5 Ways to Stand Out in Your Niche

We all know how saturated certain blog niches are, especially when you’re talking about technology, entertainment, and sports. Having a lot of competitors though doesn’t mean you can take the following steps to stand out and differentiate yourself from the rest of the field.

Focus on Geography

Everyone knows about Gizmodo and Engadget, but how many people realize that both blogs are mainly for US readers? I’ve found some degree of success with Technograph, a tech blog I created that’s all about Technology in the Philippines, where I’m currently based.

The US is still king when it comes to come to potential traffic and thus potential income. But concentrating on your region and provide updates more suited to your home audience is a great way to be unique.

First!

Some blogs become mainstream because they consistently broke news first, scooping your so-called mainstream media and online competitors. The irony is that as they become more mainstream, these blogs show less and less initiative, becoming part of the establishment that independent operators can trump.

This is a method that’s as old as news itself: be the first to break it, and you automatically stand out from the rest in your niche.

Thoughtful Reporting

Granted, it’s very hard to be first always, but it’s also possible to survey the entire situation once everyone has published their fast—and sometimes inaccurate or shallow—coverage.

In other words, by concentrating on providing quality content, thoughtfully reporting on an issue or an event and covering all perspectives, it’s possible to become an authoritative source. Being an authority in your niche is a powerful differentiator, as it establishes your blog as the site to visit for a topic.

Socialization

A lot of blog authors are content to just post the content and wait for it to bring in the traffic, not even bothering to reply to comments. This creates another opportunity to stand out, in the sense that you can interact with your readers, making them feel that they’re a real part of the (cliched) “conversation”. Readers feel more valued, and thus are more willing to return. Some of the more successful sites are those that get visitors talking with the author and others.

This approach does require a lot of time, as your formulate responses designed not only to address the reader’s questions or opinions, but to encourage further discussion as well. But experience has taught me that bloggers can derive a lot of useful content from what their readers say. It could be a perspective that no one else has thought of, or the lowest price you’ve ever seen for that gadget you were reporting on; sometimes those comments provide enough material for that next post.

Stop Looking Like a Blog

Many mainstream blogs have decidedly dropped the traditional blog format, so you’re probably wondering: how does this help my blog stand out? The answer is that, by going beyond the typical blog format—which limits what visitors can see on their first visit to your site—you’re paying attention to your readers’ experience.

Expert blog theme coders are surprisingly very affordable (take a look at wedomarkup.com) and you’ll see what I mean, so it’s relatively easy to convert your blog into something that—while not following the traditional blog format—creates more appeal for a potentially wider readership.

So how do you stand out in your niche? Feel free to hit the comments below.

Don’t Forget To Respond To Your Readers

If you currently run a blog, my guess is that you allow comments on your blog posts. If you dont, you should! Not only does it give your readers an easy way to leave feedback, but it also allows you to build a community around your blog.

However, many bloggers forget (or don’t take the time) to respond to the comments people leave. This is not a good way to build your blogs readership. There’s nothing worst from a readers standpoint than leaving a comment, specifically a question, that never gets a response. I’ve personally left a few questions in the past that never got answered, which gave me the impression that the blogger did not want to take the time to respond.

Make It A Habit

So from now on, make it a goal to always respond to your readers. Not only will it build up your blogs comment section, but it will also let your readers know you care. Depending on the amount of comments you get, it may only take a few minutes every day to go in and respond to any open comments.

Once you implement this strategy, you will start to see more readers leaving comments because they are reassured that they will get a response back. Plus it’s a great way to build up the trust from your daily readers.

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How to handle blog comments left in another language

David has already raised the issue of real comments with spammy URLs, and that’s something to deal with in its own right, but what I often find is comments left in another language (sometimes including a link) which I have to debate what to do with.

What can you do with comments left in a language that differs from you and your blog’s native tongue? Here are three ideas.

Delete the comment outright

This seems a little unfair, though it could be argued that if someone is genuinely leaving a comment on your blog (and has therefore understood the blog post well enough to leave an informed response) then they should be able to leave the comment in the same language.

However, the visitor may have used an automatic translation service to read your article and yet feels more comfortable leaving a comment in their own language.

They may be able to read and understand the language you use but find it hard to write in that language.

Simply deleting the comment outright may save you time but it could potentially alienate one of your visitors, and who knows how influential that person might be?

You could add this as part of the comment policy for your blog, of course, but it could still be perceived as a snub.

Translate and leave comment in original language

If you’re fortunate enough to speak the same language as the person who commented, or are happy to trust an automatic translation tool such as Google Translate, you can check to ensure that the comment is relevant to the entry and that the link doesn’t lead to a spam site.

Doing an automatic translation may miss some nuances, but you should get the overall flavor of the comment and be able to work out whether it’s a keeper.

Translate and publish a translation

As above, but instead of simply checking out the comment for your own peace of mind, publish a translation (either verbatim, paraphrase, or summary) in the primary language of the blog.

This is done more for the benefit of your other visitors, but be particularly careful with automatic translations because you may well miss nuances or find that some words (especially “slang” for that particular language) are incorrectly translated or not translated at all.

Getting help

If you receive a large amount of traffic from a particular region where another language is predominantly spoken, it might be worth investigating partnering with someone who speaks that language to handle comment moderation for you.

Conclusions

The admin involved in dealing with comments can be fairly high, whatever language they’re left in.

I don’t have statistics for how much spam is left in other languages, or whether spammers are deliberately using non-English languages to try to fool automated spam filters and human detection, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

At the end of the day, it’s your blog and you can choose how to handle the comments you receive. However, I’d recommend making some effort to check them out rather than simply purging them.

What’s your strategy for handling comments left in other languages?

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?

What Comment Spam Are You Seeing?

Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen a large increase in the number of spam comments that look similar to this one:

Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same sort of spam? The good news is that Akismet has done a great job catching the messages before they go live.

WP Ajax Edit Comments 2.2 Released

Longtime readers of Performancing know that I am a big fan of Ronald Huereca’s WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin for WordPress. Just when I think the plugin can’t get any better, he releases a new version that improves upon the last.

WP Ajax Edit comments is a WordPress plugin that provides the ability for users to edit their comments in an Ajax powered interface. On top of that, site administrators have additional features such as the ability to submit comments to the Akismet queue and deleting comments from outside the administration panel. You can even edit comments via the Ajax interface when your within the comment manager.

This latest version of the plugin adds a very cool feature known as De-Link. This will strip the url from the comment similar to how the dedicated DeLink plugin works. You can now also move the editing interface to be above or below the comment. Ronald has also provided a bit of a performance bump by decreasing the footprint of the Javascript while also making the editor completely stand alone from the comments system.

I consider this plugin my right hand man when I install a fresh version of WordPress. Thanks goes out to Ronald who continues to do a great job with this plugin.

Are you currently using this WordPress plugin? Has it saved you any time as a WordPress site administrator?

How To Save Time Commenting On Blogs

One thing I enjoy doing when I browse through the hundreds of news items in my feed reader is commenting on blog posts. However, entering my name, url, and email address each time I want to do so becomes a pain. Taking a page out of a spammers book, I have solved this dilemma by using a Firefox extension known as Autofill Forms. This extension has more features than I know what to do with but I’ll explain how to simplify things down so that you can use this time saving extension to comment on blogs.

Once you install the extension, a default profile will be generated for you. I recommend creating a new profile and call it BlogCommenting. This profile will only contain the rules necessary to comment on blogs. Typically, the fields used on many of the blogging sites across the web are labeled Name, Email, and URL. As you can see from the following screenshot, I already have these fields configured so that when I press Alt-J which is the Autofill Forms keyboard shortcut, it automatically fills in those fields with these configured values.

To add field rules to your profile, check out the How To Add A Specific Field Rule Form Field wiki page for detailed instructions. Once this plugin is configured, blog commenting is as simple as pressing Alt-J on the keyboard and then typing out my comment. I have to mention the fact that this process does not work for every commenting form that is available. For instance, this extension has no effect on the fields presented in Disqus or third party commenting systems. For most everything else though, this extension ends up saving me a ton of time over the course of a year. Combine this with the fact that you can add as many form field rules as you want and you have yourself a real winner here.

This article is an entry for the Perfcast Blogging Challenge as mentioned in episode 5. To have your entry viewed by David and I, leave a comment with a link to your entry on the Perfcast episode 5 blog post. You may be the entry we review on the next episode.

Would You Still Comment If The URL Comment Field Disappeared?

Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate – More Than Just Comments

If you haven’t heard by now, Automattic has acquired the third party commenting system, IntenseDebate. IntenseDebate is based out of Boulder, Colorado and is one of a few third party commenting services/systems in the so called "enhanced comment space". IntenseDebate offers features such as replying to comments via email, threaded comments, importing/exporting of comments, etc. While having a conversation with a friend of mine regarding the acquisition, he asked the question, "Why didn’t Automattic just create something in house?". It is worth mentioning that WordPress 2.7 will have threaded comment functionality as part of the core which as far as I can tell, was created in-house. However, threaded comments are just part of the equation.

I think there are a few reasons why they opted to acquire rather than create. The first being that acquisition is faster than creating something from scratch on your own. The second, commenting on WordPress.com or WordPress.org powered blogs out of the box, sucks. Both the front end and the back end of WordPress as it relates to commenting has been in need of a serious overhaul for quite some time now. In fact, I remember Lorelle Van Fossen at WordCamp Dallas telling Matt Mullenweg along with the rest of the crowd that administering comments in WordPress sucks. You should of seen the reaction on the attendees faces. Matt also admitted on his blog post that comments really haven’t changed much within the span of ten years and that it was time to kick it up a notch.

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

The third reason for the acquisition is the relatively small size of the company in terms of personnel. IntenseDebate is made up of only five individuals. On top of that, they are using PHP and MySQL as their platform which is the same platform WordPress is built upon. This makes it easier than ever to integrate the service into what is already being offered by Automattic.

I’m not sure if the WordPress.org project will have a fully integrated IntenseDebate commenting system but I can certainly see something like this on the WordPress.com side of things. Also, I find it interesting that at the flip of a switch, IntenseDebate pulls into the lead in terms of market share out of the various offerings provided by third party commenting systems. Disqus claims that over 25,000 websites have signed up to use their service. Meanwhile, WordPress.com has over four million blogs registered to the site meaning, IntenseDebate will automatically (pardon the pun) have four million blogs to work with on top of their independent users. While I have seen a number of tech bloggers jump on board the Disqus bandwagon, it will be interesting to see if they will switch to IntenseDebate, knowing that the service is now owned by the folks who develop WordPress. I have never felt comfortable using a third party to replace my comments but knowing that IntenseDebate is owned by Automattic relieves those types of worries.

Last but not least, think about this. Automattic plans on leaving IntenseDebate as a separate entity alongside services such as Akismet, Gravatar, BBpress, etc. When Gravatar was purchased by Automattic, some feared that the service would only be available to WordPress. That has turned out not to be the case and the same can be said for IntenseDebate. With this acquisition, Automattic is finding themselves opening up to not only WordPress powered sites, but owning companies/services that are independent platforms. Talk about versatility! Only time will tell on how IntenseDebate is really integrated into the WordPress.org project and WordPress.com but I know one thing, I am certainly happy to see attention being placed on comments as they are truly the one aspect of blogging that forms interaction between the author and reader.

WP Comment Remix Takes First Place

WeblogToolsCollection.com has announced the results from their popular WordPress plugin competition and WP Comment Remix has taken first place. So what does first place win?

• $2000
• Production of a professionally recorded song for the winner.
• Dedicated server for one year from iWeb (Intel Core 2 Duo, HD 160GB Sata2, 1GB of RAM and 1500GB of bandwidth per month)
• Copy of OIOPublisher Advertising Plugin

Second place went to Aaron Harp who created Manageable. Manageable allows for inline editing of the date, title, author, categories, tags, status and more on both posts and pages. Interestingly enough, WordPress 2.7 is slated to have many of these same features.

Congratulations to the winners of the competition and for all of those plugin authors who created a plugin from scratch for the competition. I was one the judges for the event and I have to admit, their was plenty of competition. I especially found the plugins that were created by Vladimir Prelovac to be innovative and thought he was going to run away with this competition but I was proved wrong.