As part of my ongoing effort to start writing more out and about on the internet, last week I published a guest editorial on WPCandy about the State of WordPress Themes and ThemeForest. There’s been a lot happening on ThemeForest over the years and we’ve come such a long way since 2008 when we first took the site online. Today, ThemeForest is the largest WordPress themes library in the world, which is both astonishing and testament to the amazing talents of our authors.

In the post I have gone into a bit of detail about the size of the WordPress theme market, where ThemeForest fits in, and a bit about our reviewing process. If that sounds like your cup of tea, head over and have a read!

I recently met a principal at the world’s largest school. It was a chance meeting at a community event, so you can imagine my surprise when I asked this warm, humble Indian man what he did, and he proceeded to tell me he was a principal at a school founded by his father, Jagdish Gandhi, that had just completed enrollment of 45,000 students for a single year. As a web guy, I’m used to big numbers. But in this case, we’re talking not about virtual users on a website, but thousands upon thousands of loud, excitable school kids. The City Montessori School in the town of Lucknow, India was very much a bootstrapped startup of its time. Some fifty years ago, a newly married couple set out with just 300 rupees (the equivalent of less than $10) looking to serve humanity through education.
- Continue Reading at TheNextWeb

Recently I was interviewed for the wonderful Offscreen Magazine (Issue 3) along with some of my favourite netizens Chris Coyier and Vitaly Friedman as well as a host of other amazing people. The premise behind Offscreen is that it’s an “in-depth look at the life and work of digital creators — captured in enduring print.” And boy was it in-depth! That’s the longest I’ve ever spent on an interview, but I was very happy with how its turned out.

The magazine is produced and published by a talented designer named Kai Brizk who I met years ago when he was working out of the same coworking space in Melbourne that was an early Envato office, a place called the Open Hub. I highly recommend grabbing not just Issue 3, but all the Offscreen editions. It really is a great publication, and very thoughtfully and artfully put together.

Visit Offscreen Magazine

In the previous post I pulled up some statistics from Google Analytics to reveal that on our AppStorm blogs we had the following distribution of traffic to our different post types:

• Roundups: 843,024 Pageviews in July
• Reviews: 126,161 Pageviews in July
• How-To: 95,905 Pageviews in July

Following on from Martin Ansty’s question in the comments, I checked and we have published the following quantities of posts:

• 288 Roundups
• 339 Reviews
• 159 How-to Posts

Doing the Math

So in other words, not only are list-style Roundups generating way more traffic, there are less of them. If you combine the results:

• Average Review nets 370 pageviews p/month
• Average How-to Post nets 600 pageviews p/month
• Average Roundup nets 2900 pageviews p/month

So by this math, if we can add, say, another 300 Roundups to AppStorm in the next year then this time next year we’d have added 300×3000 pageviews p/month = 900,000 pageviews p/month! 300 Roundups over 3 app review blogs over a year means just 2 a week – that seems very achievable, and adding 900,000 pageviews would be a 60% traffic increase!

Does this really work?

Of course whether adding more posts really brings new people seems very debatable. After all it seems equally possible that the same traffic just gets spread over an increasingly large pool of blog posts.

So what I did was to go back in time to get some historical data from December 2009 which is about 8 months ago. At that time on just the Mac Apps blog there were 57 Roundup posts, and that month they netted 161,000 pageviews. In other words each Roundup post brought in 2850 pageviews on average. That is almost EXACTLY the same traffic to post ratio! So this observation sounds very promising for our hypothesis!

Taking this logic to the extreme

So let’s take this logic all the way to see if it really does hold up. Imagine instead of publishing 300 Roundups over the next year, we published 300,000 Roundups! Forget about the impossibility of such a feat, and let’s just focus on the numbers here.

By my previous logic, every one of those Roundups should bring in about 3,000 pageviews. So by publishing the huge number of additional posts, we should end up with a whopping 900,000,000 pageviews a month!

To give that number some context, according to Google’s list of the top 1000 Sites in the world, this would place AppStorm in the top 20, and make it easily the largest blog in the world.

This doesn’t really seem very realistic as it completely ignores the fact that there is a finite limit to how many people are interested in reading about apps!

So surely at some point adding more posts does NOT equal more traffic.

This makes intuitive sense, and when I think about another blog of ours, FreelanceSwitch, it also makes empirical sense. While AppStorm is a fast growing site, FreelanceSwitch has remained very steady for a couple of years now. Is that because we stopped posting? Nope! In the last two years we’ve added hundreds more posts to the site, so by my earlier math we should have grown our traffic by a huge amount – which we haven’t.

So clearly in AppStorm’s case the post to traffic ratio is only holding because the traffic happens to be growing on the site at the moment, and it hasn’t reached its full potential yet.

Increasing Frequency

Another question is in regard to frequency of posts. Sites like Lifehacker, Mashable and TechCrunch all post many, many times a day. I’ve definitely read in places (that I can’t remember now) that one of the biggest reasons they post more frequently is because it means more traffic.

An increased frequency of posts definitely equates to more traffic if the same number of readers end up reading more posts. It also makes sense that there would be some benefit to having that much more content on the site, simply from the point of view of search traffic, chance of being linked to and chance of hitting a topic or post that goes viral or popular.

Conclusions

So to sum up my little bit of quick and dirty analysis, I would say that more posts, particularly more concurrent posts, does have a relationship to traffic. However I would not believe that it’s a linear relationship, at least not for any serious length of time because there are definite ceilings to how many people are interested in a particular topic.

As for AppStorm I do have a feeling that we’re going to have to increase the post frequency on our blogs to put all these hypothesis to the test soon!

Building a Successful Blog

If you enjoyed this article, then you can read more about AppStorm in the case studies section of my new book: How to Build a Successful Blog Business! It comes with two other case studies and a lot of how-to material based on how we have built our successful blogs here at Envato.

Today I was looking through the traffic on our app review blogs AppStorm, and decided to make use of a handy Google Analytics feature called Content Drilldown which lets you view stats for content by the directories they sit in.

So on AppStorm we publish lots and lots of app reviews, some how-to posts, and a weekly roundup or two. Knowing how popular list posts are, I figured our roundups would be the most trafficked. Here’s an example of our most recent roundup of 5 Places to Find Free Mac Software.

A typical AppStorm Roundup Post

Thanks to category permalinks in WordPress, the three types of content sit in /reviews, /howto and /roundups, so they are perfect for comparing traffic. Over the last month, here are the numbers:

• Roundups: 843,024 Pageviews
• Reviews: 126,161 Pageviews
• How-To: 95,905 Pageviews

In other words, on AppStorm, list posts average almost SEVEN times as much traffic as the blog’s mainstay of reviews and almost NINE times as much as our how-to content! Here’s the screengrab:

Why not publish only lists?

Of course when you see these kinds of numbers you’d be forgiven for wondering why we don’t publish only list posts. After all, assuming they are less than seven times as expensive to write, they are clearly the most cost effective posts to publish.

The reality is that list posts don’t build a great blog. The problem with lists themselves is that they tend to lack a voice. When a publication has no voice, there’s really nothing to differentiate it from another publication that publishes similar lists.

Rather I think of them as traffic traps to catch new readers and to introduce them to our regular content types: reviews and how-to posts. Of course some readers will also stay purely for the lists, and even the people who love our reviews will also be enjoying the lists. But it all needs to be in balance.

Building a Successful Blog

If you enjoyed this article, then you can read more about AppStorm in the case studies section of my new book: How to Build a Successful Blog Business! It comes with two other case studies and a lot of how-to material based on how we have built our successful blogs here at Envato.

In the last four years of building up Envato I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about growing and building web companies. So I decided to put some of my learnings into a presentation I gave at WebDU 2010 earlier this year. The talk covered how I would approach starting up from scratch, and throughout I referenced a hypothetical new startup idea and how I might approach it.

Today I got the audio for the talk back and I’ve put up the slides that go with it. You can view and listen to the talk below! I hope you enjoy it and find it useful. I was rather nervous, so you’ll have to excuse me if I sound a little breathless

The Audio

Download the interview.

The Slides

What would you do differently?

If you had to start from scratch again, would you approach things in the same way? What lessons have you learnt along the way?

So a year and a half ago I set out to write up all my experiences in building up blogs into businesses into a how-to book. It took way longer than I thought it would, and the resulting book is rather thick. But I’m very proud of the effort and I don’t think there’s another book out there quite like it!

The book is titled How to Build a Successful Blog Business and includes three case studies from our network, about the Tuts, FreelanceSwitch and AppStorm sites. It includes graphs of our blog income and expenses, personal experiences and step by step how-to manuals on hiring, building, writing, growing and creating successful, profitable blog businesses.

If you haven’t already, visit the Blog Business sales page where you can get your copy, as well as find out what top bloggers like Darren Rowse, Daniel Scocco and Yaro Starak are saying about the book.

Sample Extracts of the Book

If you’d like to read some sample extracts, you can grab a few from the case studies over on our various blogs:

• Extract from the Psdtuts case study
• Extract from the Nettuts case study
• Extract from the FreelanceSwitch case study
• Extract from the AppStorm case study

Hope you enjoy the book!

You can see a video of my 5 minutes on YouTube or embedded just below:

There are a lot of other great videos to watch, you can see lots on the main Ignite Show website. My personal favourite is Eugene Lin, speaking about his path to building a killer iPhone App in iPhoning My Way to Retirement $.70 at a Time:

The Ant Fable

Having trouble viewing the presentation? You can also see it on SlideShare.net.

The idea of ‘filler’ content is nothing new in publishing. Magazines, newspapers, even TV has filler, it’s the stuff that bulks up and fills out your editorial calendar. But online, filler content has the potential for a whole lot more than just plugging gaps, and it all rests on search traffic.

For most online publishers, search traffic makes up a reasonably large bread and butter base of visitors. On our Envato blogs, for example, search traffic generally makes up about 20-30% of visits. That’s a pretty substantial amount of traffic for us, but for some publishing sites those are some really low numbers.

You see there is a way to grow search traffic that has nothing to do with tinkering with the keywords on your articles, or even building link-backs. Instead it’s about publishing masses and masses of content, and that’s where filler content is taken to a whole new level.

Authority Domains, Page Titles and Quantity

Ever notice that when you Google pretty much any topic in the world, Wikipedia will appear somewhere in the top ten search results? That happens because Wikipedia.org is an authority domain. Search ranking algorithms take a slight shortcut in ranking pages and give very heavy weighting to domain names with a lot of link backs, even if the individual page itself is not that important. As it happens Wikipedia is a pretty good source of information on most topics, so this method of ranking works quite well in this example.

Now let’s say you Google “Where is Timbuktu in Africa?” and there is a page out there with those exact words in the title, Google again will give this a pretty high ranking for your query – after all it appears to be a perfect match.

Marry these two ideas together and you will see that if you could get an authority domain with tons of content with a variety of organic titles, you’d be open to receiving a lot, and I mean a lot of traffic. Of course there is also a good chance that you are creating what some pundits are calling information pollution.

Feeding the World’s Demand for Answers

In a recent Wired article ‘The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model‘, author Daniel Roth writes about how companies are using the mixture of Authority Domains and Quantity of Content to make some very big businesses.

Sites ploughing out enormous fields of content have been around for a while, from grand-daddy names like About.com to more modern Stackoverflow.com type sites. Sometimes they are driven by a fairly traditional publishing model, sometimes entirely by user generated content. But they all share the same general ethos: pump out a lot of pages with a lot of subjects on a big domain.

DemandMedia, the focus of Roth’s article, takes these ideas and applies them to publishing at a whole new level. It does this in two ways. The first is in the sheer scale of the operation. At their current size Demand publishes over 100,000 articles and video clips every month. By next year the company plans to step this up by a massive ten times to around 1 million pieces of content per month. To give this some context, Wikipedia has around 3 million English articles at present, in total.

The second part of Demand’s operation is to make the process of choosing what content they produce a whole lot more scientific and systematic. Using an algorithm that processes search trends and ad rates, then combines them with what rankings are attainable based on competition for terms, the company is producing not just a lot of content, but a lot of content that people are actually looking for and that advertisers will pay to place ads on.

Even with over $300m in funding and a reported annual revenue of over $200m, that amount of quantity is going to be difficult to produce with particularly high quality or compensation levels. Unsurprisingly video clips are shot on budgets of $20 and articles get $15. Copy editors come in at $2.50 and fact checkers at just $1 per article.

It’s hard to imagine that these kind of rates attract a lot in terms of quality. But of course, that’s not the name of the game for DemandMedia.

MediaGlow, Aol and a Friendlier Version of Quantity

While I’m impressed by Demand’s ideas and success, they aren’t the most inspiring vision of where web publishing might go. A slightly friendlier alternative is offered by the aging internet giant Aol.

While their dialup business has been slowly rattling through its death coughs, the company has had the good sense to make a plan for the future. Beginning with their insightful acquisition of Weblogs Inc in 2005, along with its very successful stable of names like Engadget and TUAW, Aol has been slowly building their roster of niche publishing sites into an empire, all sitting under the MediaGlow sub-brand.

Where Demand is building mass niche content on the cheap, Aol is taking an economic but only moderately so route. Hiring from the increasingly large pool of talented but redundant print media workers, Aol has been building a very large roster of writers and editors.

The results speak for themselves, nearly 70 million monthly visitors over 80 niche publishing brands and the elevation of this model to underpin the entire Aol strategy as it spins off from parent company Time Warner.

Where DemandMedia is the poster child for quantity, Aol and MediaGlow lean slightly more towards quality, but certainly don’t exemplify it. On the one hand, Saul Hansell—formerly of the NY Times and now AOL’s programming director—was quoted as saying “Aol is just as much as journalistic organization as the New York Times,” (source) but on the other Aol is reportedly trying to buy DemandMedia competitor AssociatedContent. In his post The End of Handcrafted Content, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington laments both approaches and implores publishers to search out new ways of profiting from a quality focus in online publishing.

Quality vs. Quantity – Psdtuts+ vs Tutorial Aggregators

Though I have no experience of publishing at the size of either Aol or Demand, I find the quality vs quantity issue interesting because when we launched our flagship tutorial site Psdtuts+ two and a half years ago, this was exactly the dilemma it faced.

Though Psdtuts+ is far and away the largest Photoshop tutorial blog today with around 2 million visitors a month, it certainly isn’t alone. In fact there are tons and tons of tutorial sites around, so many so that there is a class of meta-content sites called Tutorial Aggregators that exist to funnel all these tutorials to the reader.

The best known aggregator is a site called Good-Tutorials.com and at the time when we launched Psdtuts+ it was already pretty large. I remember wondering if it was such a good idea to be in the rather expensive business of producing long, quality tutorials, when it was possible to get huge amounts of traffic with a mostly automated aggregation system where other people had to do the heavy lifting.

Equally pertinent was the question of whether there was even a market for good quality tutorials where masses of hobbyist material was already abundantly available.

Within a few months of launching however it was very clear that there is a market for quality and it can be profitable. Given that there is only so much information a person can take in, I believe they will generally prefer smaller amounts of higher quality content than buckets of average quality.

A couple of years on and Psdtuts+ has outgrown the aggregators—though they still send substantial traffic—and thanks to advertising and subscriptions it’s even profitable. It’s also one of a growing number of great tutorial sites posting hand crafted, long, detailed and laborious tutorials.

I don’t know if the Psdtuts+ lesson holds true in every type of publishing. But it certainly makes me optimistic that there is room on the web for both quality and quantity operations. It is a pretty big web after all.

Of course a quality AND quantity site… now that would be a thing of beauty!