If an apple falls out of an old ladies bag and rolls down the street stopping at my feet I will bend down, pick it up, and hand it to the lady.  She will smile and say, thank you kind young man.  I will return the smile and move on – she is right, I am a kind young man.

A guy is walking down the street staring at a map and obviously lost.  He looks at me with a face that is a plea for help.  I will look the other way and try to ignore him, making a silent prayer that he does not stop me.  Why should I help him – he should be able to help himself.

I feel the same way about my readers – why should I help them?

I do not possess any need to help people that can help themselves.  The old, the blind, the slow, I will help if forced – if an apple hits my foot.  But everyone else are on their own.  I do not care if somebody is lost or needs a dime, there is no force driving me to help people in need.  If they have a brain, eyes and the major extremities then they should be able to help themselves.

And that is why blogging is difficult.  Blogging  is about giving advice, tips, suggestions and information with the intent of helping the reader.  Provide content that helps readers.  They do not know how to do something – show them how.  They do not know about something new – tell them about it.  They want to be entertained – stand on a beach ball and roll around juggling bananas.  Blogs are not for the blogger, they are for the reader.  You exist to serve the readers.  They should be able to help themselves – but no – they want you to help them.

But honestly, I do not care about the readers.  Besides the couple of visitors that leave comments, I know nothing about the other readers.  There is no connection with them – they are just bodies without souls.  No different then the hundreds of bodies I walk past everyday on the streets.

Do Successful Blogs Truly Care About You?

Successful blogs are run by kind people.  People who care.  Their posts offer free advice in a pleasant and loving way.  The bloggers care about their readers – they want to help.

But do they truly care?  Or are they just good at giving the impression that they care?

Obviously they are just pretending to care and are very good at it.

Just like the vacuum salesman who arrives at your door worried about your children.  You open the door and see a man holding a vacuum and beaming a smile.  You say, hello, may I help you? Suddenly with a  worried look he proclaims:  there are a lot of bacteria in your carpets, bacteria that can make your children sick, your children!  Like you, I care about your children – I do not want them to cough and sniffle,  poor little things.  Please buy this vacuum so that your children will not be sick.

Being a vacuum salesman is difficult.  You have to look sincere when you talk about ‘the children!’.  The best salesman are those that can form a little tear at the edge of their eye as they speak.  How could you say no to somebody caring so much.

You cannot sell vacuums if you do not care about the children.  To be a successful vacuum salesman, I mean blogger, you need to appear like you truly care.  Be kind to your readers.

How To Test Whether a Blogger Truly Cares

Probably there are successful blogger that truly care.  To test whether a blogger really cares is easy.  Write the blogger an email and ask them a question.  Be easy – do not make them work hard.  Ask them something simple like:

Hello.

I have really enjoy your blog and your style of writing.  Just wondering how long does it take you to write a post?

Thanks,
You

After you send this email there are three possible outcomes:

1. No response.  Does not care.
2. A quick response.  No hello, no punctuation, no capitalization, poor spelling.  For example: it takes 2 hours.  Does not care.
3. A well formatted email response with greeting, punctuation, correct spelling and capitalization.  Truly cares.

Of course, if you email me my response will belong to the ‘Cares’ category.  But that is only because I am not successful and I need to appear to care even in my emails.

So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, There is a HOW TO in the Post

Charley Parkhurst was a wild west bad ass. He was a stagecoach driver during the 1850’s gold rush in California. He spit tobacco, smoked, drank and was a private man of few raspy words. Kicked in the face by a horse, he had only one eye and a jarred scar across the face. Not a pretty sight, but if you needed to make the San Jose to Santa Cruz stage run then ‘One Eyed Charlie’ was the man for the job.

There was just one problem with this man of men. On his death bed and in his birthday suit the mourners noticed that he was missing more then just one eye. He was a she.

Throughout her life Charley had to do a lot of work to hid her secret. But thanks to the internet you do not have to get kicked in the head by a horse to appear like a man.

Why is Your Blog The Same Sex as You?

You made a choice that you are probably not aware of. You are the same sex on your blog as you are on the toilet.

If you use your real name then you give your sex away instantly. And if you use a unisex name like ‘Admin’ then you reveal yourself away by your point of view.

Let’s not get scholarly, let’s just admit it. Women and men have different points of view. For most blogs you can tell whether the writer is male or female. Either they give it away directly by stating their sexual point of view or indirectly by writing ‘don’t you hate it when you walk over a manhole and the updraft flings your skirt over your face’.

By admitting your sex you lose an exciting opportunity for something that you cannot do in live relationships. You can change your sex.

A Sex Change Is Exciting For You

Besides what you do in the privacy of your bedroom, when else do you have the opportunity to be the other sex.

You are probably bored of your sexual point of view. It’s the same you have had all your life. By changing sex new life emerges in your writing. You see new things. You are more conscious of your words. You have to think like the other sex thinks.

A Sex Change Is Exciting For Your Readers

For example. In a world where the majority of sports writers are male it is easy to get lost in the crowd if you are a male writer and virtually ignored if you are female writer. Sad but true. But a female writing as a male has a big advantage. She gets to ‘join the club’ of male writers and is guaranteed to have a different point of view. A wolf walking amongst dogs.

Sport readers tired of the man’s perspective but too prideful to read the woman’s will find solace in your writing. They will not figure out exactly why your writing is different, but it is – it has to be – you are a women and your audience thinks you are a man.

Is Having A Sex Change Honest?

Is it honest that you spatter your sentences with fuc#s and shi#s around your friends, but utter nothing but please and thanks at your grandmother’s birthday party?

Is it honest that you watch football with your boyfriend and bat your eyes with interest during his play-by-play commentary, but lecture your little brother on how he is wasting time watching numbskulls chase a stupid ball around?

You are a multi shaded person. For each relationship you reveal a different hue. Nobody sees the real you – they see the side of you that you choose to reveal. The only person that you are completely honest with is yourself. 3:30am, lying on your bed, staring into the ceiling, wondering what your life has become is the real you. Everybody else just gets bits and pieces.

The relationship you have with your blog readers is no different then the relationships you have with friends,family, and foes. Shining different shades of yourself to each of them is not lying. The difference with the internet is that you are not as limited as in face to face relations. On the internet you can decide which sex to shine.

How To Change Your Sex Online

Fortunately it is a lot easier to change your sex online then it was for Charley in the wild west.

It can be something as simple as using a name of the other sex. Your readers will assume your gender is the same as the name’s gender. It’s not your fault that just because your name is Bill “The Big Bone” Smith visitors assume you are male.

If you want to appear male then write like a male. Virginal Woolf provides a clue on how to sound more male, “I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best men can do is not to talk about themselves anymore.” So write about virtue, honour and yourself. Of course these are suggestions, not hard and fast rules.

And finally the appearance of your blog can be used to appear as a specific sex. Rounded corners and bubble gum colors are more female then army colors and sharp edges. Generalizations and stereotypes but effective.

This Post Is Female

Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology created a algorithm for predicting whether a piece of text was written by a male or a female. They argue that depending on your sex you are more likely to use certain words. There is a simplified version of this algorithm online – you can test whether your writing is male or female. I ran this post through the test and, as intended, this post is female.

One Eyed Charlie was a female stagecoach driver in a world where only men can be stagecoach drivers. She did not let her sex dictate her life’s ambitions, there is no reason why you should let your sex dictate your writing. Be whatever sex you want to be.

There is a HOW TO in the Post

40 years ago Robert Zajonc did a very interesting experiment.

Volunteers are asked to watch a screen as a series of Chinese symbols are displayed.  None of the participant understand the symbols, to them they are nothing more then a bunch of intersecting lines and squiggles.  After each character is displayed the viewer states whether they like the symbol or not.

Of course, this is a very subjective thing.  Each person either likes it or does not like it.  If asked why they liked or disliked the Chinese symbol they usually say either that they did not know or they gave a reason like – it just looks nice.

To the participants it is an easy task.  Look at the symbol and state whether they like it or not.  They suspect nothing sinister.

What they do not realize is that milliseconds before each Chinese symbol is displayed on the screen there is another symbol flashed on the screen so quickly that they do not concisely see it.  Before a Chinese symbol appears on the screen the experimenters flashed one of two recognizable symbols – either a smiley face or a sad face.  They flashed it so fast that none of the participants reported seeing it.  But it was there.

The result of the experiment is that the participants where statistically more likely to like a Chinese symbol that had a smiley face preceding it.  Flash a smiley face, and the Chinese symbol will be liked.  Flash a sad face and the symbol will not be liked.

The revealing thing is that people can be primed to like or dislike something.  And the best part is that they do not know that it is happening.  Knowing this you can influence a persons opinion without them knowing you are doing it.  They  like something, but they do not know why.  There must be a way to harness this power and apply it to a website…

How To Apply The Smiley Face’s Mind Control Powers To Your Website?

Obviously the best way to apply this knowledge is to have a smiley face flash milliseconds before your website appears.  It would be so quick that the visitor would not notice it, but their subconscious would notice it.  They would be primed to like your website.  When your website does appear, without knowing why, they will like it.  Before reading a single line, before knowing what your website is about, they will be in a state of mind to like your website.  You will have them right where you want them – puppet on a string.

But unfortunately this cannot be done.  Not because it would be wrong, but because the technology is not there.  Currently it is not possible to have a image flash fast enough in a browser without the visitor noticing something suspicions.  The browsers might flicker, or depending on the connection speed the visitor would notice a lag in page loading speed.  Browsers are not dependable enough for this to work properly and reliably.  There will be some error, some glitch, some unintended loading pause and sooner or later you will be found out  – and that would be embarrassing.

So what can be done?  It is a waste not to use this knowledge to your advantage. 

The experiment teaches two things: people can be primed without knowing it and people are more likely to like something if they see a smiley face. 

Technology prevents you from flashing a happy face before they enter your website, but there is nothing preventing you from having a happy face somewhere on your website.  The effect will be the same.  Incorporate it into your logo, or simply have it sitting somewhere inconspicuously on your website banner.  

The visitor will notice it visually, but they will be unaware of its subversive subconscious powers.  They simply see it as a happy face graphic, without realizing they are being primed.  The visitor does not know that the smiley face has special mind powers -  the innocent smile sitting on the top-corner of the website reaching into their soul and forcing them to like the website.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, There is a HOW TO in the Post

Ever since I created this blog I have wanted to know what my odds of success are. Out of 100 people that have a blog how many fail? After searching around the best I could find was 99%. You see it everywhere, 99% of all blogs fail.

This is an interesting number but the problem is that there is never any data to back it up. The number comes from nowhere. Maybe it is just intuition – the people that have been around a long time notice that most bloggers come and then they go. To them it seems like 99% of them disappear.

Intuition gone wrong is the cause of the current 50% divorce rate – intuition is not good enough. I would like to see some data to back up the claim. I can find out the chances of killing myself skiing, so why can’t I find out the chances of success with a blog?

Blogs Die Without A Trace

There is a good reason why there are no actual statistics for becoming a successful blogger. The problem is that blogs do not leave a body when they die – they disappear. They are like aliens in a computer game – once you shoot them with your photon laser they disappear. No trace remains, no clues that they were ever there, no dead bodies to count.

To find out my chances of dieing on a ski hill is easy. All I have to do is to go to the ski hill parking lot and wait till the end of the day. On a piece of paper I draw a line down the center. On the left side top part I write ‘Alive’ and on the top right side I write ‘Dead’. At the end of the day I make a mark on the left side of the page for everybody that leaves the hill with their skies and for the skiers that leave in a body bag I make a mark on the right side. By doing this everyday for the entire season I will have nice set of statistics. By adding up the marks on the left side and the the marks on the right side I can easily figure out how many people out of a hundred die skiing.

Unfortunately this kind of data gathering is hard to do with blogs. There is no way to count dead blogs. Looking around the internet there are only two types of blogs: successful blogs and those trying to be successful. The blogs that have died leave no trace, so there is no way to count them, there is no way to gather marks for the right side of the paper. All you see are the living blogs.

Problogger to the Rescue

Problogger is a very popular and successful blog. The owner, Darren Rowse, has been doling out advice on how to write a successful blog since 2005. His audience is thousands of eager bloggers trying to figure out how to make their own blog more successful.

Everyday he writes a few paragraphs of advice and tips on how to improve a blog. Most of the visitors are beginning bloggers – bloggers who just started their blog and want to learn how to make it better. These advice seeking bloggers consume his wisdom in the magnitude of approximately 15,000 visitors a day.

With this kind of traffic it is no surprise that each of his posts have lots of comments. People leave comments for many reasons: 1) To give praise. 2) To show disapproval. 3) To increase their own traffic. By leaving a comment the person also leaves a link back to their own website in the hopes that somebody will click on it and visit their site. This is great for them, but it is also great for us because they leave a foot print – a permanent record of their existence.

Problogger has an archive section on which is stored all the posts and comments since 2005. Anybody can go and look at the posts from 2005. The posts are there and so are the comments. BINGO!

We can go back in time. We can go to 2005 and have a look at the comments for each post. Each comment has a link back to the commenter’s website. In 2005 the commenter was a beginning blogger seeking Darren’s advice on how to make his blog more successful, full of hopes and dreams. Regardless of what his dreams were in 2005, now in 2009 we can find out if (s)he succeeded or not.

A Website That Estimates Traffic to a Website

Lets imagine you are sitting at the bar and next to you is a beautiful and sexy girl listening to you as you eagerly describe your blog. Her eyes are wide open with wonder as you talk about your blog. You are an honest guy: you tell her how much work it is and how slow it is going, how you have been trying to get more visitors but it is a ongoing struggle. She smiles and touches your knee – she seems to like you. Being an optimist you start to think about what you will make her for breakfast in the morning.

But then disaster strikes. In walks a fast talking, Fabio haired, blue eyed, muscles bulging from his tight shirt lady’s man. He has it all – he rarely leave the bar alone. He sees the girl next to you and makes his approach to her with a complete disregard of your feelings. He runs a hand through his bangs slowly, making sure the girl notices his camel back biceps. After introducing himself and making a lame joke he begins to talk to her about his blog. He claims that it has 10,000 visitors a day and that he makes $100/hour. The girl is impressed – you are screwed. Looks like it is going to be another night of checking your pathetic blog stats alone.

But all is not lost yet. Fortunately you never go to the bar without your laptop. You pull it out and go to the website webtraffic24.com. It is a website that provides an estimate of how many visitors a website gets. You simply type in a URL and click a button. webtraffic24.com will then check the page rank, alexa rank, backlinks, etc of the website and using an algorithm return an estimate of the amount of traffic the website receives. It is not perfect, it is just an estimate. But an estimate is usually all you need – you need to know whether a website gets around 10 visitors a day or 10,000.

After typing in the stupid brute’s blog address you get the results – 20 visitors a day. Just as you suspected – another bullshitter making false claims about their blog to pick up girls. Proudly you show the girl the results. Seeing the number she slaps the brute and turns back to you – ‘tell me more about your blog’.

 

Combining Problogger’s Archives with Webtraffic24.com to Count Dead Blogs

Using the URL left behind by the commentors in the problogger archive with the webtraffic24 tool we can count dead blogs. All we need to do is to go back to the old comments, for example in 2006, and using webtraffic24 see how the blogs are doing now. To simplify I have broken up the amount of daily visitors a website receives into 3 main states:

• Dead (0-500 visitors/day)
• Serious Injury (500-2000 visitors/day)
• Alive and Well (2000+ visitors/day)

Webtraffic24 is not 100% accurate but it is good enough – it can separate the dead from the living.

How to Find Out the Success Rate of Blogs

To determine the success rate of blogs and websites I have done the following:

1. From the problogger.com archived posts comment section I have taken all the URLs for the month of January 2006. There was a total of 2514 comments for that month.
2. I had to do some editing:
   • When somebody put a link to a specific webpage I edited the URL to just the homepage. For example, if the the URL was www.mywebsite.com/my-dream-of-having-a-great-blog.html I changed it to www.mywebsite.com.
   • I excluded Darren Rowse’s comments.
   • I excluded all URL’s that were email addresses.
3. After getting rid of all the duplicates (same person who made more then 1 comment that month) I was left with 693 distinct URLs. 693 eager bloggers and webmasters hoping to be successful one day.
4. Using webtraffic24 I checked each URL to see where it stands today. Is is dead, injured or alive.

I gathered all the data into a single table (download table). Each URL and its statistics are recorded. With the table complete it is a simple matter of adding up the living and the dead.

 

How Many Blogs Become Successful And How Many Die – The Results

• Total URLs: 693
• Dead: 497 (download table)
• Serious Injury: 81 (download table)
• Alive and Well: 115 (download table)

If you were a commentor on problogger during January 2006, here are the odds of what state your blog will be in three years:

Analysis

72% chance of total failure. It is high but not as high as the 99% claimed by people who ‘just know’. Another way of looking at it is you have 28% of your blog not being dead in 3 years.

I was quite surprised by these results. They are much better then I expected. Even while working on this blog I was under the assumption that there is a 99% failure rate. I am glad that it is not that bad.

To answer my original question: 72 out of every 100 blogs die.

Of course this experiment has some flaws. The biggest one is that there is no way to tell how well these blogs where doing at the time they made the comment (January 2006). It is possible, although very unlikely, that all the Alive and Well blogs where alive and well in January 2006. The only real conclusion that can be made is that in 3 years 72% of the commentor’s blogs have died.

The second flaw is that problogger commentors do not represent the entire blogging sample. There is a lot of commentors but they do not represent the whole. It is possible that by being a problogger commentor you improve your blog and your chance of avoiding death. Maybe problogger commentors have a 72% chance of death but bloggers as a whole have 99%. Unfortunately there is no way to tell because there is no means to count dead bodies on the entire blog population. This experiment applies to all blogs only by assuming that problogger commentors are bloggers just like everybody else. But if you want the certainty of a 28% chance of avoiding death then become a problogger commentor.

More Then Dead

497 blogs are dead. Above I defined dead as having less then 500 visitors a day according to website24.com. Having anything less then 500 visitors a day for a website or blog is only virtually dead (you probably will not be making too much money) because even 3 visitors a day is still not dead. True dead is 0 visitors. 0 visitor happens when website24 cannot find the domain – which means the owner of that domain canceled the hosting and the domain is unused. Out of the 497 dead blogs 192 are truly dead – 28% of the total and 39% of the virtual dead.

Further Study

The data for this experiment was only 1 months worth of problogger comments. Of course it would be better to use a whole years worth of comment URLs. But, as you can probably imagine, that would be a lot of work. For 2006 problogger probably has over 30,000 comments. If you eliminate the duplicate URLs you might be left with at least 5000 URLs. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to collect all those URLs and then run them through website24. I would be glad to see it, but I am not going to do it.

What I might do in the future is to check how many blogs die within 6 months.  Instead of going back 3 years I will go back 6 months.

Acknowledgments

• Thank you www.problogger.net for having such a great archive.
• Thank you www.webtraffic24.com for not blocking my IP during my 693 website checks.
• Finally I would like to thank Robby G for his post http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/06/28/perseverance-will-save-your-blog/ because it gave me the idea for this post.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Optimistic and Motivational, There is a HOW TO in the Post, What YOU Expect vs Reality

A couple months ago I stated that I was not going to create my own backlinks.  That I would wait till others backlink to me.  I was not going to shame myself by tooting my own horn, by begging for backlinks.  I was going to wait patiently until others backlink to me – let the website speak for itself.  But guess what – nobody has backlinked to me.  Four months have passed since this website went live and in that time no backlinks.  Nobody has been impressed enough to link to this site.  Surprised?  So am I.

So with a paper bag on my head I must admit defeat.  If I want backlinks then I will have to create them myself.  Climb to the rooftop of the tallest building and shout, “look at me!”.  How humiliating.

How to Create Backlinks – Article Submission

Article submission is the easiest way to create quality one way backlinks.  I signed up on ezinearticles.com and wrote 3 articles.  In each article I summarize one of the pages on this website. 

My method is simple.  I read a page from this website and then close the window.  Then I open my word processor and rewrite what I just read.  Same main points but new words.  The article version is shorter and more to the point.  The articles need to be at least 250 words.  My articles tend to be around 400 words and take about 30 minutes to write.  It is easy to do because it is not new material.  Just a summary of key points from this website.   At the end of the article I place one link to this site and one link specifically to the page being summarized.

The backlinks from this method are great because they are one way backlinks.  They link to you with out you having to link back to them – Google loves that.  Also, when you create the backlink you can use the keywords of your choosing for the anchor text.  This is good because Google uses the anchor text of a backlink to figure out what your page is about.

Get Your New Webpages Indexed Faster

Besides backlinks, another advantage of articles submission is that you can get your own webpages indexed faster by Google.  Normally for this website it takes up to a week before a new page is indexed by Google.  But if I create an article and backlink to the new page then the page gets indexed in under a day.  Here is how it works:   

1. I create a new page on my website
2. I write an article summarizing the new page
3. At the bottom of the article I link to the new page
4. My article gets published. Since ezinearticles.com is a popular site Google indexes the article within a hour.
5. While indexing the article Google notices the link to my new page. Google discovers that the page is not indexed yet.
6. My new page gets flagged by Google for immediate indexing

Besides getting backlinks creating articles is a great way to get new pages indexed.  For an example of one of the articles and the backlink have a look at my article Do Guest Posts on Other Blogs Really Bring Traffic.

How to Create Backlinks – Guest Posts

Guest posts are harder then article posts.  Creating articles is easy because unless you really screw up and do not follow the rules your article will be published.  Guest posts are much more difficult because they have a very selective gatekeeper – the blog owner.  It is up to their discretion whether your post gets published.  If he stubbed his toe just before reading your email requesting a guest post and therefore in a bad mood you could be denied just because his toe hurts.

You spend a few hours creating the perfect guest post specifically designed for a specific blog.  You send it to the blog owner and wait.  A few days later you get a rejection email.  ‘Sorry, but at this time I am not taking guest posts’, translation: your post was denied.  Now you need to decide what to do with the post.  Do you put it on your own blog or do you alter it and submit to another blog?  Either way time is wasted and the post is tainted by the stench of rejection.

Fortunately this did not happen to me.  I created a guest post and submitted it.  Within a few days it was approved and published.

What a great backlink.  A one way backlink from a popular blog back to my website.  Does not get better then that.  It was a great success – a perfect backlink.  The only problem was that nobody agreed with my post.  Not a single comment agreed, even the blog owner stepped in and stated that he does not agree.  But that is just a technicality, not really important.  Nobody agrees, I am wrong, I do not know what I am talking about etc…but I got my backlink.  By the way, I still think I am right, everybody else is wrong. If you want to disagree with me then see my guest post Put Time Into Your Guest Posts.

Organic Search Traffic Is Improving

The first couple months this website had backlinks, but they were all natural backlinks.  I frequented forums and made comments on blogs.  I did this not to create backlinks but simply because I wanted to be involved in the forums and blogs.   The backlinks came naturally, they came as a result of me simply participating in my niche.

For the last month I have been actively generating backlinks via articles and guest posts.  Again I can only assume that this is why my organic search traffic is continuing to improve.  It is still a small number but improving.  It seams that backlinks do work.  It is humiliating and pride must be swallowed but creating backlinks is a must to improve your organic traffic.

Forget your pride, ignore your shame, humiliate yourself – create your own backlinks.  Go out there and brag about how great your are.  Because if you don’t then who, besides your mother, will?

About Revenue, Earnings, Money, About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, Optimistic and Motivational, There is a HOW TO in the Post, What YOU Should Do