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Archives for June 2007

Best Way To Get Back At Feed Stealers

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I was away all day, 8 hours, sitting at the car shop as they kept giving me false promises about when my windshield would be replaced from another windshield crack (3 in the last 6 months) caused by daily driving on I-95 in Pennsylvania alongside tractor trailers. To put it bluntly, I’m a bit P.O.ed at the moment, and things got compounded when I discovered that one of my best sites is currently being uniquely aggregated into a perfect duplicate splog that’s trying to pass itself off as legit.

My question to you. What’s the best way to get back at this jerk? Can I direct unique feed content specifically to an IP or domain name? Any suggestions are appreciated.

Adding Forums To Your Blogs

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I’ve been thinking about adding forums to a couple of my more successful blogs. The thought is that while blogs allow for commenting, they aren’t ideal for reader-generated content.

My worries about introducing forums are:

1. Too much moderation work
2. I’ve had too much experience with forums that get overridden with spam
3. Unlike with choosing a blog software, I don’t know the killer app for forums

So let me ask you the following questions:

1. What forum software do you recommend for both its ease of use and its rock-solid security?
2. How do you handle moderation?
3. Do you think that discussion forums can compliment a blog and help create a larger regular readership? Or do the blog comments suffice? Is there too much overlap in functionality?
4. Do you think that adding a forum is worth the effort for bloggers? Some of the time? All of the time?

3 Tips for Being a Better Blogger

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It’s Friday evening, 6:30 pm and you’re furiously tapping away at your laptop, churning out the first of many articles / blog posts / linkbaits that you were supposed to write this week. The deadline is Monday morning, your procrastination hasn’t paid off and now your weekend (and your nerves) are wasted as you slave away to cram 5 days of work into 2.

If the above (albeit a bit exaggerated) sounds like you, then don’t fret – there’s hope, and in the process you will also be a better blogger.

Darren talked last week about the value of establishing a blogging workflow. While I think that Darren’s is mightily disciplined and a rare case, there are still a lot of good habits we can take away from the whole process.

I’m going to let you read the inspirational articles – the day in the life of a problogger series (1, 2 and 3) – but first, let’s get you started with the 3 basic habits you can adopt right now to channel your time into those areas of blogging and making money where you are most needed.

Tip #1: Chunk your flagship content together

Darren, in his blogging workflow post, talks about how he takes one or two mornings and writes all his flagship content for the week during that time.

This requires some planning ahead of time, so what I’d suggest is that you keep gathering ideas during the week so that come Monday, you DO have plenty to think and write about. And if you have to do some research, do that before hand as well, so that when the time comes, all you have to do is write.

The other obstacle that people sometimes face is that they want to write too much about ‘current’ news and not enough flagship content. I face this problem myself, despite reading Darren and Nick and Chris talk about this for over an year and despite consciously practicing writing flagship content on my blogs.

The thing is, once you start reaping the rewards of flagship content, there really is no looking back. On one of my blogs, a simple practice of creating such a resource led to site traffic tripling over the course of two weeks and then steadying itself after that.

That was a home run of sorts, but it made me realise the value of long term gains as opposed to short term gratification.

Want to double, triple, quadruple your blog traffic? Start writing flagship content.

And learn to schedule it for a specific time on a specific day of the week, so that the rest of the week you don’t have to worry about writing on your blog and you can focus on marketing and managing your other work.

Tip #2: Focus on less writing, more management

For a blogger whose main weapon is his pen / keyboard, asking them to write less feels blasphemous. Also, many bloggers blog because they enjoy writing about a particular subject. I could probably talk / write about soccer all day long, probably the same with blogging and marketing. This is what I do, what I know and what I enjoy.

But writign too much is not good – it’s not good because it tends to take you away from other, more important activities.

For example, let’s say you have 3 hours per day to give to your blog.

On Monday, you spend those 3 hours writing 6 ‘flagship posts’ for the week. For the rest of the week, with the writing out of the way, you can spend perhaps an hour blogging (putting up the newsy items) and the other 2 hours managing the blog, talking to advertisers, marketing / building links, tweaking your theme, launching a new blog (why not), hiring writers, etc.

In short, once you’ve done your blogging for one site on Monday, you have 4-5 days more in which you can work on anything else you want to – other blogs (I wouldn’t recommend more than 2-3 blogs to write on regularly) or blog-related activities. The key is that you have the option to make a choice – and the time to send traffic to your new flagship content.

Tip #3: Hire/Get help

When possible, delegate.

If you’re starting out, this won’t be possible. If you’re already successful, delegating tasks is the simple process of placing an ad in Craigslist or the Performancing blogger jobs forum and farming out the day-to-day tasks of news reporting, comment management and basic promotion and email handling to a junior editor.

But if you’re somewhere in between, it’s difficult – you know you need to delegate in order to move to the next level, but you don’t have the funds to hire someone for the job.

One way to get help in this case is to first work hard on building your community and then asking that community to contribute to the blog. I’ve done that with variable success over the last year, and the key here is to build that community before-hand – once you’ve got a large pool of readers, asking and getting help becomes easier.

The other way to get help in this case is to hand pick one or two readers and offer them a share of the revenues / small payment in return for sharing the load of a few ‘editorial’ duties (such as comment moderation and news reporting).

What’s important to remember is that you shouldn’t scrimp in compensating for help – if you’re offering money then be generous, otherwise you have no right to expect good work and you will most likely not get the best possible out of the hired help. If readers pitch in to work for free, respect their time and find a way to thank them or reward them by linking to their blogs or promoting their articles, etc.

But make sure you get help – if you want to create a big, vibrant, successful blog, it’s easier if you delegate.

If you’re managing more than one blog, then delegation becomes necessary.

Be a better Blogger

Learning linkbaiting, SEO, theme design and having your site pimped out with the latest widgets can help make your blog better and more popular, but all that is wasted if you don’t maximise it.

And that comes from being a better blogger. It doesn’t take much – just some time management, attitude adjustments (towards blogging) and the discipline to work on your long-term goals (flagship content) instead of slaving after short-term results.

And in case you were wondering, this post IS written on a Friday evening and I AM rushing to finish a couple of projects by tomorrow morning. We can’t be perfect at all times, but we can surely try 🙂

Photopress for Photoblogs: The June 2007 Performancing WordPress Theme

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Performancing is glad to announce its latest WordPress theme, Photopress.

Photopress was specifically designed for photobloggers. It is a one-column theme crafted to fit the standard 640×480 landscape image size that digital photographers love to display their shots in.

Photopress is an intentionally minimalist theme. Photoblog themes are nothing more than picture frames to highlight the photos. You don’t want your theme to distract from the pictures you took. Photopress is the perfect minimalist compliment for your latest shots.

The next time you’re looking to setup a photo blog, give Photopress a try. You can download the zip file here.

Each month, Performancing releases a free WordPress theme to the public. This is our June 2007 release.

Absolutely Positioning Your Blog Search Form

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If you take a look at some blogs, you may notice that they have their search bar in some odd places. Some put it in the header, some put it in the horizontal navigation bar, some in the sidebar. I personally like to have it in either the header or in the navigation menu. It seems like that’s always the first place I look when I want to find the search bar.

But getting the search bar positioned correctly can be frustrating, especially if you are using the entire header area to fit your logo.

So today, we’re going to position the search bar absolutely, within the header. I normally don’t recommend absolute positioning, because much of the time it’s not necessary, and if you can avoid it, definitely try to keep your positioning normal. But in this case, I think an exception is in order … so let’s get started!

First, let’s look at the header. For this article, I’ll use the a theme I created a while back called RockinSuckerfish (the 2 column version). Let’s look at some of the header code:

<div id=”header”>
<div class=”rss”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”feed:<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>”>posts feed</a></li>
<li><a href=”feed:<?php bloginfo(‘comments_rss2_url’); ?>”>comments feed</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class=”search”>
<form method=”get” id=”searchform” action=”<?php bloginfo(‘home’); ?>/”>
<input type=”text” size=”15″ value=”Search” name=”s” id=”s” />
</form>
</div>
</div>

For the time being, we’re going to ignore the “rss” div, although it is also positioned absolutely. As you can tell, the hierarchy of the markup goes like this: “header” > “search”

So let’s style the header, and position the search bar. The first thing to do is get our header styled correctly:

#header {
height: 123px;
padding: 0px;
margin: 15px 0px 0px 0px;
background: #9AB6CA url(images/header.jpg);
position: relative;
}

Your header may be different, but the one thing that you definitely need for this to work is the last style, position: relative; Without this, our absolutely positioned search form will position within the browser window instead of its parent element. By adding the position: relative; you allow a child element to be absolutely positioned within the parent.

Now, we need to position the search form. Here’s the code, then we’ll go through it:

#header .search {
position: absolute;
top: 50px;
right: 20px;
}

Now, obviously you can add whatever other styles you want, but you need to have at least this — position: absolute; — distance from either the top or bottom — distance from either the left or right. Notice I said “either/or” on those last two. Don’t do both … it probably won’t work 🙂

As you can see, I decided to position mine 50px from the top, and 20px from the right, within the header div. You can put yours anywhere you like… it’s really up to you.

Like I said, this is a neat trick when you have a pesky element that you want to position accurately and easily … but definitely don’t overuse it.

For more on absolute positioning, check out this article. It goes far deeper than this article, so if you’re interested in learning more, that’s a good place to go.

Enjoy!

Photopress Theme

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Photopress theme for WordPress preview thumbnailImages speak louder than words on this one. Performancing’s June Theme release is Photopress, a WordPress theme perfect for Photo blogs.

Have you ever wanted to display your pictures in a photoblog without sidebar uglification? Well, that was the motivation behind Photopress; a one column WordPress theme specifically designed for photoblogs. With Photopress you can display large 640px width images without any clutter; perfect for the 640×480 landscape standard.

If you want your photos to be front and center on your photo blog, with little interference from your WordPress theme, then Photopress is the theme for you.

Photopress was designed by Brian Gardner.

Visit the official Performancing forums for support.

Click here to download the theme … or … Click here for a live preview of Photopress!.

Update: Photopress has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.

Do you use Kontera?

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After over an year of exclusively running Google AdSense on one of my sites, I bit the bullet and signed up for Kontera ContentLinks.

So far all I’ve done is add the ad code and change the link color (at the suggestion of the account manager) to differentiate the Kontera ad links from regular links.

In the last week that Kontera ads have been live on the site, I haven’t been too impressed by them, for 4 reasons:

  1. Inline advertising creates a break in the reader’s reading pattern – it’s a deliberate interruption that can serve to piss off regular readers.

  2. After years of getting angry at snap.com previews, there are times when I get the same feeling if I mouse-over one of the ContentLink ads.

  3. Linking keywords to ads is a problem in itself, as the algorithm may link off-topic words to ads and reduce ad relevance.

  4. I haven’t seen the depth of ad inventory for the football news sector in Kontera as I have in Google AdSense.

#4 I can live without and #3 (relevance) has improved, and I think it will improve even more in the future.

It’s #1 and #2 that bother me.

Revenue-wise Kontera is nowhere near to what AdSense is bringing in, but then again I’ve only been using Kontera for a week and have spent a long time optimising the site for AdSense (without compromising (too much) on user experience though), so just looking at earnings (or even CTR and ECPM) is unfair at the moment.

When I first started showing AdSense ads on my sites, it made me very uncomfortable. Now it’s a natural extension of any site I’m setting up.

I don’t think I can come to the same decision with in-text advertising, but who knows?

I’d be interested in hearing your experiences with Kontera and especially if you’ve had success with it.