Proof that Content isnt always King

Don't always believe the old saying 'Content is King!' when it comes to promoting your blog. As soon as I focused more on promotion and slightly less on content, I have seen MORE hits and MORE earnings from my blogs.

I had heard it from so many corners of the internet, that good content will win you visitors in the end. I was spending too much time trying to create pristine content (or I hoped it was!); but ultimately the content was being read.

I finally saw the light when I read a post on the John Chow blog on December 9th titled 'The Art of the Ramp'. In this post, John Chow spoke of how his Digg promotion tactics and overall promotion strategies boosted his blog to the top of the heap and Chow openly said his content had little or nothing to do with the success. After reading this, I went about some promotion on Digg, StumbleUpon and some minor Facebook assaults.

Here is a graph of the traffic results:
Apologies for the poor quality image, but you can see prior to the first arrow my traffic was low with an occasional spike.

In the red circle is the blog traffic since I have focused more on promotion. Not only have hits increased and stayed at a higher level, but my RSS count has increased too. (Thanx John Chow, I may not be Lord of the Digg - but this improvement is good!)

The benefits have also helped in my earnings department as well. My AdSense account runs across my BlogRoll so the stats are slightly skewed in terms of just the 30DayMan.com focus; but anyway - prior to my promotion and repositioning of the AdSense Ads into the posts (Thanks John Chow Graphs dot Com!) I was earning around 10 or 11 dollars a week from AdSense.

This has now increased and is now approaching $20 dollars a week (see graph below), a goal I want to achieve by the end of January 2008. (It should be achievable with my NRL News and DOTA Allstars sites getting decent facelifts soon and forums implemented to capitalize on their 300+ unique hits a day.

I must also add that EntreCard has helped push my stats up, and in the next week or so I will look to explore Sphinn in more detail to extract some results.

Also high on my hit list is improving on Technorati, after reading this post on the Bloggin-Ad's site I am trying to leverage the pyramid scheme on offer to boost Technorati love. :) Feel free to check the post out, it's a great system to boost your blog in the eyes of the big T.

You can always add me to your Technorati Favorites directly by clicking the following link below: http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://www.aimsgraz.org

* In a quick update, my Facebook experiment is friggin' rocking! I am around the 200 friends mark and getting really good interest among the targeted niche. Folks in the niche are noticing me and adding ME to their friends list because of the amount of friends and groups I am connected to. (I haven't even started promoting or marketing the profile yet, simply completed signup and started adding friends!) (More info soon in a full post)