Google and blogs: “Shit.”
marco.org
marco.org
Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See:
It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb.
The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve.
IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there.
http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday
The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.
You'd have thought the same about, say Metafilter, as well. But apparently not.
In fact, if Twitter or Facebook suspect I'm a professional concern rather than simply an ordinary Joe, they may expect me to pay them money to promote my content, or even to make it visible.
I already have dealt with exactly that on my 'regular Joe' FB account in the past, because I had pages for my book label attached. Thankfully they seem to have realized that there was zero traffic to them and stopped, but I still sometimes worry about how much of my stuff is actually being 'curated' out of my friends' feeds.
I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd. Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down" version in an RSS reader.
RSS is still available though, but the email channel is clearly the winner in terms of people using and interacting with it.
I think it was almost entirely because the "follow/unfollow" experience was so clunky, especially compared to Twitter and FB. Even today, adding and removing feeds from my readers is unnecessary pain.
The hurdle is far too high for the casual audience.
Bloggers who use AdSense get stuck even worse, they aren't getting organic link love and they are seeing the CPC decline as a flat out revenue decline.
The trend to apps is to get away from that of course. Your app will always show your content. Sites like Reddit and HN become more relevant traffic generators. And "portal" type sites like Medium will provide variability with their 'stable' of writers.
I totally agree with him that to "fix" this one has to go at it to build the thing they want. I'm guessing that is a combination of advertising and subscription revenue but we'll see.
acronym alert?
- CPC = Cost Per Click
- RPM = Revenue Per Mille (revenue per thousand impressions)
Both the C and R are sometimes used interchangeably - e.g. "RPC" and "CPM" mean roughly the same thing. It really just depends on which entity and which way the money's flowing if you think of the players in an advertising game:
[advertiser] -> [advertising platforms - e.g. Google] -> [publisher / traffic source]
One player's cost is another player's revenue.
this
It's tongue-in-cheek.
Everyone else has to wait until the Googlebot ambles along some time later in the week.