What I’ve Learned Publishing Content On The Internet

If you haven’t heard, I love the book Rework. In the spirit of openness it preaches, here’s nearly everything I’ve learned from 6 of the 7+ sites I’ve been involved with over the last few years.

This blog, pauldavidolson.com/blog

Original goal: This is my main venue for sharing my opinions and testing things out.

What I’ve learned:

• Reddit has been a good source of traffic to my blog, but it’s a finicky bunch. I get accused of posting my own content (which I admit to). I prefer Reddit to Digg, but it will be interesting to see how Digg tries to evolve.
• When I write for Dappered, I get a bump in traffic to my blog. It’s good to get your name out.
• I love WordPress. It’s a great CMS. Mediate and TheSmokingJacket.com are two new and notable sites that agree – both are run on WordPress.
• With SEO, timing is key. My Blake Lively SNL booty dance post got good traffic. I beat a lot of other sites to this one Sunday morning after the clips went live on Hulu.
• I first experimented with Feedburner here – I really like their service.
• I first experimented with Disqus and Facebook Connect here. I’m less in love with Disqus lately. Comments are necessary, but they are certainly no path to success.

ProlongedInsult.com (RIP)

Original goal: Create a user-generated content site for all frustrated writers – with a focus on fiction, poetry, and travel writing.

What I’ve learned:

• Attracting authors to a user-generated content site is a lot of work. And even after you attract them, keeping them around is even tougher.
• Maintaining a customized CMS isn’t worth it. WordPress is the way to go. I’m curious to try Pligg.
• Fiction and poetry get very little search traffic.
• It’s tough to build community … even around the ‘frustrated writer’ rallying cry.
• Eventually it became more of a liability than an asset and I shut it down.
• User-generated content takes a lot of effort – it’s not something where you just set it up and watch the money roll in.

WhyYouAreStupid.com

Original goal: Test the theory that controversy brings readers.

What I’ve learned:

• Incendiary / controversial content isn’t a surefire way to build an audience. It’s better to watch and anticipate trends.
• My most successful post was about Kathy Ireland’s baby bump on Oscar night. Again, this shows the value of timeliness regarding SEO. All traffic came via Google searches. I was the first to post about her possible pregnancy. Riding trends is good, but being first is better.

Dappered.com

Original goal: Blog about men’s fashion and earn money via affiliate sales and advertising.

What I’ve learned:

• Having a secondary revenue stream is important. Ad-support alone isn’t enough.
• The audience has grown steadily for the last year. Last month was the first month with over 100,000 pageviews.
• Each one-off traffic success seems to leave behind long-term residual gains.
• RSS-powered Twitter is good enough. @dappered has 80 followers now and has seen consistent growth without any human intervention.
• Joe averages 3 posts a day. Most returning visitors appear to come back daily to check things out.
• 45% of all traffic comes from Google organic searches. Dappered does really well because many products are only featured on one other page on the entire web – the store’s page – unlike the news which is rehashed everywhere.
• The above-the-fold 300×250 ad is the best performing ad on the site.
• Big buttons don’t lead to big sharing. We added the Sharebar plugin to the site, and sharing activity hasn’t been influenced visibly. The most important factor in creating viral content is … content.

SarahPalinWillFixEverything.com

Original goal: Just a joke and an attempt at an intentionally viral site.

What I’ve learned:

• It basically worked. Site was very successful on StumbleUpon, getting 4,000 visits the day after it launched. 500 people Facebook ‘liked’ it as of this writing.
• The site performed poorly with Google – might not even be in the index.
• Nobody donated. I should have went with ads instead.
• Would have performed better as a WordPress site filled with Sarah Palin RSS feeds. I may still do this. Or maybe I’ll try out Pligg.
• Site continues to get traffic, but nowhere near the level of the first few days.
• All sites should have a wavy American flag.

Bartannica.com

Original goal: Publish bar reviews, get more traffic than Yelp.

What I’ve learned:

• Bartannica suffers from lack of content. A site needs regular updates to survive.
• Linked site to Flickr – all pictures are Flickr images. These cross-linked images seem to help search rankings.
• Bar reviews don’t go viral and don’t get shared much.
• Hip new bars get a lot of press initially, so it’s tough to rank high on these searches. Old, divey bars with little recent press do much better on Bartannica – like the Sky Ride Tap.
• Originally tried affiliate t-shirt sales to generate revenue, that didn’t work. The Dappered approach is much better.
• Maintaining multiple WordPress themes means more work.  I changed Bartannica’s design to match my blog’s design to make things easier.  I like the Thematic theme.