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.