as we’ve seen over the past few days, traffic is slowly (very slowly) ramping up despite no real content being on the site. Now we’re ready to drive organic traffic to the site using social bookmarking and viral videos.

The video is (finally) ready to upload — minor snag, filezilla has built up so many connections that the target site doesn’t accept any more connections from my IP address. So, now I need to figure out how to either clear that with the target site OR how to configure TOR/Vidalia to also work for FileZilla.

That should all work in a mo, so for the time being, let’s have a final look at very slowly growing traffic, once the video and social bookmarking campaign kicks in, I’m hoping (fingers) crossed, that the organic traffic will rise rapidly… btw, the video is a recording I did with Jeff Landers, if you own your own (small) business or are thinking about setting up your own, it’s actually worth listening to the recording.

Lot’s of great content (and yes, we are talking about his book, so please keep that in mind if you fall into the “I want free content but won’t tolerate anyone mentioning their book” camp;-)

All right, we’re done. Head on over to

http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/main-content/the-call-recordings-are-up/

and have a quick look at the video (which actually has good content in it…) So tomorrow, I’ll then do some social bookmarking (hey, feel free to bookmark it in one or two of your social bookmarking accounts… in case you haven’t set these up yet, you’ll have to do this anyway soon when you set up your own blog and follow the whole SEO using “drive traffic using social bookmarking” strategy)

posted an announcement for a call I’ll be doing tonight (remember, create video-content so we can finally start this social bookmarking experiment to drive organic traffic to the less work more money blog) — and within minutes I got an email from Jeff Landers saying that google alerts had picked it up and told him about it.

So, despite only 2 measly posts over there, Google seems to love us — I’d say cudos to Jeff’s SEO optimized blog-software.

What’s going to be interesting is what happens to our visitor numbers once the video goes up. Hopefully tomorrow.

PS: yes, we had another little increase in traffic, but not worth me printing another picture…

Organic traffic is slowly growing (very slowly) as we can see from the following graph.

Not a rush of traffic yet, but then, apart from a single post there is nothing on the blog yet.

Tomorrow night I’m scheduled to do a tele-seminar and I’ll post the recording as a video (via YouTube), which is technique #1 shown in Jeff Johnson’s tutorial. Then time for some clickery-click — would appreciate if you could help with this and do some clicking over at http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/, normally of course I’d outsource it, but in this case, why not have all participants have some fun.

Plus, as you’ll have to set up those social media accounts anyway in order to increase traffic using social media on your websites, you might as well do that now.

Ah, and please leave some comments, both here and over at http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/, so we can see who’s participating in the experiment.

Btw, what’s really interesting is that someone has actually come back (not all new visitors…)

I’m right now outsourcing mechanical tasks (clickery-click on the social bookmarking logos) on mturk.com. (actually, I will in a second, AFTER posting some content on http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/, otherwise there is nothing to bookmark, right?).

The great thing about mturk.com is that you can outsource repetitive, really small tasks — like clicking on links, image-tagging, posting blog-posts, that kind of thing. You can even use their API and automate these tasks (so e.g. if you have 200 pictures which you want tagged, you can automatically point their workers to the individual images, so there is no duplication) — but that’ll take a while for me to understand.

One of the drawbacks of mturk is that you need a US address — handy having a brother who runs a triathlon community website over in L.A. (www.trinited.com)

Places like elance.com are great too, but they’re better for bigger tasks, less mechanical in nature. They also have a $50 minimum charge (as far as I can tell), so not ideal for micro-jobs.

Right then, your input: what other outsourcing places do you use, what advantages and disadvantages do they have?

Oh, btw, I’ll be posting this post over at http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/ as well, as the first post…

If that doesn’t ramp up organic traffic dramatically, I don’t know;-)

despite not doing ANYTHING, I mean, nothing, nada, the blog just sitting over at

http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/

we’ve already picked up a number of visitors. Yes, I know, it’s not a torrent yet — but how on earth did ANYBODY find their way there, considering it is brand-new, has no content and isn’t advertised anywhere…?

Anyway, here the stats (I was tempted to call them daily stats, but I’m not so good with routine….)

Ah yes, and if someone could explain why anyone would spend 50 secs on average over there….

Anyway, right now I’m producing video to drive organic traffic through the search-engines, just like Jeff suggests in the viral traffic tutorial (see blogroll on right), then off to put this whole thing into social bookmarking action….

As you know, youtube videos are limited to 10mins in length.

What I’d like to do for this project is post a video that is longer than 10mins, but still host it at youtube.

The plan is to split it into several pieces (all under 10 mins), host over at YouTube and ….

then by some magic, play them one after another (in the right order) ‘as one’ over on our target site…

Can you help with this? I just haven’t found the right player yet that works in wordpress. If you know of such a beast, please let me know so we can share it with everyone and use it on the lesswork-project.

thanks

Veit

we’re good to go

Slight delay, apologies, I was baby-sitting
all weekend, so being lazy (read: “male”) I took
them all to the beach;-)

The experiment website is of course this one and the project we’re trying to get up on front of
Google is on:

http://www.lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/

As you can see, I’ve used Jeff Johnson’s SEO wordpress installation for both blogs.

Let me know if you need any info on this software… if you want to drive traffic to your site you’ll
need to be able to install it!

I’ll now put the Google Analytics stats for our target up here, and then we need to start posting content…

But, before we do that, we need to decide on some search-terms! What do we want to rank high on Google?
Just email me some suggestions…

I’ll be creating a video tonight, with editing etc, hopefully it can go up tomorrow. That’s where
we then really follow Jeff’s tutorials…

Is there anything in particular you’d like to see or do you have any content you could contribute to
the target blog?

An article, a blog post, anything vaguely related to the subject (of working less, earning more
money;-) would be great…

Please send me anything you have — of course it’ll go up there with full credits. As you will see from
the site, I haven’t even put adsense banners up, it’s all about learning something, not making money.

Looking forward to hearing from you — just post a comment and let me know what you think, search-terms, want to see/do/….

Veit

Ok, here are the stats — you can see there are two visitors who didn’t stay because, well, there is nothing on the site yet. Let’s get posting! (uhh, that’s ugly when posted, can someone tell me how to install the big picture into a small box with scroll-bars please?)

http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/google-analytics/

All you need to do is enter your analytics code (which you get when you sign up for Google Analytics) and you’re set to go.

What I like about this particular plugin is that

1. of course it adds the tracking code to each page, so you quickly see what traffic each page is getting, but also
2. segments the outgoing clicks, so you can tell whether the click came from an article or a comment.
3. gives you the option of tracking entire domains, rather than individual URLs — so e.g. if you are sending lots of traffic to different URLs on the same domain (affiliate marketing comes to mind;-), then you might not be interested too much in which particular page it went to…
4. collects all your adsense into one directory.

lovely stuff  — the question now is how to monetize that information, i.e. now that we know that there is lots of traffic, how do we use that information to alter pages, layout, design and content to drive more traffic to our blog.

So, right now I’d love to hear from a Google Analytics expert — any thoughts on this, how best to use this to drive traffic to your blog, how best to oursource Google analytics. If you prefer, we could do a quick interview over the phone and post the interview up here!

Veit

What keywords should we target? The advice normally given falls into two categories:

Pick a niche (or keyword) that has lots of traffic (people are searching for it) and

1. has no or very little competition (which you can easily find with the google keyword tool) OR
2. has lots and lots of competition.

My view is that it all depends on your monetization strategy:

if you have very little competition, you are sitting either on an undiscovered gold-mine (and you’ll soon have lots of competition), so better exploit it fast or it’s just something that won’t make you any money (then again, if you’re clever with a bit of leverage, almost any traffic can be diverted to a money-making destination).

If on the other hand you are planning to make a living on adwords or affiliate commissions, you’re probably better off targeting keywords where you have lots of traffic and lots of competition. Lots of competition means that people are willing to pay lots of money for it. That means your adsense ads will actually be worth something. Take insurance as an example. You can buy dinner for a single click on those ads.

So, your input please: for our LessWorkMoreMoneyBlog project, what kind of keywords shall we target? Any keyword experts who want to give us their input?

Oh, btw, just to make sure that everybody understands that this is a learning-experiment, not a money-making experiment for myself — if we decide to have any adsense ads or similar on the site, we’ll be giving all money made to charity. And I’ll post the receipt on this site. This really is about learning and collaborating.

I’ve registered the name for the target site, it is

http://www.lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/

right now it’s not up (and those of you who’ve been following me on twitter will know that I’m still fuming — customer service, how NOT to do it!).

The title for the new blog is inspired by the fact that most of us want to work less and earn more money: after all, this experiment is about creating outsourcing-plans (so you can work less and earn more money by having all this great traffic)

Right now I’m battling with the install of the blog over there (someone with legal background, can I openly mention the fact that the support-staff at hostgator and godaddy are, mhmm, not capable to help me with my particular query….)

Whilst we’re all waiting for this thing to go live, let’s all think of some key search-terms we want to rank high with in Google. (let’s focus on Google for the time being)

looking forward to your input

Veit