jon
CibbuanoZCars 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 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.
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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Comment by charles
ZCars
Ponderous
Well, ok there are some 'secrets' - perseverance (when a new domain blog is in its infancy) and consistency (posting regularly - even choosing the same time of day/night to post is a good idea to let your readers know roughly when your blog is guaranteed to be updated etc.).
Like Jon said, comments and questions are appreciated so please leave some feedback.
For those that wish to contact me directly about ZCars etc. or about their own domain blogs (yes, even those that I am not mentoring
Charles.
Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
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Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Also, I wonder if the relative financial success of Zcars is also due to the ads, which are very, very well targeted?
Comment by Anonymous
Sarah
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by jon
Orble News
Urban Hint
Blog Adviser
Jon's Bookmarks
Debate Battle
Orblepedia
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Sydney WeekendNotes
For the bigger blogs the main benefit of Orble is the large number of active domains of the same topic that link to your blog, as well as the other links to popular posts and breaking posts etc. It's all set up to get you the most SE traffic possible, which you would really struggle to do on your own. Quite a few bloggers have left Orble for the reasons you state and end up coming back because they didn't appreciate at the time that all those links in the Orble menu section are what is generating all their SE traffic.
Plus there is the fun/interesting/lots of people commenting side of being part of the community, which comes on top of the purely mercenary aspect.
Comment by Anonymous
But that's my concern/issue. If someone knows what they're doing, and knows it's very long haul, it seems that it would be better to go it alone, simply because, at some piont you're really going to resent making $600 instead of $1200 all because of orble taking so much. I think it's a little greedy of the company and I would be much more inclined to use the site if the cut for orble was something more like 20%.
Comment by www.businessfork.com
I would also like to see other advertising options besides google so there are more options, and income potential.
I would also like a mentor but no one seems to have the time so I will keep hoping.
One more thing, Does anyone know of affordable couching and mentoring for freelance writers?
Comment by jon
Orble News
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Remember all links are not worth the same. You need links from other sites who write in the same area, which also have other sites linking to them, which have been around for a while (age counts), which are kept active, and a number of other characteristics. You also need to do this without any tricks which will get you banned by the SEs.
It's one thing to say it's possible to get lots of links like this without Orble, it's another thing entirely to actually do it. I've tried and it's really, really hard and requires hours of work without any guarantee of success. The Herculean nature of the task (without resorting to risky SEO) is one of the reasons I started Orble in the first place.
If you really don't believe me you could start up two blogs, one on Orble and one on your own (quite a few bloggers do this). Publish the same number (and quality) of posts on each and after 6 months I bet the Orble blog will have much more traffic. Well worth it even without taking into account the many hours you would spend getting links for your other blog which could be put into creating great content.
Orble allows you to concentrate what you do best (and presumably enjoy) which is creating great content and for the vast majority of people they will get more than twice the amount of traffic they would writing a stand alone blog.
Plus Orble does offer many other things besides and many writers are more interested in readers, a community, and comments as opposed to being purely mercenary.
Thanks for your comments. Dealing with the day-to-day running of Orble I often forget why it was started in the first place
BusinessFork -- we are always looking at other advertising options, however for the moment AdSense still pays the best rates. As soon as that changes (and there are a few promising things on the horizon) I'll be letting everyone know.
With regards to mentoring, I'm afraid that the best thing you can do is approach the other bloggers. If you have read most of the information on the blogging tips blog and BlogAdvisor.
Comment by Anonymous
I think I'm going to stick with what I"m learning from problogger.net there are WAY too many affiliate programs and pay per click programs out there. I think it's much better to build a business a la carte, and orble just lets me be part of a blog factory. Thanks for talking with me about it anyway.
Nothing has any guarantees of success. I'm not interested in the "easy way out" the penalty down the road is far too great. I'm in this for the long haul and really think I can handle it myself. (And I've been reading a LOT, I know how hard it is, but I still think I stand a far better shot on my own for overall larger success than with orble.)
Also, I didn't realize you'd created orble. I'm sure it's a great site and right for a lot of people but I don't think I'm one of them. I'm far too independent and anal retentive to give up this much advertising option control. It might take a long time but clearly it can be done, otherwise, how did you create Orble? Is there a larger network out there that you built orble into?
You really might want to consider lowering the percentage you take from adsense I think it turns a lot of people off. It certainly turned me off. Like I said, it might make traffic building happen faster, like within 6 months instead of a year or two, BUT at a longterm financial price I and many others are not willing to pay. It's a bit like selling your soul to the devil here.
Also adding other things like at the very least amazon affiliates and maybe even ebay affiliates might sweeten the pot. Hubpages offers a similar service and they have the other affiliates.
Comment by jon
Orble News
Urban Hint
Blog Adviser
Jon's Bookmarks
Debate Battle
Orblepedia
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Sydney WeekendNotes
Maybe we will see you back here one day
Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
I think where Orble has really succeeded is in letting casual bloggers make a little money. Many of the film bloggers that have stuck with it are now delighted to find Adsense checks every month. They just love to write, and being part of Orble lets them forget about hosting, programming, etc.
Comment by Two Guys Sports
Baseball Slate
Pro Sports Wrap
Blogging in America
Reviews R Us
However, since joining Orble my blog sites here have been getting quite a bit of traffic from Google. I was shocked to see that during Wimbledon it peaked at being found on Google in 32 different countries, and after just two months has gotten up to over 700 readers in a day a couple of times. (They are sports blogs.)
So, sure Orble gets half the ad revenue, well even that isn't an accurate statement. . . Orble gets to run their AdSense 50% of the time, that doesn't mean they get half your revenue. You never know when the click will be made, it could be your ad, or theirs. Anyway, back to what i was trying to say, they take the percentages, sure, but they also get the domain name for you and renew it over and over again. You get the benefit of the built in community. Just the traffic and clicks from other Orble bloggers could get you going, slowly, but going. All those things, even for me writing from America and mostly about American sports on a mostly Australian site makes it worth it, for now anyway. If I ever reach Charles's level where the split would work out to $1200 - $600 a month, I don't think I would care much about the other 50%. . . I would be making $600 a month writing about stuff I am interested in. Plus if I got it to that level of success in about two years I would be able to see that in another two or three years my 50% could be a very very nice number.
That's my two cents. (Now if I could just have Charles's 60,000 cents.)
Gene
www.prosportswrap.com
www.baseballslate.com
www.wrestlingwrapup.com
Comment by concretethreads
Thanks, all of your input has really helped me a lot. II have a question though. What if I've been posting blogs for about a month to two now, and just created multiple categories, sub categories, do I need to go back to all of my old post and modify towards new cat. created?
Comment by Two Guys Sports
Baseball Slate
Pro Sports Wrap
Blogging in America
Reviews R Us
Yes you will need to go back and add each individual post to a category. I had to do the same thing once Charles made a "Tennis" category for me on the home page. At this point you have 40 posts so it shouldn't take too long.
My suggestions on a method to doing it the fastest way is the following:
From your My Orble page click "More" at the bottom so it will list nearly all, if not all of your posts on one page.
Then Right Mouse Click on "Modify" on the first or last article on the list. Then click "Open in New Tab" (or "Open in New Window" if you don't use tabs).
This will open the modify page in a new window/tab. It means you won't have to navigate back to your My Orble page after each one, since it will still be open in your original window. Just make sure you go in order so you don't lose your place and open an article to modify only to realize you already fixed that one.
Then obviously just scroll down, click your category, and click the modify button at the bottom.
Also note you can add an article to more than one of your own categories. (Not the Orble categories.) To do this click the first category you want to list the article in, then hold down your Control button, and click the other categories you want it listed under.
Hope that helped.
Gene