Is This Linkbait?

Regular readers of Perfomancing probably already known what linkbait is: an article that for some reason generates loads of traffic social media sites and backlinks from other websites. Linkbait can arguably be divided into two categories: (1) useful and (2) novel/ interesting. Sometimes linkbait is both.

Seth Godin gives a nutshell, positive definition of linkbait that makes it sound easy and fun to do. And it can be. But look at the example that he gave, Web Trend Map 2008. Which category is it in? Is it actually useful? It’s definitely novel, displaying popular websites clustered like stations in a subway map. But because of that very presentation, I don’t really find the paradigm that useful. It’s rather hard to absorb the map as a whole.

Subway maps are useful because a person using one is interested in getting to from point A to point B. They’ll mentally filter out all the distractions – i.e., all the other subway stations. This Web Trend Map cannot really be used for analogous purpose because there’s no real-world physical relationship for the clusters, so it might be hard for some people to follow.

My point is that it’s easy to come up with web content that give the semblance of “linkbait” but isn’t really.

Now at the time of writing this, the map itself only has five diggs at Digg. Will it get more? Do you think it’s effective linkbait?

Here is a Method That is Helping Bloggers Become More Unique

Be unique.

Don’t be like everyone else.

If you’ve been reading up on blogging tips for a while, you’ve probably heard at least one of the above sayings.

No matter how you say it being unique can help you succeed. More people are jumping on the internet and trying to make money online. The internet is get more and more crowded. Niches that used to have low competition are now saturated with many sites vying for the same eyeballs and dollars.

Also, getting people’s attention is will only get more difficult as webmasters get more savvy with marketing and monetization strategies. By being unique, you can avoid being unnoticed.

Yet many blogs are simply clones of the most popular blogs in their niche. Think of the many TMZ clones out there. How many bloggers are trying to copy John Chow or Darren Rowse? I’m not too familiar with the tech blogosphere, but I bet there are many Engadget clones.

Here is the huge problem with clones. Why would someone go to a clone blog over the popular blog? If I’m a tech fan, why would I go to an Engadget clone blog if I can go to Engadget. There’s no point in me going to clone blog if I can get the same information on Engadget.

Now that we’ve established the importance of being unique, here is a simple method to help you avoid being a copycat blogger.

Create A “Buck The Trends” List

It’s a simple two-step process.

First, think of the trends and practices in your niche. Then, consider ways you can do things differently from those trends and practices. Also, make sure your actions will add value to your niche.

I did this simple exercise for a new blog that I’m starting in a couple of days. It’s in a gaming niche. Here are four trends in my niche and the things I plan to do to make my blog different.

1. Lower The Post Length

Current Trend
The average post length is 2000 to 4000 words.

How I’ll Buck The Trend
Write shorter posts – around 300 to 700 words. With short posts, I can reach the casual gamers as well as the gamers with short attention spans.

2. Use Video To Cover Subtopics

Current Trend
Video is not widely used. I only know of two regularly updated video blogs. One is a variety show with mostly news and interviews but not much strategy tips. The other one is filled with screencasts of actual games. There are two formats, or ways to play the game. The second video blog only covers second format.

How I’ll Buck The Trend
Create at least two videos a month. By using video, I’ll stand out from most of the sites. Plus, my niche demographic visits YouTube often, so there is definitely an untapped audience. I’ll differentiate myself from the other video blogs by focusing on strategy tips rather than news and by producing screencasts with actual games from the first format instead of the second format.

3. Link Out Liberally

Current Trend
Links don’t flow freely at all. Most of the sites in my niche are old static sites. They are operating under the old assumption that you should not link to your competitors. However, it’s better to make your competitors your friends and share traffic by linking to each other. The blogs seem to be copying the old static sites by not linking out.

How I’ll Buck The Trend
Link out like a loose lemon. Linking out is a good tactic for many reasons. People can save time by just going to my blog to find out important information from other sites. Also, I’ll be able to network more effectively because I’m helping other webmasters.

4. Create And Market An Email Newsletter

Current Trend
There are only a few email newsletters. They are run by the ecommerce sites so they’re filled with product pitches. None of them are marketed well. For example, the newsletters don’t have prominent places on the main pages of the sites. They’re on the sidebar or footer with a bunch of other links.

How I’ll Buck The Trend
Build a list. Also, mention it in my blog posts and link to it on a prominent place on my static home page. I won’t be selling anything for a couple of months so my newsletter will not have product pitches for a while. A big email list is one of the best long term assets any online business can have. If someone gives you their email address, you’ve got their attention long term. You can inform and sell to them over and over again.

Your Turn

Ok, so you’ve seen my list of unique actions. Why don’t you do exercise to see if you really have a unique blog or just a clone? If you create a “Buck The Trends” list and post it on your blog, send me a private message (you have to be logged in; click here to register if you don’t have an account) and I’ll link to your list from this post.

Please write at least 300 words and make sure to have at least 3 trends and unique actions on your list.

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 4: Making Your Blog Stand Out

It’s relatively easy to track the conversation of top blogs in your chosen niche and generate topic ideas. It’s another thing altogether to have your blog standout amongst all those already in your niche. Joining the conversation does not mean just following trends but contributing something new, with the hopes of building an authority site yourself.

That’s a goal that I’m currently working towards on a few of my current projects, and I’m studying various approaches. Cribbed from my notes, here are some tips to consider.

1. Lead, don’t follow. Sounds obvious, but after browsing through a hundred posts, it’s often easier just to write a list of links to other bloggers’ posts. Except everyone does them (myself included). Try to be a unique blogger.

2. Enhance links posts. If you’re going to write a links post, make it more valuable. Turn it into a resource list.

3. Enhance summaries. If someone blogs about a particular topic, don’t just summarize their conversation and link to them, enhance the conversation. First summarize several related posts to get the gist of the current/recent conversation. Now write an original post and link to all relevant recent posts that you summarized.

4. Have parallel conversations. Don’t blog exactly the same thing as everyone else. If a post inspires you, maybe there’s a related subtopic that has not been well-addressed in your niche yet. You can launch off from what other blogs are saying. (I believe Darren Rowse talked about this in late 2006 or early 2007, but I can’t find it on Problogger.)

5. Create authority content. Depending on your niche, this could be an article series, tutorials, giant resource lists, or anything else that demonstrates what you know about a topic. Article series have added link value because if you do them properly, the posts will be interlinked – which some SEs (Search Engines).

6. Have a mix of post lengths. Blogs in some niches do best (in terms of traffic) if they have 10-20 short posts per day. Such blogs usually build their authority by creating a dialogue in the comments of their posts, or via a forum, not solely from indepth articles. (Though sometimes they rely solely on promotion on niche social voting sites.)

If you’re not in any such a niche, your authority probably has to be built with indepth content. However, that doesn’t mean you cannot mix in shorter posts daily. Personally, if I plan to be a regular reader of a blog, I prefer a mix of several short posts and 1-3 indepth posts per day.

7. Add visual media. Visual content is sorely lacking in the blogosphere. Sure, some sites have lots of it, but most sites have none. It’s not necessary in every post, but adding an image, illustration, diagram, mindmap, chart, video, or a slideshow to occasional posts helps your blog stand out visually. Some SEs also give such content more authority. Just make sure you optimize by using apropriate tag/title text.

8. Link to authority sites. This is purely my opinion, but I’m sure most SE algorithms prefer it… If your blog is new, point most of your external links to authority sites in your niche. That doesn’t mean NEVER link to other new sites or sites in other niches, but keep their collective percentage low compared to authority outbound links in your content. The other reason for doing this is that if you link to relevant authority sites that have trackbacks turned on, you’ll eventually gain additional natural and search engine traffic.

9. Refine your audience target. This is arguable. Do you want to write what you want, or do you want to refine your blog to target the people who seem to be regulars? That’s up to you, but if you want to refine, you need to know your audience and define a portrait of them.

These tips are simply my assessment so far of how to build an authority site from scratch – an effort I’ve been involved in for only a handful of sites. My feelings about any particular approach might change in a year.

Have you built an authority site? Have used any of the above tips yourself? Did they work?

Stop Spamming My Blog

I’m all about the link love. I don’t mind adding relevant links to my blogroll and I like to offer a week ending link love post on most of my blogs. That’s why it really annoys me when visitors comment just to spam. I’m not talking about the bots, I’m talking about regular visitors to my blog. Most commenters are smart. They can figure out there’s a space on most comment forms for which to leave links. Some don’t get it or don’t care.

I’m pretty easy. I don’t mind if something on your blog will add to the discussion on my blog. In which case you can state your point of view in the comments and afterwards invite people to check the link. When your only comment is a link to your blog, it’s not going to make it past the moderation filter.

Recently one of my regulars left this comment on more than one occasion:
“This site is entirely too serious. You need to come to (blog name here) for a good laugh.” How is that contributing to the conversation? Another one of my regulars only comments unless she can plug one of her own blog posts or articles. “You have a point Deb, but as I wrote the other day in my article entitled…” To me this is akin to my going to someone’s party and telling the guests, “This party sucks. Come to my house for a better time.” It’s rude.

Anyone who knows me knows I got to this point because of shameless self promotion. I never spammed a blog or forum with links though. I might drop a link now and then on a forum if it’s relevant to a conversation or I’m invited to do so, but otherwise, no spam. It would never occur to me to visit another blog and only leave a link to my blog, either.

If you want people to visit your blog, there are several ways to get their attention:

• Leave an intelligent, relevant comment on another blog and drop your link only in the designated space.
• Participate in forums in your niche and leave a link in the signature line.
• Offer to guest post for another blog.
• Write good, useful content and others will take notice.

Right now, my comments are set up so a new visitor’s first comment or any comments with a link in the body are sent to the moderation filter. I’m amazed by how many of the same people try and spam my blog over and over again rather than creating a buzz with a good comment.

If you know me, you know I don’t mind giving out the link love. Just don’t spam my blog.

When Comments Go Bad

Are there blogs you read where you completely ignore the comments? I noticed today around half of my blog reads have lousy comment areas. On the other hand there are one or two blogs where the comments are part of the appeal.

You can recognize the poor ones right away. They looks something like this:

• “Buy Pills!”
• “Me-too”
• “Nice post”
• “Link Link Link Link”
• “Irrelevant off topic nonsense”
• “SEO Real Estate Chicago Lawyer”

If your comment area looks like this what can you do?

Obviously the spam and the sneaky link dropper has to go. If you neglect that job then there is little point in working on any other aspect. Also jump on any kind of comment abuse or blatant link drops. Keeping one spammer happy is not worth it if you are annoying the rest.

Next you need to actually engage your readers in discussion. Ask leading questions. If your questions can only be answered with a single word answer consider a poll instead. You want people to expand on your conversation, not simply agree to it.

If you want a master class in comment management, take a look no further than Liz.

Don’t expect comments to magically transform overnight, it is a gradual culture change.

Are any blogs comment areas (or lack of) getting you mad? What do you do to create a better comment culture? Have you had any success in growing your quality comment count? Have you given up on comments entirely?

Please share … in the comments

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Don’t Be Afraid to Edit Archived Blog Posts

A few days ago, I posed the question Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language? In hindsight, only an hour after posting, I realized that I missed an opportunity and made a mistake with that article. It should have been formatted/ massaged into being part of my current series, Joining a Niche Conversation. The question is, should I have edited it and changed the title after I had already posted it live?

The article generated a fair bit of response, but it might have provided more value to the series than on its own. For example, had it been titled “Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Avoiding Communication Breakdown,” it might have contributed to the series’ synergy. In the latter form, it would have to be tighter and maybe contain a summary and a bullet list.

It was an oversight on my part. I’d already produced a loose outline for the series, but had not included rules of grammar as a topic. Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t go back and edit the article. This question has come up amongst members of The Hive, Performancing’s new authority forum: should you edit archived blog articles?

Here are a few considerations:

1. Website content gets edited. Why not blog content?
2. What impact will changing blog content have?
3. Is it worth the effort of editing archived posts? What value
4. Is it okay to change the title?
5. Should you change the URL?

You’ll have to answer #3 yourself, but I see no reason not to edit archived content to improve it. Improving your blog content can only be good, right? Likewise, there’s very little negative effect in improving a title. Still, you need to consider this:

1. Does your blog platform auto-generate URLs using the post title?
2. If you change the title, what happens? Will the platform change the URL? If so, will the old page cease to exist? If not, can you easily delete it? If not, do you have a means of redirecting the old URL to the new URL? (Assuming you don’t know how to write .htaccess rules.)

So the only problem I see with editing archived content is whether or not a new URL is generated. If you’re using something like WordPress, it’s not an issue. If you’re using, say, Drupal (which Performancing is on), then it is, but you can manually resolve the URL issue – though only if you have administrative privileges.

Ultimately, I did not edit my article because of time constraints. And now that Part 3 is the article you’re reading, it’d get too complicated. Providing you’re not inserting/ deleting articles from a series, editing your archived content is something to consider for those days when you can’t come up with fresh content.

Have you ever edited your archived content? If so, did you find it was worthwhile?

21 Ways to Build a Better Blogger

When we talk about ‘creating’ better blogs, there’s an underlying assumption that it’s only the blog that needs improving.

The reality is, us bloggers could use a huge kick up the ass once in a while as well. We get sloppy, we sometimes let our standards slide and worst of all, when it comes to making improvements we look at external factors, not ourselves.

Last month I started compiling a list of ’strategies’ to improve my own blogging – I’m sharing that list here. We can’t become better bloggers overnight – it takes a lot of hard work, just like a blog – but like working on a blog, the best results are achieved when you stick to it and work at it for a long time.

1. Create a Commitment to your Blog – and then keep it

In simple terms: right now, someone else who is just as smart as you is working hard to get their blog to the top. They’re committed to the vision they’ve set for their blog, and they’re doing whatever it takes to make it a reality.

The big question is, why aren’t you?

Find that one target for your blog that you are willing to work the most for, and then get busy doing it.

2. Focus on the Conversation on your Blog

Blogging is a one-to-many medium, but smart bloggers know who to turn it into an active group conversation between the readers and themselves. This requires the ability to communicate effectively – and it’s something that us bloggers can train ourselves to do better.

If you want to engage your readers and improve the conversation on your blog, you have to a) be clear, b) refocus your attention towards the audience and c) become credible.

3. Don’t Settle For Being Good Enough

If you’re a good writer (and a good communicator), you should be able to talk the talk when it comes to blogging about a particular subject.

But can you walk the walk? For a blogger dealing with subjects that involve practical application (self help, any skills-based area (SEO, web design, wood-working, photography, fitness, self defense, etc), competence in your chosen field goes a long way in establishing your credibility.

4. Love Your Blog, Love Your Blogging

A blogger’s passion for his subject and his blog shines through his writing. If you have passion, your words will carry conviction, your ideas will be persuasive and you will come across as someone who cares about his work. Without passion it’s quite hard to maintain the drive and energy needed to work on a blog day in and day out (not all of us are blessed with god-like self-discipline).

And if you’ve lost your passion one day (it happens to the best of us), here’s how (and why) you can continue blogging without losing your step.

5. Be Positive and Trust Yourself

Blogging is a tough gig. It takes a lot of time and hard work to be successful and if that wasn’t enough to make you glum, there is always a snarky commenter or two (or hundreds) lurking around who have little else to do but send negative thoughts your way.

It’s easy to throw in the towel when the going gets tough, however if you approach blogging with the knowledge that a) it will be tough and b) your reaction to problems (and therefore the likelihood that those problems will be solved) will depend on your attitude, it becomes clear that you have to stay positive.

Successful people don’t get to where they are by accepting defeat when they get knocked down. Dust yourself off, get back up and go at it again. It sounds a bit cheesy, yes, but as long as you believe in what you’re doing and believe in your own ability to make your blog a success, you’ll do fine.

6. Problem Solving

There are two kinds of people – those who deal with their problems and those who use them as an excuse not to move ahead in their lives.

This doesn’t mean that you turn into a robot – in fact I would strongly recommend having channels / avenues through which you can vent about your problems. It helps to clear your head and to focus on the solutions instead of your emotional reaction to it.

However, if you’re not dealing with your blogging problems intelligently, you’re just holding yourself (and your blog) back from it’s true potential. Find a solution, outsource it if you have to but fix it if it’s important (and stop worrying if its not).

7. Take More Risks

Part of the philosophy of giving a project your 100% every day is that you are always pushing for improvements. At one time or the other, this push will require you to take risks, and it is at this point in time that you will feel the most resistance, when you will find it most difficult to ‘bring your A-game’ to the table.

Look at your blog and your blogging efforts and pinpoint the risks that you’ve been avoiding for the last few weeks or even months. Pick one of these risks, discuss the options with your friends and family (or people who know your business) and if it’s the right thing, do it.

8. Learn the Art of Self-Promotion

Self-Promotion is something most of us are uncomfortable with – and it’s not just the prospect of ’selling’ that turns us off, in reality its insecurity (cleverly dressed as modesty) that holds us back.

As a blogger – whether you want to promote your own services or you’re promoting your blog – you have to learn to blow your own horn. No one else will be doing that for you, so celebrate your success (small or big), talk up your achievements and put yourself firmly in the minds of your readers (and anyone else who wants to listen).

9. Sharpen Your Focus

You’ve heard many bloggers talk about how you should ‘focus’ on a few key projects. Trouble is, not everyone intuitively knows exactly how to turn that ‘focus’ knob up to 100%, and even if you know how to do that, what do you focus on?

The two keys to having a clear focus in your blogging are ‘priorities’ and ‘concentration’. If you have priorities but no concentration (like me), you’ll know what to do but never get anything done because you’ll get distracted all the time. On the other hand, if you have concentration but no clear grasp of your priorities, you will be excellent in something but won’t make much progress (because you’ll be focusing on the wrong things).

10. Instill Character In Your Blog

Character in a blog means:

• Delivering on what you promise
• Doing what you do to the best of your ability
• Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success

You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.

Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.

11. Adopt Othermindedness to be more Charismatic

The four steps to being more charismatic on your blog:

• Be Passionate and Positive
• Expect the Best of People
• Give People Hope
• Share Yourself

When it comes to being charismatic, the bottom line is othermindedness.

12. Give More to Get More

If you’ve read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini (highly recommended), you’ll know that ‘Reciprocity’ is one of the six key ways to influence people (the others are: Commitment / Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity). When you give first, you create a subconscious debt on the other person’s conscience which they will feel the need to repay or risk suffering from guilt. It’s how we are socially wired.

What we’re NOT socially wired to do is to give first and ask later – in fact, we’re selfish (like it or not) and do exactly the opposite. If you want to succeed as a blogger, want to grow your blog and want to do both of these things super-fast, bite the bullet and invest in your future. The relationships you build as a result, with your readers and your friends, will be the foundation for your rapid growth in the future.

13. Go For Broke

They say that “good things come to those who wait” – and while I value patience, it has its place and it is often a convenient rationalisation for people who are afraid to take risks. There are times when you have to grab the bull by the horns and attack an opportunity with full strength.

In simple terms…you can’t wait for opportunities to knock on your door. You have to put yourself out there, put your blog out there, and make sure that you’re first in line when any opportunity comes up. You’ll take risks. You’ll make mistakes. But you’ll be much better off at the end of it than when you started, which is where you would have stayed stuck if you hadn’t moved in the first place.

14. Learn the Art of Listening

As bloggers our job is to talk – we talk to our readers, we talk to advertisers, we talk to our employees, we talk smack with competitors – it’s pretty much a full-time talking job, blogging.

However, in all this talking we need to find the time to shut up and listen to the people around us – to learn what they want, to learn from their suggestions, criticisms and support, and to spot ideas in what they do and say. Listening to others (and more importantly, to the right people) gives you the kind of knowledge few people can hope to attain, and with that comes the ability to do make a genuine difference in your own life and that of others.

15. Build Relationships

We all know that it’s important to build relationships as bloggers but do you do it unconsciously or do you take out time each day to dedicate to networking?

Some of us are naturally better networkers than others. For the rest of us, it would be advisable to take out time every day and spend it on networking. Whether you do your relationship-building through forums, social networks or person to person, it’s important that you take out at least an hour a day for it.

Like almost everything else in blogging, it won’t pay off immediately but once you’ve been doing it for some time the results will bring in many blogging and money-making opportunities and you’ll start getting a lot of help in your blogging efforts.

16. Learn Your Trade

We’re not talking about being competent in your area of interest; learn your trade as a blogger. You don’t have to be a crack designer but you need to know basic design principles and understand aesthetics. You don’t have to be a WordPress guru but it pays to understand how themes and plugins work and how you could work with them in a cinch.

Monetization, SEO, networking – learn the skills and tools of your blogging trade, and you’ll invariably improve as a blogger.

17. Vision

A top blogger without vision is like a top athlete running at full speed backwards on the track. He may be the fastest (and you may be the best at what you do), but if he doesn’t know what his prime objective is, he’ll keep going in circles.

The same goes for you as a blogger. Define your vision, understand it and integrate it in your life – you need to know where you are going, and you need to keep it in mind whenever you work on your blog.

18. Know When to Stick or Fold

Sticking to your guns (self-confidence) and working hard on a project when the going gets tough are admirable traits, and worth cultivating. However, as a blogger you must also know when to cut your losses and move on.

Your decision may be based on your financial situation, the amount of time you have available, new opportunities knocking on the door, etc. Whatever you base your decisions on, don’t base them on your emotional attachment to a blog, or your ego which tells you that you can do everything at same time.

19. Stop Controlling Everything

If you’re really good at what you do (writing, monetization, design, SEO, etc), you might get stuck in a pattern of trying to do everything yourself.

As a pro blogger, you don’t have the time to handle all the writing, the design, the research, the promotion and administration of your blog yourself. Outsource as much as you can (you can always outsource your blogging chores for free), hire help so you can get more work done.

20. Patience

What you’re working on now will not pay off tomorrow but in a few months. What you accomplish this month will pay you back 10x in one year.

The effect of cumulative growth is stunning, but to reap the full benefits you have to be (you guessed it) patient.

This doesn’t mean that you should sit back and wait – no, patience here means being patient with results, not with your efforts (you should still be going for broke).

21. Have Fun

The good thing about self employment is that you can choose to have fun on your own time, on your own terms. Take time off from your blog (not too much time!), change the pace on your blog (write something light hearted once in a while) and most importantly, if you find yourself thinking that your blogging is a chore, step back and re-evaluate what you are doing.

Bonus #1: Self Discipline

You’re not going to last a day as a professional blogger if you cannot discipline yourself to practice new habits and improve your blogging consistently.

Bonus #2: Balance

Blogging is fun and games sometimes but that doesn’t mean that you throw away all that you’ve earned and accomplished in the name of fun.

Find balance in your blogging – from varying the depth of your articles to dividing time between blogging and promoting to finding some personal time in all the blogging mayhem (take Sundays off, for example).

You’re not going to read this list and become a better blogger overnight – it takes time and commitment, and it works best if you take one strategy at a time and apply it purposefully in your life until you have mastered it.

EatonWeb Makes Advanced Stats Free

I encourage everyone to check this out. You can now browse the EatonWeb blog directory and monitor eight important statistical trends on all the blogs in the directory. Here’s what the graphs will look like:

So let’s say that you want to know the general statistical trends of a site like Randa Clay Design:

First go to the EatonWeb directory to see whether her blog is in the directory by doing a search:
http://portal.eatonweb.com/search/randa/1/

You’ll see that Randa does indeed have an entry in the EatonWeb directory:
http://portal.eatonweb.com/blogs/randa-clay-design/

Now, on her blog page in the directory, there’s a link to “View Advanced Stats”:
http://portal.eatonweb.com/dashboard/advanced/randa-clay-design/

Now anyone can visit the EatonWeb directory and see Advanced Stats for any blog that’s present.

Social Network Automation Software Review Summary

I recently did five in-depth reviews of what I felt were the top lightweight social network posting automation solutions:

• Post Toaster (review, website)
• Social Poster (review, website)
• Social Marker (review, website)
• Only Wire (review, website)
• Socializer (review, website)

And, at the end of the day, here is the summary of what I found:

The asterisks are important, like the fine print in a credit card agreement:

PostToaster

I gave PostToaster a bad workflow review even though I liked the fact that they tried something new. I think their effort there could end up being much more effective than their competitors. You will notice that they got the highest overall grade.

Only Wire

OnlyWire has a TOS that allows them to use your logins to post a link to their site and Privacy Policy that lets them send you email about commercial offers, with no opt-out. To be fair, it is plan and easy to see. But those are a deal killer for me.

Some Summary Thoughts

The reviews are long, so a readers digest summary….

All these sites (except OnlyWire) use variations on the direct-submit-URL trick, which has real limitations in terms of utility and stability.

OnlyWire stores your passwords and logins and executes the login/post cycle on their server. Which is nice but means that any social service could stop them cold in 10 seconds by blocking their IP.

All of the sites shared these serious flaws:

• No real workflow to help you do your daily linkbuilding rounds.
• No tracking of what you’d done in the past.
• No real error reporting.

Onlywire had the worst error problem because it reported success when it failed – the others just assumed you’d understand what was going on.

All of the sites looked good. Maybe I just weeded out all the cheesy sites, but I thought that some pretty impressive web and UI design was in evidence.

And, finally, only one site, Post Toaster, had a clear and reasonable monetization model. Which surprised me.

Post Mortem

My impression of these tools, before actually sitting down to review them, was that they would be easy to use. And they are, if you want to post up one or two articles to a few sites a couple of times a week. But if you have two blogs and two different online ‘identities’ for them and you want your stuff up on 25+ sites then be prepared for a long slog. I’m not sure they save much time for serious users.

We Sphunn each of these reviews and got a LOT of traffic from them. Not so many sphinns, but a lot of people. And they stayed on our blog 7+ minutes each (avg), reading 3.2 of these long articles. Fascinating.

Finally, only one tool owner, Pierre, the author of EkStreme Socializer found the Sphinn article and commented immediately. And he’s made some site improvements in response to our review, which is admirable. And these reviews were pretty direct so I’m kind of wondering where the rest of the site owners are in terms of reputation management.

If anyone would suggest additional sites, I’d be happy to do some more reviews, but I am moving on to looking at some of the semi-automated tools on the market.

New Opportunity For Tech-Savvy Bloggers: Remote Digital Coaching

Are you one of those bloggers who have a fair bit of technical savvy? Want to explore a potential revenue opportunity? Casual scanning of the blogosphere for nearly three years suggests to me that some people are more likely to be willing to pay for technical support than, say, a WordPress theme or plugin. In fact, you could probably make more money helping newbie bloggers install WordPress, WP themes, or WP plugins (or whatever) than trying to sell themes and plugins you’ve created.

Marketing genius Seth Godin is surprised at the lack of digital coaches and thinks there’s a market for people who can help others over the Internet doing simple technical support. Here’s a very rough outline of how you could set up such a virtual business.

1. Remote assistance software (RAS). Install Teamviewer, Copilot, or some other similar “remote assistance” software on your computer. Most such software is either free for non-commercial use or have “day passes”. I’ve only tried the free Teamviewer and I like it, though it only has monthly plans. Keep in mind that your customers will need to install the same software, as it’s all proprietary. I’m not aware of any remote assistance software standards.

2. Promotion. Promote your services on your website/blog, on business cards, etc. You can also promote yourself on Seth’s Digital Coach lens at Squidoo by either listing yourself or building your own lens. (They’ll remove spam listings.)
3. Initial contact. You’re probably best off using Skype VoIP software to discuss the work to be done. (See the “Billing” item below to understand why.) However, you can also manage using IM software. I prefer AIM, though it tends to be something geeks are more likely to use. There’s also Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger. (I have them all, just in case, but that’s an awful lot of RAM you’ll need to run them simultaneously.)
4. Preparation. Using your preferred means of communication, determine the work to be done, agree to a price. Ask the customer to install the preferred RAS. (If you think they’ll be awhile, you could end the call/ chat session and have them call you back. If they can’t do that, there’s little you can do to help.
5. Billing. Skype VoIP software last year introduced a means for users to send/ request payment via PayPal (they’re both owned by e-Bay). The customer would have to have Skype and a PayPal account as well. They call you on Skype, you make a payment request using the PayPal button. You can either charge a flat support rate, or by the hour.
6. Support session. Now that they’ve paid you and have RAS installed on their computer, support can start. In your call/ chat session, ask them to start the RAS and give you any codes you’ll need to connect. You will have to supply them with your code, to activate the “tunnel” between both computers. Now you can perform the support session, and they can see what you’re doing. If the work takes longer than a predetermined time, you can request further payment.

This is only one of many ways that you can launch and maintain a Digital Coaching business, and it needn’t be only for helping newbie bloggers. This side activity can even supplement an advice column on your blog.

My suggestion is that you stick to one area of expertise until you’re comfortable supporting people remotely. As a former teaching assistant, support person and corporate trainer, I know that support work can be very frustrating even when the other person is sitting beside you. Having patience is key to success, and if your clients seem satisfied, ask them if they’ll give referrals.