Case Study: Mystery Blog – Part I

Introduction To The Case Study

One of the projects I am working on is to revive a blog that I had abandoned a while ago. I thought I would make this project into a case study by telling you step-by-step what I am doing.

I am not going to reveal the niche, or subject area, of this blog, because there don’t seem to be any other blogs about this topic, and I’d like to keep it that way. So I’ll just call it the “mystery blog”.

I started this blog because I had some knowledge of the topic and thought there was a need for it. However, I soon found that I had no interest in writing about this topic. I only got as far as adding 6 posts to the blog, and 5 of those were articles from places like www.ezinearticles.com. I only wrote one of the articles myself.

I got a few links by submitting to RSS feed directories. I just checked Yahoo, and right now, there are only 34 links to the site, and a lot of those are multiple links from one site.

I did most of that back in February of 2006. After that, I did not do anything with it. I had other blogs that were a lot more interesting to me.

Why I Chose This Blog To Work On

The blog has only been getting a couple of visitors a day, some days no visitors at all. But lately I have been noticing that when it does get AdSense clicks, they are for a pretty good amount. So it seems worthwhile to put some work into it and really get some traffic to it.

What I Am Doing With It Now

So here is what I am doing.

First, I customized the template a little more. I had already customized it some, but I changed the header picture from a generic landscape that came with the template, to something that actually related to the topic.

I got some more articles from article directories, and posted them with future dates, so that one will post every 3 days for a while into the future.

My next step will be to get more links. I’ll tell you about that in another installment of the case study.

Questions

1. Why are you using articles from article directories? I thought you said that blog posts should be unique.

   In competitive areas, you have to write your own posts, or no one will care about your blog. But there are few or no blogs in this niche. So it will not hurt to use articles from directories.

   If you do use articles from directories, though, you have to be selective. When I was getting these articles, I was amazed at some of the nonsense articles I saw. Some were just a page of rambling on without saying anything of value. I made sure to select articles that were actually useful.

   This is why so many people fail with trying to do “automated” blogging. You can’t do that and expect to succeed for long. You have to give your blog the personal touch, even if you do use other people’s content.

2. Why did you customize the template? Does that really matter?

   Yes, it definitely matters. Especially if you are not using your own articles, you have to distinguish your blog from those “automated” blogs that just throw together some random articles on a topic in a boring theme. It has to look like, and be, a useful site.

   Did you notice that all those blogs filled with articles from article directories look so boring? The whole article is blah, with no visual breaks. What I do is to spice up the article with bolding, etc. so it looks better. Then I write a few sentences of introduction to the article. I put the introduction in a different color text, and also put the author’s bio in a different colored text. On other sites, I have put the author’s bio into a box with a colored background. On this site, just the different color text looks good.

3. What about Google’s duplicate content penalty? Won’t that hurt you when you are using articles from directories?

   What I have noticed from my own testing is that it does not really hurt you.

   For one thing, I put a few sentences of introduction before the article. This helps make it unique. Also, your categories, header, sidebar, etc. will be different than that of the article directory. This also makes it somewhat unique.

   However, if that was all, then the duplicate content penalty could still come into play, since most of the body of the page is still the same as at the article sites.

   But as I said, from my testing, I still get visitors from Google search when I have a site with mostly articles from directories. I believe that this is because my blog specializes in a single topic, while the article directories have a mix of topics.

   For example, if your blog is about scuba diving (that’s not my topic), then all your articles will be about scuba diving. Google will see that your blog is about scuba diving. So Google will be more likely to send visitors to your site to find out about scuba diving, rather than sending them to the same article that is on a huge article site, mixed up with a bunch of different topics.

   That’s my theory, anyway. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but it does seem to work. I don’t think it would work for a really competitive topic, though.

   For competitive topics, you really have to have unique content, both for search engines and to hold your visitors’ interest.

I should also add that I do plan to write some unique articles for this site. I will have to do that in the future anyway, when I submit articles to directories to get links. You can’t submit someone else’s articles! Besides, I think it works better to have a mix of unique articles and non-unique articles, than to get all your articles from the article directories.

Another reason for writing my own articles is that I can focus on whatever keywords I want. If you use pre-written articles, you are stuck with their keywords. I will discuss keywords in another installment of this study.

That’s it for Part I of the case study. Stay tuned for Part II.