Random Acts of Art
From the category archives:
A little blogging fun.
I just found a site where they can calculate the monetary worth of your site.
The worth of my site is a little over 2000 dollar. But since I have no plans of selling my domain I’ll never get it.
But it is fun to know that my work hasn’t been for nothing. 
My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Going from “Beautiful art sites” to Twitter and back again.
I don’t know whether there is any one around from the time I started this blog. But those who are will know that when I started with this blog I daily featured an art site.
There were two reasons to feature other sites. For one thing I liked it. Showing sites I like and sending them some traffic. The other reason was to promote my own site.
But after a while I run into a little problem. There are a lot of art sites and as my methods of finding them improved I found I had to make ever more painful decisions: Which sites to include in my feature and which ones to leave out.
It took me a while but in the end I decided that it would work better if I where to use my Stumble account to show art sites. Which at first worked perfectly.
But after using it for a few months I’ve found that StumbleUpon isn’t a very good fit for what I want. Stumble is a perfect place to show off the nice pictures you have found on the web. But it’s powers to promote my site are slowly dwindling.
The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy method of including my stumbles on my blog.
Last week I’ve found Twitter. Twitter seems to be the answer to all my prayers.
The only strange thing I’ve found up till now is that all that traffic isn’t coming from Twitter but from Google. I’m sure there is a very logical explanation for that phenomenon but I have no idea what it might be.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Celebrating my 1000th piece of spam.
A few months ago Matt wrote a post about the relationship between having a lot of visitors and getting a lot of spam. I thought the idea was rather funny so I kept an eye out for spam and it seems that Matt was right. The more visitors I get the more spam I receive.
So this post is to celebrate my 1000th piece of spam
I want to thank every one who ever used my blog to try to sell me herbal plant thingies.
With special thanks to Akismet. Without them I would have had to read all those pieces of spam!
The last few weeks my day job took a lot out of me. I was so tired that I never came round to doing a drawing. The next 3 weeks I’m on holiday so hopefully I’ll get some drawings done.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Thinking about the kind of audience I’m targeting my blog at.
(Have you ever noticed how your life slowly grinds to a halt when you give in to your fears? I’d better start drawing again soon otherwise I won’t have a blog left to target.)
Before I started with this blog I had a Dutch blog for two years. Kind of a diary. I talked about my life and the kind of problems I faced on a daily basis.
You can imagion that hardly anyone read that blog. I had about 1 reader a week. I always suspected that the only people reading where colleague’s of mine who were afraid that I would tell were the skeletons where buried.
When I started this blog it was not only meant to be a podium where I could tell my stories but also as a kind of marketing tool to present (and maybe even sell) my drawing. So I wanted a lot more readers then I had with my old blog.
So I did what you are supposed to do. I read the Problogger site to learn about blogging. I read Weblogtoolscollection to learn about design and plugins and most important I read Copyblogger to learn about how you should write. In July I came across a site that promised to teach you ways to get free traffic and for a month I read The thirty day challenge.
I did learn a lot.
That last piece of advice always puzzled me the most.
There are some 500 million people on the Internet. Some of them visit my website ones in a while. Why would I want to think about who they are?
I never think about who people are.
I think about the way they act. I think about what kind behavior I can expect of them. But I never think about who they are.
(I’m told that’s typical of autistics.)
A few months ago Ed Dale, the king of affiliate marketing and the guy behind the thirty day challenge, advised his reader to read the book Made to Stick
I’m not that interested in advertising but Ed was very enthusiastic about this book so I bought it.
It’s turned out the be a very interesting book. With a lot of anecdotes and fun the book explains how you can get your message across in a way people will remember as good as the story about the guy who lost his kidney.
After reading about two thirds of the book I just realized that they also tell a lot about targeting your ads at the right audience. The only difference is that while every other book and site stresses on how important it is. The writers of this book just give examples of real problems governments and companies face and how these problems were solved and how they could have been solved.
A few years ago the state of Texas had a problem with littering. They spent a lot of money cleaning up and educating the public with messages like “Please Don’t litter” but nobody paid them much attention.
The problem was that the kind of guy that littered: A 18 to 35 years old, pickup-driving male who liked sports and country music. He didn’t like authority.
“Bubba” wasn’t impressed by the states message not to littered. On the contrary. The more state stressed not to litter to more “Bubba” did.
The advertising companies they came up with was targeted at Bubba: “Don’t mess with Texas” says a lot about how you would want people to deal with Texas and with littering.
You’ll have to read the book if you want to find out which techniques were used to get to this slogan. The point that interests me is that by targeting the message at a specific person it becomes much clearer what you should say to get the message across. The book has a dozen more examples where imagining a specific person clarifies the message. But only after reading the story about Bubba I realized that companies who advertise have the opposite problem of what I have.
I’m not trying to get a message across. My problem is that with all the techniques I’ve learned about blogging I’m pressing myself into a mold that isn’t really me.
I’m trying to do all the things you should do to get more visitors:
Giving enough backstory is the point that I find the most difficult. Even with communication in real life I usually have the feeling that people know almost every thing there is to know about me. I know they don’t. But it feels as though they do.
It takes a lot of effort not to make remarks that refer to other articles I’ve written or even to articles that I’ve jet to write.
How can thinking about my target audience help me to improve my blog?
Well for one thing now I know for whom I’m not writing. I’m not writing for people who find me via a search engine. Most of them only stay for something like 1 second so they don’t actually read anything. The few that stay for longer usually come to read either my articles about fireworks or my articles about abstract drawings and then they leave.
Which is fine. But they don’t seem to be that interested in the rest of the things I talk about.
So for whom am I writing?
I think people that have some personal interest in autism, either because they are autistic or because they know someone who is. I like to think that my writings would be of interest both for people who believe that autistics can lead a full and fulfilling life and for people who don’t think they can.
And of course I also write for any one who is interested in drawing and in my trails and tribulation while I’m learning to draw.
(If you’re in neither group you’re still welcome to read my blog )
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Updating my Popular Post table by hand because the plugin doesn’t work.
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that really ugly music reaches the first place in the billboard singles chart?
The billboard singles chart is a comparative report of the amount of singles sold. Which means that the amount of singles that an artist needs to sell to reach first place varies over the year.
A few years ago I read that for the Dutch market it could vary with as much as a few thousand percents. In a slow period an artist only needs to sell a few thousand singles to reach first place. In other periods he has to sell a few hundred thousand singles to even enter the billboard.
And of course if a single reaches first place the chances of it being sold increase dramatically.
Nowadays people download a lot, but some twenty years ago teens would go to the record shop to listen to a few singles and buy some. Since nobody wanted to listen to every available single they would start at the top and work their way down. An ugly single in first place had a better chance of being sold then a good single in 100th place.
So a single that is released in a really slow period, say at the beginning of the year, not only has a good chance of reaching first place but also of staying there for a long time.
A few weeks ago I wrote that I suspected that I had a similar problem with my Popular Post Plugin.
I installed the plugin shortly after I started this blog. At that time I didn’t have many readers and a post only needed some five or six pageviews to reach first place. Being in first place a posting would have a better chance of being read and gaining points.
The last few days I’ve researched the problem a little more and found that I was wrong.
Checking my Google statistics I found that the Promen article that the Popular Post Plugin put on first place only has 4 pageviews where as the post about my new pencil box has more then 700 pageviews.
Even if you include pageviews via RSS (which I didn’t have when I published the Promen article) and links from other sites (which I do have but not to this article) I really don’t understand how the Promen post could get in first place.
So I’m assuming that there is something wrong with the plugin.
I’ve tried re-installing it but it seems that the plugin has it’s own table in the database. At this moment I don’t trust my knowledge of databases enough to try to delete that table.
But even if I could re-install the plugin I don’t know if it would do me any good. If there’s a problem in the way the plugin calculates first place, the problem would probably come back.
So for the time being I will be editing my popular post table by hand. Using data from Google analyze. That will disregard the number of readers that use RSS. But seeing as they subscribed because they like my post I’m assuming that won’t matter to much.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I’m going start a shop to sell my drawing. That makes it possible to change my blog and make it interesting.
There’s a blogging saying that goes something like “It’s nice when ten people read your blog. It’s nicer when a hundred people read your blog and it’s very nice when a thousand people read your blog”.
Last week I realized that the same holds true for an artists drawings. It’s a nice feeling when a few dozen people a day look at two or three of my drawings but it’s much nicer feeling when people have my drawings on their wall.
When I started this blog I planned it to be something like Steve Pavlina meets Vincent van Gogh. I would show my drawings and write about the creation process, about my life and about my autism.
I thought that I had something new and that people would flog to read my blog. And they did. With a lot of ups and downs. But over the past few months my traffic rose from fifty views a week in May to on average 120 views a day right now.
At first it was very exciting to see the stats rise, but after a while I got used to it.
By June I figured it would be fun to offer a few ads on my site and see if I could make a little money. Although I never made very much (at this moment it stands on $6.43) it was very exciting. Every time Google reports that I had made $0.07 I went through the roof with joy.
But after a month the excitement was tempered by the realization that I actual didn’t make that much money. So I read a few sites about Adsence and got advised to take an Adwords account to get some experience with advertising.
In the beginning of July I took an Adwords account and very soon found that Google Adwords is something of a catch 22.
Google rewards ads that have a good clickthrough rate. But most people don’t click on ads. They just copy the webadres to the address bar and visit a website on their own. That seems like a good deed since I pay per click but it isn’t.
When you start a new campaign or raise the amount of money you are willing to pay for a keyword Google shows a lot of your ads and you get a lot of traffic. But since hardly anyone clicks on your ads Google makes your keywords more expensive, your ads are pushed to the bottom of the pile and nobody gets to see them. Then you can either raise your budget or start a new campaign. In both cases the high amount of traffic returns for a few days and then drops off again.
Just when I was realizing that this wouldn’t work (for me) I came across something called the Thirty day challenge. Ed Dale, whose claim to fame is that he ones sold a webdomain for $58 thousand (or million, I’m not completely sure), would give a free course in which he would teach people to get free traffic and at the same time earn $10.
It all seemed like a big marketing ploy. To good to be true.
But I’m a reasonable smart guy and I figured that I could stop the moment he started asking for money. And there is nothing wrong with getting some free traffic isn’t there? So I joined up.
In the beginning of August Ed Dale kicked off with a lot of information on ways to find keywords. Maybe for people who wanted to blog but didn’t know what to blog about?
It wasn’t until the middle of August that I realized that this course actually targeted affiliate marketers. But by that time I had learned a few useful things. For instance a method to find where your target audience is located. (I targeted my Adwords ads at the USA but it turns out that my audience lives in Australia and New Zealand.)
About three quarters in he talked about getting more traffic by starting multiple blogs. Which made a lot of sense but also promised to be a lot of work.
Having three or four blogs on the same subject should bring in three or four times more traffic. Ed Dale advised to send all that traffic to your affiliate marketing site so people could buy something and make you a little money. But my goal was to get more traffic to HenkTerHeide.com and this seemed to be a little overkill.
By the end of August Ed lost me when he started talking about creating your own product. I’m just a blogger who writes about drawing. Where on earth would I get a product?
Last week I finally got it. I’ve been looking at this blogging thing from the wrong perspective. I thought of myself as an amateur blogger who maybe could become a professional blogger and make money via Adsence and maybe at some point even sell some drawings. But I’m not. I’m an artist who uses a blog as means to show his drawings.
The blog isn’t importantent. The drawings are. So instead of looking for ways to get attention for my blog I should be looking for ways to get attention for my drawings.
In a few weeks I’ll start my own art shop where I will sell my drawings. The role of this blog will be to send customers to my art shop.
This will mean a few changes for this blog:
Ed Dales thirty day challenge indeed turned out to be something of an ad campaign. His day job is giving a marketing course that will cost you $97/month. In the beginning of September he told people that they could (not should) take a look at his Immediate Edge site. Since my pockets aren’t that deep I didn’t.
But his free Thirty day challenge site is still online and you can still do the course.
If you’re a blogger who hopes to place some ads or maybe you want to sell some paintings or drawings I would certainly advise you to have a look.
Maybe you should take the promise of free traffic and earning $10 with a grain of salt (although some did), but he will teach you the basics of Internet marketing.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Commenting on comments
by Henk ter Heide on Thursday January 10, 2008
Putting down some ground rules for people who want to comment on my blog.
When I started this blog early last year I was very tiered and a little afraid of comments.
Being autistic means that it takes a lot of effort to communicate with people. Being tiered means that you can’t defend yourself against critics.
But I never received any critics. Apart from getting a lot of spam every one who commented seemed to like my blog.
But having received a number of comments I’m finding that there are some things I don’t like:
I do realize that most people won’t read this article before commenting. It’s just something to point to in case some one doesn’t understand my motivation for changing a comment.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }