Contrary To Rumours - I Am Still Alive! The Axis of T-Shirts, SEO, and Social Bookmarking.

Yes, turn your back on your blog for just a day or two and suddenly your inbox is filled with e-commiserations tentatively asking ‘where the hell is the beef Paul’?

I’ll tell you where the beef is, it’s creeping up behind you and aiming to actually form a real network around you, before you’ve even had a chance to close that browser page. Exaggerations aside, I am in the midst of building a few more t-shirt-related sites to pique your interest and eventually trap you in my Axis of T-Shirts - where no t-shirt creative or fanatic may ever escape alive.

Two things before I continue, firstly I am in a silly mood, Friday evening (woot?), old habits do die but the urge to freak out and groove the weekend away always hits me hard by the Summer nights. Secondly, well secondly I really need to lay off the italics. You may be feeling a little dejected right now, no one likes a tease, you want pages of content here everyday, and why not, you deserve it, you managed to find my blog after all (which is no mean feat - come on hurry up SEO guy!) - Yes I have an SEO guy - I found him at DigitalPoint.com - if you’re anything or anywhere close to a Webmaster (is that word still around? Shouldn’t we all be playing Dungeons and Dragons then? I never have but I have been told it’s great - by the geekiest geeks who’ve never seen the light of day). So, SEO (Search Engine Optimization …ooh), not my thing but it must be done, if I ever expect anyone other than you and me, and the cats here to read this blog, and they only like the pictures. I need the blog ranked, but that will take time, in the meantime there’s a few tricks up my sleeve.

On my travels on the Net I’ve come across a few niche t-shirt areas that haven’t as yet been conquered by the likes of Cafe Press and SpreadShirt. Firstly there’s the deal about fuel, it’s getting more and more expensive every single day, I mean if I was rich I’d be betting on it rising further, but I’m not, because whenever I do have a chance to do something like that I start thinking, woah, this is kinda bad Karma! The Stock Market is just a betting shop anyway, it’s just their bets are so widely spread and the horses take so long to ride in that most laypeople become confused and eventually disinterested - I know it sounds Marxist - it probably is - but money really sucks - I wish there was some way we could all avoid it - but I’ve had that argument with too many people too many times to bother worrying now. It seems like we have to make it until the world’s run out of everything and there’s nothing left to buy - then perhaps I’ll get a few nods in my direction. Until then let’s get on with the dirty old man of culture, business…

So what and why am I setting up other sites, shouldn’t I focus purely on the blog for a few months? Well I’m sure there are experts who say I’m spreading myself too thin (on toast even) but in all honesty a blog gives some immediate impact for most ideas, products, people, as long as you have some good content and don’t fill it with Buy This or Sign Up to That! Sure I sneak in a few affiliate links here and there, I don’t try to hide them - I know you can with Javascript but what the hell, it’s hardly a pocketful of coins by the end of the year for most affiliates out there. Besides I don’t network, well not properly, I have a habit of keeping in contact with people I like rather than those that are useful but have infuriating personalities, or worse, none at all.

Essentially I need to pull everyone in and on board, I can’t make enemies, I can make friends, I can’t ‘do marketing’, but perhaps eventually I won’t need to worry about that part of the process, it’s all ground-up they say, they, those magnificent experts of every field imaginable, the one’s that write newsletters on the dot every week, some even write books about it, how boring. I wish I could love marketing, but deep down I hate it, and so do most people I like, it’s just an end-of-the-world thing I s’pose - I’m sure it will all blow over, we’ll be running cars off our own farts and eating from Star Trek Replicator booths, sure it will mainly taste like farts, but at least it will be free (as long as you serve the damn Federation). I wonder how many other easily distractable people are finding it more difficult (than usual) to concentrate on business at the moment? I had a dream, it’s kinda freaky, but character was so laboured I can’t get it out of my mind. I’m sitting at a desk and an old Don (I mean the Dreaming Spires kind not a Mafia boss) is pointing at four lines on a blackboard. Food War, Fuel War, Bio War, Earth War. Great, I’d prefer to think of it a flashback induced by too many repeats of awful 1980’s Sci-fi movies than portent and prophecy, I’m the sort who’d just sit down and close my eyes and hum if I knew the end was imminent (I mean 5 minutes imminent), I couldn’t manage it more than a short while before I’d get bored and want to get on with something more productive. Human nature is a funny old thing, stick with what you know, till the end, that’s evolution for you.

Back to the elusive point of this post, The Axis of T-Shirts will comprise of your beloved Buy Tees blog, and 2 more sites in the making…

TshirtPrinter.org is a t-shirt printers directory (pretty self-explanatory domain name there), as I may have explained before I’m aiming to offer free featured advertising to all Organic and Fair Trade t-shirt printers, so if you are one of the few, sign up here for a free upgrade, (yes that was marketing, did you see it?). My aim is twofold, firstly to encourage more people to use local t-shirt printers wherever possible, this should cut down on the industry’s carbon footprint enormously. I use Spread Shirt and Cafe Press amongst other sites and I’m going through a rather deep cycle of guilt at the moment. There I am putting my recycables in their correct bins and then the next moment I’m contributing to world pollution from the comfort of my own desk. So this is some small recompense to the world until I can get my junk together.

What’s more I’ll be featuring Fair Trade and Organic T-Shirt Printers for free, that should further redress the balance, and every t-shirt printer receives a free lifetime local listing anyway, so should be rather good Karma all round there. Eventually I’m hoping for an enormous database of t-shirt printing resources from around the world, (if I play my cards right). It should help my blog’s Google PR (although I’ve read that doesn’t mean much nowadays), furthermore I should make quite a few contacts in the organic/fair trade t-shirt field, (filled with flowers it is ;p), and then I have another domain name to help unify them, learn from them, join them myself. Sounds like a hippie version of The Borg, but don’t worry, it’s just an ethical co-operative of t-shirt printers around the world who’d like a little more exposure. If the traffic continues to improve here should be a year or so before the site is ready, OrganicTshirt.net.

In the meantime I have another mini-site in the making RateTshirts.net which is really just a little bit of fun. If you’re a t-shirt designer and you want some immediate feedback on your latest design, this site should be up and running in the next few weeks! It’ll be another “hot or not” t-shirt sites like many others except for one thing, a terrific domain name! It should rank well (eventually) if I promote it enough. You maybe wondering what’s with all the domain names, what’s the Axis of T-Shirts? It’s just a network, something that many site owners used to build way back when, I remember being on the Net (briefly) in the early 90’s and noticed how all the networked sites seemed to rank better. Nothing has changed.

Take T-ShirtCountdown.com (please take it), they have a lot of high ranking pages, tons of traffic and they’ve been running or years. I forked out $50 last month to try out their banner advertising (what was I thinking?), as you can expect the response was lousy. Most of their traffic is geared towards getting their friends to rate their tees and slate their competitors’ designs all in one quick sweep, and then they’re gone. In truth it’s hardly more than a top list script, the more hits a site brings in, the higher their banner climbs until they’re above-the-fold on a PR5 homepage (which must be a big incentive to funnel those clicks through each month). The only problem is they’ve not sharing that PR, I’m careful to at least give each reviewed site at least one do-follow link, I’ve only got a lousy PR1 (link to me - go on but I still share. As a leader of a religious cult once told me (I thought I was making jewellery for a bunch of hippies - turned out the MD was the ‘Living Master of Love and Light’) - Share Your Knowledge and Gain More. Sort of like Spring Cleaning for the brain I suppose, I don’t know why I took that one on board, the rest was utter claptrap, but that one stuck. So I’m sharing.

I don’t pass out PR to affiliate links, or Flickr, YouTube, or anything else mildly corporate, hey don’t need it. Another site that has Google PR coming out of its ears is the aforementioned T-ShirtCountdown.com - a very successful Google PR5 t-shirt top list, but why? Their Axis of T-Shirts of course!

Here’s their axis - T-ShirtCountdown.com - T-shirtforums.com - T-shirtlinks.com

Now normally a dash in the domain name can work against you, as in “Buy-Tees.net” has lower importance from the outset than say “BuyTees.com”, however I’m convinced that with enough decent content and the support of your good self I can overcome those initial limitations. In this case things are different, namely the word “t-shirt”, which is in fact the truest form of the search term, ranks well with Google. However it doesn’t fair so well in social bookmark sites that use spaces rather than commas for tags. Either way it’s a pretty strong axis, except that no one would normally associate the term “countdown” with “t-shirt”, so I checked the backlinks and found that the highest PR site linking back to each of these sites, was each other!

I suck at SEO, but even I can see the correlation. essentially building one “authority site” and forming a network of similar sites around it creates a high Google PR network. Now even though I’m coming to the conclusion that PR doesn’t matter, many t-shirt printers still do, and so I’m hoping to gain traffic and PR from an eventual stream of reciprocal links, even directory links to my t-shirt printers directory, then spill some of that PR and traffic towards organic and fair trade sites, some of which may in be part of the OrganicTshirt.net co-operative. Perhaps I’m dreaming, who knows, either way it’s good to have some kind of marketing strategy, even if you do hate selling. The truth is I see it more as a Public Relations campaign than advertising. People rely on me for various free services, they pass the word around, and I eventually have an audience for my co-operative. It could work, if I can tap the blogging/social bookmarking sector instead of the traditional “top list” and “banner exchange” market I may just have a chance.I’ve already managed to add a few bookmarking links to TShirtPrinter.org. I can look forward to a few more dreary weeks of data input, filling the database with a global/local directory of major cities. It’s taking longer than I thought, but the script doesn’t respond well to MySQL imports, and so I’m doing it all by hand (gulp). At least you can suggest categories and so there’s always the flexibility there.

Like I say, I’m no expert when it comes to marketing, I just feel that sharing my thoughts on the subject, my plans for the future, and a few not-so-significant discoveries I’ve made along the way, might be of help to someone out there in the same position. Something I’ve found very useful for a little instant fame are the more specialist “creative’s social bookmarking sites. I’ve mentioned a few before but I have recently joined a particularly friendly site for artists at IndieRepublic.com.

They provide some excellent support in all aspects of selling your own art, fashion, design, you name it! Plus they give you a free badge like the one above with my ugly mug on it to scare away the punters.

Iv’e always felt “if you build it, they will come”, is that from the Bible or a Stephen King novel, don’t tell me it’s from “Field of Dreams”, I really don’t want to build my business on the back of a Kevin Costner script.