An Idea from You
July 3, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 7 Comments
During the Traffic Booster Program we’ve shared over 45 ideas in total on how you can drive traffic to your website or blog. Now it’s over to you. We’re looking for something you’ve done that we haven’t listed that could help others who read Traffic Booster, boost their traffic. It could be a directory you’ve found, it could a blog site that lists sites. Whatever it is we want you to share it.
Simply leave a comment in the fields below. Make sure you provide all the necessary links and info.
Advertise with Gourmet Ads
July 2, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
We’ve gone through a stack of traffic boosting ideas for your website and blog. Now the last one in the Gourmet Ads traffic Boosting series is a unique offer, strictly to publishers in our network. If you’ve considered running advertising to drive traffic to your site, Gourmet Ads can now offer special rates to our publishers.
Some ideas for an advertising campaign to drive traffic to your site could be to promote a specific recipe, blog, competition or even drive subscriptions. Whatever the campaign idea, we can develop a plan for your consideration. No matter how small the budget, we can develop a plan for you. To receive a quote, simply Request a Proposal here and make sure you mention that you’re a Gourmet Ads publisher in the form.
Finally if you need help developing ads for your online advertising campaign, please contact us also and we can give you a quote to have these developed. We’ll help with the key messaging, design and development.
10 More Small Ideas
July 1, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
When I started drafting the Traffic Booster series with friends who work in web design firms, digital advertising companies, and publishing companies, I collated a tonne of ideas on how we could write 30 ideas for publishers to increase their traffic. What has happened is we collated much more than 30 ideas and some ideas were great but either didn’t warrant a dedicated blog or were speculative ideas that may or may not work. So here are the other ideas we had. No order of preference, but we just wanted to share ALL the ideas we had with you to help drive traffic to your site.
- Join www.stumbleupon.com and submit your site to the site.
- Submit to www.digg.com/food_drink which rates the most popular content
- Like Digg, buzz.yahoo.com rates popular content
- Create an account on www.delicious.com and book mark key content pages
- Add your RSS feed and social network feeds to www.friendfeed.com
- Like a blog post? Leave a relevant comment for the publisher for a back link.
- Create A Widget at Widget Box. Add it to your site and start sharing it
- Using a service like www.pingomatic.com and ping multiple sources when you publish
- Use www.clicktale.com to understand where your audience goes on your site
- Create a link bait post – ie articles or blogs that are so great people link to them naturally.
Finally, if you’re a food blogger and need ideas for posts, then checkout my list of 100 food blog ideas. You’ll find a stack of ideas here.
Video Drives Traffic
June 30, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Video is fast becoming the must have for your website or blog. Nearly every day of the week Gourmet Ads receives requests for online video advertising, i.e. either in unit video advertising, pre-roll or post roll advertising. Nearly every advertising agency we talk with these days asks the question of video.
Advertising aside, video can be a great traffic source. Sites like www.winelibrarytv.com gets literally thousands of people to the site every day just to see Gary Vaynerchuk’s daily wine video, where he reviews all types of wine that are available in his wine store in New Jersey. Wine Library has a massive following.
So what kind of video could you produce for your site? Ideas could be video recipes, wine reviews, visits to food markets, interviews with food producers, interviews with celebrity chefs or restaurant experiences. The ideas are endless.
So apart from using your own website, Youtube or Viddler where could you upload your videos? TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.
Make sure whenever you setup an account on sites like Youtube or Viddler, that you add a link to your website or blog. Then whenever you upload a new video, make sure you put a link in the text accompanying the videos. This is key, as many video sites syndicate their content and you’ll get back links pointing to your site on places you’ve never knew existed.
Use Great Photography
June 29, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Yesterday we talked about publishing content all the time, today is an extension to that, it’s about always using photography in your content.
After publishing content on the internet for years, I am in no doubt that people engage written content longer when there is great photography related to the key theme of the article or blog. Think about it for yourself; are you going to be anywhere near as engaged in a recipe which doesn’t have a photo compared to a recipe that has got a great photo showing the final dish. Would cookbooks which don’t have photos sell anywhere near as well as cookbooks with photos? I doubt it.
When it comes to photography on your website or blog, you don’t have to be an award winning photographer to make an impact. I few years ago I wrote this article about Food Photography which broke down a few ideas for people who are taking photos of recipes.
Apart from taking your own photos, there are some great online resources which can be used to acquire the rights to photographs. We use istockphoto which we use for nearly every blog on the Gourmet Ads blog. Why? because we can get a related image within in a few minutes and the costs are more than reasonable. There are other stock photography sources out there.
If you’re not publishing an image with page of content then now is the time. Not only will your audience read more of your content, but they are more likely to click through to other pages increasing your time on the site, page impressions and more importantly your ad impressions.
Publish Content all the Time
June 28, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
One question I’m asked all the time is how often should I publish content? I think the publishing schedule for a commercially focused recipe site is going to be very different to that of a personal food blog. On the wine side a site that professes to review every bottle on earth will be different to a small wine site that reviews the odd wine from time to time. There’s no simple answer to how much you should exactly publish, but the key is to publish content all the time.
One question I’m asked all the time is how often should I publish content? I think the publishing schedule for a commercially focused recipe site is going to be very different to that of a personal food blog. On the wine side a site that professes to review every bottle on earth will be different to a small wine site that reviews the odd wine from time to time. There’s no simple answer to how much you should exactly publish, but the key is to publish content all the time.
Here at Gourmet Ads we try to publish a blog every weekday, but I read some marketing blogs that post 10-15 blogs per day and others that write a article once a week. You need to work out what works for you and more importantly what your audience prefers. Are you better to write a great post once a week or 7 average articles per week.
There is no doubt that websites and blogs that publish content all the time do better in the search engines. Add to this, as you push content our via RSS you’re exposing your audience to click on the links and come back to your site.
However depending on the format of your website or blog, do you and your team have to produce content? Could you allow your audience to produce content (user generated content) like recipes to the site. Could you let them do the hard work? Also it doesn’t have to be just written content to drive traffic; you might produce a daily video or podcast. There are lots of alternatives.
Newspaper and magazines (even web portals) establish a content plan to help decided when they’ll publish content. You should do the same, even if it’s a basic word file that you simply jot down ideas, you’ll always have a dozen or so ideas ready to go.
Finally here is a great guide which I found at about.com about publishing blogs.
- For maximum growth: post multiple times per day to drive the most traffic (3-5 times or more is considered best for power bloggers).
- For steady growth: post at least once per day.
- For slower growth: publish at least every 3 days or 2-3 times per week.
- For very slow growth: posting less frequently than 2-3 days per week is most appropriate for bloggers who maintain blogs as a hobby with no strategic plans for growth
Guest Blogging
June 27, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
For those with blogs and particularly food blogs, Guest Blogging can be a great way to not only increase traffic to your site, but leverage off the network and audience of the host blog. If the blog has a similar theme as yours then you gain access to a similar audience. It’s typical for a Guest blogger to be offered a simple bio at the end of the page together with a photo and link back to your own site.
There two ways that Guest Blogging can work for you.
You are the Guest Blogger.
This is where you write the blog and it’s published on another blog, similar to guest writer in a magazine. You need to make an impact here and grab the attention of the hard core bloggers who religiously read the host blog. Do well here and you can gain longer term benefits.
You invite Guest Bloggers to your Blog
This is when you invite bloggers from other blogs to write a guest blog on your site. These could be via invitation only or could be via bloggers contacting you asking to write a guest blog piece.
When I know I’ve been heading out of town for say a week I’ll open up my blog for guest bloggers to write blogs for the site. In my experience its best to have a conversation with Guest Bloggers prior to them writing the piece. This is because I have had times when I’ve approved a title to then be in the position where the blog is very different from the title and as such had to reject it.
Optimized Footer & Sitelinks
June 26, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 1 Comment
Footers can be a great way to send people to key areas of your site without requiring them to navigate through the existing navigation. Additionally and from a search engine optimization perspective, many believe that internal links such as the ones in footers can contribute to things like Google Sitelinks.
Google Sitelinks are regular listings in the Search Engines with additionally listed locations such as this search brings up for JetBlue;
Footers could have any of the follow areas, which in turn lists out content underneath;
- Featured Recipes
- Latest Recipes
- Latest Blogs
- Interesting Links
- Most Popular Articles
- Must Read Articles
- Latest Links
- Most Popular Tags
- Tag Cloud
If you’re looking for some ideas on Footer designs, here is a Footer Showcase worth looking at http://www.smileycat.com/design_elements/footers/
Create Great Content
June 25, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
This may sounds really stupid but when you write great content traffic increases. There are number of reasons why this happens but let’s start off discussing how to write great content before we discuss reasons for why great content brings in traffic.
First off before we look at some ways to create great content, can I recommend you have a word a file that you dump ideas into all the time. I think in my file at the moment there are over 150 ideas on blog and article ideas. As soon as I have an idea I make a record of it so when I am looking for ideas they are always there. When I am looking for ideas try and pick the best one.
Then spend some time exploring some of the blogs and content pages which become the most popular in the food and Drink section of the site Digg – http://digg.com/food_drink. Today the top ranking articles are one about the 10 best Grocery Coupon sites another about How to make the perfect French Fries. They become popular because they are quirky, unusual and unique. You could of course go down the path of writing a factual article, like the one I wrote a while called “How to Cook the Perfect Steak”. It’s a complete how to guide and stacks of people around the globe have referenced it over the time since I wrote it.
So by creating great content how do I get more traffic?
Links
First of all people will link to it and make reference to it if it’s a great article or blog. Not only will they discuss it on blogs, but they will discuss it in places like Facebook and Twitter.
Social Bookmarking
When people like your blog or article they will book mark it using popular tools like Digg, delicious, Yahoo Buzz and Stumbleupon. All these sites can have an amazing effect on traffic, there is even a name for getting too much traffic to your site called the Digg Effect. This is where being listed on Digg brings so much traffic to your site it melts your server.
Sharing
Although most people place links on sites, most of my close friends who share links with me actually share them through Skype, Email or some sort of instant messaging.
Subscriptions
An effect of bring a lot of new traffic to your site is the fact that most will never have been to your site before. So if they like the content they’ll either subscribe to the site then and there or they will take the RSS Feed to read your content as you publish it. Either way great content will increase subscriptions.
So if you blog every day and think you do a good job, could you do a better job if you just posted twice a week writing great content instead of just content.
Online Press Releases
June 24, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
When we launched Gourmet Ads in early 2008, we worked with a PR firm from New York who specialised in working with online businesses to develop a highly targeted press release to the media. Apart from gaining an exclusive article in a top advertising trade magazine they released an online version of the press release via Market Wire (www.marketwire.com).
Our press release got picked up by a raft of online news sites like Reuters, Yahoo News, Forbes and MSNBC. All together we gained over 700 back links to the site all with links back to the homepage in just a couple of days. We also got picked up in nearly every advertising trade magazine you could think of. Not a bad result. Traffic to the site exploded and since then we’ve grown from strength to strength.
If you’re sceptical about developing an Online Press Release consider how off line media has propelled the profile of many popular food blogs and recipe sites. Some have gone on to do deals with the newspapers, magazines, book deals and even TV deals. So don’t underestimate the value that a strategically developed online press release can have on your site.
If you can afford it I would work with a PR firm to “craft” the release. I am sure that if you’re site has been around for sometime they’ll help find possible angles to promote your content. It could be something related to a holiday or event. It could be something as simple as creating a collection of recipes and publishing a press release like “Ten Burgers for Summer” or “Ten non-traditional Christmas Dishes”.
If you can’t afford a PR firm, then that’s fine. But to get maximum effect from a online press release you need to have the following;
- A great story or angle of a story
- Use a quality distribution service like Market Wire or Business Wire.
- Use keyword rich phrases
- Include your homepage URL and any specific URLs
- Ensure you can provide images to support the release
- Contact details for an interview
Finally if you don’t want to undertake an online press release, can I suggest that you subscribe to Peter Shankman’s HARO (Help a Report Out) email newsletter. Twice a day Peter publishes a list of journalists that need interviews for a story they are working on. There is a lifestyle section which regularly has requests for recipes, food content or opinion.
