Retro Yakking

Since it’s kind of an unofficial EntreCard butt-kissing day, I thought I’d share with you some of my thoughts on this relatively new blog publicity tool. A couple of months ago I suggested an EntreCard beginner’s strategy over at my other blog, but since I’m not really updating that these days I thought I’d post a follow-up here instead.

Relative success

Entrecard has brought me 3900 unique hits in January and 3700 so far in February. Well, it has been a shorter month - a few more days and no doubt that figure would have easily surpassed the January total.

This is due, in part, to my increased use of the advertising function in February. Since the end of December, I concentrated on dropping on other blogs to collect as many credits as possible with which to advertise, without really knowing exactly what I was going to do with them.

I came to the conclusion that an EntreCard credits contest would be a bit out of place on this blog, and I’m not really a fan of entering competitions in general: there is a low probability that any prosperity at all will result, and I’d rather be writing informative blog posts.

The strategy

So, when I came across a suggested advertising strategy at Turnip of Power, I thought I would put those credits to good use.

The beauty of this method, however, meant that I didn’t actually need to have many credits to spare to get started with it: credits earned from dropping 300 cards a day in addition to another 100 or so received from drops back would most likely have been sufficient. This makes it ideal for any level of user, even if you can’t always manage the 300 a day max.

I will not completely repeat the details of strategy in this post (you can read Turnip’s whole post here), but it basically involves making effective use of the 2EC blogs in combination with a few other advertising tips I’ve picked up along the way via experience:

• Don’t be afraid to buy the 2EC advertising slots. You may think these are useless, but if you buy up, say, forty (Cost: 80EC, not even a third of a day’s dropping), I’ll bet this will earn you at least fifteen reciprocal drops from blog owners and maybe a few advertising hits here and there if you’re lucky.
• Skim through the low cost blogs in the directory, ordering the cards by most popular. Look for and buy ones that have a high popularity rating compared to their price. For 4EC, 25+; 8 EC, 50+; 16EC, 100+; 32, 250+.
• And of course, regularly check for the newest blogs. EntreCard check and accept submissions in batches, meaning you may get about six or nine new blogs appearing within about 20 minutes of each other. If you can, snap these up at a cost of 2, 4 or 8EC - they’re more than worth the price if you can catch them cheap.

It’s worth repeating that the popularity rating given on the top right corner of the cards only represents how much coverage that blog is getting within the EntreCard network, when the actual popularity could be much higher, or even minimal outside EntreCard.

Statistics

As EntreCard members are prone to repeating, it’s all a numbers game. The graph above shows that, although the numbers fluctuate, there has been a gradual increase in advert clicks over the course of the month.

A nice side effect is that you get a few extra drops back, too. Since I began advertising extensively, I have found that the average number of drops on my blog per day has increased by a couple of hundred. This means an extra 200 points per day to spend on advertising, give away in blog contests, or whatever you like.

Image by Sammy0716 on Flickr.

“Wikpedia” is one of the most searched for words on the Internet. “Yet it does not exist!” I hear you scream, and you’d be correct. This is an example of a search term that’s based on a mistype, from which there’s huge rewards to be had for webmasters.

OK, I’ll come clean. This post is a Search Engine Optimisation article in disguise, and a case study of how I managed to get my crummy Geocities website to the top of a Google result page using Wikipedia and a deliberate spelling error.

The boring-ish background

A few years ago I created a research website for a college project. It was meant to be a low-maintenance site, one that I uploaded and left as an archive of my work on the internet. It has not been updated for three years and yet it still gets at least eight hits per day. This may perplex you somewhat, but read on and learn why this happens.

First of all, my site contained excerpts of text, otherwise undocumented on the internet, from a number of publications. When I came across Wikipedia in 2005, I thought I would help out by adding a sentence or two to the page on my website’s subject, using the secondary sources on my website. Of course, Wikipedia requires the addition of a reference for each piece of information added, so I included a link to my website in the appropriate section of the article.

Expand the knowledge base and get noticed at the same time

If you have a highly niche blog, then it is likely you might be the original reporter of certain news stories. Whilst Wikipedia frowns upon original research, if the references you add are embellished with genuine links to reputable news sites, it adds an element of respectability to the article.

Wikipedia is full of niche articles, maintained by hardcore fans and armchair experts. If you notice that a particular article is missing or currently unmonitored, then you may choose to create, adopt or expand it with your knowledge of the subject. If you are canny, you can use your blog as reference and gain an extra top ten Alexa linkback.

Don’t tell Jimmy Wales I said that…

Quick tip: put links to your blog on your own Wikipedia userpage. In fact, you could do pretty much anything to promote your content here, as long as it is vaguely related to you and your interests.

Making an ‘impresion’

Remember, I did tell you that my website’s relative success was twofold… and I haven’t yet told you about my most successful method of traffic generation. Well, I kind of did earlier. I made a spelling error in the title of one of the pages, shooting it to the top of the Google rankings of any search for the term, which was a common mis-spelling.

The mistake was semi-intentional, as it was a genuine error that stayed on the site for a few months. I only noticed it when I was looking through my traffic statistics and spotted that my glorious error was almost overloading my Geocities free site bandwidth with page requests. Not bad for a little website, eh?