Why Do I Blog?

Video response to Why I Blog. Short answer: Personal Brand.

Making Changes to Your Website

First video. Didn’t come out perfect, but life isn’t perfect. Get over it :).

Increase Pageviews By Lowering Your Bounce Rate

I’ve talked about bounce rate before when I released my Attention Span plugin for Mint. Bounce rate is one of the best ways to gauge the effectiveness of your site. In one month I’ve improved the bounce rate on MacTips from 37% to 26%–let me explain how.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who visited only 1 page on your site and then left.

This is the most basic definition of bounce rate. So if your bounce rate is 30%, 30% of your visitors left without visiting any other pages.

The other 70% visited 2 or more pages. The lower your bounce rate the better.

I know you’re begging for an analogy, so here’s one. Imagine a cup with a hole in the bottom. Our goal is to fill the cup with water as quickly as possible.

In this scenario, the cup is your website, the water your visitors and the hole your bounce rate.

There is always going to be a hole in the cup, it’s the nature of this cup (some users will always leave after only 1 visit). However, the smaller the hole (lower bounce rate), the quicker our cup fills and the faster we reach our goal.

Ignoring your bounce rate is like trying to fill a cup with no bottom. No matter how many visitors you pour into your website, none stick around. You have a tough time building a following of any measurable size. There is an easier way.

Why is a Low Bounce Rate Important?

A low bounce rate can:

• Increase ad revenue, more page views usually means more $$$ (not always)
• Increase return visits, when a user begins surfing your site they remember you and are more likely to revisit
• Increased attention, attention is our ultimate goal building a website. Bounce rate is a shortcut to retaining that attention
• Momentum, user activity breeds more activity. Users don’t like contributing to a ghost-town Web site. The quicker you build users, the more momentum you gain
• Increase subscriptions to RSS and E-mail, A user who navigates multiple pages is more likely to want more information in the form of subscriptions

How Do I Lower My Bounce Rate?

Many individual factors contribute to a poor bounce rate. Overall, I’d say 50% is content and 50% is page design. I’ve tweaked both heavily and both have a huge impact. Let’s break down some factors:

Remove Ads: Crazy right? Let me explain. Users don’t like ads, they tolerate them. Overload your users and they’ll flee. Don’t remove all ads, but the low-paying ones you crammed in for an extra penny at your users expense–consider ditching those.

Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS): Simple beats trendy any day of the week. Your users will thank you with their attention. Adding superfluous effects, transitions and moving objects will confuse your users and make them give up. You don’t want them to give up, you want them to dig in and get their feet wet. Keep it as simple and intuitive as possible.

Clutter is another problem. Don’t try to cram as much information as possible into one area. Whitespace can be visually appealing. Keep the important stuff and move everything else out of the way.

Accessibility: Is your website accessible? This touches on keeping things simple as mentioned above. An accessible website works on all browsers (mobile too). It can be used by people with disabilities and non-savvy Internet users. Also, for goodness sake leave your damn links underlined.

Relevant Links: This was the single most important factor while improving the bounce rate on MacTips. Relevant links to similar or popular content are fine. But cross-linking inside content will do more for your bounce rate than many of the previous techniques combined.

Consider cross-linking like this: Quality content is important when building your Web site, but its also important to have a plan for success.

Linking to previous (relevant!) content will send users deep into the nooks and crannies of your site and help new users catch up on content they missed.

When I started doing this on MacTips, the bounce rate plummeted. This makes sense because your users eyes are fixated on your content. Not your sidebar, footer or header (though the header holds a lot of attention)–the vast majority if your users are focusing on your content.

By putting relevant links in front of their eyes, you grab and hold their attention. This is the way to build readership.

In Conclusion

Bounce rate is not a cure-all solution to building a successful Web site. However, by paying attention to it–you can test different versions of your site and measure the effect on your users.

This enables you to create a following much easier than just hoping users liked the one article they happened to stumble across.

AttentionSpan Plugin Updated For Mint

You may recall I recently released a Mint plugin for determining bounce rates and pages per visit. I called it AttentionSpan. I’m happy to announce a new version is out (this will be the first release to the Mint site) that adds a Quick View panel as shown below:

Download AttentionSpan v0.3

Stay tuned for some tips on how to lower your bounce rate.

My Plan Succeeded! So Far…

Your achievement can be no greater than your plans are sound.
-Napoleon Hill

How is my plan unfolding?

Last week I talked about creating a plan for success. I described two plans I had to increase subscribers and pageviews on MacTips. The first part of the plan was:

If I can build a Dashboard widget that enough people use, I can keep it in Apple’s Top 50 Widgets. This is a huge source of traffic, but the key is keeping it in the top 50. I’ve been building this widget all weekend–but I’ve still got lots more to do until it’s ready.

I said in my post I would report back with my results. Its been a week since I released the Widget–and so far its been a huge success.

The number of subscribers on MacTips jumped from 3,757 to 4,788. That’s a 20% increase in one week. Not bad for a little planning.

Creating a widget is easy. Creating a widget that stays in the top 50 is a little more difficult. Currently it’s settled at spot #17, but it jumps around quite a bit. Yesterday it was at #27.

I just made the realization if the widget gets into the top 10 it gets bumped to the Apple Downloads page. I’m willing to bet the traffic difference in #17 and #10 is worth the extra effort.

So What’s Next?

Well, the second part of my plan is working on an iTunes podcast. I’m not sure this will be as successful as the Widget has been–but it’s worth a try.

If the MacTips widget drops out of the top 50 (entirely possible), I’ll make some changes users have been asking for and try again.

By keeping a widget in the top 50 I’m adding 1,000 new subscribers to MacTips every week. That’s worth the effort.

Creating A Plan For Success

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
- Napoleon Hill

For a larger part of my life, I was anti-planning. I credit this to my father, who was in the Military for 20 years and always had a plan. For a long time, I thought of plans as I thought of suicide pacts–you stick to the plan under all circumstances. I’ve learned this to be a flawed strategy.

The Importance of a Plan

A plan gives you direction. It lets you know that you’re not only moving, but moving in the right direction. It’s silly to work hard for the sake of working hard. Having direction insures you end up where you intended.

How is this relevant to web development you ask?

It’s especially important for developing a website. You can literally do anything you want with your website. You’re in complete control. Without direction, without a plan–it’s likely you will fail. Not because you didn’t try hard, but because you didn’t give yourself direction.

My Example of Good Planning

In an e-mail to the new owner, I explained the single biggest reason behind BlogCatalog’s success is the users linking back to the directory.

I realized early on in developing BlogCatalog that bloggers by nature love to link to services they use. If I could create enough incentive for users to link back, I could build something that performed extremely well in the search engines.

I came up with the Rate this Blog button which allowed users to rate your blog directly from your site. The success of this button was overwhelming, propelling BlogCatalog to become the largest blog directory on the Internet. BlogCatalog even ranks very well for competitive keywords such as blogs.

All this because of a little planning.

Applying these Principles to MacTips

So, how can I apply these same principles to MacTips? I’m taking two approaches here I think will work well. Let me state without quality content, neither of these ideas will work.

First, if I can build a Dashboard widget that enough people use, I can keep it in Apple’s Top 50 Widgets. This is a huge source of traffic, but the key is keeping it in the top 50. I’ve been building this widget all weekend–but I’ve still got lots more to do until it’s ready:

Second, We’ve recently launched videos on MacTips. By posting these videos on YouTube and iTunes, I hope to draw in new viewers that may have never found the site. I’m especially excited about the iTunes possibility–it was recommended by Omer (one of my writers) and I think it will be very successful.

In Closing

Are these cutting edge ideas? Hardly. But by having a plan, then executing it to the best of your ability–you’ll be amazed with the results.

Of course I’ll report back in a few weeks to let you know how these ideas are going.

If it turns out one or both don’t work, we’ll revise and then try again. Don’t be afraid to adjust the plan. But don’t be stupid enough to think you can wing it.

Below is one of my favorite Latin Proverbs as it relates to motivation:

If there is no wind, row.

Attention Span: Bounce Rate & Pages Per Visit Plugin For Mint

Download Attention Span 0.1b

Why Use Mint For Analytics

I use Mint to track stats on MacTips. Mint in itself is not that amazing. It provides pretty good stats, but nothing above and beyond what anybody else is offering.

What did draw me to Mint is the ability to create plug-ins. This is the deal maker for me and many others. There’s tons of standard and 3rd party plug-ins available that take Mint to the next level.

I needed a plugin for Bounce Rates and Pages Per Visit but one didn’t exist–so I made one and I’m releasing it here (and on the Mint site once I test more).

Introducing Attention Span

Attention Span shows you how “sticky” your content is by displaying the Bounce Rate and Pages Per Visit.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who left your site after 1 pageview. The lower this number is the better.

Pages Per Visit: The average number of pages a user visits in 1 session. The higher this number is the better.

This is very useful for determining trends and content/design effectiveness.

What Did I Learn?

So, what have I learned from this plug-in so far?

I’ve learned MacTips is in a downward trend for effectiveness.

In the past month the Bounce Rate has gone up and Pages Per Visit has gone down.

As you can see the bounce rate has gone up to 40% in the past month. This isn’t great news, but at least I know now and can do something about it.

I’d guess the reason for this is either me placing more ads on the site or me cramming more information into the pages.

Either way, I realize there’s a problem now and I can actually do something about it. This is what Bounce Rates and Pages Per Visit stats tell me.

Without this information I may have never realized my effectiveness was going down, especially considering my visitors were going up.

Download Attention Span 0.1b

Innovative Content Brings the Best Visitor

Origional and innovative content brings the best kind of reader, the innovative early adopters.

I wrote that in a journal I keep way back on October 28th, 2007. MacTips had just broken 2,000 visitors for the first time and it was due to original content that we published before anyone else.

Yesterday, Leopard 10.5.2 was released. With it brought some new changes to the way stacks work in the dock. Michael (one of my writers) jumped on this and had a great post up explaining the news stack features.

I let him know last night how great of a post this was not only because it was well written, but because he had written it before anyone else. This is the type of content I’ve been striving for.

I woke this morning to find we were linked by LifeHacker. This is not the first time this has happened, but I always love traffic from LifeHacker. Their Mac users are some of the smartest (and friendliest) around.

Not to mention LifeHacker Mac users relate well to MacTips because the nature of the two sites (tips, tricks, hacks).

So, what was the result of this? We’ve had nearly 10,000 visitors today. Last night, I wrote out a goal to hit the same number by July 31st, 2008. Of course in my goal I’d like to sustain this daily traffic, but this is a great start.

Gina Trapani From LifeHacker

Gina is the editor for LifeHacker. I mention her because she is the one who posted the entry.

I’ve spoken to Gina on a few occasions and she seems like one of the smartest most down to earth people I’ve ever talked to. I asked her for thoughts on turning a blog into a book since she had recently written one, and she was very helpful and always nice.

Come to find out Gina is also a programmer and web developer–talk about a talent.

Content is King

This goes back to my Content is King post. All the other marketing, design, programming, SEO and newsletter stuff is fine–but without content you’ve got nothing.

If you’re just starting out, forget about everything else and focus on building quality content. Maybe I’ll write a post or two on what I think quality content is. Yes, I think I’ll do that.

It’s been a good day, I love when my site grows.

SEOSense 0.1b - A WordPress Theme For SEO & AdSense

In an effort to continue giving back to the community, I’m releasing my first WordPress theme–SEOsense.

What is SEOsense?

SEOsense is a WordPress theme that aims to be very lightweight. It also attempts to provide a good framework to build a theme on. It focuses on search engine optimization and AdSense placement to make this happen. I’ll go into detail about each below.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization

There’s a number of things I did to focus on SEO with this theme. First and foremost I put the content first and used CSS to arrange the layout the way I want.

This is important because the higher the content, the more importance Google gives it. When your content is above your header and navigation–it lets Google know this is the most important content.

Search engines love more content and less markup, so I’ve focused on making this as clean and minimal as possible, using CSS whenever possible to style tags.

Another thing I did with SEOsense, is I attempt to generate the best page title possible.

Every title ends with your blog name. Your blog’s description is used for your main page. A post’s title is used for a post page. With categories, the category description is used unless it’s empty–then your category title is used.

I set it up like this so you can target specific keywords easily and make changes through the WordPress backend as needed.

Pages and posts have appropriate hierarchy and repetition to let Google know what the page is about.

WordPress AdSense Optimization

This area probably could have used a little more work, but I think it’s off to a good start. I personally don’t like “optimizing” AdSense to the point where it becomes hidden and tricky–so I’ve left some things I could have added out.

What I have done is allowed a large 728×90 ad up top. On single posts pages, I’ve wrapped the content around the ad.

On the archives and category pages, however, I’ve opted to put the ads between the posts. This is done through the functions.php file with the function betweenPosts(). I’ve found this a pretty clean way of inserting content between posts that allows for easy editing.

A few other notes

It’s good to note the entire theme uses 1 image, which is for the RSS feed icon. Without this image the theme is an impressive 13KB.

If you’re going to be using the AdSense, remember to swap out my ads with your own. While I love making money on sites that aren’t mine–something about that doesn’t seem right.

If you don’t want to use AdSense, simply remove the code and everything should snap into place as expected.

There is a link to my website on the bottom. You do not have to leave it in, but I would appreciate it.

I tried to keep all of the ad’s separated from the layout for easy updating. The ads are located in ad-top.php, ad-single.php and ad-between.php.

The CSS is setup in a way that editing styles is easy. The first part is only structure, meaning the placement of the header/sidebar/content. Everything after /** Styling **/ is styling and can be edited to your hearts content.

Also, please note I’m not a designer by trade. I can design, but I’m color deaf. I’ve done my best to create an appealing theme, but the design is only a portion of this theme. The real work goes into the placement of content. This is part of the reason I make it so easy to edit, because it’s a framework and should be built off accordingly.

This is my first WordPress theme I’ve ever released, so I’d love to hear your feedback.

Download SEOSense 0.1b

WordPress Plugin: Ask A Question - 0.1b

It’s time I started giving back to the community that’s done so much for me with Ask A Question (0.1b)

I’ve been developing on WordPress for a few years. It’s become my CMS of choice for nearly any project. On MacTips alone I’ve written over 10 custom plugins, not to mention all the hacking in the template.

Ask A Question - 0.1b

So the first (of many) plugins I’ll be releasing is called Ask A Question. What’s it do?

It allows your users to ask you questions.

Pretty easy right? Well I wanted my first released plugin to be easy–but not too easy. So I added some AJAX and sexy effects with script.aluco.us.

This was something I needed for MacTips as I started trying to get more user feedback. The site is also being geared towards helping users so this seemed like a good idea to connect with the confused Mac user.

The Features

I wanted my first plugin to be simple, but not crippled. So I’ve added a few features I think are necessary when adding a form like this to your website.

• Flood protection: Keep users from asking more than x questions in x seconds
• Degrade Gracefully: AJAX is nice for things like submitting forms without page-loads. AJAX is not nice for users that don’t have Javascript. So the form degrades gracefully so non Javascript users can still submit questions
• AJAX Backend: AJAX backend for easy managing. This part requires Javascript, sorry–maybe next version.
• File Size: Some AJAX libraries are huge. I’ve done my best to use the smallest one I could find and strip out all unnecessary information. I’ve also removed all unnecessary effects in script.aluco.us.

Ground breaking? Not by any means. But I needed it and figured others might too. WordPress thrives because of all the plugins available–I’ve certainly benefited from this.

I’m able to contribute–so I will.

If you try it let me know your thoughts.

Download Ask A Question (0.1b)

Have Patience with Affiliate Marketing

A few weeks ago I talked about selling T-shirts on MacTips because affiliate programs weren’t performing well for me.

Even though the affiliate programs weren’t performing well, I kept trying–determined to get my first sale.

Difference Between Affiliate Marketing and Banner Advertising

With Banner advertising, I saw revenue right away. Every day I saw how much I made that day. Whether I was counting clicks or impressions the revenue details were instant.

When I began affiliate marketing–I didn’t make any sales my first day. The second and third days came around but no sales were made.

I began to feel like I was loosing guaranteed banner revenue and started to get discouraged.

Finally on my fourth day I made a sale that accounted for much more than I would have made in four days worth of advertising.

Two days later I made another sale. Maybe there’s something to this affiliate marketing thing after all.

I’ve now made more in 6 days with affiliates than I would have in two weeks with advertising.

This is an exciting new area for me because it proves there are programs out there that work for my visitors–I just need to try harder.

Making Adjustments

This goes back to Test, Review, Adjust and Start Again.

Small adjustments make huge differences. Never stop experimenting and never stop pushing ways to monetize your site.

However, always remember to keep your users best interests at heart.

Users understand the need for advertising. But keep it relevant and don’t force it down their throat.

Sudden Success with Selling Shirts

While I was adjusting affiliate banners, I began testing selling t-shirts as well.

To my surprise I’ve already sold two today. While the commission is not as high as other affiliate programs–I love seeing initial success when I try something new.

This means there’s a lot of room for growth with some tweaking.

I’ll be sure to keep you updated with my progress in this area as it’s somewhat unexplored territory for me.

Meatball Sundae For Web Developers

What is a Meatball Sundae?

Meatball Sundae is Seth Godin’s latest attempt at convincing the rest of the world that “Old Media” is dead.

Godin makes the argument (in many of his books) that interrupting people used to be very successful. If you had a well designed ad and a decent product you could market your way to riches by interrupting as many people as possible.

Godin argues we’ve created so much noise we’ve desensitized ourselves to this type of marketing. So much so that we’re spending more money with less customers converted.

Marketers are scrambling to make up the slack. Many have decided New Marketing is the way to advertise. So they pay people to create buzz on blogs and they pull gimmicks to get their commodity product (their meatball) noticed.

Godin argues they’re doomed for failure because their product (the meatball) doesn’t fit with New Marketing (the sundae).

Why is this Important for a Web Developer?

This is good news because you don’t have to align your product/service/company to fit with New Marketing. You can design it with this in mind from day 1.

This means going the extra mile to wow your users. Building excellence into your website from the beginning so users stay and bring others.

As Godin says, give your customers a megaphone then get out of their way.

If you follow Godin’s blog, you may be able to skip this book as there weren’t as many “a-hah” moments as in his previous books (at least for me).

If you haven’t read Permission Marketing, Purple Cow or Free Prize Inside–you’ve got some homework to do.

Unimpressed With Yahoo! Targeting

I signed up for a Yahoo! Publisher account a long time ago and never really gave them a chance due to terrible performance.

At the time I attributed their lack of targeting to being new, it seems not a lot has changed:

I’m willing to let it run for a day or two and see how it performs but I’m not very optimistic about this.

I wonder how Microsoft adCenter will perform if they ever open themselves up to publishers.

Test Monitization, Review, Adjust, Start Again

Right now I’m in an interesting position with MacTips because it’s reached the point where small changes make big impacts.

The site isn’t huge by any means but we’ve reached our first week where traffic hasn’t dipped below 4,000 pageviews per day. I’m that much closer to reaching my short-term goal of 5,000 pageviews per day.

Inconsistent Google AdSense Numbers

I have mixed thoughts about Google AdSense. On one hand it’s nice because it’s guaranteed ad dollars that actually produce a decent amount.

On the other hand my numbers from day to day vary drastically. I can’t specify exact numbers, but eCPM varies by a few dollars every day. I’m not sure if this is normal–but I haven’t seen activity like this previously.

Tweaking Google AdSense

In attempt to bring some stability to my numbers I’ve began tweaking AdSense. I’m doing 2 different things currently with some initial success.

Competitive Ad Filter

The AdSense Competitive Ad Filter allows you to block certain ads from displaying on your site. For the most part this is used for blocking competitor ads, but I’ve also found this useful to block un-related ads.

Google does a good job selecting ads most of the time, but a little help never hurt anyone. In my case it’s actually helped me by bumping my eCPM up $1. I’m not sure how permanent this is however.

Note: I see Google has added a “Ad Review Center”. I just signed up–I’ll let you know how this goes.

Rich Media Ads

The other thing I’ve begun experimenting with is non-text ads. This means images/videos/flash. So far it’s doing OK but nothing amazing.

I’m going to continue tweaking AdSense as small changes like this can produce big results.

Monetizing with T-shirts

I’ve dabbled in affiliate programs but there just aren’t many good Mac related affiliate programs out there. The ones that do exist just haven’t performed very well. Infact they’ve performed awfully.

But part of being a webmaster is continually trying and improving.

I have a hunch that T-shirts will sell better than most affiliate programs I put on my site. The problem is, there aren’t any Mac related t-shirt affiliate programs. I’ve contacted the companies–they’re not interested.

I want to sell their products and they’re not interested, unbelievable!

I’ve decided to create a few t-shirts of my own and see how those sell. I’ve started a contest at MacTips for ideas with mild success.

This whole thing is a big experiment so I’ll be sure to report on my results. Nonetheless it’s not a very big investment with companies like CafePress and Zazzle doing the dirty work.

Continuous Improvement

As the title suggests, improving your site follows the basic steps of:

1. Test: No sure if an idea will work? Try it.
2. Review: Record and review your results.
3. Adjust: Adjust your test trying new ideas.
4. Go to #1: Start the whole process again.

Never stop tweaking, never stop trying new things, never stop improving.

Building Your Website One User at a Time

One User Does Make a Difference

I would rather have 1 passionate user than 10 regular users. That 1 passionate user will give more constructive feedback, become more active and tell more people than the 10 regular users ever would.

This seems contrary to popular belief. Building a website one user at a time seems like it would take forever to build momentum.

There’s truths to this, but the overall problem isn’t the time it takes–it’s your attitude.

When you treat your users as a whole instead of individuals they feel unimportant. When they feel unimportant your site lacks feedback from the people you need it from most.

What does this actually mean?

This means when a user takes the time to e-mail you, respond. Thank them for taking the time to contact you and let them know they’re important to you.

When a user makes a suggestion, actually consider it. Not every suggestion is a gold mine, but often users suggest things you will never consider.

When a user complains, listen and listen well. This is your chance to really win over a user. Instead of blowing them off–consider it from their point of view. Do they have a valid point? If so, let them know. If not, try to resolve the situation the best you can. If you put your best foot forward the user will notice.

User Complaints Hurt my Ego

A while back I was designing a new front page for MacTips. I wanted new users to be able to find popular content easily.

Right after launching the new page I got this e-mail:

I just went to your site and I absolutely despise your new setup. It makes me want to stop looking at the site, which is exactly what I (and probably countless others) am going to do. The format is so complicated that I can’t find the actual tips without reading about a thousand different links that all look the same. You over-structured to the point that the site is rendered useless and defunct. I hope you realize you immense mistake and how inviting simplicity can be. People looking for the kinds of tips that your site offers are now especially disinclined to view your site. Good luck!

Re-reading this still makes me cringe–but it shouldn’t. I worked very hard on the new front page and I thought it was great. But after considering it from his point of view–he was exactly right.

I tried to fit so much information on the page, I made it all useless. Not only did I change it back, but I started removing unnecessary information from the rest of the site. As a result the site is much easier to navigate and looks a lot cleaner. I still have some things to change, but I’m headed in the right direction now.

That user did me a huge favor. Dozens of users were probably thinking the exact same thing, and would have never returned without telling me. He took the time to e-mail me. Not only was I able to improve the site for the whole community, but I gained a loyal user in the process

Why Did You Unsubscribe?

You can also be more proactive in communicating with your users. The e-mail list does fairly well at MacTips with over 500 subscribers. This number is growing by about 15 users every day.

Of these 500 subscribers, only 1 has unsubscribed. That’s not a bad ratio–but I wanted to know why, so I e-mailed him:

Hi “rew”,

I’m the webmaster of MacTips.org. Recently you subscribed to MacTips and then unsubscribed.

I was curious why? This is in no way an e-mail to try and get you to re-subscribe.

You are my first and only unsubscriber and I was just curious why? If there’s something I can do to keep users I’d like to do it, hopefully you shedding some light can help that.

If you don’t want to answer, then please don’t. You’ll never hear from me again–I was just curious if it was something specific that I could address.

Thanks,
Brad

I was very careful to let the user know he wouldn’t hear from me again if he didn’t want to. Because he unsubscribed I assumed he didn’t want to hear from MacTips again.

I was surprised by his reply:

I didn’t mean to unsubscribe I was wondering why I hadn’t received any tips. Please go ahead and subscribe me again. Thanks.

Had he not accidentally unsubscribed, I would have listened to what he had to say to prevent future users from unsubscribing.

Instead I was able to gain another subscriber and maintain my 500/0 record.

Hard Work Pays Off

Building a successful website is not easy, but it’s not rocket science either. Knowing that your users are your livelihood should always keep things in check for you. Treat them with respect and as individuals and you will be surprised by their response.

TheSixtyOne - Music Exploration Done Correctly

I’ve long searched for a service that helps you discover new artists. There have been a few attempts at this in the past. Last.fm was my favorite for a while and they do a pretty good job.

Recently I came across TheSixtyOne, a Digg like rating system for songs.

Initially I liked the idea, but calling it a “Digg-like” site actually cheapens the experience. TheSixtyOne goes so much further in to music exploration I immediately signed up.

I hardly ever sign up for a site immediately. If you want my e-mail address you’re going to have to work for it or really wow me.

Instantly I fell in love with TheSixtyOne. It uses a little Flash, a little AJAX but uses them in appropriate ways. It manages to continue playing songs through page loads, a great feature.

It also allows you to build a queue of songs to play, effectively making TheSixtyOne a media player.

I’ve already found a few new artists I really like, on Last.fm I’d find one or two per session max.

I even went to purchase a song through Amazon but abandoned ship after realizing Amazon makes you download their software, yuck.

The last concept I find interesting is the idea of points. You can bump songs or artists but it costs points. You get points for logging in, and I assume other routine tasks like writing comments.

This means you only bump artists you really really like because you only have a certain number of points.

I’m still sorting through the site, there seems to be a lot here–but so far I love the idea and the implementation.

Visualize Your Web Visitors - Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is one of those services that somehow slipped under my radar. Initially I passed this off as yet another poor attempt at visualizing your visitors–boy was I wrong.

I signed up for an invitation for this service way back in 2006 and it just recently crossed my path again.

Crazy Egg does a remarkable job visualizing your visitors for you. It’s all done in a Flash interface that works very well together.

They have a couple different views–link overview, heatmap and confetti.

The link overview gives you details on how many clicks each link received and where the users came from (Google, Direct, etc…).

The heatmap is my favorite and is shown below. This is the first time I’ve seen a heatmap pulled off this well.

The final view is called “Confetti” and is extremely practical. This lets you drill down your clicks based on referrals, browsers, platforms, screen sizes and more. It’s easiest to show you, so I’ve included a screenshot below.

Web analytics are good. This is great!

Crazy Egg does an amazing job of showing you how and where your visitors are clicking.

Why is this useful?

This is useful for a number of reasons.

• Allows me to lay out content more efficiently
• Allows me to see at a glance what copy works and what doesn’t
• Allows me to find best ad placement
• Allows me to remove items that aren’t working and find better alternatives
• Allows me to see what types of users do what, IE “Google” visitors subscribe to the newsletter more

The list goes on and on.

I’ve seen services that try to visualize web visitors in the past and I’ve never seen it done as well as Crazy Egg does it.

Crazy Egg is free to try, I highly recommend giving it a whirl–you won’t regret it.

My one small gripe is I’m not very fond of the name Crazy Egg. I’m thinking that’s the original reason this slipped under my radar. Not very descriptive and not very memorable.

I’ve had to look up the name 3 times just today! Maybe it’s just been a long week, however.

Note: Because I signed up for the invitation I’ve been granted the “Basic” plan. I’m not sure what advanced features are offered here and not on the “Free” plan, but it should be enough to give you an idea of the service.

Content is King–Long Live Content!

You hear it time after time when building a website. Content is King

Why?

Why Unique Content?

Having unique content is key to building a successful website.

• Unique content builds links from trusted sources as an afterthought.
• Unique content makes you the authority source. You’re not regurgitating information.
• Unique content establishes credibility amongst your readers and builds a following.

Why Frequent Content?

• Search engines love frequent content–blogs are preferred often because they’re up-to-date.
• Users love frequent content. When your site is updated on a regular basis, users know when to expect an update–visiting more frequently.
• Frequent content establishes momentum. Momentum is an extremely powerful tool for developing a website.

So what does all this mean?

This means stop focusing on SEO. It’s a small fraction of the big picture. Yes it’s important.

Content is more important. Way more important. 100x more important.

You can have the best SEO’d site in the world–without content it’s useless.

Contrary, you can have the worst SEO’d site in the world, and you’ll probably still rank well if you have golden content.

Obviously there’s exceptions to this. Don’t design in Flash, search engines are still learning how to read this.

Search engines don’t read Javascript very well if at all. Any Javascript is for your users only.

Practical advice

Focus on making your site readable to search engines. This means:

• What your content is about in your title.
• What your content is about again in your header tag.
• Important content up top.

This is more for web accessibility than for SEO, but applies to both.

Then, forget about SEO and focus on content. Content content content content. Unique content. Cutting edge content. Focus on content for users, not search engines. Search engines will follow the users.

Are you sure?

Yes I’m sure. Here’s an example from my current site MacTips.

MacTips has been established for over 2 years now. Just recently it’s begun getting regular content again. I’ve been getting decent search engine traffic for a while, but today the floodgates opened and traffic started pouring in.

This is a direct result of frequent and unique content.

I’ve hit my goal of 5,000 visitors per day 4 months ahead of schedule.

Regular and unique content has brought links from popular sites such as Gizmodo, LifeHacker and TUAW.

Also, a community is starting to develop–which is my #1 goal for MacTips.

This is where building a site gets very exciting. Large enough to make a difference but small enough to grow exponentially.

Conclusion

Focus on your users and you won’t go wrong. Your users give your site life. Without them you have a bunch of pages on a webserver.

With them, you have a vibrant and active community with ideas, expressions and most importantly momentum.

Note: The stats for MacTips are publicly available at http://www.mactips.org/mint/.

BrowserPool: Test Your Website on Different Platforms

If you follow the W3C Standards, your website should look the same on all browser and all platforms.

Anyone whose ever developed a website knows this is often not the case. Different browsers render completely differently let alone different platforms.

There’s never been a suitable solution to this problem, so developers have been forced to keep many different browsers and platforms on hand for testing purposes only.

A few years ago, various services were started to help this problem. Basically taking a screenshot of your website in various browsers and feeding the images back to you.

The problems with this is these services is they often take a very long time or they don’t work at all when there’s a lot of traffic.

You’re also limited because you’re only getting a screenshot. You can’t see how mouse movement effects your design. Hovers, Javascript, pull-downs and other items are limited here.

Recently I discovered a great service called BrowserPool. This service lets you VNC into different platforms and try all the different browsers available. Great idea!

The best part, however–it’s free to try. You’ll only get booted off if a paying customer needs the space.

So far I’ve done lots of testing using BrowserPool and I’m ecstatic I’ve found this service.

My Powerbook died, so I’m waiting for MacWorld 2008 before I upgrade. This allows me to continue developing MacTips on Windows (I know, sac religious) and still make sure everything is compatible for 95% of my users.

If you need this type of service, BrowserPool should certainly be your first choice. Free to try, and 30 Euro’s per month to buy.

First Week on the Job at TownNews

This isn’t exactly about building a successful website, but it is related.

I just finished my first week on the job as a programmer at TownNews. TownNews is a company that helps newspapers make the transition online. We do this by offering a completely customizable solution for papers to extend their business to the Internet with full support for our products.

We have a sales team that trains customers for selling ads online and a complete design and development team all in-house. We also have systems administration and customer service divisions, all under the same roof.

This allows us to offer a complete package you won’t find many other places.

Now am I praising TownNews just because they’re my new employer? Of course not–TownNews was my first pick for employment here in the Quad Cities. They are bringing innovation to a declining market, which from a business perspective I find fascinating.

The founder, Marc Wilson, started the company way back in 1989–before the Internet hit its growth spurt and saw an opportunity for existing papers before the medium was fully established.

That takes an amazing ability to see a vision before all the pieces are complete, something I’ve been working towards developing lately.

The people I’m working with are all very talented and passionate about what they do–and it shows by their work. I’m extremely lucky to work in a field I love and for a company thats passionate about what they do.

I won’t be posting too much more about TownNews here, but I wanted to give a small update and talk about an opportunity I have to see an innovative technology company first hand.