So I should be upfront, this post is more about the way of thinking for your sites advertisements as opposed to straight up tips and advice to get more visitors. Two reasons for this, obviously every website is different, with different content and different target markets and all advice should be tailored to the individual needs of that website. The second and more important reason this article is more philosophy, over facts is that finding and checking facts is really hard and takes a lot of work and like most webmasters I have an adverse reaction to hard work. So I could write another whole article on efficiency (although that would be more effort again) but given a choice between a philosophical diatribe that will change your (the reader) life, or another bland list of tips requiring vast amounts of effort and time and I think you will see the decision is clear.

So having aired my dirty laundry and given you the mistaken impression that I am lazy and don’t really care I am actually going to start and try to provide some insight for you. I was thinking of going into political speech and writing a 2000 word donut. It looks good on face value, leaves you mildly satisfied but after further thought you realise its hollow inside. Despite the fact I have been doing exactly that for close to three paragraphs now I am going to stop and discuss your website, well not exactly YOUR website but personal websites for webmasters.

Back on topic (“finally” I hear you all say) but the number trillion is an amazingly huge number. I know this is obvious but if you really consider that a trillion $1 bills stacked upon each other would stretch one quarter of the distance to the moon or 67,866 miles. Now consider each one of these as a website and its obvious why pages on your site would be so easily missed by the majority of the internet world and it becomes clear why search engines and social bookmarking have been so successful.

Usually the advice here is to make your site “stand out” from the crowd yada, yada, yada. But if your site does not “stand out” or offer a point of difference than your site is obsolete and adding to the garbage pile that is unused websites online. So assuming your site stands out, or at least competes on some level as to have a purpose, you need to attract visitors. But instead of broad, sweeping methods to attracting visitors, many of whom have no interest and will provide no value to your website, you need to be specific (a good analogy to use is the dating scene which I am an expert at). Now when looking for a partner (long term not this one night stand crap, think visitors to your site) your personal traits (website) play an important role. A devout christian would obviously be well advised to look for partners in their congregation or other christian groups. Someone who loves to party and go out would be well advised to look for a partner at a night club. And someone who hates going out, hates crowds, hates most people like me, can look for partners on the internet. On a side note my casual search has resulted in many offers of marriage (because I am such a catch obviously) from women all across the world. Currently Oksana and Tatiana are vying for my love but I have to organise immigration details and pay some sort of fee, I assume its a Russian family thing.

Obviously I am not discounting the effectiveness of targeted paid advertising and the rewards of great search engine rankings. But these are not the only ways to get some quality visitors to your site. From experience the ones who comment on my post, buy my products and share my material are the visitors that I have personally gone out and found. This may not be the best approach for many types of websites but when in my case you are looking to build a community, not those communities in the deserts where the patriarch has several partners (although if there are 10-20 beautiful women looking for this type of community please contact me because I will see what we can do), but a community of core contributors through discussion makes good information, great.

So what kind of visitors do you want, and what type does your website need? Spending some time on related forums and blogs and building proper relationships like the one I have with Oksana, and the rewards can be great. It can be another issue of quality over quantity where a strong relationship with one visitor may result in them buying several of your products and become more profitable than 100 random visitors to your site. Also not to be underestimated is the security such visitors provide to you as a webmaster. Often all your work can seemingly go unnoticed and unappreciated and a few comments from your regulars can really boost your self-esteem and confidence although personally I have never had such issues, especially with Tatiana by my side, oops I mean Oksana.

So if your website is lost amongst the other trillion web pages online, consider refocusing your goals from making your site stand out to millions of internet users and apply some time and effort to headhunting quality visitors to your site. The rewards are small to begin with but there is a snowball effect with this type of marketing, particularly if you do it correctly because your initial visitors will become long term contributors (in the right environment) and may also be able to successfully promote your site depending on your individual circumstances. So the question now becomes…will you be my friend? You can have dinner one night with me and Oksana. Pleasssseeee?????

Because of my planning and filing systems which involve me trying to remember things off the top of my head and searching through scribbled A4 pages through the trash I completely forgot about the experiment I started. To be fair (or to make a poor excuse) the guest post was published 4 months after I submitted it. The original details and ideas behind the experiment can be found here.

So I can here you all say “with your amazing abilities as a writer and wonderful personality, not to mention your sporting accomplishments and devilish good looks, how many times did your server crash?”. Well the short answer to that is that it didn’t crash not even once. Obviously I suspect there was some sort of catastrophic world-wide communications failure that meant my post went by almost unnoticed, but still I thought it would be interested to look at the stats.

Results

• Published: May 12
• Traffic: 27 visitors
• Pages: 2.7
• Time on Site: 3:21
• Bounce Rate: 37.04%

Conclusion

Well for a site that has 40,000+ RSS readers, 27 visitors is extremely disappointing. However considering the article took me probably half hour to do and that the visitors bounce rate was lower and the time spent on my site were much higher than normal, suggests that guest post is a step in the right direction to try and build the community around the blog.

I guess the question that is most important is not “were the results expected achieved” but rather “was it worth the effort” and in that case definitely. Partly because I got two articles on this site out of the effort, and also learnt some useful lessons along the way, and partly because I may have a few possible long term readers. Also any efforts I make online are never a waste of time because it all becomes a catalog of my achievements and profound knowledge which historians will be able to study centuries from now.

Where to from Here?

Well fear not faithful readers, many of whom probably found this article via the search engines and have no intention of ever returning, but I am already in the process of writing another masterpiece to test out this guest posting gig further. My thinking is that the article I wrote previously, whilst solid in terms of factual and useful information, was poorly constructed and lacked any personality or more importantly any reason to check out my other post here at Scribblescratch. Once a large number of people see my unbelievably likable personality through my uncanny ability to manipulate letters into words and sentences that tell a story, the likes of which has not been seen since Shakespeare, my business decision to get three dedicated servers will finally begin to pay off.

Hi Sean,

I just want to say thankyou for revealing all your secrets that allowed you to earn $130,235 in just six months from scratch. I find it hard to believe that you will let me earn 130K and all I have to do is give you $37. You only have to sell 3519 copies to make your money’s worth and together, us 3519 lucky webmasters will earn 458 million dollars. I can’t believe no one else is tapping this exponential market. I read that you are only going to sell 1,000 copies though and it must mean that the market is only worth 130 million dollars, which is still pretty good.

But I wonder if you realise that you will receive $37,000 for all the hard work of writing, promoting and customer service efforts by selling your ebook. This is just over 1/3 of your income from 6 months work, starting from scratch and one would assume with a 130 million dollar market there is plenty of room for you to grow. Also I noticed you spent time and effort on 3 extra bonuses for people who buy your product because $37 outlay is too much to be earning $260,000 a year. Judging by your video all this extra work has led to heaps of extra stress which has resulted in some binge-eating and poor decision making including using the devil as your inspiration for facial hair style. Perhaps instead of making the videos and providing the bonuses you should spend some of your immense wealth on a dietitian, personal trainer and a stylist. I heard from a guy that personal trainers work miracles and thus you can kill two birds with one stone this way, by improving your fitness and health, as well as some filling up your religous miracle quota.

Anyway you use 5 testimonials from people who must be now as successful as you and I was wondering if you need a 6th person? Particular since the third guy is either on the train, is the train or most likely some sort of transformer from the planet Cybertron. I assume he is an Autobot because you would not hang around the bad guys that the Decepticons are. Even though the other guys don’t have links or any real evidence to being real people or more importantly successful people I take your word that they are, after all there is no reason to lie about $130,235. Most people don’t like to mention how much money they make its one of those funny social conventions, but not you you mention your earnings like 3 times telling it like it is. Bam, there it is in the thread title, BAM again in bold red letter on the header of your page and BAM!! again just after in a screenshot you provide. You go man! Problem is I don’t really have $37 to spend on your videos (even though I understand i will be earning 260K in 12 months) and would prefer too if they could be in ebook format. No offence but staring at a fat guy talking into his camera for 3 hours doesn’t sound all that exciting unless we randomly break out into hot dog eating contest. I reckon you could easily knock down 10 in a couple of minutes which would be an awesome achievement, but you still probably wouldn’t beat that little Japanese guy he can really hoover them down.

Best of luck in your ebook sales and if you need another testimonial just send me a copy of the ebooks.

Sincerely

Adam Diver

I have a friend who has written a 1500 page novel, edited it countless times and is now trying to get it published. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with his dedication and patience to complete such an enormous task. As a blogger I am lucky to have enough patience and dedication to read all my emails without being sidetracked with something else. An analogy of blogging I often use is the primary school classroom. The authors and novelist are sitting on the bean bag in the corner quietly reading their books and us bloggers are running around the room, screaming, hitting other kids, throwing toys, opening drawers, and frustrating the hell out of the teacher. So how does a blogger overcome this inherent ADD issue. The answer is setting short term goals.

A lot of bloggers write about the importance of goal setting. Most of this time is spent really emphasising long term goals and the introspective search required to create these goals. And this is an important part of the blogging process. If you have no long term goals you can quickly lose perspective and purpose and your blog quickly collapses into mish-mash of random thoughts.

Many bloggers also write about medium and short term goals as well. Setting targets that make logical steps to help you reach your long term goals. But even these goals are too vague and too lofty for the ADD blogger. We need a new goal setting strategy that will keep us in our seats long enough to avoid being distracted by that squirrel in the tree outside. I call them Micro-term goals (micro-goals) and I use them religiously.

A micro-goal has to be so short and so succinct that the only way to not achieve the goal is to make the conscious effort of not completing it. Because of the scope of the goal, lifestyle pressures should no longer be a factor in achieving (or not achieving) your goals. In fact micro-goals are so short-term that I would write out new goals every day and in some instances several times a day. So if you want to accomplish something tangible in your day as opposed to checking your AdSense stats every 5 minutes, here are some guidelines to setting up useful micro-goals:

The goal can not take more than a day to complete.

Obviously its not a micro goal if it takes longer than a day, but it becomes open to failure if you have to sleep on it. Instead break up the goal into several micro goals, half to do one day the other half the next day. Your chances of successfully completing your goal increase dramatically.

Has to be specific

No more vague goals, no more “I will write three articles today”, “I will make 10 forum post” or “I will comment on 10 blogs”. Be as specific as you possibly can. This does require a bit of research though. I will use the first quote as the example here: “I will write three articles today”. If you don’t know what your articles will be written on your first and only goal for the day should read “I will think of three article ideas in one hour and write some quick notes”. After you complete this task you then reset your goals. I will write article 1 in x hours. I will write article 2 in x hours. I will write article 3 in x hours. You have now made a vague short term goal into 4 specific easily measured micro-goals.

Should be written down at the start of every day

The keywords here are “written down”. Don’t just have a list of goals in your head. Despite the fact you probably won’t remember the goals it is far easier to ignore a goal that is not written down. Top personal growth experts always recommend sharing your goals with friends and family to add extra motivation on yourself. Obviously you don’t need to share the mundane details of your daily blogging life to friends and family, but you must consciously acknowledge to yourself the goals you have set for yourself.

The other reason why its so important to write them out at the start of the day is subconscious thinking. In exams its is recommended to read through all the questions first before you start answering any. Why? Because your brain will subconsciously process this information (come up with answers) the whole time during your exam. The same can apply with your micro-goals. Writing them down in the morning has you subconsciously working on them the entire day.

Must complete start to finish
Every goal you set must be completed from start to finish. This shouldn’t be too difficult if you set your goals properly because they should be so specific that you can’t really stop half-way. Despite that this is a rule you should not break. Do not go jumping from goal to goal, starting all and completing none. Micro-goals are designed to keep you focused for short periods of time and maximise your chances of actually completing some of your goals.

So put away your blogging Ritalin and just focus on setting yourself micro-goals every day. Each simple goal you reach is a step in the right direction for you and your blog and will ultimately bring you closer to realising your long-term goals. To maximise the effectiveness you really need it to become a habit of your daily blogging (or life) and your day will be filled with achievement as opposed to disappointment. So set yourself a short-term goal to set micro-goals every day for the next week and reap the benefits.

1. Post Reviews

We all know of reviews and have probably heard a hundred times to do a website, business or product review when you can’t think of anything to write about. But something I often do is an post review. This isn’t “the post was good because…” or anything as trivial and pointless as that. Its probably best to review a post of the most respected bloggers in your niche as this will have the side effect of linking to quality content and building a relationship with important bloggers. Every post on the Internet, no matter how well its written and how extensive it is will raise further questions in the minds of the readers.

Let me give you an example. Say a blogger writes a post about 10 tips to help you improve something. Generally the detail is fairly light in these type of posts. So its a safe bet that the readers will think of some if not all of the following questions:

• Are there any more tips that can help?
• Which tips are the most important?
• How exactly can I implement some of these tips?
• Why, do these tips help me improve?
• What does the blogger know that makes these tips valid?
• I could keep adding more questions but I think you get the point.

So if you read a quality post you can simply brainstorm the questions it raises in your own mind, then write a post answering these question. Be sure you include a link to the post to give your post some context. Easy, quality content that builds a relationship with a respected blogger, you can’t do much better than that.

2. News

When I say news I am not referring to just your industry specific news. That is an obvious source of new content where you can simply republish news that is related to your niche. I am speaking of the more generic prime-time variety of news. Whilst it may not be completely relevant to your niche it only requires a small amount of imagination to make a connection. In my case I could make the following post from the news at the moment:

• The war in the middle east = the search engine wars
• The dog that went missing and was found years later = finding old content and re purposing it.
• The winter Olympics = achieving gold with your blog (or another 100 possible post)

Its not hard to think of heaps of ideas this way. Personally I like to include the prelude to the post when writing it, it gives more context to your post and helps your readers relate to what you are proposing.

3. Ebooks

Most of the best bloggers offer a free ebook as bait to subscribe to their site. These ebooks are usually unbelievably good and packed full of useful information and tips. However they are also very lengthy and as such much of the incredible information gets largely unseen. Normally when I read an ebook, I have notepad open and jot down points that interest or can help me as I go along. Remembering 20 key-point and messages is far easier and more effective then remembering 200 pages of content. But for the purpose of this post you should use this same tactic to find plenty of great post ideas from one ebook.

Recently I read an ebook on boosting your adsense profits which included really interesting and useful passages including adsense mistakes, best adsense blocks, and the growth of video ads. In future I may re-write and add to these passages to create new post for this blog which my readers will appreciate. Of course its important to give credit to the original author and try not to just copy and paste the information you want to maintain your voice throughout all your post and give your particular perspective on the information.

4. Your Life

Similar to using news for post in your blog, you should not underestimate how interesting your life actually is. If you have kids they are an unbelievable source of information as you watch them learning the world that surrounds them. But kids are not the only ones who learn something new every day. The benefit of this type of writing is that you also get to tell your readers a little bit more about yourself and build trust with them as they begin to know you the person, not just you the blogger. This type of trust builds loyalty, repeat traffic and ultimately sales.

Don’t worry I am going to provide you without some examples of this lateral thinking technique. Its only 9:30am as I am writing this and so far its been a fairly inane day for me but I can think of a couple of post ideas still.

• I woke up late but had luckily organised everything I need for today, last night = How proper organisation allows you to be an effective blogger. I could write a number of tips of how to organise a blogging schedule and the importance of being organised in becoming an effective blogger.
• I have had to communicate with several older members of our society (which has been difficult) so far today = How to effectively communicate with all your readers not just your clones. I could explain several communication barriers faced by potential readers including using jargon, small text, jokes, and images and explain the negative impact this could have on your readers.

5. Things you would like to learn

Last item on this list may also be the most beneficial for you as an individual. It doesn’t matter how much you know about any subject if you give it some thought, I bet there is hundreds of things you would like to learn about your subject. Well as a blogger its a perfect opportunity to make the effort and learn something new because not only will you grow as a person you will get some great content out of it as well. Once you embark on your learning experience the post takes care of itself. “What I learned about…”, “My experiment on” and “My X Journey” are some simple templates you can use for this type of post.

So you really have no excuse to run out of ideas for post. It takes a little bit of lateral thinking but there is an amazing number of different post you can potentially write if you want to be a little creative. This list only covers the more unique ways to come up with post ideas and does not include the standard list, interviews, resources etc, that you hear every where else. If you consider them as well you have enough ideas for posts to last you a lifetime.

If you have any other unique tips for coming up with post ideas please let everyone know in the comments below. We will all grow as bloggers this way.

Whilst moderating these comments I have noticed trends with spammers trying to get their links published on my site. Some are plain stupid, some are completely irrelevant to the site and some are copied and pasted across many sites. I think the funniest part of the following list is all of these comments have been collected from my site within the last 14 days only. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences and I expect some more classic comments added in my own comment section below (don’t worry I will approve these ones).

So here are the top 10 Dumbest Blog Comments:

1. Huh?

Does this type of comment ever work? I doubt any moderator would even publish it, but say if it does get published, who will click on the link? And if they click on the link they get taken to a site that doesn’t exist. So whats the point?

bAHKuh pzavtjgqropq, [url=http://apxveswqcfdy.com/]apxveswqcfdy[/url], [link=http://gqcobwczfhtp.com/]gqcobwczfhtp[/link], http://vhlrmwvzfcec.com/

2. Do what I say

Most advertisers ask politely for business but not this commenter. Reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I keep thinking the last line will read “watch it or I will blow your brains out”.

Watch this video online or download it:
[url]http://youtubelink.info/angelina[/url]
Enjoy it.

3. Flattery will get you everything

Except a comment on my blog. I particularly like the tangent the commenter takes that leads to nowhere. Perhaps a legitimate comment that just sounds like spam?

Hi – really good website you have made. I enjoyed reading this posting. I did want to publish a comment to tell you that the design of this site is very aesthetically pleasing. I used to be a graphic designer, now I am a copy editor for a marketing firm. I have always enjoyed working with computing machines and am attempting to learn computer code in my free time (which there is never enough of lol).

4. Huh? Oh the shotgun approach.

Similar to the first comment this one doesn’t follow a whole lot of logic. I think this is my favorite comment with the keyword stuffing of 4 different opportunities mixed with letters, numbers and characters (like a good password).

ine casino kah reliastar life insurance 952418 health insurance gshx home insurance =-(((

5. Specific Flattery

Perhaps the commenter has a better chance of their link being published if they add links to my own blog several times. Completely unnecessary as I would have approved the comment based on the sage advice they provide “There is not much to state except the following universal truth: Stuff happens, then more stuff happens. Stuff will continue to happen until stuff stops happening.”

I am to a great extent impressed with the article I have just read. I wish the author of http://www.scribblescratch.com can continue to provide so much worthwhile information and unforgettable experience to http://www.scribblescratch.com readers. There is not much to state except the following universal truth: Stuff happens, then more stuff happens. Stuff will continue to happen until stuff stops happening. I will be back.

6. Everyone likes list

Keyword stuffing in comments don’t work as you can see above. But perhaps if I create a nice looking list of completely unrelated and inappropriate keywords my comment will be approved. Kudos for the formatting and the effort of adding every type of spam related content available; adult, ringtones, downloads, cracks, wallpapers and mobiles (all in one list!).

Hi,
Today I found a good site. It is on the network by the following keys:
lotr ringtones
garmin mobile blackberry megaupload
free sex mobile horse
ring women video
wwe ring announcer
seeyou mobile 3 1 crack
health conditions due to cell phones
lesbian clips mobile
text message alert tones
free shyla stylez mp4 mobile porn
army airborne cell wallpaper
sexarabe mobile
Hope, it will help you too.

7. Social Butterfly

Oh so you have bookmarked and told your friends. I think there should be some sort of remuneration for such a loyal reader. Oh you use the name “free sex” for your comment and link to an adult website. At least you loved my webmaster related site.

It is a excellent ?nternet site.
I have bookmarked the page and I will notify my friend about it.
Thankfulness

8. No….Thankyou!

Not saying anything except what I just wrote …and that…and that…and that…you get the idea.

Nice Post Thanks.

9. I have a Question!

Looks like the commenter gets their 2 year old to mash the keyboard and then tags their website on at the end. Wish I could of been more helpful to them and answered their question though.

??5???? ?? ????????O(?_?)O??~????????? ???www.cn-clothes.com?

10. Vague is the new vogue

I think the comment subject has been discussed before, and it is an important subject we should all consider. Its funny because I was talking to another webmaster recently about the subject of the comment and this comment was exactly what I needed. Adios.

Ola, nice blog you?ve got here. I really liked reading your post. I accidentally found it this morning and thought it was interesting, so it led me to post a few words. I have a feeling there will be others who most likely share your opinion concerning this subject. So, I?ll return soon when I find extra time to view more. This is funny, but I was just calling my room mate regarding this subject, so this post was just what I needed. I will link to this website and find the rss as well. Thanks very much

On a side note what is the connection between comment spam and question marks. Looking through this list it makes me think I have been using question marks incorrectly at the end of questions when they have far more uses then that obviously. Don’t forget to add some of your best blog comments as well.