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Orble has been up and running for several years now, and there's been quite a lot of good writing to come out of it, as well as a sense of community, sometimes tumultuous.

What makes for a good blog? It seems like an easy answer: a good blog is one that people want to read.

Well, notable blogger Merlin Mann has an interesting article on good blogs.... as the blogging industry has matured, it seems like there's fewer and fewer gems to read. Or are there more, but they're lost in the chaff?

What Makes a Good Blog on 43 Folders

I'll just list Merlin's points here, with my own comments:

Good blogs have a voice

They sure do - it's not an easy thing to do without writing for a long time. It's easy to fall back on the easy solution of writing formally, but with no spirit.

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions.

I can understand Merlin's point, even if I don't think it's necessarily true. Bloggers that are extremely knowledgeable about a field, or are just weirdly obsessed with it make for good stuff. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm obsessed with anything other than lounging around.

Good blog posts are made of paragraphs.

Please use paragraphs. My eyes hurt reading continual unbroken text.

Good blogs make you want to start your own blog.

This is almost the golden rule... readers should be so thrilled to read your work, so energized that they'd want to try to emulate you. On a personal note, as I've read reviews and essays by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and David Denby (though they're not bloggers - well, Ebert is), it made me want to clean up my messy writing and try a little harder.

Merlin's got more points on his post, so I strongly recommend that you read it! He's a fun blogger in his own right, and used to do a great GTD podcast. Er, that's Getting Things Done.

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Posted By: Cibbuano - Category: Orble Tips

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ZCars Analysis

May 18th 2008 01:50

The ZCars blog currently attracts over 20,000 individual readers a day. I thought I would do an analysis of why ZCars has been so successful so other Orble bloggers can apply the same techniques to their own blogs.

ZCars is written by Charles, an Orble employee, however there is nothing about ZCars which cannot be replicated by any Orble blogger with a domain blog.

Charles has taken quite a mercenary approach to ZCars which may not be for eveyone. If you just enjoy posting on Orble and debating various topics without worrying too much about traffic and revenue then that's absolutely fine, you can probably skip the rest of this post.

Revenue

ZCars currently makes just over $40 USD per day in AdSense revenue ($20 commission) for about 60 minutes of work (nearly 90 mins per weekday) with traffic continuing to increase. It is also reaching the point where it can take on large direct advertisers at which time we expect revenue to increase by a factor of around 3-4. Note that a large proportion of the ZCars traffic is from Google image searches which pays very little. Non image-search traffic amounts to about 3500 unique readers per day. By this measure there are a number of Orble blogs which attract similar levels of traffic. For the rest of this post I will be talking about non image-search traffic unless otherwise stated.

It is an unfortunate fact that large well paying advertisers will only place ads on websites with very large traffic volumes and an audience that fits their target demographic. Thankfully a number of Orble blogs are finally approaching this point. Once we establish relationships with advertisers for particular blogs I am hoping to extend their advertising to the corresponding Orble channels so smaller Orble bloggers can also benefit from the better advertising rates.

Obviously for a large part of the life of ZCars it has made much less than $40 per day. I've regarded the time spent before now as an investment which is starting to pay off and which should give quite a good effective return over the next few years.

Traffic Sources

As can be seen from the graph below about half of ZCar's traffic comes from Search Engines (mainly Google, some Yahoo and MSN) and the rest from returning readers (email, bookmarks, type-ins) and referring sites.

ZCars Traffic Sources

ZCars does get some traffic from the Orble home page and popular posts lists, however it is a small fraction of the total. Charles has mainly concentrated on attracting search engine traffic rather that write posts which attract votes on Orble.

Below are the factors which have contributed to this traffic:

Being part of the Orble Network

The main benefit of being part of Orble for ZCars is the set of links from other Orble blogs which helps with search engine rankings. ZCars would not have anywhere near the amount of search traffic it has if it were a stand-alone blog.

Continuous and Frequent Posting

ZCars has had at least 1 post per week since it's creation in April 2006. Since April 2007 it has had an average of 5 posts per week and since December 2007 an average of 15 posts per week (3 per weekday). Charles spends an average of about 30 minutes on each post.

Continuous posting over long periods is one of the most important factors in attracting Google (and other SE) traffic. This post on average Orble blog traffic illustrates the fact.

A blog needs to have had a long period of continuous posting to attract serious SE traffic. For the first 6 months of it's like ZCars struggled to attract many readers at all, certainly much less than 100 per day. The key is persistence. The longer you blog the more of your competition drops away and the more traffic you will pick up. The last blogger standing wins.

There is some question over whether it is better to post say 3 posts per day on one blog, or 1 post per day on three different blogs. I would say that for the moment the jury is still out. There are a couple of Orble bloggers who make similar amounts of revenue to ZCars from (what they say is) about 60 mins per day of posting on a number of different blogs. The advantage of this approach is that all your eggs are not in one basket, however the disadvantage is that we may find it harder to sell to direct advertisers once you reach sufficient traffic volumes.

Stable Topics

Most of the posts on ZCars are about specific cars. Many people who are thinking about buying a specific car search for information about that car using a Search Engine. Each new post on ZCars can attract SE traffic for months and some for years after being published. Topics which continue to attract SE traffic over long periods of time are known as Stable Topics. You can find out more about Stable Topics here.

Original Content

Most of the text on ZCars posts is entirely original. Occassionaly some quoting is done, however in small amounts (and always attributed). Having lots of original text in your posts is essential for attracting SE traffic. Lots if Duplicate content (text which is copied from elsewhere on the web) will result in your blog being penalised by the SEs. For more information see this post.

Your posts should also be of sufficient length. A post requires at least 200 words on original content to have any chance of attracting SE traffic, and the more the better. You are better of writing one substantial post of 500 words, than 10 short posts of 50 words.

Images

Each post contains an image. Many of the images have been cropped. Properly named and captioned images help attract regular SE traffic as well as image-search traffic. It also makes each post so much more attractive to your readers and they are more likely to hang around and click on an advert.

Remember to be careful of copyright and always attribute!

For more information on why having an image in each post is important see this post.

Categories

ZCars has lots of categories and they attract lots of SE traffic. Use categories! See this post for information on creating categories.

Think carefully when naming your categories. Which keywords are people most likely to search for?

Outside Links

One of the most important factors in the success of ZCars has been the effort Charles has made to attract links from blogs outside of Orble.

This has been done by creating great content (people will link to good, timely content) but also by visiting other motoring blogs and forums outside of Orble and leaving comments. Most sites will allow you to leave a link at the end of your comment back to your own site, as long as you are making a genuine contribution to their site with a useful or informative comment.

Don't spam (leave very short comments containing a link) as people will rightly get angry and possibly ban you. Sometimes it's best to establish an identity on a different site or forum first by leaving quite a few comments, before you start including a link back to your own site.

These inbound links will not just generate direct traffic (people who click on the link) they will also increase your SE rankings resulting in more SE traffic.

Correct use of Title and Short Title fields

Charles always puts some thought into the title of a post and the short title. See this post for more information on choosing the correct title for a post.

Conclusion

There is nothing magic about the success of ZCars. Any Orble domain blogger should be able to achieve the same results given a little time and effort.

As always comments and questions are appreciated.

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips

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Duplicate Content

January 11th 2008 08:43

Copying content from other sources on the web for your own blog will hurt your search engine ranking. Google (and other search engines) take into account the "uniqueness" of a site's content (text and images) in their ranking algorithms.

If a site (or page on a site) mainly consists of text or images copied from another website they will usually rank poorly. Just changing the order of the paragraphs will not help either, or just copying just a segment of the text. If you want to duplicate content safely it needs to be completely rewritten.

This also applies to "quoting" from another source. Quoting is fine, but make sure that no more than 1/3 of the text of your post consists of a quote from another source. Copying an entire article, and then putting a link to the source after it with a few quick comments is not a good idea either. You would be better off simply having just the link and your short comments without the copied text.

In summary? Quality unique text and image content is best.

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines, Google

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Making the most out of image traffic

January 8th 2008 03:44

Those of you that have been with Orble for more than a year have probably noticed that your traffic has grown consistently over the year. As the network grows larger, if you write often enough, you'll find that search engine traffic comes your way.

When reading your stats, it's important to remember that Page Views and Visitors are a different metric. We're interested in the number of actual people coming to our sites, which is a tough number to pin down, as there are a lot of robots surfing the web these days

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Posted By: Cibbuano - Category: No Category

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Orble Blog traffic over time: what to expect

October 6th 2007 04:51

I've unleashed the inner geek and done some research into how an Orble blog can be expected to perform over the first 500 days of it's life.

These results show that

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips

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Writing long posts about old or stable topics

October 5th 2007 04:35

Most bloggers write about recent events and people who are currently in the news. This is a great way to attract readers because we all like to know what is happening in the world around us. However recent events usually have a limited shelf life. After a couple of days or weeks people will mostly lose interest.

There are however many topics which people will always be interested in and which most bloggers overlook because they are so focused on what is new. A few examples

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines

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Incoming Links and Blogrolls

October 4th 2007 06:32

Most successful blogs obtain a large percentage (80% or more) of their traffic from search engines so it's very important to know how they work.

Search engines rank websites by counting the number of other websites which link to them -- called incoming links. The more incoming links your website has the higher your ranking will be for search terms relevant to the content on your site. However it's actually more complicated that this

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines, Google

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Correct use of Meta Tags and URL

October 3rd 2007 09:57

Using the Meta Tags and URL correctly for each post on your blog can make a big difference to the amount of Search Engine traffic your blog will attract.

There is a lot of debate amongst the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) people about whether meta tags are used by the search engines at all anymore. From my experience if the search engine trusts your site they will at least take notice of the Title meta tag

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines

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Don't make sudden large scale changes to your Blog

October 3rd 2007 04:46

A blogger contacted me yesterday asking why Google had suddenly stopped sending her blog traffic. After a bit of questioning I discovered that she had added a number of new categories and had then gone through all the posts on her blog (a couple hundred) and had added them to these categories.

This has the effect of creating a large number of new pages very suddenly. Not only does each new category create a new page, but each new category combination creates another new page if there is a single post that is in both of them. So after creating just 5 new categories she had effectively created around 100 new pages which was about a 50% increase in the overall number. Changing the name of a category (even just one letter) can have the same effect

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines, Google

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Attracting Image Search Traffic

October 2nd 2007 12:14

Image search traffic accounts for a huge proportion (more than 50%) of the total traffic of most successful blogs so it's very important to be absolutely on top of making the most of it.

There are a couple things you can do which will help

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines

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