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Archives for September 2007

How Often Should You Post?

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There’s a writing forum I visit from time to time to read news and catch up on what’s going on in the freelance writing world. In the blogging section, one of the regulars wondered if it was really necessary to update daily. He cited an expert who claimed to regret posting so often. He felt if he only drops a post every few days his readers have a chance to really understand and digest the information leading to more comments. Besides this being rather insulting to his readers, I think this is the wrong approach.

Here’s why I don’t think it’s a good idea:

It’s not good for traffic. While you may get a couple of people who check back often for comments, the majority of your readers are only going to stop by every few days if you’re only posting every few days. Maybe even less if they don’t feel you’re making an effort. The best trafficked blogs are those that post often, meaning several times per day. Your post will still be available for digestion even with new content.

It’s not good for revenue. Really, it isn’t. The only way to get people to click on your links or buy whatever it is your selling, is to get them to visit – often. How is this going to happen if you’re only posting once or twice a week? You want daily revenue, not just on the days you post something.

It’s great for the competition – Here’s the deal. People who read blogs want to read them every day. They read blogs to procrastinate at work, pass time during their lunch hours and learn something new. If you’re providing good, engaging content, people will take the time to read and comment, even if you post several times a day. By suggesting your readers aren’t digesting what you write is rather insulting to them. So don’t post often. Meanwhile, other blogs in your niche will post once or several times a day and that’s where your traffic will go.

Lazy blogging

It was suggested in that same thread that if you post often, your content is watered down and useless. That’s crap. Lazy bloggers post watered down content. People who blog outside their realm of expertise post watered down content. Bloggers who truly know their niche, can blog all day and still hold the attention of their readers because they always have something useful to throw out there.

No time? Enlist help

After school ended last spring, I found myself with less time for trolling for job leads. I made the mistake of only posting job leads to Freelance Writing Jobs two or three times a week, so I could concentrate on building up my other blogs. My visitors were still loyal, but they spent the rest of the time visiting my competition and traffic went way down. Though revenue was down too, I paid someone to post leads in my absence, plus I posted discussion topics once or twice a day. I also brought in guest bloggers to pick up the slack. Traffic soared and continues to rise. Is the rise in traffic due to my posting job leads every day only, or could it have to do with also posting great content? This week, I found out.

Thanks to construction across the road, my power or cable is knocked out at least once a month. Yesterday, my power was out for a good chunk of the day, and the day before it was sporadic. As a result, my helper posted job leads on Thursday and Friday, but I didn’t post any discussion topics. Traffic and revenue took a dive, as did the amount of comments I receive on a regular basis.

It’s not just FWJ. I maintain several blogs for myself and for others. I learn during these power outages that you truly get from blogging what you put into it. If you’re only going to post the network minimum, you’ll get paid the network minimum. If you want the traffic and revenue bonuses, you have to post often. Sometimes that means several times a day.

Don’t underestimate your readers

Don’t underestimate your audience. By thinking they don’t take enough time to digest your information, you’re inadvertently sending them to seek out information elsewhere. They may not abandon you altogether, but you’re missing out on some great traffic and revenue opportunities.

When Do You Monetize Your Blog?

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A friend of mine asked me this morning if he should put ads on the blog he’s launching next week from the first day. There are two opposing ways of thinking about it – some people prefer to have their ads in from the first day while others tend to add them later on once they’ve built up their reader base.

Readers are usually tolerant of advertising as long as they don’t have a preconceived notion of a specific site being ad-free. We are bombarded by advertising so much in our lives that we understand and accept it even on a personal reading level when browsing online.

Showing ads from the first day helps you avoid false expectations that your readers might develop about an ad-free blog which could later prove to be a hurdle when you finally do show ads.

On the other hand, it may make sense to hold off on showing ads and instead use the ad space to highlight key areas of your blog to new readers. Later on when you’ve got a lot of traffic (especially search engine traffic) you can then consider showing AdSense or other advertising on your blog.

What do you do – show ads from day 1 or delay it until your blog has enough traffic?

How to Get Extra Traffic to Your Blog from Image Searches

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If you put images in your posts (and if you don’t you absolutely should), be sure and name your images descriptively and make sure you fill out the alt and title tags on them. I get a lot of hits to my site from people doing image searching and finding my images. True, some people could just use the image search to come and swipe the image and they never come back, but even if only a small percentage actually visit your site and take an interest, it’s worth it in my opinion.

Here’s a real-world example: In the past 7 days, 5% of my hits came from images.google.com (stats courtesy of Pmetrics). Even something silly like the question marks image I use in my “Name That Candy” segment pulls in people searching google for “question marks” (I’m the 5th hit on Google Images for it ) and that’s not really even relevant to my blog topic. Of the 5% of hits that were from images.google.com in the past 7 days, 15% of those were searching for “question marks” images. For images that are relevant to my blog topic, my images rate very highly with Google Images.

I read somewhere once (and I have no idea where) that Google gives more weight to an image’s content if the title and alt tag are filled out and if the image name had keywords in it so I have always done this from day one. An example of a bad image name:
DSC1001.JPG

a good image name:
nerds_candy_box.jpg

Looking at the second image name, any automated “bot” (or person for that matter) can tell what the image contains. The first one – nobody knows. With the second one (and with the proper alt and title tags), Google will index that image with the keywords in them: “nerds”, “candy”, and “box”. I also try to always make the alt and title tags match the image name, so in this case, the alt and title would both be “Nerds candy box”.

I always use underscores and make each “word” in the image name important/relevant. I also always use lowercase but I don’t think that matters to Google, I just prefer all lowercase. I almost never tack on a number to an image. I’d rather rearrange the words in the name or add an extra/different word for the second. If I absolutely must add a number, I do something like:
nerds_candy_box_2.jpg
not
nerds_candy_box_opened2.jpg

so that the number and text stay separated.

I can’t say for sure that all of the things I do regarding images is helping, but I’m certainly doing something right judging by how Google ranks my images. Start naming your images descriptively and using the alt and title tags and see if you don’t start getting more hits from images.google.com too.

Blogging for the Future

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Earlier today Shane wrote about staying motivated and staying consistent in your early blogging days when the rewards may not be as immediate or … rewarding … as you’d like them to be.

It’s sound advice and it can be extended to blogging in general. Blogging for the most part is all about delayed gratification. When you see a successful blog that gets 100s of comments for each post, you see potential and an opportunity for you to be successful as well. What you don’t see is the sheer amount of hard work that went into building that success.

What you don’t see is the daily slogging and an insane amount of consistency behind the blog.

This works both ways. If you’re consistent and work hard all the time, your blog will eventually grow and become successful (but that success won’t show up now – it’ll show up 3-4 months later). On the other hand, if you have a successful blog and you let up your blogging efforts for a few weeks, the crash won’t happen then but in a few months as you’ll find your user base eroding and your blog set back by anywhere between 6 months to an year because you took your foot off the gas.

The next time you sit down to write on your blog, remember that you’re not blogging only for your readers today, you’re also blogging for your blog’s success several months down the line.

Keeping The Faith: 3 Tips to Staying Motivated In The Early Days

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Starting a blog is an exciting event with new ideas, new material and new audiences waiting to be discovered. It does not take long however for that first flush of excitement to begin to fade as you start to settle down into the serious business of creating content. It can be difficult to remain motivated as the full complexity of your chosen task begins to unfold in front of you, but it does not necessarily need to be this way. Below are the 3 most effective methods I have experienced to maintain the rage when you begin to wonder if it is going to be all worthwhile.

  1. Set yourself achievable and realistic goals on posting frequency. In the early days, when you are brimming with new ideas, it can be tempting to go all out and commit all your ideas to the screen. You may well benefit from a more scaled down approach that helps you provide content on a consistent basis. Your main sources of information will help inform you as to what is realistic and achievable. News-of-the-day can easily support (if not demand) daily and multiple-per-day postings. Flagship style content that is more considered and analytical, or tutorial style content can support weekly posting.

  2. Ignore the stats (at least for a little while). It can be hard to get an audience in the early days (in fact, I continue to struggle). Watching that stat counter climb painfully slow one visitor at a time can be demoralising. While it is tempting to regularly check the stats several times a day “just to see who stopped by”, you may be better off checking every couple of days or even once a week. The chances are that on a weekly basis, your stats will continue to rise. This way you can enjoy the motivation of increasing traffic while maintaining a sense of perspective on the scale of your stats.

  3. Take time out to reassess your goals and achievements. There is nothing wrong with pausing to reflect on where you are going and where you have come from. It is a valuable exercise to see if the direction your blog is heading is the one you originally envisaged. If it is, great! If it isn’t, it’s not the end of the world. Maybe this is an opportunity to move off into a different, more exciting direction, or perhaps it is the right time to refocus on what it is you hoped to achieve in the first place. This is a position I find myself in with one of my own blogs and this process has had the unexpected benefit of reinvigorating my desire to keep on posting.

What techniques did you use when you first started blogging to keep you motivated through those early days?

Father Braun originally uploaded to Flickr by katievision. Used under a Creative Commons licence.

Will The Google Bashers Please Shut Up?

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You can’t pass a day in the blogging / SEO / make money online niche without hearing someone complain about Google. For some it’s about getting shafted by the search ranking algorithm, for others it’s a tiff over things such as the no-follow debate and paid links mess, and still others who have a deep-rooted mistrust for all things Google because of Google’s increasing influence over the web.

Here’s the hard reality – at least ONE of your top-ranked sites will eventually suffer either through a hand-job or because of some quirk in the algorithm. You WILL get screwed over by Google and your rankings WILL drop. It’s how the game goes – if you cannot control 100% of your ranking factors (and you cannot), then you are not 100% safe. There is ALWAYS a risk with Google or with any other vehicle that you depend on to earn your livelihood.

There are only two ways out of this:

Remove Dependence

Develop a system that allows you to earn money even if Google disappears tomorrow morning. Develop a system that survives even if PayPal shuts down in the next 24 hours. This is by no means an easy task, but it’s definitely achievable, as long as you know your end game (what you need, as a bare minimum, to live comfortably) and work towards securing that first.

In theory you can have a system that transcends mediums and will survive everything but the absolute breakdown of human economic relations (and even then you should have a backup plan).
It’s not going to go doomsday and not everyone is that fanatic about preparation, but at the very least you should have the following:

  • A minimum of 3 different (and non-related) revenue streams.

  • At least 2-3 different backup plans for generating income in the short and long run if one or more of your revenue streams collapses

I’m by no means what I would call a successful blogger or internet marketer, but I do have one thing at my side which few people have – the ability to have ‘backups’ ready at all times. If today I was to lose all my current income sources I could, with some (but not too much) trouble, switch to alternative ways of generating income. It would take the collapse of the Internet to push me into serious problems, and even then I’ve got things covered.

I’m saying this because to achieve financial independence it’s not merely enough to make enough money, it is to create a system that is (as much as possible) disaster-proof and not dependent on anyone or anything.

Stop Whining & Find A Solution

John Andrews (the Aaron Wall interview over at ProBlogger led me to his blog, and I’ve been devouring his blog since) says it best:

I say it over and over. Stop projecting your own beliefs onto Google, and start listening. Google is practically shouting at you, telling you how to rank well.

I suggest you go ahead and read the whole article. Sure, he broadsides the whole panel on the buying links session at last month’s SES and sure, you will probably roll your eyes when you read about ‘listening to Google and playing by their rule-book’, but there is plenty of wisdom in those words.

Listen, there are only three ways you can beat a system:

  1. You can build a rival system that’s better and more popular. Even if you have the resources and the manpower, first-mover’s advantage and Google’s huge lead is one big monster to overtake. You are better off cutting the competition up (going after vertical search) or trying something else.

  2. You can find loopholes in it and exploit them – good for you if you do so, but this is a short-term, risky strategy.

  3. You stop fighting and bitching about it, learn how it works and then use that knowledge to your advantage. That means figuring out what works today and what’s going to work 5 years down the line.

It’s not rocket science, just blood, sweat and time. Pay someone to do it for you if you have to, but there’s only one approach to long-term success with Google and it doesn’t involve bashing Google for it.

If your business does not rely on Google, more power to you. If it does rely on search results though, what exactly are you gaining by complaining?

As John says:

You need to get to know Google, and listen to what Google says. You don’t need to agree, and please, stop whining.

Don’t Be Shy, Show Us Your Blogging Rig

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Following Darren over at ProBlogger, I thought it would be cool for Perf members to post images or video of their ‘puter and office setups. Post them in this thread, but make sure to kill 2 birds with one stone by heading over to Problogger to share there as well.

I’ll kick things off with my College Startup / Performancing HQ

It’s a 2 computer setup. One laptop (old and borderline useless), one desktop (a souped up powerhouse with 4GB RAM). Each computer has its own distinct public IP address. I prefer safety in redundancy. If one machine goes down, the other is there. If one IP address gets put on some blacklist, the other is there.