Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss discuss building a blog audience. Focus on the right readers, not raw numbers. Write definitive guides on topics, use basic SEO like page titles and incoming links, and post less often with higher quality. Moderate your community actively.
April 19, 2009.
About 35,000 ("I have an email list of about 35,000 or so.")
In your experience, what are the biggest misconceptions that people have about getting a lot of readers, whether it's for a blog or book or anything like that?
There are a number of misconceptions that come to mind. The first is that you need a lot of readers. So what is important to me is having the right types of readers. I think that like attracts like in this case, so that if you build a community and I'll come back to a number of the misconceptions, but if you, for example, like I do, I police the community fairly strictly in the sense that if people are critical, that's fine, but if they're abusive towards other commenters, then I nip that in the bud immediately. And so fostering a very positive environment where smart people can express themselves without having to deal with idiots abusing them basically is important. A few other things, just briefly, I think combining offline, and I know that you do a lot offline, combining what you do offline with online is a very cheap way to build traffic in many respects. If you're launching a book, if you're launching a product, if you're doing speaking engagements, really refer to assets, information that you have on your blog. Really create what, what you might call evergreen content. So when I write posts coming back to building traffic, the best SEO search engine optimization is good content. And it sounds cliched, but I'll be more specific, creating content that can really become the default reference for people online for a specific subject. And so like the definitive guide to X.
Like say, using chopsticks.
Yeah, like chopsticks. Or I'll be doing one on steak soon. Like everything you could possibly want to know about cooking steak. And few things related to PageRank and Google rank, just for people who are wondering the keyword density on a page. So you'll find people who, like, they'll write the first paragraph of their post and put in like steak, steak, steak, steak, steak, 40 times. That is not what's most important. And that can really backfire as well. What's most important is page title. But even more than page title, it's incoming links and the anchor text that people use. So when I'm writing a post, I constantly ask myself, how would someone describe this? And if there are 20 different ways that they could describe it, that's a bad thing.
So if it's the definitive guide to.
Steak, people are going to say post about steak, post about cooking steak. There are only going to be a few variations and I want those to repeat because If I have 20 anchor text for a specific term. It's going to be more valuable assuming there's search traffic there. One other just basic tip would be for the title of the post and hence oftentimes the page title, use the Google Keyword tool and if you're thinking, well, any one of these three or four words or terms is equally acceptable to me, then check out what the average monthly volume is and you can choose. But really good content that people are going to link to is ultimately what's most important. And I find stumbleupon actually a really good tool to measure how good your content is and look at what is stumbled most often and most positively.
I completely agree with what you said about writing good content. It's cliche, but it's true. And it's not. When you're trying to build traffic and build readers, there's no real tricks. I mean, there are a few minor things. But I'll give you an example. I've been writing my blog for almost five years and just like two weeks ago, my designer asked me, so like, when you create a post, what keywords do you look for? And I'm like, huh? Yeah, it's all built for the community. And now I'm at the point where I'm like, okay, let me start thinking about keyword stuff.
It's after the fact though.
Exactly.
All of my most popular content was before I knew anything about anything and just put a ton of time into producing the content.
And what I noticed about your posts, they are long.
Yeah, some of them are really long.
Pages and pages. And they're not. You don't write. Like some blogs write five posts a day. Yours are maybe once a week.
Once a week.
One thing you guys would like to know is that when Tim talks about like monitor your community and stuff, just to give you a sense of what that means. So you guys look at any of Tim's posts. He's got 50, 60, 80, 100 comments on him. I got an email from Tim a few days ago and it said important in the subject line. And someone had asked a comment that needed my answer. And he took it upon himself to email me and say, please respond to this. That's how important it was to you to make sure I responded. And I did. That's the way you really have to monitor your community as closely as that.
Other misconceptions just because you alluded to it. Post length, I've tried everything. There's no magic formula. I've been told it has to be 500 words or less because People won't read that much. It depends on what you're looking for. If you're trying to hit the front page of Digg, it's pretty tough to do with a really, really long article because you're given a very short period of time in which to get from one Digg to the number you need to hit the front page. If on the other hand, you're looking for something you want to stick on the front page of Google for a certain term for a very long time, for even months or years possibly, then it doesn't matter then. In some cases, I do think longer is better frequency up to you guys. Better infrequently is much better than mediocre and timely that expires two days later because it's no longer relevant five times a day.
You mentioned the type of traffic that you get, and it's important and I think that's true. Give you an example, there's a couple bloggers in Silicon Valley. One of them is named Andrew Chen. The other one is named Eric Reese. Both of them have relatively small audiences. They have some of the most important readers, though, in Silicon Valley. Exactly. Exactly what they need. So a lot of one of the marketing terms people say is I'd rather have a list of 1,000 that converts rather than 50,000 that doesn't. And that I've measured it. I've compared my list. In fact, I have an email list of about 35,000 or so. And on that list I have sub lists. One of the lists I have is a frugality list. These are people who are by definition frugal. They signed up for one of my frugality things. And I've split tested sales offers to see what would convert. And they convert at a fraction of the rate that people signed up for when they signed up for a program where they were paying for something or paying for value. I'm talking about 10x or in some cases 50x difference. So having a small group of the right type of readers can attract others like that. So I would say focus on the important ones first and you can grow it out later.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. So for me, I'll just talk about what I found in some of my testing for blog posts I used to. I tested, like how frequently I post and what kind of traffic that drives for me. Certainly the more posts I do, the more traffic I get. But I find that I burn out.
Yeah. It's unsustainable.
Yeah. You can't do it. Yeah. So for me, I'd rather write like each time I try to post something, it's like, would I be proud of having this as part of my legacy that's going to be online forever? The other thing is, you know, sometimes it's better not to post than to post something crappy. And finally, you're conditioning your readers. If you post 25 times a day, like if you're a gawker, that's fine. That's a different model. But your readers will come to expect that.
