Blog Experimenting

[kirbybowl]

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

[d1976]

I made simple blog which includes various online earning idea. If you want to earn online then this is good blog for you.
Make blog in this way which is easy and understand for people.

[Auctionman]

Originally Posted by d1976

I made simple blog which includes various online earning idea. If you want to earn online then this is good blog for you.
Make blog in this way which is easy and understand for people.

I would invest in a domain to add creditability, although I instantly closes it back down as it was way to spammy orientated for me..


OP: image/video blogs have some great potential if the niche is catered right for, some serious earnings are possible to from them..

[QuirkyJessi]

Yeah, with a name and focus like "reallycuteasians" you're bound to get a lot more traffic and interest than a japanese music blog.

[kirbybowl]

Originally Posted by QuirkyJessi

Yeah, with a name and focus like "reallycuteasians" you're bound to get a lot more traffic and interest than a japanese music blog.

My old blog name is Jpop Addict, which definitely doesn't sound as appealing as you had said

[QuirkyJessi]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, lol. Cute asians are going to attract a ton more people than some random music blog.

[Bloggeries]

Originally Posted by QuirkyJessi

Yeah, with a name and focus like "reallycuteasians" you're bound to get a lot more traffic and interest than a japanese music blog.

I agree 100%. You also said you got ~280 uniques a month from Blogcatalog. Goes to show how using keyword rich titles / domain helps. Also cute girls helps. Example; we had "Sexy Indian Girls" as a blog in this directory before we went 100% family friendly. I used to get thousands of uniques a month for it but to what end? You'll always get more traffic with a topic like that than say "Bob's Marketing Space" or something long those lines. Now the issue is how to convert that traffic.