Hold the Alexa, here comes URLFan

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Yes, we know Alexa isn’t accurate, in fact it has a number of blindspots, but it’s a easily accessed public web metric. But for checking out the Web2.0-ness of your site, you might like to check out URLFan.com.

urlfan.com

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

urlfan top sites

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I Continue reading →

Search Engine Traffic vs Social Traffic: Traffic Generation and Monetization

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Getting traffic from all sources is a good way of diversifying your risks. That way a shift in the search engine algorithmn or a social networking site won’t entire rock your traffic picture. But how does organic search engine traffic compare to social traffic?

Lesson 1: Your site needs to mature

This is probably one of the harder lessons for new marketers to absorb, or mentally comprehend. You need to achieve critical content mass and have it indexed to attract either search engine traffic or social traffic.

It could be as fast as 24 hours, or as long as a month before your traffic hits ‘acceptable’ levels. [Acceptable levels could be 1,000 uniques or 10,000 or 100,000 uniques depending on your personal goal and strategies]

Lesson 2: It’s not just purely a numbers game

Traffic quantity is as important as traffic quality alone. What’s the point if you’re going to get 50,000 uniques in a day if they aren’t interested in your content? Perhaps someone inadvertedly did a redirect to your page.

Metrics like Continue reading →

Weekend Wonderings – 18 May 2008

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I’m listening to Geekcast ep 16 with guests Scott Jangro and Todd Crawford. Much funnier than the regular series (I think Lisa Picarille’s presence helps up the content quota on both Geekcast and Affiliate Thing). Perhaps it’s time to break the Geekcast into 2 separate sessions (1 content-driven with Lisa and/or a guest on) and a “frat boy” humor edition focused on Hand Teddys (sic?), Man-dles, being unable to pee in airplane toilets, etc.

Sam talked about Todd’s new blog,  be sure to check out Todd Talks. If you’re nice, you might even hear about his secret project…

This week also saw the launch of Sam’s new RedHatBlueHat political podcast. (and if you’re following the industry, political blogs are quite the money rakers…)

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In other news, I’m getting blog consultants to work on the this blog and there’re a number of neat enhancements coming up. You’ll see the weird MySQL errors popping up when you post comments, but they do end up in the moderation queue.  If you posted a comment and didn’t see it published, chances are you dropped a “nice post” or “come and look at my site -> [link to made for adsense or ebook opt-in page]. Your name makes it into the master blacklist of bloggers too…

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I’m posting twitter updates more often too. Twhirl seems to be working like a charm.

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I got a bunch of schwag from CPA network Market Leverage (Thanks Debby and the ML crew!) and have been playing with the Flip Ultra that came in the goodie bag. I’ll post an update next week.

Social Traffic Site MyBlogLog Goes 2.0

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Insiders at the recent blogger convention SOBCon revealed plans about $10 million wunderkind social network site MyBlogLog. In the mix: a rebranding, a new widget and features to protect against social spam that is becoming more pervasive on the networks.

David Dalka mentions that during SOBCon upcoming changes to the popular social networking site include:

  • A rebranding (to reflect it’s acquistion by Yahoo!)
  • Some MyBlogLog 2.0 upgrades – site redesign and a Web2.0-ish widget upgrade
  • Anti-social spam features like avatar moderation and masking type features

Since Google rules the roost at the moment on the search engine front, there’s plenty of opportunity for Yahoo! and Microsoft to capture mindshare and market share on the non-search engine traffic fronts.

There’s opportunity to look at the hubs of highly targeted traffic clustered around social sites and forums.

So far we haven’t heard not many high profile forums being acquired have been reported in the mass media, even though transaction values for these deals can range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

Selective media focus? Perhaps. But as social traffic and social media continue to Continue reading →

Ranking For Your Name In Google = Money In The Pocket

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Most information marketers might focus on developing a strong product, or a sales page with high conversion rates, but it pays to rank at the top of the search engine results for your name and/or your company name, even if you don’t give a flying H1, H2 or META about Search Engine Optimization.

Witness the case of musician “AM”, who gave up his given name and goes by his initials and has been lost in the search engine results pages. (Wall Street Journal “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Google Well“)

AM probably has lost countless sales due to fans landing on the pages of AM radio stations or American Greetings Corp (stock ticker: AM). Appearing on page 20 of the search results could spell online death.

You could counter this in a number of ways.

Increase your search engine Continue reading →

Friday Podcast Episode 4: Develop Podcast Content for Traffic and Profit

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This episode of the Friday podcast focuses on creating podcast content designed to drawn in highly targeted and relevant traffic.

[audio:http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/podcasts/WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast4.mp3]

For session notes, click more:
Continue reading →