Well, the title says it all, methinks. I’ve been interviewed by Elizabeth Able, Cre8asite’s chief blogger-in-residence and a moderator in the forums.
First time I’ve ever been interviewed, I think - it was a good experience, though! Thanks, Elizabeth and Cre8asite!
So, the general shape of blog posting around this time of the year is in the form of “my five predictions for 2007” and in discussing site statistics for the calendar year. I’m not going to bother with predictions; but I’m going to walk through my statistic through the year and talk about what I was doing in the way of marketing and how those activities impacted my site traffic.
It’s been an eventful year, as these statistics fairly clearly demonstrate:
Although any set of site statistics should be taken with a big fat grain of salt, these do seem to show a teensy trend towards more traffic. In the month of January: 156 unique visitors. In December: 4940 unique visitors. What caused this increase?
To be entirely honest, it was a bit of careful planning and intentional personal marketing. Let’s be honest: I’m in business doing accessibility consulting and web design, and I though that increasing traffic to this site might help me in pursuit of that goal.
In January, I received, as I mentioned, 156 unique visitors. This is generally along the vein of the traffic I’d receive during the previous year as well, based on, essentially, no marketing at all. I’ve been listed in DMOZ for quite a long time, but as of January that was the extent of my marketing activities.
In February, traffic doubled to 300 uniques. This was the result of my authoring a brief tutorial on Blogger. Using the interface, etc. Although most of this information can be found on Blogger’s help pages, this tutorial summarized things nicely. It also mentioned explicity information on uploading documents to Blogger: apparently, a very common question.
This was my first taste of search-based traffic, really: people finding what they want on your site.
March and April get grouped together because I didn’t really do much more with this site during that time. Instead, I started a second site: inter:digital strategies, a search marketing consultancy. I joined Cre8asite Forums and began to maintain a search marketing blog. Both of these things increased my overall industry profile, but didn’t directly associate with http://www.joedolson.com.
In May I authored a pair of articles on Boolean searching with PHP and MySQL, which accompanied a PHP script doing that very task. These were highly strategic: I knew full well that this was a highly specific search query which was currently lacking any valuable search results. I filled it. The articles were posted in mid May: my traffic doubled that month.
During the summer months, I continued to let things grow. I began a blog at JoeDolson.com and backfilled it with a few of my older announcements and articles. I continued posting heavily at Cre8asite Forums and in both blogs. I took a month’s vacation (all of July). I moved from Vienna, Austria to Saint Paul, MN. Traffic kept growing, a mixture of the greater search traffic spawned from my PHP/MySQL articles and the higher profile which was gaining valuable in bound links.
In August, I became a site grader for Accessites, an awesome accessible design showcase, thanks to the invitation of Mike Cherim.
Kept on writing. Ultimately, this is the key: find an article that needs to be written and write it. Overall, this technique caused my traffic to multiply 35-fold over the course of this year. I spent practically nothing on any other kind of marketing: a couple of quality directory submissions which were probably completely unnecessary, but otherwise my only expense was my own time.
At the beginning of the year, my job queries were very slow: I knew a few people who might need websites, and would talk to them and let them know I was available. Every once in a while, I’d receive a cold contact: 90% of this proved to be unqualified leads. This week, I’ve been contacted 7 times so far through my website. Two job proposals, four “thank you” notes for articles, and one offer to become a moderator at Cre8asite Forums. (Thanks, Kim!).
No question in my mind: business profile is the key to success on the web. In my industry, this has meant writing useful articles, helping people out through Cre8asite Forums, and letting people know I’m out here. The key has been writing with people in mind: being friendly, approachable, and responsive. Do I think that my writing alone has made this much of an impact? No, frankly. I think the fact that I’ve also made a concerted effort to respond to blog comments, to respond to every query I receive through my contact form, and that I’ve helped people is what’s ultimately been the most effective marketing tool I could wield.
Cre8asite member Jozian has been having a ball recently doing recreations of other member’s avatars. It’s like caricature, but digital. At any rate, here’s what I got out of it:
And speaking of the violin…I’ve got a concert tonight for anybody who happens to be in or around Saint Paul, MN. 8:00pm, Sundin Music Hall at Hamline University. Admission is $18.
I enjoy reading; so a literary meme seemed like a fun thing to participate in. And it’s a great excuse to talk about one of my favorite authors, so I’m taking the liberty of going thoroughly off topic. This one, I picked up from Emma, who picked it up from ThePickards.
The rules:
And here it is:
He looked a total tyrant.
“Wipe that smile off your face, Smedley,” he said, “and get you gone back to that hoeing.”
When the whole gang had gone sucurrying out again, Mr. Maxim pranced forward. He was almost as full of himself as Christopher was.
It’s unlikely anybody reading this is going to get that one…it’s “Conrad’s Fate”, the latest addition (minus 1) to Diana Wynne Jones’ “Chrestomanci” collection. Diana Wynne Jones is, for what it’s worth, the absolute best in juvenile fantasy. That’s the category she’s most commonly put in, at any rate - although I consider most of her work to be quite sophisticated and unquestionably well worth reading.
Recommended reading for Diana Wynne Jones (all affiliate links, FYI):
That is, an Uninterruptible Power Supply. Why? Well, on Saturday I had a bit of a power failure: in the middle of working on a project. I didn’t lose much…but I did lose some project work. Frustrating experience…
So, now I have my own little battery backup: 45 minutes of continuous power. That should give me plenty of time to save my work and shut down! Comes complete with handy-dandy auto shutoff software (which I have not yet installed).
Its just one of those things which I’ve considered doing for ages - being self-employed, I’m in that position where my livelihood depends on having my equipment continue to work, my back-ups be consistent, and that I not lose work to emergencies. This was pretty minor; but I have to be conscious of the greater potential. I’m lucky that my little reminder came with a loss of only an hour of pretty routine processes - rather than while I was in the middle of trying to solve some kind of tricky, unusual problem!
Well, I’m currently on a trip into the Northeast - spending a little time in Rochester, NY to complete the long process of moving to Saint Paul. Rochester was my home for two years prior to moving to Vienna - and it’s still the home to about 350 cubic feet of my possessions. It’ll be nice to see them again!
Unfortunately, there’s too much chaos in the trip to be able to do any driving around the rest of the Northeast - really unfortunate, since I’ve come to know a number of people out this way. But Rochester just isn’t actually all that close to much…
At any rate, although this is a working trip - I probably won’t have the luxury for a lot of posting in addition to keeping up with other projects. But you never really know! Inspiration and free time could strike at the same time…
This post has nothing to do with IE7’s support for CSS, adherence to web standards, or general functionality. Instead, it’s a general complaint about one specific annoyance: why did Microsoft’s IE development team want IE7 to “click”?
I mean, as a marketing metaphor, it’s great. Everybody wants their product to “click”. However, in this case I think they’ve taken it a bit too literally.
Filed under Blogging, Personal by Joe Dolson