Sunday, July 03, 2005

General Update

Tidying Up and Tweaking

Well, we've been slowly but surely implementing changes on the site, in case you didn't notice. A lot of tidying up went on to reduce the clutter a little bit, but also a couple of attempts to improve our google rankings. Now, I have written a lot about optimising for 'funny cartoons' over at 9mmfilm.com, so you can read about a lot of the initial efforts over there.

More recently it has been more tweaking than anything else. For a start, I wanted to make it easier to add content myself, so I set up my own blog. This means that BifSniff.com now actually consists of three blogs. One for the cartoons themselves, one for Bif's musings and another for my more general and less frequent posts.

Shamelessly flogging Funny Cartoons

My own Blog is shamelessly called 'Funny Cartoons'. This is a blatant attempt to help boost our google rankings for Funny Cartoons, because all my posts titles will be prefaced by 'Funny Cartoons'. Also the blog is in a directory called funny-cartoons and that should help a little also. However it is relevant because most of my posts are about the actual job of keeping a funny cartoon site - whether it be the drawing of funny cartoons, how to make money from them, or the navel-gazing subject of how to improve traffic through findability exercises etc.

Things we've dropped

Other changes we made included dropping some rather unsuccessful bits and pieces, for example Blogsnob just didn't really work for us, so we dropped it. Also we dropped LinkBuddies in favour of more prominent Google ads - however LinkBuddies is still a valuable resource. It may not have driven huge traffic our way but I found it extremely useful in experimenting with banner ads to see what got clicks.

We also dropped a lot of the sidebar text from the musings section in order to try to increase the visibility of the musings on Google (the higher up the page your content starts the better). And for a while now we have displayed the latest musing on the homepage (using Magpie) to get fresh content on the homepage too, and to increase visibility of Bif's musings.

Navigation

We also tried to make the navigation on the site a little clearer, and yet people still seem to have trouble finding our archives! People who are used to blogs have no trouble, but less techy people seem to struggle. If you have any ideas, please let us know!

Funny Cartoons Syndication

The idea Bif had for providing small versions of our funny cartoons that people could display on their own Blogs has proven quite successful. We have a fair few people displaying BifSniff cartoons on their own sites now. This increases our exposure, generates some new traffic our way, gives us extra inward linkage and makes our stats look very healthy indeed as we host the cartoons on BifSniff.com.

Shopping

We still haven't sold a single thing in our shop. We are obviously doing something wrong. I know the shop thing needs more attention, but as Bif has been telling me for ages, our funny cartoons probably aren't all that suitable for t-shirts. Which is why we have changed the focus to our mug - and rather than try to pretend it's what everybody needs in their life, we are simply begging people to buy them to send a few dollars our way. Also, we ask people to let us know if they have any ideas how we could make money out of our cartoons... email us if you have any ideas.

Rambling

Ok, I think I'm just rambling now, but I just wanted to run through some of what we've been up to... I'll do it from time to time just in case anyone is interested. The next thing we plan to do for our funny cartoons is pay for some banner ads on other comic sites and try to drum up some new traffic to the site and see if any of it sticks. This means shelling out more money on something that we still haven't figured out how to make any money out of, but hey - it's all in the name of fun!