone trying to figure out how to change your Youtube Thumbnail, this is what you can find from his video.  The thumbnail image occurs at 37 to 32 seconds from the end of the video. The video is 66 seconds long, so there are three possibilities:

1. You  Tube grabs a frame between 29 and 34 seconds from the beginning of the video.
2. You Tube grabs a frame 37 to 32 seconds from the end of the video.
3. You Tube grabs the center frame of the video.

I would guess option 3 which would explain the extra second of staring at the camera on his video.

A much more helpful post reaches the same conclusion here.

If this is the case you should be able to add a single frame to You Tube to control the thumbnail.  It might even be short enough that it wouldn’t even show up in the video. (Of course you’d need to get something more accurate than a stop watch. )

Shawn from www.zoomstart.com left a comment here so I went and checked out his site.  It is definitely worth a read.  He covers a range of topics.  His discussion of how search engines implode, was an interesting read.  I particularly liked the post about how to make 300% return buying cereal. It reminded me of the guy who tried to turn in a bunch of Pepsi UPC symbols for a Harrier Jet.

Anyway, Zoomstart is worth checking out and possibly including in your RSS reader.  I definitely added it to mine.

I’ve been running a contest at Productivity501 to give away an iPod Shuffle. In the next few weeks I’m going to have a guest post over at Problogger.net that talks about how to run blog contests–especially on small blogs where the goal is to get more readers.

I’ve started getting emails from other people running contests to let me know about their giveaways as well.  Brock from Existential Ventures is giving a way a printer to his readers. You have to join his MyBlogLog community.  I haven’t done anything with MyBlogLog, but it looks like it might be a good way to run a contest.

The ideal contest is one where you reward people for reading your blog.  Normally you don’t have any way to see exactly who is reading your blog and no way to contact a winner.  That is why most competitions make you leave a comment, signup for an e-newsletter, or something else that will give the blog your email address.  I’m going to have to look into MyBlogLog as a way to run contests.

Good luck to Broc on his contest.  I hope it works out well for him.

Google has gained prominence by offering services for free.  They are now making use of the same infrastructure to offer business class services.  For $50 per year you can get a 10Gb email account.  That will hold a whole lot of email.

Along with their online wordprocessor and spreadsheet, this could be a pretty compelling option for small businesses.  If your staff never uses 75% of the features in Microsoft Word, the online Google versions are going to be pretty attractive.