Axodys

I was reading Mark Mason’s blog today and discovered this cool RSS feed promotion being run by fulltiltblogging.com called FeedaPALOOZA 2008 and figured I’d better jump on board as a good way to generate traffic and RSS subscriptions to axodys.com.

Here’s what FeedaPALOOZA is all about in Aaron Abber’s own words:

What is FeedaPALOOZA?

Everyday beginning Thursday, May 1st and continuing until Thursday, May 15th, you will give an email from us.

Each email will have a description of the participating blogs for that day. Every blog will be giving away a free gift to readers who subscribe to the RSS feed.

You view the description of the blog as well as the free gift for subscribing to their RSS or email and if you like what you see, you sign up and receive the gift. No muss, no fuss.

The funny thing is that I was actually already working on a blog post directly related to RSS feed subscriptions, but hadn’t finished it yet. Now it makes more sense to use it for this promotion and I’m in the process of turning that post idea into a free ebook I can give away to get people to sign up for my RSS feed.

I worked on the ebook for a few hours early this morning, but it’s not quite ready for primetime yet. It’s important to get this right though so I’m going to give myself a couple more days to get it set up properly before going live.

In the meantime head on over to FeedaPALOOZA 2008 to sign up if it sounds interesting to you.

Josh Spaulding recently had a pretty good guest post on his blog covering the uses of web redirection, especially in regard to affiliate marketing. The one thing that post lacked was a good practical explanation of how to implement that functionality in a WordPress blog. I was kind of surprised since WordPress is so ubiquitous in the internet marketing world and I know Josh uses it to power his own blog. Luckily it just so happens that I know a little bit about this topic and can fill in some additional gaps.

Basic WordPress Redirection Plugins

There are several WordPress plugins that will do the job and eliminate the need to set up hand coded php redirect files. While there are commercial plugins out there that cost $50-$70 to incorporate this functionality into WordPress, rest assured that you can save your money and still get excellent results.

The simplest plugin out there is called GoCodes and it allows you to create redirect links from your blog in the form <http://blog.com/go/yourlink>. GoCodes works fine, but requires a modification to your .htaccess file and is not very flexible.

Link-Cloaking plugin for WordPress is similar to GoCodes, but offers a few more features and the ability to substitute a different word like “recommends”. Using recommends to preface a redirect is pretty common practice among internet marketing bloggers and yields urls like: <http://blog.com/recommends/someproduct>. This plugin is also dependent on Apache and a customized .htaccess file to work properly.

The Hot New Redirect Plugin

While the above two plugins make creating static redirects easy, there’s a relatively new plugin currently in development called the WP-Affiliate plugin that it is even more powerful. It requires WordPress 2.5 or later, but it allows for multiple categories of links and provides simple link tracking as well. Since I’m running this blog on an nginx server rather than apache, I was especially impressed that it worked fine with my existing configuration and didn’t depend on a custom .htaccess file (nginx doesn’t use them) to function properly.

Initially, I was confused as to where you create the new links and categories, but it turns out that the plugin incorporates the link creation functionality directly into the post writing interface. This is incredibly handy since you can quickly create URL redirects while working on a single post.

The built in link tracking statistics information was pretty thorough as well.

Conclusion

While there are a variety of free plugins that can make web redirection in WordPress pretty simple, if you’re running WordPress 2.5 or later, the WP-Affiliate plugin is definitely the way to go in terms of power and functionality. Furthermore as powerful as the plugin is right now, it’s still being developed and things like built in Clickbank support are being incorporated. I fully expect this plugin to make a big splash in the Wordpress IM world in the coming months and become the free defacto standard.

Analyzing Axodys.com Traffic

I’ve been monitoring axodys.com with Google Analytics since the big move to slicehost at the beginning of the month and so far the initial data isn’t too surprising. I’m averaging roughly 36 unique visitors and 57 page views per day. I have a few pages that get multiple hits from the search engines on a daily basis, but they’re fairly random niche posts from a long time ago that don’t really contribute to the direction I’m taking Axodys these days.

The big issue I’m currently facing as I reboot this blog is that I don’t have any significant topical pillar articles to attract the kind of traffic that generates a regular readership. That’s something I definitely need to focus on more now that I’m trying to move Axodys into more of the blogging, web development, social media and internet marketing niches. There’s plenty of opportunity to find things to write about in any one of those areas let alone all four.

Top Current Posts

While it’s not especially relevant towards building new traffic, looking at my stats to dtae revealed some interesting trends about which existing posts that are getting most of my traffic. Amusingly enough this Harry Potter Manga Illustrations post that I wrote almost 7 years ago ranks pretty highly on google for the phrase “Harry Potter Manga” and averages around 10 unique pages views per day. My second highest ranking page is for axodys.com itself with an average of 3 uniques per day. This Amazing Flash Site post and a Kubuntu PPC post both get a few unique hits a day to grab the third and fourth positions. Finally, rounding out the Axodys top 5 is a Honda Element Roof Rack post that is currently 10th on Google for that phrase and gets 1 or 2 hits per day. Incidentally, that post strikes me as one that would be interesting to monetize in some fashion.

One odd discovery I made while analyzing my stats was that I seem to have a pillar image in the form of a small widescreen Lebron Witness desktop I created last June after his big game against Detroit. It’s currently number three on google images for the phrase “lebron witness”. My initial reaction is that a pillar image is basically just a bandwidth sink, but I will have to investigate further and see if I can think of any ways to further take advantage of this phenomena.

Establishing A Baseline

The bottom line on of all this traffic analysis is that it’s really all about showing where I’m starting from as I make a concerted effort to improve things. Priority one on the blog improvement front is to focus on creating new pillar articles in useful and relevant areas that will attract and retain readers. As always, good content is still the key, but I think I can also be a little smarter about topics and seo techniques than I have been in the past. I think axodys.com does get a bit of a boost with google because of its longevity though so I’m going to continue to experiment with seo optimized titles and posts.

I don’t know if I will necessarily do axodys.com traffic related posts on a monthly basis, but I think I will continue to do them periodically so that I can show what kind of traffic growth progress (or lack thereof) I’ve made to date. If nothing else it should be a useful learning exercise to see what kinds of activities and strategies pay dividends when trying to grow a blog or web site in general.

I don’t know if this is a common problem for people that are trying to come up with ways to earn a little money online, but sometimes I get so enthusiastic about and an idea that I lose all site of practicality. After dealing with my normal time crunch and doing a lot of thinking the last couple days I realized that my idea related to the coming NBA playoffs as envisioned last week is too ambitious and simply not practical right now. I think I can still use the domain I purchased down the road (it’s not actually NBA specific), but for now I definitely need to scale back and refocus because what I was envisioning was like trying to run before I learned to walk.

At this point in my internet marketing odyssey I need to simplify and work on a few simple bum marketing/article marketing campaigns. In baseball terms I would equate the nba playoff related idea I was think about to trying to hit a home run in my first at bat when I needed to step up to the plate and take a couple swings. Step one for me needs to be writing a few articles and submitting to various directories and seeing what happens. So that will be primary writing goal for the remainder of the week.

It’s been a week now since I put out my first weekly project list. Here’s a quick run down of where I’m at a week later (task complete, some progress, no progress):

• Help my brother Micah move a few of his sites over to our slice on slicehost.
• Pillar content for axodys.com.
• Help Mary launch her new blog.
• Develop a new theme (most likely modifiying an existing one) and install various plugins I’ve been thinking about for axodys.com.
• Install/develop a new theme for 100km.us.
• Look into wordpress plugin development.
• Start one Bum Marketing affiliate campaign.

Needless to say a lot more red than I’d like to see after a week of work.  I think I’m going to continue to use this list as a public exercise in getting more of these projects done.

As most people that know me a little bit are aware I’m a pretty big basketball fan.  My dad was a pretty successful high school basketball coach for over 30 years so I suppose it only makes sense that I would pick up an affinity for the game that I was exposed to from day one.  High School and College Basketball are by far my primary interests during the winter, but this time of year when those seasons have ended and the NBA playoffs are just around the corner my interest in the pro game really starts to pick up.

I’ve been thinking about starting some kind of affiliate campaign this week, but I hadn’t come up with any solid ideas.  Then last night while thinking about the coming NBA playoffs my two interests collided and I had a great idea for a potential niche site domain name.  I checked the domain name and surprisingly enough it was available, so I jumped on it immediately.

Even though the new site isn’t going to be a blog per se, I’m leaning towards managing it with good old Wordpress just for ease of setup and management.  That’s just my initial thought though.  I have a lot of work to do in the next week or so to get things ready.

At any rate, I’ll definitely be covering this new project and the NBA playoffs a lot more as I start to make progress so stay tuned for a lot more in depth discussion.

Once I get our taxes wrapped up in the next day or so I can finally get back to making some progress on the various online projects I’m working on around here. Here they are in no particular order:

• Help my brother Micah move a few of his sites over to our slice on slicehost.
• Pillar content for axodys.com.
• Help Mary launch her new blog.
• Develop a new theme (most likely modifiying an existing one) and install various plugins I’ve been thinking about for axodys.com.
• Install/develop a new theme for 100km.us.
• Look into wordpress plugin development.
• Start one Bum Marketing affiliate campaign.

That’s a pretty good list to start with and it actually gives me several different things to write about this week. Putting together a list like this should help me be more productive as well as I work through it.

One of my biggest downfalls when it comes to blogging and writing in general is my tendency to over think each individual sentence and word. I find that my output quickly grinds to a snail’s pace as I over analyze what I’m writing and search for the perfect turn of phrase. Even Mary, my lovely wife, has commented on how long it seems to take me to write what should be a quick email to a friend.

Becomes of the various projects I have in the works in conjunction with the big axodys reboot/remodel/axodys(heh!) I definitely want to start maximizing my writing efficiency. As such I’ve been looking into different strategies for improving my writing output.

Recently I got an email from Bum Marketing guru, Travis Sago, that included a link to a free ebook that offered various strategies for improving your writing speed. The ebook wasn’t particular long, but the idea that really jumped out at me was the idea of writing in short timed bursts.

There’s something about being up against a clock that has a certain appeal to me so I’m actually giving it a try as I write this. On the one hand I think the quality of my writing could drop, but I don’t think it will drop off that significantly. Mainly I’m curious to see how many words of cogent content I can get down on the screen, before my time is up. Finding a way to compete against myself is usually a pretty effective way for me to find improvement.

To aid me in this task I did a quick search on Google and downloaded the unassuming little widget I found called minutes (runs on MacOS 10.4 or higher). Minutes only takes up about a square inch on your dashboard and can be set for for up to 600 minutes or as few as 1. The downside of using a widget like minutes is that you can’t glance over at it to see a nice to-the-second countdown number unless you specifically pull up the Dashboard. On the other hand, minutes actually calculates what time of day the alarm will go off so you can glance at your menubar clock to see how much time you have before the alarm goes off.

Working against the clock allowed me to write the bulk of this post in a productive 15 minute block of time. I’m excited to further experiment with writing in bursts further because finding 10 to 15 minute chunks of time is very doable even at a place like our house where there are lots of young kids seeking my attention.

Of course writing in bursts is just one strategy and I’m sure that there are a lot of other good ideas for writing quickly and efficiencty. Please leave a note in the comments if you have any good tips or suggestions for increasing writing speeds.

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds

–my daughter’s book of nursery rhymes

A Username

Axodys started out as my AOL username back in the mid 90s. I wanted a unique handle rather than some common term differentiated by a number so I combined two words I liked into a new one. Thus exodus + odyssey became axodys. Although I cast AOL aside at some point in the mid 90s, I continued to use axodys as my handle as the web grew in popularity in the late 90s and beyond.

A Blog

In early 1999 I decided to buy my own domain name and build a website; axodys.com was the logical choice. I didn’t really know what I was doing and there wasn’t much in the way of blogging software at the time so I spent a couple months doing a hand edited weblog in bbedit until my interest and enthusiasm kind of petered out.

Everything changed in the Fall of 1999 when Blogger was released as a free service to the internet. I immediately set up axodys.com as a blog utilizing Pyra’s breakthrough system and the rest was history. It was incredibly empowering to be able update from anywhere with web access after doing everything by hand for so long. Even more importantly I was part of a new and pioneering blogging community.

A Concept

At some point not long after creating the username Axodys, I began to think about what it actually meant. The meaning of the two original root words was important to me. An exodus usually means a departure from something- usually by a lot of people. An odyssey is generally a long and eventful journey. So what do you get when you combine these things?

While I asked myself that question shortly after coming up with the word axodys, it was not something I ever really answered satisfactorily or even tried to too hard to figure out. I think early on the journey element had a stronger emphasis than the departure, but over time it’s coalesced into something a little more balanced in my mind. Yet it still defies a simple definition.

At the moment I would describe axodys as a state of departure from old ways and habits, and an exploratory journey, metaphorical or physical towards new thoughts and knowledge. It’s about improvement, flexibility and evolution. And this is kind of zen, but it just occurred to me: axodys is itself subject to axodys. In other words axodys is constantly evolving further meaning while evading complete definition.

A Blog and Concept

So now that I’ve explained my conception of axodys where does that leave us? Well, I’ve been unsatisfied with the state of axodys.com for a long time. If anything is in need of axodys it’s axodys.com. If anything should be about axodys, it’s axodys.com.

That said, at this point I really don’t plan to talk specifically talk about axodys very much. I really see axodys as more of an overarching theme and principle that I want to approach this blog with. Hopefully the changes and improvements I hope to make will reflect this in the coming weeks and months. At any rate, it’s time to weed the garden, please join me as I roll up my sleeves and get to work.

Early this morning I successfully migrated this blog from its longtime home at Cornerhost and onto a shiny new VPS at Slicehost. That was an educational process in and of itself that I’ll cover more in the near future, but that’s not the focus of this post.

The time has finally come to resume posting regularly on Axodys again. It’s been a long time coming; mainly because it’s something I’ve thought a lot about, but never acted on. “Paralysis by analysis” is certainly the phrase that comes to mind. That stops now.

For the past three or four years I’ve fiddled around with finding ways to monetize this blog and generating online income, but I’ve been generally unsuccessful. Part of the problem has been a lack of focus and direction. Axodys started out as a web learning exercise back before “blog” meant anything and although it has evolved quite a bit since its early beginnings it’s been tough to find the correct direction. Blogs that get a lot of traffic and have a lot of readers are generally pretty targeted to a given niche; Axodys has always been fairly random or a rundown on my daily minutia. That stops now.

It’s time to move forward. Come back tomorrow to see if I’ve finally figured out what that means.