The Hive, a Performancing project, was created to provide a community for those looking to increase the performance of their blog and network with the pros. The Hive still continues to grow, and there are many great things being discussed within.

What Is It?

Performancing Hive is a place where you can talk about blogging, advertising, writing, search engine optimizing, monetizing, and anything else related to this business we call blogging. It really is a place where professionals and those hopeful of going professional can bounce around ideas and talk about our passion.

If you have questions, we have the answers.

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There is quite an impressive amount of quality content that has been written in the past for Performancing. Just like any great site, we want to make sure that our great content doesn't get lost simply because new great content is written. It would almost be criminal to do otherwise. To ensure this doesn't happen, I am proud to present "Performancing's Most Memorable."

Over the next few months, I am going to be linking to some of Performancing's best articles for each month. To kick things off, logically, I will start with January of this year. Once we are all caught up, I will then do the same at the end of each following month until we reach the end of the year, and when that happens, I will have an impressive article to recap the entire year.

If you are new to blogging, you'll want to check out every single link within this post.

If you want to be a great blogger, you need to learn from the best. With our reader's help, several bloggers were observed for their efforts. We begin with one of Performancing's most memorable moments—the Performancing Blog Awards 2007.

Awards

Performancing Blog Awards 2007 Winners

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The Hive, a Performancing project, was created to provide a community for those looking to increase the performance of their blog and network with the pro's. Well, the professionals are buzzing around, and even I am learning stuff from the other members. The Hive still continues to grow, and there are many great things being discussed within.

Here is a glimpse into what has happened recently:

Hive's 100th Member

I would like to congratulate "woodpecker34" on being the 100th member to join Performancing Hive. All our members are in good company with the likes of Matt Craven, David Peralty, Hartley Singer, Deborah Ng, Jesse Nachtigal, and other successful bloggers. As the Hive grows, the information and feedback continually improves, and you are missing out on great opportunities if you are not a member.

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Although I only recently joined Performancing, I have taken great interest in the site. That is why I want to help Performancing be successful. There would be no better way to do that than helping this site to achieve consistent growth. Well, Performancing has been doing just that for the past year. As a matter of fact, Performancing has been gaining roughly over 400 subscribers per month over the past 12 months. I am a statistics freak, so this these numbers just make me excited.

As a result, Performancing will exceed 10,000 subscribers very soon. This news is great because it means that—along with the Performancing staff keeping our jobs and satisfying the sponsors—we can continue to create amazing content for more new, amateur, and professional bloggers, just like you, that have taken the time to read what we fellow bloggers have to offer. This blog is for bloggers by bloggers, and I am confident that we will be doing even greater things as the 2008 year progresses.

The Hive, a project started by Performancing to provide a community for those looking to increase the performance of their blog/site, is steadily growing in numbers. There are many great things going on in the Hive, and I will take this opportunity to let everyone know what they are missing out on.

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I’ve been using Performancing Metrics for a while now, and I find it much easier to navigate around than I do Google Analytics, and it’s nicer to look at. I have started to monitor visitors by tracking on the organisations that are visiting my travel blog

Yesterday I noticed that someone from Yahoo via Digg had visited my post about Yahoo Pipes, but what has surprised me are the number of travel agencies who have visited the blog via Google for passport and visa plus many trip planning keywords.

What’s this telling me as a blogger?

Well it’s telling me these companies are regularly returning they are finding the information they want and that the blog is useful to them. If I click on an organisation I can easily see which pages they visited, and also it records previous visits by that company.

From looking at the history I could see someone from the BBC, Guardian newspaper and Fox network are visiting my blog daily and spending a lot of time reading the content. This could be an employee planning their holiday, or someone interested in the content and what I have to say.

Interesting stuff..

It is nice to see that the blogging functionality is back to life at Performancing.

The stopping of this service was the main reason for me, to leave Performancing aside my interests...

Performancing is all about encouraging bloggers to make good blogs. And this year, we're going to recognize the best blogs in the business with the first annual Performancing Blog Awards.

Starting today, we're opening up nominations for the best best blogs or bloggers in each category. You are free to nominate your own blog, but we'd also encourage you to nominate others...blogs and bloggers that you truly believe in.

In addition, why not help spread the word about the Performancing Blog Awards by making a post on your own blog. You are free to hotlink the image and also include the following categories that are up for nomination.

Each category will have a single winner, two runners up, and possibly some honorable mentions. Our goal is to highlight the very best that the blogosphere has to offer, and we appreciate any tips/help that the Performancing community can provide to help us make our decisions:

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Note: Article reblogged because Akismet thought it was spam. All the nice comments are gone. Sorry for that!

Do you know that you have a personal blog on performancing.com?
Which subjects to blog about in your blog on performancing.com?

Become active! Start your own personal blog on performancing.com!

The moment you become a member on performancing.com you do not only have the right to write comments or forum entries but you also get a personal blog and user profile. If you are following the performancing.com community activities then it is a natural thing to post your own blog entries.

Let's get your performancing blog going step by step

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1. How to find your blog on performancing.com
2. How to publish to your blog
3. What to write about?
4. How to write

You are a registered user at performancing.com and you don't have a nice profile page? What a shame!

Create your personal profile page on performancing.com!

Basically your profile is an HTML page stored in the performancing.com database. Because of the HTML nature of your profile it is very easy to create a profile page to promote you as blogger, your websites and feeds.

Let's talk about structure, content and personality and how-to embed those facts into your profile.

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I have been trying to figure out why some bloggers do not participate in their own comment area.

Today I posted over at Blog Herald saying one of the things I like about Performancing is the bloggers like and support each other. I think there may be something related between the two ideas, see what you think?

On the one hand, most people say it is about time. Yes, answering comments does take time. But consider this, we all do stuff that takes time but we make time because we get something out of it. Why is it ok to drop commenting but ok to spend the same time on Twitter?

I do post on other blogs other than my own that do not provide emails when someone comments so I get caught up and distracted with other business. For this I need a better system to remind me of where I have posted and what about so I can go back and check comments. If I make this mistake myself then I guess I really ought to forgive others ;)

On your own primary blog though I think there has to be an element that if you are not motivated to answer your own comments then there is a problem. Perhaps you are not interested in what your readers have to say? Is the topic becoming boring for you? Do you only see profit in blogging, nothing more?

If this is the case then there are a couple of solutions:
1) Make friends with your readers. If you see commenters as friends you are less likely to ignore them
2) Re-invigorate your interest in your niche, even if that means drifting your topic focus towards areas that still hold your fascination

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Am I off base here? Please do share your thoughts in the comments ...

Yesterday the Performancing site was down all day, and I realized how much I have come to depend on it. I come here several times a day, to read the latest blogs and get tips on what's going on. I think this site is excellent for a new blogger, or freelance writer looking for tips, or jobs. So when it was down yesterday I found myself sad, and kind of disappointed. I was actually surprised how much I've come to appreciate this site.

I am happy that this morning when I clicked on it, it instantly appeared. Of course there is no fresh content because it has been down, but hey, I'm sure that will change soon.

I just wanted to say a big thank you to Performancing! Thanks for all the jobs you've brought my way, thanks for all the great articles and tips, and thanks for coming back online! You are a great resource and I appreciate it. Thanks for coming back!

Happy blogging!

Today marks the two year anniversary of Performancing's public launch. It's been a crazy, wild, roller coaster ride but we're thankful to everyone who has stuck around to make Performancing the community that it is today.

Over the next couple weeks, we'll be holding several contests and give away a whole slew of prizes. And to get things jumpstarted, I'm announcing the "Happy Birthday Performancing" banner contest.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is design a banner that celebrates Performancing's 2 year anniversary and post the banner on your blog/website along with a link to this post.

Not only will we return the favor by displaying your banner on our site, but we'll also link back to your site.

Plus, the winner will get the chance to have their graphic design services featured on the Performancing sidebar for one month, along with a front page interview.

So go ahead and make us smile on our birthday: design a happy birthday graphic, and then let us know about it by linking to this url:
http://performancing.com/birthday/happy-2nd-birthday-performancing

Contest ends Thursday November 15th.

(Thanks to Randa Clay for the logo in this post)

It seems that with the latest PageRank update Performancing has been nuked down from a 7 to a 4.

The idealists will tell you that this doesn't matter. That PageRank is obsolete. On certain days, I'm one of those idealists.

But the fact is that Performancing depends, for its success, on perceived authority. And like it or not, the majority of people in this niche still perceive authority based on a single factor - a little green bar.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what the best response to Google's act of aggression is. So I'm turning to you. I've always believed that community intelligence is much greater than individual intelligence. And I think that the best answer for how to proceed will derive from the comment section...so please do be part of the solution;-)

First, let me list the facts:

1. Performancing, based on principle, has supported the idea of sponsored themes.
2. Performancing discusses PageRank on its advertising page and offers to sell links. We have sold a very small quantity of links. Perhaps 6-10 over the last 9 months.
3. Performancing has indeed done a few sponsored posts, but sponsored posts have always been fully disclosed.
4. Performancing changed its link structure in the previous quarter.
5. Performancing encourages its authors to use real-life examples and to link-out to their own sites.
6. The majority of outgoing links on Performancing point to sites that are A) run by Performancing authors and B) are completely relevant to the Performancing niche.
7. Performancing has had massive success (both in human response and link gain) over the last 6 months as our themes and our pMetrics stats package have been very well received. This points to site growth and momentum.
8. Performancing's Alexa growth over the last 6 months is completely natural and consistently strong. This points to site growth and momentum, which you'd hope Google might reflect in PageRank.

So now, what are our options?

1. Ignore Google and proceed as if PageRank is irrelevant, build great services, launch an ad-network and just brute force our way to being a counterexample to PageRank
2. Ask someone like Matt Cutts for a advice and a specific action set that will get Performancing back into the good graces of Google.
3. Add nofollow to all outbound links
4. Drop all paid and sponsored links of all kind
5. Go on a massive flame-bait campaign, ripping into Google for it's abusive use of power and the utter incompetency of its single indicator of site importance;-) This of course would be fun but maybe not effective.

Those are the options as I see them. The problem with 1) is just that Performancing depends on its authority status. the problem with 2) is that I once called Matt Cutts The Link Nazi. The problem with 3) is that most of our outbound links are completely relevant and natural and nofollow is really quite silly. The problem with 4) is that we'd be abandoning our theme sponsorship principle (not to mention that there are plenty of sites receiving links from sponsored themes without penalty). Since we don't really do a lot of business with paid links, it might be best to drop them all together. The problem with 5) is that Google is known to act like a friendly dictator, forgiving the people with power and resources and loving on those who are willing to get into bed.

So, Performancing community, what is the best course of action for Performancing at this point regarding PageRank?

I didn't realize how cool Performancing profile pages could be until I saw this one from Markus.

Right now he's winning the competition. Can you beat him?

I'm offering $100 to the person who creates the coolest looking, most original Performancing profile page. It's Halloween, so why not dress up your profile?

The contest ends a week from today (November 7th).