Timothy Ferris on Building a High Traffic Blog

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, Revised and Expanded: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich recently
gave this presentation at the San Francisco WordCamp,

It is entitled- How to Build a High Traffic Blog without Killing Yourself.

Here’s what he covered:

- Why He blogs
- How he blogs and select best practices
- Frequency and tools — best times and days to post
- Blogging myths and how to harness data for better results
- Testing design and surprising findings that can be copied
- How he addresses comments and community building
- How he writes and researches for good social media response
- 20 minutes of audience Q&A on Twitter, branding, outsourcing, and much more.

I’ve added notes and hyperlinks for all the sites he mentions below this video. Just click the play button , then follow along with my notes and enjoy:

Notes and Links on the “Building A High Traffic Blog” Video by Timothy Ferris

I’ve set the links to open in a new window for your convenience

• This tip is great : Words Matter- Under the categories label, Change the word “categories” to” topics” and people will click on it more.
• Tomothy uses WordPress www.WordPress.org. It’s the best platform that I know of. That’s why I offer free wordpress installations.
• The top righthand side of the blog is your most valuable real estate for getting attention
• Timothy removed the Twitter Status from the tophand right side of his blog to keep first time users from leaving his blog quickly. He moved his twitter info down the page.
• Remove the date from older posts because visitors want fresh content
• Learn to test longer posts. Timothy puts the total read time on longer posts in bold to prerequisite longer posts
• 250 words in general is a good average for the length of posts

Tools for Tracking

• CrazyEgg www.CrazyEgg.com– I didn’t know about this website. You can use it to create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website; you can also create heat maps and  check out click patterns on your blog.
• Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics- is the very best web analytics solution that I know of. It gives you great insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness

How Timothy Researches

• Use slinkset.com http://gregnemer.slinkset.com/ to create your personal digg or social news site in about 20 seconds
• Use twitter for polling, research and tracking
• Use Evernote.com www.EverNote.com for research. I used it to take notes for this post.

How Timothy Writes

• I didn’t know who Tucker Max was. http://www.tuckermax.com/
• Passion beats polling in focus groups
• Put resources in drafts- use www.EverNote.com
• Never attack other people on your blog. Write about the problem and not the person
• For Important posts edit by hand
• Save SEO for last-
• Check adjetives using Google Key Word Tools www.google.com/sktool -This tool helps you choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term.
• Try to make sure that posts can only be described in one way – In other words.-Only one way topic for post.

Video and Photos

• Short is good when it comes to video
• Very rarely do stand alone videos- Add text
• StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/ is the cheapest source for traffic and works extremely well. View My StumbleUpon
• Topics have to be fun for you or it want be fun for your readers
• How to find photos- Use Flickr-  http://www.flickr.com/ - When in Flickr, go to advanced search, then creative commons only- then sort photos by most interesting View My Flickr Photos

Comments

• O tolerance policy on any abuse or negative comments
• My blog is like my living room, I’m inviting these people into my home. Kick negative commenters out of you home.
• Encourage proper commenting by having comment rules.

Playgrounds and Labs

• Create a free website and blog with Weebly http://www.weebly.com/
• Create short form blog posts using emails
• Use Twitter for microbloggging

Some Great Quotes:

“Think Big, Play often Take fun Seriously!”

“If you are wasting time – but having fun – you are not wasting time!”

Bonus:

Grease Monkey Script https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays.

As good as the content of his video is I also learned something else while viewing this video-

Timothy Ferris uses Videopress to post his videos. I decided to write an article on Videopress.

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Tagged as: Building a high traffic blog, get more blog traffic, Tomothy Ferris, wordcamp