How to Use the Web to Succeed in Publishing, Life - Page 2

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Getting things done

Ferris has two blogs, a presence on Twitter and Facebook and a book, but he makes his money from speaking engagements, he said. He occasionally speaks for little or no money, as he did at the Circus, because he's interested in the audience, but if you want to guarantee that he'll accept your invitation, he charges five figures for an appearance.

The goal of the blog is to get noticed and known rather than to make money. "I get access to people and resources and I don't have to pay for them 90 percent of the time," he said. "I also enjoy it."

His goal is to create content that people will come back to. "I produce evergreen content whose value goes up over time," he said.

On the day of the book launch, instead of promoting the book, he posted the story, From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks. The article continues to do well on Google in the popular muscle-building category. He explained that he wanted to be such a presence online that his target audience could not avoid learning about him.

He uses a lot of data, some of it visual. "Evermore.com is my external brain," he said. "It stores photos and the text in them is searchable, even wine labels."

Some of the data he uses is quantitative. He tracks site usage with Google Analytics and Crazy Egg.

In spite of all the data he has on visitor behavior, Ferriss said that you never know what will get noticed and what won't get noticed. A YouTube video called Tim Ferriss - How to Peel Hard-boiled Eggs without Peeling that took minutes to make is approaching 2.5 million views. A four part series on chocolate got only a few thousand views.

One obvious difference: the chocolate video is over 7 minutes for just the first part, while the egg video is one minute long. "Videos should be one second to three minutes long," said Ferriss.

He added that in order to drive traffic to your Web site, you should never tell the whole story in the video, and leave some details to be explained in the text. "That way, people have to link to my site," he said.

Ferriss gets photos from Flickr that are under creative commons license.

He said that the various referral services will help drive traffic. Digg gives a big short term boost, but StumbleUpon lasts longer. "StumbleUpon drops off more slowly than Digg," he said. "In my opinion, the cheapest qualified traffic on the net is from StumbleUpon."

He said that he has found that for him, posting to Digg at 7 a.m. or 6 p.m. PT on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays delivers the best results. He said that posts that are between 250 words and 750 words long work best for the site.

"When you land on the front page of Digg, you get 15 to 30 visitors per second," he added. "Think about that."

He said that he moved the date of the post to the bottom of the page so that people would read old content, and it worked.

Although he has an RSS feed, Ferriss said having one may not make sense if you earn more from visitors to the site than from visitors to your feed. "Don't push people to buy the Yugo if you can sell them a Mercedes," he said.

Changing the name of the sections block to "topics" increased the clickthough rate of that section of the site dramatically.

He lists current hits first, because if he displayed the all-time favorites, that section would become a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

He advised attendees to ignore most of the advice they hear about social media. He said that people will tell you to accept all comments on the blog, but "I treat my blog like my living room. If you're being rude to people and you start breaking furniture, you're not welcome."

In his comment rules, he asks people not to post URL links and to post under their personal name, not the name of their business. He said he was surprised that most people followed these rules. In the rules of the blog, he notes, "Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff."

The blog used to have a Twitter plug-in (he's @tferriss), but it diverted about 15 percent of his site traffic.

Conclusion

"Start small and build way up, like a Katamari, Ferriss said. "Plan big, but test your assumptions."

"Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think," he concluded.

Editor's note: Mediabistro is part of WebMediaBrands, parent company of this Web site.