Welcome to Smuggle Me

On CrowdSource This there is a really interesting post about the new My Starbucks Idea. It’s always great to see big companies using technology. Certainly Starbucks took a lot of this from Dell’s Idea Storm, but I don’t think Dell will mind.

I’m personally not a big Starbucks fan. Although I get a lot of chances to go there since I’ve won a bunch of Starbucks gift cards and so free Starbucks is usually worth it. Should be interesting to see what ideas come out of the numerous Starbucks fans around the world.

So, you don’t know how to market your blog or you’re not sure what to do to drive traffic to your blog. Well, don’t say I didn’t point you in the right direction. I haven’t looked at too many details of this list, but just looking at the volume and the categorization I’m sure there’s a lot of information in it that could be used. In fact, probably too much. The key will be to take this list and find things that match your interests, blog and skills well.

I recently came across a pretty interesting way to try and market something as common as a backgammon game. It’s a website trying to promote online backgammon. They are using what they call the “#1 Player at BackgammonMasters, Jean-Claude the animated tiger.” It’s really quite creative what they are doing. They have an animated video of Jean-Claude doing his thing. Here’s one of them:

It’s a pretty cool animation. The first part was really nice and I loved the sign that looked just like the sign that is so famous here in Las Vegas.

Jean-Claude is a really interesting character. He has a series of these videos of Jean-Claude explaining how to succeed at a variety of life’s endeavors. Jean-Claude is a tiger, humoristic, mafia type, dressed in 70’s clothes (bell-bottoms and cream-colored shoes, a button-up shirt with a dice print and a large dollar sign chain around his neck) sitting in his trailer in the used junk car lot he manages. I loved the bling around his neck.

I think there on to a pretty interesting concept that could be an interesting method of viral marketing. Especially since viewers win prizes for trivia questions after viewing, and are offered rewards for suggestion any script ideas used. Looks like even the common game of backgammon isn’t immune to viral internet marketing.

This post sponsored by Gammonish.

Well, this last year I have done quite well with bringing in some side cash. It’s a great thing to bring in some side money. It’s not so great a thing when taxes come due. I’m just lucky that I have made $1798.15 doing PayPerPost. Yes, that’s right. I’ve made that much money blogging for payperpost. Blogging is the best and I’m sure most advertisers will agree that blog marketing is on the way up. Too bad almost all of my money is going for taxes. I guess it’s better that it goes to pay my taxes then trying to have to find that money somewhere else. Either way, taxes suck. I normally get them done near the beginning of the year. This year I’ve been waiting as long as possible since I know I’m going to have to pay a heft amount. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to make some more money blogging. I must admit that I still like doing PayPerPost, but I have become much more picky with which opportunities I am willing to take. I remember near the start of PayPerPost I was perfectly willing to take a $2.50 opportunity. Now I don’t remember the last time I took something less than $10. I think it is also because the topics that were available at the beginning of PayPerPost were more interesting. I mean I got to blog about So You Think You Can Dance. That’s a great TV show and I got paid to write about something I would have written about anyway. I guess we’ll see how they are able to innovate over time. We may need the extra money at some point. Like for taxes next year.

A little while ago my wife went on a trip with my son and so I was home alone. When I’m home along I usually find something cool on the internet that I can play with and implement. During this trip, I found phplist. Essentially it crunches an RSS feed and then sends it out as a newsletter.

I wanted to use this for an LDS news website (and I still think this could do well if someone wants to do the work of compiling LDS news for me) and then I rolled it out for my BYU Football and Basketball Blog. PHPList wasn’t an easy app to figure out. It wasn’t too bad of an install for me, but some of the details of reading in the RSS feed weren’t very good.

I should have just looked around for some other way to do email marketing like Zookoda. Turns out that Zookoda will do all the work for you. It’s everything that you could want in an email subscription to your blog. It’s a great application, because you can really use it to build readership and market your blog. Sure, many of us techies have RSS feed readers and the like. Well, let me tell you that the majority of the population doesn’t have a feed reader and doesn’t know what a feed is. However, most people know how to read an email and click on a link. Ta da!! You just increased the number of regular readers you have.

Of course, the best part of Zookoda is that it is FREE!! If nothing else it’s worth a try.

I can’t believe that a Jewish Dating site would put out a video like this. I guess I shouldn’t be that amazed, but I guess I would have just expected a more conservative approach to the audience their trying to market to. The video’s pretty funny. I’m mostly surprised that they didn’t post this video on YouTube or some other sharing site where it would become hugely popular.

I don’t know if any of you read or know of SmartMoney Magazine, but there is an article in the November 2006 edition where they quote me talking about PayPerPost. Page 94 and 96 if you find the magazine. It is funny because on the cover it is called “WEB RIP-OFF Retailers Fake Rave Reviews”. However, inside the magazine the article is titled “Romancing the Bloggers.” The things they do to get you reading their magazines.

I can’t find the article online. I don’t think they’ll be putting it online. I’ll see if I can scan it later if someone wants to see it. I’m just not sure how copyright works for it.

The article gives a nice statistic, “Six million Americans over the age of 30 keep a blog, and the majority write about companies or products at least once a week.”

This is exactly the principle of PayPerPost. Bloggers are writing about products already. Why not get paid to write about things you would be writing about anyway? When I started PayPerPost I was able to turn 2 of my existing blog posts into paid posts. Cha ching!!

The rest of the quote from SmartMoney Magazine says, “Meanwhile, 57 million American adults read blogs, according to Pew Research Center, and 32 million post comments to online forums.”

Now I’m thinking that the $3 million investment in PayPerPost i spretty small. Ted, I’ve got a couple thousand dollars I’ll throw on the table next time you need a little funding.

I was a little disappointed that the article treated forums and blogs as the same thing. I guess it was ok in the article for the purposes of exposure and marketing. However, the inset was called Best of the Blogs. However, there were a ton of forums listed and not many blogs. I was excited to find other blogs and ended up with a bunch of forums.

I was also happy to see that the SmartMoney Magazine article used my quote to end the article. Here’s what I said:

“If the product is bad, you’ll eventually read about the bad stuff.”

The quote didn’t capture my full idea, but wasn’t bad. My point is that if a blogger trusts one post on my blog to purchase something, then they are crazy. My blog should be just one piece of the online research that’s done before making a purchase.

Thanks Anne Kadet for writing the article. Too bad magazines don’t have hyperlinks. I wonder how much traffic this could really generate for PayPerPost? It doesn’t even give the address for my blog so I guess I’ll have to be happy with just seeing my name in a magazine with Warren Buffet on the cover.

If you’ve read my blog you’ve already seen about PayPerPost doing another viral marketing using their own PayPerPost product. Essentially they spread pieces of an image throughout blogs and then bloggers have to search the web to find all the puzzle pieces and put them together. Of course if you’re the first to put them together then you get $500. Not bad.

I thought it was a fun thing, but now it is just irritating since the pieces come out slowly over time. I wish they’d alll just come out and then you have to go find them. Maybe they could have been posted by PayPerPost in comments or something. Well, I’ll keep watching, but I hate waiting. I’m a fast action kind of guy.

Here’s what you’re really looking for payperpostbluemonster fans:

Here’s a great article on getting paid to Digg. I like it refers to it as the Digg black market. It is really funny how invested people get. This is a really serious issue for Digg to combat. I must admit that I personally like submitting my good articles to digg because often I get traffic to my website from those diggs that are just indexed and made available for through the search feature of Digg.

It’s true that this same type of “black market” could also apply to del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, or netscape and I’d add redit to the list of possibilities too. Either way, if you have a blog and have been dugg before then you know how much it can do to spark your blog. I’m still waiting for it to happen on one of my posts. One day. I have a couple of good ideas to make it happen.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately on the PayPerPost message board about how to get your blog more traffic. I’m definitely not an expert, but I’ve had some nice little successes. Who knows. Maybe one day I’ll be able to blog full time. If I did then I’d have to be more like Scoble who meets with people all the time. I just love people way too much. But, I digress!!

Well, until I find more time to share my own nuggets of wisdom I thought I’d share Pronet’s words of wisdom on making your blog more popular using content.

Break news

News spreads through the blogosphere like a wildfire. If the news is hot everyone else will start writing on it and link back to where they found it. In most cases it is not easy to break news due to thousands of people trying to do the same thing. But if you can find the time to break news people will link to your blog as well as read it on a regular basis so they can be up-to-date on the latest happenings.

Post on weekends

There is a good chance that your readers also read other blogs. Because of the sheer number of blogs that post on a daily basis they probably don’t have time to read all of them. If you post when your readers have time, such as the weekends, there is a good chance that they will read your blog. Look around at all of the blogs in your industry, there is a good chance that most will not post on weekends. I know that some may not agree with this idea, but it is something to consider if you have the time on weekends.

Write timeless posts

Try not to only write blog posts with a lifespan of 1 week, mix it up a little by writing on things that are timeless. Those posts might not be a smash hit right out of the gate, but they might become popular a couple months down the road. So try to also write things that can last for longer then 1 day or 1 week.

Teach don’t sell

A lot of people are starting to blog because they want to make money. There is nothing wrong about making money or even blogging to make money, but try not to make a sales pitch in your blog posts. If you try to educate and teach people through your blog, it is possible that people will think of you as an authority in your industry which can lead to all kinds of great opportunities.
Join in on conversations

Emailing out bloggers and asking them for links can be an effective approach to increase your traffic. But another good way to increase your popularity is by joining in on conversations. A good example of this is when Rohit Bhargava wrote 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization; after thousands of people saw it and started adding to it the list grew to the 17 rules of Social Media Optimization.

I’m fine with this list. However, breaking news is even harder than is described in this post. Don’t count on it. I also don’t personally trust the weekend rule. This depends a lot on the blog. On my EMR and HIPAA blog I see drops during the weekend because most people read that blog during working hours as the research the subject. A better lesson would be to know your audience, watch your statistics to know when your blog is most seen.

Timeless posts are important. Otherwise, you’ll have a spike in traffic before you go back to a deep depression that no one enjoys when blogging. I would suggest that 90% of blog traffic comes from 3% of your posts. The more you blog, the larger that 3% becomes.