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Archives for June 2007

The Year of Branding and Consolidation: Why Bloggers Are Trying “To Do a Few Things Well” In 2007

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Each year a few clear patterns emerge among content producers and marketers. As the net changes, so do its dynamics, and so do the best ways to make money.

In the past we’ve had the year of the blog (when blogs made their first big splash), the year of article submissions (before article submission succumbed to over saturation), the year of the linkbait (when the search engines got smart, and organic links became a necessity), and so on.

2007 is turning out to be the year of branding and consolidation. Not that branding and consolidation haven’t been important in the past. But I’m seeing clear signs this year from several independent corners of the web that the dynamics of the web (probably thanks to a combination of information saturation and Google’s push to measure quality indicators) have put pressure on web publishers to consolidate content and build brands. This is a real world observation.

The days of easily squeezing dollars out of AdSense by putting up an article on thirty different blogs, every 2 days, is on its way out. Why? Because with thirty different blogs, the economics of time and money are no longer in place to do proper SEO on each one, and because of information saturation, you can no longer rely on the Search Engines to send you enough free traffic to get the clickety-clicks that you need. The skinny is this: the time and effort required to make this model work is going up, while the monetary returns are going down.

Ok. So how should you respond

If you’re a single individual (not a company) and you own lots of blogs, don’t despair. Take your five most successful blogs and ask yourself “which of these three do I enjoy the most.” Keep them and focus all your energy on them. Maybe focus all your energy on just one to begin. Whatever feels right.

Then consider all of your other blogs. Would they consolidate smoothly into any of the three that you’ve chosen to focus on? If so, consolidate. If not, then muster up your will-power to sell them off. By selling off your worst performing blogs, you will feel a huge burden lifted from your shoulders, will gain capital to leverage and focus in the direction of your focus blogs, and will gain the freedom to finally create some great works of monetizable art.

The key is to stop thinking of blogging as a chore, with content to crank out, and start working on only a few projects that you’re passionate about. You know, the one’s that make you proud. The one’s that excite you. By doing this, you’ll naturally create great, brandable sites.

I say all this perfectly aware that there are some brands that aren’t worth creating from a monetization standpoint, so if you’re in this for at least partially for the money like most of us, then you should definitely stick with monetizable niches.

Why this is a good thing

In my view, the movement towards consolidation and branding is a great trend for the overall health of the web. The dynamics are now in place so that bloggers have more incentive to create a few great blogs rather than lots of tiny, borderline spammy blogs. When humans are able to focus their energies on one or a few creative projects, the end result is almost always a better work of art.

And that’s what you should be doing. Put your energy into making great, brandable works of art. By standing out in a vast sea of mediocrity, you stand a much better chance of surviving as a problogger earning a full-time wage.

7 Quick Observations About Linkage

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I’ve been running a number of experiments over the last few months and closely monitoring the effects of various types of links for new blogs.

Here are my conclusions:

1. Always start out your link campaign with a week’s worth of article or page level links.
2. Never start off with run-of-site links
3. Leaving your link in the no-follow comments section of a blog works wonders, especially if you do it on about 5+ blogs
4. Only add run-of-site links if you’re desperate
5. A few good page level links can get you killer results
6. Too many run-of-site links can literally sink the short-term effects of you linkbuilding campaign
7. A mix of about 35/65 between main page and deep links seems to work very well.

So there you have it. A recipe for quick linkbuilding success (in terms of SERPS not PageRank) consists of getting about 10 main page links (within fresh content…not old, retrofitted content), 20 deep-links, and participating in the comments section of 5-10 thematically related blogs.

The order of your linkbuilding campaign should be something like this:

* Start by getting deep links in fresh content on other blogs
* Next participate in the comments section of a few blogs where your name on each comment links back to your main page
* Next get a few main page links
* At this point, you might start doing some social media promotion via Netscape, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon.

And for God’s sake, only do run-of-site links as a last resort (if SERPS are your main concern).

Is Your Blogging Stressing You Out?

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In the last month I’ve fired a client, turned down several projects, dropped three of my blogs and brought in writers for another one.

The upside? I now have more time to concentrate on my main project, more time to blog here at Performancing and most importantly, zero stress about work not getting done.

The downside – none, actually. I’m making the same amount of money as before (a bit more actually), am stress-free and have been able to put more time into the projects I really care about, allowing me to move them along at 3 times the speed than I would have otherwise.

In short, doing less work will actually make me more money this year.

But it’s not all about the money – even though many of us slave day and night for it (or used to) and worry about it all the time.

By consolidating and concentrating your efforts on fewer, more important things you’ll be able to grow your blogs faster, build a bigger community of readers and have more fun while doing it.

However, before you jump to the comments to argue or (worse) go delete all your blogs, I should point out that there is clear-cut right or wrong between having 20 blogs or 2 blogs.

The key to all of it is you, and how you manage your blogging.

I wrote about this dilemma in more detail last year, but in a nutshell:

  1. Don’t launch more than 1 blog per month if you are the main blogger for that site.

  2. Don’t be involved full-time in more than two blogs at a time – this involves blogging, marketing, participating in comments, strategizing for future growth, etc.

  3. In the beginning, your blogs won’t be earning you enough to live on. Instead of starting new blogs:

    a) Find a system that works and helps you make money online (such as PLRPro – (disclosure – I’m a member)).

    b) Hold on to (or get) a real job.

    c) Get hold of freelance projects (what I did).

    What type of projects? Writing, programming, consulting, designing, whatever suits your skillset – and if know nothing, you can still probably write – otherwise you wouldn’t be blogging, right?

  4. Blogging isn’t just about posting articles on your blog, it’s about finding out what people want to read about and then writing about that. It’s about networking with fellow bloggers and leveraging those relationships to help promote your blog. It’s about marketing your blog, because let’s face it, you’ll need to get links to your blog one way or another.

    It’s also about planning ahead, so that you know when to take your site in a particular direction, when to grow it and when to split off a section into a new site.

    If you do all of the above, two things will happen – one, you’ll have time only for a couple of blogs and two, your blogs will grow much faster.

If you are spread out too thin, you’ll lose money and traffic and stress yourself out.

If you are too focused, you’ll lose money and traffic and (almost) never make it big.

To find a balance, you need to maintain enough focus while constantly working on growing your sites.

Part of that means hiring designers, programmers and writers to work for you.

Part of that also means that you should know when you’re just churning out articles and not putting enough effort into growing your site – usually that point comes when you’ve been blogging for a while and your site’s traffic numbers have been stagnant over 2-3 months (once again, this applies more to new / young blogs).

So where do you stand? Are you spread out too thin? And are you stressed about your blogs?

pMetrics multi-day viewing has arrived

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Good news. Viewing your data in pMetrics from more than one day at a time has finally arrived. The calendar icon in the top right corner has been replaced by a new drop down menu that you can see in the screenshot directly to your right. The default options should please most of you, although we’d like your feedback definitely. It is still a work in progress but is well enough along that we want everyone to start using and enjoying it.

More “full months” will be available once that data has been fully summarized, which happens about every 8-10 days. May’s data actually isn’t quite finished but should be by the end of today (June 19). We also plan to add in a “More…” link right below “Two days ago” that lets you select a specific date, maybe the old calendar will popup when you click that? Not sure yet. There will also be a “Custom…” link at the bottom which will take you to a page and let you select your own date range. URL hax0rz should be able to create their own custom date ranges already, no problem, but currently data is only available back to April 25 or so.

This feature works great with the dashboard. For example, try selecting June 2007 on your dashboard, and the range of dates shown for visitors, actions etc will change to the selected range, and the “top 10” will change to the top 10 for that time period instead of just one day.

The only thing you CAN’T do (yet) is filter your visitors by referer domain or search query from more than one day, as that is not fully optimized. So if you’re viewing your dashboard for June and click “digg.com” from the incoming links list, the visitors you see as a result will only be for the “latest” date in your range, in this case that would be June 19 instead of June 1 through 19. This should be fixed in the near future, we hope.

Multi-day viewing is available to everyone right now, but in a few weeks or so it will become a premium only feature. Do enjoy, and we welcome your feedback.

A Performancing Experiment: Book Arbitrage

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Every month, Performancing is going to run an experiment that we hope will accomplish three things. First, and foremost, it should be fun! Second, we’ll all learn a new thing or two about marketing strategy. Third, by running a collective experiment, we can share seo and marketing wisdom with each other.

This month, the experiment is going to be Book Arbitrage. Let’s have fun with it!

The book we are going to try to do search arbitrage on is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Basically, this is the art of creating a useful website about a popular book (almost like a squidoo lens) and gaining Amazon affiliate sales.

If you read Performancing closely, you might have seen my suggestion that the Photopress theme is the perfect tool for book arbitrage because it lets you put up a nice and big picture of the book’s cover art….plus it’s clean and professional looking.

To get started, I’ve gone ahead and setup a bare-bones book arbitrage site for the 7th and final Harry Potter book that releases on July 21, 2007. As a community, we have about one month to put our plan into place and execute it. Profits will be split evenly between Performancing and everyone who either offers a suggestion in this comment thread or links to the Deathly Hallows site.

What I want us to do collectively is make suggestions for how to make this a killer landing page for HP 7. So fire away in the comment section. What should we add to this barebones template to make it kick some Google ass?

Getting Back into the Problogging Groove

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Sometimes, no matter how strict and disciplined our posting schedules are, there are events that will forcibly push us out of our rhythm, such as family tragedies and emergency out-of-town trips (to places without good Net access, to boot). The longer the event, the more work gets piled up, and the greater the disorientation upon our return. That said, count me as one disoriented blogger. (I have been one for the past two weeks!)

In response to this problem of mine, I cooked up a list of activities which helped me ease myself back into the numerous problogging tasks on hand. Hope these can help future bloggers who’ll unexpectedly get yanked out of “the flow”.

Reading old blog posts – Days or weeks without blogging can dull your writing voice, as well as your vocabulary and wordplay. Sifting through your old posts will serve as the sniff of that familiar perfume that brings back the good ol’ memories.

Commenting on other blogs in your field – Well-written comments are like microcosms of blog posts; the views and thoughts contained within them can stand on their own for their author, and they elicit comments from other people as well. As such, writing comments can serve as an excellent warm-up drill. Go around a couple of good blogs in your niche and chip in your thoughts. This can be applied to other forms of online discussion, such as forums.

Randomly surfing the blogosphere – How many times have we posted about the blog posts written by other people? Other bloggers’ opinions are a potent fuel to fire up the hibernating blogger in you. Take a stroll around the blogosphere using Technorati, BlogExplosion, blog directories like EatonWeb, or even Blogspot’s Next Blog feature.

Why the “randomly”? Often, we are already familiar with the way of thinking and tone of the bloggers in our feed subscriptions and blogrolls. Random surfing can introduce us to something new, something that can shock and awe and draw forth the emotions, something that can trigger a blog posting frenzy, never mind the blog-rust.

Reading offline sources – Before going on blogging hiatus, I talked about getting blog content from offline sources. Whether you’re nicely tucked into your blog posting rhythm or totally out of it, offline material such as newspapers and magazines can provide the ammunition. If you’re having trouble consciously looking for something bloggable, you might want to try this: don’t actively look for what to blog. Just let it jump at you.

Managing blogs before writing – For your own blogs, do some blog management first before doing some blog posting. Doing those little design and SEO tweaks will get you into the doting-blog-owner mode fast. Don’t forget to check your visitor stats and ad revenue – if there’s a dip in either of the two, then you’ve got further reason to be inspired and blog again!

P.S. You might also want to check out Raj’s What To Do When You Lose Your Blogging Mojo. This related article dealt more with writer’s block than rustiness, but many of his tips can also be applied here.

Divide and Conquer – a Simple Strategy to Dominate Any Niche

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How do you translate knowledge / experience, quality writing and marketing into a successful blog? For each big hit there are thousand other bloggers who know their field and write well but aren’t able to break out into the limelight.

The key ingredient is razor-sharp focus – and it means the difference between being remarkable and being ‘like everyone else’.

As you know, Performancing’s motto is ‘helping bloggers succeed’.

As part of this effort, we ran several Blog Reboot sessions in which we took a blog and analysed how it could be improved to:

  • increase traffic
  • retain readers / increase readership
  • increase revenues

This was personalised and specific advice, telling bloggers exactly what they needed to improve on their blogs in order to increase their traffic (and readership) and maximize their revenues.

In the 5 blog reboots I’ve done so far, only one blogger had the the right idea about blog focus and the value of dominating a niche. It helped that Paul Tan had been doing this for 3 years, but this isn’t a lesson that’s learned with time, it’s something that you can implement on your blogs right now.

It’s no wonder that Paul Tan’s car blog is one of the more successful blogs around – most of that success can be attributed to his focus on a particular niche (he is THE authority in Malaysia on cars and car buying), which in turn brought in valuable links and increased traffic and readership (not to mention increased revenues).

This is also the hardest part of blogging, because if you have been blogging about a topic for some time you are liable to have some sort of resistance to change.

For example, in one of the blog reboots I did, I told the blogger to offer something unique and specific to his readers instead of merely regurgitating the same news and following the same pattern that most other blogs were following. His answer? That he thought that his readers appreciated his efforts to act as a filter.

Well, of course your readers are going to say that – that’s why they stick around, don’t they?

But have you asked those people who came once, left and never came back again?

Or those people who subscribed to your RSS feed, then unsubscribed because they found it boring / too similar to other blogs?

Your readers will usually tell you that you’re doing a good job – because fact is, if they didn’t think so, they wouldn’t have stuck around to tell you.

But you don’t know how many readers you’ve lost because you’re doing a ‘bad’ job – that is, either just repeating / rehashing what everyone else is saying or not talking about anything in particular (like many personal blogs are).

Hey, if you are running a personal blog and don’t have any intentions of growing your readership fast, having many people read your blog and / or make money from your blog, then don’t listen to me.

But if you DO want to increase your fan base, increase traffic and increase your revenues, then focus on a single niche (and in that niche, focus on specific topics), and favor quality over quantity.

Don’t write about gadgets when you can talk about home theater systems.

Don’t write about soccer when you can talk about your favourite club.

Don’t write about music when you can talk about a genre (and don’t talk about a genre if you can talk about a band or a specific musician).

The right way to dominate a niche is to start by attacking and dominating a sub-niche. Want your blog to be the most-read parenting blog on the planet? Start by talking about a limited set of issues – don’t attack the whole niche at once.

After you’re the top dog in that sub-niche, move on to the next level – i.e. a bigger niche.

Divide and rule, then you consolidate.