Startup Blog Project: Part 1
Written on August 17th, 2008 by Graham
So it is finally time to do something that I have wanted to do for a very long time. I am going to launch a blog and promote it only with Entrecard as part of an experiment to see how big a blog can get on Entrecard alone.
I am setting out to prove that using Entrecard, and only Entrecard, a blog can grow from nothing to very large, and generate a ton of search engine traffic, tons of social media traffic and of course tons of subscribers. So, I know what you’re all thinking and No, I am not going to take advantage of any administrative privileges I have with Entrecard. I’ll be dropping as usual, spending only credits I receive from dropping and advertising, and overall using the system like a normal blogger would.
This will be kind of an ongoing tutorial, about the methods I personally use to promote a blog with Entrecard, as well as how I launch a blog and what thought and effort goes into it. A lot will deal with optimization. On this blog we’re going to optimize everything -the comments, the subscribe buttons, deep linking other posts, and I’m going to show you how to do it every step of the way.
The Requisites
For my upstart blog, I wanted to blog about something that met the following requirements:
- Something I feel passionately about
- Something that is an increasing trend (meaning it will effect even more people a year from now)
- Something that currently effects a lot of people
- Something that will be a positive contribution to society
I ended up choosing “How To Not Get Cancer” because it met these four requirements. I got the name because one of my hobbies is researching cancer, its causes, and its preventions, and developing a lifestyle that minimizes my risk. I am always preaching to friends and family how public school systems need to start teaching “how to not get cancer” in schools because of the rate at which its increasing and all the risks we come into contact with in our daily lives. I do believe it is the single largest health risk my generation will face in their lifetime.
So the choice was natural. Helping to promote awareness on various causes of cancer, and giving tips and reminders about increasing their safety and decreasing their risk would be making a positive contribution to society. It’s something I feel passionate about. And it will certainly effect more people a year from today than it does now.
Platform
For this blog I am using a self-hosted installation of Wordpress. I do consider this to be the most powerful and customizeable platform for blogging, with an amazing library of themes and plugins. I have a single shared hosting account that lets me throw up a live site for any domain I own, as I work on the project and see if it sticks. So, after activating the .com domain, I added a MySQL database, uploaded the Wordpress files with Filezilla, edited the config file on Wordpress, and did the install. Up in running in 5 minutes. If anyone out there would like a step-by-step tutorial of setting up your own .com domain and installing wordpress, let me know in the comments.
Plugins:
Immediately once Wordpress is installed, it’s time to install some plugins. Here are the plugins I installed:
Sociable: For social bookmarking chicklets at the end of each post.
Edit comments: Because everyone likes to be able to edit their comments
Subscribe Remind: Puts a reminder at the end of each post to subscribe to your RSS
All in One SEO pack: All your basic SEO in a neat little package
Random Posts Widget: To highlight other posts, making the blog a little stickier
Search Meter: Tells me what people are searching the blog for.
Feed locations: Sets all RSS links in the template to your feedburner feed address
Now I’ve probably forgot some, so I may add another plugin here or there. I’ll keep you posted.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service that will be providing me with data pertaining to my blog’s traffic as I begin optimizing the blog. It is strongly recommended that every blogger install Google Analytics on their blog for their traffic statistics -it is by far the best product on the market.
Feedburner
If you’re a blogger and you aren’t using Feedburner, you should be. Feedburner will handle your RSS feeds and give you lots of options to customize it, build a list of email subscribers, advertise in your feed, and of course it will give you that chicklet that displays your subscriber count.
The Theme
For the blog’s theme, I chose Wordpress’d by Blog2Life because it is clean, having been modeled after the admin backend of Wordpress itself. It’s fast loading, widget ready, and a really sleek and familiar design, attractive, professional, yet understated. A great one to start with.
An attractive Entrecard
Of course the most important thing for any Entrecarder is to have an attractive Entrecard right off the bat. This is a single strategy to greatly increase all the traffic you will get from every aspect of Entrecard. People have gone back and forth a bit on what makes a really good Entrecard, and I am of the opinion that it should accomplish two things:
- It should use an interesting image
- It should convey what your blog is about
I figured the name of the blog itself is pretty explanatory, and I just searched around for a commons-licensed image of a cancer cell, opened up photoshop, and voila.
The BlogRoll
You’ll notice the blogroll I have installed. The blogroll contains useful and relevant links. In this case, the links go to a chart, showing the official mercury levels in fish, The Top 10 cell phones in the US by radiation emissions, a Wikipedia article on Resveratrol, one of the most potent cancer-fighting compounds known, and a comprehensive report about the flame retardants present in the dust on your computer screen.
What this BlogRoll does is it builds my credibility and sends a strong message to the reader/visitor: This BlogRoll is NOT for sale. These links are not paid for. They’re here because I want you to read them, if your interested in this topic. I may add more, or switch some out over time, but the general idea is to provide useful links that I personally think would be of great value to anyone interested in the topic.
Initial Optimization
So here’s the plan. The first part of this series is going to be about OPTIMIZING. I think that one of the greatest opportunities Entrecard gives the blogger is that of optimization. That is, I can get a guaranteed and metered stream of traffic to my blog, of real people / real bloggers, and using that traffic stream and analytical tools, I can make tweeks to my blog to increaes the number of comments, clicks, subscribes, and so forth.
I’m going to be working in 3-day optimization periods. That means for each element I change, I am going to leave it for three days, and examine the statistics over that period to see if certain actions increased or decreased. Because the blog just launched and I need accurate statistics, I am going to wait three days before changing the first element.
Dropping
I am going to be dropping a steady 100 cards per day. At first, I will only drop them on other blogs in the Health and Medicine category. I know that these bloggers are concerned for their health and the health of others, and so my niche will appeal to them in a very targetted fashion.
To do my dropping, I’m going to use the EntreBar because it makes life so easy. Here’s what I have it set to:
Because I need repeat, random samples of targeted traffic this setting, Health and Medicine on Random will give me just what I’m looking for. There are almost 1000 blogs in the Health and Medicine category, and once I have dropped on all of them, I am going to start dropping on the “Self Improvement” category, “Parenting and Family”, “Lifestyle”, and “Environement”. I think that these categories will give me the most targeted traffic. The beutiful thing about this system is that you know if a blog is about the environment, then that blogger actually cares about the environment. And you know if someone is blogging about self improvement, then they must be interested in self improvement.
So that is my strategy, to drop on relevant targeted bloggers only. As I drop I am going to comment whenever I have something valuable to contribute, or whenever I really enjoyed an article.
Optimization Period 1: Baseline
So we’ve established that for the initial optimization period, I’m going to drop 100 cards per day in related categories. I will see how many visits it brought and how many comments were left. Because I’m initially optimizing for comments, the comments are all I’m concerned about. After we have our base period of three days, I will install SezWho, continue the regiment for 3 days, and report the results.
Stay Tuned
The Blog Startup Project is just getting going. We’ll be talking about optimizing your blog for comments, stickiness and social media. We’ll be using every trick in the Entrecard book, so if you’re interested, join us for the ride! And don’t forget to tell us what you think in the comments! Look for an update every three to four days!
August 17th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
That’s awesome. But still you’ll get good traffic due to being an established blogger. Those who know that the blog is being run by Graham will drop there. I liked the purpose of the blog. I don’t know how far it’ll reach but due to the purpose I’ll be always supporting the blog. It’ll add to my knowledge also.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I agree but there is no getting around that. Initially I wanted to do all this in secret, wait until it was all done, and then release the articles. But this process is going to take months, to optimize properly, so I figured this is all information that should be used now to help you, and not months down the road.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Great post..
I’d definitely recommend the google analytics and feedburner to all bloggers and I’d make feedburner your default feed link. It has some handy tracking features so you can see the size of your readership.
As for website analytics I hugely recommend Woopra.. a great desktop stats program and Crazy Egg, a very clever way of tracking visitors clicks on individual webpages.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Thanks for the tips. I did install Crazy Egg actually, just to optimize the home page. I probably should mention that
August 17th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Well isn’t it a bit skewed now that you’ve posted it to the public on a really popular blog?
August 17th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Actually, anyone can post their blog on the Entrecard Blog by guest writing. It’s free to write for our blog (in fact we pay you 500 – 2000EC) and you get to plug your blog. Just look at Saph, he does it every wednesday. You just have to write something that is not self-promoting and something that bloggers would find useful.
So it really isn’t using any more of the tools available to all EC members, whether or not they choose to take advantage of them.
See? It’s all just part of the tutorial for utilizing Entrecard’s effectiveness: put in some extra time and guest post for us!
August 17th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Eh, I guess you’ve got a point there. Should be interesting to see how things turn out.
By the way, did you get my message?
August 17th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
This is a great idea and I think this will prove that Entrecard is a successful tool that more bloggers need to be implementing.
Entrecard really gave my Alexa rank a boost and I noted every time on one of my blogs when I noticed a spike in my rank. It was because of Entrecard.
On a side note I too do a lot of reading on unethical cancer research so if you dig around my blog you may find some interesting info. I’m all about the politics as prevention of cancer.
Take care and good luck.
Jordan
August 17th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I’m not feeling well so my mind is a bit cloudy and the best I can come up with right now is ‘Good luck Graham’. Sorry, will hopefully have a better comment tomorrow.
August 17th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Excellent Work Graham..! But Am little jealous that why i did not had that idea. Yah but sure, Entrecard is Really great that it increased a lot of my blog’s ranking. Hope you give us tips then and there so that we can follow up with your Blog’s growth
August 17th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Dear Graham,
Subscribe to comments- check [Please add it to this blog]
Live Comment Preview – ??? [Please add it to this blog]
Thank you.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
“Actually, anyone can post their blog on the Entrecard Blog by guest writing. It’s free to write for our blog (in fact we pay you 500 – 2000EC) and you get to plug your blog.”
Anyone? How do I find out more about guest posting on this blog? How can I submit a post? Do you accept posts from any category or is it limited to posts about blogging?
Thanks,
brad
August 17th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
@Brad,
First, send an email to me at graham@entrecard.com -our audience is bloggers, so whatever you want to write about has to be useful or interesting to bloggers. For that reason, you have to get the post topic cleared by me, and then we pretty much take it from there..
August 17th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Very interesting project, I must say. I will certainly follow and learn from your model.
At this very moment alone, I learned a few tricks from the optimization segment of this post.
Good luck & all the BEST!
August 17th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Perhaps this is cutting pretty close to the bone for me. My Dad suffered through 4 different kinds of cancer before he died and the look of your cancer cell on your widget literally makes me queasy.Maybe if it was black and white. I don’t know.
Beamer
August 17th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I’m very sorry to hear that Beamer. I too have a relative who suffered from cancer, and perhaps that is why I feel so strongly about figuring out how to avoid getting it. The statistics are grim. As of now, 43% of all men living in the US will contract cancer it at some point in their life.
Understand that this is not a joke, or a dramatization, but a real effort to help spread awareness about a very grim problem facing our entire country as well as a worldwide population.
August 17th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I wish you hadn’t told us the blog URL. The “how to” articles will drive more traffic than the blog would ever have deserved.
August 17th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Admittedly, perhaps I should not have disclosed the url. I’ll probably refrain from mentioning it in the future. But with a little extra traffic or not, the name of the game is optimizing, link building, search engines, and social media. And I intend to demonstrate how Entrecard can greatly enhance all of it.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:00 am
I am starting a new blog up so perhaps i will follow along with what you do and compare how i do compared to yours
August 18th, 2008 at 4:59 am
Wow! I want to see what would be the outcome of this experiment
August 18th, 2008 at 5:02 am
I’m in the same boat as EmmaB although I had intended on using another site related to the niche to help things along. I might just hold off using that resource though and see how Entrecard does first
August 18th, 2008 at 5:21 am
I’m eager to see how things go for you as well, Graham.
I don’t know that your results will be indicative of a similar experiment with a different blogger, however. If, for example, given the same topic by an equally passionate blogger who did NOT happen to have the immediate audience you will generate with this post alone, would they attain the same level of success (eg. audience size) you will right out of the gate?
I know I’ll be adding to your traffic stats just to see how things are going. And I’m likely to go ahead and drop on you while I’m there just because the little yellow button is so hard to resist. If your content is good, I’m likely to comment as well. Without this announcement on the EC blog, there’s no telling how long it would take me to find your cancer blog or how interested I would be from the get-go.
I think a similar experiment by a random Joe with an equally hot topic (and otherwise level playing field) running concurrently with yours would offer some valuable information for the average blogger about promoting a blog with EC only.
But that’s just me.
August 18th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Interesting experiment, but it would have been MUCH better if you had not told everyone what the blog was. You will be getting traffic just from this blog post, as the first thing I did was go visit the blog. Maybe try again, but without telling everyone the site.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Skewed in favor from the get go. This is not a Joe Bloggs starts a blog project. It’s like rich people trying to tell poor people You can make big bucks with no cash investment, without realizing that why the rich people can sometimes succeed and poor people never do is the whole infrastructure. It would have been more believable if you didn’t kick start it by posting it on this blog. Can *I* start a new blog and guest post about it here telling you what its about and what plugins I use and how fast I’d like to see it do 0 to 75? No, that would be promotional. If I were to get a backhanded plug to my blog in by guest posting it in this blog couldn’t be directly about my blog like this post is.
Having said that, I wish this blog all the success in the world. No one wants to get cancer.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:47 am
that is an interesting project and I wish you all the best and keep us posted! Cheers!
August 18th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I don’t know, anyone could have started this idea and written this blog post. I don’t really think it’s skewed because the blog was mentioned as, as someone previously said, all that is being done is using the tools that entrecard gives you.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Interesting concept and nice topic of choice. Dropped on your blog. Will check back here for updates on how the blog quest is going. Good luck…
August 18th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Just read your post and subscribed immediately!!!
August 18th, 2008 at 11:55 am
@Graham: Get Woopra live stats for your blog. It’s an awesome analytics package.
I’d love to guest blog on EntreCard. In the month of August I have written 6 articles about EC.
I have devised a killer EC dropping strategy and an EC Code of Ethics that I’d love to share with your readers.
I drop the max of 300 EC cards everyday. I started doing this on Aug 05 2008 and initially only got back about 100 drops. Yesterday, less than 2 weeks since I started, I got back a record 273 drops, and my blog traffic has soared through the roof.
I’d like to share my ideas with your bloggers and help them achieve similar results.
I have written the following 8 articles on my blog:
My EntreCard Code of Ethics
What EntreCard sorely lacks
The Ten Rules of EntreCard dropping
Rewarding my Top 10 EntreCard droppers
How to achieve an EntreCard rush
The new EntreCard toolbar is EC on crack!
For Bloggers, Entrecard Strives to Make a Difference
BlogTrickle, you are out of style. Take the runway!
I’d like to tie up everything I have learned into a single new article that I will guest blog on EntreCard’s blog.
My suggested title is:
Richard Catto’s EntreCard Dropping Strategy for Dummies
August 18th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I would absolutely love a step by step on installing wordpress. I made the mistake of registering my desired url through wordpress dot com, and I am now approaching the end of the 180 day waiting period before I can switch registrars and go self hosted. I could use all the hand holding you can offer as I go through this switch!
August 18th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Hi Graham, You caught my attention with the Cancer awareness campaign. My mother survived a Uterus cancer and god knows what our family went through. With the blessings of kind hearted people all is fine now. Do tell me if i can promote any of your campaigns, i would do it free for the cause. Thanx and keep posting.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I’ve just tried this experiment with my newest blog (lolgangsta.com) and in three days the blog is averaging over 100 hits per day thanks to Entrecard. I haven’t stumbled it, posted a link anywhere yet, only used Entrecard to promote it.
I’m also getting daily repeat visitors and a few people have even subscribed to the RSS feed. So for all the people out there who say Entrecard doesn’t work and that visitors from EC have a high bounce rate because they only go to drop cards, I say – If you have an interesting blog with interesting original content, EC is the bomb, but if you’re just another of the zillion “Make Money Online” clone blogs, of course people are going to bounce.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
[...] I won’t be linking to Graham’s case study blog. You’ll have to check out the Blog Startup Project post yourself. Rate This: 3.3 Topics: News [...]
August 18th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
[...] is holding their own blogging experiment so it gave me inspiration for starting one of my own. This will take place over the next few [...]
August 18th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I am going to mirror your experiment. I am setting up a blog following the steps you laid out, with the requisites you discuss. The topic is from European politics, so the appeal is unlikely to be as great as your blog on cancer.
I will add some backdated posts so it will not be obvious that the blog is part of this experiment.
I will keep you updated as to the progress.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
It certainly is an interesting project to undertake to see how much can Entrecard do to a blog. When I check on your new blog, I see that you don’t promote it as Graham’s from the Entrecard but we all the entrecarders know that it’s yours.
My point is would it fare better if it is not your blog? I doubt so…
Yan
August 18th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
@Jennifer Robin: I see no reason why you should have to wait to switch registrars before going self-hosted.
If you need help installing WordPress, you may contact me via this page.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Interesting project but I believe like some earlier commenters you’ve already skewed the results. It’s already out there and the groupies will all be dropping on you in hopes of getting a return drop …be interesting to see the ratio of male to female bloggers on your blog as quite a few Entrecarders find you handsome!
The passion for not getting cancer will be good and bad …good because you will have a very searched for keyword and bad because Google shows 270 million results for the word cancer alone.
Maybe what you can do is start two blogs…kinda like a blind case study. One that’s known, the cancer blog, and one that’s not known.
and give regular updates as to their progress.
August 18th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Ok, so I feel better today (thanks for being so concerned everyone (hehehe I’m joking!)) and I actually agree with turnip: it’s given you an extra boost having everyone know that this new blog is yours. A boost that most start-up bloggers won’t necessarily have. I’m not sure I understand how it won’t make a difference since the methods you use may provide skewed results because of this? There could be a lot of people who will want to visit just to suck up to you even if no one will admit it.
However, I do also want to say that I admire your choice of subject. It’s not an easy subject to write about and certainly requires a lot of research despite having a disclaimer at the bottom of your site. You (general ‘you’) just know there’s going to be someone naive enough to believe everything you write even with the disclaimer on there, but that’s not really for you to worry about. It just came to my mind so I typed it out.
Anyway, the original message of my first comment still stands: good luck!!
August 18th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Ok, I agree with everyone, and I won’t mention the URL again.
BUT, the real point of this is to teach you all the most effective ways to use Entrecard. So all the optimization and testing I’ll be doing in the case study will be the real interesting “meat and potatoes” of the project, and not just the fact that it does or does not become a popular blog…
August 19th, 2008 at 12:39 am
What you should do is start a new blog now. If you are correct at how much traffic you get to EC, then your link could have been spread already.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:39 am
I can’t just start a new blog Mark, a lot of thought went into selecting a topic that met my criteria, and then finding a perfect domain name for it. I’m going to stick it out, and proceed with my tutorial. Everyone is exaggerating just how much traffic the one link on the blog will provide anyway, imo.
August 19th, 2008 at 7:34 am
@Mark Jacobs: Do you have a blog? Because the site that I get when I click on your name goes to a gaming site? Just curious
no harm if you don’t.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Blog fight??
Talen said..
“…be interesting to see the ratio of male to female bloggers on your blog as quite a few Entrecarders find you handsome!”
Now that sounds interesting.
August 19th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Up to 4096 ad price in one day and not even dropping more than 100 cards… That’s incredible and not even close to anything realistic of a new blog on Entrecard. Hate to keep pounding the nail into the hollow drywall, but yeah, not disclosing the URL would have made it fun to follow the results…
You could have done this post without mentioning it and in a month or so add a post and mix it in with other new guest posters… Your future results as far as Entrecard traffic, etc. is related are unnaturally inflated…
Keeping it as a blog experiment as far as Google and other social sites along with your blog building techniques are going to be a great benefit to new bloggers though. Best.
August 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I have no idea how the price hit 4000. That’s more than people pay for the Entrecard blog itself.
August 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Buzz!
August 19th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
hmmm.. left a comment here yesterday stating I’d already used only Entrecard to drive traffic to my newest blog but I guess Graham doesn’t want anybody elses comments to interfere with his agenda.
Not cool at all – not approving comments that aren’t spam.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
LOL Ohio
August 20th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Interesting and really great idea.
A couple of thoughts and or questions if you may..
1) I disagree with the unfair advantage view point. What do most people do ? they promo their new blog. Be it Entrecard, BlogCatalog, digg, Twitter,Stumbleupon or any social venue they promote it. This is what you are doing – Remember not everyone subscribes to ec newsletter or visits here. I suppose initially yes there may be a influx but in regards to all the other stats and how EC works on the blog i think its going to be a success. I think it will be good for you to see how the general EC member works from a member pov rather than admin. When one mucks in thats when you usually get the best ideas
2) So you will be dropping only on those in the relevant category but if someone drops on you will you return drop?
Good Luck with it. I think its a great idea.
August 20th, 2008 at 1:26 am
Can’t wait to see this project in action…
August 20th, 2008 at 2:11 am
Oh I wanted to ask are your comments moderated then ?
August 20th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Hmmm… My first thought mirrored the first comment here (and a few others) in the fact that you have a higher visibility profile than your average Joe Blogger. That being said, it’s not like you’ve got the visibility profile of, say, Kevin Rose or Robert Scoble (yet? lol), so it might not make that big of a difference in practicality. I’ll be interested in following this one though, so good stuff indeed.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Best Wishes for you new projest matt ohh sorry Graham.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] decided to start this experiment while reading the Entrecard blog post Startup Blog Project Part 1. Now I know Wildheart’s Works is not a start up blog and has been out there for at least two [...]
December 12th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I really like these type of posts. Wish you the best. Ill be staying tuned and following what you have in mind.