Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See:
It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb.
The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve.
IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there.
The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.
I can't make AdSense revenues from a Twitter account.
In fact, if Twitter or Facebook suspect I'm a professional concern rather than simply an ordinary Joe, they may expect me to pay them money to promote my content, or even to make it visible.
I already have dealt with exactly that on my 'regular Joe' FB account in the past, because I had pages for my book label attached. Thankfully they seem to have realized that there was zero traffic to them and stopped, but I still sometimes worry about how much of my stuff is actually being 'curated' out of my friends' feeds.
The trend seems to be "blog + feed" all-in-one platforms like Medium.com now. The old blogging model was the feed readers were separate from the platforms. I'm not sure if that's better or worse but that seems to be all that's left.
Honestly, I think people just never really liked using feed readers. I saw in my own data that RSS usage seemed to top out in the late 2000s.
I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd. Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down" version in an RSS reader.
This is the reason I prefer that my readers subscribe to my opt-in weekly email newsletter rather than using Google Reader/RSS. They get a quick little digest of the top content from the previous week and click through if it looks interesting.
RSS is still available though, but the email channel is clearly the winner in terms of people using and interacting with it.
People love stripped-down versions: Instapaper, Pocket, Flipboard et al are all testament to that (as is AdBlock, to an extent)
I think it was almost entirely because the "follow/unfollow" experience was so clunky, especially compared to Twitter and FB. Even today, adding and removing feeds from my readers is unnecessary pain.
The hurdle is far too high for the casual audience.
Marco makes a solid point. The challenge for Google of course is that their CPC has been eroding for years now. That means the only way to make their number is to increase the available ad slots on the page, which pushes organic folks off the page. You can of course spend AdWords dollars and stay on the page, but then your RPM is offset by your ad spend and you're margins just get smaller anyway.
Bloggers who use AdSense get stuck even worse, they aren't getting organic link love and they are seeing the CPC decline as a flat out revenue decline.
The trend to apps is to get away from that of course. Your app will always show your content. Sites like Reddit and HN become more relevant traffic generators. And "portal" type sites like Medium will provide variability with their 'stable' of writers.
I totally agree with him that to "fix" this one has to go at it to build the thing they want. I'm guessing that is a combination of advertising and subscription revenue but we'll see.
Pretty standard for anyone who follows anything about advertising:
- CPC = Cost Per Click
- RPM = Revenue Per Mille (revenue per thousand impressions)
Both the C and R are sometimes used interchangeably - e.g. "RPC" and "CPM" mean roughly the same thing. It really just depends on which entity and which way the money's flowing if you think of the players in an advertising game:
Google made it really hard to search for blogs or blog articles too. Which is annoying when you just want to check for articles on something by people rather than organisations.
Marco famously tweeted "Shit." when Apple introduced an Instapaper clone into iOS/Safari. He kinda re-uses it whenever a big company does something to squash smaller ones/individuals.
What annoys me regarding Google and blogs is that content which is written on its own Blogger / Blogspot-hosted blogs is indexed and presented in the search results within minutes.
Everyone else has to wait until the Googlebot ambles along some time later in the week.
Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See:
http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494
It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb.
The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve.
IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different, but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there.
http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday
The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame. Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger' crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never care as much as we do. They have no shame.