Be sure to check out part 1 here.

Well, it worked for a while. Here are some lessons I learned from implementing part 1 of the experiment.

Lesson 1: Don’t Break Your Crossposter
I was using a crossposting plugin to re-post t-shirt’s blogs onto the myspace blog, but there was a nasty drug-interaction sort of situation between that plugin and another I’m using. After that, I had to start re-posting the blog notifications manually because I wasn’t particulularly interested in coming up with a fix. If you’re going to do this, lesson 1 is that you can’t break your crossposter, because it’s essential. Manual crossposting is a pain in the ass and impossible to maintain. I know that Jared Smith is using the same plugin without fail, so it’s definitely my fault and not the authors.

Lesson 2: Outsource
Outsource your spam monitoring and friend-adding to someone, either a hired hand or maybe just a gullible friend. The MySpace friend-adding process is incredibly clunky, and a terrible drain on time. It seriously wasn’t worth my time to send out those invitations.

Lesson 3: Don’t Bypass msplinks.com
I was also using a little code trick to bypass MySpace’s msplinks.com outgoing link redirect. Apparently that will get your account deleted. I say “apparently” because there was no warning, or even a notification email. I just noticed one day that the account didn’t exist any longer. This is the only thing I did that I could imagine would piss off the powers that be at MySpace.

I’ve since re-registered the name, but have not re-created the profile. If I’m going to pursue this again, I will need to apply some of the above lessons and approach it from a different angle. That being said though, there WAS a noticable traffic increase and some new RSS subscriptions, so I’m convinced that this can work well if your demographic matches the MySpace crowd. You just have to have the resources to commit to such a high maintenance site (at least to begin with).

Last year I thought I’d give Office Live a try because it integrated with the Microsoft Accounting 2007 package that I use. Office Live includes a free domain, but a woefully inadequate…well, everything else. After a quick Google search I came up with this article where I found what to ask Microsoft for before cancelling. If you’ve got an Office Live account, or if you want to create one just for the free domain, you can move your domain to your host of choice whenever you’d like.

Here’s how to move your domain step by step: (more…)

If you have a blog or website and aren’t using Google Analytics, you should check it out. There are equivalent services out there but there are a couple compelling reasons to try Analytics.

• Detailed
  There’s so much information available on your traffic patterns, it’s crazy. You can easily see where everyone’s coming from, where they went, the paths they took through the site, etc. It really gives you some great opportunities to increase value for your readers by adjusting the site to them.
• Interface
  With the amount of data that Analytics tracks, it’s amazing they’re able to keep the interface as clean and as organized as it is. The dashboard is very helpful for a quick overview, but it’s still easy to drill down and switch between sites.
• Adwords integration
  If you run adwords, you can set up conversion goals and traffic funnels to determine which pages need to be tweaked. I haven’t done any of this yet, but I can see how helpful it would be.
• Free
  Seriously, they could charge for this, it’s so useful.

All that being said though, I’ve had some problems with it. I’m currently tracking 3 domains and I’ve noticed some overlap. All of the top landing pages for this site are being identified as t-shirt pages. When I’m tracking tshirt all the data fits, but I can’t see which pages you’re all landing on when you visit bradleykelly.com.

I’ve triple-checked the tracking code I don’t know how many times, and I’ve tried using the legacy Urchin code instead of the Javascript. I’m starting to debate putting this domain on a separate Analytics account so it has a new ID. Any ideas?

Always practice what you preach, right? I was making a “simple” change to t-shirt live yesterday, just swapping out one ad block for another. I finished my change and notice the site was broken badly in IE, but not Firefox. “No big deal” I thought to myself. After undoing the change, the problem persisted. That’s when I started to worry a bit. Pulling out backup copies, turning on and off the relevant plugin, nothing seemed to work. I started to panick a bit and Jared was able to point out a few things I might have overlooked.

The problem ended up being a completely different plugin that I had installed a day earlier and had used sucessfully a few times. Turning that one off fixed everything. Apparently the two elements couldn’t play nice together. Finding problems like this ahead of time is a good reason to keep a Wordpress test environment. I suppose I was arrogant enough to think that this one change was simple enough that I could do it on the live site. Oops.

Today I created a MySpace profile for tshirtreviewblog.com. There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of traffic to be had with MySpace. Plenty of bands don’t even have actual websites anymore, relying solely on the incestual sort of traffic you find on MySpace.

I’ve had a personal profile forever since that’s where all my friends are, but I’ve long avoided doing something like this to drive traffic to a site.  I don’t have the mad skills to hack up a decent-enough page. I simply lack the CSS knowledge to bob and weave my way through the convoluted ass-backwards web of code that is MySpace. Thankfully, Mike Davidson (founder of Newsvine) has the skills that I lack. He shared them on his blog quite a while back, but I hadn’t looked until recently.

Why you want to use MySpace to drive traffic to your site

• Brand Awareness
  I see plenty of companies, especially those in youth-centric niches that have a website, but just maintain a MySpace (should I really capitalize it? I feel ridiculous. It’s myspace from now on.) profile just to keep their name out there. The pages are rarely updated, but there’s a steady flow of visitors there. Politicians do this too. Why else would they be on myspace? Seriously.
   
• Targeted Traffic
  Everyone that attempts to friend you (that isn’t a spammer) is already interested in what you’ve got to say (or they hope you’re interested in what they have to say). Think of them like an RSS subscriber. You can choose who you want to send a friend request to, of course. I started with people that were friends already with a number of tshirt companies. That showed they were already interested in the niche and they were looking for exactly what I serve up.
   
  Be careful having bands as friends. They will post “check out our new songs/album” every time they record something. They will want to post info on their next gig, even if they’re in Australia and you’re in Ireland. They’ll often use a large gaudy graphic too that will pollute your page and generally make you look like an idiot for adding them in the first place. That’s a perfect example of someone not targetting their traffic actually. An Australian band should only be inviting locals to a gig, but I digress.
   
• Bulletins and Status Changes
  Now you’ll understand why I drew a comparison between RSS subscribers and myspace friends. With a bulletin you can instantly put your message right in front of every one of your friends. Be careful not to abuse this (or do it too often) or you’ll come off as spammy and get yourself ignored and deleted. You can also change your status or mood anytime. That will put your short status message, your name and avatar at the top of your friends’ screens when they sign in. This is excellent for keeping yourself fresh in everyone’s mind.
   
• Blog Crossposting
  There’s an awesome little plugin out there that will automatically post a bulletin notifying all your myspace friends of new blog posts. Since the key is to get them off your myspace profile and onto your site, be sure to only post the notification to myspace and not the post itself. Keeping the juicy content off of myspace can help to serve as a catalyst for the user to visit your site.
   
• For Some People, MySpace IS the Internet
  If your target demographic consists primarily from teens and early 20-somethings, myspace is the place to be. Though I sometimes find it hard to fathom, I do have (real life) friends that think Google is just for doing research for papers and reports. They check their mail, they IM, they myspace. If you can do them a service, you really can get them to your site though.

I’m of course speaking in theory, I haven’t had this profile long enough to sucessfully prove myself that these items can be accomplished with a myspace profile. They are, however, the reasons I am doing this. I’ve also based these in things I’ve seen other profiles do. If you have a site or blog in a niche that might benefit from the myspace demographic, I encourage you to consider creating a myspace page to let some of that traffic filter through to your site or blog.

Check out part 2 of the experiment here.