A Tale of Two blogs: You get what you put into it

I recently decided to invest some of the advertising revenue from my blogs to create two new blogs. One, owned by me but written by a legal expert, is about DWI/DUI laws and news. The other, maintained by Yours Truly, is about Celebrity Role Models.

The First Blog: DWI Penalty
The The Celebrity Role Model blog began a week ago. As a celebrity blogger I’ve noticed all of the most popular posts center around stars who forget to wear underwear or do idiotic things like crashing into palm trees or trying to kill themselves. I wondered why we always reward bad behavior and ignore the people who do good stuff – or at least don’t screw up daily. I decided to start a blog centered on the people who use their power for good instead of evil, something I wouldn’t mind my nieces reading.

For this the promotion was a heavier. Though I don’t put as much effort into it as I do my other celebrity blog, I did more than just the usual signature links by submitting certain posts to Lipstick, Smoochr or Digg and by linking to other blogs. The results are amazing. In less than a week I have over 300 visitors, 700 page views, BUT absolutely no revenue. I didn’t expect to earn anything right away, so I’m not upset over the lack of coin. Mind you there are less than a dozen posts there at the moment. I expected more traffic than the DWI blog, but not in the first week. I’m quite pleased with the results.

No Two Blogs are Alike

I find it an interesting contrast. One blog is slowly becoming a success, while the other is racing out of the gate. If there’s any proof to the theory that your blogs are what you put into it, this is it.

Your Blog’s First Week of Content

In past few days we’ve talked a lot about the different steps associated with launching a new blog. Today I want to take this a step further and talk about what content you need to prepare and publish during the first week (or first 2 weeks) of your blog.

Let’s say you want to start a blog covering the popular TV series ‘Heroes’ (2nd season is about to start, and it is a kickass show, so if anyone wants to take this project up PM me and I’ll be glad to help). Here’s how I would write the first 2 weeks of content – or more appropriately, the key ‘resources’ that the blog needs at the time of launch.

Episode Details

Most websites do a sloppy job of covering the episode-by-episode storyline. For Heroes, however, you’ll find that there are detailed entries for every episode in Wikipedia – and since you want to be #1 AND there’s enough room in this niche to reach that spot comfortably, you have to go and do one better than what Wikipedia has done.

This means creating posts for all 23 episodes of the first season and then doing detailed plot summaries, key moments, goof-ups and what not for each episode. It pays in spades if the episode is fresh in your mind, so you should probably watch them again and write afterwards (take 2 a day, that’s about 3 hours of work and you can be done in 12 days).

The shortcut to this is to take everything that Wikipedia offers then edit and add to it, to the extent that the Wikipedia entries start looking like summaries of your pages (I’m serious). Your objective here is to be the best resource possible for Heroes, and while anyone can get the story from a simple plot summary, you’ll have to jack things up a couple of notches to make people notice and talk about you.

Character Details

For each character, you should do a complete storyline starting for the whole season 1 (and then continuing it beyond when the series starts again). It would also pay to write in detail about the character’s background as told by the series and any information gleaned from news sources around the show.

Image Galleries

There are a LOT of people who will have a new interest in Hayden Panettiere and Ali Larter (as well the guys, but I don’t know their real names ), so think of Google Image Search as your best friend and create extensive image galleries for these artists. Read this excellent article on finding images for your blogs, always quote your sources for images and news and use the NextGEN Gallery plugin for WordPress, I haven’t used it myself but from what I’ve seen it’s quite good.

Rumours and Spoilers

No self-respecting TV series blog can go without an active rumours section. Find out the best sources for news and rumours (and spoilers) for Heroes, and get the news ‘out there’ as quickly as possible. It helps, if you’re starting a new blog, to make a list of all the latest rumours and spoilers and put them up as an introductory post.

More

The above should be enough to keep you and your readers busy in the first couple of weeks, but that’s not all there is to it if you want to dominate the niche. For example, content-wise, it’s probably a good idea to check the Heroes entry on Wikipedia and see what you can add and improve on your blog. The greatest advantage you’ll have at this point is that your readers can discuss and give feedback on each page / post and considering how active tv viewers are in forums, launching a forum once you’ve got good traffic going (bbPress or SMF if you ask me) is the next step.

Putting all the things I’ve mentioned together (especially if you ‘borrow’ from existing content) should take you a week’s work, at best. During that time you can easily have someone do some custom graphics for you and customise the latest Performancing theme so that in a week’s time, you are ready to launch your blog.

However, you’ll notice that everything that I’ve mentioned doesn’t really ‘differentiate’ me from any other blog or site claiming to be the ‘#1 resource’ for Heroes. In this case, the ‘resources’ I’ve listed above (and tons of other information that you can put up) are not the difference.

I’ve left the ‘unique angle’ approach open as an exercise, so feel free to come up with any suggestions on a possible ‘unique angle’ and / or anything else that you might suggest to a blogger to do for such a project.

Is your Blog #1 in it’s Niche?

No one starts a blog aiming to be #2 in their niche, or worse, to be completely unknown and an invisible part of the blogosphere.

On the other hand, not many people start with a clear vision and a step-by-step, executable plan to be #1 in their niche. And from the few who do so, hardly anyone stays the course in the first 6 months.

Now before we talk about blog positioning and working to be #1, here’s a question for you: For the last blog that you started, what was your plan to make it #1 in it’s niche / subniche?

There are two ways of being #1:

One: You can use the bulldozer approach, where you go up against established competition and then try to steamroll over them by spending more money, more time, getting more links or just getting dugg more than them.

Two: You find an angle, a facet of the niche that does not have a clear #1 blog, and you jump with both feet in it and from day one, you act as the authority in that niche (and deliver on it).

Usually, the most successful blogs use a combination of the two approaches, and when you ask people about their approach, they are as liable to mention the second approach as they are to mention the first one.

However, in reality, you’ll see the top blogs in any niche use the same strategies and ‘gimmicks’ (if any) to build their readership and to stake their claim as #1. In other words, blogs practice the first method almost exclusively, and we rarely find bloggers who dare to take a ‘unique’ angle to the niche (and by unique I don’t mean a person’s unique thoughts or views on a subject).

What is the most important benefit of being #1?

Who’s the king of blogging?

Who’s the king of search marketing news?

Which domain name registrar is the most popular (not best, but most widely known)?

Which blogging platform is most popular amongst newbie bloggers?

The answers for each should be quick and evident (Darren Rowse, Danny Sullivan, GoDaddy and BlogSpot), and there lies the rub – if your blog is automatically associated, by name, as the primary source of knowledge for a niche, you will have managed what 99% of bloggers will never do.

And you’ll be rich because of it.

I cannot overestimate the importance of aiming for the #1 spot and the value of acheiving that spot.

It goes back to the two paths to being #1 – if you have competition, then option 2, finding a new, different angle, is the best path to go on and one that should dictate all your plans.

If there’s no (or little) competition, or if you’ve already found your unique angle, you need to apply option 1, the bulldozer approach, to wade in and dominate as quickly and as comprehensively as possible.

Position your blog to be the #1 source of information for your target niche. And if you need help in learning how to differentiate your blog, read Chris Garrett’s article on “Positioning Your Blog“.

Go Easy on the Eyes: Use Images in your Posts

A well placed image can make or break your latest blog post. I’m sure it has been mentioned on Performancing many times in the past but I feel this is worth mentioning again as a reader, I continue to be confronted with screen after screen of unrelenting text.

Although many of us read for leisure, reading is not necessarily an easy thing to do, particularly if it is screen based reading. Screeds of text can be exhausting, both physically and mentally. Images within a blog post help to break up the flow of the text which, strange as it might sound, actually helps to improve the flow of your blog.

That’s enough of the why you should use images. Now it’s on to where you can find them.

It is preferable you don’t just yank photos from any old site, just because you like the image. Apart from the copyright issues, it is also tad rude. Having said that, it can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to get images from a corporate source. It is amazing how many places release press releases without an image or do not have have some images available for reporting purposes. Apple’s PR is a good example of how to do this well. Use PR images where you can. The quality is almost always excellent and formatted with online use in mind.

Another good source of cheap, good quality images are stock photo places like iStockPhoto. This gives you easy and quick access to a wide range of photos at an accessible price. Just be sure to check the licensing agreements as these change from service to service.

If you are like me and either too cheap or can’t afford to pay for blog fodder, Flickr is your friend. The default license for Flickr photos is a Creative Commons one. Remember that this is only the default license and many uploaders choose to reserve their rights so check the status before you use any pictures. The best option (and my own little secret weapon) is the Flickr advanced search. The advanced search lets you select only Creative Commons pictures. As an advanced tip, sort by “interesting” rather than “relevant” for some images you might not have ever thought to use but once you’ve seen them, you can’t imagine ever not using them.

As always with images, please be sure to attribute appropriately (and in the case of Flickr, please also respect the Community Guidelines).

With those tips above, there is no reason not to regularly use images to spice up your valuable written content on your blogs. Remaining easy on your readers’ eyes improves the chances that they will come back for more.

b&w tired eye originally uploaded to Flickr by izzie whizzie. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license.

Selective (Back) Networking: Kiss A Little Ass

Debng recently wrote of the importance of social networking. It’s true. Successful probloggers are the ones who find ways to engage their readers, and enter into long-running conversations with the greater internet community (rather than spitting out monologues).

I want to suggest that there’s another form of networking that most bloggers don’t know the first thing about or completely ignore.

I call it selective (back)networking and here’s the idea: the internet is just like any other human network. There are hierarchies of authority. If you want to be successful, you need to move up the hierarchy.

That probably sounds a bit disconcerting to some of the “democratic nature of the web” idealists out there, but there is no denying that power gets collected and wielded on the webernet. So how much power do you have?

See, what Deb says in her article is so very true. You need other people to be successful. But your network should not be an egalitarian one. Not all internet friends are created equal. Don’t deceive yourself.

The key to building a (back)network is to intentionally and selectively seek out people who 1) have power and leverage 2) are smart and capable and 3) are fair in their online relationships. By building up a social “backbone” of good friends in high-places, you’ll be able to execute your plans a lot faster, realize profit a lot quicker, and avoid burn-out a lot easier (ten shoulders are better than one).

“But Ryan Caldwell, you’re already successful. What about those of us who are just getting started?”

Suck up and kiss ass.

That’s it. That’s how you get into my good graces. Start doing me favors and I’ll send some love your way. Ask me to do you a favor before you’ve proven your worthiness to me, and I’ll ignore you. Completely and utterly ignore you. But if you’ve got something to offer me, something that I truly benefit from…then you’ve got a friend.

That’s how things work. I hate to speak the truth when it hurts a little. But it’s gotta be spoken. People use each other. That’s a fact. But this setup can be mutually benefitial and mutually rewarding.

The trick to building a selective (back)network is to identify people that you want as part of your social backbone. Bend over backwards to show that you’ve got something worthwhile to offer. And pretty soon your load will be lightened. You’ll be in good company.

So if you’re just starting out here’s my advice: kiss a little ass. The payoff is huge.

Is a good domain name as important as good content?

Domain names and quality content go hand in hand – it’s not a case of one over the other, rather it’s a case of getting both together to make a kick-ass blog.

However, depending on which stage you are at in your blog’s life-cycle, each factor will have a different role to play and understanding that role can help you make your blog more successful.

In the short run, right after launch perhaps, the name of the blog is perhaps one of the most important selling and branding elements available to the blogger. You can do more and go further with a good name and average content as opposed to an average name and good content (I’m talking about short-term results, the first few days or weeks after a blog’s launch). Since it’s a new blog, people will give you some leeway when it comes to product quality. However, if you are average in your brand (name), people won’t remember you as easily as they would remember the other blog with the cool name.

In the long run, however, product quality always trumps the ‘cool’ name. So while having a good name will help you in the beginning, in the long run you can have a successful blog by taking an average name (not a bad name though) and build a brand around it simply by consistently providing your readers with quality content.

So how important is the blog name and blog branding for you?

Looking for a Blog Name? Ask your Brain Trust

In Chris Garrett’s article, “How to choose a perfect blog name“, he talks about the difficulties of selecting domain names (especially since the good ones seem to be all taken) and suggests strategies on how to pick a good blog name.

One of the things Chris mentions is the different characteristics of a good domain name:

1. Readable
2. Pronounceable
3. Spellable
4. Memorable
5. Concise
6. Unique

Now while it’s easy to recognise a good domain name and then identify why it’s good, it’s much harder to generate such a name (I’ll deal with the options of buying domain names in a future article). Let’s face it – some people are not great at thinking up of cool / memorable domain names, while others can do it naturally.

Personally, I’m average or slightly above-average when it comes to picking names (I can recognise winners but find it much harder to think of them). I have a friend though, a fellow blogger, who’s quite good at brainstorming for domain names and there have several occassions in the last year or so when we have chatted simply picked excellent domain names out of thin air.

What I’m getting at is that you will have, in your circle of friends or acquaintances, someone who is naturally creative and clever and as a result is good at picking names, taglines, ideas for logos, etc. Just like you would think of your SEO friend or your PHP expert as being part of your brain trust, the guy who helps you brainstorm is and should be a key part of your brain trust.

We spend so much time and energy after finding domain names, that sometimes we forget that it’s much easier to ask for help from the right person.

Do you have a ‘brain trust’ that you bounce ideas off or have success brainstorming with? If you don’t, maybe it’s time you started.

Understanding the difference between ‘Resources’ and ‘Blogs’

When you are planning a new blog, the first thing you do is define your purpose. Why are you blogging?

Once you answer that question, a rough image starts to build your mind about how your blog would be like. One of the key distinctions at this point that you’ll be making is figuring out how much of your blog is going to be a traditional resource (timeless content) and how much of it is going to be a blog (updated news and a collection of (almost) daily thoughts).

To make things clearer, suppose that we are setting up a blog on … dating advice. Notoriously tough niche to get into but considering the ultra-popularity of it, why not? After you select your topic, you move on to the content that you are going to put up on your blog.

And here’s the rub – there’s only a finite set of topics (basic or advanced) that you can talk about and give advice on in any niche. You may go deep into subthemes but on the whole, there’s a limited amount of foundational topics that you can start off on and write about.

And these topics can be covered in a finite number of articles – 100, 200, 300, maybe 500 – depending on the size of your niche.

Sidenote: I would expect some strong opposition on this point, and it’s warranted. Yes, if you want to, you can write an infinite amount of content on any given topic. However, in a realistic setting, and keeping in mind that because you’re setting up a blog to make money for it, you would have chosen a relatively ‘tight’ niche and not something as generaly as technology (if you have, then it’s a different process and I promise to discuss that angle further in the next post). In such a case, you have a limited number of things that you can talk about. You might want to rewrite them and add new slants to them, but there comes a time when you run out of new topics to talk about and therefore you have to back through your list and find those new slants to freshen things up with.

So immediately your blog now has two different orientations when it comes to content. On one hand, you have this ‘resource’ need to fulfill and quite definitely your blog needs its flagship / timeless content if you want it to become an authority blog.

On the other hand though, there’s a need for the conversation to be kept going, for readers to be regularly engaged and for the blog to do more than just inform. Your blog is not a just a book or a means to archive knowledge, it’s a conversation as well. So you’ll be balancing the need to add resource articles with the need to discuss the latest developments, valuable information on other blogs, fostering debate and discussion, etc.

For timeless niches (topics where last year’s knowledge is not “out of date” – self-help is one example of a timeless niche), the balance tilts towards ‘resources’ and away from the ‘what’s happening today’ type of blogging – and as a result your approach to building that blog should be different as well.

Just because you are using WordPress does not mean that you should be updating your blog with fresh content every 12 hours. You could (in the case of timeless niches, you SHOULD) follow Nick Wilson’s advice on building ‘Self Sustaining Blogs‘, establish a foundation for your site by writing 100-300 articles on your target keywords and topics, and then using both reader feedback (as Nick suggests) and ‘regular’ updates via blog or mailing list (always good to capture email addresses and build a targeted list) to keep your blog going forward.

It may happen that after the initial burst of content (which can be pre-written and/or taken from ‘private label rights’ services such as PLRPro), you only need to put up 1 blog post a week, and that too in a roundup format discussing what’s happening in the world and on the Internet with respect to your niche.

Bottom line – learn to differentiate whether your chosen niche is biased towards ‘resources’ or ‘fresh updates’, and structure your blog accordingly.

Do You Use Your Own Name While Blogging?

Bloggers practice varying levels of privacy when revealing personal information on their blogs. Some people are comfortable revealing their names, contact information and pretty much everything else, while others can go to the opposite extreme, use pseudonyms and in general be very protective of their identity.

In many cases privacy concerns arise out a greater fear of revealing too much personal information in case someone decides to come after you in anger (if you think that’s ridiculous, you haven’t been the target of such incidents – it’s very real, if not frequent).

However, as professional bloggers, there’s also another concern – do we want our names attached to our most controversial opinions / most personal thoughts?

I wrote about this last year in an article on managing reputation in which a lot of people gave good advice on how to deal with a situation where your personal blog can become a liability when people search for you online (especially if they’re looking to hire you).

In the comments, a Performancing reader linked to an article he’d written in 2005 about the same problem, albeit from a different perspective. Of note:

I remember telling someone at a dinner party years ago how, “Even though it’s after work, and we’re friends, for better or for worse, I still represent my employer, right now.” The response was an incredulous, “Are you serious? How can that be?” I went on to explain that, “If I act like a fool, you will form the opinion that my employer hires fools. If I act unethically or immorally, you will form the opinion that my employer hires unethical or immoral people. If you are a customer of my company, or were considering being one, or you yourself work for a company who is a customer, how would this impression influence your decision or recommendation to do business with my company?” From the pause that followed, I could tell that he got the point. Even though I was “just an individual contributor” working for a large corporation, I was representing my company even when I wasn’t working, even in times that many people would consider my own very private, personal time. And this was long before blogs existed, let alone popular.

He’s absolutely right – just as a person you are responsible for your own actions, you are also responsible for how your actions and words reflect on the people associated with you – whether they are your family, your co-workers, your employers (or employees) or even your religious or social community.

You might not like it, and you might not judge other people this way, but that is how most people make quick decisions and form biases. It’s not just about blogs, it’s about how we are in our daily lives.

But getting back to blogs, this raises an interesting question – I have a strong desire to use my own name everywhere and not ‘hide’ behind pseudonyms, but several times this policy has gotten me in trouble (a case of mistaken identity, or just because someone read something on my personal blog that they didn’t agree with).

The underlying lesson is that if you are pushing to use your own name and reveal personal information online (or anywhere else), you have to be prepared for the consequences and own up to what you say (whether it’s on your blog, in the comments of another blog, a forum thread, in a conference or even an email). Otherwise, you are best off by using a pseudonym or hiding your identity as much as possible. I used to think that it was the cowardly thing to do, but it’s not about being brave or not, it’s just a decision you have to make about which set of consequences you are willing to live with.

So what about you? Do you use your own name everywhere online (especially when you’re blogging), or do you take on a pseudonym and play it safe?

What’s Broken On Your Blog?

A few days ago I happened to be browsing through my blog, looking for some articles I had written last month. As it happens, I hit the category archives, but to my surprise it was showing ONLY the latest 15 articles. No links at the bottom of the page to older posts in that category, nothing.

I use the WP Page-Navi plugin, which allows you to show a full list of archive pages for that category on each archive page. Apparently that plugin had been deactivated by mistake (I can only guess that I had disabled another plugin that was sitting just above it a month or two ago and had click on the wrong link by mistake).

Bottom line – A simple act of carelessness made most of my site’s archives (almost) completely unavailable to readers and search engines (luckily, my archives page lists all posts on the site, so there was at least one way for crawlers to get there).

It made me wonder what other things might be broken on my blog (and on other blogs), and how often we let our blog management go unattended and let small errors like these creep in (especially in design – read Shane’s post on virtual clutter).

We’ve talked before about the need for doing monthly ‘blog reboots’ to your blogs to evaluate your progress and highlight how you can further improve your blog. It would be wise to add a ‘audit’ section in which you look specifically at what things are broken or have gone downhill from the last month.

After all, you don’t want to be in a situation where no one can read your site’s archives.