I came across this post the other day Proper Title Tags Will Earn You More Money Online, in fact that wasn’t the title of the post, it was the pages title. The posts title was “Your Crappy Title Tag Is Costing You Money – Are You On My List”. The post took a look, and a swipe, at some of the top 100 money making blogs failure to capitalise on an opportunity to inform the search engines, and their vistors what their sites are about.

It’s widely accepted, that one of the most important factors that search engines use in determining a pages rank, is the pages title. With that in mind what does my site title say? Well at the moment “The Attention Project”. Am I, as Ryan says, missing a trick? If I am, then I should try and correct this. First I’ll have to identify what message I want to put out there. How can I encapsulate the essence of the site in a few words?

Ryan posted 7 guidelines:

1. Use page related, relevant keywords.
2. If possible, use the keyword near the beginning.
3. Avoid using a keyword phrase as your entire site title.
4. DO NOT use your keyword phrase more than once in your title – it looks like spam, and it won’t help you
5. Don’t use ALL CAPS in your title, it’s very noobish, and the search engine’s don’t like it.
6. Keep it around 50-60 characters for best results.
7. Capitalize each word in your title.

With those guidelines to follow, what should the site title be? First off I need to determine what the site is about and who I’m targeting.

• The site is an experiment
• It’s looking at how to attract attention
• It’s about how to keep that attention

So the site title is: “How to attract and keep attention | The Attention Project”, I don’t think that’s good enough. Is my target audience likely to search on that? No. Probably not. I’m my site’s target audience, I’m trying to build a successful blog, I’m looking at ways to achieve that, and I’m documenting that journey. So if I know my audience, as I’m among them, then perhaps a better use of the title may be: “Tips for a successful blog | The Attention Project” – not strictly true at the moment but the site should in time offer this.

So I’ve got my new title. Anything else I need to do? Well I could move the keyword to the beginning, and capitalize each word. Which leaves us with: “Blog Tips To Make You Successful | The Attention Project”. But that’s switched the meaning, and sounds more like a self help guide. So finally I think: “Blog Tips To Make Your Site Successful | The Attention Project”

So it’s just over a month since The Attention Project was launched. This post describes what went on in the first 15 days. In summary, it was mostly structural work. Setting up the technology, doing the designs, etc…

Since then it’s been more about trying to get settled in. Starting to write some interesting content, and formalising in my own mind what needs to be done, and what can be done to build an audience.

Over the next week I’ll post about what I’ve done in the first month to get the word out, and the impact those actions have had on the sites “attention”. For today though here’s some more stats.

Some more stats

• Technorati: currently has us ranked as the 8,911,336 top blog – down from 4,601,744. !!
• Feedburner: is showing 10 subscribers – Up 9 on 2 weeks ago.
• Analytics: is showing 85 absolute unique visitors – 74 new people in the last 2 weeks.
• Post average: down to posting once every 3.4 days from once every 2.8 days.

!! I’d suggest that was an internal error on their part showing us too high originally, and that in fact after a certain point, there is nothing to seperate blogs without any authority, so we’re all just equal some number – perhaps 4,601,744.

Not directly related to the topic of gaining and keeping attention but in-line with my previous posts on RSS.

Newsgator, are now offering all of their feed readers for free. So if you’re looking for a desktop application, or something for your mobile to subscribe to feeds such as this one, then you can’t do much better than what Newsgator have to offer.

I myself use NetNewsWire for the Mac and stumped up somewhere in the region of $20 back in the day when they were charging. And I was more than happy to pay the premium.

It seems that they are going to look to make money from their enterprise offerings, and I guess in the future they are hoping to find a way to moneterize all the extra feed reading data that they’ll be collecting from their expanding user base.

I posted about RSS Feeds: Making it easy for your audience a few weeks ago. Then promptly ignored a crucial part of that message, MAKE IT EASY.

I, as a “techy”, had overlooked the fact that perhaps some of this sites audience were not aware of how you might subscribe to an RSS feed. I’d assumed incorrectly, based upon my own knowledge, that everyone knows that their browser supports this (not all do IE6 anyone?), and therefore how they could subscribe.

I’ve now corrected this oversight with an explicit Subscribe to The Attention Project link in the right hand side bar.

1. Post something interesting 2-3 times a week, every week for the next 52.
2. Get at least 500 subscribers (currently sitting at 3).
3. Break into Alexa’s top 100,000
4. Make Digg.com’s front page at least once
5. Be invited, or push for a guest post on at least 1 prominent blog.

In my personal life I almost never, ever, set, or make New Year resolutions. The reason is that I try not to limit myself to goal setting at specific points in the year. New Year is the famous one, everybody does it. This year I’m going to loose weight, get a better job, be more successful, or some other completely useless poorly defined goal. For the vast majority, the end of January sees disillusionment and disappointment, as those good intentions fall by the way-side.

Goals, and the setting of them, specifically externalizing them (writing them down, etc..) are probably the most important steps you can take on the road to achieving them. They must be specific, “I’m going to loose half a stone” as opposed to “I’m going to loose some weight”. They must be realistic / achievable “I’m going to increase my income by 5%”, instead of “I’m going to increase my income by 1000%” – although that may well be achievable. Finally they must be measured. Religiously. Rigorously. For if you are not measuring yourself, then how do you know how far you have come? Or how far you still have to go?

Goal setting studies performed at Yale in 1953 and Harvard 1979 (amongst others) provide some real motivation for setting, and writing down your goals. In a study of 1,000 undergraduates at Yale, 84% had no particular defined goals. 13% had goals, and 3% had goals and had written them down. 10 years after graduating, the 13% who had set themselves goals, earned on average, twice as much as the 84% who hadn’t any clear goals. Better than that, the 3% who had externalized, and written down their goals, earned on average 10 times as much as the other 97% combined. Pretty good motivation for setting yourself some goals then.

Time and again setting and measuring oneself has proven a most excellent method of achieving. If you’re looking for somewhere to start in search of this proof, and some inspiration, then sport offers up Lance Armstrong. The worlds most phenomenal athlete. A man, who came back from a probable death at the hands of cancer to win cyclings toughest event, The Tour De France a record breaking 7 times. How did he achieve this feat? A combination of natural talent, the setting of goals and an obsession with data and measurement.

So go figure out some goals, set realistic targets, write them down, and obsessively measure your progress. I can’t guarantee you, or I will get to where we want to be. But I bet we’ll be a lot closer than if we just left them as dreams.

I looked over the shoulder of my fiance to see just what it was she was doing on my laptop. I hadn’t expected to see anything interesting, as I knew she was looking over women’s fashion pages. But there it was, a very small thing making a huge difference to her online fashion experience, and very soon after that, my bank balance.

What was it you ask? Over at ASOS – they weren’t just showing pictures of the garments. They were showing small video catwalk snippets of attractive women wearing the items, set to the kind of music that my fiance finds appealing. And in that moment I could see why that was so much better than what most online fashion stores are offering. Usually if you’re lucky some well taken static shots.

Over at Orange Bus we’re putting the finishing touches to an online fashion store. When the client came to us they were just planning on being another fashion outpost, but a little bit of digging found a passion for denim. We’re helping them to push that knowledge, create their own little niche, and prevent them from being just another online fashion store. We’ve helped them to be different!

What small changes could you make that would make your offering that much different?

After two part-time weeks on this project, it looks as though we’ve finally got everything we need to really get started. We’re now ready for your attention.

Two weeks ago we had nothing but a domain. Since then we’ve added this site using Drupal as the platform.

We’ve replaced the initial simple design we had, with this new custom one that was crafted between myself and Torunn – head of design over at Orange Bus ( 99% of the credit for the design has to go to Torunn ).

We’ve told you what the project is about, and posted something interesting. We’ve enabled comments on all the posts, and turned on the RSS feed. Added an analytics package so that we can track both web requests, and subscribers. Given the search engines forewarning of our existence and registered with Technorati.

Some Stats

• Technorati: currently has us ranked as the 4,601,744 top blog
• Feedburner: is showing 1 subscriber (that’s me)
• Analytics: is showing 11 absolute unique visitors
• Search Engines: Only Google and Yahoo are returning us on a search for our own domain.
• So far we’ve posted on average once every 2.8 days.

There’s been plenty written about RSS but here’s my take on it. I’ll start by introducing what it is, apologies if you’re already up to speed with that. I’ll then talk a little about how it can help you increase your traffic / readership and then about how you can monitor its impact.

What is RSS?

RSS is one of those TLA’s, Three Letter Acronyms. What it stands for very much depends upon who you are speaking to. There are a variety of explanations of both what it stands for, and what it’s used for.

Keeping it simple RSS allows your readers to consume the information you provide in a manner that best suits them at a time and place that suits them. Or written another way, it allows them to read, view, or listen to your content without having to go through the hassle of visiting your site and every other that they’ve chosen to bestow with their attention. Thats got to be a good thing.

If I’ve peaked your interest you could start here; nice and simply by the BBC and in more depth
Wikipedia.

Changing the dynamics

Viewing information on the internet, traditionally is achieved through the use of “pull” technology. That is when you want some information you would go out and look for it. So the reader is responsible for initiating the communication.

Continue reading

Now that we’re on the web it’s important to start to let others know that we’re here. If not, then we’ll forever be alone and the purpose of this particular project will never be fulfilled.

The most basic and the easiest thing we can do is submit to the major search engines. Comscore gives market share at:

• Google – 55.2%
• Yahoo – 23.5%
• Microsoft – 12.3%
• Ask 4.7%
• Time Warner (AOL) 4.3%

Submit your own site to:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• Ask

Now is not the time to sit around and wait for the search engines to pop by. Even when they do, and have added us to their indexes we’re not likely to turn up in any searches beyond our own domain. So tomorrow I’ll see who else we can notify of our existence.

So it’s day two of the attention project and as expected none of the three major search engines have yet to visit. Why would they? I haven’t told them I exist. Have you?

Just to make sure they don’t know about me, a quick search on my domain theattentionproject.com provides these results:

Google: Recognised the context of the search, and that by typing in the domain I was infact using the engine as a replacement for my browsers address bar.

Yahoo: Isn’t directly aware of me but I am within its index, albeit through another site which is monitoring new domain name registrations.

Microsoft: Again hasn’t visited. But unlike the other two has ignored the context of my search and has offered up 67 results.

Expect a post in the next few days on the topic of search engines, a simple overview of how they work and the importance of context.

We’re ready to get started. We’ve laid the foundations. We’ve created a simple site, with an even simpler design, and we’re on the internet. We’ve hooked up Google Analytics an incredible free web statistic tool, that will form the core of our web metrics toolbox.

I think its time to start to get the word out, and to begin building an audience.