5 Ways to Spice Up Your Relationship with Your Blog
Okay it happens. You and your blog have been together for a while. You see each other day after day. It’s not that you don’t care, but . . . um . . . the sex has gone out of your relationship and you both have just accepted that as the way things are.
What? Next thing you know, you’ll be cheating on your blog, guest posting and a having a grand time on other blogs while your blog sits at home. Surely this blog relationship can be saved.
5 Things to Spice Up Your Relationship with Your Blog
Ah, remember when you wrote that first post and you hit publish. It was love. You can feel that again. Here are 10 things you can do to put the romance back into your relationship with your blog.
- Change the header. Changing the header is like getting a blog makeover. You’ll feel like a whole new publisher. Go for a radical difference. It will wake you up to new ideas. It will get the attention of new readers.
- Find 5 ways to clean up things. In fact, clean up all of those things that have been irritating you for some time now. Clean out the closets. Open the windows and let some fresh air go through. Fresh air brings fresh ideas.
- Do 5 days of beginning blogger behavior. Read only blogs you’ve never read before. Take time to comment on every one that says something that you find interesting. Go back to your blog, and post on the new ideas that you found.
- Invite 5 bloggers to guest post. Ask them each to post one a week for five days in a row. Have them post on grand ideas — ask them questions such as what they want to be when they grow up.
- Rewrite your first 5 blog posts. i know this sounds silly. But if you go read them, you’ll see how much history you and your blog have together, and what a great pair you make. Otherwise, how could you possibly have grown so much, and gotten all of the readers, you have since then?
Besides, after a closer look, isn’t your blog just that much nicer than the blog next door?
Liz Strauss
Performancing Metrics Unveiled
Well, we already have a bunch of users. But after a wee bit of testing. I’m inviting everyone to sign up for their free trial of Performancing Metrics. Features are added weekly and we have a great developer working on it all the time.
Feedback is more than welcome. It’s geared toward Mom and Pop Bloggers rather than large A-List type sites. It provides a ton of data, most of it useful.
“Performancing Metrics is a new and unique web analyzer that gives bloggers and smaller web sites a more personal understanding of their visitors. Many analyzers give good summaries, and Performancing Metrics is no different – but the similarities stop there. Performancing Metrics stands out with its refreshingly clean and simple interface, innovative features like Spy and RSS feeds, and an unrivaled per visitor level of detail. You also get real time stats, outbound link tracking, download tracking, and much much more.” ~ About Performancing Metrics
My favorite part is the affiliate program. You will earn 20% of every payment made to us by any user who signs up through your affiliate link and eventually becomes a paying premium member. Additionally, there is a second tier commission of 5%, which means you will get 5% of any payment made to us by your referal’s referals.
Problogger — Don’t Forget the People or They Will Remind You that You Did
When we we’re children, doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like “the terrible twos.” As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.
Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.
Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I’m thinking of today is when I used to think
that being good and smart is everything. Yeah I was that way once.
It could be a stage we all go through.
What Could I Learn from Them?
Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistics, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say “hello.”
In other words, people in their world are as flat as baseball cards.
Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, “problogger,” Search Engines don’t read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn’t stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.
People understand when we don’t care about them.
What’s more interesting is that, if we’re looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.
First some will start to email, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back favors they’ve asked.
Whether we make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn’t really matter. If we treat people as “less than,” they will find a way to let us know. Here are some ways that they choose.
- They stop reading our blogs.
- They tell other folks how they’ve been treated.
- They remove links or stop linking.
- They post about whatever made them feel that way.
Let’s face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can know even other ways that folks remind us they are people.
The fact is if we worry only about beating the system, and ignore the people who read us — we have to wonder why we’re blogging. It hard work to game the system and the gaming process never ends. . . .
But getting loyal readers and having strong relationships makes blogging easier every day.
So much so that I came back to this post — just to write that last sentence.
Liz Strauss
Hey Problogger — if You Forget the People, They’ll Find a Way to Remind You
Doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like “the terrible twos.” As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group, easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.
Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.
Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I’m thinking of today is that people really don’t count only the system does.
What Could I Learn from Them?
Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. They spend their lives gaming the system. They play digg and similar sites. They find ways to link to higher page ranks. They monetize their blogs within a an inch of overweighting the entire Internet. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistice, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say “hello.”
In other words, people in their world aren’t people they are stacks of statistics, flat as baseball cards.
Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, “problogger,” Search Engines don’t read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn’t stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.
People understand when we don’t care about them.
What’s more interesting is that they find a way to let us know.
If we’re looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.
- First some will start to emai, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back faors they’ve asked as our time, our credibility, and our willingness to treat them with respect by telling them what’s going on takes away their generosity of spirit.
- Whether you make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn’t really matter. If you treat people as “less than,” as one-dimensional creatures who are all the same, we are reducing them to some lowef level of the food chain.
- People know when they are being treated as less than people. Smiling from strangeers does not make trust or credibility, especially when the issue is open for the world to read in a cathedral in Scotland.
- They stop reading your blog.
- They tell other folks about what a slick blogger you are.
- They remove your links or stop linking to you,
- They find a way to tell the folks that life without you works for them,
- They tell all of their friends about the negative experience they had while working with or for you.
- They post about whttever neative act you might do or they tell your boss.
Let’s face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can think of even more.
The fact is if you worry only about beating the system, and you ignore the people in it, the people will find a way YEs, you would both know about it and feel that it happened. Hopefully, you’d figured out that the most complexs systems was guilt to serhumans durin hours that personnel didn’t want to work.
So let’s quite puttung people in those tiny little groups and soon enough you’ll be ready so that you can make an appropriate apology and perhaps even start on building a real rapsody of singin each other’s praises.
Liz Strauss
Blog Reboot Session #1: Throughball.com
As I mentioned on Monday, today is the first session of Blog Reboot.
The basic idea behind Blog Reboot is to analyse different aspects of your blog (content, design, monetization, marketing and SEO) and offer advice on how to improve it in these areas. The advice offered here is free, and selection of the site to be reviewed is at our discretion.
The first site being reviewed is Throughball.com – a football (soccer for you Americans) blog run by Josh. In this case, I chose Throughball.com because I’m involved in the same niche myself and understand the challenges a football blogger faces.
So let’s get this started – I’ll be looking at 6 main points – Blog Focus, Content, Design, Monetization, SEO and Marketing.
1. Blog Focus
Who is Throughball.com’s target audience? Are you offering general football news, offbeat footy news, showing expertise in one league?
My view (and I have had Throughball.com on my RSS reader for the last month or so) is that TB is a ‘general’ footy blog without any particular focus. That doesn’t mean that TB doesn’t have a lot to offer – being a football fan (and blogger) I enjoy TB’s coverage but the main reason I read the site is because I run 2 football blogs and I rely on bloggers as much as the mainstream media to find interesting, off-beat news items.
TB is interesting, but it doesn’t have any particular appeal for me as a fan.
You can get away with being a general news site, but for that you need massive resources (or blog 10 hours a day covering all the news until you can earn enough money to hire people and grow). Examples of general footy sites : BBC Football, Guardian Football, Sky Sports.
Competing with the big media isn’t a smart idea – when you’re starting out (TB’s an year old) you want to focus on dominating a narrow niche first and then expanding into a broader, overarching niche if you wish to later on.
Sometimes general football sites work well – CaughtOffside.com is one example – but these guys are facing trouble as well. With so much news being generated everyday, there’s no way you can cover all of it. You have to focus – either pick a club or pick a unique angle.
101greatgoals.com is trying to corner the football videos niche, and doing a good job of it. You probably already know plenty of club-specific blogs – Arseblog is top dog where Arsenal is concerned, UnitedRant for Manchester United, ChelseaBlog for Chelsea, etc.
You have to decide for yourself what you want to focus on, and whether you want to focus on a club or find your own angle to football.
From what I gather, you’re US-based, so catering to US-based football fans (or should I say soccer?) would be an ideal first step. There are some US bloggers writing about football but they try to go after the same UK audience as everyone else.
Bypass all that, hit the US audience, and see what you can offer to them.
2. Design
I put Throughball.com through the blink test and the first thing I noticed was that the post headlines are downplayed because of the AdSense blocks above them and the subscription info in the center of the screen. I’m not saying that you should remove those two items – especially not the RSS subs info – but look at ways to make the post a more prominent part of the page.
One way to do this would be to widen the content area and reduce the space given to the two sidebars. Another way to do this would be to shift the content column to the center and take the first sidebar to the left. If you do that you’ll probably have to change the order of what you’re showing in the sidebars as well.
The 3 column approach isn’t bad, but to make it work you should give as much breathing space to your post / content area as possible.
I’m hoping Liz can add more to this section – Liz?
3. Content
With blogging it’s important to let your voice shine through instead of regurgitating what the mainstream media is printing – TB has a unique voice and viewpoint on football and that definitely helps attract readers.
The three things that I think you might want to look at are:
a) Content focus – this goes back to point 1 and what I’ve said there.
b) Timeless content – this is a bit hard to manage with football sites, but here are a few ideas:
- football videos – think niche and see if you can build archives (even if you’re linking to youtube).
- football images – like it or not, WAGs are popular with footy fans. Be care of copyright issues though.
- non-news items, such as player profiles
- event-related information – are you ready for Euro 2008? For the 2010 World Cup?
- Player transfer records
- Fixture schedules (copyright issues again, but there are ways around them).
I’d suggest that you try to move away from news items now and then and provide info that people can refer to in the future as well.
4. SEO
Your title tags and permalink URLs are fine, which is a great head-start compared to other bloggers. The other main thing blogs miss out on are Meta Description tags – and neither your main site nor individual posts show meta description tags.
Solution: Use the ‘head meta description’ WordPress plugin and follow the instructions on the plugin page. You might want to insert the meta description tag for the main page yourself. For individual posts, it pays to take out a minute and write a brief description in the ‘post excerpt’ box instead of relying on the plugin to insert the first couple of lines of each post as the meta description tag.
Second item on the menu – links. Throughball.com doesn’t show up in Dmoz, or BOTW (as far as I know). Submit to both these directories (BOTW blog submissions are free), and start looking at football-specific directories to see where you can get links from.
Of course, directory links aren’t everything – you also want links from other blogs. The football blogging niche is usually not too keen on linking out – you either have people too concerned with ’sending readers away’ or engaging in circular linking.
The easiest way to get links here is to do blogroll link exchanges, but they aren’t effective at all, so it’s a tough ask.
The second best way is to linkbait the top blogs in your niche. Find bloggers, start reading their sites and get a feel for what type of news / sites they link out to. See if you can write a story that captures the same audience / angle, and once you’ve written it, mail them the link. Chances are, if your piece is good and relevant, they’ll link to it in a future post. You get a new reader, you get an in-context link from a popular blog AND you have a quality post on your blog.
Guest blogging on popular blogs is also a good way to get in-context links (and if you’re looking for blogs to write on, Soccerlens, a fan-based football news site, welcomes new writers (disclosure: I own Soccerlens.com).
Some on-page optimization advice – remove the ‘month-by-month’ archives from your sidebar. You already have the categories listed and from the SE point of view, showing topically-related content is better than showing content segmented by time.
Some more on-page advice – use keywords in your title tags and try to write posts around topics that get searched-for regularly. For example, during last year’s Champions League final my coverage got a lot of SE traffic. Ditto for the upcoming Manchester United vs Europe XI game.
Non-SEO advice – add a help page for the social bookmarking and RSS subscription options to help explain to readers what they are and how to use them.
I find that Newsvine is far better than Reddit or Delicious in sending traffic. Digg works too, but for that you’ll have to make it tech related. Try StumbleUpon as well.
5. Monetization
The fact is – football is not as easy to monetize as gadgets. Here are a few options for you to consider:
AdSense – you’re using AdSense right now but it’s not optimal. I’d suggest removing the sidebar panel (unless you move the centre sidebar to the right) and adding a rectangle ad above the comments in all your posts. You might also want to consider adding link ads instead of the small rectangle you have at the top of the page.
With AdSense you’ll never know what works best until you test. Even then, my personal experience is that in-context, large rectangles convert best, as do horizontal link ads.
Here’s a tip – ads relating to football betting and gambling pay out the most, so you might want to use the ‘google_hints’ optional tag to improve ad targeting. If you don’t know how to do it, email me.
Paid Ads – you already have sponsors, but since I don’t know what you’re earning from them I cant say if it’s good for you or not. You may want to consider Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers to sell link ads on your site.
Affiliates – There are plenty of options for you – football betting sites, football tickets, football jerseys, football equipment, etc. Find out what relates best to your site and audience, then promote them on your site.
Each revenue source doesn’t have to earn you thousands – but a couple of hundred from here and there can add up quite nicely.
6. Marketing
Who do you know in your niche? Are you commenting on / talking to the top blogs / bloggers in the football niche? It’s not what you know, it’s who you know 
In football this is even more evident as something as simple as being the supporter of the same club can get you regular links (and thus a steady stream of traffic and readers).
In football,social media optimization (SMO) means using:
- football videos as marketing tools for your website.
- tech-related football news to leverage Digg.
- old-school word-of-mouth marketing techniques – goes back to ‘who you know’.
Are you listed on NewsNow? It’s full of spam and crap news, but it’s an excellent way to get readers to your website. I’ll be writing about NewsNow optimization some time in the future on BlogFC, so keep a look out for that.
Start guest-blogging on more popular football blogs. Also, invite readers to contribute to your blog (some will, and 1 or 2 will stick around for the long run, and it will make your blogging job a lot easier).
Wrapping Up
Phew…that ran over an hour, didn’t it? I couldn’t go into details about a few things (such as keyword research / link building) because of time constraints, but I hope I’ve covered as much as possible.
I’d love to hear what Liz has to say about design issues, and I’m sure Raj can contribute a fair bit on link bait strategies (hint hint).
Let me know what you guys think about the first Blog Reboot session here at Performancing
Ode to the Women Who Blog
I spend a lot of time surfing the internet, and looking for new blogs to read. I must say that some of my favorite blogs are written by women, and I thought I’d share a few of my “must reads”. These blogs, in my opinion are some of the best in their field, and wanted to recognize some of the best bloggers in the world.
Dooce
For those of you who have never heard the term “dooced” before, you should read what it means. Utah blogger Heather Armstrong contributes in whimsical, sarcastic and sometimes vulgar way on her blog. And I love it. I do have somewhat of a risque side to me, and Heather touches on that almost every day. If you want a taste of how funny she can be, you should read her Frequently Asked Questions page.
Whoorl
Last year, this blog was basically prego mommy meets the OC. Blogger Whoorl (aka Sarah) spent a majority of last year pregnant with her adorable little baby Anders. She’s got a very simple blog layout, which is saturated with some spunk and wit. When I need a break from the real world, I check out to see what kind of recent discoveries of motherhood she’s going through. A fun read, especially for moms.
Building My Empire
I’ve been following this blog for some time now – talk about a woman who’s driven to make money online. Empress, as she calls herself, has been pimping her blog for a while now, and seems to be seeing the fruits of her labor. To be honest, I’ve never seen anyone try so hard to make money online, as she is with affiliate marketing. Loaded with content, her blog is a fine example of how to build a blog online, with the intentions of providing helpful tips, as well as how to make money.
Lastly, I wanted to share a few blogs I’ve seen over the past few months that are being used to showcase work. Many people are using Wordpress to display their portfolios, which is a great way to utilize “blogging” for business. I’ll take that concept a step further in an upcoming article about businesses adding blogs, but for now, here’s a little eye candy created by women bloggers. Phokiss Photography, Expressions by Michelle, Beyond Ordinary are fine examples of photography sites, using creativity to mask their blog.
So if you’re new to the blogging world, take a look at some of these sites – they are successful, and I believe that we can all learn from them. They are really good examples of how to display content, how to encourage interaction and how to be creative with your blog.
The Dangers Of Working At Home – Monitor Your Health
You wouldn’t think that working from home would be such a bad thing, right? I mean, you wake when you want, sleep when you want, work when you want. You can excercise whenever, take a stroll with the dogs, stay out of traffic. What’s wrong with that?
Of course, you have to learn to budget revenue, to deal with the ups and downs of contracts. But if you have a bit of business sense, you should be able to learn that lesson. The more serious issue, which is very easy to forget, is health. Bloggers who work from home seem to be increasingly reporting a variety of health problems, or are more prone to them given the change in lifestyle.
- Flu – though this isn’t due to working at home, bloggers have been reporting serious cases of illness. I was lightheaded for a few hours today, but it passed. Last year, around this time, I was sick for days – something that hadn’t happened to me for as long as I can remember.
- Obesity – I’ve definitely gained weight working at home full-time for nearly a year now. I know it’s bad, it’s just not always easy to do something about it without a concerted effort.
- Diabetes from obesity and inactivity. With diabetes becoming an epidemic, weight is something to watch very closely. I’ve tried to eat less per meal, but sometimes I end up snacking too often since it’s easy to do so at home.
- DVT – Deep vein thrombosis from inactivity or sitting in a cramped position for long hours, over extended periods. If you’re over 40, or have had surgery or recently had a baby or surgery, or are susceptible to any number of risk factors. It’s typically a traveller’s disease but does strike people with sedentary lives.
- Stroke or heart attack from DVT or other reasons.
- Headaches from lack of fresh air.
- Insomnia – especially if you work and sleep in the same room/ studio.
- Hoarseness of throat, due to not speaking all day. Unless you conduct a lot of phone calls from home.
These are only a few ailments that someone working at home could be prone to. That’s not to say that people working offline are not prone, but when you work at home, it’s easy to forget to exercise or even leave the house for fresh air on a regular basis. Now, the question is, how do we remind ourselves to actually take a break when we’re thinking, “I’ll do it in a minute.” Any suggestions? Scheduling your time like a regular job might be the key.
Domaining For Fun And Profit?
Last month, I talked about buying websites for profit and SEO ranking. Of course, you could overdo it and end up with too many blogs. Well, what about investing in domains. I’m talking about domains with no websites attached.
Aviva Directory is a general purpose site with some interesting content. One article, how to get started as a domainer, gives some suggestions on how you can get into domaining, what tools to use, how to pay for it all, and how to make money at it.
The primary difference between blogging and domaining is that the latter does not require as much investment in time, and can be automated to a degree. Domaining can earn you a lot of money, if you do the necessary domain name research, and there are a number of strategies for doing so. Some strategies are getting a bit dated, replaced with newer methods. A few methods:
- Free parking, which brings in contextual ad revenue, split with the parking host. Under this strategy you might only make a few cents per day, but if you have hundreds of domains, you could earn a few hundred dollars or more per month.
- Automated bulk buying, which amounts to buying hundreds of “interesting” domain names and then selling the lot for a small profit per domain.
- Flipping, which is usually done with domains that have been around for a while. You buy it on speculation, thinking that in the near future, it’ll command more than you paid for it.
- Traffic gathering. If you have a weblog or site that covers a general topic, you would have a number of domains whose names would have keywords relating to your site’s topic. Each domain would redirect to the main site. This way, you probably have to rely on type-in traffic.
I’ve only very recently started into domaining and it’s yet to make me a cent – but only because I really haven’t put in the time. If you’re interested, the potential profit can be more than the average blogger might make. Check out the Aviva Directory article for a list of tools, tips and resources. If you’ve been domaining, do you have any tips you can add?
Nightlife Theme
After a lot of work we are proud to announce the release of our first theme Nightlife For WordPress.
It’s a custom creation by Brian Gardner our in house design guru here at Performancing.
This site is your how-to guide for Performancing themes for WordPress, all rolled into one stylish package! By taking advantage of the information offered here, you’ll be able to maximize the potential of this amazing and unique theme.
We want you to enjoy Nightlife as much as we do, which is why we’ve created this site to support the growth and maturation of the themes. Think of this place as a living, breathing set of instructions for Nightlife and other Performancing Themes. You want an answer? Ask a question. You want to contribute? Share the love in the comments, or head on over to the Performancing Community Forum.
Update: Nightlife has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version now.
Introducing Performancing Themes
After a bit of work and some coordinating I’m proud to announce to Performancing Themes, free and ad supported themes for WordPress.
Our first theme was done by our very own Brian Gardner. Head on over to Performancing Themes and download the latest. Our head on over to wordpress themes in our navigation.
You can also get free support for the themes from the Performancing Community Forum. If you download and install it you can also get access to our Performancing Metrics Beta.
Feel free to leave comments if you are a designer and want to contribute, or have suggestions.
