Have you noticed how you cannot lose nowadays? There are rewards just for entering competitions. We get prizes for losing. Kids even get a grade plus a certificate for "Did not fail". After going through Wordtracker, checking the relevancy of our keywords, we need a little love right now as well. The words peppered throughout our site were clearly derived from gut feelings, not SEO knowledge!

Wordtracker dead end

Daily, satire, web tech, pisstakers, quirky and even jackass of the week are not exactly popular terms in the Wordtracker 30 million word database. Or if satire is popular, it ranks almost zero in terms of ever getting us seen before page 34,000 in Google. Oh dear, because satire and pisstake and web stuff is what we do and who we are!

The old "directory" ways are the best?

Maybe not the best, but an option. Our Crown from King of the Blogs directory certainly makes us feel loved and more confident in our approach to life, especially after that bruising from Google keywords. And look, we are getting hits already from the Kings, so that directory must be working?

A more holistic marketing approach

Is this destined to fail?As bloggers on a mission, we could go the mega ad, multi icon link-back traffic-generating no-content route and earn some money that way. But we want to do this for a living and as a way of life. Pisstaking is fun and so we are looking for less "establishment ways" to sell ourselves.

First plan is to sell ourselves on the back of our name. There aren't too many sites with a name that makes Brits and Ozzies smile and some Americans think,

"Euuh, is that real piss they are talking about? "

Web 2.0 to the rescue?

We thought we would keep visitors coming back, by rolling out our own style of humor-riddled content day after day. And thereafter go the trendy new "Web 2" route. Yeah, we are tough, we don't need Google-friendly keywords! Technorati and RSS are the way to go. Or is this just another hunch that is doomed?

In the name of creativity and thinking different, surely if we produce decent shit, people will talk about us to their friends, subscribe via the Feedburner feeds, check out tags in Technorati, bookmark us in De.li.cious (or however it is dotted) and keep up with the Pisstakers? And won't people read our insightful posts in forums around the world and click on our signature or look at our commented photos on Flickr and go, "Ooh, that site might be a bit of fun."?

We shall see. And so as not to be total asses, we have modified some keywords. If you read "mad world" a lot, be assured, it is the one single term we found that is relevant to our blog AND has a chance of getting us seen in a Google search return - in 2008!

Thanks to Aspen on the Sitepoint forums

The 2005 SEO Guru on Sitepoint gave us a real kick in the pants with his wise SEO words. I know this link will probably take "his" thread higher up the rank for "Pisstaker" than we are, but I don't know if we "get" SEO yet.

Mike's Money-Making Mission

We are learning something though about blog marketing - that this Mike is making money 9 weeks into his mission, and you just know he is going to succeed. So his original uncluttered site may end up as flashing GIF central and his content may become keyword city, but he will make money.

So will we, just not that way! Sweeping the streets maybe with a fun but uneconomic site sitting at home on the desk?