My question is simple:
If someone takes private email correspondence and, without asking permission, posts the other person’s email message to a blog, what is the legal status of that content? Does the person who has not granted permission have a legal case to bring against the person who posted the content of the e-mail message?
I love Twitter. Of course I didn’t always, I have both loved and hated it with equal measure. It can be an incredible waste of time but if you are careful about who you follow there is just the right mix of socializing and signal v noise that I am kept involved.
The funny thing is the service today has been taken over by talk of the “Tweeterboard” which ranks users based on their conversations by counting how many times their name is referenced. Will this turn it into a popularity contest?
It seems if today is any indication, a lot of people are trying to game their rankings. I do hope this is a one day aberration.
What do you think? Do you Twitter? Will this spoil it for you?
SEO works so well because most sites on the web do not actively practice effective SEO.
(SEO Book, pg. 43)
It seems like most bloggers don’t do SEO on a consistent basis. They might build a link or two once in awhile but for the most part, bloggers want to blog instead of implementing an SEO strategy.
Of course, you can do whatever you want on your blog, but if you don’t do SEO on a continual basis, you’re missing out on a lot of benefits.
Reasons to Try SEO
Here are some reasons to do SEO for your blog.
But the biggest reason in my mind to do SEO is most sites are not doing SEO. Sure, there are a few competitive niches where many of the sites have an SEO strategy, but for the large majority of niches, most sites don’t do SEO.
As I’ve dabbled in a wide variety of niches, I’ve found that the majority of bloggers have not done keyword research. I can tell this because they don’t have relevant keywords in their titles. Also, they aren’t building links. They subscribe to a “build it and they will come strategy”. However, with the large numbers of blogs on the web, it takes marketing to get people to visit your site. And search engine marketing is a great way to attract a steady stream of visitors every month.
This lack of SEO among bloggers means that it will not be difficult to achieve high rankings for relevant keywords.
SEO Doesn’t Have to be Complicated
With everything that goes into creating and maintaining a blog, it’s easy to forget about search engine traffic. However, there are many effective SEO tips that don’t have to take too much of your time and effort. Also, even if you do one SEO activity week (like building a few links or finding juicy keywords to target), you’ll be way ahead of your competitors.
Your SEO strategy doesn’t have to be complicated to outrank other blogs that are not doing SEO. Most of my work as an full-time search marketer is simple. Yet I’ve helped my company gain some great rankings. It just takes a little time and effort.
I’ll be going through SEO basics in the next couple weeks, so watch this space to increase your search engine traffic.
Feedback
How much time do you spend a week on SEO?
Interviews rock because they show us the brilliant people behind the usernames. Today, Performancing is excited to share with you this interview we got with The Gaffer… a guy living in Florida, originally from Wales, who runs the very successful EPL Talk soccer blog, podcast and video show.
1. How’d you get started as a blogger?
I did things a bit backwards really. In 2002, I launched a corporate blog on an intranet where I was the director of internet marketing for a brick and mortar company. Then in 2005 I got the bug to write about my first true love, soccer, and EPL Talk began. I’ve always been a writer so it came naturally to me.
2. What’s the key to being a successful soccer blogger. How do you stand out from the crowd?
Differentiation is key especially with more than one million blogs worldwide on the topic of soccer. With so much competition (both from the international press and blogs), I focus on the world’s most popular sports league which is the English Premier League (aka EPL). I target the readers from around the world who experience the league via their TV sets. As a result, the topics I cover on EPL Talk are quite different such as the quality and quantity of TV coverage, the commentators and TV presenters who the viewers see and hear on a weekly basis and my colorful opinions regarding what happens on and off the pitch.
The key to being a successful soccer blogger is to remain impartial and to keep the content remarkable. It’s easy to say but difficult to do.
[Editor’s Note: The Gaffer also stands out by differentiating his soccer blog with a Podcast and YouTube video show]
3. Do you blog primarily for money or for passion?
It has to be passion. If I blogged for money, I would have quit a long time ago.
4. Tell us about the biggest mistake you’ve made in blogging and what you’ve learned from it.
The biggest mistake I made was deciding to host the blog on the Blogger platform. Blogger’s ease of use was wonderful, but I invested so much dependency on Blogger where I drove a ton of traffic, built a respectable Google PR and generated a ton of links to a site that wasn’t even hosted on my domain. If I had to do things all over again, I would set up a WordPress blog on my epltalk.com domain, which is precisely what I just did and it was something I should have done two years ago.
5. Do you see yourself still blogging in 2 years, 10 years?
I don’t foresee a time where I’ll stop blogging. In the past two years, I’ve launched an EPL Talk podcast and vodcast but both continue to take so much time and energy, and are quite tedious. In contrast, blogging is such a joy to accomplish and a wonderful release. All I need is an Internet connection, a blogging platform, an idea and the words just flow.
6. List your three favorite blogs (the ones that you read the most).
Funnily enough, the blogs I read most often focus on technology rather than soccer. The top three that I read religiously are TechCrunch, Sphinn and Scobelizer. All three of them give me a ton of ideas of how EPL Talk can continue pushing the envelope in its coverage of soccer.
7. What do your family and friends think of you blogging? Do they even know?
Most of my friends and family are aware of my blogging but few of them truly understand what it really is. The biggest thrill I had was finding out that my parents had printed one of my blog posts and read the story with genuine interest even though they both have no interest in soccer.
8. Has Performancing helped you? Do you think that we offer useful information that’s helpful for soccer bloggers? In what ways? And, do you think it will continue to help you?
I was turned on to Performancing after hearing Chris Garrett give a presentation. I’m still a relative newcomer to Performancing so I haven’t had the opportunity to benefit from the site as much as your veteran readers have. But I can see the value for fellow soccer bloggers especially in the tips that Performancing provides. As long as that continues, the site will always be a valuable resource.
9. If you could meet any blogger who would it be and why?
Without a doubt, it has to be Seth Godin. The man has so much clarity. He continually amazes me with his remarkable ideas and has been an inspiration for me since the first day I read his blog in 2002.
10. Which ad networks have been most profitable for you?
I’ve tried several but I keep on coming back to Google AdSense just because it’s the easiest to implement, the most dependable and provides a steady stream of revenue. The other advantage is that they’re pretty efficient at cutting checks and sending the money.
11. How much time do you spend blogging (and on blogging-related activities) every day?
Including research and writing, I typically spend 3 hours a day working on EPL Talk. That doesn’t include time watching soccer, which can easily be 7-10 live matches a week. It ends up being a big investment of time, but it’s something I enjoy doing. For me, it’s the perfect combination of my interests which are writing, internet marketing, coding, search engine optimization and watching the beautiful game. Who could ask for anything more?!
The Blog: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
http://harrypotterthedeathlyhallows.net/
This blog was started as a Performancing experiment to raise money for charity. We only sold about 85 books (not bad, but not great) which didn’t even cover expenses.
We’re putting the site up for auction in order to raise some money for a great literacy charity. Because of this, the starting bid is $1000.
Details:
Top of page 2 in Google for a search on the book (and forthcoming movie) title. At one point it was in position 5 on the front page. With a little SEO TLC, you can get it right back into that position.
http://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+and+the+deathly+hallows
There’s a killer marketing opportunity here for the person who wants to jump in and build a strong Harry Potter related site and capitalize on the movie release in a few years. If you work at it, it should not be hard at all to build the site into a strong HP community that’s thriving within a few months.
Homepage – PageRank 4
Internal – PageRank 3/4
Backlinks to Homepage: 3,938
Backlinks to the domain: 24,166
(these numbers are quite inflated in Yahoo because most of the Performancing backlinks are no longer in place – still, there’s a nice strong set of diverse backlinks)
Starting Bid: $1000
All proceeds to go to charity.
After five years of development PhpBB 3.0 is available.
Already about 500 extensions available.
For some blogs a forum can be an essential add-on!
PhpBB 3.0 ‘Olympus’ comes with many new features and improved security. The new features include UTF8-Support, better treatment of search engines, temporary banning of users, multiple anti-spam features, better log and reporting functions, guidelines for user names and passwords, attachments, speed increases by using multiple caching mechanisms, and loads of other improvements. The number of available translations increased from 50 to 61, including languages written from right to left.
Let’s check the PhpBB 3.0 news and see some other nine solutions…
Very impressive feature list but:
Negative killer argument: PhpBB does NOT support RSS!
If you take a look at the BlogBridge forum which is powered by PunBB you will see that you can subscribe to RSS feeds for every forum category and for every single forum. From my personal experience I know that I don’t follow forums where it is not possible to follow all discussions and complete threads via RSS. PhpBB 3.0 not offering RSS feeds is a very big NoNo!!!
Semi RSS feeds are no answer. I also follow (read: try to follow) the Gregarius feed aggregator forum which is powered by Vanilla 1.1.2 and Vanilla only offers a castrated feed. The RSS feed does not show new discussion items but only the very 1st item. At least you know that something is happening but I definitely don’t want to load each thread in the browser every time somebody posts a ‘me too is having the same problem’ item.
Sorry PhpBB 3.0, a dead horse is a dead horse is a dead horse! Integrate RSS feeds in your forum software and I might look again.
If I have a blog and I want to integrate forum threads then I must have the possibility to update content blocks on my blog via RSS!!!
I did not check all links and I did esp. not test the different forum software but here are some links extracted from the comments in two German Pro-Linux articles: 1st beta of PhpBB 3.0 and PhpBB 3.0 published In ascending alphabetical order:
Well, as a blogger you should definitely not only look at the feature list. More important are questions of how to integrate a forum into your blog. Somebody willing to write an article? My two word article would be ‘Take Drupal’ (and start from scratch).
Somebody willing to shoot with the social networks canons(s) to promote this little list?
My thoughts on controversy are that I would much rather have low traffic with a good brand than massive traffic and a poor brand. But that is just me, others believe the traffic is worth whatever backlash and all publicity is good publicity. Who is right? Well, we can see what happens as it happens as a story is just ending over at 1938media …
Step 1. Release a video that causes a blog storm.
Step 2. See stats have dropped back to normal levels so hatch a scheme to get them back up
Step 3. Release another controversial video
Step 4. Stir it up even more by banning a whole country
Step 5. Bask in your traffic
Step 6. ???
Step 7. Profit!!
Results are already coming in. You can see on Twitter and blogs “Loren who?”, “Racist?”, “Racist!”, “Not racist!” … Not the kind of publicity I would want, probably a text book case of exactly what you DON’T want brand-wise, but it is certainly bringing in the traffic.
What do you think?
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Are you using images and symbol pictures? Fact is that readers will remember strong pictures more than your text desert. Sorry to all the Pulitzer Price worthy text producing bloggers out there. Images create readers attention. The standard human brain is a remarkable pattern recognition machine. Visualize your article subject and people will remember that specific content and all related information much stronger than without images. Performancing.com image posting tips, related articles and where to get free pictures… |
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The following CSS declaration makes sure that inside the CSS ID ‘content’ an image tag inside a paragraph is floating nicely left of your other content.
#content p img{ float: left; border: none; margin-right: 15px; margin-bottom: 10px; }
Despite defining a CSS formatting declaration for a certain CSS ID I would recommend to have different semantic CSS Classes for article images. An ID declaration (#) is only allowed once per page!
Instead I would use the CSS classes “.article-image-left” and “.article-image-right” to have two classes for pictures floating right or left in the text. Sometimes an “.article-image-top” for the top picture is useful.
Example: Four pictures floating around on a small space. The big one to the right is the standard image position. The two small ones just float left one after another at the top of the article text and the small photo below is above the sub-headline. The last one would need some fine tuning but I didn’t bother 🙂
The easiest workaround if you want one image to float left instead of floating right is to have a single style declaration for the single picture which will override the standard CSS stylesheet rule:
Always think ahead and define a set of appropriate classes for all your content elements!
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Let there be light… |
Some sources are mentioned in the related articles above but beside the ‘almighty’ image search with the search engines I would recommend the following lists:
And of course a search on specialized photo community sites will help to find the right article images.
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Don’t miss the comment thread here: Is Hotlinking a Copyright Violation?
