Webloggist Media - the ‘gist

Lifehacker picked up on the blog on November 10th, and I had my first big, post-blog post spike. About a month after the initial craziness began, things were starting to settle into what I thought would be a nice 200 to 300 page views a day. On December 8, 2006, Mark Frauenfelder wrote a quick entry about the glassyeyes site at BoingBoing.net. I got 50,000 more page views in the next three days before traffic calmed down again, this time to a pace of 400 to 600 page views a day. Traffic grew pretty organically apart from a couple of article mentions in the New York Times, Star Tribune, and Smart Money for the next year or so which caused traffic spikes for a day or two at a time.

A big day at the end of November, 2007 in which Matt Haughey of Metafilter fame, wrote a piece mentioning the site on 43Folders, took things to another level again. Now I was approaching and exceeding 1,000 page views a day. This coupled with a site redesign to get the pertinent information up front, made things really start to hum.

One thing is for certain. Print publications are great for posterity, and your parents might stumble upon it, but if you want to see traffic spikes, it’s all in doing things that the hard-core bloggers recognize. You’ll get more traffic in a day than you’d get in a few months if you get mentioned in the right places.

That’s the rub though. I never campaigned or marketed myself or the site in any way. It just got noticed and people tell their friends and all of a sudden a little bomb goes off and when things settle down you’re a bit more popular than you were previously. And you keep writing and doing the work and it happens again. And hopefully by the third or fourth time this happens, you recognize it and it’s become a habit.

Never expect it will happen though, because it won’t unless you let it, and you keep writing. Self-promotion doesn’t work for guys like me. I’m no Seth Godin.

I wrote “the eyeglasses post” on November 10, 2006. I think I was playing with del.icio.us at the time and posted the link. A few hours later I’d received more comments than in the entire previous six years combined. I knew I had stumbled upon something big. I also knew I didn’t want 3MEW to turn into the eyeglasses blog. So that day, instead of lunch, I hit godaddy again looking for a name (RULE #1: IF YOU SEE A NAME YOU MIGHT LIKE, BUY IT — RIGHT NOW).

I found Glassyeyes.com to my liking, plopped down about $7 (RULE #2: ALWAYS LOOK FOR COUPONS) and jumped over the Wordpress to set things up. Initially, I thought about advertising to support the time I was going to spend on this endeavor, and Wordpress wasn’t going to allow that using the free platform. I was hoping, right before Christmas to maybe make enough money to buy a Wii for the kids, so free was definitely the way to go (remember, the reason this started was my inability to pay $400 for glasses).

My next stop was Blogger. I already had a photo site on Blogger from a couple of years previously, and I knew I’d have more control over the HTML so that’s where Glassyeyes.com began, and continues to this day 15-months later. With steadily rising traffic, Google has done a pretty solid job in hosting — the site. I initially expected to use Google Adsense for revenue, but Google Adsense was a joke — for this site. Not having any say over the advertising content of the site is not a solid long-term decision, and the pennies I was making made me want to rename it “Google Ad-cents” (RULE #3: DON’T USE ADSENSE).

If I had it to do all over again, and had any idea I’d make more than a couple of hundred dollars in the process, I’d probably forgo the Blogger and host the site at WebHost4Life or Dreamhost. I’d have had more control and could have gotten away from the split references online between “glassyeyes.com” and “glassyeyes.blogspot.com”. On the other hand, using Google’s tools may have gotten the site the attention it needed right away — they certainly know how to crawl their own systems. I had serious search engine credibility within days. It’s tough to come up with a hard-fast rule for this, but if you’re starting a new site, and you’re not under the gun with time-frame, don’t go with Blogger.

I added forums and reviews to a newly created Google Groups and dumped in all of my research I’d done before buying my initial two pairs of glasses. I already had the content for the site.

I spent that night reviewing two additional online eyeglasses vendors, signed up for a couple of affiliate programs and for all intents and purposes had a fully-functional site.

And the people came…

Back before the turn of the millennium, I worked at a little place called BigCharts.com, building webpages and generally enjoying the rush of working with really smart people in a start-up environment. We worked long hours and were rewarded with decent wages and lots of free swag and happy hours. It was a blast. It became slightly less of a blast when it was time to grow up — about the time we were purchased and took over the technology for MarketWatch.com (then owned by CBS/Viacom).

One of the things that came out of that period was a habit to buy domain names when the moment struck. I was doodling during a meeting on March 27, 2000, when I came up with a geometric pattern that reminded me of the number 3 rotated counter-clockwise in 90 degree segments. It looked like 3-M-E-W. Thirty minutes later I had my first blog — 3mew.com. I hosted it for awhile and built all sorts of little management apps and then realized that I was more interested in the content than the reinventing of the wheel. I moved it to Wordpress.com. Free hosting, excellent administration modules and a handful of decent skins. Things moved along quietly for the next couple of years with sporadic posts about the growing family, photography and music.

Then it happened. In October of 2006, I broke my glasses.

My world was about to change and I had absolutely no idea.