Blogging Tricks Will Only Bring You Part of the Way

Recently, I was working with someone that considers themselves an expert in social media marketing, SEO, and other popular terms these days for promoting a site and getting it some traffic. The person ran their ideas past me, and there were two things I quickly noticed.

The first was that they had probably read some blogs that told them to do various things to increase their SEO, things like bolding keywords, stuffing meta tags with keywords, and changing out H2 tags for H1 tags all in the hopes of beating their competitors.

The second was that they were focused on various tricks relating to creating landing pages, buying links, and other marketing methods.

All of the information this person passed by me was older information, most of which was nearly useless today as well as short sighted, with possible results that would end in disaster.

Imagine if you will, owning a blog for years, slowly building it up, trying to get to the next level in traffic, revenue and whatnot, hiring an “SEO expert” and having that person create, via tricks, some serious traffic.

You pay the person, thinking they’ve done a great job, and three months down the road, your site starts dropping in rankings, traffic dries up, and various other things happen that puts your site lower than it was before the “SEO expert” came along.

This is a far too common occurrence in blogging. Even the bloggers managing their sites make mistakes in SEO, marketing and social media in hopes of creating a hugely successful, viral, high positioned page that they can leverage in terms of making huge amounts of money or popularity that they can leverage in other ways.

People have to stop and realize that blogging tricks will only get you part of the way to your goals, and if done incorrectly they can actually cause huge setbacks.

Too much optimization, too overt in your self-promotion, and you’ll end up wishing you could undo your hard work.

The best advice I can give someone looking to do better with their blog would be to research as much as you can before you act in any way to effect your blog in any important way.

Don’t just leap into action after reading one person’s experience, and always check the age of the information because all the search engines are working hard at providing the best natural, gaming free search results.

Blogging Offline: Internet Withdrawals

One of the things I’ve been doing lately is writing offline. It feels weird to write blog posts, and not make them immediately available online. I keep looking at them, and editing them, using larger, more intelligent looking words, and moving things around. It is a horrible time sink and also really amusing to me as I come to the cafe and post a bunch of content that I’ve previously written.

Currently, I write, edit and organize my blog posts using Crimson Editor, a tool I also use for programming.

I know many people like to use other pieces of software specifically focused on blogging and blogging offline, but I find, probably due to my web development background, that organizing a post in a simple text editor is easier. I can’t organize categories and tags really, but I feel more comfortable keeping one application open for development, notes, and blog posts, rather than three.

I have been using NetNewsWire for keeping up with RSS feeds though, since I am only online at the cafe. I typically like using Bloglines the best, despite their issues, but hosted applications are only useful when you have Internet access.

I think that many people forget that while Internet is becoming more ubiquitous, it isn’t everywhere, all the time yet, and so offline options need to be considered as well. If you are developing an online application, it wouldn’t hurt to figure out a way (maybe through AIR) to give people an offline way of reading/interacting with their data until they get offline.

One of my favorite websites that takes advantage of offline/online issues is Gmail. Properly configured with Google Gears, I am able to delete e-mails, respond, tag, and more and once I connect to the cafe’s net access, it syncs up my changes, and a fair bit of e-mail work still gets completed without having to resort to applications like Outlook.

I have to admit though, working with a limited window of Internet access has been very stressful for me. I am used to being connected all the time, and have become dependent on the Internet. In the end though, I’ve always loved hearing what other people use though for blogging software, especially when offline. So what applications or services do you use to stay “connected”?

Stay Informed: Learn About RSS Feeds

One of the smartest things a new blogger can do, other than writing their own content, is to keep track of what others are doing. This is especially true if you are running a news focused blog, or are trying to compete with another blogger. Many of you probably understand that there are RSS feeds, and that you can subscribe to them, but do you know how or why?

In talking to a client of mine, I was asked, “why do I want to subscribe, rather than just bookmark and check back in?”

The simple answer to this is: so new content gets pushed to you. If you don’t want to miss potentially important content, and want to receive it in a reasonably timely fashion, making sure to subscribe to various RSS feeds, is like buying into your own, personalized newspaper consisting of all your favorite blogs. This will allow you to be more efficient, and if you turn that time savings into writing time, you’ll produce more content.

If you are still bookmarking sites, and visiting them each day, or getting their content in your e-mail inbox. How does that help you? Why are you still doing that when we have RSS subscriptions now that are near instant in pushing content out to you, easy to manage, and powerful, when you dive deep into controlling them.

Currently, I use Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice. It is a hosted, web-based service that makes subscribing, managing subscriptions and reading my subscriptions from any computer connected to the Internet very easy. I know the more popular choice is Google Reader, another hosted service, but I’ve never been completely happy with their user interface (probably because I used Bloglines first and have become accustomed to how it works).

There are also hundreds of desktop clients that you can install on your computer, no matter the operating system you use, and thus allow you to download and read your content when not connected to the Internet, or notify you when you have new content to read in a more “attention grabbing” way than an online RSS reader can do.

If you are looking for more information on the best available options, LifeHacker did a roundup a while back with some great choices.

Start using an RSS reader, keep yourself organized and informed, and you might just be more productive on your blog, but don’t blame me if you start subscribing to everything under the sun, and it consumes your whole day. RSS subscription overload can be a common problem as well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Blogging Fear: Just Start Writing

Recently, I was consulting with a business owner about starting her own blog. Darren Rowse, Problogger, referred her to me, and so I was excited to get started. One of my biggest passions is to teach, and there is nothing I love more than to see a business jumping into the blogging world.

She was very hesitant though. She had looked at many blogs and was awestruck by their high quality content, amazing editing, striking use of images, and she felt like competing would be hard. Then I told her that the blogs she was comparing herself to were years old. Both bloggers had already done hundreds of posts, and had refined their writing style, use of images, and editing over that period of time.

She was just starting out and like anything, blogging requires time, effort and practice to do amazingly. She begrudgingly started writing a post, and saved it as a draft for me to look over. Other than a few stylistic things like making some text bold and italics, the post looked great. She looked it over again and was finally ready to publish it. Nervously, she wanted to take it back.

We all have those doubts, those questions. “What if others think it is horrible? What if it doesn’t make sense to them?” In the end though, while the blogging is about helping build her business and brand, it is also an archive of her life as a businesswoman and should cater to her own desires first.

Quickly, the “bug” of publishing content online grew, and she was always thinking about what to put on the blog next.

This whole experience made me wonder if the issue with blogging is that too many people expect to be experts on day one. When you had your first day of school, did you know everything in the text books? When you started your first real job, were you the number one expert in your field? No! So why should blogging be any different? Be it as a hobby, career, or a promotional tool, blogging is like any other task from riding a bike, to building a business: it takes practice to do well.

Don’t let your fear stop you from producing content. Even if it doesn’t appeal to everyone, I highly doubt that with over six billion people living on the planet, that you won’t make a connection with at least one of them, and if you are really shy about your content, don’t promote your blog, just post what interests you. Use your blog as a tool to express yourself, and let come what may. It is your island, you control the design, content, comments, and more. Fear nothing, and get blogging!

Understanding Social Media Traffic

Online communities have been around since the dawn of the Internet, even before the World Wide Web made its appearance. People have used computer to computer communications for the same reason they’d use a telephone or, prior to that, the postal service – to interact with each other across distance. Today, what appears to be an emerging market, social media, is actually not new at all. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Digg, Twitter and others are all actually evolutions of the founding ideas that the Web was based upon. We’re just beginning to get good at connecting people with each other and only now are business people realizing the untapped potential of interacting with their customers on the more personal level that social media provides.

If you run any kind of business venture online you definitely need to have a social media presence. One of the big ways to gain traffic these days is through social bookmarking services. These include sites like Digg where users submit links or stories. Those submissions are then voted on by other Digg members.

The higher the number of votes, the higher that article or site rises in within the Digg ranking system. Links that Digg members love can get massive traffic sent to that particular site so pleasing Digg users is definitely a good thing! But be careful, because there is also a phenomenon known as “the Digg effect” where a site will take so much traffic that it actually crashes. That’s not hard to imagine when you realize Digg gets over 236 million visitors annually.

Reddit is another social bookmarking site that focuses on news, rewarding users who submit particularly popular links with karma points. A site called del.ico.us takes an approach that encourages people to comment on each others links and build a strong sense of community. With this site, a wiki adds a more collective slant to the offerings and it’s become a real source for viral Internet memes and other popular Web items. These are only a handful of the social bookmarking sites available to those who want to dive into the social media sea of opportunities.

The thing you need to remember is that with social media sites, the key word is social. You do not want to leap into these communities and start flinging your links and promotions around. You need to keep in mind that like any community, and social media sites are very much communities, there are those who are obnoxious individuals and there are those who add value. To gain a true level of popularity, you need to add value. Find out what’s hot and offer bookmarks that others in the community will love. Leave valuable comments and feedback for other users. Make friends and use the social angle to your advantage by creating a positive reputation for yourself and your business activities. For those who match their business acumen with polite, constructive social interaction, there are no limits to the success that these social media sites can bring you.

If you find yourself confused, do what you’d be advised to do in an unfamiliar situation offline. That’s right, ask others around you for help. Learn all that you can about each community that you participate in and show that you care about more than simply the next visitor or sale. Positive word of mouth is what you want from social media, you want people to spread your links based on their own desires rather than because you harassed them into it. Pay attention to emotional cues that people give off in online communication and if you sense people are becoming annoyed, immediately back off and try something else or even apologize. You need all the help you can get to keep your site attractive to visitors and the more popular folks in the social media scene can either help or hurt your reputation and the traffic that goes with that reputation.

It’s not that difficult to succeed when it comes to social media and using social bookmarking sites. By letting common sense, fair play and the same politeness you learned in grade school be your guide, you’ll find that it’s an easy, efficient and productive way to do business on the web. And you might just have a lot more fun than you bargained for finding your way towards the success you’ve been wishing for.

Creative Link Building

When you run a website, whether it be a blog or a static site, aside from quality content, the name of the game is link building. Not only is building quality links essential to your strategy in terms of search engine rankings such as Google Page Rank, it’s also another way for Web surfers to find your site and obviously you want each and every inroad to your site that you can possibly get. The number one strategic concern for anyone with a Web presence has got to be obtaining links that legitimatize your business.

If you’ve already got high quality content that visitors want, then you’re ready for link building, but if not, then you’ll want to tackle that part of successful site construction first. Otherwise, the links you build will only point surfers to a disappointment and they aren’t likely to return. Returning visitors are the foundation of any good site, you need to make sure you please those you seek to bring to your site, or all the strategies and tactics in the world will do you no good.

Once you’ve built a site worth visiting, it’s time to hit the link building circuit. Link directories have now become known as ‘link farms’ and are frowned upon by search engines and visitors alike. Unless you can find an extremely high quality link directory that caters to the niche you’ve designed your site around, it’s best to try other methods of obtaining links. Blog commenting can work, but these days many blogs are no-follow, which means that search engines will not recognize the links as a valid means of judging the popularity of your site. That’s the bottom link in link building, from an SEO perspective: popularity. The more sites linking to your site, the more popular the search engines will consider it to be.

Social bookmarking can do wonders, but you want to be sparing with this technique. It’s widely used now and many spammers have invaded the scene. You can also use social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to build links to your site. By pinging your profiles that you’ve built links to your site inside of, you can encourage the search engines to follow through to your site and link it. It’s extremely important to employ the maximum amount of creativity that you can in order to get links. Contact sites you admire and ask for a link. Use friendliness and any people skills you have. If you’re not a people person yourself, why not have a friend who is contact them on your behalf?

Linkbaiting can lead to links. If you blog about someone on the Web who offers real value, often these people will check their incoming links and then check your site. If they like it, odds are good that they’ll link back. You can offer services such as blog posts to bloggers and even write articles for static sites. Using article marketing can be a powerful way to generate links, but a personal approach to a webmaster with the offer of a free article? That’s a favor they’re very likely to return. You might also try to make videos that you could post on YouTube and then offer them up to be embedded on blogs across the net. Many times, people will link to your site in exchange for a quality or just plain fun video.
Use your imagination and the sky is the limit for link building.

Don’t waste time on old methods that are being overused and may soon go extinct. Push the envelope and use your personality. If you’re serious then provide seriously useful content for others. Do the favor first and you’ll be surprised by how generous many people will be in return. If you’re artistic then offering graphics, music, photographs or other forms of art could net you quite a few high quality links. If you’re known for your sense of humor, why not work that angle and come up with a hilarious post for bloggers or a video that’ll bring a smile to people’s faces? Don’t be afraid to try something new because you cannot know until you give it your best shot. That’s how new methods are developed, trial and error.

In the end, it’s up to you to make your link building campaign successful. There’s no reason to shy away from any new technique you believe might help your site out. The Web is for innovation so if you aim your efforts in that direction and stay persistent, you will absolutely see success.

Real Comments, Spam URL’s

So lately, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time going through and dealing with Spam on so many blogs. The comments look real, they read like real comments. They are most likely done by hand rather than spam bots, but if you look at the URL they’ve used, and sometimes their name as well, you’ll see that they are still trying to spam.

This is frustrating because their comments add some small value to blogs, but on the flip side, they are just trying to get links to their site, drive traffic to their ads, or otherwise create a poor experience for people online.

How do you deal with this type of spam on your blog? Do you mark it as spam, delete it, edit it to not include the URL, or just approve it outright?

We can’t check the URL on every comment, as it can get time consuming, but by marking good quality comments as spam based on the URL field, are we messing up Akismet?

Let me know in the comments below, and please…no spam.

Sidenote: J Angelo Racoma recently wrote about this on Performancing (What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links?) and got a few opinions about what to do with the comments, so I’d love to see more discussion on what tools you use to moderate and manage these comments without getting too many false positives. Is Akismet still the best way to manage spam on WordPress blogs, should people be using multiple plugins, or is another service better?

Tablet Input: Helpful for Blogging?

I just finished writing a review of the Adesso CyberTablet Z12 on Forever Geek, where I took a look at the tablet, comparing it to other devices in its class, and it made me wonder if a drawing tablet could be useful for blogging.

I usually try to stick to only things that I can easily adopt and use as part of my blogging duties, and so I wasn’t too impressed with what I, as a blogger specifically, could do with a tablet input system.

This doesn’t have any effect on my review of the tablet, as I found the Z12 to be a great product, but what could I use it for on a daily basis?

It has the ability to convert writing into text using handwriting recognition, but I type faster than I can hand write a sentence (in part because writing with a stylus or pen is a one handed experience, and typing is a two handed one).

Even if the handwriting recognition was perfect, which it isn’t due to my horrible chicken-scratch, it would still take me longer to pen out an entry than typing it on my computer.

For doing mock-ups of designs, annotating pictures and drawings, and doing other simple editing tasks, I found the tablet to be helpful, but I don’t do these things every day, and I don’t have a very still hand, leading to graphics that aren’t as clean as I’d like them to be.

Sure, the technology is great, but I feel like for blogging, there isn’t much that beats a keyboard and mouse. Hopefully, this doesn’t erupt into the same kind of battle people see with console gamers (game pad users) versus keyboard and mouse users, but do you have any input device that you enjoy for blogging above and beyond the keyboard and mouse?

Performancing.com on WordPress – Goodbye Drupal

Some of you might have noticed the change in design on Performancing.com. This is because we’ve changed software. After many years of wondering how to accomplish this goal, we’ve transitioned from our old Drupal installation to WordPress. This is a great relief to myself, and I think many of the writers on this site.

Changing to WordPress was a difficult ordeal, with many issues. Things still are not perfect with our WordPress installation, and we will require many more hours to perfect our new home on the web.

We transitioned from Drupal to WordPress because many writers found Drupal to be slow to publish on, and with the web moving ever faster, we wanted to make sure this site not only caught up, but surpassed expectations.

Over the next few months, you will see many great changes to this site that will bring it back to what some of the “older” folks in the blogosphere remember: a brand unlike any other.

Changing from Drupal to WordPress was the first step. We have many plans for the future, and we hope you’ll all stick around with us as we complete this journey.

I want to thank Randa Clay, the designer of our WordPress theme for Performancing, who continues to work hard to make everything not only beautiful, but functional under these odd circumstances. I also owe a big thanks to Jon Watson, of the Watsys Technology Consulting Group for writing the importer that allowed us to move from Drupal to WordPress with as few headaches as possible.

At one point, we were thinking of hiring a small piece of Asia to manually move all of our content over. Wouldn’t that have been a sight?

If you notice something broken, feel safe in knowing that we’ve probably realized that and are working on it, but we’d love your feedback and what you think of not only our new design, but the fact that we’ve changed blogging platforms. Leave a comment, and be heard.

Why WickedFire is a Great Forum to Learn Online Business and Marketing

Look, if you’re interested in joining a forum where everyone is polite but nobody is making serious money, try WarriorForum or DigitalPoint. Those two, for example, have very strict etiquette rules but only one “minor” problem. Simply put, lots of WarriorForum and DigitalPoint members talk the talk but few of them walk the walk.

Do you know why most people are extremely polite over there? The answer is almost obvious: it’s because a lot of them are trying to sell you something. Maybe an e-book, maybe a coaching problem, maybe some other semi-useless product.

WickedFire is different. Nobody’s there to sell you anything. Well, almost nobody and those who are just trying to sell you on something you don’t need, usually get “loved tenderly” (a commonly used WickedFire term, just like “making monies”, that represents anything but the pleasant idea the phrase conveys) by the community. This forum is what it is and there’s no other community out there that’s even remotely similar. Let’s try to look beneath the surface and determine what exactly makes WickedFire so special. [Read more]