How To Run An Effective Case Study
Case studies are probably the most underused and underestimated forms of gathering a following of regular readers, gaining traffic and creating a lot of ideas to talk about. Their power comes from the sheer amount of interest shown from the possibility that somebody might just discover something new, or dispel a myth, and by following it, a reader will be the first to witness this advance and put it into practice.
Case studies are not only a good form of gaining loyal readers, but also make spectacular link bait and viral content, circulating around the blogosphere in the time it takes me to write this post and sending floods of traffic the way of the blogger conducting the case study.
There are 3 main ways in which you can improve the effectiveness and profitability of case studies: telling the world, following through, and publishing every single detail and result there is.
Tell The World
Don’t expect success of any form if you conduct a case study secretly. Let readers follow every step of the journey, so that they feel included in the case study and become more involved, leading them to be much more likely to subscribe to your blog for every update. Create a following before you start the case study, and make clear your intentions, so that readers will know what to expect and the following can grow exponentially along the way.
Follow Through
Once you start your case study, commit to it. As a reader, there is nothing worse then getting excited by an event only to be disappointed by a cancellation of events or a long wait. In order to protect your reputation, maintain your follower base and see results, commit and don’t disappoint.
Publish Every Single Result And Detail
Readers are interested in what you have to say. Don’t set them short of the results they have been waiting patiently for as they have followed your study. Give them every single statistic, observation and detail. Leave nothing to guesswork, and answer all questions. Readers will have a lot more respect for you if you help them out with all of their questions (after all, you are the expert, right?).
And remember, capitalize on the case study. Ask readers to subscribe to the blog on the first post in the case study so that they can get all of the updates and results that they are waiting for as soon as they are available. How can you resist revolutionary results?
Technorati Authority Is Manipulated Too Easily
Technorati is the bloggers choice for ranking blogs, allocating bloggers a ranking anywhere between 1 and a few million. The number of blogs are always changing. Most bloggers seem to get a kick out of seeing this authority ranking improve and spend a lot of time concentrating on improving it. But today I was just thinking to myself just how inaccurate the Technorati authority ranking system, and all other ranking systems, such as Alexa, are on a whole. Their algorithms have so many flaws and ways to manipulate the system that it seems like it isn’t always the good blogs with the best authority ranks, but instead the blogs with the most manipulative minds behind them (no offense too anyone, just making a generalisation).
Although their list of the top 100 blogs can hardly be manipulated, I have seen manipulated authority rankings ranging anywhere from the top 2k to the top 150k. It appears that in this range of blogs, few rankings are determined by how much free stuff they give away or how much paid promotion they have done, rather than natural, in content links.
Ways In Which Bloggers Manipulate Technorati Authority Rank
- Purchasing bulk blog posts on hundreds of blogs over different C-Class IP’s – Head over to the link sales section of DP and you will see what I am talking about. For around $100 you can make your ranking go from 1,500,000 to 40,000 very easily.
- Commenting on hundreds of blogs of which you get in the top commentators widget – This method is free. I have found that most bloggers don’t even realize when commenting that there is a good chance of them getting one Technorati authority point because they are in the top commentators widget. I feel that including the links in this widget is inaccurate as the linking is not controlled by the owner of the blog, but by the commentator.
- Distributing free items – By distributing free items such as WordPress themes and widgets that include a link back to your blog bloggers can gain thousands of links counted by the Technorati authority system, effectively placing some blogs into the top 2k list even though they may have very minimal presence or traffic.
It’s not just Technorati authority that I feel can be easily manipulated. Alexa is probably even worse.
Variable 1. A blank domain name with no site and no traffic, it is simply visited by me once a day to check my stats of this blog on. Alexa Rank = 700,000
Variable 2. A functional soccer website averaging about 20 visitors a day since I have neglected it and never visited by me. Alexa Rank = 5,800,000
Can you see how dodgy it is… Whatever rank you want can be controlled by you.
What I Get For Not Posting
As you might have noticed, I haven’t posted for over a week now, which is a time length I really didn’t want to hit. School is back and I haven’t had a spare second on my hand for the past week and a bit, so I’m trying my best. I do have some good news though: My IT knowledge has paid off, and I won the IT award. 
Take a look at some of my recent stats since I haven’t posted in a while.
CPanel Stats
Analytics Stats
I’m going to let the images speak for themselves (because I have an assignment to complete), but the moral of the story is: Don’t have large breaks of time in which you don’t post – it will hurt your blog (and I promise I’m never going to make the same mistake again).
It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know
Okay, so maybe that has a small lie in it. As readers, you do care what a blogger knows, and continually visit blogs for their fresh and informative content. However, in saying that, you cannot run a business successfully, whether it be a small online blog or a huge offline company without connections.
Connections Are King
So why are connections so important? They’re important because of the massive marketing power behind them, free promotion and public awareness. In a blogging situation, you still might be thinking content is king… WRONG. What’s the point of writing good content if there is no-one out there reading it or taking some knowledge away from it. Apart from paid advertising, the only way to actually have readers visit and comment on your blog is to go out there and get to know them by leaving comments and interacting with them on social profiles. I’m sure many of you have realized that if you leave a comment on someone else’s blog, most bloggers will return the favor. If you do this regularly enough and post quality comments, you will be able to attract hundreds of visits each day and tens of comments simply from commenting.
Commenting also makes it easier to ask favors of other bloggers, as the relationship is already forming. The great thing about it is, it doesn’t sound pushy or spammy. Contacting other bloggers and asking them to be featured on link love and similar posts is what gives you that extra publicity to take your blog to the next level.
The more connections you have, the better. If you wish to release your own product, you are able to contact your connections and ask them to promote it for you, resulting in a lot more sales. In return, all that needs to be done is for you to return the favor at some point.
Case Study: Danny Cooper
Recently, a new blog run by Danny Cooper called Linkers Blog has hit the blogging world with a bang. If you’re reading this and have never heard of Danny’s blog, the only feasible explanation would be that you have been without internet access for weeks. . With a top 100k one week average Alexa rank, a rapidly increasing Technorati rank and an average of approximately 35 43 comments on his last two posts, the results of his networking and connection building through commenting are already clear. If you did miss it, Danny is running a case study on the effects of blog commenting for the month of October, and I have a feeling the results are going to blow us all away. He’s been able to achieve everything he has so far in the short space of this month through regular blog commenting and by talking to other bloggers. That’s it… nothing else to it.
The Benefits Of Networks And Connections
- Time to relax and socialize.
- Free promotion
- Growth
- Publicity
- Respect
Respect: The respect you gain from connections is a biggie. No-one is going to help out someone they have little or no respect for, but for someone they do have respect for they almost feel obliged to. Earn other’s respect and make a splash!
The 5 Keys To A Successful Blog
If you’re reading this post, the odds are that you are one of 2 types of people:
- The owner of a successful blog.
- The owner of an unsuccessful blog.
But what is it that is the deciding factor between the two? What have the successful bloggers done that the unsuccessful bloggers haven’t?
I call them:
The Five C’s
- Committment
- Connections/Communication
- Content
- Commenting
- Contests/Competitions
Commitment
Most bloggers are committed (or at least start out to be). They realize that a blog is not just something that they can spend an hour a week posting to. However, after a few weeks of this commitment, they don’t see results and fall away, and so too does the blog. Remember, good things take time. A blog will not become successful over night. To keep yourself motivated, set yourself some goals and track your progress, or get yourself into a routine.
Staying committed is probably the biggest factor in determining a blog’s success, as it entails all of the other factors: frequently writing good content, dropping comments on lots of blog, having contests and establishing connections.
Connections/Communication
Connections
When I was playing around in the world of affiliate marketing (months and months ago now) one major thing seemed to frequently spring to my attention: Each big marketer was constantly scratching the back of other marketers (in other words, they all helped each other grow to be bigger, more powerful marketers). What I have learnt is that bloggers are all the same. Take a look at this example I have for you of big blogs and how they interact. I see this almost everyday: John Chow is promoting Yaro, who is promoting Shoemoney, who is promoting John Chow. See the pattern evolving? Yes, it’s a circle of promotion. No wonder they are all big… they each have a huge force behind them giving them readers. Now I’m not saying to try and push your way into this circle. What I am saying is to take the time to have a conversation with some other bloggers and you might be talked about by them on their blog. Share them a bit of link love and there’s a good chance they will return it.
Honestly, answer yourself this question: Would you still check by John Chow’s blog if he was an unknown? All he talks about is food and blogging expo’s. People follow big bloggers because they are amazed at how big, popular and powerful they are.
Content
Ahh… What can I say. Content Is King. We’re all constantly reminded of this, so there shouldn’t be any excuse for not having quality content. If you don’t know, the reason why you need good content is so that the visitors you obtain from your marketing and promotion will want to stay and read, and become loyal readers. If you get floods of traffic but have low quality, grammatically incorrect content then you are wasting your time marketing your site.
Commenting
In my opinion, commenting is the best way to gain visitors that will actually read your content and comment on it. There are 3 reasons for this:
1. You are commenting on content related to your niche, and therefore visitors are targeted.
2. Most blog owners will check out the blog of someone who leaves a comment on theirs, and try to comment on that person’s blog.
3. You gain great exposure in your niche and establish connections.
Contests
Contests/Competitions
Holding, sponsoring or participating in a contest is a great way to gain short term exposure and many more readers to your blog. You can gain readers by asking them to subscribe in order to have an entry, and the exposure comes from other bloggers posting about it if the contest is big enough or has high value prizes. It’s also a great way to get links.
Lost For Words?
As a blogger, I sometimes become lost for words and know just how hard it can be to come up with different articles that will interest my readers day after day, month after month, year after year. I mean, there are only so many things to talk about in one niche. However, when your stuck for ideas about a new post or article, there are 3 main ways that you can go about to discover some new and interesting topics that your readers WILL enjoy.
- Recent news in your niche that has created a lot of attention and buzz.
- Use the ideas of another blogger’s article/s that you particularly enjoyed.
- Answering question posed by members of forums in your niche.
Recent news in your niche that has created a lot of attention and buzz: I find that this is the kind of stuff that gives relief from the heavy daily schedule of bloggers. As a blogger, you can simply post your views on the new hyped up item or event and the post is fairly simple, but the readers will still thoroughly enjoy it. They are the ones creating all of the buzz around the new launch, so you are still writing for them. A good example of this is the launch of the Google Chrome browser, or the frequent WordPress upgrades.
Use the ideas of another blogger’s article/s that you particularly enjoyed: This one is very effective, as I have one simple thought towards this – “If I enjoyed reading this, then so will others enjoy reading my article about this topic.” It makes sense. If you like an article, chanes are someone else will too. You just need to write your post based around the same ideas as those in the article that inspired you to write it. Just search around many of the top blogs in your niche and you are bound to find something interesting easily.
Answering question posed by members of forums in your niche: Doing this will help your readers out a lot more than you may be interested in making the post. It will probably gain you many more readers as it is what they want, almost like from a questions and answers session on your blog. Simply search on forums in your niche for threads that pose a question to other members. For example, a thread titled “How do I track my blog’s stats?” may inspire you to write a detailed post with detailed images about installing different tracking codes on your blog, such as Google Analytics. The great thing about using this method is that there will always be people posting questions they want answered, and you can always promote your article to them in that thread because it is relevant to their needs. Trust me, they will highly appreciate it.