Generating More Traffic than Entrecard

This site will be two months old comes April 9 but I still haven’t reach my target Alexa rank yet. I was hoping to break the 100,000^th place before my second “monthsary” but it’s not going to happen specially now that I’m on the 7th day of Entrecard dropping hiatus and I stopped sending my posts to StumbleUpon and Digg.

My latest project, a local community site I called Maasinsii, is taking much of my time and energy lately. My lack of formal training on php programming and database management made it more time consuming as I try to grasp every new thing I read about the subject.

We now have more than 30 members and much of the marketing efforts are done only through Friendster and Myspace. I’m yet to cover about 7,500 users and leave them with a comment containing the site’s banner and link. I was hoping to find a software that could automate the process but haven’t found one, so far. Everyday, I see about 4-6 visitors referred from Maasisii and hoping to see more of them once I launch it officially comes June, the opening of classes.

Building your own social network or community discussion sites is a good way of establishing reader base or fan base, if you want to call it that, and it’s definitely better than Entrecard and best for your Analytics statistics too but that’s not what this post is about.

My fellow Pinoys who still watch local news may know about this story already and may have blogged about it days ago. (Shucks! I’m always late when it comes current events.) For those of you who don’t, well, here’s the story…

Almost a month ago, March 4, 2008, an Australian guy, Brian Gorrell, started his own blog to try to recover $70,000 dollars of life savings. Allegedly, his Filipino boyfriend, a columnist of a nationwide daily and a member of what they called the “Gucci Gang” composed of people from the Alta Sociedad, duped him into investing the amount for a fancy restaurant in Manila and a tourism related business in Boracay. Along the way, he also dish out the secrets behind their lifestyles which involves, cocaine, deceit, corruption, and the truth behind the death of a socialite a year ago.

The Blogspot hosted blog has garnered closely 2 Million visits and has been featured in several newspapers, TV shows and currently holding the 72,631^st spot on Alexa. It’s worth mentioning that judging from the looks of his blog, the guy is a newbie to blogging and I doubt he knows anything about search engine optimization or other methods most of us painstakingly do in order to get our contents noticed.

Gorell’s blog is proof that controversy blogging is slowly transforming into an established niche just like make money blogs. I’ve seen many of them cropping up the bloggosphere and gaining popularity and reader loyalty as well.

I’ve been harboring on thoughts of spicing up my contents and making it a bit controversial by going against the mainstream, which I usually do in real life, but I’m concerned of how my 100+ subscribers would respond to such move. I’ve worked hard for that number and I don’t want my feed chicklet to plummet.

My previous post about Manny Pacquiao has gained that much of an attention that a fellow Entrecarder posted it on Entrecard blog and accusing me of hitting bellow the belt and a commenter also said I was being a racist. I’ve been called a lot of names, in Tantra Online Forums, I’ve even been called a bitch by someone who obviously don’t know what that word means and I don’t really care about what others think. However, I have plans to make this blog big and would need every single reader I can have to attain that goal so it’s better not to piss them off right?

Well, I guess I’ll save controversial posts and opinions until I get to where I want to be.

Have you written a controversial post already? How did your reader respond?

Tags: alexa, better than entrecard, blog, blogging, boracay, Brian Gorell, celine lopez, comlumnist, DJ Montano, EntreCard, Filipino, fraude, gucci gang, high society, Manila, philippine star, Pinoy, reastaurant, rich, scam, socialite, traffic, travel