5 Basic and Yet Essential Tips to Get You Started with Blogging

So you were inspired by the self-made successful bloggers that you read daily and you want to start a blogging career? The problem is you don’t know where to start.

Here are 5 simple, basic, bare and yet essential tips that will help you get started with your blogging adventure. [Read more]

Blogger Appreciation Contest – Call For Nominations

Bloggers pour their heart and soul into their blogs and often get very little in return. As a whole, I think it’s safe to say that we’re an under-appreciated group who work very hard and what we do. Most of us blog for free and the only thing that keeps us going is the thrill of interacting with our readers or the rare time when we break a big news story or get recognized by other blogs for an insightful commentary.

But the fact is that even the most popular bloggers barely make enough money to scrape by. There are really only a handful of people who actually make a full wage off blogging.

Cell Phones .org thinks that bloggers don’t get enough appreciation and for that reason they are running a Bloggers Appreciation Contest. The contest will reward the three winners with some really cool prizes:

First Prize: a full year’s worth of your cell phone bill (up to $1000)
Second Prize: free cell phone (does not include plan)
Third Prize: $100 gift certificate to use at Cell Phones .org

Nominations for the contest will be accepted until February 28th 2009. Blogs that have been nominated will then ask their readers to show their appreciation by voting for them over the next few weeks. Voting will be held from March 1st until March 17th. Each visitor can vote once per day during the voting period.

To nominate your blog or any other blog, go to the Cell Phones.org nomination page.

Comment Form vs. Contact Form: Do You Mistake One for the Other?

Many of the blogs I run, manage or write for contain a handy contact form for directly emailing the blog’s owner straight from the browser. For those familiar with the difference, you would know that contact forms send email directly to the blog owner or author, while comment forms will leave a message viewable by the public. For instance, you can use this form to email me directly. Or you can leave a public comment at the comment box below.

But apparently, to some, it makes no difference whether you leave a comment or send an email as long as the message goes through. The mixup sometimes results in headaches and annoyances. For instance, a reader could be writing with the intent of replying to an existing comment. But if he uses the contact form, then the messages goes only to you. Are you obliged to re-post the message as a comment?

Or perhaps a reader wants to send you something in private, but instead publishes a comment. It’s probably easy enough to just unpublish the comment and respond to the writer via email (WordPress conveniently sends you alerts when there are new comments). But what if that message contained something you’d rather not have everybody read? Even if you hit the “unpublish” link, you can’t be sure that a comment would not leave traces (such as in comment RSS feeds).

There’s a simple solution, and this involves properly identifying both your email forms and comment forms. On the email form, you can write something like:

We appreciate your feedback. Please use the form below to send a direct message to the author/owner of this blog. Messages are sent directly to the author’s email inbox and will not be viewable by the public. If you wish to post a public reply, comment forms are available at the end of each article.

And then for comment forms:

Comments entered in this form are published for public viewing (once approved from moderation, if applicable). If you wish to send the author a private message, please use the contact form.

With luck, this should result in less confusion, and your readers will appreciate being told where their message will go.

Ask Performancing: Personal vs. Authoritative Voice

For our first Ask Performancing feature, we have a few opinions on the Personal vs. Authoritative voice issue, which has been discussed over at the Hive.

The question is whether to use a personal voice or an authoritative voice, and in this particular case, the site in question is a community resource site that caters to higher education: College Crunch.

And so, the following were compared:

I have tried to come up with a wide range of career options that nearly anyone with any interest can take a look at.

vs.

We have selected a wide range of career options that nearly anyone with any interest can take a look at.

and:

What are your thoughts on how the economic shift will effect higher learning? Let me know in the comments below, especially if you’ve seen other reports regarding this issue.

vs.

What are your thoughts on how the economic shift will effect higher learning? Let us know in the comments below, especially if you’ve seen other reports regarding this issue.

You may notice that the first statements come across as more conversational and informal, particularly with the use of “I” and “me,” which pertains to the author of the statement. The latter ones are more of collective, by using “We” and “us.”

While the authoritative voice does not necessarily only entail using “we” instead of “I” this is perhaps the easiest difference to spot–that is, talking as if directly conversing with your reader. This is definitely the best approach when emailing a relative, friend or colleague. When emailing on behalf of your business or company, then perhaps it’s better to write with a more formal tone, as may be required.

Some snippets from the discussion among our Hive experts.

deb_n says it depends whether one is writing web content or a blog post:

If you’re blogging and hoping to establish a community and encourage comments and discussions around your articles, I prefer [the personal] approach.

If you’re planning a more antiseptic and less community driven website, go with the stuffier more authoritative voice.

gerrybot cites the magazine approach, where the collective approach is indicative of a group mentality:

We see a lot of celeb magazines in the UK using this form, which seem a little more authoritative because you’re implying a group mentality, “We think the Sarah Connor Chronicles rocks”, which I thought carried a little more weight. Unfortunately, when occassions called for a personal tone “As a new guitarist, Led Zeppelin were a huge influence on me”, you had to switch.

But then some would prefer having a mix of the “I” and the “we” in one statement, such as hart, who thinks an author can cite the collective statement (such as a site policy or a fact), but also have a personal approach:

“We have tried to come up with a wide range of career options. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.”

In my opinion, it does depend on the purpose and the context. If what you are writing represents fact, a collective thought, or a statement by your company, team or organization, then it’s best to use a more formal voice. If you’re writing a product or service profile, then it’s best to use a formal voice. But if you’re writing an article or blog post where you want to invite reader interaction and discussion (whether through public comment threads or even email feedback forms), then it’s best to use a personal tone. This makes it easier for people to respond, as they would feel just like they’re talking back to you.

You can find more discussions like this at Performancing Hive. If you’d like to post a question, feel free to do so at the comment threads here or email us feedback at support (at) performancing.com. I also dig through the community forums and even the Hive for interesting discussions. Our first question actually came from our former editor Ryan Caldwell, as posted on the Hive.

Soccerlens 2008 Writing Competition

For the next two weeks (11th to 26th October), Soccerlens.com will be accepting new article submissions for the contest. Your entry must meet the minimum criteria. Articles will be published on Soccerlens and will be considered part of the contest. During the last week of the month, the Soccerlens team will evaluate all published entries and pick a winner which is to be announced on Friday, October 31st.

Click here to read the rules and criteria for the contest.

Soccerlens.com is headed by Ahmed Bilal, a past contributor to Performancing.

MSN, Google, Yahoo, Who Will Win?

c4sr who is a prominent member of the Hive Community is responsible for pointing this video series out to us. It’s called the Search Engine Rap battle. (Warning: Video automatically starts playing when you browse to the site and mild language is used. Probably not safe for work.)

Just like the rap battles you may have seen on TV, these search engines battle it out for the dopest lyrics. Upon the completion of the video, users can vote for which they think did the best during the battle. There are three different battles to watch, MSN vs Google, MSN vs Yahoo!, and Google vs Yahoo!. While MSN puts up a decent fight, the real battle is Google vs Yahoo!. I found that one to be the most difficult in terms of voting for a winner.

Here is the video featuring Google going up against Yahoo!.

Google is not only good at search, but they know how to rap as well.

AdWords vs 125X125 Ad Block

Late last night, I sent out a random blogging poll to Twitter. The question I proposed was this: As a blogger, have you ever clicked on an AdSense ad or anyone’s 125X125 pixel ads? Thankfully, I received a number of responses on Twitter, most of which surprised me.

Here are the responses as they came in.

• chris24 @jeffr0: Not AdSense. I’ve clicked on 125×125px ones a few times, but I 9/10 times click on The Deck ads (they’re *too* relevant).

• jdevalk @jeffr0 yes.

• arickmann @jeffr0 I have clicked both adwords and 125 ads.

• hans_engel @jeffr0 Same as @chris24 – never on AdSense, but I usually always click on The Deck ads. Love ‘em!

When Joost gave me his answer, it rung a bell in my head. No wonder 125X125 pixel ads were clicked on more than the AdSense block, they were simply more relevant to that particular blogs readers than the AdSense blocks. This is weird, considering that AdSense uses the content on your site as a way to display relevant advertising.

When asked why 125X125 ads were clicked on more than the AdSense blocks, these are the responses I received.

• jdevalk @jeffr0 because those are usually actually targeted at blog X’s readers, instead of AdSense, where the targeting is crap.

• JanKarlsbjerg @jeffr0 Because the 125×125 are less descriptive/informative than the AdSense ads and you have to follow the link to see what it’s an ad for

• JanKarlsbjerg @jeffr0 The 125×125 may be relevant to the blog’s regular readers, but the point of adsense ads is that they’re tailored to each page

Now, I invite you to participate in the discussion. Based on your own experience, how have the 125X125 ads performed for you when compared with AdSense or AdWords? Is it all about relevancy? Maybe the 125X125 ads just look better?

Authority Blog vs. Hub Blog

In this post, I’m using the terms “authority blog” and “hub blog” in this manner:

Authority blog

• Filled with conceptually unique content
• Posts are longer than the average blog post
• Doesn’t link out very often
• More likely to link internally than to other blogs
• Posting frequency is not as important as post quality

Hub blog

• Multiple, short daily posts
• Links out liberally
• Most posts are talking about content on another website
• Posting quality takes a backseat to posting frequency

Or as SEO Book says:

An authority is a site that is linked to by many sites and pages covering that topic. A hub links to many relevant topical sites. It is said that a good authority has links from many good hubs, and good hubs link to many good authorities. (page 203)

This discussion is not to pit both blogs against each other. Both types of blogs work well. You have authority blogs like Zen Habits, which has over 60,000 RSS subscribers. And then you have hub blogs like Gizmodo, which is in the Alexa top 1,000.

Also, I realize that many blogs are hybrids. They have authority blog elements as well as hub blog elements. Hybrid blogs can definitely have success too. My goal in writing this is to teach you about these type of blogs so that you can structure your blog in the best way possible.

Pros and Cons of Authority Blogs

Pros:

Usually the content on authority blogs is more linkworthy than the content on hub blogs. Because the content is more in-depth, you can build your brand quickly. Check out Chris Pearson’s: How Can 10 Simple Articles Change Your Life? (via)

Cons:

However, it is harder to produce longer pieces of conceptually new content. You really have to know your niche and have a passion for it to continue in the long term. And for many niches, you have to be an expert to gain credibility and trust. Also, you’re writing less posts than hub blogs so you won’t have as much search engine fodder, or indexed pages on the search engines.

Pros and Cons of Hub Blogs

Pros:

Many bloggers start off their blogs as hub blogs because it’s relatively easy to create the content. They love their niche and can easily find stuff to link to and talk about. Because your posts are shorter, you can create more of them, which gives you a lot of pages for the search engines to index.

Because you link out a lot, your blog can be the one-stop destination for people who don’t have time to check out all the authority blogs in your niche. As you build your hub blog’s brand, you may get breaking news first because companies respect your coverage of the niche.

Cons:

However, your content won’t be as linkworthy as authority blogs. Oftentimes, it takes time to build your brand as a hub blogger because your posts are not as in-depth.

Consider the Niche

In many saturated niches, there are many hub blogs. This makes it harder for a hub blog to gain traction because of all the competition. However, in other niches, there are many authority blogs, but not many hub blogs. This often happens because authority blogs and commercial sites don’t like to link to each other.

If you setup a hub blog, you can become a top destination site for your niche because the sites in your space are not linking out. Every niche can definitely use a couple good hub blogs.

Hub blogs work better in niches that experience a lot of change and therefore have a lot of news. For example, the entertainment and tech niche is especially ripe for good hub blogs. To avoid all the competition, you should focus on a sub niche like movies or mobile products.

Authority blogs work in any niche but for some niches, you have to be an expert. A classic example are the make money online bloggers who haven’t made money online. These guys won’t succeed. Gaining expert status can be a huge barrier to entry because it can take some time to become an expert.

Consider Your Strengths

Do you see yourself more as a reporter or writer?

Do you like writing longer pieces of content or short blog posts?

Are you good a finding cool stuff in your niche (including under the radar but quality blogs)?

Are you good at covering the news in your niche in a timely manner?

Are you an expert in anything?

Feedback

How would you categorize your blog? More of an authority blog or a hub blog? Why did you choose that format?

Also, what kind of blogs do you follow?

Akismet Might Have Some Serious Competition on Their Hands

Automattic’s Akismet has been long known as the king of spam detection. It has been ported to multiple content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, MovableType, phpBB, Joomla, b2evolution, Geeklog, and many more. It is, hands down, one of the most popular solutions to handle all this spam, but now there is something else ready to take on the likes of Akismet. It, perhaps, might even be more effective than Akismet.

Defensio, a comment spam detection system which claims 99.77% accuracy, is really striving to become serious competition to Akismet. Not only that, but the development team aims to pick up where Akismet has left off.

The system improves upon what Akismet has built in many ways: the system ranks comments by “spaminess,” it adapts to your blog over time, and it also provides RSS feeds for your comments. But it also does so much more.

Rick Olson of ActiveReload discussed the ways in which Defensio differs from Akismet:

How does Defensio differ? It sports a very similar API with a few added methods. First, it can scan articles as they’re posted. I’m assuming this provides an extra layer of protection by finding topics that may be off topic. They also provide a method to retrieve basic statistics. Though I think the most important additions are the inclusion of unique signatures and ‘spaminess’ scores. Unique signatures allow me to report spam/ham on previously checked comments without having to reconstruct the original request again. The spaminess value provides a convenient way to sort comments. Perhaps you want to see valid comments with the highest spaminess value, or spam with the lowest spaminess value to look for false reporting.

With Defensio’s claims of 99.77% accuracy, I managed to get around 96.43% accuracy (I took this screen-shot this morning, but it has changed to 96.43% since then) , but I did not reach a level of comments which was sufficient to accurately judge. If I had given it a few more days, I quite possibly would have over 99% accuracy, but I just managed to get hit with a false-positive yesterday. I believe it is still in “training.” Over the past four weeks, I received zero spam on my blog and two false-positives. With that in mind, I believe it was fairly accurate considering the low volume of comments. The aggressiveness of the filtering can also be tweaked. I set mine to a relatively low setting, but you might prefer to set it higher once you have trained the application.

The only suggestion I have would be to send email notifications when there are questionable items in the spam queue. But other than that, I was more than satisfied with the product, and I would recommend that people who have not been overly satisfied with Akismet to give it a shot. It is a really simple setup.

If you have used Defensio or have any questions, please let me know in the comments section. I’ll be glad to hear about your experiences and offer any help that I can.

To Sponsor Or Not To Sponsor

Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com discussed an interesting issue over the weekend regarding blogging and hypocrisy.

It seems that unless you are a part of a blog network or some big name blogger the idea that you would even think of stepping beyond the bounds of ad networks and god forbid go looking for deals of your own then you are stepping beyond your pay grade and need to be put back in your place. The most common method of slapping forward looking independent bloggers back into place is by calling their ethics into question.

Being an up and coming blogger myself, my opinion has been that if a blogger is going to monetize their blog through the use of sponsored posts, they should always give out a disclaimer. Many of the resources out on the web which help you to become a better blogger have stated that once your readers lose trust in what you write, it’s incredibly difficult to get that trust back and I agree. Therefor, if you remain transparent and clearly label a sponsored post as being one, I have no qualms with bloggers creating sponsored posts.

Here is one example of where there are potential problems with sponsorship.

Let’s say a blogger writes a number of reviews about a particular product and or service and most of those reviews are in a positive spotlight. It’s then later discovered that the blogger was being paid for those reviews by the same company in which he/she was reviewing calling not only to question the ethics of the blogger, but also question their trust. This situation would of been easily solved had the blogger publicly identified as being paid to write a particular post.

This idea of blog sponsorships is still a sticky subject. On one hand, bloggers need to make money and sponsorships are one way of doing so. On the other hand, independent bloggers have the freedom to say whatever it is they want without the influence of cash. It’s like one of those situations where you can’t have your cake and eat it to.

So my question to you is, how have you handled sponsorships either through posts or paid reviews? Have you had to deal with an onslaught of negativity from your readership because of the way you handled sponsored posts either presently or in the past?