Archives for June 2006

Most of the reviews of Vox so far have focused on the social networking and privacy features… Which makes sense, because that’s the Big Story Six Apart is telling about Vox.

Vox has the ability to set specific privacy features on a post by post basis. A blog post on Vox can be set for the world, friends and family, friends, family, or for you only. For a lot of bloggers, this is actually kind of a big deal… with all the stories in the news about bloggers being fired from jobs because of posts online, or failing to get a job after a google search revealed a compromising MySpace page, I can see where it would be a relief to be able to record your thoughts and share them with a select group.

For me, it’s not such a big deal… my income stream comes from being pretty much exactly who I am. In most cases I feel that if I’m likely to offend someone by being the guy I am, then I probably shouldn’t work for them. I’m big on the idea that a candid public persona is a huge time-saver for everyone. When I do want privacy, I just use email or the phone (and yeah, I know, email isn’t as private as you’d think, but I figure anyone who can tap mine is entitled to laugh at my more off-color remarks). The feature that I do dream of when it comes to privacy, is a way to go back and edit or delete comments I make on other blogs when I’ve been awake too long and say something I later regret… it doesn’t happen often, but it has happened.

Anyway, here are a few quotes that explain the value of the privacy feature better than I can. The first is from a post titled Behind the Curtain, Out of the Cupboard on Mena Trott’s Vox blog.

My roots are in personal blogging.

My first blog, dollarshort.org was all about my personal life: my childhood, my family, my daily interactions, etc… I loved blogging on dollarshort because I could tell stories. I wrote about my parents inventing a fake brother for me. I made up silly infographics. I wrote about my first boyfriend and my nightmare summer camp experience. I even podcasted in 2001! I could track my life and interact with people in a living room of sorts. And I found it increasingly difficult to write about my personal life with the same freedom and intimacy. I wrote all these difficulties in my my banjo post from July, 2004. It was then that I realized that having a public blog and a public persona and keeping the intimacy that made personal blogging fun was an incredibly difficult balancing act.

So yeah, I can see where if you were an integral part of the public face of a blogging company, you might really want some privacy features!

Matthew Haughey has another take on why this useful on his post Vox Love:

Vox came out and I’ve been playing with it for a couple months and enjoying it immensely. It’s still pretty streamlined and straightforward but it’s got the UI that never gets in my way (unlike LiveJournal’s UI). The friends and family blogging is the key feature and I’ve read a lot from people that don’t understand what all the hoopla is about.

It’s kind of like TiVo in that you have to try it out first, live with it a month or two before you realize it’s the greatest thing ever. Or think of it as an iceberg — it seems simple and not very useful at first but my god is that one little feature hiding a great deal of utility. I’m blogging at Vox now and a couple dozen people I see in real life and hang out with several times a year are also on it and on my friends list. If I want to ask them something or share an intensely personal tidbit, I can post it there for them and I don’t have to IM or call anyone and I don’t have to tell the same story 15 times as I see them throughout the year. And I don’t have to read about how I’m the biggest dumbass on earth on another blog as a result of the post. Don’t get me wrong — I have skin as thick as leather but after seven years of this, it gets old when someone that doesn’t understand you or your tone misinterprets something you’ve said. Blogging to friends means never having to explain the joke.

Andre Torrez opens his review with the perfect example of where privacy features come in handy: “Here’s where I’d mention how long I’ve been writing online, but it’s irrelevant, and also I don’t want you tracking down the story about when I accidentally…” [click the link above to see what he did]. Towards the end of the review he makes another really good point:

Vox is a return to that early time I don’t think most people had a chance to experience. The commercialization of blogs has, I think, skewed people’s perception of what they can be. To many, if you’re not doing 50,000 unique visitors a day you should just throw in the towel, you’re a failure. If your funny story about shopping at the Apple store can’t be Digg’d or Boingboing’d then what good is it?

Someone once gave me some good advice on how to write a blog post, they said, “Write it like you’re writing an email to your friend.” That became hard to do when it turned out lots of non-friends were intercepting our correspondence. Vox gives me the chance to write to my friends (and family!) again and I can’t wait for you all to join me.

One of the major criticism’s of Vox has been that it isn’t well-suited for commercial or professional blogging. Well, of course, that’s the point actually… Vox is intended largely as a platform for the non-technical audience who would like to just get up and running without having to learn a lot of code or do a lot of set-up. I think the market for that is much larger than people assume when the only RSS subscriptions they have are for big name bloggers.

I don’t really read many personal blogs, and I know that most of the people who read mine are friends I made on the internet, not the friends I had before I started blogging. But if my daughter had a blog, I’d read it… and not because I’m worried about watching over her shoulder but because it would be a great to stay in touch when we’re apart. And it would be nice actually, to be able to turn some of my pre-internet friends onto blogging and share news that way. Just think how cool it would be if Vox replaced mass email, forwarded jokes and family newsletters! I’d be a lot more likely to look at a blog post than open an email from someone who still hasn’t learned to use BCC headers!

Would I recommend Vox for a commercial or promotional blog? Probably not, in most cases. Would I recommend it to pro bloggers who’d like to remember the fun, low pressure joys of writing whatever’s on their mind without feeling that it may come back to bite them later? Heck yeah. In fact, I could see Vox being very effective therapy for blogger’s block… It could well be a valuable tool for getting the creative juices flowing on those days when you’re just not in the mood or mindframe to write a post that everyone can see

I’ve learned an awful lot about writing by doing it on my blogs… the feedback is helpful whether it’s in the form of comments or links from other blogs that liked what I had to say. But sometimes you might want to try out a different voice or style or make some departure from what you’re doing now that might throw your readers for a bit of a loop if you posted it for mass consumption. I guess Vox could also make a decent sketch pad for trying out new things as well.

Okay, now I’ve sold myself. That’s funny, because the one thing I didn’t appreciate about Vox was the privacy features (I don’t mean I hated them, I just didn’t get it). Now I get it. Cool.

In the comments to my 10 Step Plan to a Profitable Blog post Trisha asks

How necessary is it to really find and write around high paying adsense terms? Does it make that much difference as long as you are writing about something that has some commercial relevance?

I did reply but I think it is worth a fuller explanation here.

Perhaps the easiest way to think about Adsense on your blog is to imagine your blog posts as being searches on Google. The words you use to compose your post are like search phrases and Google will attempt to return the most relevant results for the phrases you use. Think about your niche and the phrases people might use for research, leisure, etc. Then consider what words and phrases are used for commercial searches. The difference between the adsense payout for those different categories will be like night and day.

To give you an example one of my niches is programming so syntax or error message research phrases might be entered into Google search such as “sorting a list alphabetically” or “changing scrollbar colour”, etc. OK, a savvy advertiser might cotton on to the fact that those phrases are perfect for targeting a particular products audience but the competition for those phrases will be sow low we are talking pennies a click. On the other hand if the phrases used were highly commercial and competitive the payout is transformed. In programming these would be (I am guessing) “.net/java/php training” or broader IT terms like “data recovery”.

How do you know your guesses are right? Well first of all you can see the affects in your adsense account but a litmus test is to do some searches in Google and see how many ads show up. You can usually see just by looking at your adsense ads that show up in your posts how commercial and targeted your topic is. To illustrate with the example I used in my comment on the thread, take a look at this and this and work out which draws more income from adsense. I expect you will not find it difficult. If like me a percentage of your posts have ads for “free blogs” your content is not targeted enough to earn more than the bare minimum.

So if you are inflicted with a low paying topic how can you fix it? Personally I wouldn’t push this too hard, I actually think bending your blog to fit adsense is a bad move long term and this sort of thing is what makes adsense so damaging. On the other hand you might only need one or two teaks so that is fair enough.

1. Be concious of your page titles – vague and non-commercial page titles give vague and non-commercial ads. The title (and filename interestingly enough, which on most blogs now are synonymous) has a disproportionate influence on which ads show up. Try and insert a company/product/service into titles that risk not performing.
2. Always come back to money posts – Steer the content back to more commercial topics after addressing less commercial subjects. I wouldn’t encourage you to make a previously non-commercial blog 100% commercial as that is dangerously veering towards the splog. A good mix is probably best.
3. Post commercial posts last – In a blogging day you want to leave the commercial topic top of page for longest. Overnight you don’t want the top post to be “and by the way my cat did the cutest thing” when you have a “Brand X announces update to product Y” post right under it. The top post can often influence the ads for the whole index page.
4. Use section targeting – Section targeting is an adsense feature that allows you to influence adsense to take more notice of certain content than others using comment tags. It doesn’t work brilliantly for me but I have heard it can help.

So what about these lists of high paying adsense terms? Yes there are lists out there that promise to tell you which phrases earn $15 a click (or more) and they are useful … to a point. First you have to remember that these headline figures are NOT what you would get paid, not even close. They are what you would bid in adwords for search, a very different prospect. People bid much lower in content than they do in search, you get a cut not the whole fee and smart pricing reduces it even further. I have always had the nagging feeling that if you can get hold of this exact phrase info then Google is probably using it too, perhaps to seek out spammers. Paranoid? Probably, doesn’t mean they don’t do it. Best way to use those lists is to get ideas for broad subject areas that might be more profitable than what you are currently covering rather than using the exact phrases.

Which brings me to the final point, exact phrase matches are less important than getting the page theme right. Incremental improvements will make a big difference to your adsense income without destroying any audience you once had by twisting your blog into a made for adsense site. You don’t need to laser target your content, just be in the right ballpark. After all, your blog is all about your readers enjoying your content, not random visitors clicking adsense ads and never coming back.

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Another social bookmarking site for you to take note of, what makes this an important contender is the company behind it is AOL and the site in question is the made-over and pimped-up Netscape

Jason Calacanis had this to say

Of course, in the first hour of being open we get tested by a bunch of DIGG users who voted up a story about a horrible AOL user experience–to the second position!

We’ve started doing metajournalism on the first wave of stories already… this is a real test of our integrity.

It is indeed going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Digg is going to have to respond to this. Of course the most loyal Digg users are going to knock it and they will be laughing their socks off that a negative story got to number one. Regardless of what the Digg fans think AOL is big enough that they don’t need their approval nor particularly want it. AOL plays to the mass market and have the budget to make some big waves.

Already they are drawing criticism for alleged “sneaky linking” (ie. not giving full and obvious link credit). I think this sort of thing will be soon remedied.

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