If you're tired of refreshing this page every day like a d-bag, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed.
Nickycakes is finally back home after spending a week in Vegas for Leadscon followed by a week in southern cali.
Leadscon was held at the Mirage Hotel on March 4th and 5th. Nicky had never been to the Mirage so didn’t really know what to expect, especially for only $100 per night for a room. The hotel ended up being great. Having been forced into the Rio for Affiliate Summit, the Mirage was a welcome change for sure. Just walking in, there is an enormous saltwater fishtank behind the check-in counter. Huge like xbox. The rooms were really awesome, especially Nicky’s which had a brand new bathroom with jacuzzi bath and stuff as well as an amazing view of the Mirage pool below.
At night, it also had an amazing view of the hotels on the strip:
So yeah, much better than staying off the strip at Affiliate Summit.
Nickycakes arrived a few days early to enjoy the Vegas weather and other fine things the city has to offer. Okay, more like 4 days early, but who’s counting? The weather was great (compared to boston anyway) and a giant snowstorm hit the northeast a few hours after the flight got in the air. Nicky promptly gloated on twitter.
Days before the conference:
Well, as to be expected, these were mostly full of Nickycakes and his friends gambling a lot. The Cakes was introduced to and quickly fell in love with the game of craps, which is highly recommended to anyone looking for an exciting casino game that requires pretty much no thinking, moves really fast, and has pretty fair odds compared to most everything else on the casino floor (especially the fcking slots). Nicky also was able to catch a show called Le Reve which is indescribable. You really have to see it for yourself. Do yourself a favor and get tickets next time you’re in the city.
The first night, Nicky and friends also caught up with friend Chris Armstrong from Van Komen Media (the masterminds behind Ultra Lean Green Tea, for those who remember the offer, as well as many current offers). Chris invited Cakes and crew to come to Salt Lake City and catch a Jazz game…more on that later.
Conf Day 1:
Due mostly to jetlag, Nicky woke up at the crack of 8:30am and was able to make it downstairs in time for the Leadscon keynote. Ok, seriously, Nickycakes has been to some keynotes at conferences. They have ALL been AWFUL. Usually they are either an advertisement, like the stupid keynotes at PPC summit were advertisements, and Gary V at affiliate summit…good lord, just end yourself guy. But anyway, the keynote at leadscon was AWESOME. It was by Dan Ariely, a Behavioral Economist, and author of the bestselling book “Predictably Irrational.” The dude was the victim of an explosion at one point which left 70% of his body covered in 3rd degree burns. He spent like 3 years in the hospital recovering, which alone makes him a total badass. Dan went through so much pain during his treatment, especially from the retarded nurses yanking off bandages and whatnot, that he went on to study how to make painful treatments better. Since the nurses had always done things the way they had done them (ripping off bandages from burn victims as fast as possible instead of slowly and less painfully) they were set in their ways and wouldn’t accept (irrationally) the idea that there was a better way of doing things. After realizing this, Dan then branched out and applied what he had learned to other areas, especially behavioral economics.
The keynote went into tons of really brilliant ideas about how customers react to certain things, and ways to increase sales/leads/whatever by simply rewording or restructuring an offer. Why do some european countries have a 10% organ donor rate and others have a 99% rate? Because the drivers license forms for the 10% country are opt-in, and the 99% are opt-out. Most of his ideas stemmed from the idea that people hate having to make complicated decisions for themselves (by complicated, he means like…3 or more choices, or choices that have a large impact on their lives), and that they will do pretty much whatever is suggested to them. Really really interesting and relevant stuff, and made the conference worth every penny ($0 for nickycakes since they were nice enough to hook him up with a press pass, but would have been worth the full price anyway).
The exhibit hall, however, left much to be desired, from the shoes of an affiliate anyway. The conference was really not geared towards affilaites at all really, and it probably wasn’t intended to be. There were several affiliate networks in attendance, of course, and a lot of people there that Nickycakes knew, but if you’re looking for a wide variety of companies that would be beneficial to meet with as an affiliate, Affiliate Summit and Ad:Tech have the market cornered. It is, however, just the 2nd year of Leadscon, and they were able to pull in a registration of over 100o people, which seems like quite an accomplishment. The lunch they served in the exhibit hall was pretty good though, and Nicky was able to meet up with his friends Wes and Steven from Tracking202 as well as Jivan from Advaliant.
Night 1:
As mentioned earlier, Chris from VK invited Nicky and crew to Utah to come see a Jazz game. Not only invited, but booked the tickets and everything. Nicky and his boy hopped on a plane in the afternoon, took the hour flight to SLC, where Chris rolled up in the Range and drove to the game. Van Komen has a nice suite in the stadium, fully catered and everything. Dinner and a game were awesome. Got to see Yao Ming’s oafy ass get steamrolled by Utah. Good times. Here are a few pics:\
Cakes and John with some of the Jazz cheerleaders before the game:
Cakes in the VK Suite:
VK has a sick guest house…or mansion or whatever, the place is huge, and on the side of a mountain in Utah. An awesome place to spend the night for sure. It snowed overnight, and waking up the whole place was covered in an inch or two of snow. Really beautiful, even for someone who lives in new england and sees snow all over everything for like 8 months out of the year. Imagine waking up to this every day:
Anyway, Chris came and drove to the airport early morning for a quick flight back to Vegas for the rest of Leadscon.
Day 2:
Pretty much like day 1 except Nicky spent it all networking and hanging out with business friends.
Speaking of networking, let’s talk for a second about bluetooth guy. Bluetooth guy is not just one person, but several people, who always have their bluetooth headset in their ears. Don’t get it twisted, bluetooth headsets are great, especially while driving, or at home, in the office, whatever. But seriously, you don’t need to wear your bluetooth. The first “bluetooth guy” Nickycakes met was Jason H from Eclipse at ASW 08. That dude was all over the place all night at every party rockin a jawbone like it was princess cut ear bling. Hopefully he just forgot to take it out or something, but all night? Doubtful.
Ok, and then we have Geoff from Revstars. Nickycakes first ran into Geoff (not geoff from advaliant) on the Advaliant fishing trip at ASE in Boston. He wore a bluetooth headset the entire time..while fishing…on a boat. He did catch the first fish, though, so maybe it was good luck. Then at Ad:Tech NY he was spotted again walking around all day wearing the bluetooth. And once again at ASW, rocking the bluetooth. And whaddya know…leadscon…bluetooth. Here’s a pic:
When asked about it, he said it was cause he couldn’t hear his phone in his pocket, but seriously that’s what vibrate is for man! Geoff is a really cool guy though, and the revstars people were all keepin it real at Leadscon. They look like a pretty solid network. Just the bluetooth all the time makes you want to ::facepalm::.
There was also some good sushi to be had at Nobu that night.
Night 2:
There was a party at Pure nightclub in Caesars. The club was kinda cool, but, as expected, it was a total sausage fest. All 3 girls in the industry were there, each surrounded by about 20 nerds dancing to YMCA.
Conclusion:
Leadscon was fun. The keynote was amazing. The exhibit hall left much to be desired. The conference seemed like it didn’t have much to offer an individual affiliate. But overall well worth the trip. Would go again, and probably will. Thank you to Jay and crew for the pass. Nickycakes wishes he could have thanked you in person.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
This is part 1 of Nickycakes’ Affiliate Marketing Newbie Guide. This post will not be new information for almost anyone who has done much of anything with affiliate marketing, but there seem to be plenty of people who don’t know anything about the industry, so feel free to direct them to this post if you’re too lazy to explain.
Often times you will be asked, as Nickycakes is often asked, “What do you do?” When you start making money online, people are generally curious as to exactly how you are doing it. The first time you are asked this, it’s hard to come up with a short answer. Nickycakes generally says something like, “I run an internet marketing company.” If they pry further and ask specificially what that entails, it’s usually, “Companies pay me to run ad campaigns for their products.” (No, Nicky doesn’t refer to himself in the 3rd person when talking to people irl) While Affiliate Marketing is a little more complicated than that, and a lot less glamorous than “running an internet marketing company” implies, that’s pretty much the reality of what you’re doing. Companies pay you a commission to advertise their products.
Of course, when you are asked by a family member to explain what you’re doing, you may have to give them a little more detail. The analogy Nickycakes uses is one that was given to him a while ago by one of his affiliate managers: Let’s say that Coca-Cola wants to sell more Coke. They already have their own ad campaigns running on TV, and possibly the internet. But, they want to sell more. So Coca-Cola sets up a program where anyone who so desires can make their own advertisements for coke products which link to the coke website. For every case of coke sold through one of these links, Coke agrees to pay the “affiliate” $1 commission. Pretty simple.
There are affiliate programs for thousands and thousands of different websites, companies, and products. Amazon.com has an affiliate program where you can link to any product on their website and make a few % commission on anything sold. Ebay the same deal. Lawyers sometimes pay very well for leads forwarded to them since they make so much money per case that they win. Most dating sites will pay for every person who signs up for a free account on their site. With the extremely low risk on the part of the company offering the affiliate program, it’s almost stupid NOT to have one.
So how does Coca-Cola know that the sales are coming from you and not from another guy? Well, they have tracking software set up, and they give you your own link to advertise, like… coke.com/affiliate/12342345 or something, and anyone using that link is kept track if, usually via browser cookies, so that the resulting sales are credited to the proper affiliate.
What’s an Affiliate Network?
Ok, so since affiliate programs have gotten so ridiculously popular, it is easy for companies with such programs to get lost in the crowd. There are hundreds of webhosting providers that offer generous affiliate programs, for example, so going to each one individually to see which one is the best to promote becomes tedious. That’s where Affiliate Networks come in.
An Affilaite Network is just a company that handles the relationship between the company with an affiliate program, and the affiliates. An affiliate can sign up to an Affiliate Network and then select from thousands of different products and services to promote, and can easily see exactly how much they will get paid per sale/lead/signup/whatever. The Affiliate Network handles recruiting and paying the individual affiliates, so they never have to have a direct relationship with the Merchant/Advertiser. In return, the Affiliate Network takes a small(well not always small) cut of the commissions. With enough affiliates sending enough sales, Affiliate Networks get rich just for being a middleman.
So why would you work with an Affiliate Network instead of with the Advertiser directly, knowing that they take a cut of the money you are making? Well, there are a few reasons. First, and most important, is payment terms. A lot of merchants will only agree to pay you Net 30, or worse. This means that after the month is over you need to wait 30 days to be paid for that month’s commissions. This can suck if you’re spending a lot of money on advertising their products and can’t afford to continue for 60 days without being paid. Affiliate Networks generally have much better payment terms, often giving affiliates weekly wire transfer payments if they are generating a decent amount per week (usually around $1000 is the standard threshhold). Also, many Merchants don’t want to deal with a bunch of affiliates, they just want an Affiliate Network to just handle it all for them, so even if you wanted to you couldn’t work with them directly.
Methods of Promotion
Here’s the work part. It is completely up to the affiliate to generate customers to buy these products if they expect to earn some commissions. There are way too many individual methods of promoting websites to even begin listing, but they generally fall into two categories: paid and unpaid promotion.
Unpaid promotion is stuff like SEO, email spam, social network spam, “social media”, “viral marketing”, etc. These unpaid methods of promotion, while basically free (money wise), generally require much more work than their paid counterparts. They also (generally) do not provide nearly as much volume as their paid counterparts. But, they are a good resource for newbies to get started with if they’re broke.
Paid methods of promotion are things like PPC (pay per click), media buys, legit email spam…err…deployment, paying bums to hold up signs at busy intersections, etc. These types of promotion can generally, but not always, generate a ton of traffic if you have the money. They are, however much more risky, since you’re obviously investing your own money with no real guarantee that you’ll see any return on that investment.
PPC and media buying are what Nickycakes does the most of these days, so that is the focus of the majority of the info on this site. He has done his fair share of SEO but it’s rather boring, doesn’t generate enough traffic to be worth the time, and it’s so brainless and monotonous that you could train a monkey to do it. Even blackhat SEO is only fun for a few days after you figure out what you’re doing before the novelty of pushing a button and seeing 10 thousand backlinks showing up completely wears off. Also, Nickycakes has never ever met ANYONE that has gotten rich from SEO. Find someone making 5 figures a day with SEO. Seriously, good luck.
Warning Before Doing Anything
Most people fail. Seriously, don’t quit your dayjob. Don’t drop out of college. Don’t invest any money you aren’t comfortable losing in PPC. If you want to learn how to do online marketing as a fulltime job that supports you financially, please do not make any serious life changes until you’re already making at least twice what you need to live comfortably. Nickycakes spent the first several profitable months as an affiliate working retail and going to class full time.
Seriously, expect to fail, because chances are you’re too stupid or lazy to succeed, which is why the rest of us make so much money.
Why Nickycakes Loves Affiliate Marketing
Nickycakes loves affiliate marketing because it’s not boring, he’s good at it, the rewards are directly related to how much effort is put in, and it provides amazing freedom because there is no boss and there are no employees. Also, the people in the industry are great. When you go to an industry conference for the first time, you really expect a bunch of obvious computer nerds who live in their parents basements, and there are some of those for sure, but mostly everyones pretty cool.
Part 2 will be about setting up tracking.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on October 3rd, 2008 in Promotion
Ok, hopefully everyone by now is tracking their ppc campaigns with prosper202, and if you’re not, you’re a retard and should start doing so immediately. P202 makes it easy to see which of your ad copies is giving you a better overall ROI, which is very important. It’s also important to always be at least making progress with your campaigns, either through improvement of a current campaign, or by making fresh ones. Improving your ad copy is something that should be done at least weekly, and possibly daily depending on your volume. Nickycakes makes it a point to make fresh text ads at least once a week for all his campaigns.
So, what’s the best way to go about split testing ad copy and improving on it? Well, it’s pretty simple. When you make a campaign, always make 2 ads per ad group. There are two schools of thought on this one. Some people think you should make the ads similar with only small changes to give you a better picture of what specific changes do to affect ctr. Nickycakes, on the other hand, makes every ad very different. This gives you more opportunity to find great ads you may not have expected to do well. Pretty much every successful campaign the Cakes has had has been him submittting some campaign on a whim not really expecting it to work and then coming home a few hours later to find the budget completely spent and a couple G’s profit in the ol’ affiliate account.
Ok, so you’ve made 2 ads for your adgroup…now what? Well, now you wait for a while to see which one does better, then you dump the one that was worse and come up with a new one to put in its place. There are 2 things you can look at to determine which ad is “better”, CTR and ROI. You can use p202 to individually determine which ad has a better ROI, which is certainly interesting and useful info, but in terms of scalability and long term profit, CTR is what you should be paying most attention to. This is, of course, assuming that you’re not stupid and all your ads are on topic. Making an ad that says “YOU’RE A GIANT DOUCHEBAG” to advertise your free scholarship offer may get a decent CTR but will probably not leave you with many leads. So yeah, you look at the CTR, because a better CTR, at least for search and contextual advertising, generally means your ad will be placed in a more visible spot for less money than your competition. This means more traffic for less money which means you get to go buy yourself that hot new xbox 360 game at the end of the month.
So how do you know if you have gotten enough traffic to make a good decision on which CTR is actually better? Cakes’ buddy Charles dropped a twitter bomb a couple months ago about using splittester.com for split testing. Basically you take the lifetime # of clicks and lifetime CTR for each ad, enter it in the little boxes, and it’ll tell you how certain you can be of which ad is gonna be the better performer in the long term. If it’s over 95%, it’s time to make a new ad and get rid of the worse one.
Making new ads is something that would be good to set aside a time every week to do, like say monday or friday every week you devote to making new ads. It’s all about staying ahead of your lazy ass competition. Just remember: Adapt or get paved the fck over.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Yesterday, Nickycakes let everyone know that the Myspace Ads self serve platform was up and running. Today, he had a chance to see it in action for himself, made some money, and learned quite a bit in a short period of time. Here’s the scoop:
If you’re familiar with Facebook Ads, this is going to be easy for you.
A few general things first. Myspace has A LOT more users than facebook. Much wider audience, which means a lot more impressions to go around. They also have many many more international users. The ad formats are much larger. You can choose between a 728×90 banner and a 300×250 box ad. In these ads, you can draw pretty much whatever you want. So it’s going to take a little more effort than the 110×80 dinky facebook ads, however, it also means a much higher chance for someone to click your ad. 1% CTR’s should be no problem to get if you have any idea what you’re doing.
Ok, here’s how to get started making money with myspace ads, step by step, for the complete retard:
1. Sign Up to Affiliate Networks
Most of you have done this already, for those that haven’t, you will need something to advertise. Unless you already have your own high converting website and product, you should probably get signed up to one of these affiliate networks using the links below. Yes, these are Nickycakes’ affiliate links, which means if you have any questions about any of this stuff, and you ask for his help on IRC, you’re much more likely to get a real answer if you’re signed up under him.
Advaliant
Ads4Dough
CX Digi
Copeac
Neverblue
CPA Empire
Seriously, go sign up to all of those right now so you can get the approval process going. If you’re having any trouble with the approval process, CALL THEM during normal business hours, and if that fails then come on IRC and bug Nicky.
2. Pick Your Offer
Ok, “offer” is misleading. Unless you already know what works for this demographic and are just porting your facebook campaigns over (not recommended due to much more relaxed approval practices) you’re going to want to pick several offers to test. Remember that you’re bidding on demographics, not really keywords, so think of what certain demographics would buy. Ringtones and crush offers for teenagers is a winner obviously. Dating is always solid over 18, etc.
3. Make Your Ads
Honestly, you may not even need to do this part, as most offers already have pre-made ads (creatives) that you can use, in both the 728×90 and 300×250 sizes that you need. If you decide to make your own, the sky’s the limit pretty much. The myspace terms say no celebs, and you’re obviously not going to get nudity approved. If you’re so inept that you can’t crank out a banner ad in photoshop, or can’t figure out how to steal someone else’s, then it shouldn’t be too expensive to get someone to design some for you (please, someone start an affiliate program for their site/banner design service, thanks). No animation allowed, and 600k is the size limit for the graphic files.
4. Submit Them To Myspace Ads
If you didn’t already get started, here’s the link to Myspace Ads. Basically you have to create an ad first and then it will prompt you to sign up for an account. It is NOT linked with your regular myspace account, so if you’re worried about submitting some shady type ads and getting your precious myspace account banned, worry no longer.
After you’ve submitted your graphic and named it, you will be prompted for a destination url and demographic targeting. Please note that there is a bug that isn’t letting prosper202 landing page destination urls through properly, so you’ll want to make a php redirect on your server that redirects to that destination url. That may sound complicated but it’s not. You just make a file called, lets say, destination.php in the root of your landing page domain, and in that file put something like:
<?php
header(”Location: http://www.yourlandingpage.com/?t202id=asdfad&t202kw=”);
?>
And use http://www.yourlandingpage.com/destination.php as your destination url in myspace ads. Hopefully this bug gets fixed soon.
[edit] This bug with p202 urls isn’t affecting everyone. If myspace lets you submit your url, then you’re good. It will work fine. If it rejects the url and says you need a “valid” one then you can use this script.
5. Choose Your Budget
Pretty straightforward. You choose how much you want to pay per click, and how much you want to spend on your campaign, and what dates you want it to run. There are a few catches at the moment, though. First, minimum bid per click is .25. You will never pay less than .25 per click, period (at least at the time of writing this). The max budget for the campaign is $10k. This seems to be for the life of the campaign. This sucks because you will likely have to re-create an ad after you have spent $10k, which could potentially happen very quickly (in a couple days, if things continue this way for Nicky). Also, there’s no “forever” option for campaign dates, a minor annoyance.
6. Payment
This part is straightforward as well. At the time of writing this, they’re only accepting US advertisers. This confirms what Americans have known for years: foreigners don’t matter. Billing seems to happen incrementally. They bill you once you hit around $200, then $500, then $1000, unsure after that. Fortunately it’s not like facebook where they gradually raise your daily budget. These myspace peeps actually seem to know what they’re doing unlike the drunk college intern retards over at facebook.
7. Ad Approval
Here’s where things get juicy. At least for now, they seem to be approving EVERYTHING. For long time facebook advertisers, this is AMAZING. The only thing they deny are trademarked logos and celebrities, it seems. Want to run ringtones? HAVE FUN BITCHES! The first ads Nickycakes submitted in the evening weren’t approved until about 18 hours later, but people were reporting 10-20 minute wait times for approvals later in the afternoon today. Also, the ad approval process is clearly NOT done in order. Some people’s ads are getting approved way out of order. There are a few possible explanations for this. 1) They just have a retarded system that selects random ads for them to approve. 2) They may favor ads that have a higher budget, or higher bid per click, or 3) It actually IS in order, and they’re just unsure about certain ads, so they forward them to their manager or whatever. Either way, it’s pretty much open season at the moment, so get your ads in while you can! You’ll get an email when your ad gets approved/disapproved, so no need to keep refreshing while you wait.
8. Traffic and Stats!
Ok, if you’re smart, you’re using tracking software such as Prosper202 to see your traffic coming in. If you don’t like laggy ppc stats, you’re going to HATE myspace ads stats. They update every few hours with a snapshot of your stats, which is really not usable if you’re testing out a high budget campaign. Also, the traffic starts VERY slowly and then ramps up if your ad does well. If you’re not sure how bidding vs CTR works to determine how much traffic you get, then here’s a quick recap, even though this was discussed at great length during the beginning of facebook ads:
Basically, they use the CTR for the ad times the BID you set to figure out, on average, how much they’re going to profit for each impression your ad gets. For example, if your ad has a .50% CTR, meaning 1 in every 200 people click your ad, and your bid is $0.30, then, on average, myspace knows they will get $0.0015 each time your ad is shown (.50% x .30$ = $.0015). This means that your CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is $1.50 ($.0015 x 1000). So what Myspace does is they look at your CPM for your ad, and compares it to the CPM for everyone else’s ads that’s bidding on the demographic, and whoever has the highest number (the most potential profit for Myspace) wins. For this reason, if you have an extremely high CTR, you can bid lower per click than your competition and still get all the traffic.
Unfortunately, at this time, Myspace has made a few mistakes with their bidding system (at least they’re mistakes in Nickycakes’ eyes).
First, and most importantly, they have set a $.25 minimum bid for all clicks. This creates an artificial price floor on the traffic. While, at first, this seems like a great idea for them, it will actually drive away potential advertisers and create a surplus of advertising space which will end up being sold off for lower prices anyway to advertisers from google and such, which means myspace is not only screwing advertisers, but in the long run screwing themselves. This part is maily for the people running Myspace ads, if they’re reading this: A user willing to pay $0.10 per click with an ad with a 1% CTR is going to spend $1 per 1000 impressions, whereas a user willing to pay $0.25 per click with an ad with a .3% CTR is only going to spend $0.75 per 1000 impressions. Do you really want to lose those $1 cpm customers?? Seriously, for a company potentially worth billions of dollars, you figure they could put an undergrad with at least freshman econ classes under his/her belt in charge of these decisions. Here’s a refresher for you morons:
Second, unlike pretty much every other self serve advertising platform in existance, including google, yahoo, msn, facebook, and even the morons at failure 2nd tier search engines, they don’t adjust your click cost. This means, even if you have an amazing CTR, you will be charged the FULL PRICE that you bid per click, NO MATTER WHAT. This is either done out of greed or they just haven’t coded automatic bid adjustment yet. If it’s greed, it will end up biting them in the ass as advertisers budgets are raped quickly causing them to drop out of the market in frustration.
9) Profit!
Nickycakes spent about $1k in the last 24 hrs and made back about $2k. The potential is certainly there if you know what you’re doing, but as mentioned earlier, the $.25 per click minimum is going to keep a lot of potential advertisers money safely on facebook ads.
PS. If you know anyone working at myspace, specifically people working on the ad platform, please let them know about this so that the problems may be fixed and everyone, especially myspace can make a lot more money.
keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
As Nickycakes.com nears its first 1000 rss feed subscriptions, it’s probably a good time to talk about how powerful rss subscriptions can be for a website, commercial or non.
First the crap that you probably alread know. RSS feeds are great for building loyalty and keeping people on your site. Obvious. They take the headache out of making the user manually return to your site to check for new content. Obvious. They do a good job at preventing the user from forgetting about your site. Obvious.
Alright, so a while ago, Nickycakes read a post on problogger where he had asked all his readers to post reasons that they unsubscribe from blog rss feeds. The idiots all came up with elaborate answers as to why they generally unsubscribe from feeds, and these were the top 5:
- Too Many Posts
Lol…seriously, this is the best they could come up with?
- Infrequent Posting
Eh, isn’t this the REASON people subscribe…so they don’t have to refresh endlessly waiting for the new posts to come?
- Partial Excepts Feeds
Other than wanting this for some gay mobile device feed reader, why the hell would this matter..
- Blog Changes Focus (off topic)
This one makes a little sense…
- Repeat/Duplicate Content
So does this one…
Well guess what…none of those reasons are valid. Why? Cause nobody unsubscribes from RSS feeds. Nobody. Once you have a reader subscribed to your feed they’re there for a damn good while. You wonder why retards like john chow have astronomical RSS feed numbers? Cause no matter how bad their content, it’s not offensive enough to convince the user to actually go through the process of unsubscribing. And even if they grow to hate the blog, they will still check out the new posts. Hell, even Nickycakes was still checkin out shoemoney’s new posts up until like last month even though they have sucked for over a year.
For non-commercial sites like this one (ok it’s semi-commercial i guess since there are a few cheap ads and some referral revenue involved) RSS feeds are a no-brainer. There may or may not be some actual useful information here, and so people are inclined to subscribe because they want to know more…obvious. For commercial sites, however, things can be a little more tricky. Assuming we’re talking about commercial sites as described in cakes’ earlier post on affiliate product blogs, you may have a difficult time to get your readers to subscribe to a feed, depending on the type of site it is. The biggest hangup will be new content. Depending on how you’re doing things, you may only have 10-20 posts of content, and not plan on updating frequently, making an rss feed a little useless. For these types of sites, you’ll probably want to go the route of an email list, which the Cakes will try to do a write-up on at a later date.
Ok, so how do you get more RSS subscribers? If your blog readers are generally smart people, like this one, they’ll probably know how to subscribe to a feed, and frankly if the reader can’t figure that out on their own, then Nickycakes would recommend they kindly f-off back to digital point or ubercamp or wherever. But if your site’s readers are the general internet public (retards) then you will likely need a page explaining what an RSS feed is and how to subscribe. Feel free to find any such page on some other blog and copy it to yours, as wasting time writing up that crappy page is not part of a good gameplan, but it’s important that it be there on your site. Also, make sure that the option to subscribe via email as well as with a feed reader are advertised prominently on your site.
If you’re using wordpress, you will want to install a couple plugins. If you’re using feedburner (which you should be, to track subscriber counts if nothing else) then you need to install the feedsmith plugin. This plugin will take every possible feed url that wordpress has and forward it to feedburner which won’t actually increase your subscriber count, but your subscriber numbers will go up in feedburner because, by default, it doesn’t count all the subscribers that don’t use the feedburner subscription url to subscribe.
Another good plugin that Nickycakes just started using on this site is called What Would Seth Godin Do? Seth Godin is some marketing guy or something. The wordpress plugin basically puts a message at the top of each post asking the reader to subscriber, but only for the first few times the user visits. Good for bulding up readers. Thanks Gab for the suggestion.
Ok, finally the Cakes wants to talk about Full Post vs. Excerpt RSS feed styles. Just about every week, someone complains to Nickycakes about his feed only having Excerpts from his articles instead of the Full Post because they can’t read the full article on their iphone’s rss reader or whatever without going to the site to read the whole thing. First off…who cares. Go to the site and read it if you like the first paragraph. If not, scurry back to your macworld articles where you belong. Second…Nickycakes uses rss feeds all day long to scrape content, and he’s gonna be damned if he’ll let some dickweed do the same to him, so just drop it. Not happening. Besides, if it were your site, would you want your readers reading just your content from an rss feed reader? No..you’d want them to come to your site so they can dance around your minefield of adsense ads in hopes that you can score a few $.10 clicks to help you buy a new goat for your village, m i rite?
Update:
So Nickycakes’ buddy ricdes pointed out a pretty cool RSS feed tip. Basically, wordpress lets you make a feed for each category on your blog which you can then burn into feedburner to offer feeds to people who only want to read about certain stuff on your blog. For example, people only wanting to read about coding categorized posts on this site could use this feed url. Neato.
Published by nickycakes //
« Previous Entries / Home
