Blogging - 2/26 - TheWayoftheWeb

A weekend trip…

August 15, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I spent the weekend taking my son to see his grandparents and great-grandparents on my side of the family, and we also managed to get time to check out the Hornby Visitors centre and build some sandcastles on the beach. I’d link to the Hornby site, but it’s showing a fatal error on every page!

All my own work - which is why I don't work in construction

Staying offline for almost two whole days has been rather pleasant, although we did have to jump onto iPlayer to catch up with the latest round of the MotoGP championship on Sunday. But what struck me was the urge to write a blog post about something like ’10 blog tips you can learn from building sandcastles’ or something similarly odd.

Yes, it can grab traffic. Sometimes those types of post can be useful. And sometimes they can be incredibly crass and slightly offensive (need I mention the Huffington Post and the death of Amy Winehouse?).

Maybe the simple lesson is shoehorning every experience into some kind of social media and blogging lesson makes for some crappy blog posts, and I should just focus on the fact it was great to spend time with my family, and have four generations all in one place. There are some real stories in there, which are intensely personal, and I’m not necessarily comfortable in sharing, but they are the ones worth posting.

So maybe I can sneak in a lesson for blogging on a personal or business level – if it feels like you’re kinda, sorta, maybe forcing a post – maybe you should just forget it and do something more valuable?

Buffer

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging

Rethinking how I manage my sites

June 23, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I’ve been pretty busy with client work and my own sites recently – and managed to commit a cardinal sin in forgetting to renew the hosting package on one of my oldest projects, 140char.com.

I still own the domain, which I registered back in 2008 to give me a place to write about Twitter and Microblogging as it started to gain interest from early adopters and a wider audience, and over time I included the likes of Tumblr, Posterous, Plurk, Yammer etc, with whatever insight and analysis I could provide, as well as covering the bigger news stories.

Over time it proved reasonably popular, and a few articles got some great links from prominent bloggers such as Stowe Boyd, and prominent tech sites such as Engadget – but I always saw it as a smaller side project alongside this blog and my day job at the time. Move onto the 2010 and having seen traffic level off, and given the launch of other projects which seemed more viable, I decided to effectively park it for a while, and operated it as just a link blog, reposting everything on the subject which came into my Google Reader via Diigo, while I considered what to do with it, and whether or not to keep it or sell it etc. At the same time, I saw the deserved success of virtual friend Shea Bennett when he launched the far more focused Twittercism, which has now become AllTwitter after acquisition by MediaBistro

Traffic obviously dropped due to the linkposting, to the point where it was steadyish at around 1000 uniques a month, but in terms of priority, it’s dropped below all my client work, this site, and 3 others I’m currently working on… So when the hosting account was coming up for renewal, I planned to transfer it over to my main reseller account, and at the same time, work out the best use of the domain for the future…

And whereas I always set-up all client and current projects with multiple reminders to ensure this never happens, as an older project from the days before I was so diligent, it didn’t have any of that in place.

So the question is what I do with the domain and content now?

And at the same time, it seems like a good chance to re-evaluate all of my websites, profiles and web activity to ensure that I’m practising what I preach when it comes to an effective, efficient and productive internet strategy.

So be prepared for a bit of soul searching over the next couple of days as I review everything I do. And at least I’m not alone in a hosting slip-up, considering Disney managed to forget to renew the Club Penguin domain and leave several million users without a site!

In the process of re-evaluating everything, I’ve also started to tidy up my old accounts on places like Tumblr and Posterous, and start using them with a bit of actual purpose, so if you’re interested in the somewhat esoteric interests I have in cult books, music, films and comics, then you can always see what I’ve been enjoying at http://badgergravling.tumblr.com/.

So the question is whether I pay to just renew my hosting with all the original links intact, and then start transferring everything over to another site with the appropriate 301 redirects to maintain most of the value of the original links, which would be time consuming, but would retain something from the 3 years of posting, and would be generally what I’d do with clients. Or in the interest of time, just nuke my past like Steve Rubel.

Do I set myself up to continue a half-hearted attempt at updating by linkposting for the sake of it, or is there a more valuable use for that domain?

I could probably sell it for a tiny amount, considering that although it has respectable page rank, I’ve never really monetised it effectively.

Or is there another way to utilise it which would mean that it’s providing value to people – considering that Twitter coverage in particular has spread to mainstream traditional news publications?

In the meantime, my current main sites are:

TheWayoftheWeb – you’re here, so should have an idea what I do. Hopefully. But it’s all around freelance digital content, marketing and running that business.

OnlineRaceDriver.com – online race games. Currently growing by over 20% every month, and getting to a good, solid traffic level.

FPSPrestige.com – FPS games – i.e. Call of Duty, Battlefield etc. Far newer, but growing faster than ORD, and again, getting to a decent traffic level already.

MyDpip.com – the site for Digital People in Peterborough. Slightly neglected due to the fact that both of the people originally involved have been a bit distracted recently, but getting a bit of a reboot in the near future.

Jodanma.com – and this is why we’ve both been a bit distracted. As the non-designer in the company, it’s been slightly frustrating to be waiting with a holding page whilst we’ve been working on client projects, but we’re building in some space soon to finish our own site, which will be a relief.

Not a bad tally, even without 140char.com, and without including a few smaller, more experimental ideas…

Buffer

The importance of beating your own drum…

April 20, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

There are certain people I follow on social networks who tend to share things outside of the normal technology, social media, marketing echo chamber, and one of them is Stuart Witts, who’s as likely distribute bizarre Lego creations as digital insight. He recently shared the following video, which sparked some thoughts…

Firstly, that video has been watched almost 10 million times since June 2010 as I write this. 32,000+ people have left comments and 64,000+ people have liked it – and it’s been featured on sites such as the blog of Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet.

So whether or not you think the drummer is talented, funny, or making a fool of himself, it’s proved popular. And you’ll certainly remember him far more than the rest of the band…

Right about now, I’m guessing a fair number of you are thinking about this from a marketing or advertising perspective and wondering ‘How could we do something like that and go viral?’

That’s not the point!!!

Don’t get inspired by that video.

The inspiration comes from the approach of the drummer. He probably didn’t start playing drums with the dream of wearing a gold suit jacket and playing in a cover band. It’s also pretty unlikely that anyone taught him to drum the way he does in the video. And most importantly, he’s not doing it at the expense of the song – he’s hitting all the right beats, and providing the right backing for what is meant to be the chance for the guitarist to shine.

But he’s doing it in his own way, and that’s what makes him worthy of conversation and sharing.

Now picture your industry, content, and marketing:

If those band members were representating your business competitors and their marketing strategies, one brand may have secured the traditionally starring role of the singer/guitarist.

And the rest are probably much like the bass player in the video. Doing the basics, fitting into the perceived look and feel of their industry and peers. Occasionally giving a little flourish, but generally plodding along.

Neither is particular memorable.

But certain brands are able to use their passion, belief and drive to stand out far more than anyone thought possible by doing things in their own way. And that’s what makes a brand memorable, allows people to share it without shame, and encourages people to interact and purchase from it.

But what if they don’t like us?

Now, you may think that the drummer looks like an idiot, and I’m mad to suggest your brand should be twirling drumsticks when it could be providing a nice safe steady beat. Like any £100 drum machine could do.

But that assumes that bland tolerability drives purchases and sharability more than actively loving or hating something.

Far better to have a growing army of people who love what you do, and will passionately hoover up everything you can offer.

Being actively disliked by a large number of people hasn’t stopped the Daily Mail from being the second most popular newspaper website in the world, as sad as that makes me. And it’s built a large number of people who not only like what it does, but pay money to it for that product.

Being actively disliked by some people means that they might be driven enough to explain why they don’t like you, which lets you decide whether to do something about it. And just by responding to them, you can increase your business.

If you don’t run the risk of some people disliking what you’re doing, you’ll never run the risk of being able to be loved by people who are willing to part with their scarce attention and money.

Here’s to the mad drummers.

Buffer

Filed Under: Content Marketing, Digital Culture, marketing, social media marketing, Viral Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, generating loyalty, innovation, marketing, passion, viral video, Writing, youtube

How soon does blogging deliver results?

January 27, 2011 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

One of the first questions that gets asked when blogging is mentioned as a topic is how quickly it will be successful. And the honest answer is impossible to give without several factors which are completely individual to every business. Do you already have a media presence? Can you devote time and resource to creating great content? And most importantly, what consititutes success? Are you looking to drive awareness, engagement, interaction, sales, ad revenue?

But at the same time, it’s handy to have something to benchmark against, and most online comparisons are flakey at best when compared to actual analytics. So I thought I’d share some recent figures for one of my personal projects, OnlineRaceDriver, as it recently celebrated a first anniversary.

: Time by M$$MO on Flickr (CC Licence)

To give some context, OnlineRaceDriver and its new sister site, FPSPrestige, are experiments in extremely niche targetted content, driven partly by a shared passion for videogames by everyone involved, and partly by my desire to be able to build a small media business which allows me to continually experiment and evolve all the digital content and marketing skills any business or client can benefit from. Both are done in the spare time available to me and the other contributors, and the only financial investment has been in paying for hosting and a custom blog design (Both use the now-replaced Metro theme from StudioPress) – they both use WordPress as a free CMS system and PHPBB3 as a free forum solution, with Google Analytics providing measurement above what is available straight away from WordPress.

So, after 12 months of spare time work, how has ORD done?

215 Posts (The biggest sign of the time constraints – ideally it should be a lot more!)
204 Comments (Just under one comment per post isn’t too bad..)
46,831 Page Views (Could have been more with a little more focus on high traffic posts and promotion)
30,705 Unique Visitors (Again, this is an area where we probably could have done a lot more with more time)
1,100+ Youtube Views (This is all from press release videos, and is a somewhat painful process a lot of the time!)
59 Facebook Fans (The biggest challenge here is that Facebook Notes is increasingly broken, requiring manual updates which sometimes get forgotten!)
Cited as a reference source on Wikipedia (One of the nicest recent developments has been that someone working on Wikipedia has started referencing some of our breaking news on the site)

In terms of monthly figures, in the first month of ORD we had:

334 Visits
713 Page Views
205 Unique Visitors

And 12 months later, and with 5 more days to go in January, we’ve had:

4,175 Visits (Up 1,150%)
5,352 Page Views (Up 650%)
3,678 Unique Visitors (Up 1,694%)

1000% growth for something in a very experimental and low-key first 12 months isn’t too bad. Good enough that FPSPrestige launched and has achieved slightly better figures in its first month.

There’s no real conclusion here – in terms of success, both sites are around where I expected and hoped in the first 12 months, and all the graphs are ‘up and to the right’, so I’m happy there’s a lot more to come, even as I roll out more features (The forums for both sites have just launched, for example).

: The queue to join the new forums (Image by Gematrium on Flickr – CC Licence)

But as a simple guide – if as a small business with no budget, you could do something which puts your brand in front of 4000+ relevant people every month in exchange for some time, that could really start to change things. If you leveraged all the connections you have, that could change things a bit more. Through in some relevant promotion, and that moves it on further…

I recently scared myself when I realised that across this site and the other 3 or 4 main sites I’m playing with in my spare time, one bloke at his kitchen table now reaches over 10,000 people and growing every month.And with constant attention and improvement that number will hopefully keep growing. Of course, 10, 20, or 500,000 visitors might make a ‘successful’ website, but it doesn’t make a successful business… That’s another piece of the puzzle…

Buffer