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Archives for February 2007

How Blogging Can Make Or Break Your Success

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I’ve often wondered about the tagline of this website, “Helping Bloggers Succeed”. First off I like to talk about success online and offline a lot. In fact its one of my favorite topics. When some folks talk online all they talk about is revenue. Revenue isn’t success necessarily. And more of it doesn’t always make you happier. All of us who blog have goals and dreams. That’s what this is all about. Providing you with a community that will help coach you along into success. I like to pick on Adsense because a lot of people think success is driving people to your website and getting people to click on your ads. To me this is the last kind of success I need. Although if you can do that you will have some success. I hope I’m not offending the Adsense Driven Model. It’s just that my goals and aspirations are different.

In some ways I’m a relationship blogger. In other ways I’m just a guy who wants to help other people reach their dreams and find a way to be successful. In a lot of ways I find joy in doing this. I like watching other people move on to bigger and better things.

To me not blogging would make me a lot more unsuccessful. I love communicating in this avenue. It helps me think and allows me to be more productive in relationship building. And that’s my bottom line. That’s how I measure success. The quality of relationship I have.

Let’s get to know each other.

I’ve been talking to different people about various projects they are working on or are blogging about. I love this kind of interaction. Getting involved in other people’s projects makes my day.

I want to open the comments up for people to share a project you are passionate about. It will give you an opportunity to share your project with our readers and allow you are readers to share some ideas on how to improve your projects.

First up is mine.

901am ~ New media news every morning
I feel really good about this site. It’s 3 months old and starting to take off the ground. Our traffic is fairly steady and our readership is pretty active. I’m not focusing on revenue to much but it should be fairly profitable once we start monetizing more aggressively. What would you suggest doing differently with this site?

Ok, your turn.

The Simple Mathematics Of Link Sponsor Revenue

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Anyone who’s been blogging at least a few months knows that in most cases, contextual ad revenue from networks such as Google AdSense comes in trickles. A better option, provided you have a Google PR (PageRank) of at least 4 and a blog in an appropriate niche, is link ads such as  Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers. (Know of another one? Drop a comment.) You also need backlinks (outside links to your blog), some feed subscriptions, and at least a steady bit of traffic – though not necessary a lot.

Steady Revenue

It’s not passive revenue. At least not at first while you’re building PR and backlinks, etc. But it can tend towards that. A word of caution: not all blogs are suitable. Of the eight blogs I have registered at Text Link Ads, only four have sponsors. Some have never had link sponsors since they were registered maybe eight months ago. One sold out its inventory in less than 2 months. Another sold out today, and another was just accepted but already has four sponsors. I have another 7 that need a bit of TLC before they’re ready, but when they are, they should do okay.

I can’t live off the TLA alone, but it is steady income. And once the newer sites are registered and sell out their inventory, the total TLA earnings will be enough for rent in Toronto, where I’m moving later this year. In other words, it’s comforting, generally steady income with very little fluctuation. And I haven’t even utilized TLA’s Feedvertiser yet (mostly because I’m too busy to upgrade my WordPress installations to 2.0+).

Example

Let’s look at an example of how you might benefit from link sponsors. This is based on my own experience, so your mileage may vary:

  • Assume: ten weblogs of PR4 – 5 and different niches but related topics. Say sub-niches. Or maybe you have two distinct groups of sub-niches. It doesn’t matter, but blogs in one group link to each other in both navigation and content.
  • Reasonably steady traffic of at least 40 pageviews per day or more per site.
  • Offer ten sponsor slots at at least $10 per slot per month per site. (The selling price would be $20 per, since TLA takes 50% commission. I’m not sure about TextLinkBrokers.)
  • That’s 10 sites x 10 spots/ site x $10/ slot/ month = $1,000/ month. That’s your take.

General Plan

Pretty simple, right? And that’s a very conservative figure. If the conditions are right, you could be making that much per site, or $10,000/m. (I have no proof that anyone is doing this; just speculating.)

Sure, the numbers are simple, but here are a few things to consider before you go sign up:

  1. You need to build up your Google PageRank (PR) to at least 4. If you are patient and think you’ll go to PR5 fairly quickly, register your sites at PR5 not PR4. You’ll very likely earn more.
  2. You need to increase your feed subscriptions. Though, TLA for example only counts Bloglines. Not all subscriptions are necessarily equal.
  3. You need to increase the backlinks to each of your blogs, from relevant sites. Not just PR6+, but also PR3-5. That comes either by buying or by building valuable content that other sites link to.
  4. You need to increase your daily traffic to where it’s steady, even if just from SEs (search engines). This is part and parcel of posting “valuable” content.
  5. You need to maintain all this after you start getting sponsors. They want the traffic, too.
  6. There’s no guarantee you’ll sell out your inventory, even at $12. Some blog niches lend themselves better to text link ads than.

It’s all speculation, but as weblogs become even hotter property, the opportunities for monetizing them will continue to grow. Link sponsors is one way that has been working for me.

New to Blogging? Here are 5 Mistakes to Avoid

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If you’re new to blogging, there’s enough advice out there in the blogosphere (and here at Performancing as well) to make your head swim. Information overload leads to analysis paralysis and in minutes you’re back where you started – at the beginning, with no idea what to do.

In an effort to simplify the blogging process, here are 5 key mistakes bloggers (new, old, established, popular and unpopular) make, and how you can avoid them.

1. Procrastination

There are few worse things in life than sitting back and watching life roll by in front of you without taking advantage of the opportunities that keep knocking on your door. Sometimes we have limiting beliefs that hold us back (such as “I don’t know how to write!”), other times we’ve got fears holding us back.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. – Mark Twain

The key is to take action on the ideas you have. You’ll fail in 100% of the plans you never implement, but every plan you implement has a chance of success (and if you follow the next four tips, you can greatly increase that chance).

What are you going to do today?

Stop thinking about it, just start blogging (or working out, or writing that business plan, or calling on your business network; whatever it is you have to do to make your ideas and plans a reality.

2. Lack of Focus

Seth Godin wrote an excellent post today on creating micro hysteria in your audience. As a blogger (new or old), you need to accept a simple truth – big successes where your blog will have a mass appeal are rare and the exception. The real opportunities, as Seth puts it, lie in niche audiences who are passionate about a particular subject.

“Far better to obsess about owning the micro audience, at least for a moment, then to waste your energy trying to be everything to everyone.”

3. Lack of Value

Seems to me that the ‘experts’ have been shouting themselves hoarse talking about the advantages of concentrating on delivering value to your readers, but too often bloggers ignore this advice (or find it too hard to implement).

There is enough material on ‘providing value’ here at Performancing than I can remember, but the best advice is this:

Before you write, evaluate your topic from the perspective of your target audience. Do you think they need this information? Do you think they can use it?
Once you’ve written it, evaluate again. Do you think it is easy to grasp? Usable? Worth sharing?

If your topic and subsequent post gets a ‘Yes’, you’re in business.

If this sounds daunting, think of it this way – whatever topic you want to blog about, you will either have strong opinions (sports, news, politics) or expertise in the area (blogging, SEO, web design). In both cases, you will ‘know’ enough about the industry to figure out what is important and what is not important to your audience (and if not, you can always do some research and find out instead of giving up).

4. No Networking

Are you ‘putting yourself out there’ and talking to other bloggers in your niche? Participating in forums and talking to your audience? Talking to people offline who share the same interests?

Why not?

The only way to build a readership and get traffic to your blog is if other bloggers and the community around that niche knows who you are. Bloggers are more likely to read your blog if they know you, and if they read your blog (AND you’ve done step 3 right) they will be more likely to link to you. Links will bring in traffic and search engine ranking benefits.

No one will link to your blog or talk about it if they don’t know about it. And how are they going to know about it?

If you get up, get out and start talking to other bloggers in your niche.

In fact, all of blogging can be summed up in two words. Value & Networking. Get this right and you’ve got it made.

5. Stuck in a Pattern

Technology changes. Communities shift and evolve. People change, opinions change.

If you apply the four strategies above, you will succeed, but only for a while. Eventually, you’ll be set and comfortable in your pattern and BOOM!, the landscape of your niche will start changing. Imperceptibly at first, but change it will.

Scott Adams talks about how artists can only produce quality material for a period of time before the ‘big hits’ stop coming. It’s the same with bloggers – there’s a life cycle for each subject, and once you’ve exhausted it from start to end all that’s left for you is to rehash the same ‘news’ everyone else is talking about, or start repeating yourself.

Embrace change and learn to reinvent yourself (something that is easier than it sounds). Nick and Chris have done it after moving on from Performancing, and there are many such examples in the blogging and SEO industry.

Learn to anticipate, prepare and act on changes in your niche. Lead the change instead of reacting to it. You’ll be much better placed as a result, and your blog stock will continue to rise.

What’s Next

Nothing – just start blogging!

If you’re NOT so new to blogging, I hope you can use this as a reference for your blogging efforts – we all need reminders and nudges in the right direction from time to time.

What’s Liz Doing at Performancing?

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When I first started blogging, it was easier. Technorati indexed something near 12 million blogs, not the 60 million it does now. Blog Networks hadn’t really started. Content theft wasn’t a major problem. I had 20+ years of writing experience. I had managed major print and online publishing efforts that were produced for International markets.

It still took me 21 days to get my first comment.

I left a few of my own, and few people followed me home. One was blogger who beautifully described what the blogosphere was like back in summer of 2005.

I’m beginning to find that having a blog is akin to having a village store. You have the regulars that stop in on a regular basis to get their usual wares and to catch up on anything new. And then there’s the new person in town who stops in for a look see. The new person might get a couple of the regulars curious to the point where one asks, “Who’s that.” To which the reply is, “Don’t know, someone passing through I guess.” As for my blog, I’m glad you stopped by to have a read and for your kind response.

That’s what it was like, back in days when we had time.

But now . . .

In just a brief one-twentieth of a second–less than half the time it takes to blink–people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.

–Kamakshi Tandon
REUTERS, Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink
Jan. 17, 2006

A twentieth of a second.

Today everyone is a reluctant reader. Publishers who waste our time with text that is

too dense to read without a machete,

too broken up by ads to have the energy to find our way through,

  • too distracting to hold our attention
  • too apologetic, self-serving, or link-begging, self-promoting, “give me a break” unaware
  • too many colors, too many type faces, too many gizmos, gadgets, and widgets, to attend to what’s being said

have no idea how fast we click away leaving their content unread.

My career for the last couple of decades has been getting readers to want to read.

I’m going to show you how I do that.

The Top-Down Approach To Article Writing

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Are you planning on writing some lengthier articles/ blog posts than you’re used to, such as flagship content, link bait, or viral /strategic content? A large writing project can be daunting, and many good writers get intimidated. One thing that my 30 years of computer programming taught me is that you can pretty much write any program if you (1) know the tools and (2) know the functionality you want to achieve, then using a technique called “top-down design”.

What is Top-Down Design?

Top-down design was a buzzphrase in coding circles during the 80s and early 90s. It amounts to breaking a large project down into manageable bites, all the while giving you the feeling that you’re in control and that the project is achievable. Using that technique, I could write up to a thousand lines of code in a day or three, including editing/ testing. You can apply a similar methodology for writing larger blog articles, tutorial series, e-books, etc.

  1. Scope out your project.
    Break it down into stages: know your goal, produce an outline (for bigger projects) and task list, do your research, etc.

  2. Know your writing goals.
    What are you planning to say? Start with a bullet point list or mindmap of topics you’d like to cover in the article. Go with what you are comfortable. Sometimes I use mindmaps, sometimes bullet lists, or both. It depends on what “feels” right for a particular project. Similarly, I sometimes use paper and sometimes I type my objectives.

  3. Have a task list.
    Don’t think this is important? Something small will be forgotten, if you’re a busy blogger. You’ll want to utilize your fave search engine. I typically use Google and Technorati (blog-specific sources). I’ve also been putting together a few custom Yahoo Pipes (tutorials to come).

  4. Build an outline and pad it out.
    Here is where the real top-down design begins. You want to maintain the feeling of knowing where you are at each stage. I’ve adapted principles from my coding experience:

    1. Write a preliminary outline of your article.
    2. Add section headings and apply whatever HTML formatting you want (h2, h3, bold/ strong).
    3. In each section, create a bullet list of subtopics.

    This all gives a feeling of partial completeness. You’ll have a better feeling of what you’re trying to accomplish.

How Do You Use It?

There you go. You’re done. Well, sort of. But go through those steps. Don’t you feel like you accomplished something? I’ll emphasize that you cannot have done this on paper. The point is to progress towards your end goal (a finished, formatted web article) in stages.

You now have the start of your article. All you have to do is fill in the blanks 🙂

  1. Start writing by filling in sections or bullet lists wherever you can.
  2. Research what you don’t know and refine the article.
  3. Rinse and repeat until you have a rough draft.
  4. Add hyperlinks externally and into your archives. (Some bloggers prefer to do this as they write, others like to wait. Do what’s comfortable.)
  5. Edit for content (grammar, spelling) and length.

That’s it. Follow this methodology and you can tackle big writing projects. Obviously, I’m leaving bits out, but I’d like to hear from other bloggers who have written large posts/ series/ linkbait. How do you go about completing a big writing project?

Becoming A Professional Blogger Was Never As Easy As Today

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One of the most frequent questions I’m ever asked by people who are unfamiliar with blogging is ‘You make money doing this?’

It’s a rather frequent question, at first it was hard to explain what I do. But now its getting easier. It’s also getting easier and easier to build high quality sites. Mostly because I understand how to do it. My biggest mistake when I ventured out was to create a bunch of little sites and then losing focus on all of them and getting overwhelmed and giving up.

No need to panic though I tried and tried again. The best way to go about professional blogging is very simple. Find a niche you love.

I can’t stress it enough. No need to fear there are plenty of untamed niches to be conquered. You just have to be creative. I’d love to share with you how to find your niche but I really can’t so let me explain to you the tools I use to create a killer website that will elevate me from the status of blogger to professional publisher.

1. Instant Domain Search
This is easily my favorite tool for branding. It’s great to find catchy domain names that are short. I recently used it to pull a 5 letter domain out of the hat and a few months later I have a growing strong brand.

My biggest piece of advice is don’t build a website based around a popular adsense keyword. Build a website around a niche that you love that you can create a brand around. If your looking for advice on building a site to monetize with adsense you are going to want to find someone else to get advice from. I make some money with adsense but in all honesty. It’s not even close to being my number one income provider.

2. Pick up an industry related magazine

Go to the supermarket or a local bookstore. Find the closest magazine you can to your niche. Devour this magazine for a week before ever making a single blog post.

3. Learn how to craft good headlines

There are some great tutorials on how to craft good headlines. Many great books have been written about crafting headlines. My favorite way to learn how to craft good headlines is to pick up the magazine you just bought at the bookstore or supermarket and emulate their style.

Personally when I think of headlines the one person I consider an expert is Brian Clark.

4. Create Flagship Content

I can’t stress how important it is to create flagship content. Chris Garrett has been my biggest inspiration on this. I’ve personally seen how valuable flagship content is to a new website, and to pushing out and growing an old website.

5. Marketing Your Website

Creating flagship content, crafting great headlines, and creating a powerful brand isn’t good enough. You have to make a positive effort to market your website. Marketing your website is one of the most important things you can do. And to be honest its time to start asking yourself why are you writting. If you are writting to become a professional publisher than you need to spend about as much time marketing your product as you do producing it. This is smart business practice. Your blog, or website is your product. Don’t waste it. Start marketing now. The leading SEO’s in the industry have a huge leap on you. They have all marched over and created power accounts on all the leading social media websites. The reason they have done this is because they understand the importance of strong marketing. I’d love to share with you all the secrets to marketing your site but we will have to save that for another day. Instead take the time and read Lee Oden’s 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog.

I’m sure I have more ideas but this is a great start to becoming a real publisher not just an adsense money maker. Feel free to ping me via private message and get a conversation going.

SplashPress Media Acquires Performancing.com

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SplashPress Media Acquires Performancing.com Community and Metrics Assets

International media group SplashPress Media acquires Performancing.com bloggers community and metrics assets.

New York,NY — February 14th,2007 — SplashPress Media, owner of numerous sites including The Blog Herald, one of the oldest sites on the internet covering blogging news and new media, has announced it is acquiring the core assets of Performancing.com including the bloggers’ community and Performancing Metrics.

SplashPress Media operates and owns 30 blogs, and a variety of other online web properties. SplashPress Media has been online as a hosting company and a support agency for publishers for a few years before launching several blogs and acquiring others.

According to David Krug, “Over the last year Performancing has built up a large and loyal community of bloggers from all walks of life. They have created and provided tools and quality resources to bloggers and blogging communities. We wish to continue providing the blogosphere with affordable tools to help people join the new media revolution which is changing how we consume media. Nick Wilson, and the other Performancing founders rushed onto the scene and were quickly covered in top blogs such as TechCrunch, among others. They developed the Performancing for Firefox tool, and created a great portfolio of tools that I use to this day in my blogging. We look forward to carrying that vision forward and farther.”

Performancing.com will continue to operate as a separate division of SplashPress Media.

The Future of Performancing

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First off the reason that SplashPress Media purchased Performancing was simply to give back to the community and to not see it die. We saw so much potential in the community who stood by Performancing even through the good times and the bad.

I am a blogger. I run multiple sites, and blogging is how I make my living. It is by far one of the hardest, and most enjoyable career paths to take. I travel a lot for enjoyment sake and am always willing to spend an hour or two coaching a blogger on how to monetize their site more effectively, or how to drive traffic to their sites.

Sorry for the slow updates here at first by me. I’m still feeling my way around drupal. Next, tackling a few existing technical problems. Although I think we’ve done that.

I’ve brought on Raj Dash, who’ve some of you know and a few others to share their stories in blogging. One of things I enjoy so much about Performancing is the original vision it had. To really help bloggers go to the next level. Publishing has always been a dream for me, Professional Blogging is another way for me to say Professional Publisher. It’s hard work but its enjoyable.

The future of Performancing is bright. I’m in this for the long haul. Consistent ongoing community participation by a leader is the key neccesity. Currently Performancing is my only priority.

So what lies ahead?
Without overcommiting ourselves I’d like to find a way to help give back to the community. We are planning some free resources that will help grow the depth of the community including some fresh themes for WordPress powered blogs, as well as tackling the various issues with Performancing Metrics.

Performancing Partners was not part of the sale mostly because after analyzing the software I thought we could do better by licensing software or developing something from scratch.

Performancing Blogs and the front page.
Please continue to submit to your own blogs. I will be going through daily and promoting the best content to the front page. Hopefully their will be a nice balance of fresh helpful content.

What is Performancing’s Number One
Bloggers are constantly on the lookout for ways to find new gigs. I’m working hard to rebuild Performancing Exchange so that bloggers can find more blogging jobs if they so desire. I dont want to tackle all of our goals at once. My mentality is tackling one at a time. But doing it the right way. Right now if you were me what feature, what service would you find the most value in having developed?

I look forward to being apart of the rich history of Performancing. My goal is to give of myself to help others become successful in blogging. Success is different for everyone. For me its about giving back to others. This is the most enjoyable aspect of blogging for me.

Welcome to the next generation of Performancing. The future is bright. We can make of it whatever we so desire.