This interview with Internet marketer Stephan Spencer is the fourth in a series of interviews by B.L. Ochman examining the business models and marketing tactics of successful bloggers.
Stephan Spencer, publisher of the Internet marketing blog bearing his name, quit a PhD program in 1994 to start an Internet business. He quickly landed a couple of hundred million dollar clients. “Pretty big for someone with no business experience and no other clients,” he says.
Today his agency has 40 employees and he uses his blog as a reputation builder that opens doors and lets him “build relationships with other people that might not have been possible or might have been more difficult.”
Blogging since 2004, he’s built his audience organically to 800 to 900 visitors a day by:
– getting mentioned in other bloggers’ posts,
– commenting on other blogs,
– sending trackbacks to other posts,
– search engine optimizing his posts and category pages,
– plugging his blog whenever he does speaking engagements,
– getting on blogrolls
But there’s much more to his success.
How to Build a Broader Blog Audience
Now he’s begun a link-building campaign with high PageRank sites, like his company does for client sites. “It’s surprising,” he says, ” how few such links you need to dominate Google rankings. When a site with a PageRank score of eight links to one of our sites, we get a huge lift in search visibility.”
He’s also thinking of buying blogads on other people’s blogs , carefully selecting the link text based on keyword research.
RSS Caveat
Spencer uses the FeedBurner Pro service from Feed Burner with his RSS feed, in order to track the number of subscribers, clickthroughs, and item views that are coming in through his RSS feed. He cautions: “If you use a service
like Feedburner, SimpleFeed, or the like, careful to publish your RSS feed at a URL that you own and control. Don’t just use the default URL at feeds.feedburner.com because then you are trapped into using their service forever, or notifying all your subscribers to update the feed URL in their RSS reader/aggregator.” You can learn more at http://www.stephanspencer.com/archives/2005/06/28/control-your-rss-urls/
Web Bugs
Feedburner Pro embeds web bugs (tiny invisible gif images with unique file names) into Spencer’s posts to track how many people viewed each RSS item through a newsreader and when. “As blog technology matures,” he notes, “more blogging packages will include RSS tracking and metrics reporting by default.” “Someday, I hope to see WordPress and others offer web bugs automatically, without having to use a third-party service.”
Podcasting & Screencasting
Spencer has also done a bit of podcasting on his blog. in the form of monologues, interviews, and roundtable discussions. He is thinking of also doing screencasts, in the form of an Internet marketing tip of the day..
“Maybe I’ll demonstrate how to create a podcast or how a particular search result ends up in the top slot,” he says.
“Or perhaps I’ll show how one can add a video component to a podcast or I’ll do a primer on how to create a blog on blogger.com in three minutes or less. A lot of people are kinesthetic learners. It will help them to watch the process unfold right in front of them on their computer screen.”
Advice to new bloggers: focus, focus, focus
His advice to bloggers starting out:
– Pick a very narrow topic. Nowadays even a blog specifically about Google is too broad. There is a blog about Google AdSense – now that’s nice and narrow, he says. “You are more likely to be seen as an expert in a narrow topic area.”
– Make sure you have enough content to be able to keep the blog going.
– Really put some thought into the name of the blog. B2B Lead Generation blog is number one in Google for the phrase “lead generation”, primarily because it’s the name of their blog.
– Do a good job of tracking your RSS subscribers. Maybe get into offering customized or personalized RSS feeds based on the subscriber’s interests on your company site.
– Write articles for other sites and get a byline with a text link back to your blog. Do webinars for other sites on your topic and create podcasts and screencasts of those webinars and publish them in your RSS feed.
Almost read this buit stopped when you said “A-list” bloggers. How about we kill that term and just call ’em “high-traffic bloggers.” “A-list” is very…”Heathers.”
Feedburner really is a great service, those guys over there do some great work.
If 900 visitors a day makes you an A-Lister, then I have no idea what our blog would be. We get that many before breakfast :)
You are right about A-list being a tired term. I’ll stop using it.
However, not all successful bloggers have high traffic. More important is:
– who and how many other blogs link to it;
– how often there are trackbacks and from where;
– how often the blogger is quoted
– how much business comes in through the blog
BL
One clarification on the comment about being “locked in” to your FeedBurner URL – we encourage people to use URL redirects and/or map a subdomain so they retain control over their feed URL (details are here and here). In addition, should anyone choose to leave FeedBurner and have subscribers who are subscribed to their FeedBurner URL, we’ll help transition them off of our URL (details here).
Hope this info is helpful!
Regards,
Rick
—-
Rick Klau
VP, Business Development
FeedBurner – http://www.feedburner.com
rickk@feedburner.com
AIM/Y!/Skype: RickKlau
office: 312.756.0022
cell: 630.362.8911
Amen. Thanks BL.
Thanks for the interview. Stephan is one of the blog world’s best.
One more strategy that Stephan neglected to mention and is at the heart of all successful blogs – content that is relevant to the audience and well written. Stephan’s and BL’s blogs are 2 excellent examples.
Thank you Toby. I’m an admirer of your work also. :>)
BL
Interview with Stephan Spencer: How to Build Blog Audiences
Stephan Spencer was interviewed as part of a series of interview with succesful blogger by B. L. Ochman. He uses his blog as a reputation builder that opens door and lets him build relationship with other people. Here are a few tips how he built his…
Thanks for the interview.
Spencer is one of the blog world’s best.
Great tip about feedburner…
I m totally agree, be careful with it…
a high pagerank doesn’t mean that the site is good too…