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Archives for July 2007

Edition #1 of the Carnival of Internet Pros Now Accepting Entries

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The Carnival of Internet Pros (CoIP) Edition #1 is now accepting entries. The rules are simple. Please make sure you read these thoroughly, as several people are not bothering to read what is posted at Blog Carnival. The list below is subject to change, but if it does, I will post an “[Updated: __date__]” message at the top of this post.

  1. One entry per edition only. If you enter more than for an edition, all your entries will be deleted. Other reasons for exclusion:
    1. Scraped entries.
    2. Completely irrelevant topic.
    3. Not in English (sorry).
    4. Entering in the comments instead of using the submission form.
    5. Not bothering to read the carnival rules.
  2. The idea is both to share experience and get exposure. However, to go beyond a regular carnival, submitting an entry means that you agree to have your article picked apart, gently, wherever the carnival is being hosted. Two entries in each edition will be selected and the hope is that other readers will suggest – constructive criticism only, please – how the article could be improved, if at all. If you do not agree to this, then please do not enter.
  3. Relevant entries. The general theme includes any article that helps make us better “Internet Pros”, earning a living online. This includes tips on blogging, techniques for writing, productivity, managing contract work, tools to help us, etc. Put yourself in the frame of mind that you are working solely online. Think of “Performancing” articles that help you become a better “Internet Pro”.
  4. Please support whichever site is hosting a given edition of CoIP by linking back to the edition page from your blog, if you were included. If you were not included, that’s probably due to being late, and your entry will be considered for the next edition.
  5. We’re not turning anything down unless it falls into one of the reasons in point #1 above. So do not enter multiple times. Wait until your article appears, or until you’re sure that your entry was deleted for one of the above reasons.
  6. If you want to host a future edition, I’ll announce how in August. However, you must hold to the above rules yourself.

The first edition will be published on July 24th. The first deadline is Fri July 20th.

Here’s a link to submit your articles to the Carnival of Internet Pros

If It Ain’t Broke, Break It

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Part 3 of the Performancing Reboot.

It’s supposed to be: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That’s good, commonsense advice. If something is running and is successful (like a good design – heck, like Perf’s current design), then don’t rock the boat.

The problem here is that the “don’t mess with it” mantra is a risk-averse strategy. It keeps you safe, but there are a lot of times that you DO have to take risks. Performancing wouldn’t be here if the founders didn’t take a risk.

When you take a risk, there’s a chance for success and failure – you can minimize the chance of failure to a certain degree but after that, it’s all about timing, luck and a lot of elbow grease.

What does this have to do with design?

The common proposition towards design is that if it’s working, you shouldn’t change it. Stability is good.

Stability is also positive-spin for being stagnant. Not all change is good, but that does not stop you from going out and seeking change, seeking improvement.

When it comes to blog design (or blogging, or anything you do in life), I think you should be pushing for constant refinement and improvement. Don’t rest on your heels and accept the status quo – when you are successful, look at how you can improve and then do so.

It will give you an added advantage over the competition.

In that backdrop, today’s reboot will take care of two things: discuss the need (if there is one) for a complete Performancing redesign and discuss the minor tweaks that could help make the current design better.

Let’s do the tweaks first.

Improving the Perf Design

Why would you tweak a blog design that you might change in the future? One, a new design for a professional-grade blog like Performancing takes time – and I wouldn’t want to sit on my ass waiting for it while I could do something to improve my current theme. Two, the design may not be an immediate priority in the big scheme of things – which makes the tweaks even more necessary.

Here’s a list of tweaks that I think Performancing should have with reasons for all of them – please feel free to critique and disagree.

Site Architecture

What can we do about setting up proper categories (a limited set at that) instead of (numerous) tags? This is something that bothers me a bit, especially when you want to find old posts on a specific topic. Part of my work here is cataloging the Perf archives by topic (the good posts only – and I’m a bit behind on that particular project), but intuitively speaking it just feels wrong that I can’t click on a particular category and look at it’s recent posts. Mind you, the taxonomy system works well. But we should ideally have a limited set of tags / categories.

It’s probably something that we need a Drupal developer for – if there’s anyone in the Perf community willing to help out (in exchange for fame, credit and lots of love), feel free to PM me or Ryan 🙂 .

We’ve already fixed the URLs, so no problems there.

Other than that I’m not too pushed about anything else – oh yes, there’s no sitemap (or at least no visible link off the main page). Something to look at for us.

General Advice

Overall the rest of the design is well done – although I’m sure some of you might have suggestions for improving things. It’s simple and I like it that way, plus there is space for advertising as well if we choose to go that route (I’m discussing this in more detail in part 4).

There’s a list of things that I’d like to see fixed though:

  1. Increase the height of the search box and search button:

    Right now it’s too thin – making it bigger would make the search area more prominent and make it ‘appear’ more accessible.

  2. Increase font-size of header menu options:

    Those tend to get buried because of the logo on the left and the ads below them. Raise their profile by increase their size.

  3. Increase size of feed icon:

    Same as above.

  4. Push the ‘Top 20 premium pMetrics blogs’ panel to the bottom or move it to the pMetrics area:

    In terms of ‘usefulness’, I’d either move this to the bottom of the sidebar (thus pushing the recent posts and recent threads panels a bit higher) or remove it from the sidebar completely.

    I admit that I check it often to see where Soccerlens is compared to the other 4 blogs in the top 5, but unless we’re giving a full ranking of all the blogs, the list has no place on the main site.

  5. No italics for ‘read the rest of this entry’ link on the main page:

    A personal aesthetics choice – you’re already using ‘bold’ to draw attention to it, why do the italics?

  6. Promte the Perf tracker:

    This is one of the most important pages on Performancing in terms of telling people what the latest conversations and posts are. We should be promoting it in the Perf Resources page.

  7. Update the ‘about’ page:

    Non-design issue, but we should update the About page.

  8. Better ad placement:

    I think there are several ways we can improve our current ad display / placement and give them more exposure throughout Performancing. This has more to do with monetization so I’ll discuss this bit in more detail in part 4 (tomorrow).

Like I said at the start, these are very minor tweaks – and individually you may not even notice the impact of changing things – but these tweaks eventually add up and make a positive, significant change.

Does Performancing Need A Redesign?

Yes.

Does Perf need a redesign right now?

No.

Priority-wise, our main goals are to a) rebuild the content base as well as push out new tools and services and b) revive the old members and bring them back. Under the current circumstances, design takes a backseat, at least for the next 2-3 months.

However, if I was redesigning Performancing, I’d keep the following things in mind:

  • Stick to a 2-column theme

  • Build it with a full-length horizontal menu bar at the top – the current arrangement limits us a bit

  • Cater for siderbar ad space – along the same lines as SEJ’s right sidebar and Marketing Pilgrim

  • Cater for in-post advertising – whether it’s affiliate promotions or AdSense in archives or even if we’re just pushing house ads

  • Get visual – it’s not as much a problem with the current theme as with the people blogging (us) – more visuals required at Perf

  • Change the logo – like it, but it needs more edge to it

  • Come to think of it, the whole design needs more edge to it

  • The current setup of social bookmarking plugins is fine but when you design a theme with those things in mind, you can format things better and make them look more natural

In the coming weeks I have a couple of articles planned on the topic of blog themes, which will go some way towards plans for a new Performancing design.

What’s Next

There are 2 parts of the reboot left – monetization and promotion. We’ll look at them thursday and friday, and then I’ll try to do that recap on Friday as well.

And now it’s your turn:

how would you improve the current Performancing design?

Note: Interestingly enough, after I wrote this article (the headline was decided a day before) I Googled the headline and found that a book is selling by the same title on Amazon. I don’t remember coming across this book before, honest 🙂

Performancing Experiment Rocks The SERPS – Can you say “front page”?

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Many of you have written to me privately indicating that the first monthly Performancing Experiment has been a huge gold-mine of information – advice in action, as one of you put it.

That’s exactly why I decided to start these experiments. I find that unless I see advice in action, I normally don’t act on the advice.

While the experiment is not yet over, and will continue through the end of 2007, I did want to provide an update and offer some reflections:

  • As of July 11th, I’m seeing front page Google results on a search for “harry potter and the deathly hallows” (this could change of course, as Google might flip some switch)
  • I’m currently conducting an interview with the Global Literacy Project, the charity to which all proceeds from the project are going
  • The comments on the Harry Potter blog are starting to go through the roof
  • The viral email that I sent out seems to have failed.
  • The Harry Potter for charity program is underperforming.

In my estimation, while the blog is still only about 3-4 weeks old, it has established itself as an authority on book 7 in the Harry Potter series.

So what I’ve discovered so far is that it’s much easier to establish oneself as an authority in the SERPS than it is to create a “phenomenon” – the One Million Harry Potter Books for Charity was an attempt to create a phenomenon (1 million books is a lot). So far, we’ve only gotten about 20 books ordered through the site.

The good news is that we still have the entire year of 2007 to generate funds for the charity. Then, we can probably sell the blog and donate all proceeds to charity as well. And I’m also going to be volunteering my services to help the Global Literacy Project setup a blog and promote their website. Even when you don’t “hit it big” there’s still much to gain.

Overall, I’d call this experiment a success. We didn’t create a “phenomenon” but we did learn some valuable lessons and have created an authority website.

Content is NOT King

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This is part 2 of the Performancing Blog Reboot.

I could, of course, toe the established ‘bloggers’ line’ and say that content IS king.

But it’s not. Seriously.

Content is just one part of the puzzle that is successful blogging. The world’s best advice on blogging is meaningless if no one’s there to read it.

Quite often when we shout from the rooftops – ‘Content is KING!’ – we forget that content is NOT everything – heck, it’s not even the main thing.

So what is ‘the main thing’?

You. The blogger himself.

It’s the effort the blogger puts in: from writing quality content to networking within his blogging community to meeting people at conferences to marketing his blog to building a community around his blog with his readers to putting in the extra hours managing the blog in the background.

It takes a helluva lot of work, and that’s just to be ‘acceptably good’.

If you want to be the best, I’d suggest you read the following articles and then decide if being top gun is the right choice for you:

5 Things You Should Know About ProBlogger
Michael Arrington’s profile in Wired
Turning blogging from hobby to career

If you’ve already read them, then you have an idea of what I’m talking about.

Of course, you may decide that being numero uno is not the thing for you. That cuts back on the work, yes, but blogging is a full-time gig and takes as much effort as any other business (probably more so as you have so many hats on) to make successful.

So, to reiterate, the blogger is King. If he’s a kickass king with a knack for picking up on future trends and networking, then his blog has a good chance of success.

But if he’s a lame king, or if, relative to his competition, he can’t beat them for effort, strategy or knowledge, then his blog isn’t going anywhere.

So what does this have to do with the Performancing Reboot?

It tells us that you can’t take your eyes off the ball – that while content is important you need to view it in direct relation with everything else that a blogger must do.

Performancing.com – Helping Bloggers Succeed

I strongly believe that your readers come first in any ‘planning’ that you do about what your site offers. Think about your own expertise later – figure out what your target market wants and get busy providing it.

In Part 1 I said that with Performancing’s history and the resources available to us we could target the spectrum of bloggers by segmenting different topics and establishing our expertise in those areas.

The danger with doing that is that you could be shown up in a particular area by a dedicated blogger who is talking ‘only’ about design or ‘only’ about monetization. Fair enough. I don’t believe in running away from competition – it makes us stronger and pushes us to improve, so the more the merrier.

In fact I’d go so far as to say that you need competition in order to a) maintain your quality standards and b) push you towards continuously improving yourself and your blog.

Let’s take a look at what topics Performancing can possibly talk about in the future:

What to talk about

If this were a proper reboot I’d not only list the topics that a blog could talk about but I’d also go into detail, list sub-topics, show sample blogs / sites that cover those topics and establish a minimum level of quality and knowledge that would be expected from that blog.

  • Blogging
  • Monetization
  • Promotion
  • Management (hosting, legal issues)
  • Design (including WP themes and plugins)
  • Blog Networks
  • Blogging Jobs (and hiring)
  • Blog Buying & Selling (including blog valuations)

Beyond this I’ll just say that yes, that’s a LOT of ground to cover and yes, it’s an ambitious plan. It’s easier if you tie in the fact that a lot of this is ‘already written’ and that we’re going to enlist the help of Perf members, it becomes a bit more manageable.

Bottom line – whatever you write has to be of a certain quality and whatever services and tools you provide must meet certain expectations. With Performancing that level of quality must be the initial levels set by Nick and Chris and the expectations to be met should be the same as those that were in place when ScribeFire, pMetrics and the Perf Ad Network all originally launched.

Tools & Services

Some of these you’ve already seen in one shape or the other. There’s our blog stats package, pMetrics. There are wordpress themes, which have done quite well. The Blogger Jobs and Blog Sales forums have done well, although they’ve been limited in reach.

In the future we’ll be bringing out more tools and services, and will continue to improve what we already have.

In fact, by next week you should have at least one new service on the table.

Blogging Rhythm

While Performancing will give more attention than before to blogging tools and services, the content will still be a core part of the offering.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll be looking to upping the tempo here on Performancing – part of that means lots of writing from my end but luckily for you guys that also means that we’ll be bringing in more columnists, each experts in their own areas.

On the other hand, since we are rebuilding it also means that you’re focusing more on packaging old content / archives, reactivating relationships, reviving the userbase and providing tools and services instead of just talking about blogging, so there also needs to be a tradeoff.

For your own blogs, heavy blogging may NOT be the ticket out of all problems.

A few months back when David Krug was running Perf I argued with him a lot about the need for regular blogging ‘like the old days’. He was polite about it but effectively his answer was that ‘blogging’ wasn’t the priority, reviving old services was. It pissed me off, but now I know that David was right.

Write as much as you can without compromising quality.

Now I’m not the best writer on the planet, I know, so I’ll make sure I get other people to contribute. Ok?

What’s Next

I had to leave a lot out of this part of the reboot, mainly because it’s stuff that we’re planning to do at Performancing in the next couple of months and while I don’t want to ‘tell-all’ I also don’t want to talk about something that might later be scrapped.

In part 3 though, I’ll be a lot more open as we’re talking about design issues – and Liz, I need your help on that 🙂 .

Performancing.com – what’s the point?

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This is part 1 of the Performancing Blog Reboot.

Let’s dive right into this as there’s a lot to cover today.

For the first step, we’re breaking it down to 3 phases:

  • Collecting basic information

  • Evaluating / measuring the good and bad

  • Defining purpose, focus and audience

Let’s get started on the first one, collecting stats on our target blog, Performancing.com.

1. Collect Stats

This is a 3-part process:

  • basic blog stats

  • comparison with top blogs in that niche

  • blog history – what the blog is about, path from launch to current state, reputation issues

Basic Performancing stats:

Daily / Monthly Uniques: 1.5k / 44k
Daily / Monthly Pageviews: 9k / 282k
RSS Subscribers: 5K
Registered Users: 42k (remove 50% for dead accounts / spam so you’re left with 20k)
PageRank / Alexa: PR 7 / 11k
Site Age: Started October 7, 2005, so that’s 1 year 9 months.
Content Count: 7000+ pages

Comparison with top blogs in the niche

Blogs considered:

There are other leading blogs in this niche (Daniel’s Daily Blog Tips, Liz’s Successful Blog, Lorelle’s blog on WordPress, Chris’s new blog, Blog Herald, etc) but I think you can safely say that if Perfomancing can match the reputation and attention these blogs enjoy it’s a good start (I say this without judging whether Perf is ahead or behind these sites).

So how does Performancing stand up to these players?

Performancing vs Problogger – no contest, Problogger wins hands down in terms of community, RSS subs, reputation and momentum. Potential-wise I’d say ProBlogger edges Perf as well, although Performancing does have the pMetrics ace up its sleeve.

Performancing vs CopyBlogger – once again, no contest – Brian wins in momentum, community, RSS subs, reputation, etc. What works in Performancing’s favor here (again) is pMetrics plus the added fact that Performancing probably has more resources to dedicate to growing the brand than CopyBlogger.

Performancing vs WeblogsToolsCollection – It’s a close one – WTC has a lot of mindshare but to be honest (no offense intended Mark) it’s core strength is that’s its the primary announce board for new plugins and themes. WTC edges it in terms of mindshare but out of the 3 top competitors I’d say that WTC would be the easiest to overtake.

In a full reboot (I’ve cut some steps out to save time here) you’d compare hard stats as well – RSS subs, traffic (estimated) and rank blogs based on community / comments ratio on their latest posts.

Performancing History

  • Fantastic launch, chock-full of content, within a couple of months of its launch Performancing was easily rivaling ProBlogger as the leading blog ‘about’ blogging.

  • ScribeFire (formerly Performancing for Firefox), pMetrics and the Performancing Ad Network were all well-received blogging tools and services that further established the Perf brand.

  • Like it or not, the blog’s biggest problem was that it was branded by the ‘voice’ of Nick and Chris – any new blogger coming in / taking over would have big shoes to fill, not to mention be an experienced blogger and write extremely well.

  • The protracted sale of Performancing took away a lot from the brand (for several reasons that we won’t go into detail here), and till now I’d say the blog has struggled to regain that ‘oomph’ it once had.

  • Right now Performancing is moving in the right direction (rebuilding services, offering quality content for bloggers) but by my account it’s much harder in 2007 to reclaim that place Perf had over an year ago and as such there needs to be a change in focus AND an acceleration in the rebuilding process.

I’ve been a Perf reader and member for a long time so it’s easier for me to summarise the history – if you’re doing a blog reboot in a niche that you’re not so familiar with, you’ll need to get this info from the site owner himself.

So what does this tell us?

2. Good and Bad

We know what Perf’s objectives are, what it’s capable of, and where it stands now.

The Good

  • Thousands of premium-grade articles on blogging.

  • pMetrics – fantastic stats tool that needs better promoting.

  • Established user-base (members and RSS subs).

  • Mindshare – on the RSS readers / radar of many influential players in the blogging niche.

The Bad

  • It’s a lot harder to succeed in the blogging niche today than it was in late 2005.

  • Dormant user-base / community – they’re are thousands of registered users but few of them participate anymore.

  • Still talking about blogging like its 2005 – the leaders get away with it because of their momentum, but blogs that are a bit behind need to do something special / extra.

We’ve done a comprehensive job of setting the scene for Performancing in terms of where we are and what we need to do.

Next step: where to go from here.

3. Purpose, Focus and Audience

Now for the big question:

What’s the point of Performancing?

The tagline reads: “helping bloggers succeed”. It’s specific about ‘helping bloggers’ bit and open-ended about ‘success’. This can be a good and bad thing – leaving it open-ended allows the site itself to define the term and introduce various services as long as they all target the same goal. The downside is that if you have to maintain high standards in your pursuit of ‘actually helping’ bloggers – if you let up and don’t deliver on the quality of service expected of you, readers will drift away.

I wouldn’t change the tagline – it’s perfect as far as Performancing is concerned.

What I WOULD do is redefine the focus of the blog and the services / tools it looks to provide based on current circumstances and future expectations.

Redefining Focus

Blogging ‘about’ blogging is like flogging a dead horse. There is already such wealth of information in the archives of the leading blogs on blogging that most of the new stuff is just regurgitation / rehashing and eventually, a waste of time (no offense intended, mind you).

So for Performancing, here’s what I think should be the way forward:

  • Get maximum value out of the archives. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

  • Establish a high level of quality and only allow the best posts to filter to the front page. To put this in context – there are some articles I’ve written here on Perf in the last month that I wouldn’t put on the main page.

  • Focus on developing tools and services for bloggers to help them succeed. We’ve had several discussions on this behind the scenes and I’ll talk about this a bit more in future parts of the reboot (still on part 1, remember?).

  • Get the old members back.

Who Is Your Audience?

It would probably be better to target one segment of the blogging audience, but we like big challenges here and Perf has done it before, so we’re going after the whole niche. Having said that, you need to cater for different segments of that niche and treat newbies, experienced bloggers and fellow site owners differently (and feed them different content / tools / resources).

The newbies are still at the start of the learning curve, so for them the content will be the main draw (followed by the tools). For the experienced blogger you’ll need a different level of content (in terms of depth and topics) plus the focus would be more on the tools and services that Performancing intends to provide.

But how do you target fellow site owners? It’s something we’ve been discussing and I think that this is something that’ll happen through time and building relationships – maybe a trip down under is in order? 🙂

What’s Next

Next (tomorrow), we’ll talk about what Performancing can offer to its readers in terms of content, tools and services (without revealing too much 🙂 ), so stay tuned.

I’d love your feedback on this very public blog reboot, so let me know what you think.

Be an expert, write for Performancing!

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I have a deal for you. As you may have noticed, Performancing is rebooting. And part of the reboot involves you.

Ok. So what’s the deal? Right?

Well, we want you to be an expert, and we’re offering free front page links if you’re willing to give it a shot;-)

Performancing is looking for members with expertise to step up to the plate and write articles in the following areas:

  • Blogging
  • Monetization
  • Promotion
  • Management (hosting, legal issues)
  • Design (including WP themes and plugins)
  • Blog NetWorks
  • Blogging Jobs (and hiring)
  • Blog Buying & Selling (including blog valuations)

Do you have what it takes? I think you do.

Start by submitting posts to your Performancing blog and establish yourself as a Performancing expert. Not only will Performancing position you as a knowledgeable expert in front of a hugely influential audience, but you’ll also get a free backlink from each front page article. That’s a great deal.

To get started, go ahead and commit to writing just one expert article. See how it goes.

Not only will you be helping the Performancing community, but you just might be opening up doors that you didn’t know existed.

Previous Posts, or Next Page?

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Unfortunately, sometimes the logical thing to do and the “technically right” thing to do are polar opposites. Such is the case with those little tiny links at the bottom of your WordPress blog that send your reader into the pits of your archives. One must make a choice here… should I link to “page 2” of the blog archives using the words “previous posts” or “next page”?

Technically speaking, they are indeed previous posts. One would think that while a person is browsing the articles on your blog, they would naturally know what “previous posts/entries” meant, and would consequently know intuitively which link to click when presented with the options.

One would be wrong.

In fact, yours truly has been so indoctrinated by habit (and perhaps through digg’s “next” link) that I found myself more times than not, actually not reading the text of the link, and simply clicking based on the position of the link, and the direction of the arrows.

This was not acceptable. All my free themes, as well as the customs I had done, all had “previous entries” and “next entries”.

No, I haven’t gone back and changed them all yet … but I have implemented a new policy … and wrote some simple code to get them displaying correctly. Wanna see? OK…

The first challenge is getting the WordPress code working right.

The code for the “next page” link looks like this:



It seems as if WordPress wants us to use the “next page” phrase 🙂

But there’s also the “previous page” link to take care of. No problem…



Notice that we are using the « and » symbols to indicate next and previous. Again, this is just because it makes sense and it reinforces the idea of true forward and backward navigation. So currently, there are actually 2 links siting side by side, probably aligned left, with little or no spacing between them. With a little CSS magic, we can take care of that. Here’s the code in full … then I’ll give a brief explanation:

I embedded the CSS to save room, but feel free to name your divs and do this in the stylesheet. Basically, what I’ve done is calculated the width of the parent div (in my case, it was 450px) and divided the width by my 2 navigation divs. That way, we get one link on the far right of the parent, and one link on the far left (further reinforcing the idea of going to the next page or previous page). All this code does is floats the “previous page” link to the left, and aligns the text left, and floats the “next page” link to the right, and aligns the text right.

Presto! Now you have logical navigation links at the bottom of your archive pages. Feel free to insert this code in any WordPress template page that needs navigation.

Hope that helps! I know it saved me some frustration 🙂

Legal Issues for Bloggers: A New Performancing Resource

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Performancing is happy to announce a forum dedicated to legal issues that bloggers face. In addition to stock DMCA notices and cease and desist letters, Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today will be offering advice and conducting research into specific issues.

The forum will focus primarily on content theft, but also other issues that a blogger may face including, defamation, trademark, free speech issues, privacy and more. If Jonathan does not know the answer he will research it for you and provide an opinion.

We hope that this resource proves to be helpful to the blogging community, especially as many of us are “on our own” so to speak without the standard legal resources that an incorporated business might have.

Jonathan has written an introductory post to get things started and we hope that you’ll all welcome him to the Performancing community.