Have you read my blog?!?!

If you look at the successful bloggers, you will find that almost all of them do things to promote themselves as a brand attached to their blog. They appear in interviews, they do podcasts and video clips, and so on. They basically are willing to use “Internet fame” to help promote their product.

Now obviously this is a valid and good tactic; the question however is whether it’s necessary. Can you have a successful site without putting up pictures and videos and letting people into your personal life?

My first observation is that it is an obvious mechanism to build trust. The more I let you know that I am a “real person,” the less you fear that you’re being manipulated by a spammer or a Viagra salesperson or a cold-hearted corporation. Much of the same impulse that drives the stigma of monetization makes people leery of anonymity. In fact, anonymity is one of the best and worst parts of the Internet. While we all like that we can look up information on our reason for incontinence without everyone knowing about it, we don’t necessarily all enjoy people who use the anonymity to spam us or spout racist nonsense and such. Thus the more “signals” you can put on your site that you are “real,” and to some degree “not malevolent,” the better.

My second observation is that I’m not entirely sure why I’m so opposed to things like putting my image or voice on the Internet. I’m an introvert and greatly enjoy my privacy. I’m one of those people who would not only rather be rich than famous, I’d rather not be famous. All that being said one wonders why I’m so convinced that I am going to suddenly become dazzlingly famous if I put a picture of myself on my websites.

When I have worked out with girlfriends in the past I have always tried to get them to do fewer reps with heavier weights. To forestall a weightlifting debate let’s just say that I believe there are some benefits to doing that at least some of the time. Anyway, whenever I would suggest that practice, they would always tell me they didn’t want to “get bulky.” I always thought that was a ludicrous worry. Did they really think that by lifting a heavier weight twice a week they would develop the kind of muscle mass that people strain for lifetimes to develop? Perhaps this is similar to my fear of “Internet fame.” One picture does not a Paris Hilton make.

Ultimately, I would have to say that at the very least it is going to be a serious impediment to be overly concerned about your privacy when trying to develop an online product. The same things that make me leery about having my “personal information” out in the ether are the same things that make people leery of trusting a site without—at a minimum—the ability to put a face to the name/pseudonym/website/whatever.

Background

You may recall that last week we mentioned launching a 101 Linkbuilding Tips Experiement Series. We’ve had an exciting few days in terms of link building for WDW for Grownups and thought we’d make this our first experiment in the series.

SEOBook’s 101 Link Building Tips number 14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

We’ve been lucky enough recently to have a few options pop up for content swapping. Currently, Brad has negotiated an article/forum post swap with one fellow webmaster, and I’ve had the chance to give an interview about Disney travel for another website (with the hope of more article sharing in the future). I’ve also reached out to a more established website to determine their article submission guidelines, but haven’t heard anything back yet.

Results To Date

Already we’ve had several forum posts from both of our partners, and we’re excited to move forward with articles. What’s perhaps most intriguing, however, is that both of these partner sites focus on markets adjacent to–but not overlapping with–our primary market, which is Walt Disney World adult guests.

One site targets solo travellers and one site targets general theme park go-ers. This means that by partnering with wdwforgrownups.com, these sites are able to gain access to a much more focused (yet still huge) market as well as targeted article content (from us), while wdwforgrownups.com is able to gain access to two broader markets that take our site more mainstream. It’s exactly what we were hoping to do, and there are multiple opportunities for next steps.

We’ll keep you updated on where these new relationships take us.

I love Google Analytics

In fact I may love it too much. I often spend far too much of my day sitting in front of the screen checking to see if and how our visitation numbers have changed. It’s really quite a waste of time. That being said I feel like anyone running a website should have Google Analytics or some kind of tracking software installed.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service that allows a webmaster to see who is viewing their website, where they came from and what they are viewing. It also allows you to track things like how people navigate through your site and allows you to define goals and see what factors are contributing to people who satisfy those goals.

Why You Should Install It Now

I recommend putting Google Analytics on your site as soon as possible. I actually intended to write this blog right when I started the site, but…I didn’t. You’re probably thinking that since you will be pretty much the only one going there for a while, there’s no rush. There’s a possibility however that people will just “drop by.” All of our sites have been spidered without us submitting them to Google and before we had an inbound link. When people “wander in” by certain search terms you get a feel for what you should be focusing your content on.

Installing Google Analytics also helps you quickly come to the realization that you need some kind of Content Management System (CMS), even if it’s a DIY one. In the course of developing your site you will have all kinds of site-wide changes like adding analytics that you will need to do, and some kind of content management is a must to make that simple. Even if it’s just using Smarty templates, you need to make these kind of changes easy.

Quick Tips

A couple of quick tips that would have saved me some time:

Use a Cookie to Exclude Yourself

You want to exclude yourself and anyone who works on your site from inflating your stats. You can do this with a filter as described here. Most people tend to exclude themselves by IP address. I may be unique, but I travel a lot and use my laptop from many different locations. I also have semi-frequent changes in IP due to my ISP, so IP seems like a fairly inexact way to exclude myself. If I set a cookie on my browser, then I know that I will be excluded regardless of where I log in from.

Important: You need to do this on every browser on your machine as it is set via cookie. If you rune IE and Firefox both for example, both need to have the cookie set.

The “Referrer” To Your Site Sticks

I found the documentation on this subject to be unclear but finally found confirmation here. If someone comes to you from a certain link or search and then returns to your site directly in the future, it will still show as being “referred” from the original site. This makes sense as it helps you calculate how “useful” that source was.

Read the Google Analytics Blog

The Google Analytics Blog oftentimes has great insight and information. I recommend reading the archived content as soon as possible and then keeping up with new posts.

I sometimes think that everyone has read this book. It’s featured prominently on sites like 43 folders. In fact “personal productivity” or “life hacking” is an entire genre of blogs out there, and a useful one at that.

While I don’t consider Protoscopic to necessarily be one of those sites, I think improving your productivity is one of the best ways to improve the returns of “You, Inc.” If you can waste less time and let others waste less of your time, you will be able to devote more time to side projects and possibly bring your “hourly rate” up. For those of us who keep our “day job” and still try to build an Internet Empire, increasing productivity is often a must.

Given all the attention already given to David Allen’s method, why am I still bothering to post a review? Well to some degree I want to reach out to the skeptical, like myself, and explain why I think that this book is a must-read even with all the hype. It’s not rocket-science, but it is fundamentally sound. So allow me to add to the chorus of praise.

Lists, lists and more lists

As I started reading Getting Things Done I became quickly annoyed. I am a list-maker by nature and his advice largely seemed to boil down to “make a bunch of lists and put stuff on them and periodically check them over.” I didn’t need a book to tell me that!

Despite my skepticism I followed his plan as I read. I didn’t wait until I got to the end to start his method, and as I proceeded through the book I found that the system was working. After this I decided to try to identify what it was about his lists that was so much better than mine.

I quickly came to the conclusion that his methods aren’t nearly as important as his goals. I think everyone who reads this book implements things a little differently, but his fundamental tenets sink into your mind and color how you do things. I think for me the key piece of advice that made the difference was (paraphrased):

Get everything on lists so you know what you have to do and don’t have nebulous worries floating around in your psyche.

If you keep up with your lists and manage them correctly you know what you’re supposed to be doing, have done and what’s behind. I so often find myself feeling “behind” without having enumerated exactly what I’m behind on. As I implemented the system I found that I easily knew what I was behind on, so even if I was behind I didn’t just have a vague feeling of dread. I knew what needed to be done and it seemed much more manageable with it all in front of me.

Required Reading

This book joins the exclusive club of books I would recommend for just about anyone. I suppose if you aren’t feeling like you don’t have enough time, then productivity concerns can wait. But I think that most of us are feeling a time crunch and a quick dose of Getting Things Done, can help alleviate things.

One of the greatest things about a home-based business is that you can pretty much work from anywere–as long as you have internet and phone access (which these days is…well…anywhere!). It’s the new “American Dream,” and all you have to do is figure out how to make it happen.

But, as we all know, starting a business takes time, and time, and time, and money. Lots of things can fail before something succeeds. So the best piece of advice that’s the hardest to heed is often, “Keep your day job.” You’re so excited about your venture, you’re spending all your free time moving it forward, you’re finally starting to see some traction, and you really want to ditch this 9-5 gig and dedicate more resources to the start-up. Me too. Here’s what I have to keep reminding myself:

Our top 5 reasons to keep your day job…even when you want nothing more but to sign that resignation letter:

1. If you panic, your venture will suffer. Any investment takes time–and usually a series of failures–before it provides a decent return. You may even need to go back to the drawing board several times before you get it right. If you believe in your idea and have the unencumbered time to take it through its iterations, success is much more likely than if you’re forced to quit and job-hunt after one failure because you don’t have the back-up income to weather the storms. Also the same panic may drive you to monetize your work prematurely before you’ve worked out all the kinks, which may turn a growing successful idea into a failure.
2. Emergencies happen. Even if you’ve planned like a champ, the unimaginable can happen. Your car breaks down, there are new and sudden medical bills, your spouse is laid off, anything. Having that steady income from your day job can save the day.
3. You need health insurance. And dental insurance. And tuition reimbursement. And child care reimbursement. And transportation reimbursement. Whatever your company pays for often costs a fortune to get on your own. And the disability and sick leave shouldn’t be sneezed at as just-in-case precautions.
4. Your company contributes to and/or matches your contribution to a retirement account. Again, why walk away from free money unless the job is seriously inhibiting your venture.
5. You have a built-in network. Of course you won’t put posters for your off-hours business in the company cafeteria, but take a look at your business network for potential future collaborators, customers, and clients. Lots of business colleagues are part colleague/part friend; start cultivating them now–just keep it on the “down low.”

We all get carried away with the desire to throw caution to the wind–after all, how could we possibly fail?!?–but keep your head on straight. When your venture DOES succeed, it will be even sweeter.

Can Google continue to

The manic pursuit of Pagerank, often at the expense of quality content, exposes some interesting aspects of Google’s dominance. Now, I’m not a Google-hater by any stretch of the imagination. The number of Google’s tools we use here should make that clear. I think they do good work and their tools are very helpful, however their methodology is often dangerous.

When it comes to Pagerank for example, they are intentionally vague on the way it works. Just make good content and Pagerank will follow, they tell us. While this makes sense in theory, in practice, anyone can defend why their content is “good.” However, if their motivations do not line up with what Google considers “optimal,” then there exists a disconnect that the webmaster is punished for.

Since Google is largely a monopoly, their influence on the net is huge. Moreover, as they try to combat things like spam pages, they increasingly create rules about what a “good web page” should be. I may be only speaking for myself, but I don’t think we’re to the point where we know authoritatively what constitutes a “good” web page, and I’m not sure such a day will ever come. But when Google is the “master” of the game, we all make web sites that conform to Google’s idea of “right.” This could potentially be stifling to innovation.

Basically, because Google controls much of the web, we have to make sites that will maximize us in Google’s eyes. Consequently most of the most popular websites will all be very similar. Someone with a dramatic innovation may not be able to get any “airtime” for that innovation because it does not yet fit Google’s model of a good page.

This may potentially leave room for a competitor to Google. Cuil’s less than impressive launch still showed us that the market is downright anxious for someone to show up and give Google some competition. Perhaps this is because, in the long run, people are reluctant to let Google dictate the web’s future. Google’s monopoly may in fact be a danger to everyone, including itself.

Is It Wrong To Want To Get Paid?

Now obviously there are justifiable reasons for the stigma associated with site monetization. If I go to two sites and one has no advertising, it’s more likely that the advertising-less site is done out of love and isn’t a spam site. It’s also more likely however that the proprietor will lose interest, decide it’s too costly, or disappear for any number of reasons.

Although some hesitancy is justified, there seems to be a stigma above and beyond the initial skepticism against sites trying to “get paid.” If a site has been running for quite a while and adds advertising to its pages, many times the users will be angry with this decision. Somehow their content is less worth reading now that the creator is making money. Either that or they are horrified by the idea of having advertising cross their vision.

The interesting side-effect of this anti-monetization bias is that “serious” content developers are going to suffer a penalty against an amateur. If there is a penalty for trying to get paid for your work, those that would like to make a serious play at making a quality site are going to have to overcome an additional hurdle that someone “toying” with their site doesn’t. Thus in many cases the inferior site may “win out” just because it doesn’t have advertising.

While we feel this may be a dangerous principle, we are fairly loathe to monetize our sites before they are popular anyway. When you have low traffic levels, the income will be trivial anyway, so you’re not giving up much to keep the “good press.” Why try to scrape out a few bucks if you’re just going to have to use it on advertising because you’ve added another barrier to entry? Identifying when to monetize is a decision for another day, but for now we see no rush to try to monetize our endeavors.

The only exception is affiliate programs for products we’re going to recommend. We figure if we’re going to link to them anyway, we might as well get some benefit out of it. As Problogger.net points out, these can be a long term investment that pays off in the long run. We don’t want to go back and add them later in the future. If people hate us for having affiliate links, so be it.

Walt Disney World for Grownups is a Page Rank 0 Site.

I *WILL* Discover The Secrets

Because of the mystery surrounding Pagerank and particularly the dreaded PR0, it took me a while to come to this conclusion. I initially thought I was just waiting for my first Pagerank update and then we would see our initial Pagerank. However I am getting a different response than the “N/A” that I got when the site wasn’t ranked in the database. I’m getting a 0.

So of course in a panic I began a frenzied session of research. How can I fix this? What does this mean? What will happen? This is where the intentionally vague nature of Google’s Pagerank and the twisted landscape it has created became clear. Separating myth from logical conclusion from fact is nearly impossible.

In a perfect world, Google would say “Don’t worry about your Pagerank”, everyone would say “OK,” and we’d move on. Unfortunately, in this world, people create hypotheses, test them, and post their results. Other people just create hypotheses and post them as facts. All of these hypotheses get mixed together and relentlessly presented as fact, eventually making it nearly impossible to identify reliable information. Here are some conclusions I have drawn based on my research, in order of confidence. Be aware NONE OF THESE ARE KNOWN FACTS.

Fairly Confident: Pagerank Zero is not the same as Banned

I feel fairly confident that this is true, although considerable documentation will lead you to believe otherwise. The easiest way to verify this is the fact that a Google search for our site returns results. Also using Google’s Webmaster Tools I can see that we rank highly for a few searches. So it seems that we exist in the database and can receive searches. We also of course have a few search hits from Google that also corroborate this.

Somewhat Confident: “Badrank” is real

Walt Disney World For Grownups has several decent inbound links. In the same timespan Protoscopic has a PR of 2 and WDWForGrownups has a PR of 0.

Neither site is conducting any type of “shenanigans;” the only difference I can come up with is that WDWForGrownups has many outbound links, some to PR0 sites. While I wouldn’t think this would be a big deal, this site, which I have always found to be very reliable, mentions a Google employee who warns webmasters not to “Link to bad neighborhoods.” This supports the idea that sites are given a “Badrank” penalty whenever they link to other PR0 sites.

It may be at the time the last database was generated, WDWForGrownups had few inbound links and several outbound links to PR0 sites which penalized us sufficiently to get us down to a PR of 0. While I don’t really think this is a good policy, it at least seems plausible, is supported by knowledgeable experts, and seems to be supported by evidence. I can’t really think of anything else that would influence our ranking negatively, so I’m hoping that the next update will show our link-building efforts have counteracted our “Badrank.” I am not really sure why some of the sites we link to have PRs of 0 but they have excellent content that we are loathe to drop just to improve our Pagerank.

Somewhat Confident: Pagerank Zero is not a Death Sentence

As mentioned before, we rank fairly highly for some searches. So obviously it is possible to overcome a Pagerank zero. Additionally we know of sites that are “leaders” in our sector that also have a Pagerank of zero. This leads me to believe that it is at least possible to operate successfully with a zero page rank. In the long run, however, we don’t want to test this hypothesis empirically.

In the end, the only things I am confident of are that PR is not as important as I thought and that there is a lot of bad information out there. I saw many forum threads in which someone stated something authoritatively, was refuted, and then said “well it sure seems that way to me.” So plenty of people want to act as authorities when they are not. We will continue to try to sort out this information and try to continue to improve our “working understanding” of the mysteries of Pagerank.

You’ve heard us talk about our link-building frustrations and about how tempting it is to bring in loads of traffic through temporary links. But we continue to put our collective nose to the grindstone, because, as Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall at SEOBook say in the archived 2006 gem,101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website, links “for the forseeable future [are] going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.”

Yes, things have changed since 2006. But we haven’t seen anything out there that discourages solid link-building as one of the best ways to establish a site on the web. As long as that’s the case, we’re going to put some of that grindstone energy behind few of these ideas—the ones we deem to be particularly timeless—and show take you through our trial and error. Stay tuned as we explore specific experiments in implementing many of these 101 tips.

One of the most fundamental questions we need to ask is: What are people searching for?

Enter: Google Trends

You can get a general overview of Google Trends in this article from the Google blog. As you might expect from the name Google Trends is useful for identifying the relative “strength” of various search terms. So by using the service, you can determine which of various search terms is most popular.

Additionally you can determine the changes in a search term’s prevalence over time. You can watch whether the term is becoming more or less commonly sought. You can also break down all these results by region and download the data to analyze on your own. While you can’t get a “raw number” of searches, it’s questionable what good that number would be. If I knew that “pickle” was searched for 10,000 times a day, I wouldn’t know whether that was a lot or a little unless I had something to compare it to.

Examples

Graph of Grownups vs. Adults

So an example of how we could have helped ourselves is in the naming of our site. We chose the name “Walt Disney World For Grownups” over “Walt Disney World For Adults” because the term “adult” has a connotation relating to “adult entertainment”, which doesn’t really jive with our more “PG-rated” site. However if you look at this graph, you can see that “adults” is searched for about 300 times more often than “grownups.” While we expected a disparity, that one is so extreme we might have re-evaluated our name choice had we known about it.

An Awesome Trend (ho ho)

While relative popularity is important, you don’t always want the more popular term. If you are trying to carve out a niche, the less popular term my be less adequately serviced. Take for example: “cool” versus “awesome”. While this shows that “cool” is about 14 times as popular as “awesome”, if you look at this chart you can see that awesome has actually been trending up quite strongly for quite some time. This could mean that it is a candidate to be “off the radar,” but gaining strength. I would rather be a big player in the smaller, but growing pond.

The ways that Google Trends could be used are obvious and numerous. As we find more complex and interesting uses we will share them with you.