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Archives for July 2006

Tips for Avoiding Summer Blog Death

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Every summer, comments and participation tend to drop off on most community sites, and we’re no exception. You have to have some serious critical mass for it not to affect you. But now is not the time to slack off on posting, on providing value to the users who aren’t out having fun in the sun. The folks who are still commenting represent the core of your audience, the absolute die-hard, passionate, and above all loyal, cream of the crop. So clearly you should use them as guinea pigs for your summer blog experiments heh….

Tips for Avoiding Summer Blog Death

Some of these I’ve tried and some are just ideas, but off the top of my head here are a few thoughts on beating Summer Blog Death:

  1. Post shorter posts, but post more often.
  2. Experiment with new features, newsletters, styles and designs, community tools (you can lay the groundwork here for when september comes, try to work out what will be killer, and what will be shit)
  3. Hold competions, polls, and generally break out of the norm for a bit
  4. Arrange a blog carnival
  5. Recruit guest authors from your core audience, and go to the beach for the day
  6. Do reader spotlights, the Blog Heralds How I Blog series is a great example of this and the point above
  7. Invite readers to ask a question on your topic, make a series of it.

I’d love to add to the list, buti i have to go play in the sun… If you can think of more, add them in the comments, or tell us what you’re doing to get through the summer…

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The End of Adsense?

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The results are in, and they ain’t pretty.

Market research firm Outsell released a report Wednesday that shows what many already knew — that click fraud in contextual pay per click advertising is a big problem. The report reveals that 14.6 percent of all clicks are bogus, and that 27 percent of advertisers reduced or stopped spending on click-based advertising.

That type of reaction is to be expected, and it’s reflected in Scott Karp’s post asking What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? However, closer inspection shows that the majority of the fraud comes from third-party publisher sites, not in the actual search engines themselves, and that vindicates a pay per click model that actually works.

As I indicated in my recent pay per click advertising post, smart search engine marketers don’t bother with contextual advertising on third-party sites. Even without fraud it’s just not a good return on investment.

I’m not saying there is no fraud in the search engine result pages (SERPS) themselves, but it’s easy for Google to detect and discount that, and the motivation is lower. It’s a whole different story on independently-owned sites where a profit motive is present, thanks to AdSense.

AdSense has been a cash cow for Google for one simple reason — it caters to the “money for nothing” mentality that pervades the world of Internet publishing and marketing. You don’t have to sell anything or even add value to the Web… you just need that click.

So, once you have a program that rewards publishers for producing content and pages that effectively encourage people to leave as soon as possible, can we really be surprised that organized click fraud is the natural result? Did we think the millions of splogs and junk web pages littered with AdSense ads would be as bad as it got?

Nope. That’s not how this end game works, and I’m fairly sure Google had to be aware of this inevitable result.

However, pay per click advertising in search engines is still effective, and if the knee-jerk reaction from some advertisers is to abandon all PPC, better for the rest of us. Just understand that you can opt out of having your ads displayed on third party sites and still enjoy the ROI of search engine marketing.

But there is a definite shift afoot, and even Google’s smartly getting into it.

Affiliate marketing is making a strong comeback.

For many (such as myself), it never left. Unfortunately, the emphasis placed on AdSense, especially in the blogging world, has left many newcomers to Internet marketing completely in the dark about affiliate marketing techniques that work. And those techniques generally do not involve banner ads inserted in the spot where your AdSense used to be.

The fact is, you can make money with your blog (and other types of sites) if you’re willing to put some work into it, and invest a bit in learning smart strategies. Just don’t invest in any “make money with AdSense” programs at this point! :)

Why ActiveCollab Wont Nix BaseCamp

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I remember reading Paul’s Being 37Signals for Free a while back and thinking yeh, that could happen. ActiveCollab, a free BaaseCamp clone won’t be what brings 37Signals down though, not even if Techcrunch say so.

With ActiveCollab, you have to download and install it. And the fundamental point Marshall Kirkpatrick misses is that essentially, people are lazy. BaseCamp is inexpensive, AND you can use it pretty much immediately via free trial.

Now, if someone were to use the open source ActiveCollab code to open a new hosted service for free, with a tolerable business model, that’s be a proper threat…

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IE7 – No Firefox Killer

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Despite liberal amounts of brainwashing from Nick, my new found love for all things Drupal / LAMP and the small part I have played in the life of a Firefox extension, I still wanted IE 7 to be a great web browser. Microsoft has a special place in my heart, I am still a fan and proud to be an MVP, plus competition is good, innovation requires credible choices. I wanted IE 7 to blow me away, instead it blew itself up.

I have been monitoring progress for a while, this version was supposedly the most solid yet. Not on my system it wasn’t. If you want to try it out for yourself, check out the beta 3.

In theory there is a lot going for it, tabbed browsing, more secure, RSS, it still has a lot of promise if they can get it to work reliably for all users. Is it potentially a Firefox killer? Nope. There is nothing here that isn’t already in the FF base install or available as an extension. And of course, our essential extension is not available for IE!

Once you have had enough of the beta you can uninstall it by following these instructions from TechEnclave

start->control panel->add remove programs->at the top check “show updates” radio box->scroll down in the list->you will see IE7 listed, uninstall that, restart and you are on IE6

Microsoft is still a great company that does some wonderful things, it is so strange to me that they can’t get their browser right. Please Microsoft get your act together! Let’s see some stability, great security record, resistance to malicious code and full-on standards compliance. Come back to leadership position and show the world you are still a contender.

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Making More Space on Performancing

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Sometimes it’s nice to take a little break from the bigger stuff (building the Partners Network currently) to work on some of the smaller, but still important things. It’s been bugging me for a while now that our “pubish, track, discuss” graphics really push the content down the page, so we’ve taken some small steps to make them work a little better.

Now when you hit a blog post you’ll see nice small graphics above it. For regular members I hope it will make things easier to navigate and for new, that what you came here for is quicker to see. The larger widgets remain on the homepage, though for logged in users we’re considering replacing those aswell (as you no doubt know where they lead anyway).

Let us know what you think…

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Dirty Laundry

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Eeeooow! Please stop now…

When emails start getting published on blogs, sides of arguments are skewed in favor of one party or another, readers / viewers start taking sides and the mob starts baying for blood, blogs really show their dark side.

And I’m just as bad, because the whole thing facinates me.

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Thoughts on Sharing Code

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Code, in particular client side code, is somewhat of a commodity these days. Anyone can read it, anyone can copy it, so it’s not something we want to hide or obfuscate from the community when building the Performancing Partners ad network. Far from it in fact, we intend to freely share it and license it under an appropriate open source format.

You need a lot more than some fancy client side code to build an ad network for bloggers. You need community, and passion, and commitment. By sharing the code, we hope that those CSS/XHTML/JS geeks within the Performancing community will help us improve it, and will benefit from the work we’ve started in building their own applications.

Aswell as releasing the Partners client side code, and opening development of Performancing Firefox, we’d also like to make the Metrics code more accessible. Right now it’s clean, unobfuscated and you’re most welcome to use it, but it doesn’t have an appropriate license yet and you have to sift through the source to try and understand it. Hopefully we can get that out and available to you shortly also.

Coming Soon…

We’re not quite ready to solicit feedback from our BETA group on the ad format and code just yet, but give me a couple of days and we’ll make it available. In the mean time, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the following if the July 4th hangovers aren’t to gruesome…

  • Which license to use when making code available?
  • We dont intend to open up everything (particular DB related code) but what else would you like to see made available for Performancing members? What other projects would you like us to start and host for the benefit of the blogging community in general?

Do let me know what you think, thanks!

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Do You Have a Post View Problem?

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I just commented on a thread over at Threadwatch but I thought I would more fully answer the question over here where I can waffle on a bit more. The question was why are Nick Dentons visitor figures and page view figures so close?

The simple fact is most blogs have page view figures that almost match the visitor sessions. This is because

  • Homepage-centric navigation where all the action is on the first page you visit. Browsing the homepage lets you see all the new stuff. If you return every day then there is no need to click any deeper.
  • Defaulting to full post rather than snippets. If you switch to partial content as teasers you force the reader to click through to see the rest of the post, only you can decide if it is worth it as some visitors might not like the change.
  • Success of RSS. If your readers tend to read the RSS rather than visit the blog you will only get post views on those posts where the RSS user has to click through.

So first of all is this a problem?

I would say it’s not a massive problem but it is good to have high page views as it is a metric used to gain advertising (or just as bragging rights). Google Adsense in particular is interested in page views and more and more advertising is going back to CPM (per thousand impressions).

Despite this I do find visits, return and unique visitors far more interesting personally. To me a loyal readership is far far more powerful than search engine visitors that suck up all your archived content and never return. Perhaps this is my old marketing personality asserting itself but unique visitors are potential subscribers and therefore customers. Thing is the two go hand in hand, you need individuals to view many pages. You want to focus on human beings but get them more involved. By creating more stickiness you can get visitors up the loyalty ladder towards creating advocates who spread word of mouth.

It is still worthwhile keeping your visitor involved in your blog for longer. You want your blog to be satisfying and a great resource. This is a primary reason for them to visit again or recommend you. Rarely do people recommend a whole blog on the basis of one good post. How do you get them to dig down further? The way to do this is to show off!

Some bloggers do this by having a “best of” in the page navigation, on one of my blogs I have a “most popular” list. This will serve to catch the eye of readers who arrive at a particular post and wonder what else is good to see.

The best way of achieving more clicks is to inter-link your posts. Talk about other posts that are relevant to the current discussion or have a “related” list at the end of the post. You will get more clicks by embedding the links in the content though, especially if you really sell them. To sell another post lead into it showing some sort of pay-off without giving the whole game away, for example “.. where I discuss ten guaranteed killer post ideas you won’t want to miss”.

Another way of “selling” older posts is to build in this chain of posts by design by creating a series. You will see I do this occasionally here on Performancing with “part 1”, “part 2”, etc. Anyone arriving at part three will more than likely want to read the older posts, especially if you say “you need to know about X which we described in part 1”.

What many people don’t realise is the more interactive your blog is the more page views you will get. Every time a visitor clicks that’s another page view. You could have a directory or host tools for example, we get quite of use out of our private message system between performancing members. Encourage visitors to comment, that is absolutely critical. A commented blog is often a healthy blog. They will return to see if there are any replies too, increasing your visits as well as page views. Polls and surveys too work for increasing page views and can even serve to produce content to blog about.

Having said all of this, page view numbers are not something to get into a knot about, the most important thing is your readership and if it is increasing. The best way to get a good readership is great content well publicised, if you concern yourself with anything that would be it.

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