Why do you participate in social media services and networks?

When people talk about Digg and co, very often they are discussing a traffic tactic. You can get a healthy spike of thousands of visitors with a front page link, which is cool, but …

Are bloggers killing social media? read more

Weblogs, Inc, the blog network founded by Jason “I’m not blogging anymore” Calacanis, is doing well under AOL’s ownership. In a presentation, published by TechCrunch on Docstoc, they show massive growth since 2005. Just to illustrate, in 2005 Weblogs, Inc had a estimated revenue of $6 million and 4 employees. In 2008, the same numbers are $30 million and 26 employees. Add a massive traffic increase, with a unique visitor growth of 994% between October 2005 and August 2008, and the success story that is Weblogs, Inc just seems all the more impressive.

Of course, the growth is possibly due to the fact that the blogosphere by itself have had a massive growth during this period as well, with blogs going mainstream and getting the recognition they deserve (and sometimes don’t), but numbers are numbers, and they generally don’t lie.

Check out the full presentation for more number crunching. It’s just 10 pages and mostly pictures, so it’s very accessible. It also shows how much larger Weblogs, Inc is when compared to both Gawker Media’s network, and b5media.

While attending the How to Hire a Professional Blogger For Your Business session at Blog World Expo, it was very interesting to learn that you have to know your performance numbers and how they work in order to really understand what it takes to make money as a hired blogger.

As part of this series on what you need to know about hiring a professional blogger and being hired, let’s look at what the pros had to say about performance numbers and metrics and what you need to know before you go pro.

Gregory Go of About.com Guide to Online Business made it clear to the crowded room about how the numbers drive payment and drives success when it comes to paying a blogger. “If you are looking to make money blogging for a company or blog network, you have to understand the metrics.”

Gregory listed three key web analytics that should be used to set a price for paying a blogger.

1. Consistency - Word Count Metric: Number of posts per week or month published with a minimum word count per post.
2. Internal Metrics: Numbers based upon direct interaction and actions such as comment count, feed or newsletter subscribers, and direct sales generated.
3. External Metrics: Performance compared to the general Internet/blogosphere metrics. This includes page view counts and referrer or inbound links.

While few pay solely based upon one of these three metrics, most blogs and blog networks compensate bloggers based upon a combination of these numbers. read more

Right as I throttle down my guest posting to the lowest in my blogging career it seems guest posting is gaining steam.

This is because it’s not just traditional bloggers who are realizing the value of guest posting, but marketers, SEOs and other webmasters. Rather than looking for profile and personal brand building, these folks are using the tactic for growing their traffic and links. read more

One of the things people write about a lot in the blog world is “Pinging”. Apparently it should help you increase your traffic and/or backlinks.

Pinging is basically a notification to a website or service that you have updated the content on your blog. Most blog platforms do this automatically, but you can also add services or do it manually.

Problem is, while many people advocate it, I haven’t been able to find anyone who can prove it has the benefits people say it does … read more

Gawker Media, the blog network lead by Nick Denton, had a great July, it would seem, with no less than 6 sites setting new traffic records. Impressive indeed. The official posting also notes:

Also important is the year-over-year growth that continues with this new high. Gawker Media’s network traffic level is 70% higher than last year, 330% greater than in July 2006, and a whopping 700% higher than three years ago in 2005.

That is some growth for sure. read more

Those big traffic days are very satisfying. When you hit the front page of Digg, get a snowball effect of Stumble traffic, or when several big blogs notice you and throw you a link.

More and more though I am hearing from bloggers who are chasing these spikes at the expense of their long term success. read more

Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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