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Archives for October 2007

Should You Take That Blogging Job?

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You’ve decided to become a freelance blogger. You’ve been scouring the web for blogging jobs. You’ve found a gig that sparks your interest, but should you take it?

What’s the payment arrangement?

Many blogging gigs (especially for networks) offer a monthly rate plus page view bonuses. Others pay per post. Some pay in shares of ad revenue. Revenue-only pay can be zero if the blog gets little traffic. Even a low monthly rate + traffic bonus can be too little if it becomes your job to find the traffic.

Will you have to network?

If you’re getting traffic bonuses, sometimes a low monthly rate is worth it. How much traffic does the blog already get? If it’s your job to network to get the traffic, make sure to account for that time when making your decision.

How much work will the writing take?

Will you have to do research, or can you easily write on the topic? Is there a word count requirement, or can you write short posts?

Are you trying to establish yourself as a niche blogger?

If the low-pay gig could lead to higher paying jobs within your niche, taking the job might be worth it.

Will you enjoy it?

Blogging jobs generally require coming up with your own ideas for content on a daily basis. You’ll burn out fast if you don’t enjoy the topic.

Are there other perks?

Some blogging jobs will allow you a good amount of room for self-promotion. Others won’t even give you a byline. Some offer free products to review, others free samples. If the offered perks are of benefit to you, it might be worth it to take the gig even if the pay isn’t great.

What kind of commitment are you making?

If you’re going to have to sign a contract, make sure you know what you’re getting into. If the arrangement doesn’t work out, can you quit in a month or are you locked in for a year? Does blogging six times a week mean you can write all six posts in one day and “drip” them to appear throughout the week, or do you actually have to log in six days a week and post something new? Get the details ironed out before you commit.

Deciding whether or not to take a blogging job can be difficult even for an experienced freelance blogger. The choice will ultimately depend on your own personal and professional goals.

Blog Posts or Articles

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I have a pet peeve regarding some individuals and networks advertising for bloggers. Many of them are jumping on the blogging bandwagon without actually knowing what blogging entails. They know blogs are popular and profitable and want in, but have no clue about blogging. In fact, many places want articles and not blog posts. Trust me, there’s a difference.

Article

Articles are well researched paragraphs of information following a specific format and word count. They’re static pieces of content in which the author cites sources and speak with a particular tone and voice.

Blog Posts

Blog posts are less structured. Posts can be one line or several paragraphs. They can be expert interviews or opinion pieces. A post can consist of a photograph, a video or useful content such as this. Blogs are supposed to encourage community and posts should elicit conversation among your readers.

Finding a Happy Medium

One of my former clients has a magazine publishing background and wanted her blogs to run the same way. She didn’t want me to use “I’s” and insisted on each post meeting a certain word count. Another client found my blogging to be too conversational and turned off the commenting feature because it was too “distracting”. Speaking of distracting, a current client sent an email around to all of his bloggers because he felt images were unnecessary and rather we didn’t use them.

In these situations I do my best to work with the client, but also offer a few suggestions as to why it might be beneficial to encourage a more open-minded approach to blogging. Some clients are willing to compromise, but the ones that don’t “get” it tend to have a “my way or the highway” type of attitude.

Adequate Compensation

If your client wants you to write an article as opposed to a blog post, be sure you’re adequately compensated, especially if you’re expected to do a lot of heavy research or interview experts. $3 a post isn’t going to cut it for a heavily researched 500 worder. I understand why blogging pays less than traditional writing, but if it’s traditional writing you want, you’ll have to open your wallet a little wider.

I’m not saying you should pay for a couple of lines a day either, but if you’re looking to hire bloggers it’s a good idea to take some time out to learn a little bit about blogging and what it entails.

Google Gets Things Right? Well….

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Back from a nice 2+ week vacation to Italia and Greece. Vacation is a definite must for all bloggers;-) But it did occur to me while I was on vacation that I enjoy my work because I had the urge to get back into the cockpit.

So it looks like Performancing got nuked while I was gone.

That makes Performancing less important than the DrudgeReport. Which, in all candor, is probably correct.

However, some of the nuke’s collateral damage seems to have hit YouTube – currently at PR 3 😉 And that makes Performancing, at PR 4, more important than YouTube. I’m sure we’ll see a few more jerryrigged epicycles added to correct this situation and get YouTube back up to PR 8+ where it belongs.

All of this nonsense points to just one fact:

PageRank should not and should never have been a factor in shaping your vision as a web professional.

Why Do You Blog?

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Lately, I have read many posters on forums talk about blogging. The questions aren’t about the best approach, best sites, or best topics. The posts always start like this: “I heard blogging was a great way to make money. So what do I do?”

Well, the first thing you need to do is realize that blogging will not make you rich, at least not without hard work, dedication, and knowledge. I have “met” some amazing bloggers that do make a living through blogging. However, they are the not lazy, get rich quick people, they are hard workers. To make serious money on a blog, you need to work.

Building up a readership is not as easy as starting a blog. Actually, setting up a blog is as easy as filling out a simple online form and choose a template. Well, at least a simple blog is, I’m sure many profitable blogs required more work than that. My point is, setting up a blog and adding content is the easy part. Gaining the attention of the millions of internet users takes work. You have to dedicate yourself to advertising your blog in a way that makes people want to visit. Then once you do get them there, your content better be excellent if you want to keep them.

I hate seeing someone talk about a great article they just posted on their blog only to go visit the site and realize it is all about ads. I don’t mind a few ads, I understand and respect that advertisements help increase pay. However, when I spend time out of my day to visit a blog, I want something for it. Whether that something is a great and interesting article or a link to a great resource, I want a reason not only for taking the minute or two to visit, but a reason to link to it and share it. When that is met, I will return to the blog, even if there are ads plastered everywhere.

Blogging takes a lot of hardwork. If you want a get rich quick job, you should reconsider your career choices. However, if you are passionate about a topic (or more, as having more than one blog may increase your revenue) then by all means, set a blog up. Then nurture that blog as if it is your life. Beacause if you want to make money with it, it is.

Branding and PR is Better Than Marketing and Advertising

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I found these interesting pictures on Neil Patel’s blog. Neil Patel is a personal branding expert and personal branding is definitely something bloggers should be focusing on. Check out the pictures and see why branding and public relations (PR) is more effective than marketing and advertising.

As you can see, the message in marketing and advertising originates from you. However, the PR message comes from a third party. And PR leads to branding. In branding, the prospective customer/visitor is interested in you because of what someone else said.

Neil ties everything together by saying:

If you want to brand yourself you need to understand that it is much more effective when other people talk about you in a positive fashion compared to self-promotion.

So, how can you get other people to talk positively about you?

Network. Webmasters are much more likely to promote you if they know you. Get out there, knock on some doors, make some contacts, and build friendships especially with people in your niche.

Blog for the long haul. The longer you blog, the more people will notice you. As time goes by, you’ll be considered a fixture in your niche. This leads to links and traffic.

Do something unique. Webmasters are much more likely to talk about you and link to you if you do something different from the rest. This means you need to know your niche well. Find out which topics in your niche are not getting enough coverage. Then, write quality content about those topics. For example, in my market research, I found that many of us bloggers were juggling too many blogs to our detriment. But not many people were writing about this phenomenon. So, I wrote this post, which attracted a couple links and went viral on StumbleUpon.

What other things can you do to get others to promote your blog?

Google Turns PageRank into a Joke – OR – How to Get On With Blogging

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By now you’ve probably heard: Google spanked a lot of websites. Hard. Very hard. With a PR (PageRank) penalty, for yet unconfirmed reasons. Sites with a solid PR7 for 3 years, such as Search Engine Journal, dived to PR4. It’s probably disheartening but nothing new for Google. One of my sites had PR6 in Oct (Nov?) 2005, then dropped to PR5 by the next PR rollout, where it’s stayed since – though maybe not for long. Google regularly changes their algorithms, in their ever-pressing quest for relevant search results. Though this time, I think they let the proverbial Shakespearean Monkeys change the PR algorithm.

Still, as more than a few bloggers have said the last few days, PR is Google’s toy to do with as they please, even if it means dinging true authority sites. If your sites got dinged below PR4, then it’s possible you’ve lost some forms of revenue or soon might. Maybe. But there are alternatives to the ad networks, which you should start exploring so that you can get on with your business.

As Brian Clark from Copyblogger says in an interview at Problogger, the PR drop is the best thing that’s happened to him. Of course, Brian has just launched his fantastic new Teaching Sells workshops, complete with articles, audio and video. I’m signed up and have started scanning the articles, and they’re in line with my own beliefs pre-blogosphere: that selling content that teaches someone how to do something DOES sell. But it was easy to get blinded with the blog successes of the few, and then the competive facet of scoring a high page rank.

Ultimately, though, you should get on with your blogging and ignore PageRank (whoa, what a switch of stance), now that it’s kind of a joke. I mean, Copyblogger and Problogger ARE AUTHORITY sites in their niches – as are many of the others hit – and by definition should rank high. So that proves PR is now useless as a measure and you shouldn’t fret over it. Gaining relevant, quality backlinks should be your target (as always), but for their own intrinsic value, not for PR.

I still say blog as a supplement, not as an end-all. Consider freelancing and maximize your income. Or start exploring your knowledge and consider what you could turn into paid content. Are you a subject matter expert on any topic? Can you become one? If yes, then you have some options for earning online that go beyond Google AdSense and anything else that depends on PR: paid content in the form of ebooks, audio, illustrations/ visuals/ video/ screencasts, limited-circulation e-newsletters, subscription services and more. Don’t even rule out print books. Sell your knowledge, and use blogging to show your authority in a niche.

Mini Blog II. – Flickr and Textpattern

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Show Flickr pix with Textpattern as mini blog. This is a follow-up to Publish mini blogs as asides.

How to get a nice Flickr mini blog inside of Textpattern

There exists a nice plugin for Textpattern which fetches pictures directly from your Flickr account. It publishes the pics directly inside the blog, can create a photo gallery from your Flickr sets and also grabs the description or lists your Flickr tags.

For the purpose of creating a mini blog based on filtered Flickr tags most convenient is the ability to hand over the Flickr tags you want to show. The following is a rough concept. For the perfect implementation you must figure out how to create the wanted txp:vdh_flickr tags yourself as there are many different possibilities.

Why not use the Flickr tag feeds?

If all this sounds way too complicated you can still use Flickr RSS feeds for your tags 🙂 But then you won’t have the possibility to have internal landing pages which is a nice way of enhancing your content.

The basics from the documentation

vdh_flickr is a full-featured gallery plugin for textpattern, using a classical three-step system: First, you are shown a set (=album) preview page, then a thumbnail page, and an image page afterwards. The Demo shows the default configuration.

But you can leave out any step, so you can for example leave out the set preview or both the set preview and thumbnails to show an individual image.

How to – Use the advanced options

The default sense of that plugin is to create a picture gallery. But of course you can simply call the txp:vdh_flickr tags individually and put them into a div which floats in your article and only shows thumbnails which link back to Flickr (open=”self|window|flickr”). More interesting is to link to another internal landing page which shows the single image with description.

Demo1 shows the default gallery Plug’n’Play Style but you can play around with the templates (Textpattern forms) as you like. Make sure to study the default Textpattern forms to get more txp:vdh_flickr tags.

  • vdh_flickr_thumbnails: Specify the needed size for thumbnail images to fit your mini blog template.
  • listmode=”img|text”: Funny. You can show the Thumbnails as text list
  • txp:vdh_flickr_thumbnails_slideshow: You can also create a link to show a Flickr slideshow pop-up.

If you create landing pages for single pictures:

  • Show image title and description
  • Show a list of tags associated with the current image (local links)

Playing around with the many options you are able to generate a complete picture gallery inside your Textpattern website. More important in our mini blog case, you can create a list of thumbnails for certain tags from your Flickr photostream.

Caution

  • Remember to link back to the single photo pages at Flickr.
  • Double check the performance on your system and how fast Flickr responds.

Examples for a Flickr mini blog with Textpattern? Not yet…

How to Market on Facebook

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If you’ve never heard of Facebook, it’s time to get your head out of the sand. Facebook is a networking site that has over 24 million active viewers. That’s 24 million people who go on that site a day. That’s 24 million people you could be offering your product or service too.

If you have joined, great. I hope you’re not one of those people who have the fun wall, and other unprofessional things. If you are, you might want to think about having a personal account and having a business account. I know that Facebook frowns on this, but really you need to make sure you stay professional. Do you really want your potential employer to see you drunk with a cigarette at the latest club? Or even worse a picture of you doing drugs? You may cringe, but people are doing this on Facebook everyday, and using their real names.

Potential employers and clients, ones who are savvy, do punch in your name on Google or Facebook to see what they find. Wouldn’t you rather have your business profile show up?

If you are like me, than you would. So this is what you need to do. Make sure your profile is dedicated to your business. So if you are a freelance writer or marketer, only advertise that. Don’t even go into what your day-job is, etc. Toot your horn, let everyone know you are the best online marketer or human resources there is. On your profile it also gives a blurb to talk about yourself. Use this space to really promote yourself and put any websites that you want traffic too.

Now before we move on, you might want to adjust your privacy settings so that all your friends have limited profiles, and your mini feed is contained. A mini feed is a play-by-play of everything you do. If you have any friends, this can annoy them and fast. There is nothing I hate more than logging in and my whole home page is covered in; “R Roberts joined this group,” “R Roberts left this group,” “R Roberts installed the fun wall,” “R Roberts removed his album….” You get the point. I recommend instead to use the Status update. So if you want to advertise you can update your status by “I am so excited – check out why at branding yourself online.” All your friends can now see this new status on their homepage when they log in. I think one line is more effective than a page, and you aren’t annoying people.

Next, you want to have people as friends. The whole goal of Facebook is to network. So make sure in your profile you say something like, “feel free to add me as your friend because I am all about networking…” This guarantees when someone clicks on your profile they see the invitation to be friends.

Why are having friends on Facebook a good thing? Because you can advertise directly to your friends, as long as you do it carefully. Send them emails about the latest groups you’ve made, or articles of interest. At the end of the email, maybe add your url. But do it smart, don’t spam.

One thing about Facebook, they are strict on advertising. When they mean it, they mean it. The only place you can really advertise is on a group you created yourself. So that’s my next suggestion. Create a group. Call it your company name. Set up the profile and info to be about your company. Now that you have a group, you have to invite people. Find similar groups and paste your url (to your group) on their wall. First you have to join. This may mean joining 30 different groups just to get people to come to yours. On each wall of each group type a blurb like, “created a group called Facebook Marketing 101, if interested http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5029874932 click this link.” Then interested people will click on your group and join. For every person that joins, you are directly advertising to them, plus you now can send mass emails to these people to talk about your group.

Okay so you have a profile, you have a group, and you have people, now what? Now you have to get them talking, because if there is no action on that group, they are not going to stay. People join groups to either learn or talk, so if none of that is happening, make it! You do this by writing your own discussions and posting them on your group in the hopes you get people to join. So you might start one discussion as “WELCOME AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF”, this one always works. People will join the group, read a bit about other people’s backgrounds and maybe post their own. This leads to conversation, which leads to tips, which people enjoy.

My last tip, you have to be responsive. Nothing worse than creating a group and you leave it struggling. You need to check it everyday and respond to any comments that might not have been answered. You need to make sure there is no spam going on, and people are staying on target. Or if there is nothing happening, talk about things.

My last item – the marketplace. Don’t try advertising there. If you do, use real products. Don’t advertise affiliates, or digital products. You can get kicked of Facebook so fast for spam, even if it’s not spam. So tread lightly. Only advertise on your group, your profile, and where appropriate in your email. Good luck and happy networking!