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Doshy Link Attack! Sticky Websites, PPC, Note Marketing and Post Frequency

Lots of great articles and news in the past two weeks. I’ve been doing more reading and it has helped me to develop some ideas for my sites. Sometimes, learning is just as important as doing.

This collection of links include articles on how to build sticky websites, guerrilla marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, direct response blogging, blog networks and of course, social media:

I love the Arcade Fire, a Canadian indie rock band. They recently released a pretty cool website which is really an interactive music video of some sort for a song on their Neon Bible album.

I love it. Try clicking on his face and hands. Viral stuff like that will get you links. If flash and videos aren’t your cup of tea, try some viral post ideas from Skellie.

Raj Dash wrote a great article on Performancing on the 41 Reasons why your blog probably sucks. Avoiding these common errors will help you to improve the overall quality of your blog and may help you to eventually make more money.

No blogger makes all of these mistakes, of course, but the list serves to help those of you who are still establishing your name in the blogosphere, and to remind you that you’re not alone.

SnowboardJohn has a detailed article on direct response blogging, which focuses on maximizing the actions of your blog readers. How do you do this? By pushing readers and peers towards performing specific actions to and for your content.

Direct response marketers have learned through bitter experience that a person faced with more then one choice is likely to do NOTHING AT ALL…Give them LESS to do. And ask them to do it at the point they are MOST LIKELY to do it. It sounds so obvious - but if that were the case I wouldn’t see so many blogs asking readers if the first thing they want to do is subscribe the blog RSS Feed.

Laura Alter has an interesting article on using psychology to create a sticky website. The article is several months old but the insights are still relevant. While Laura is mainly talking about web applications and social sites although some of the points could easily be applied to blogs as well.

The uniting theme in all of this is that you need to understand what makes people act and react in order to develop something that they want to use again and again. This is about creating interfaces that understand the way we consume and create content. To me, the future of social applications on the web is fully understanding how we can better use data to create userfulness and relevancy.

If I wanted to promote my websites offline I might try what Jarkko Laine says about using small paper notes as a way to get visitors. Apparently, a Finnish webmaster has been going around the city, pasting small post-it style notes with his site URL at random places. I like the idea a lot.

This usually intrigues the person who discovers it. This sort of guerrilla marketing isn’t new but it never fails to attract attention when you create unique messages for each note and spread it in a coordinated fashion across multiple areas.

Basically, the notes go where we go. Trains, buses, parking lots, bike parks, libraries, grocery stores, waiting rooms, restaurants… We hide them between magazines, pin them on bike racks, stick them to cracks in the wall, drop them to open bags… Anything sneaky and personal will do.

Traffic isn’t going to make you very rich. Conversions matter and Aaron Chronister has some tips on improving conversion rates by mastering perspectives. He explains that there are four types of customers and suggests that you should optimize for each accordingly.

I think that well trafficked sites will always get visitors of all types. It is a tricky thing, to satisfy each potential visitor/buyer and keep them coming back for more. Experiment with your site structure and always test for results. You might not please everyone but make the masses buy and you’ll turn a profit.

Make sure the creative and copy addressing your particular customer type is front and center. Don’t give Mr. Spontaneous your most popular products and toss it into your navigation. If you’re targeting the humanistic customer, don’t make them click on a link to see some testimonials. Give them what they want where they will see it immediately.

Brian Turner recently made a list of 7 Wordpress plugins for better indexing and some of them are worth checking out, not because of the indexing benefits but to encourage overall stickiness by displaying your popular blog posts and improving the reader’s general experience of your site.

Wordpress offers a potentially great solution for building a CMS. However, as the site grows, ensuring that search engines and human users can properly find your content can become a challenge. Luckily, there are a couple of great Wordpress Plugins already available which can help resolve this issue. When implemented, they should be able to help improve your site architecture in a number of different ways.

Are blog networks a good way to make money? Possibly. It all depends on how you run it. David Peralty, a blog network owner himself shares his knowledge in his article on the 46 things to do before launching a blog network. Good tips because most of them seem to come from his own valuable experience.

There are so many things that a potential blog network owner should do before actually showing the world their sites, and I think that most people who decide to start a network, are really unaware of the challenges that they will have to surpass…I have come up with this list of forty-six things you should do before launching a blog network.

Post frequency. Eric Kintz says that blog frequency does not matter anymore. Derek tells us ways to decide how often to update your blog and Mohsin explains the virtues of posting less often. This is something I have been thinking about in the past few weeks too.

I’m actually experimenting with a different blogging mindset, which you can see in the less frequent posting on Dosh Dosh. I’ll explain more in an article.

I always thought you should blog at any rate that makes you happy. If you’re getting stressed from the pace you’ve set, its probably not worth it. Keep blogging fun and you’ll make your blog successful.

Marcos Azaro writes about what to do with social media visitors who land on your website. This entails knowing what they like and setting clear goals on what you want to get out of them.

I think this applies for search traffic as well. Make sure that you always end with a specific call-to action on webpages which are getting significant hits from search. You can either pitch an affiliate ad, ask them to subscribe or direct them to an article.

So next you check your stats and you find out that you are receiving a new stream of traffic from a unique source ask yourself if you are taking full advantage of this. Understand what they want and why they are looking at your blog. Crack that code and move your troops in the direction you want.

Best of The Web, a great website and blog directory is holding a promotion which allows you to get a 15% off their one-time or annual review fees. If you purchase a listing, you might also stand to win $10K in cash too.

If you’ve always wanted to get your site in a quality directory like Best of the Web, this might be a good time to do so.

Derek Beau has released a free PPC campaign builder, which allows you to create ad groups rapidly with multiple keywords and custom ads. He’s offered this as a free download so you can host it on your own server and play around with it.

I haven’t had the time to test it out but according to Derek, there aren’t any major errors at the moment. Supports Adwords and MSN AdCenter. Check it out if you do any heavy duty PPC advertising.

The concept is actually very simple. You take two sets of keywords, set some options, and write some ads. The tool will then create the CSV data required to import everything into your AdWords account. All you have to do is copy/paste it into AdWords Editor.

Last by not least, check out Copyblogger’s article on how to stop worrying about Google once and for all, especially if you afraid that you’ll come down with a penalty of any sort for selling links.

I think its important to learn from successful internet marketers. They don’t bank on a few keywords or PageRank for profits. They build their brand while developing multiple sources of targeted traffic (affiliates, mailing lists and paid search etc).

When you focus on attracting traffic via social media referrals and converting as many of those people as possible into subscribers, you build trust with your audience. And when you have trust, you can make money from selling stuff, whether by affiliate marketing, joint ventures, or your own products and services.