Moroccan bloggers and the secrets of e-commerce

I get the feeling your blog’s success is not measured in unique visitors or page views but the number of comment spam caught and back links from content scrapers stealing your stuff. - Baron VC

In the last couple of days we received a large number of visits from people who posted comments such as: Great site. I will add a link. Please visit my site at ...sexy underwear.co or viagra.org or russian brides etce etc... All very boring and it is taking some time to clean up (our comments will be back up once we have completed the housekeeping). But it did start us thinking about the quote we posted above, from Blogger Baron VC.

Is spam a sign of success? Well, we take Baron's point, but figure we could do without such attention - flattering or not.

At the same time we had been looking around the Moroccan blogosphere in response to a comment from a Finnish blogger, Pentti Halonen, who had written saying he found it interesting that so few Moroccan bloggers were involved in e-commerce. He had been hunting and found some interesting though probably not highly accurate statistics.

With blogs that have been running for more than a year or so he found that around 60% of them carried no advertising content. The 40% who did so, appear from what he could ascertain to be based in Casa or Marrakech. Also a majority of them were French language blogs. Some sites, such as Bloggal org are in fact nothing but advertisements and it has to be asked just how much traffic such a site will get without having any content.

So why is this interesting? Well, according to our correspondent Pentti, 'Sixty percent of Moroccan bloggers are missing out on potential earnings. The problem for most bloggers is that there are probably few adsense-type services that will pay into Moroccan bank accounts. However some should allow postal payments via cheques.'

So are Moroccan bloggers missing out? Or is the so-called e-commerce bonanza a lot of hype and hot air? Our feeling is that (to quote http://tropicalseo.com)"Content is still king. But if you venture into my little world, you’ll find that packaging is queen, promotion is the crown prince and a baity title is the Sword of Excalibur."

And the latest form of promotion that a great number of the Moroccan bloggers have employed is link baiting and social media marketing - where your blog is linked into a social network of "friends". Mybloglog is one form of social network building that is packed with Moroccan bloggers and it probably has contributed to much more linking between sites. However, at the end of the day, if the content of the posts is not particularly interesting, you are not likely to spend much time on a return visit. It was the experience of Mybloglog, that in the early days bloggers were linking to almost anyone in return for a reciprocal link. What this produced was meaningless lists of "friends" with content not even slightly related to any common theme.

Link baiting (or linkbaiting) is a bit of a buzz word at the moment and has come to be the preferred way to natural link building.

It means to create something that naturally attract backlinks for your web page by getting people to talk about it, discussing it on forums, blogging about it, posting it on del.icio.us/Furl/Digg/Shoutwire and linking to it from their sites. It also attracts a lot of visitors.

The secret, according to the experts lies in the title. Your post may be interesting, but unless the headline grabs a reader you might as well not bother. There are even sites now that advise how to write headlines.

The sites that are used to promote stories work on a voting system which, sadly, is open to manipulation. Here are the sites most often used by Moroccan bloggers.

Toot. This is a site that gathers together Arab bloggers. It is still small but growing. Because of its small base it does not take many votes to get to number 1! As we discovered. It does however deliver readers with common interests.

Digg is a huge site which is weighted towards a techie audience

Delicious - which is the one used by The View from Fez and a lot of webmasters and bloggers

Netscape seems to be the tabloid area - and not frequented by the techie crowd.

StumbleUpon is another bookmarking site that we get a large number of hits from, though we have never worked out quite why!

Finally there is Technorati ( which we also use) which assembles posts by topic tags. For example when you click on the "morocco" tag below you are presented with a list of 2,795 blog posts tagged Morocco. Enough to keep you reading for a while,

Our thanks to our reader, Pentti for the info.

Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news