How much effort would you go to to get a feed subscriber?

Posted by stuart as , , ,

I received an email a couple of months ago from a blogger. The blog was one I’d never heard of, and by the looks of it it was fairly new.

The email was friendly enough, and quite well tailored to me specifically.

The email mentioned a post I’d recently written about my kidney transplant, questioned how that was going, and casually alluded to a couple of other posts I’d recently made, and here’s the kicker:

The blogger asked if I could possibly answer some questions, in interview form, and they’d post the interview on their blog.

I thought to myself, “why not?”, and sat down for half an hour or so writing detailed responses to their questions.

I fired off the email, and subscribed to their feed, and waited to see my interview on their blog.

And waited..

….and waited….

…………….and waited…………

It would seem I had been had.

So this has got me thinking. It seemed like a lot of effort to go to to get a feed subscriber/blog visitor. But was it really?

I’ve been stuck at the same number of feed subscribers for some time now. (just under 100). Nothing I seem to do will make that number take the next jump.

I reckon I could fire off around 50 of those type of emails in a few hours. Personalising them to each blogger, asking them questions, attempting to interact with them. I don’t think I’d even have to offer them an interview or link from my blog. I would guess that at least half of the people I send the email to would subscribe to my feed, as it’s just such a simple thing to do, and we all know it’s about a million times harder to lose a subscriber once you’ve got them, than it is to get them in the first place.

So other than the fact that this blogger wasted about half an hour of my time getting me to answer questions to which the answers were never going to see the light of day, would this be seen as a legitimate way to increase subscriber numbers?

What do you think? Would this be seen as spam, or a geniune attempt to network with other like minded bloggers?

Wikipedia for dumbasses like me

Posted by stuart as

simple.wikipedia.org

Who woulda thunk dumbarses like me had there own wikipeadier!

Is low entry cost a barrier to online success?

Posted by stuart as

I wrote a while ago about the fact that we might struggle to treat our online endeavours as a proper business because the cost of entry is so low.

Let’s take a look at the main costs that any bricks and mortar business must face when starting up:

1. Labour
2. Equipment
3. Infrastructure
4. Marketing
5. Premises
6. Delivery
7. Administration

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but you get the point, right?

Now let’s look at those costs, and how they relate to an internet marketer starting out on their online travails. (I’m aware that you can do this for free if you really want, but let’s assume that you’re even half-way serious about your new online business)

1. Labour - Free! (Of course, you’ll be doing all the work)
2. Equipment - the PC you’re reading this on will do the job nicely. If you don’t have a PC, you can go to the library and use theirs or pick up an old pentium for under $20.
3. Infrastructure - An internet connection, which you probably already have, if not, cheap dialup is good enough
4. Marketing - Free (you can pay for PPC ads if you like, but we’re being cheapo’s here). you’ll be doing your own SEO and marketing through blog comments.
5. Premises - Wherever you lay your hat……
6. Delivery - Web hosting can be had for as little as a couple bucks a month, which is more than adequate for simple blog hosting.
7. Administration - it’s all you baby!

So we’ve worked out that for effectively no startup cost, and spreading your domain name and hosting costs over a year we’re looking at around $3 a month to keep the whole shebang running.

Pretty cheap, huh?

I’ve been letting a lot of domains go over the last twelve months. Most of these were names I’d registered either after a few beers, or late at night when an idea struck me. Some of these domains have never even had the DNS delegated to my server, let alone had any actual HTML on them. These domains cost me about $8 each. If I’d had to pay, say, $50 each for them I:

1. Would have been much less likely to have bought them;
2. Would have tried a damn site harder to at least earn their purchase price back.

The point I’m trying to make here is that were the startup and running costs considerably higher than they are, I’d be mich more likely to put in the work to make some money back.

I wonder whether only allowing myself to “cash the cheque” or spend the money I make online when it reaches a certain level would motivate me to work harder?

Let’s say I can only spend it each time it ticks over $500. I reckon I’d work a bit harder to reach the goal quicker.

What about you?

Now here’s a website ranking tool that would REALLY work

Posted by stuart as

“Akexa rankings suck”

Yep - no doubt that the rankings we get from Alexa are fundamentally flawed, not the least by the ridiculously small sample size used, the fact that demographics are not taken into account (webmasters are apparently more inclined to have the toolbar installed, which will directly correlate to a disproportionately high ranking for technology based sites.)

But I’m damned if i can give up my ridiculous penchant for checking the ranking for a range of my sites each day.

So what would be a good metric to use to externally judge the traffic levels of a particular site? Or, more to the point, who already has in place the network upon which they could simply “switch on” browsing tracking.

Firefox

According to the W3C,  installations of the Firefox web browser have grown consistently to reach 34.0% in June 2007. This has to be the largest (percentage wise) distribution of any toolbar / plugin / browser or anything else I can think of. (Unless Microsoft decided to be truly evil and included it as part of Windows - but there’d be no real benefit to them in doing it)
I understand that technologically-minded users are still more likely to have Firefox installed, but a quick bit of statistical calisthenics could allocate the correct weighting to certain sites.
It would be interesting if the creators of Firefox opened up the discussion on doing something like this - maybe installed by default, with the option to turn the tracking off.

Would you still use Firefox?

More wierd stuff from google

Posted by stuart as , ,

Those of you who are regulars will know that I have a site called textreplace.com, which is a site which offers the following services:

• A typo generator
• A Keyword Injector
• A text multiple search and replace tool
• A randim niche text generator, and
• a text scrambler.

I noticed something whilst going through the logs of this site today - Google is crawling dynamically generated URL’s on this site.

I wrote a while ago about the fact that google is able to crawl and index orphaned pages and directories if there is AdSense code on the pages, but this one struck me as particularly odd.

As is normally the case, the textreplace.com typo generator passes variables to the typo script in the URL, with two variables being passed - the word from which the typos will be generated, and the output format in which they will be delivered, so we end up with a URL something like this:

• http://textreplace.com/typo-generator/typo.php?word=doowadiddy&output=list

…which returns typos based on the word “doowadiddy”, in list format.

The interesting thing is that google is coming in some time after the typo gneration is done, and crawling that exact same URL.

This tells me that not only is the AdSense bot telling the Search bot “Dude, I’ve got this new domain for you to crawl, you better go have a look“, it’s actually saying “Listen mate, I’ve got this shitload of URL’s which have AdSense code on them, here they are, can you crawl them when you get the chance?”

This is interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. Every time someone generates some typos on the site, as far as Google is concerned, I’ve added new content for it to crawl and index, without me lifting a finger.
2. After a while, people will be able to do a site:textreplace.com search in Google to find out what typos people have been generating.

Probably old news to some, but interesting to me all the same.