Have you been wondering what all the fuss about social media is?  You’ve maybe registered for Digg, submitted one of your stories and nothing came of it.  Seems like a waste of time, well…yes and no.

Social Media Is About Community

I had read this time and again.  As I am wont to do before I so much as joined any of these sites, I read everything I could.  They all agreed on one thing, if you just go on to a social media site, submit your links and wait for the visitors to roll in you’re wasting your time.  This of course makes perfect sense, you have no reputation, so how can they even tell you from a spammer?  You’re not looking to add value to the community, so why would anyone take you seriously?  It all makes sense.

Unfortunately, There is a Corollary

Sadly, this isn’t the end of the story.  In my tale, I joined Digg, didn’t submit anything of my own for several weeks, made clever comments that were voted up on lots of threads, dugg interesting articles.  Then one day I submitted one of my own stories and of course…no one read it.  It’s not that people read my article and disregarded it, it’s that no one even bothered to read it.  Ultimately Digg was a huge disappointment.

Digg is Too Big

Getting into the Digg “elite” seems like a full time job.  However there are tons of smaller communities out there where you can make an impact immediately.  I just get a few of my friends to join one with me and then I submit my stuff there.  People actually read it because it’s a smaller community and it’s much easier to get on the front page.  This actually drives traffic and seems like a much better strategy.  Moreover, it’s easier to network with those people because the “elite” isn’t nearly as well defined so you can make friends and expand your circle, instead of just begging people to vote for you.

Ultimately getting on the front page of smaller sites doesn’t yield to as many readers as getting on the front page of Digg.  But I’ve gotten way more value out of contributing to those sites than I have with Digg.  Moreover, I tend to only bother with sites that are dofollow, so at the worst case I have a link to show for it, even if I get no traffic.  Plus the administrators of those sites are usually grateful for a worthwhile contributing member (and his or her friends), instead of imperious.  All in all it’s a win-win.

Photo by: ivanx

I’ve written before about my love/hate relationship with Drupal.  It has always seemed like if I just learn one more thing I will suddenly have complete mastery and be able to create fantastic sites with minimal effort.  I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of help and the lack of intuitiveness in the application itself and in its community, and I’ve always been convinced that it is a result of perverse incentives.

Right now, Drupal is a great and interesting piece of software that is free.  All the people who work in the community to expand and support it basically get bupkis for their time.  In fact, it is my (completely unresearched) opinion that most of them make their money through Drupal consulting.  The obvious power of Drupal convinces some hapless soul to use it and then they find out they are over their head and call in the cavalry.

Obviously you can see how the incentives here are bad.  If I’m a Drupal contributor, I want my software to be powerful, but I actually want it to be hard to use. Now if you ask me, I doubt very much that any of them think of it in those terms and are actually really awesome people who contribute their time to make a really cool product.  However, I think that their incentives are such that they’re going to be motivated to do some things and not others.

I’ve repeatedly considered making an external wiki, not subject to the peevishness of the Drupal forums.  Where people don’t like to tell you why you shouldn’t want to do what you want to do and just help you do it.  However I’ve noticed a horrifying transformation coming over myself.  As I slowly learn how to do things in Drupal, I don’t want to share.

I think to myself, “If I can patch X, Y and Z together it will make an awesome site and it won’t be hard at all.”  But I’m suddenly overcome with a desire to keep that information to myself in order to maximize it’s benefit for me.  I mean, I’ve struggled forever to gain mastery over this evil program, why should I share the fruits of my labor.  If I share how easy it was to make my super-cool site, everyone will do it…terrifying.  I think the Drupal is taking over…

Photo by: nevet5

We decided a while back to enter the world of niche sites. We’re basically pursuing a three tiered strategy in the whole Internet Empire plan:

1.) Look for new small opportunities to try out different things.
2.) Continue to promote our existing sites to learn marketing techniques.
3.) Look for the big hit that will take us big time.

Obviously the niche site falls under area one. The theory is that if we can get a relatively successful niche site in various areas, that gives us a viable way to provide “link juice” for any other sites we want to start. There’s also always the chance that anything we discover in that area can be leveraged to apply to area three. So let’s say that we find a tactic that lets us crank out tons of small niche sites at fairly low cost, then that could actually be a valid overall approach. So the general idea is that the worst case scenario is we get another small property out there that doesn’t require any maintenance.

In order to make a quick test a picked a fairly pricey Adsense term, investing and wrote up a small niche site about it. I have some knowledge in the area so it didn’t take long. I also tried to stick to general education and timeless facts, so that the site wouldn’t have to be continually upgraded. The idea here is to stick this out here, promote it briefly and then let it go.

We did some long tail searches and managed to find a fair number of topics for which we could potentially rank and made these the internal pages. For example, “what is the first step to investing?” and “creative real estate investing.” These are hopefully “gettable” terms that will help create an overall investing site that will generate some Adsense revenue.

Problems

The only problem with the site itself is getting its Adsense running. Right now it is a big blank, which I”m hoping is just waiting for the site to be spidered. We’ve had bad luck with waiting around for things to improve when it comes to Google, but I can’t find any other approach other than “wait for it to show up” on the Adsense. The site isn’t in Google’s index yet, so I’m not overly worried. This of course leads to the second problem which is marketing. We’re going to use article marketing, but that comes with it’s own set of hassles, which I’ll discuss next time.

We enjoy a good mystery as much as the next guy, but…

Stumbleupon has always felt more like a feel-good solution than an actual marketing approach. That being said you always have to consider that possibility that if just one person writes a blog about one of your articles it was well worth stumbling it. We have had some interesting results with Stumbleupon so we thought we’d share them with you.

About a month ago we did our first test with Stumbleupon. We had a post in our Walt Disney World for Grownups forums about your most artistic Disney Photos. It has received by far our best results and is an entertaining thread. I stumbled it, Annie stumbled it and one other friend of mine stumbled it over the course of about 12 hours. As a result we got 220 visitors from stumbleupon that day.

Now 220 visitors is an exciting number for us. That far exceeds our usual daily volume by itself. The bounce rate on those visits was 52.27% which was actually much better than I expected. What was a downer was that as far as I was able to determine from the analytics, none of those users ever came back. This was roughly the end result I expected, but it was still somewhat disappointing. On the flip side at least a good influx of people had looked at the post and I thought it was worth trying again.

I didn’t want to annoy people by spamming with lots of posts so I waited until last night to try another attempt. This time we stumbled an article about working remotely from Disney World. I actually thought this article would have a better possibility of “catching on” since this is the kind of thing that sites like Digg go for. I was cautiously optimistic. Once again the three of us stumbled this article, this time within a few seconds of each other and so far, we’ve gotten exactly one visitor. I’m not even sure that visitor wasn’t me, although there seems to be evidence it wasn’t.

Conclusions

About the only explanations I can find for this disparity are:

• This article was submitted to travel instead of photography.
• The other post was submitted over a longer period of time. I find this somewhat unlikely however, because I got about 20 visits just from 1 stumble last time.

Overall I’d say I’m considerably less enthused about stumbling than I was before. I will certainly have to try a few more experiments before I decide for sure though.

We’ve written before about the importance of relationship building. I think that quite simply it is one of the key differentiators between success and failure in any space. If you can make some kind of collaborative work relationship with the right people you can succeed. However making those relationships can be very difficult.

Twitter gives us a chance to simplify the hardest part. I quite frequently send e-mails to bloggers or website owners to see if we can collaborate. Unfortunately that e-mail basically boils down to “Hey will you be my friend?” It’s hard to phrase that in a way to not sound desperate and give the impression that you have value to bring to the table. Twitter helps brush all of that out of the way.

When you join Twitter you have people who you “follow” and people who “follow you.” So basically as soon as you join you can just start “following” people who are in your space. Almost no one has so many twitter “friends” that they don’t notice a new follower, so they come check you out. Usually if they like you they follow you back, and bingo! You’ve skipped the whole uncomfortable “can we be friends” phase.

This lets you get down to immediately starting to “vet” each other and see if you can “take the relationship further.” I know all this metaphorical language sounds creepy, which is exactly why Twitter is so useful. You don’t have to figure out a way to approach people without being creepy, which, sadly, is not easy for me.

Today I was reading Skellie’s article on not posting for quite a while and it totally bummed me out. Not necessarily because she’s dealing with some issues regarding her blog and keeping up with it (I’m far too self-centered to worry about that). Instead I was troubled by her claims that she is only giving up $600-$1000 per month by not having ads on her site.

I discovered her blog during one of the periods she was guest blogging for Darren Rowse and I like pretty much everything about her blog. She re-affirmed my hope that you don’t have to make your persona completely public to be successful and she writes very useful articles. She has around 5000 RSS subscribers according to her post, of which I am one.

5000 RSS subscribers is a lot. We have one, me (Annie doesn’t even subscribe). So I find her statement that she could monetize at only about $1000 per month to be a little demoralizing. While I’ve never really wanted to “make money by blogging,” I think her site is indicative of the capabilities of Adsense based revenue. If someone as successful as her could be making a whopping $12,000 per year, what shot do we have?

All of this is validating my fears regarding our Internet Empire. I fear that if we work really hard and apply ourselves, we can make as much as we make now for roughly the same amount of work. Annie and I are both fairly successful people and I enjoy a lot of freedom in my work. It’s troubling to think that a large up-front cost of effort, we can duplicate my current situation.

I know all the super marketing pimps like John Chow will point out that there are way more ways to make money than just advertising. There are of course examples of plenty of people making good money from their websites. As I said we don’t intend our blog to be our sole source of income, or even primary. We’re building an Internet Empire after all. Nevertheless it’s a bit daunting to think that if we scaled the seventy five hundred levels, between our blog and Skellie’s that we would be in the 12k/year range.

I am continually waffling back and forth between an unshakable belief in immediately developing a “content network” and a unswerving loyalty focusing on one site. To be honest it is really impossible to run Protoscopic as a solitary site since it is intended to be a case study increating another business. I suppose we could have focused on the business of blogging, but a blog about blogging has been covered ad nauseum by more qualified minds than I.

So we inherently had to have Protoscopic as well as our first business venture, but the question was always:

Are Websites More Like Flowers Or TV Shows

The question boils down to this. Is time a critical element in any websites development, or is momentum the key? Should you focus on one project until it is somewhat self-sufficient before you move on to the next, or is any effort past a certain point a waste? Do websites grow like a garden, slowly and with a modicum of care, or are they like a TV show where you can‘t let up lest they lose momentum?

Limited Bandwidth

Today I believe you should focus primarily on one site. I was convinced by a recurring issue in the development of Walt Disney World For Grownups. We have repeatedly gotten to a point where I am convinced “This is it, it’s straight up from here.” Of course it never is and I grow lax in my promotional efforts in the meantime. While I’m out starting new websites and thinking up new things, the gains we’ve amassed begin to dissipate.

For example, not too long ago we were fortunate enough to get two new forum users are the same time. They were active and exactly the kind of users we were looking for and they were on enough that I was convinced they were hooked. Unfortunately this led me to spend less time “pimping” our site. Sure enough the interest of those users waned and they visited less and less often as they were unengaged due to a lack of new content. I am hoping that as I continue my promotion efforts they will return and help add energy then.

The Future

So unfortunately in the process of waffling back and forth I have created several websites that I am loathe to abandon while I refocus on Walt Disney World For Grownups. I’m hoping I can keep them limping along while I focus my efforts on our main site. I’m sure that if I can just get one more influx of users it will be straight up from there!

I’m a complete miser when it comes to my time and looking for ways to keep from wasting it. Nearly everything I do is calculated on a cost-benefit equation and potentially discontinued based on whether it was worth my time. In fact I’m timing how long it takes me to write this blog right now. Ignoring the question of whether I’m a soulless automaton, let’s get to the question at hand:

How can I tell which blogs are worth the time to post comments on?

I have a pretty simple formula for this. Just like PPC, I value a click at about 10 cents. If I were buying ads from Google, that’s about what I’d pay. When I go back and look at my Google Analytics, I can quickly tell how many viewers my post got me. So the obvious formula:

($0.10 x Visitors) – (Hourly Rate * Hours Taken To Post)

If I have an hourly rate of $50 and it took me 3 minutes (1/20^th of an hour) to post a comment that got me 10 visitors, that post was worth:

($0.10 x 10) – ($50 * 1/20) = $1.00 – $2.50 = -$1.50

I got $1.00 of value for $2.50 of work, so that probably wasn’t a great use of my time. I could have invested my $2.50 of effort and bought 25 clicks from Google. In this scenario my break-even is 25 visitors. If I get 25 or more it was worth it.

If you don’t know what hourly rate to use, check out our article on Valuing Your Time.

What about quality?

There are a ton more variables you can use in this equation, like bouce rate, pageviews or return visits, but I am just looking for a simple rule of thumb. I can pretty quickly assess whether the traffic I’m getting is junk or not without getting too technical. It’s never going to be a science, but as long as you’re posting on relevant blogs and keeping an eye on the quality of traffic you’re getting, this method should help you keep from wasting time.

Stock photos are an Internet entrepreneur’s friend. A surprising number of people are willing to allow you to use their work for free. In a lot of cases site administrators try to capitalize on this and put themselves in as a middle man, but there are still plenty of places on the web where you can get stock photography and graphics for free.

A good starting place is the Wikipedia Page listing a good number of resources on the topic.

If those don’t work for you, here’s an Older List, which has quite a few possibilities as well.

There are of course plenty of ‘scams’ out there, so we have typically found a few that work for us and stuck with them. Some favorites of ours are:

• stock.xchng
• Public Domain Clip Art
• PD Photo

One way you can thank them is by putting a link back to them!

They're easier to see in the rearview mirror.

For a long time our primary focus was the Walt Disney World for Grownups forums, and we had several milestones associated with them. You look forward to your first ‘signup’ and your first ‘post’. We also made new friends online and asked them to come post. Each of those had some element of success but there’s always some gray area.

One thing that you always forget when you’re awaiting your milestones is: The Internet is mean.

Because of this, much of the time you’re not sure if you’ve actually passed a milestone when it happens. For example, when our first “unsolicited” post came to the forums we weren’t sure whether it was someone we had solicited, or if it was someone up to some sort of spam shenanigans. So while we were somewhat enthusiastic, we had misgivings. Did this “count” as having met our goal?

Though you plan for the milestones, they’re really things you see in the rearview mirror. While you’re not sure if you’ve actually passed a milestone when it happens, you can definitely look back and know you did at some unclear point in the past. They’re things that have become commonplace now, though you can remember when you wanted them badly. You still get the feeling of progress. You just can’t quite ever get the feeling of euphoria you always imagined.