Remarkablogger

Let me tell you a story. It’s my story. It’s a story of success and of mistakes, and I think you’ll learn from both. It’s the story of blog, called GoogleTube Video of the Day. I started this blog very soon after Google Video was born. At that time, there were hardly any personal video blogs (there were full-blown sites, like ebaum’s world and other sites too lowest-common-denominator to even mention). There were no copy-and-paste embed codes or flash players.

In the beginning, the blog was called Google Video of the Day. I was looking for specific kinds of material: odd, strange, and funny videos, hopefully made by normal people–and I found ‘em. To post on the video, I had to download a thumbnail image from the video, upload it to the post, and hand-code it to link to the video page. I would write some smart-alecky commentary about the video and hit publish.

Things chugged along just fine for a while, but I had no real traffic. Then I got my first big break: somebody at Google found GVOD (that’s my nickname for it) and posted a link to it as a Blog of Note. Normally, a blog of note would enjoy the top spot for a few days and then another blog would appear and push it down. But GVOD remained at the top spot as a Blog of Note over three weeks. Every blogger who logged in to their Blogger dashboard saw Google Video of the Day as the first Blog of Note.

Naturally, I got tons of traffic. I got tons of comments. I was stunned. I had already put AdSense ads on the blog, but was making laughably small amounts of change–pennies, really. I knew nothing about ad optimization. When my traffic soared, my earnings started to pick up. I suffered the AdSense agonies anyone who’s been using the system for a while will be well familiar with: sudden, inexplicable drops in revenue, the odd eCPM going through the roof one day only the crash back down to mere chump change the next.

But hey: I was making money. It was an incredible feeling. I started getting monthly AdSense checks that were hundreds of dollars. The highest was over four hundred. I got “AdSense fever”, and I made a lot of beginner mistakes. Looking back on it, I can see everything I did wrong:

• I spent waaaay too much time checking my AdSense reports and visitor stats, and less time searching for great videos.
• I didn’t give ad placements enough time to prove themselves, and over-optimized, which would make my earnings drop.
• I kept changing everything around too much, and it annoyed my visitors.

I did learn a lot about ad placement and color combinations, but I didn’t give things the time they needed to work out and prove themselves. I’m constantly learning new things about blogging successfully, often by observing how other successful blogs are run. I knew that more frequent posts drive more traffic, which would increase ad clicks and earnings. I began posting more than one video per day. The blogs that did this the best were team blogs, like Boing Boing.

So I approached a couple of my best and most frequent commentors and video referrers, and asked them if they wanted to be co-bloggers, and they could have ads with their publisher IDs in them and make a cut of the ad money. Now we were posting at least 3 times a day. But there were problems. Some people didn’t like the changes, and were pretty vocal about it in the comments. For the most part, the videos my co-bloggers chose were good, some were great… but some were videos I had already passed on or never would have chosen. I didn’t want to have to approve videos like some kind of anal-retentive middle manager.

Yes, I was still making money, but it wasn’t really any more than I had been making already. I wasn’t happy anymore. I wasn’t even happy with the videos that I was choosing. I wanted to open up GVOD to videos from other than Google, because I saw a wealth of videos on YouTube that I wanted to post that weren’t on Google (this was before Google bought YouTube). So I changed the name of the site and the design, and that upset more people. Traffic began dropping to less than 2,000 visitors a day. I was accused of jumping the shark by a commenter.

Either before or after that (I can’t remember, exactly) I informed my two co-bloggers that the team was over, and that it was back to solo posting for me (no hard feelings and we still keep in touch today). I had told myself when I started doing GVOD that if it ever became no fun, that I would quit. I put GVOD on hiatus for many months, and spent many hours thinking about what happened and how it went down. Traffic went down to less than 1,000 visitors a day.

So, the takeaways from this:

• Don’t mess around with your ad placement and channels too much. I don’t take a look at things for about 30 days, anymore, and then I reevaluate.
• Don’t forget why people visit in the first place. Don’t make changes that take that reason away, or your visitors will go away.
• Establish a clear, unwavering goal for the blog and stick to it.
• Spend your time concentrating on producing quality content according to the goals of your blog, not overanalyzing your ad network numbers or your traffic statistics package.

Since then, I’ve got my groove back and felt ready to renew GVOD. It seemed like such a shame to just let it slip away. If I could enjoy it again, I knew I could rebuild my audience and make money with it, too. I have learned important lessons about ad over-optimization and sacrificing greed for content, and I hope that you will benefit from reading my story. So far, my traffic growth on GVOD is climbing and I’m posting some great, crazy content. I already know what ads should go where, so that’s not going to change for a long time. I’m looking forward to when its numbers are back up to–and beyond–any previous levels. Is it possible to recover from “jumping the shark”? I think it is, because I’m already doing it. Come on over and watch some videos with me.

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