Anyone out there a blog experimenter? I wanted to try out some blogging techniques on a "test" blog to verify some speculations and observations. If you have a blogging experiment to share it would be interesting to read about it
Here was my (little) experiment:
Why?
About 3 months ago, I got fed up with one of my blogs (on Japanese music) because of the low average page views (about 2), high bounce rate (70%), almost no ad revenue, and low (and falling) unique visitors. It was time to try something different.
The Photo Blog Idea
In my despair I decided to experiment on a photo blog for the following reasons:
1) Photo blogs require very little text, my previous blog was heavy on writing and it was very time consuming
2) Popular photo blogs that appear in blog listings get 1K-5K unique visitors a day, which is quite high considering how little text is involved
3) I've noticed that photo blogs tend to have high average page views because people are likely to visit other pages. The posts are generic enough to get people interested in viewing a large portion of the blog
4) I was interested to see if people would click on ads with "appealing" titles. My previous blog had terrible ad titles which were rarely clicked
5) There were many blog directories to measure relative growth of this blog
6) I wanted to see if there was a niche for a photo blog featuring fully clothed models. This type of Asian photo blog is quite rare in North American blogs but quite popular in Korean and Japanese photo blogs
The Process
I began aggressively posting (about 140 posts in three months) and advertising via link exchanges and blog directories. I focused heavily on keywords to get as many first page results on Google as I could.
Results
3 months later, I now realize why there are so many photo blogs out there...it's possible to get some nice traffic in a short time span.
I was able to reach the goals of:
1) Getting higher average page views (4.58)
2) Get a lower bounce rate (50.36%)
3) Higher ad revenue due to more relevant and "appealing" ads
4) A somewhat competitive number of unique visitors relative to other photo blogs (470 UV/day)
Regrets
However, I do regret a few things:
1) My blog focuses on Asian celebrities, which immediately removes a large demographic since it's very specific
2) My demographic is instantly cut in half since it's more for males than females
3) Not reading SEO books and not reading Bloggeries Forums for other optimization techniques
4) I have been criticized for my blog name since it has implications of a NSFW website. If I were to restart, I might pick a better name