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Archives for May 2007

Sponsor the June 2007 Performancing Theme

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Each month Performancing releases a new WordPress theme to the public. Now, each month, we’re giving the highest bidder a unique chance to co-sponsor each theme; giving back to the Performancing community while building links. A win-win situation all around.

Sponsorship will be “blind” in that you’ll need to trust Performancing to release consistently solid themes. One thing you can count on is that our themes will be adopted by dozens or even hundreds of people.

Sponsoring a theme is a great way to give back to the Performancing community while simultaneously building a solid base of links back to your site.

Performancing reserves the right to refuse any sponsorship and will only take bids above $500.

So let’s get things started with an auction for the June 2007 WordPress theme release… Do I hear $500?

Blog Reboot #2: Jump Rope Videos

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Site: Jump Rope Videos
Owner: Chris

Chris says:

I collect the best jump rope videos from around the world and discuss them. For those that don’t know, jumping rope is not only a great exercise, it is an adrenaline charged extreme sport all by itself.

JRV is still very young. It is only about 3 months old. I’ve seen pretty steady growth each week and now average over 220 visitors and 500 page views a day according to site meter. I’m very pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far, but I know there is always room for improvement.

Well Chris, here’s what I think you can do to make your blog THE go-to site for all the crazy people who love jumping up and down with a rope swinging around them 😛 (which would include me too, btw).

Jump your way to the rest of this post

1. Blogging Basics

The first thing I’d suggest in this case is to move off blogspot and get your own domain.

With Chris, the moment I picked his site for the blog reboot I had emailed him and talked to him about registering his own domain (see the new Jump Rope Videos site) ahead of the blog reboot.

For anyone else that hosts a blogspot blog, I strongly suggest that you get your own domain. If you are serious about your website and are in it for the long haul, blogspot (or any other hosted blog service) is out of the question.

It very easy to install WordPress (from signing up and registering for your domain to installing WordPress takes 5 minutes on a webhost that has the one-click WP install) and it’s free.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

The biggest problem people face when moving off of Blogspot is on redirecting their domain. It’s not ‘that’ hard.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

The link above is an article on getting your posts off Blogspot and redirecting the blogspot subdomain to your new site.

It’s fairly accurate with one mistake: It’s true that there’s no way to put in 301 redirects on the Blogger server and as such you can’t issue a 301 redirect the way you would when shifting domains normally, but that DOES NOT mean that your rankings / PageRank will be lost as well.

I repeat – I say this from personal experience that the javscript-based redirect does get properly read by Google and does transfer PageRank and rankings. It may not do it properly and for best practices you should contact sites that link to you and ask them to update their links, but it DOES work.

I had a personal blog on blogspot which later went to its own domain (and later on switched to a different domain) – PR and rankings are preserved in Google.

WordPress Notes

If you’re looking for WordPress themes, here’s are some good lists:

If there are any WordPress-specific questions that you (or anyone reading this) have, ask here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Since you are showing videos, one WordPress plugin I strongly suggest is WP-Video. You’ll have to drop it in your wp-content/plugins folder and add some CSS to your style.css file in your selected theme, but overall it’s a very easy-to-use and very useful plugin.

Once you’ve installed it, just enclose your video URLs (for example a YouTube URL) with tags and you’re good to go.

2. Content

There’s a lot you can do with the jump rope videos angle. A few ideas:

  • Do plenty of product reviews.

  • provide a how-to section where you show people instructional videos of how to a) jump rope the right way b) how to perform tricks.

  • write health-related articles on the benefits of doing jump rope-based exercise.

  • If you can do the tricks yourself, shoot your own videos and put em up on YouTube (put your url on it at the end).

  • Do an informational product, something like “lose 30 pounds in 30 days” where you talk about bodyweight and jump-rope exercises. This one is probably one for the future but there really is a lot you can do here.

In short, if you teach people tricks, and if you cater to the health-related benefits of jumping rope, you’ll have a lot more to write about and you’ll attract more readers.

I’m approaching it from an instructional / educational angle, but that’s just my view. I’m sure you can add more to this once you sit down and brainstorm on what more to add.

We also talked about forums over email and I think you should hold off on the forums for now – getting a forum up and running is a thankless task and you don’t have the traffic right now IMO to make it happen. It would be better to focus on increasing monthly traffic and your subscribers base.

3. Design

I can’t say much about design yet because obviously you’re moving the blog to www.jumpropevideos.com but there are a few general things I’d suggest:

  • have horizontal navigation on the top.

  • go for a two-column theme if possible – it gives your posts more breathing room.

  • as soon as you generate revenue from the blog (or if you have a few hundred bucks to spare), get a professionally-done custom theme for your blog. It pays in spades, believe me.

  • go with a wide design (800-900px width) – once again, give you more room.

My first impression of the blogspot site was very bad – ads everywhere and the content is marginalised and pushed down too much. With WordPress I’d suggest that you focus more on affiliate programs (more on this in the next section) and less on adsense (maybe one large rectangle in each post).

Other than that, get back to me here on this post when you’ve picked a theme and we’ll talk about what more can be done.

4. Monetization

You can:

  • use AdSense – like how you’re doing right now, but more conservatively.

  • promote affiliate programs – Amazon is a good option to get started, but I think you’d be better off by contacting companies selling jump ropes yourself (this ties in with the product reviews you’d be doing) and talking to them about affiliate arrangements. If that’s difficult for you then Amazon is a fair choice, but for best results talk to the vendors yourself.

  • sell text link ads (Text Link Ads, Text Link Brokers) – this can get you some good steady revenue once you sell off the ad spots, but don’t rely on it.

  • create your own products – this is where you have to head in the long term, IMO. Along with affiliate products (which you’ll be soft-selling through your product reviews), selling informational products on your site (complete with a DVD set, of course) will help you earn more money from your site than AdSense or selling advertising.

5. Marketing

In this section I usually talk about SEO and link baiting, so why not highlight an excellent post on Performancing written last year by Nick Wilson:

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic

It’s a lesson in linkbaiting, and it gives you a very good introduction on how to promote your blog.

Talking specifically about JRV, I’d say that getting links from the more respected blog directories (BOTW Blogs, BlogFlux and Blog Catalog come to mind) and asking other bloggers in your niche for links (see ‘the perfect link request email‘ for a template on this) takes little time but gives you a good initial push (just as the links from Perf here will give you some juice as well.

Eventually, you’ll want to focus on link baiting and getting links from a variety of sources.

Read more about getting your non-technical site into digg and read Todd’s linkbaiting playbook post.

Feedback

Ok guys, that’s it for today’s Blog Reboot. Chris, I hope this helps you and to everyone else, if you’ve got any ideas to contribute here do let us know in the comments.

Blog Monetization Part One: Using Blogs To Promote Your Business

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Most Performancing readers read this site to get hints, tips and tools to help their own blog. But one of our goals is to expand the way we think about blogging and how to use blogs

In this piece, I’m going to discuss how you can effectively use your blog as a tool to promote your business. The target audience I have in mind is the online retailer who’s either just started or is struggling to build a customer base. As we all know, it’s no longer sufficient to just build an online retail store, sit back, and expect customers to flood in. You’ve got to bring customers in.

That’s where a blog can come in handy. By setting up a blog on your retail website, you can achieve three main strategic goals:

1. Search Engine Candy

Many retailers that I’ve worked with don’t like the idea of putting paragraphs of descriptive material on product pages. Instead, they like to keep descriptions to one or two sentences. But one or two sentences really isn’t sufficient to pwn the serps. A blog provides the context to be more verbose and to provide a detailed, conversational description of your products (you can even throw in a little salesmanship).

Wondering what to write in your blog? Well, for starters, why not go through your entire inventory of products (maybe one per day) and discuss them on your blog. Aim for 2-5 paragraphs. Make sure to keep keywords and phrases in mind and throw them into each paragraph of your blog entry.

Just remember… when using a blog for your retail shop, the goal is to get products sales. With each blog post you should liberally link into product pages where the customer can quickly make a purchase. By doing this, you can also utilize your blog to naturally build deep links into your site.

2. Establish Your Expertise

A blog allows your business to establish confidence in the eyes of the consumer. Show the consumer that you know what you’re talking about and they’re more likely to trust you and buy product from you. A blog allows you to quickly and easily write authoritative articles in your business niche. Aim to write one authoritative article per week and within six months you’ll find a growing base of dedicated customers.

Writing authoritative articles pays secondary dividends. You might get free exposure from other sites in your niche. You’ll definitely build deep links into your site. Just make sure to submit each of your expert articles to, at minimum, reddit, netscape and digg.

3. Communicate With Your Customers

A blog provides the perfect opportunity to make company announcements, to promote new products, or to make limited time sales offers. While a blog does not replace the effectiveness of direct email marketing, it can certainly supplement and enhance the system. Anyone who has done direct email marketing knows that roughly 5-10% bounced emails is quite normal, not the exception. Chances are that some of those 5-10% will stop by your website and see your company announcements at your blog, when they may have otherwise been oblvious.

Ok. So I’ve given you some basic ideas here. But if you’re like me, reading alone doesn’t do it for you…you like to see things in action. Well, the good news is that for about a month I’ve been employing many of these tactics in a live web promotion campaign. In April, I and a few others started a web promotion campaign for a watch company in England. We’ve been using the methodology that I discuss in this article as the primary method to increase traffic and customers for their new online retail stores. You can see almost all of the things discussed in this article at one of blogs that we setup for their Watch Tool website: http://www.watchtool.co.uk/blog/.

After you take a look at some of the things we’re doing at that site, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about effectiveness, etc. For starters, I can happily report that within one month we’ve seen more than a 100% increase in site traffic.

Intrusiveness of Online Ads

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Advertisements are a vital (and often the most vital) part of a problogger’s monetization strategies. Thus, the choice of which type of ads to serve on one’s blogs is always an important question. You might be interested in the results of a study conducted by McCoy, Everard, Polak, and Galletta that appeared in the article The Effects of Online Advertising (Communications of the ACM March 2007). Yeah I know, it’s May already – the copy arrived a month late 😉

The paper presents nothing new or radical; rather, it somewhat ‘formalizes’ what many web surfers have known/felt for long:

  • Intrusiveness: Pop-under ads are the most intrusive type of ads, closely followed by pop-ups; inline (often banner) ads are considerably less intrusive than the two
  • Return visits: More site visitors intend to revisit sites with inline ads than those with pop-unders and pop-ups (which are slightly worse than the pop-unders)
  • Content retention: Visitors exposed to inline ads remember more of the site’s content rather than those exposed to pop-ups and pop-unders.

Unfortunately, I can’t quote exact figures or an excerpt, as to republish part of the work requires prior permission and/or a fee. Suffice it to say, the figures for pop-up and pop-under ads are neck to neck; the article seems to suggest inline (e.g. banner) ads are the most user-friendly among the three.

(For those interested in dissecting the paper more, access to the magazine’s online version requires ACM membership.)

What To Do When You Lose Your Blogging Mojo

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Writing is nothing like computer programming. The latter is scientific yet was relatively easy for me, when I did it for a living. I could reuse code fragments and thus produce large, functioning programs in just a few days. Writing isn’t like that. While hyperlinks are probably the equivalent of code reuse, writing involves a wholly different process. There is only so much “system” you can apply. In thirty years, I’ve never suffered coder’s block. Ever. I used to brag that I’ve never suffered from writer’s block, either. At least, not until I started writing full-time for a living. That is, multi-blogging professionally.

Mind you, it’s not that I don’t know what to write about. I’ve done a lot of research into what topics are popular and/or profitable, and my blogging contracts already define my topic parameters. So you think it’d be easy to write, right? Wrong. The problem is, there’s more and more “invisible” pressure to be linkworthy, and when you write on as many blogs as I do, it’s not easy. That doesn’t mean that every one I write for is expecting linkbait out of each article, considering that most of what I write is a combination of news summary and my spin. So, in fact, much of the pressure is of my own creation, my drive to be a better blogger.

Still, if you let such feelings carry too far, you do suffer from writer’s block – or whatever you’d like to call it. And then you end up with unproductive months, which is bad for your clients and bad for your business. So what do you do when you’ve got some sort of writer’s block? Here are some suggestions that have worked for me in the past, and a few of which worked for me this week, after a month of bad writer’s block.

  1. Take a break and treat yourself.
    If you work from home, get up and get away somewhere. I headed downtown a few days ago to try out a new restaurant and treat myself to blank sketchbooks, a packet of original Moleskines journals, and some new rollerball and fountain pens. And you know what? It worked. I started writing this article you’re reading on the bus ride home.

  2. Draw a diagram.
    Despite my writer’s block, I’ve been producing a lot of diagrams lately, as well as screencasts. Your diagrams don’t even have to serious, as this hilarious Venn diagram attests to. [via Digg] If you’re not having any luck in this area, maybe you’ve got a spreadsheet that helps you in your daily blogging activities. Consider sharing that with your readers by using a web-based spreadsheet app such as ZohoSheet or Google Spreadsheets.

  3. Record a podcast.
    Do something other than writing. If you have something to say, try actually speaking it instead of writing it. You can find cheapo $1 microphones that do almost as good a job as a better $50 mic. Maybe not broadcast quality, but okay for an occasional podcast, or just for fun. And go get Audacity, the very well put-together cross-platform audio recording software for free, to help you record and convert audio formats. There are also a multitude of blogging platform plugins to help you publish your podcast files.

  4. Produce a screencast.
    If voice work isn’t your thing, maybe you’re good at using a piece of software and you can capture a screencast of how to use a certain feature. (Practice up, because later this year, I’ll be looking for paid contributors to Tubetorial, which is a SplashPress site that I’m currently editing.) You can use the free Camstudio to record a screencast.

  5. Make a SplashCast.
    Have a number of images and screencasts that you’d like to integrate together into one presentation? Try SplashCast or other tools.

  6. Blog some TV.
    There’s nothing like blogging a show while you’re watching it to really fire up your creative juices. There’s really very little planning needed – it’s all stream of consciousness. Reality shows are good for this, and if you pick the right ones, you can build a bit of seasonal traffic to your blogs.

  7. Go see a movie.
    It’s partially the simple act of getting away from your unproductive writing activities, but also the opportunity for some different creative input.

  8. Read a book.
    Since I started blogging full-time, I’ve barely read anything in print, and miss doing so sorely. I find lately, though, that if I actually take 15-30 minutes per day to read offline, not only does it relax me, but it doesn’t seriously affect my work time. Do this and you can even blog about the book.

  9. Write fiction, lyrics or poetry.
    When I was a  paid technical writer, between programming gigs, I found it very hard to come home after work and write fiction. They involve two different mindsets, at least for me, and the activities couldn’t coexist on the same calendar day. But blogging is much more creative in nature, the way I do it, and can coexist with fiction writing. Try it. Start by creating a story premise, writing down a list of events in sequence (and which characters are involved) and see where your story goes from there.

  10. Write something irrelevant but fun.
    Make up something to write. Or try Jason Rekulak’s The Writer’s Block (non-affil.), which is a small, cube-shaped book of writing inspiration. There’s also Naomi Epel’s The Observation Deck (non-affil.), which contains an instruction book and a packet of flash-style cards to help spark your creative juices. When I remember to use these, they’ve helped me considerably.

  11. Write something important.
    Maybe you’ve never written your will. Or is there anything else important that you might write?

  12. Write a list.
    Write it point form, without details, and see what develops over time. It might turn into listbait, once you beef it up with details and relevant hyperlinks. (A list is only a list. Turn it into a useful resource to become linkworthy.)

  13. Write your future bio and/or obituary.
    Imagine that if you were, say, a subject of A&E’s Biography show, what would people say about you? What do you want them to be saying? Write that down. Now go a step further. What do you want to be remembered for, when you leave this mortal coil? Write that down.

  14. Write summaries of other bloggers’ posts.
    When I can’t decide some days what to blog about, I start by reading a batch of posts by other bloggers, then writing a few sentences of summary for each post. A topic may catch my interest, and a post will form on its own out of one or more summaries.

  15. Laugh.
    Laughing relieves stress and tension, and brings down inhibitions. It’s long been touted as a curative for many reasons. Laugh heartily and you’ll see why. I make it a habit to watch at least an hour of comedy every day.

What works for you, when you’re suffering from writer’s block?

Finding Good Writers For Your Blogs

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When I bought my 5th blog a few years ago, it became clear that I could no longer write and manage all my blogs on my own. Running a single blog well takes a lot of work (writing, promotion, ad management, etc). But running multiple blogs *well*, on your own, is borderline impossible.

The fact is that to run a good network of successful blogs, you’ve really got to work with other people. But finding the right people to work with isn’t nearly as easy as it seems. Below I list the qualities that I look for in online partners:

  1. Timely and Reliable (your blog can’t sit around for weeks, unattended)
  2. Long term commitment (you can’t be in the business of finding new writers every month)
  3. Capable and Productive (lots of people will show interest, but it’s the rare person who can actually make it happen)
  4. Passionate and Invested (find people who know their stuff, love their stuff, and enjoy telling other people about their stuff)

So that’s what I look for. But how do I find people who meet these criteria? Well, there’s really no panacea, but there are a few things you can do to find the best fit for your needs.

If you’re looking to get a blog started, and care more about the first three items on the list (as well as cost-effectiveness) then I’ve found no better solution than WordContent. They are eerily precise with the timing and reliability of their posting (reliability is priceless in the online world). And they are always there, ready to work when you call on them. The only thing you are really missing with WordContent is number 4 on the list. My strategy has been to use WordContent to build about 50 blog posts, and then to turn the blog over to someone with a genuine interest in the topic.

Here I should put in the disclaimer that WordContent is owned by Splashpress Media, the same owners of Performancing. However, I should also note that I was happily using WordContent long before I had any other relationship with Splashpress whatsoever. Right now, WordContent is putting the basic infrastructure in place for my latest Poker Blog.

So based on experience, I find that you are best off going for reliability and consistency at the beginning when you’re just starting up a blog. But pretty soon (3-6 months), you’ll want to find a real expert to take over your blog. How do you find a real expert whose still reliable and consistent? That’s a problem I struggled with for months until I hit up on the ultimate solution.

This is what you do. Post an ad on Craigslist describing the blogging position and the terms, along with a request that applicants email you with a simple cover letter explaining why they should get the position. I usually get about 30-50 applicants per Craigslist posting. You might also consider posting your position in the Performancing Blogger jobs forum.

Once you’ve gotten your 30-50 applicants who actually took the time to write a cover letter, email them back with a link to a 5-10 question application form carefully designed to weed out the half-hearted and the posers (see the link above for an example).

Of the 30-50 initial inquiries, you’ll probably get about 60% of them to fill out the application. But this is good because it filters out the lazy people from your applicant pool. Read through the applications and sort them into three folders: 1) definitely not 2) maybe and 3) definitely.

If you’re lucky, you’ll only have 5 or so applicants in the “definitely” folder. If that’s the case, you can move on to the next step. If not, you need to identify about 5 “finalists.”

This is where things get fun. With the five finalists, you offer them each $25 to participate in a one week competition where they each get to post “live” on the blog. This lets you get to see them actually doing the job, and proves to be invaluable in selecting your blogger. I’ve run this competition about 5 times now, and without fail, each time, there’s one blogger who sticks out from the rest.

I know that it seems like a long, convoluted process, but in the end, I’ve found that it’s the best way to find a blogger who’s dedicated and passionate while bringing a level of expertise and personality to the blog.

Reminder: Blog reboot coming next Tuesday

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Just wanted to remind everyone that a blog reboot is coming up on Tuesday May 8th. It’s not too late to nominate your blog.

Each Thursday and Friday we’ll be announcing the upcoming blog reboot as well as “open nominations” and you can expect to find a new rebooted blog each Tuesday. Stay tuned. This is going to be fun!

Lessons from an SEO Contest

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I don’t know all the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but I hope the ‘lessons’ our team of three learned from two consecutive Philippine SEO contests can help fellow bloggers here at Performancing. (One of my teammates was J Angelo Racoma, who now helps manage sites for Splashpress Media – Filipino bloggers like to tease him “blog overlord”.)

Without further ado:

Don’t be content with your rank, changes happen fast – You’re number one in the search results for “fake petunias” today, with your competitors nowhere in sight…but tomorrow they’ll overtake you. We learned this the hard way when our first contest entry grabbed 1st place in Google, only to end up in 5th weeks later. Even more painful was the second entry – from 2nd to 11th.

Don’t go overboard with the keyword density – There has been much talk and debate as to what is the right keyword density for each of the three big engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). It is all right – imperative, actually – to conduct keyword research and inject keyphrases into your articles, but don’t be too generous in dishing them out. If the blog content sounds inhuman already – “Fake petunias can be bought at fake petunia shops by people who love fake petunias” – then you’ve probably gone overboard with the keywords.

Here’s good advice from Pholpher’s Perf post: “Don’t spam by stuffing your posts with too many keywords. Three to four times should be enough for blog posts between 400-500 words.”

Don’t forget the images – As mentioned in this earlier post, inserting images and adding alt and title attributes to your posts can give you an SEO advantage.

Link exchanges still matter – One contestant diligently did the rounds of the Philippine blogosphere (IMO one of the friendliest and link exchange-hungriest blogospheres around)…and he placed high in the results. For your link-building efforts, Ryan’s 5 Ways to Diversify Your Links is a heavyweight resource.

Feed scrapers pay the price – One of our contest observations was that most blogs filled with duplicate content (mostly feed scrapers) languished in the SERPs. The same was true for blogs that relied on article directory content, though those that had a good balance between unoriginal and original content did fairly well.

Releasing a WordPress theme can do wonders – Especially if it becomes popular! Getting a free PR 5 or so link from WordPress is simply too good to pass up (not to mention the links from blogs using your theme). Once you’ve crafted a great theme, changing the colors and releasing them as spin-off themes can net you more links. With this tactic, one contestant who entered the competition quite late shot up blazingly fast through the rankings and finished among the Top 5 (if my memory serves me right).

Watch out for hackers – Hackers a.k.a. your competitors? Possible. It happened to us. Don’t let your efforts go for naught; always run regular backups so you can bounce back with a vengeance, and bounce back fast.

Google’s the easiest, Yahoo the middle guy, MSN the hard-to-get – It’s my opinion that Google is the easiest search engine for a new blog/domain to break into. Barely a week with scant content and we were already there. On the other hand, it took us a month or so to appear on Yahoo. As for MSN, well, our entries didn’t appear even after three months.

* * *

Of course, there’s a big difference between an SEO contest and a ‘rivalry’ among blogs in the same niche: the former has a deadline. The latter just goes on and on until the warriors fall one by one by the wayside. Just like in every business, ensuring that your blog outperforms its rivals in the search engine wars requires perpetual vigilance, research, and experimentation.