Blog Experiment Updates
In Affiliate Marketing | 16 comments | permalink
I have been experimenting with two things recently, and today I am going to give a brief update of the results thus far.
Experiment 1: SEO title vs Branding title
Experiment 2: Is Twitter Worth The Hassle?
SEO Title vs Branding Title
With experiment one, I changed my blog title to a more keyword based and technical title. I then monitored the search engine rankings for one week.
Initially it worked really well, I went up from 9th to 6th for my main keyword “Buzz Marketing” and was number 1 for all my sub-keywords.
Then, after 4 days the main keyword started to slide, and by the 7th day it was 11th.
Disaster.
It seems that Google initially fell for it, but then spotted it afterwards.
So as you can see, I am back to the branding based blog title.
Twitter Experiment
Due to a post on here, I now have 76 people following me on Twitter. I even installed a plugin that publishes a daily update here on DeanHunt.com
However, I still don’t really get Twitter, and I am amazed that “successful” people have the time or interest in telling everyone pointless little details that only THEY care about.
I also removed the plugin, as whilst the daily updates would no doubt help traffic, I prefer quality over quantity, and I don’t feel that those posts represented the quality I look for in a blog post.
I will continue to use Twitter to see if I can get more into it, and I will monitor my traffic stats in the coming weeks.
Dean
PS: Spain won Euro2008 last night, so Madrid is going bonkers. Good times
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16 COMMENTS
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Do You Feel the Buzz?
Dean Hunt puts the "buzz" in buzz marketing
..and the "viral" in viral diseases
Football won and Germany lost. It’s a tough life
Sure is David
Really enjoyed the entire competition to be honest… Spain winning was icing on the cake.
Dean
Dean,
You’re being too hard on Twitter. You’re only typing 140 characters, so people can always find time to send a succinct message of what they’re doing at any given time.
Twitter is social networking at its best. The best tweeters take the time to follow others, not just be followed. It sounds like something your mom might say - “If you want to have a friend, be a friend”.
For example, there’s a guy that I follow because he works in the music biz, like I do. I didn’t know him beforehand, but his profile and past tweets seemed interesting. After reading his tweets for a couple of weeks, I noticed that he tweeted a lot about food. One day, I sent him a tweet saying that his tweets were making me hungry. He tweeted back, and a tweeting relationship has begun. You find a common interest, and you build on that.
In my opinion, people often tweet more personal details than they would otherwise blog, so you learn about their kids, their interests, etc. When you learn what you have in common with someone else, it’s much easier to spark up a conversation, and make a connection.
Just remember: Twitter is about two-way communication.
Carla
@carlalynnehall
http://RockStarLifeLessons.com
I really dont see the appeal of twitter. Its like the ‘is:’ function on facebook only its made in to a website…
Hi Dean
Well yes, I kind of agree with Carla. But only kind of.
Twitter can be used brilliantly as a two way communication device, and build a relationship …. sure. That much is true.
But wait! The difference to email is that it feels ‘live’, because all ‘followers’ can access your thought stream at any time.
Sadly it’s largely used by internet marketers as just another form of e-mail that favours by far those with a large number of followers.
So no change there.
Ed Dale has over 5000 followers, but only follows 50 or so himself. John Reese is working on it hard - he’s got over 3000. Jason Calacanis has over 28,000 followers, and follows about 32,000.
What?
Now look here! It is not possible to have a two way dialogue with that many people, so of course it is used in a similar way as teenagers do - as a personal popularity vote and as a broadcast mechanism exactly the same as e-mail.
Worse still, internet marketers send an email PLUS also now get in touch with you via Twitter to broadcast ‘personal’ messages that in reality simply put a human face on an additional commercial notifications.
Us IM guys get you twice now!
Now here’s the dark side of Twitter:
It works particularly well by way of social pressure: If you don’t join Twitter then you must be outside the loop - an outcast, inferior, uncool, unpopular, behind the play …. want more?
Right now I am typing this in the food court of a shopping mall. I’m propped against a large Aspidistra display ‘coz I can’t get a seat in the eating area. Nope, that is infested with teenage girls clogging up all the coffee table seating. They aren’t buying, but sit dabbing make-up and furiously texting each other from one meter away, talking at the same time.
And … I just overheard this:
“I” says one “have over 2000 friends on Facebook”. “When I hit 2000, I was like OH!” Her friend remained silent. “And” she went on “I Twitter with more than a 1000.” Her friend looked slightly distraught.
How vicious!
Fascinated by this juvenile friend crushing game, I went on to count the number of times she said “and I was like”. 25 times every 30 seconds at last count.
In light of that, here’s the Twitter Whore for ya on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ALbH63Ali9U
Jonathan
PS. Even Seth Godin who refused for two years to Twitter, now does. It’s the latest mass media.
Dean,
Because I follow mostly interesting people, I always find interesting stuff - but I only log on when I have some free time, not every day.
If nothing else, as I speak about blogging and social media, it is fun to get to the point where people feel overwhelmed by daily blogging, and then hit them with the idea of using twitter every 5-10 minutes. There eyes get really big.
I know exactly what you mean about not getting twitter. I thought this sure isn’t worth wasting my time on, Seemed like a bunch of senseless text messaging to me. I don’t get on there much. Yet when I do I see a comment sometimes that someone makes to someone else and I get curious about what it was all in reference to, example when they type: @soandso that was the funniest thing I ever saw lmao !!
My curiousity makes me want to see what soandso said, I click on their name and check out their posts. Sometimes it makes me want to follow them. So that comment by whoever it was about @soandso made me a reader of soandso’s comments. and I may have started following them. So I guess it is spreading by curiosity possibly. The ones I don’t want to follow are the ones who have like 10,000 people they follow and maybe 100 following them. That just seems strange to me.
yo dean..
“folling”? it should be “following”, am I right?
I have grown to really enjoy twitter. I don’t use it fanatically though. Maybe once or twice a day. Sometimes not at all on a given day. At that rate, my following is growing slowly. But it is starting to become enough to notice a difference when I tweet about a new blog post. If I tweet something funny, I usually get a few more followers from a single tweet.
I don’t know if a month is long enough for your experiment, but over time a large Twitter network can be very valuable.
You’re off to a great start. I’ve been enjoying your tweets!
Just attended a seminar this weekend with lots of big names (To me at least), one is a Twitter addict and wrote a book on the stuff.
Over 4 people in a room of 100 Tweeted all during seminar speakers presentations.
Now the Twitter person is way up there in following and claims that Twitter has opened a door for her and she has pocketed $60,000 in 60 days due to Tweeting all day.
First, the seminar was on Persuasion and polarizing the audience is a must if you want to succeed. The 4 people ignoring the speakers were making most of us around me annoyed (Yes they told me) and 1 speaker told them to stop, to which the 1 relatively successful Twit answered NO way!
Thinking she was funny I lost complete respect for someone that felt that Twitter was more important than the content this guy was about to teach.
I wanted to say you are all annoying me so get out of the room…in fact why come here?
If you are sitting in the room because you know people and you type on the freakin’ laptop for 8 hours on Twitter, why come in the first place….
Did this Polarize me? Heck yea, I don’t believe Twitter helped one speaker earn $60,000 as she claimed, but hey I’m also a copywriter so I know how to make it sound good.
Personally I am on the phone with her and her husband every week, I believe it was the 2 years of her being on the road, speaking at “LIVE” events and her other businesses that she’d been building that did it, Twitter helped…but didn’t magically produce $60,000.
That being said, every major speaker at this event had a Twitter account and to stay in touch I was told to open one up…yet I still refused….
Until Dean sent me an email….Dang it!
Now the Social Media dude I look to for advice is doing it and I joined…I still can’t figure out how to use it because I’m not patient enough to look at it yet. (I mean use it as in make money, I know just type in the box)
I don’t even post to my blog like I should but now I will try Twitter for awhile…for 2 reasons.
Dean is launching the experiment and I signed up, and second…here is what I picked up from the seminar, apparently each Tweet acts as a post and for SEO and your name that must be good…the details were fuzzy, but that’s what this speaker said.
Do I like it? No, I avoided it as long as I could
Did I register because I felt Dean hypnotically told me to? No, but after hearing about 10 people I do learn from are now using it, and Dean is my top Social media coach…I did it because I wanted to capture my name @TheProfitCoach.
Why? Because I’m getting ready to launch my coaching business online, Been offline and quite successful.
So I want my website to be branded and TheProfitCoach .com is the site…Sort of feels like a necessary evil…And I pride myself on being a non-conformist as much as possible…in the marketing world that just isn’t that hard.
So I’m in, I’m going to commit some time and see what happens with my brand new site (Under construction still) and I’ll keep tabs from a start-up and relatively unknown persons point of view in a highly competitive niche.
Time will tell, and I have to find the time to commit to this now too!
Jim,
You sir doth rock!
Awesome comment, and very helpful.
Dean
Killer Bunny Master,
I have to disagree with you on your google experiment. Google is always bouncing around rankings of pages. I often see pages bounce around several times per day.
Just because the rank of your blog dropped a few spots for 3 days doesn’t mean it would have stayed there forever. It may have only been at that spot at that particular time of the day and from the specific google server you accessed at that time.
I would want to see the results of your experiment for at least a few weeks to believe the results I got from it.
However, I do agree with you on Twitter. I don’t understand what kind of people have time to follow the ramblings of some person they may or may not know.
Of course I also don’t know what kind of people sit around at midnight (my current local time) and make blog comments.
Twitter can be a bit addictive. A bit like your German porn fetish
Here’s my Twitter thingymagig:
http://twitter.com/DavidMaleney
Carl,
Yes, I was aware of that… I did check over 20 datacenters… and I was looking for fairly drastic results, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been worth the effort.
Dean
The experiment is quiet useful, thanks for sharing info!!!
I had used that plugin for a while, but quickly gave it the axe as it didn’t provide enough quality content on my blog. Those short little updates were horrible, not only that, it sometimes rehashed what I had did on the blog, since my blog updates my twitter feed.
I like twitter, it’s a cool little network, I just don’t have the time to update every single thing I do.
It is interesting to see what others are up to though, especially when it comes to blogging and marketing stuff.