Long-Term Vision Should Trump Reader Feedback

In July 2009, a new blogger entered the same gaming niche as my blog. His blog looked like it had a lot of potential. He posted daily including several 1500+ word posts. He was very active on Twitter. He wrote several guest posts. He scored an interview on a popular blogging blog. With these efforts, he quickly made an impact in the industry and his traffic and Twitter followers grew quickly.

You could tell that he spent a lot of time building his blog and it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before he became a top five blogger in the niche. However, his initial enthusiasm only lasted three months. After that time, he started posting less and less and in December, he made his last post – one short of the 100 post milestone.

What happened? How did the promising blogger end up in the wasteland of abandoned blogs?

Too Much Feedback is a Bad Thing

One thing I noticed was his obsession for feedback. He was always asking his blog readers and Twitter followers for topics to write about. Also, he used polls all the time to determine the topics of his posts.

He had a diverse audience who wanted to talk about many different topics. He didn’t filter his feedback and wrote about all the different topics. As such, his blog became very unfocused. I stopped reading it because I never knew what to expect.

He catered to his whole audience but his traffic plateaued once people realized that he was going to serve everybody. Without a strong focus, people liked his blog but no one really loved it. And ironically, less and less people responded to his requests for feedback.

What’s Your Long-Term Vision?

I think it’s important to have a long-term vision for your blog that trumps reader feedback. You shouldn’t give up too much control to your audience. You are the expert.

Apple didn’t ask their customers for feedback on the iPhone. If anything, they probably would’ve requested too many features and made the iPhone just like the other smartphones. The iPhone works because it has less features which makes it easier to use than its competitors. This was the vision of Apple and they weren’t going to let feedback change their course.

Consider the creators of popular TV shows. I bet their shows would be much worse if they implemented audience feedback on a regular basis. Before the actors were even hired, they had a vision for their show and they knew that straying from that vision would hurt their show.

Therefore, have a concrete vision for your blog. The blogger I first mentioned didn’t have one and it cost him.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t listen to feedback. Feedback can be useful. Just don’t let it trump your long-term vision.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Book Review of Rework, a New Bestselling Business Book

Rework is the new business book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the executive team of 37signals.

I’m a big fan of their blog and Backpack, one of their products, so when I found out they were releasing a business book, I had to check it out.

The release date was yesterday so I went to my local Barnes & Noble, found the book, and read the whole thing there in two hours. Yes, the book is short compared to other business books but I liked it so much that I bought it for reference sake.

Even though the book is not a book about blogging, I think the book has many great tips for probloggers.

Basically, it’s a manifesto for doing work differently. Written from their experience, Jason and David blow up many of the workplace norms you find today in most companies, big and small. For example, here’s a look at some of their chapter titles: Learning from mistakes is overrated, Planning is guessing, Meetings are toxic, and Underdo your competition. Also, they claim that workaholism is a bad idea.

As you can tell, Rework is not the typical business book that reminds people of boring college classes and stuffy professors.

Jason and David have figured out how to run a wildly successful business in the new media, internet-based world we live in without the negative aspects that people normally think of like long hours, ineffective bureaucracy, and cutthroat tactics. Their company, 37signals, has only 16 employees. But even though the company is not big, they have a big impact with over 3 million people using their products.

The employees are very autonomous. They can work at their own schedule and can choose to work at home. In fact, half of their employees don’t even live in the same city as the company office.

Here’s a telling quote from Jason in Inc. Magazine:

Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

Therefore, I think Jason and David’s experience of running a business is great for the average problogger. You don’t need the typical business book that caters to offline businesses and big corporations.

Also, 37signals understands the power of blogging. As a small business, they don’t have a sales team or a marketing department. In fact, most of their business comes from their blog. That’s how I found out about them. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is very popular with over 100k RSS subscribers.

The book can help you get into the business mindset, which is the mindset you need to be in to really make money – not the blogging mindset.  A blog is a great marketing channel but you need a strong business as a foundation to have the best chance of quitting your day job.

There will be sections in the book that may not apply to your situation right now. For example, it has some essays about hiring employees but most bloggers I know are not in a position to hire. Still, the other sections are well worth the price of the book and who knows, in the future, you may want to hire employees or freelancers for your blog.

Learn more about Rework.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Why eBay Partner Network Makes 22 Times More Money Than AdSense On My Blog

Updated on March 5, 2009: I noticed a huge discrepancy with my Google Analytics pageviews versus the impressions being reported by eBay Partner Network.

Needless to say that changed my calculations. I reworked the numbers and found that instead of 200% in the original post, eBay makes me 22 times more money than AdSense! Or in percentage terms, 2,100%. Of course, with this new knowledge, I’m very motivated to put eBay links on all my relevant posts, not just my most popular ones

I’ve been pretty excited the last couple days. I finally found an income stream for my gaming blog that actually makes a decent amount of money without hurting the usability of my readers.

At first, I tried AdSense but the ads I got were very irrelevant. My gaming blog is about a collectible card game called Magic The Gathering. As a card game, the word deck is huge keyword. However, that word was a problem since it would show ads about building a physical deck for your house. Also, since the title of the game has the word magic, I would get ads about magic tricks and how to cast actual spells.

I estimate that 70-80% of my ads were irrelevant. As such, I knew my readers were having a poor reading experience on my blog. I even hated looking at my site. The big intrusive irrelevant ads were a turnoff. I tried smaller ads but my income sunk too much. But even with the big ads, my income was not very good. Relevance is huge if you want to make money and very few people were clicking my ads.

My sister has a dating blog that gets less than half the traffic as my blog. But she has earned more with AdSense since her blog shows more relevant ads. After a while, I couldn’t optimize AdSense to make more money. My income was so low that I decided to drop the program and look for other ways to make money.

I tried affiliate programs from online retail stores but I couldn’t find a quality program. Surprisingly there was no info product I was comfortable with endorsing that had an affiliate program. I was close to giving up. I thought I would have to focus solely on creating my own products to make decent money from my blog. I’m working on my own info product but it will take a couple months to complete. I wanted to make some money right away without resorting to AdSense.

To add to my frustration, my blog was reaching new traffic highs every month for the last couple of months. I had recently reached the 1,000 daily visitors milestone.

eBay Partner Network

As a last ditch effort, I turned to eBay’s cost per click (CPC) program called eBay Partner Network (ePN). I knew they could be a great income source, since they have a lot of traffic and there is an active eBay market for the cards I blog about.

I sent my application but immediately regreted it when I read this article about how to get accepted in the network. Yeah, I know. I should’ve read the article first! My excitement and impatience got the best of me when I found out that eBay had a CPC program.

In my application, I wrote a 50 word blurb about my site. I didn’t put any effort in explaining why my site was a good fit for eBay. Needless to say, my site was rejected after a couple of weeks.

I then wrote them a 380 word email message asking them to reconsider my site. I explained my business plan and gave multiple traffic stats. I even included my experience as a search specialist and blogger. I knew my site was a good one for eBay so on the second try, I spent the extra effort to communicate that fact.

I couple days later I was accepted into the program.

I immediately create a couple eBay links and placed them on my most popular pages.

After a couple of days, I looked at the numbers and was very happy to discover that eBay made 22 times more money than my previous AdSense numbers (based on CPM, or cost per thousand page impressions)

Plus, the best performing AdSense ads are the big square ads that take up a lot of space and make your blog look cluttered. On the other hand, eBay has text links that can be placed in the middle of your posts. Therefore, you add value and an income stream without making your blog look cluttered with ads.

My blog doesn’t have any ads right now and it’s a great feeling. I do plan to sell ads on my sidebar in the future but I’m glad I don’t have to put ads in the content section of my blog. That section is the best place to put ads if you want to make money but it’s the worst spot from the user’s perspective.

I’m excited about the future with ePN. I haven’t done any testing on my eBay links so I think there’s room to optimize and earn more money.

If you have a product driven site, I definitely recommend eBay Partner Network.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Your Product Doesn’t Have to Contain 100% Unique Content

Many bloggers seem to find the task of creating a product daunting. I know I did.

I knew creating a product could greatly increase my income, but coming up with content to fill up an ebook, video, membership program, or any other product seemed like an overwhelming project.

However, after listening to this interview with Pay Flynn and thinking back at products I had bought, I realize that creating a product doesn’t have to be this huge audacious goal.

See you don’t need your product to have 100% unique content. This realization takes a lot of the work out of the equation. You can repurpose some of your existing content and include it as part of your product to make the task easier.

This may seem like a scam but your customers won’t mind.

Flynn created an ebook with 15% unique content. The other 85% was already existing content from his blog. Yet he doesn’t get complaints from his customers and he sells many ebooks every month.

I look back at one of my favorite purchases, the ebook that SEO Book used to sell. This ebook gave me a great SEO foundation and I was able start a successful freelance SEO business. About 60% of the ebook was something I had already read on the SEO Book blog, but I didn’t mind.

So why do people not mind repeat content in a product?

Let’s look at 5 reasons.

1. They forget what they read.

People are usually in a browsing/scanning mindset when they read blogs. They are not very focused and forget a lot of what they read.

Therefore, the product seems much more unique when they consume it.

And once they pay money for it, they are willing to concentrate more since they have invested money. So they get more out of the product than reading the blog.

Also, products contain much more content than a blog post, which makes people set aside more time and focus to consume them.

2. They haven’t read the existing content.

Most of your readers have not read all your content. For example, anything older than 6 months is often brand new to the bulk of your readers.

3. The content organization adds value.

When I read the ebook from SEO Book, I started seeing how different SEO elements connected with each other. In the past, I had looked at SEO as a bunch of unrelated tasks. But through the ebook, I saw the effectiveness of holistic thinking, which made me a much better search specialist.

A well-organized product allows you to lay the proper foundation for your topic. You can sequence your content in a way that adds a lot of value.

For example, a good ebook will have the beginner stuff first, then intermediate, and close with advanced subjects.

In contrast, the order in which blog posts are published typically don’t add much value. And anyways, many of your readers are not reading your posts in order.

4. The unique content is very valuable.

Pat Flynn’s ebook is a guide to passing an architecture test. His 15% unique content in his ebook contains many of his best studying tips.

So even if a customer realizes that most of the ebook is repeat content, if they are able to pass the test using the unique content, they will be grateful they spent the money.

Here’s the takeaway: Give a lot of value for free on your blog, but save some of your best stuff for your product, the stuff that’s worth paying for.

5. Repetition is useful.

Finally, don’t underestimate the repetition factor. The more you read the same piece of info, the more you will remember it and be able to apply it in your life.

I hope this blog post has given you more confidence to create your own product. It’s not as big of a process as you think. You can include some of your existing valuable content to lower the workload.

Good luck!

Performancing offers blog management services.

The Best Way to Differentiate Your Blog

One of the blogging tips that I hear a lot is be different. Be unique. Stand out from the crowd. This is a great advice for typical businesses and it’s also helpful for probloggers especially with all the competitors on the internet.

But how can you apply it practically to your blog?

I’ve been thinking about this advice for the last couple of years and from my experience, I think I’ve realized the best way to differentiate your blog. The answer is pretty simple so it might surprise you.

Narrow your topic.

That’s it. Nothing too complicated or revolutionary, but this suggestion will make your blog different from 99% of the other blogs.

Copycat Blogs

I wrote last week that copying A-list blogs is not a good idea for the average problogger. Yet, most blogs look to the A-listers as examples. I said that reaching the success of the most popular blogs is very unlikely. It’s much better to implement the strategies of successful mid-level blogs. These blogs may not earn the millions that the A-listers earn but they still make a decent wage and their success is much easier to achieve.

But there’s another reason why A-list blogs should not be your example. A-listers are all about getting a lot of raw traffic, so they cover a very wide range of topics. This lets them reach the most amount of people.

But if you try this tactic, you’ll end up fighting a losing battle. See the A-list blogs have much more resources than you. They have more money, more staff, and better partnerships. They will cover your niche much better than you. If you copy them, you’ll end up with a subpar copycat blog.

And here’s the big question. Why would someone read your copycat blog when they could read the A-list blog?

Go Deeper Not Wider

Fortunately, with many bloggers copying the A-listers, there’s a lot of opportunity for probloggers who choose to specialize and focus. Instead of focusing on all usual subjects in your niche, pick only 1-2 and really learn them well. In other words, go “deeper” instead of “wider”.

For example, let’s say you have an interest in video games. Instead of trying to cover every single video game like Joystiq, you decide to only write about Xbox games. You could even narrow that subject down. Maybe just do Xbox reviews. Or only blog about future Xbox games. Or just create Xbox strategy videos. You get the idea.

After some time, by focusing on a small topic area, you’ll get enough experience to draw from that will help you generate truly unique valuable content. Quality goes down when you’re juggling too many things but it goes up when you concentrate on a few things. You’ll actually become an expert instead of a so-called expert that just spouts the same old advice that everyone’s already heard.

Going deeper is better too because you can make more per visitor. You’re delivering more value so you can charge more. You won’t need a ton of traffic to make a decent living.

Performancing offers blog management services.

A-List Blogs Are Not Good Examples to Follow

Photo by Kriss Szkurlatowski

When I first learned about problogging, I definitely looked up to the A-List blogs. You know, the TechCrunches, the Gizmodos, the TMZs, the Daily Koses, the Mashables. These were the blogs that had made it. They were the most high profile blogs. They had the most traffic. And more traffic meant more money, right?

Therefore, I thought of them as good examples to follow. I patterned my first couple of blogs after them. But after a couple failed blogs, over the last couple of months I’ve realized that for most of us those blogs are not the best examples to follow.

An Easier Way to Make a Living

I realized that it’s very difficult to reach A-List levels of traffic. Just from a odds perspective, only a few can reach A-List status. Not everyone who seeks A-List status will achieve it. There just isn’t enough demand for many A-List blogs in any given industry.

Think of the classic bell curve. Most of us will languish in the middle of the curve.

However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make a decent living. I realized that there are many mid-level bloggers that make a good living. They don’t get a lot of press because they don’t have nearly as much eyeballs as the A-List bloggers. But they love what they do and they provide value to their industry.

If your goal is to earn a decent living with blogging, those mid-level bloggers are much better examples than the A-List ones. It’s much easier to get the mid-level traffic than A-List traffic. Sure, you probably won’t earn millions of dollars but you’ll have a much better chance of being able to quit your job.

One thing I noticed a lot with the mid-level blogs is they have their own product. This is one of the main things that separates them from the A-Listers. A-List blogs need a ton of traffic because their main income source is advertisers. But mid-level blogs have learned how to make more money per visitor.

Creating and selling a product is the key. With a product, you can earn more with less traffic because you don’t have to split profits with advertisers and affiliate programs. It will take more work to create a product than to manage ads and affiliate products, but once you’ve done it, you have a recurring income stream all to yourself.

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Find Guest Post Opportunities For Your Blog

Guest posting is a great way to increase traffic, network with other bloggers, and build links. But how do you know which blogs are good guest post opportunities?

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of guest posting for various blogs so I thought I’d share what I learned from my experience.

Check Blogs For Previous Guest Posts

The strategy that worked the best was checking blogs to see if they published guest posts previously. If a blog had published them in the past, then there was a really good chance they would publish my guest post.

You can search for “guest post” if the blog has a search box. If not, you can type in “site:example.com guest post” on Google to search the blog.

This strategy also helps because you can get an idea of the kind of guest posts that are published. You can then use that information to create similar content.

Investigate Forums

Blogging or internet marketing related forums can be a good place to find guest post spots. I had success finding some opportunities on the ProBlogger forum.

My Blog Guest forum is another good option. I like it because it’s caters primarily to guest bloggers. It was recently created by Ann Smarty, a prominent search expert, and she’s attracted a good number of quality sites looking for guest posts. I’ve already gotten a post published on a PageRank7 blog.

In forums, you’ll find many off-topic blogs so you might have to do some digging to find a blog in your niche. To save time, you can create a thread saying you’re interested in guest posting and hope that a relevant blogger finds you.

Also, if your niche is relatively obscure, you may not find a related blog. Still, you can get good off-topic links, which is fine for SEO just as long as you get them from trusted sites and you don’t overdo it.

Over to You

How do find guest post opportunities for your blog?

3 Reasons Bloggers Should Read Books

Reading a book seems very low tech in this current digital age. But don’t underestimate the words on a physical page.

While many bloggers do their reading online, you can gain an advantage by shutting off the computer and reading a book offline. Here are three reasons to head over to your local bookstore.

1. To Improve Credibility

Books are still perceived as trusted sources of authority. If you become well read that you quote books often, your credibility will increase. I felt that Brian Clark of Copyblogger knew what he was talking about because he quoted the classic advertising and copywriting books. He was someone who had real expertise because he had learned from the giants in the past.

2. To Go Deeper in a Niche

Online content by nature gives you a shallow perspective. The content is short to please the short attention span of the average internet user. On the other hand, reading a book allows you to concentrate more deeply and really learn about a topic. This prolonged exposure to a topic helps you create more in-depth posts than your competitors.

Also, books can give you topic ideas for evergreen content. Online content especially blog posts are many times about current issues or news that will fade away soon. However, books are usually about topics that have more lasting value.

3. To Differentiate Your Content

For many bloggers, their only reading is done online. So if you’re reading books, you’ll be exposed to content many of your peers are not consuming.

This will help you avoid the “echo chamber,” a phenomenon where the bloggers in a niche are all talking about the same thing. You’ll be drawing inspiration from different sources so your content will be different from your peers.

Over to You

How often do you read books?

Have you ever drawn inspiration from a book for your blog?

How does you offline reading time compare to your online reading time?

Performancing offers blog management services.

2010 Reminder: Test the Monetization of Your Blog

Monetization can get lost in all the blogging activities we have to juggle. Let’s face it, there’s a lot that goes into blogging. Content, marketing, and building relationships take up a lot of our time and it can be easy to forget about monetization. But if you want to make money with your blog, you can’t ignore, well, the making money part

I believe that content and traffic comes first, but after you generate a healthy content and traffic base, there comes a time when you must focus on optimizing your monetization. Otherwise, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.

So, at the beginning of a new year, I thought I’d remind you to look at your monetization tactics and see how you can improve on them. How can you get conversion rates and make more money with the same amount of traffic? I’ll share two examples from my sites.

There are various ways to approach the monetization process but basically it boils down to testing. In other words, try different ways to make money. Then, let them run at the same time and after a couple weeks, analyze the results and pick the best method.

Testing AdSense

I’ve been testing the AdSense ads for a dating blog I co-own with my sister. The blog reached a respectable level of traffic a few months ago, so I started optimizing the ads since they were the blog’s primary income source.

In my first test, I created two different ads and placed them above the fold and below the fold. Then, I let them run for a couple of weeks. During the testing period, ad #1 ran half the time and ad #2 ran in the other half. After the test, it was pretty clear what we needed to do to make more money. Above the fold, ad #1 made almost four times as much money as ad #2. Below the fold, both ads made the same amount of money but it was very small amount.

Based on the results, we kept ad #1 above the fold and discarded ad #2. The money from the ads below the fold was so low that we scrapped them to make the site less cluttered.

Giving Up on a Strategy

Sometimes you have to drop a monetization strategy since it’s clearly not working. For example, I’ve tried multiple ways to get AdSense working on my gaming blog. The biggest program was the irrelevancy. AdSense kept showing irrelevant ads even when I tried to tweak my posts. Because of this, the dating blog makes 30 times more than the gaming blog yet it has half the amount of traffic. I understand that dating is probably a more lucrative niche than gaming but not 30 times more!

Therefore, I scrapped AdSense and found a couple related affiliate programs. It’s still early, but the numbers have been better than AdSense.

Continual Improvement Through Testing

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much time to set up a monetization campaign. Most of the work is just setting up a test and that can be done in a couple of hours. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to check it until a couple days or weeks have passed. Then, you spend a couple more hours to analyze the results, make the necessary changes, and setup a new test.

But you do have to remind yourself to continually test every couple weeks or so. Again, it’s easy to forget since you can get lost in all content generation and marketing so put it on the calendar as a reminder.

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Stop Being Boring (and Why You Probably Are)

I’m boring and you’re probably boring too.

I just listened to this interview with Seth Godin. He gives really good advice about how to successfully run a business. You should definitely listen to the whole thing if you want to make more money with your blog.

One of the things Seth said that struck me is found at the 38:30 mark. He said, “If people aren’t talking about you, they’re not talking about you for a reason. And the reason isn’t that they dislike you. They’re not talking about you because you’re boring.”

These are harsh words, but the first step to solving a problem is admitting that it’s there.

If you don’t fit Seth’s criteria, if people are talking about your blog, congrats. Keep doing what you’re doing. But I think for most of us, people don’t talk much about our blogs.

So, what’s the remedy? Seth recommends being different.

Stand Out From the Crowd

If you want to be more interesting and less boring, you need to do something that the other blogs in your niche are not doing.

At the 39:34 mark, Seth tells an anecdote about a street in New York City with 18 Indian restaurants. One of the Indian restaurants claimed that they had the spiciest curry in the city. They had a deal that if you could finish a bowl, you got it for free.

Guess which restaurant had the most customers? The one with the spicy curry offer.

Yes, this advice of being different is not new at all. In fact, it’s become a cliche in online marketing circles. But how many of us are actually different from our competitors? If we’re honest, our blogs are very similar to other blogs.

We underestimate how similar we are to our competitors. Consider the following experiment.

Take a post from your blog and a couple posts from other blogs in your niche. Blank out the names and print the posts without the formatting and blog design. With just the printouts, would people be able to tell which post is yours?

Take Risks

To be different, we’ll have to be risk takers. It’s risky to break away from the crowd and do things differently. But like the Indian restaurant, we need to figure out our own unique offer. We need to find something to stand for.

Taking risks will leave us open to criticism since there’s always a group of people that doesn’t like change. Innovators have always had their critics but the critics shouldn’t keep us from taking action. As long as we have enough supporters, we’ll be fine.

My Application

Like I said, I’m boring. After listening to Seth, I realized that most of the content on my gaming blog can be found on other blogs. The main reason I still get a lot of traffic is because my competitors don’t do keyword research.

But that’s hardly a competitive advantage.

There are a couple blogs with much lower traffic that have more influence than me. They have more natural links, Twitter followers, and comments.

I tried to apply Seth’s principles and I came up with these three action items.

1. Narrow my blog’s focus.

I cover too many topics. This is a consequence of just being lazy and not taking the time to figure out the core of my blog.

I realized I’m only really interested in two topics, so I’ll only write about those. This should differentiate my blog since most blogs cover a lot of topics. My niche is pretty big so I should still have a big enough audience to support a business from the blog.

2. Cover a topic that doesn’t get talked about a lot.

One of my topics doesn’t get much airplay, so I was hesitant to write about it. But after some research, I think there’s a market for the topic.

I’ll probably have to sacrifice some short-term traffic. People are not searching for keywords on the topic and I get most of my traffic from the search engines. But by covering the topic, I hope to create my own keywords and make them popular.

For example, a couple years ago seo book was not a popular search term until Aaron Wall saw a market for a book and released his SEO ebook. Once his book was released, the keyword started to pick up and now it’s popular.

3. Sell my future product at a higher price point than the norm.

I’m working on a membership product that I hope to release in the next couple of months. I was going to charge the same price as other membership products in the niche. But I always felt those prices were too low. Also, my product will cover the topic that doesn’t get much coverage, so I should be able to charge more.

Over to You

Are you different from other blogs in your niche? If you are, please give specific examples on how you are different. If you’re not, how can you stand out from the crowd?

Performancing offers blog management services.