I'm Just Sharing

This used to be a very popular blog. It’s hard to get people to believe that unless they were a part of this blog years ago, but it was actually ranked in the top 100K blogs in the United States at some point. I was flying pretty high.

Then came the Google updates of both Penguin and Panda, which were supposed to do… something nasty to sites that it determined weren’t up to snuff, or had links that weren’t organic, or sites that they determined didn’t have content that it considered worthless to a degree.

I have to admit that I felt immune to both of these. After all, my blog was about blogging and writing and social media, and my articles were about the same thing. I’ve never conducted a link building scheme; all I did was comment on a lot of other blogs. Sounds pretty good so far, right?

You see that graph above? You can ignore all the straight blue lines, which represents Penguin. It seems that Penguin had nothing to do with my dropping in what they call the SERPs (search engine results page). It’s those straight red lines you want to pay attention to.

As you see, for a while there it looks like Panda was my friend. My blog started shooting up and all seemed right with the world. I figured I’d been doing all the right things with it, as well as my other blogs, so I stopped paying attention and got on with life.

And then… something bad happened in July of 2012; that’s when I was at the top of my popularity; I was flying high and loving life. But time wasn’t on my side. Google said “This update “noticeably affects only 1% of queries worldwide”; it was the beginning of my downfall.

By September it had fallen, then adjusted a little bit. They’d come out with another update that said they pushed out a Panda refresh that impacted fewer than 0.7% of queries. Yet I took a major hit; guess I was “special” in some way. I fell some more until February 2013, when it was barely above the zero line; yeow! After that point it didn’t matter what Google did; except for a brief uptick I was done with true organic traffic… with no real reason why.

Topher McCulloch via Compfight

You know why I say that? I went back and took a look at the content I was putting out between July 2012 and September 2012. I was writing a lot more then than I do now. If that 3-month period I wrote 37 articles. Fourteen of those articles were specifically on blogging; 8 were on social media, and 3 were on writing. The rest were a mixed bag, but 2 of the articles resulted in the two of the 3 most commented posts I’ve ever had on this blog, both of those in August. Only 6 of those posts had fewer than 30 comments; that shows how well IJS was doing… even as I was losing ground in the SERPs.

There is one possible thing though. It’s possible that what got me is that for a short period of time I was writing a few articles that were shorter than my norm. For instance, in July 2012 I wrote a series of blog posts on blogging tips, 8 in all. Yet, only one of those posts was more than 500 words. That could have been considered as “thin content”, which is one of the things Google was looking at during this time period. Yet, even if that was the case, I also had a bunch of posts in August that were over 1,000 words, including one that was over 2,000.

Maybe the die was cast by that point; I have no real idea. At this juncture I’m thinking that most of my posts end up being close to or more than 1,000 words, and that’s not with me keyword stuffing.

It’s time to stop whining. Truthfully, I just discovered this issue last week after my friend Chuck shared a link to an article titled Penguin Recovery Case Study –How we stopped the bleeding and Increased Organic Search Traffic for an Ecommerce Client by 125.66%, which was a pretty interesting read. In the header there’s a tool his company is sponsoring that allows you to pop your domain name into to see if you were affected by either Panda or Penguin updates. That’s when I realized I’d been smacked in the head by Panda; sigh…

It seems all is not lost, but to do it right will take a while… if I decide to do it.

The first step is to go back and look through all the content that I believe could be considered weak and either punch it up or eliminate it. As I looked at my blogging series from that period, I realize that each article really needs to be beefed up. I also know that some of my earliest articles are pretty weak, but at this juncture going back to 2007 isn’t in the cards. Still, if I look at a lot of that older content, I know I can do some good stuff with it if I want to.

The second step is something I’ve talked about in the past, that being to look at links on your blog to see if any are either broken or going to sites you don’t want being shown on your blog. This one I do about every 3 or 4 months, but mainly to see what’s broken. It might be a labor of love that will take a bit of time but I might have to go back to see if there are any links I’d rather not be associated with, which I wasn’t as careful to check back then.

If you have a lot of ads, you might want to work on that. If you have paid for links… well, you might be in bigger trouble than you can fix.

If you think you’re good at some point, you’re going to want to test your domain name to see if there’s a manual action against your website or blog. If you don’t see it on their list, they’ll tell you how to add a code to the header of your site so that you can check that out. By the way, once you add that code you’re going to want to leave it there; I’ve removed the code here and there, forgetting what it is, and suddenly finding that they’re not seeing my site there any longer.

If you don’t have any manual actions (which I don’t), then supposedly cleaning up your dodgy posts and links will eventually get your rankings to improve. If you do have manual actions, you’ll see something telling you how to request a reconsideration of your site.

These things are never easy, but they can drastically improve your blog or website. I’m going to work on it slowly since I don’t have a manual action against me. What about you?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2017 Mitch Mitchell

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was doing an experiment on one of my other blogs by writing a blog post a day for a month. Tomorrow ends that month and, though it’s been harder than any other challenge I’ve ever given myself, I’ll close out the month by accomplishing that feat; yay for me! lol

brar_j via Compfight

Yet, something happened that I thought was really strange. Usually having a lot of content helps your traffic ranking go up; at least via Alexa, which is the only easily visible tool I have to go by. Instead, every day my ranking went down until, with a week to go, I was suddenly unranked. What the hey?

Last year I wrote an article talking about how writing a blog post a day didn’t work for one of my other blogs for December 2015. However, I figured that one out, realizing it had more to do with mobile speed than anything regarding the actual content. Yet, even then my ranking didn’t drop, but pretty much stayed the same.

This time though… well, I was a bit dismayed by what I was seeing. I figured it was time to do take a look at my traffic via Google Analytics, which is always recommended, as the first step towards a traffic audit.

You can imagine my surprise when I saw that, instead of my traffic falling, it had actually increased over 300% from the previous 30 days. A couple of the posts actually got some pretty nice traffic, which is rare for that blog since most of the content is about local stuff. So then… if my traffic actually increased, why did Alexa drop me into the void?

I don’t have anything definitive; truthfully, I’ve always seen Alexa as kind of a global barometer of website health and nothing overly specific. I’ve never added the toolbar because the way I saw it, I’d be ranking myself against only other sites that used it instead of everyone. It sounded good on paper.

I decided to do what I do; research it. I came across this post titled Alexa Rank Dropping Fast in April 2016 – [Case Study], which looked at a lot of very popular and large sites and tracked how their traffic had decreased drastically… at least via Alexa. One of the funny stats is that Alexa’s own site lost ground as well.

The article alluded to a blog post by Alexa themselves talking about an increase in the size of Alexa’s Global Traffic Panel… whatever that is. Supposedly by doing this particular thing, more websites would see their rankings increase; nope didn’t happen. Actually, it was intriguing to find out that Alexa even had a blog.

After that… there were very few articles about it that were recent. Most of the discussion traffic was on forums… and that was fruitless, with most of the responders saying “why are you concerned with Alexa anyway?” A couple stated something about it being related to something in our .htaccess files. I did notice that a couple months after changing those on all my sites when I was working on my mobile speed that Alexa stopped showing my traffic growing and all of them started going in the other direction. The timing was close but a bit imprecise so that doesn’t seem like a viable conclusion in my case.

I get that. I’ve heard that one for years, and while I’ve always taken a slightly different view about it’s importance, I also recognized that those same traffic numbers didn’t quite match what I was seeing in my Analytics panel, let alone matching up to what I was seeing on other blogs whose traffic I knew was less than my own. At the same time, I was usually only doing month by month comparisons, almost never looking at 90-day totals, which Alexa is based on.

Regardless, after all these years I’ve finally come to the conclusion that Alexa isn’t getting the job done any longer. At this juncture, the only site I know that’s giving me accurate traffic numbers… even if I don’t always like them. I’ve removed the app I’ve always used to track Alexa and I’m not replacing it with anything. I realize it’s time to track my traffic using Google and nothing else for the moment… unless one of you responds and tells me of something else that’s worth taking a look at to compare with other sites.

Traffic numbers are important because all of us hopes to get as many people as possible to look at what we’re doing on our blogs, whether we’re trying to make money from it or not. Looking at your traffic and how people are finding you is pretty important stuff. Most of it probably has to do with how you decide to market yourself but content is, in my opinion, as important as the marketing piece. As long as you’re using a credible tool, at least you’ll have an idea of what you might need to do to change things.

Alexa, unfortunately, isn’t it…
 

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My wife is in a very strange quandary. She’s thinking about selling one of her products online, after going to a women’s business meeting a couple of weeks ago. Her long term hope is to make enough money from it & another product she has so that she doesn’t have to travel for work anymore.

Look at the baby lol

Her quandary is that she’s not on social media… sort of. I’ve mentioned her on this blog but rarely mentioned her name. A physician also created a LinkedIn profile for her without asking her permission, but he misspelled her name; that’s pretty funny.

Yet, every woman she talked to at the meeting, then a couple of subsequent meetings, said that she had to be on social media to make any real money, suggesting mainly a Facebook page.

This is making her very antsy, and she’s fighting it tooth and nail. In her zeal to stay away from it, she then send me this video:

I watched it, then said “he may not be on social media but with this video he’s on social media… and lots of people know his name. 🙂 He may not go back and watch it, but I’m betting he’s received email because of his video… on social media!

We started having the “conversation” about whether or not she should be on social media. She’s so reluctant that she actually gets animated and emotional when she starts thinking about it. She’s kind of technologically challenged, so the thought of having to keep up any type of online presence is freaking her out.

Although I’m a fan of social media (who almost quit social media in November), I’m also a pragmatist. I like to think things through and offer beliefs and thoughts instead of solving people’s problems. That way I can’t take the blame when they make their own decisions. lol

What I said to her, I’m ready to say to you, and it started out with this: “don’t do anything you don’t want to do, no matter what anyone else says.”

That’s paramount above anything else you do in life, not just on social media. Once you get that one through your head and are willing to accept it as a pretty good resolution, we get to move on to the next step.

In this case, I told her that there was nothing saying she had to go on social media, but if she did I’d disagree with the chorus of friendly supporters. In my opinion, very few people are actually killing it on Facebook with their products. Sure, there might be a sale here and there, but there’s probably better ways of getting it done.

Humunculus; not a product but she made it

I also told her that LinkedIn wouldn’t be a good choice for her. It’s for business purposes but in this case she wasn’t going to find the type of market she was looking for. After all, LinkedIn is trying to become Facebook, and since I don’t believe Facebook is the way to go for her product then I have to extend it to LinkedIn.

Her product is quite visual; each item is one of a kind, and when women see it they go nuts. This means her product should be on a site that caters to visibility and sharing; that would be Pinterest. I’ll admit that I don’t know tons about it but I do know two things.

One, it’s visual, and people love to share their pins with others; hard to get better publicity than that.

Two… you don’t have to show your face or even your full name there. For that matter, you don’t have to write a ton of content either. All you really have to do is share your images… making them presentable of course, and maybe say a few words about them. And, in her case, she’s already on Pinterest because she loves going through a bunch of sites to find things she thinks she’d like to buy. Thus, she wouldn’t have to create a brand new account, just start posting some of her own images to generate interest.

After this bit of advice, I ended it with “However, if you’re not going to be comfortable with it, don’t do it. Find another way to do your business.” I really believe that because I hate when people start blogging when they have no intention of continuing beyond a few posts. If she hates adding pictures then how long will it last, which means possibly leaving up images of things she’s already sold (each item is one of a kind; no duplicates)? Wouldn’t that irk a lot of potential customers, and destroy sales?

I thought this was an important post to write and a good followup to last week’s post where I advocated that people tackle a challenge I’m doing this month on a different blog by writing a blog post a day to challenge themselves. Most of the comments were, truthfully, kind of whiny, and most others totally missed the point. Yet, no where in there did I say anyone “had” to do it or “should” do it; I’m not the boss of anyone!

The overwhelming majority of us are somewhere on social media, even if we’re not fully participating. The rest of us “out” some of those people, which includes family members, intentionally or not. Nothing says you have to participate; go do something else. Just realize you can’t totally hide; the internet is forever.
 

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Before I get deep into this blog post I’d like to share that I made a list of top leadership blogs. Pardon me while I take a quick moment for myself. 😀

young Mitchell writing

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about blogging. About 2 1/2 years ago I wrote a post where I, on the last point of the post, stated that blogging is hard/easy. I said it that way because blogging can be easy or it can be hard; I’m sure most of you know that, and I’m betting the majority of you think it’s pretty hard.

Let me ask you this question; have you ever challenged yourself to try to write a blog post every day for at least a month? If you haven’t, why not? I’m going to assume that puts you in the “blogging is hard” camp. If you have, what kind of experience did you come out of it with?

I know so many people who often get into a place where they can’t even write a blog post more than once every 2 weeks, sometimes once a month. Whereas that’s not the worst thing in the world, I also know that many of those people have lofty goals for their blogs.

Blogging takes work; trust me, I know, and I can sympathize. While I was traveling a couple of years ago I found that it was hard to blog on all my blogs as often as I wanted to. Even so, I made a commitment to blog at least once a week on two of my blogs, which I’ve continued to this day. Whereas that’s still pretty good, every once in a while I figure I not only need to do more, not only because it helps SEO but because I need to challenge myself and my perceptions of not being able to do the deed.

Not that I’ve ever doubted myself when I have the time. The first 3 years of this blog I wrote just over 1,000 posts, which means I rarely missed a day when I didn’t write something. I knew that every post I wrote wasn’t going to be War and Peace or even a Pulitzer Prize winner. Some of the posts were going to be dogs, but at least a few were going to knock it out of the park.

I’ve taken on some challenges within the last couple of years to not only show that I could be prolific but to challenge myself to do it. For instance, last September for this blog I said I was going to write 12 posts for the month and I did. That’s 3 posts a week, along with all the other writing I do, and I got it done. On my business blog (the one referenced in that first link above lol) in December 2015 I decided to create a post a day for the month, and I did. On both of my video channels I picked a month and did a video a day. And this month on my local Syracuse blog I’m once again putting together a post every day for January.

Hector Alejandro via Compfight

Here’s the thing. I put out notice that I’d like to see if anyone wanted to join me on the quest; I got no takers. Truthfully, the only person I think I know who did something similar at least once in the last few years is my buddy Holly some years ago. I really thought that at least one person would give it a shot with me; nah!

This time around, on the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, I’m putting out the challenge via this blog, but it’s more of an encouragement than a challenge. It’s the beginning of the year, which makes it a good time to break out of your blogging funk and giving it your best shot. However, I’m not going to totally leave you hanging. Instead, I’m going to give you some ideas of things you can do, some of them with examples you can check out.

First, not every post needs to have a lot of words or verbal content. In this post I’m linking to, I put together 26 motivational quotes from my years of blogging on my business blog and included an image with each one. It took time to find the images I used to match up with the quotes but it was still a pretty good post if I say so myself.

Second, I did a similar thing on my local blog this month where, instead of images, I posted 9 short videos highlighting things I’ve seen & filmed around central New York in 2016. I gave a short blurb and then added the video, which it turns out you can load from your computer without having to upload it to YouTube first, and the WordPress program will condense it for you; sweet!

Third, it’s not about trying to write Nobel Prize in literature worth articles every single day, it’s about being creative. In this particular post I took some lessons I’ve learned from Star Trek over the years and turned it into a pretty epic post, while still staying on my topic of leadership. You might not believe how easy that post came to me, since it was over 2,500 words, but Star Trek is a subject I know pretty well. I’ve always said that people should try to write about what they know best and try to fit it into their niche if need be; this was proof that it can be done.

Fourth, you can try finding something you can repurpose while adding new things to it. That’s what I did in this relatively short post where I gave 10 communication tips that were pretty short, then linked to every other article that was part of a years long series of posts where I gave short “10” items posts and threw in a couple others. It not only achieved internal linking processes but gave those other posts a nice little boost again.

I’m going to stop there, otherwise I’ll never finish this post and go to bed. I want to encourage you to give it a shot… the post a month shot. If that’s a bit much for you then how about doubling your output for a month, which means you’ll write less than 30 (or 31) posts but you’ll still write more than your norm? Trust me, you’ll discover things about yourself that you’ve never expected to learn, and it’ll definitely help your blogging long term.

Come on; get ‘er done! 🙂
 

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That’s an ominous title, so let me first say that I’m not ending this blog, not leaving my relationship, and nothing else bad has happened to me. Not that any new readers will care, but some of the consistent readers might be wondering what I’m talking about; all is good with me. 🙂

What’s not good is one of my websites, one that I’ve had since 2006. It’s called Services and Stuff, and I’m not going to link to it. The reason I’m not going to link to it is because when it expires in March I’m not going to renew it, and I’d rather not have to try to remember to remove the link from this particular article, especially since I have to try to remember to go back and remove it from any other articles I’ve added those links to over the years.

When I created that site, it was my intention to create kind of a portal site where businesses could add their links to and I could make money off it via affiliate marketing. The two images above represented “services” and “stuff”, since I hadn’t fully defined what “stuff” was going to be back then. It turns out that over the years I never fully defined what stuff was, so it turned into anything that wasn’t services.

The difference between my portal and all those directories you see everywhere else is that I was personally reviewing each site, which means people couldn’t just add their wacky sites to it. If a site didn’t fit my own quality standards, then it didn’t get listed. I also indicated that to anyone who visited the site, hoping that they’d see what a difference it was from other sites purporting to do the same thing.

I changed the initial look pretty quickly, within a couple of months actually, and what you see is what it looked like after the change. It was a lot cleaner than my original main page, which was more of a splash page without any real content on it. I thought I was on my way to making at least a few hundred dollars a day. Who doesn’t dream big?

early look after 2 months

Within a year I had added a lot more affiliate links and way more categories of both services and stuff. Yet I wasn’t making all that much money, and almost all of it was through Google Adsense, which isn’t always the best option because when people click on those ads they leave your site. Still, I was averaging maybe $2 a month; that’ll buy you a candy bar but not much else.

Over the next few years I’d keep adding pages and subtracting pages and adding links and removing links. When I wrote about leaving Commission Junction back in October, I was griping about not making a lot of money through its affiliate program. What I didn’t mention is that it and other programs of the past (like the Google Affiliate Network) kept adding and removing affiliates, sometimes totally shutting down, and most of the time they wouldn’t tell you they’d done it. Not only was that hard to keep up with but sometimes a link I’d added for one of those affiliate programs would expire, and they didn’t tell you that either. It was a lot of work for little money; sigh…

I knew problems were there long ago. Heck, my 2011 goals even mentioned that I was thinking about changing it to some kind of online store because my original idea wasn’t working that well. It took me 4 years to give that a shot, when I created a page of all the books I’d been recommending over the years on all my blogs and other books I liked. That all came crashing down with the B&N fiasco that I hadn’t realized occurred months earlier; now the only page I still have on there is my Fitbit page, which I’m not linking to yet because I’m going to move it elsewhere, possibly linking it directly to IJS… which means I have to change how it looks, which probably isn’t a bad idea. Luckily I went the route of not using CJ for any of those products; whew!

The last time I renewed the site was in 2014, and I did so because I was out of town consulting and I didn’t have any time to think about it. After all, it was kind of my baby, my dream, and I was holding onto it for all it was worth.

S&S now

Well… it’s time to let it go. What you see above is what the page looks like right now… and it’s all wrong. The movies are old; about 80% of those affiliate programs are gone because they were part of CJ. All those other pages are still around, but there are banner ads on all of those pages and, frankly, I don’t have the time or inclination to go and remove them from each of those pages. Instead, over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to start removing all the content from that site. When I’m done, I’ll only have an index page, and I’ll probably link it to this article explaining why I’m shutting it down. I’ve given it a good 10 years; who wouldn’t agree with me that it’s time to let it go?

I should have done this years ago, but now that I’ve come to this decision, I feel a bit of pressure off my shoulders. It’s like when I decided in November to give up news and to focus more on happiness. Sometimes we all need to learn when something’s not doing us any favors, or some people are hindering our progress, and we just need to let it go.

At least it didn’t take me 18 years like it took Elsa! 🙂

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