Brand Equity and Mascots?

WHen I built my blog in 2006 it was completely by accident that I stuck to some sort of branding in the form of an insect (the title of my blog is “A Bugged Life”). Four template changes later, I’ve managed to keep this brand and it’s been known by the local community. I’ve contemplated on going crazy with the idea by building a full mascot outfit of a huge cute bug which can be displaced during new media events. Mugs, tees, stickers — yeah you get the idea.

What sort of personal branding have you done as a blogger to enhance your equity in other spheres apart from the online space? Have you gone crazy with the idea or are you happy with the way your blog is now? Is your blog ubiquitous, allowing it to take on many shapes even off the Internet?

I write this in reference to the resurrection of UK’s Ask Jeeves — based on surveys, despite Jeeves’ departure from the Internet in 2006, he still brings forth a lot of brand recall as “Jeeves” is easier and more fondly remembered than a corporate logo. And in Asia, just look at the brand recognition Ajinomoto has achieved with it’s “Dapur Umami” online cooking class.

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.

Thanks to our sponsor, Winners Circle

We’d like to thank our Performancing sponsor, Winners Circle.

With numerous educational websites offering mentoring programs and promising to help business oriented people make money on the internet today, it can be quite a challenge choosing which one is right for your needs. First time entrepreneurs in the internet business can be overwhelmed with the wealth of information available to them. The vast resources are helpful all right but not all can ensure success in terms of driving traffic and profits.
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Getting Links to your Blog

Is your blog not experiencing the volume of traffic that you would like to see? One of the major flaws that many blog owners do not consider is the importance of links and linking. Links are to a blog, what highways are to the automotive world. Without highways, information, people, and goods cannot reach their destination. The same is true when talking about links. You can post the most credible or well written blog on the internet, but without proper linking from your post, or to it, the information you have provided is simply that: yours.

Links take readers of other blogs and different miscellaneous websites to areas of the internet that they normally would never have gone. Your blog might just be one of the areas that are outside of their comfort zone. These internet users are crucial to your blog’s survival. One of the most important reasons why it is essential to build a large linking network to your blog is how much higher you rank in search engines.

One of the methods that search engines like Google and Yahoo! use to rank their pages is how many other websites link to it. For example, a site that has fifty sites linking to it is more likely to be higher on a search engine list than a website that has ten. Keep in mind that this is not always the case, but this is definitely a good rule of thumb.

Another element that is crucial to the growth of your blog is the quality of the links that you provide. While gaining reputation through other websites, you have to ask yourself if the websites that are linking to you are doing you any good. If your blog is on the best Super Nintendo games of all time and you are getting links from sites that focus on the poverty of developing nations, then search engines are not going to take your blog seriously. If, however, you can find a way to talk to Nintendo itself and convince them to link to your blog, then your credibility and influence is going to be greatly affected in a positive way. It takes a combination of quality and quantity for your blog to gain strength on multiple search engines.

Again, it is the goal of a successful website or blog to be first on a search engine’s results, or at least on the first page. While this process may take a while, if you produce quality content, then you can be sure that you will succeed.

The most important part about linking is actually convincing someone to link to you. There are two methods that almost all blog owners use, due to their ease and effectiveness. One method is to actually write on someone else’s blog; a quick article is usually sufficient. This is a quick and easy way to simply show the bloggers on that site that you exist, and as long as you produce great content, then many of them will stop at your blog regularly. The more direct route that many blog owners use is to just simply ask another website’s owner if he/she would be willing to link to you. Sometimes this method works beautifully.

Sometimes the person you asked may want to barter with you, such as an exchange of links. Just remember, the worst thing that can happen to you if you ask someone is that they will just say no. Simply thank them for their time and move on.

Eventually, your blog will begin to contain multiple links to and from many websites. Keep in mind that linking is equally affected by the quality and quantity of your linking potential.

The New Landing Pages

With social media talk fluttering about, your product’s website doesn’t necessarily need to be discovered via search engine results or billboard ads (for more info, go to www.yourwebsiteyay.com). The past 3 years has brought forth a new set of “landing pages” for your brand. Here are some of them:

a. Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Yahoo! 360 (eep, they’ve closed!)… the list goes on. But which one should you join? Which platform should you grow your community? Should you pick at random? Should you do all? The key is to experiment, yes but according to Gladwell’s principles in Blink!, you may already know the answer — go for gut feel. If you still need social proof, take a look at your referral traffic in your stats page. In my case, I run a blog for a local men’s lifestyle magazine and we figured that Facebook and Plurk (not Twitter), give us the biggest referral traffic next to Multiply.com. It’s gut feel, solidified with stats.

b. Apps: Brands are slowly realizing this, by taking their brand name into sponsoring or co-developing applications mostly for your mobile phone. The iTunes store, open social app development for social networks, the Nokia Ovi store, the Android store — a plethora of opportunities lies in ubiquity. So let’s think for a bit: do we put that flash game in our website or do we bring the game to our users onto their Facebook profiles and iPhone apps? I say the latter!

c. Brand Ambassadors: There’s nothing like good ‘ol word of mouth. Genuine word of mouth. Not those conceived “viral” messages that get passed on artificially. I personally think PR practitioners should be more attentive to what goes on in the circle of their “stakeholders” on the web. There are tools for this — Twitter hashtags are great ways for finding people who have good things to say about your product. Why not encourage them to love you more by giving them a little push (like a review unit of your upcoming phone). It isn’t about losing credibility. It’s about selection and being a smart marketer.

Sitepoint Marketplace becomes Flippa

Most of you have probably heard of Sitepoint, either from its books, tutorials, or their well established marketplace, but over the last few years, they have been finding the marketplace becoming a community of its own. At first, they split off the design work to a new site, 99designs.com and now it seems the buying and selling of websites will be moved to a new domain called Flippa.

Currently in Beta, Flippa looks like a whole break with the current Marketplace, where 99designs looked fairly similar in nature to the older design market. The good thing is that they’ve moved over the user accounts so anyone that has or had an account on the old Marketplace, can use Flippa.

Why change the Marketplace on Sitepoint? Details are already on Flippa:

Why Flippa.com? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

In a nut shell, the SitePoint Marketplace has outgrown its tab on sitepoint.com. For this marketplace to remain the #1 location for buying and selling web sites, and for us to properly service the needs of our buyer and seller community, it simply had to have its own identity – it had to be set free from sitepoint.com. Once you’ve had a chance to look around the site we’re confident that you’ll agree it was the right move.

So far, there doesn’t seem to be much real content on the new site, as people test out the new site. How will we be able to tell the real sales from the fake as they run this Beta? Not really sure, but one thing is for certain, Flippa is something we will all have to get used to, and hopefully it won’t kill the community that has grown on Sitepoint.

Who Makes Twitter Great for You?

With everyone talking about how few people actually Twitter, I wanted to take a second to reflect on those that make Twitter great for me. See, even though the following facts are true, I still enjoy Twitter:

A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

-source: Harvard Business Publishing

Everyone on Twitter has a few core people that they couldn’t bring themselves to unfollow. Be it because they are friends, family or because they say such amazing things that you couldn’t see yourself removing their nuggets of information from your daily stream.

Mine include the following:
@WTL – he is a good friend of mine in Ottawa that keeps my spirits up and Tweets about things I am interested in.

@markfox – my cousin, a fellow geek, and online gaming squad member.

@JimKukral – Inspiration to me in many different ways. Stays positive, works hard, and has interesting ideas that he follows through on.

@chrisbrogan – Another amazing inspiration to me. He is also a crazy Twitter conversationalist. Very friendly, helpful, and interesting to read, even just in 140 characters.

@jamescogan – Tweets some interesting business and new media stuff, as well as a few Canada specific things. Runs a media network with dozens of websites, on some pretty amazing Canadian domains.

@joetek – Brilliant guy, lots of fun, and posts great stuff on Twitter. He is one of the few people that ReTweet things I am interested in, acting almost like a Twitter filter for me.

@collis – The guy just exudes success. It will either make you very excited about working on the web, or very jealous. Depending on the day, I go one way or another.

@mike9r – I’ve been a fan of his design, his blog posts, and just the way he looks at the world. He’s been able to keep up that certain vibe on Twitter, and is fun to follow. He gives previews of his work, and some interesting opinions on various things.

Of course, I can’t list everyone I follow, nor all of the people that are great on Twitter, but those are my “key” people on Twitter that tweet at a decent pace, and that Twitter wouldn’t be the same for me if any of them left.

Who are the people on your Twitter list that you just couldn’t unfollow?

What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links?

You probably get these a lot of times. Some posts a valid comment, with well-thought out and substantial paragraphs. But when you check the author name and link, it’s a link to a commercial site, using keywords meant for search optimization. Some of these get caught by the spam filter, but some are approved. You tell yourself there’s no worry, because you use rel=nofollow anyway. But if your comment policy (if you have one) prohibits outright advertisements, your readers might start to wonder.

You probably get two to three paragraphs with good arguments, but signed as “buy used cars” or “bank loans” or whatnot. With a blog as big as Performancing, this can become a big headache.

What do you do with valid comments that have commercial links? You can either:

1. Remove the URL, leaving out the name;
2. Unpublish or delete the entire comment; or,
3. Leave it be, making sure you have rel=nofollow turned on.

Deleting the entire comment is probably the easiest option, since it just involves one click. Editing out the URL is a bit more complicated, since it involves editing the comment and manually setting the URL field blank. Perhaps there should be an option or plugin on blogging platforms to nuke the URL field in one click, but leaving the contents intact.

And then there’s the question of your threshold for commercial links. What exactly does constitute a commercial link that you’d rather delete? What if the link were relevant to the post you made? For instance, if you post about viruses and malware, and someone from a known antivirus company posts a valid tip, with a link back to his site, what do you do?

Again, dealing with a couple of these would probably be easy, but if you are faced with dozens or hundreds per day, it can get tedious, and you want something automated. Most anti-spam plugins are either a go or no go, meaning you can get them to publish or kill a comment depending on certain characteristics. I’d like to see something like publish the comment but not the link.

Of course, you can just hide the contents of the URL field, but that would not be fair to valid comment posters and readers interested in checking out commenters’ sites.

What’s your general rule on these kind of comments?

How Do You Advertise Affiliates?

Since the launch of WPTavern.com, I’ve received numerous offers from companies asking if I would like to join a higher tiered part of their affiliate program which offers higher than average payouts when compared to a normal affiliate. I’ve always had a problem with affiliate advertising in that, I don’t think you should advertise just for the sake of advertising. I’d much rather someone paid me directly for display advertising rather than placing an ad on my site, hoping people click through and then hoping even more that they make a purchase.

However, where affiliate advertising makes complete sense is when you advertise for a product or service you have used and can stand by. This enables you to have that trust factor, stand by your claims for the product/service and chances are, you’ll probably have an easier time convincing people to purchase through you.

So how do you handle affiliate advertising on your site? Do you advertise for anyone/everyone or only those things you can vouch for?

Keep On Top Of Trends With TrendPedia

With everything that takes place on the web, keeping track of trends can be a tough process. Although Google provides a Trend search of their own, TrendPedia looks to have its place in the trend search market. The front page of TrendPedia showcases the hottest trends from the previous month as well as popular trends from the previous week.

At the top of the site, you are provided three text fields which will add combine all three trend searches into a comparable graph chart. In my test drive, I compared MovableType, WordPress, and LiveJournal.

For whatever reason, I could not get any trend results for MovableType. For LiveJournal and WordPress, the chart showcases WordPress in the lead with 68% of articles around WordPress with 32% dedicated to LiveJournal. Search results for each trend are shown in their own tab at the bottom of the site and consists mostly of blog posts. This means you can use TrendPedia to get a grasp on blogs staying abreast of the latest trends.

I think Google Trends has a nicer interface and a cleaner way of presenting the information but I find TrendPedia cool because of the mentions of blog post in the search results. At any rate, it’s nice to have more than one site in this market.