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Archives for July 2008

What Is Social Media

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So what the heck IS social media? If you don’t know the answer to that question, this SlideShare presentation will do a good job answering it for you. This presentation was created by Marta Kagan, a self acclaimed social media evangelist + online marketing pro. Special thanks to her for uploading this to SlideShare and allowing people to pass it along.

I’ve gone through most of the presentation myself and although I already had a good idea as to what Social Media was all about, this presentation gives you a ton of numbers to think about and it just makes sense.

Let me know what you learned from the slideshow in the comments.

Akismet Might Have Some Serious Competition on Their Hands

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Automattic’s Akismet has been long known as the king of spam detection. It has been ported to multiple content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, MovableType, phpBB, Joomla, b2evolution, Geeklog, and many more. It is, hands down, one of the most popular solutions to handle all this spam, but now there is something else ready to take on the likes of Akismet. It, perhaps, might even be more effective than Akismet.

Defensio, a comment spam detection system which claims 99.77% accuracy, is really striving to become serious competition to Akismet. Not only that, but the development team aims to pick up where Akismet has left off.

The system improves upon what Akismet has built in many ways: the system ranks comments by “spaminess,” it adapts to your blog over time, and it also provides RSS feeds for your comments. But it also does so much more.

Rick Olson of ActiveReload discussed the ways in which Defensio differs from Akismet:

How does Defensio differ? It sports a very similar API with a few added methods. First, it can scan articles as they’re posted. I’m assuming this provides an extra layer of protection by finding topics that may be off topic. They also provide a method to retrieve basic statistics. Though I think the most important additions are the inclusion of unique signatures and ‘spaminess’ scores. Unique signatures allow me to report spam/ham on previously checked comments without having to reconstruct the original request again. The spaminess value provides a convenient way to sort comments. Perhaps you want to see valid comments with the highest spaminess value, or spam with the lowest spaminess value to look for false reporting.

With Defensio’s claims of 99.77% accuracy, I managed to get around 96.43% accuracy (I took this screen-shot this morning, but it has changed to 96.43% since then) , but I did not reach a level of comments which was sufficient to accurately judge. If I had given it a few more days, I quite possibly would have over 99% accuracy, but I just managed to get hit with a false-positive yesterday. I believe it is still in “training.” Over the past four weeks, I received zero spam on my blog and two false-positives. With that in mind, I believe it was fairly accurate considering the low volume of comments. The aggressiveness of the filtering can also be tweaked. I set mine to a relatively low setting, but you might prefer to set it higher once you have trained the application.

The only suggestion I have would be to send email notifications when there are questionable items in the spam queue. But other than that, I was more than satisfied with the product, and I would recommend that people who have not been overly satisfied with Akismet to give it a shot. It is a really simple setup.

If you have used Defensio or have any questions, please let me know in the comments section. I’ll be glad to hear about your experiences and offer any help that I can.

What Makes A Problogger?

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First, a little history. I’ve been blogging since 2006 back when a project called EFx2 was being developed. EFx2 was like the WordPress.com before I knew of WordPress. I used the blog as a way to share my thoughts, ideas and opinions on things that occurred in my personal life as well as what was going on in the world of technology and the web. Back in June of 2007, I decided to jump off the subdomain bandwagon and start blogging seriously on my own domain. Thus, jeffro2pt0.com was born.

Since the launch of my own domain, I’ve written short posts, long posts, engaging posts, list posts, and all sorts of other posts. I blogged for one year as an experiment to see what would happen. As luck would have it, the way I wrote about WordPress topics caught on and netted me my first paid blogging gig. Afterwards, I landed my next blogging job here at Performancing. So the road of experience for me is not a long one but I’ve learned quite a lot since I started getting paid to write.

I don’t consider myself a problogger. I’ve never dabbled with AdSense, Adwords, Sponsorships, advertising, affiliates or any of that other stuff which makes a profit. I’ve generated income for myself by blogging for people, not for myself. Does this make me a problogger?

A problogger to me is someone who can make a living blogging on their own domain. A problogger is also someone who is a professional within the niche they are writing for. Although I don’t claim any expertise in anything at all, I love writing about WordPress and know a thing or two about the software. I’ve been paid to write about WordPress before, does that make me a WordPress problogger?

Suggestions On When To Turn Off Comments

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Ronald Huereca of the Readers Appreciation Project brought up a point in which I haven’t thought about before and that is when to turn off comments. In his post, Ronald mentions that it is probably a good idea to turn off comments when:

  • You’re on vacation
  • You’re done with blogging
  • You’d rather concentrate on writing
  • You don’t ever respond
  • You don’t ever have time
  • Legal Issues

I’d like to add on to this list with a few of my own.

  • Spam filter doesn’t work
  • Receiving hateful comments on a regular basis

Personally, the way I have Akismet set up on my WordPress blog, I don’t think I’ll ever have to worry about a ton of spam getting through. However, I would much rather have the commenting system disabled on my blog rather than coming back from vacation to 100 or so comments that are within the moderation queue.

Have you ever disabled comments either on a post or your entire blog? If so, what brought about the change? Also, if you have any more suggestions to add to the list of when comments should be disabled, be sure to add them in the comments.

FireFox 2.0.0.15 Released

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For those of you who have yet to step into the FireFox 3 arena, FireFox 2 is still being supported. FireFox version 2.0.0.15 has been released to the public. This release goes down as a security update. If you’d like to see what was fixed, check out the release notes. You can obtain this version of the 2.0 branch by manually using the Check For Updates feature located in FireFox under HELP – Check For Updates. For those that want the automatic upgrade, this process should occur the next time you start FireFox 2 today or tomorrow.

To manually upgrade, follow this link.

Are you still using version 2 or have you moved to version 3? I’m currently using version 2 on the desktop and 3 on the notebook.

AdSense Referrals Bites The Dust

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Google is making some big news today as they have announced that they will be retiring their AdSense referrals program at the end of August and will be substituting it for the Doubleclick Performics Affiliate Network. The Google Affiliate Network works in a similar fashion to the AdSense Referrals program in that, it enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser defined actions, instead of clicks or impressions. Also, if you have less than three AdSense content units on a page, you can replace the referral ad units with the standard AdSense for content ad units.

Since the current program will be retiring at the end of August, Google is recommending you take the following steps:

  • Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
  • Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.

What does this news mean to you? How have the regular AdSense referral blocks performed on your blog?

A Blogging Proclamation: Quality Content Wins

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It has only been within this current year when I realized a serious difference in the way I was generating traffic for my blogs. I realized that it is no longer any use to me to simply link to great articles. It is an epic waste of time.

I am no longer concerning myself with posting frequency on my own blogs; instead, I will be focusing on creating only quality content. It doesn’t matter if it requires one day or one week, I will only publish original and quality content.

There are reasons for this:

Originality—original content is content that others talk about. When you look at news sites, social sites, etc., they are buzzing with original content. Original content generates interest by readers. We desire this originality, and we eat it up. So, feed your readers some originality.

Traffic-the amount of traffic I receive from completely original content, as opposed to that which has been written about before, makes writing anything but original and unique content a waste of time for me and my readers. I’m not going to make a name for myself by doing anything else other than be the creator of spectacular content.

Subscribers-when I write truly unique and quality content, I earn those reader’s trust. I earn subscribers. I know my audience, and I know that they are fairly technical. They subscribe to content, and they know what is going on throughout the blogosphere. I would not dare to bother them with the same content they have already read. Instead, I want to be the creator of the content they will read everywhere else on the web.

Links—truly unique and quality content has a great chance of generating links. Your common resource articles are, for the most part, great, and they do generate a nice amount of links. Will that be enough though? If you can write original, unique content that no one else can easily replicate, you have truly created a masterpiece that will be linked to by dozens, if not hundreds, of blogs.

Marketing—the ability to market quality content is easier than sub-par content. If you expect a piece to get noticed by the bigger fish, and you plan on attracting advertisers, the more unique your content, the better off you are.

Wasted Efforts

Another point is the fact that a lot of great blog posts just get pushed away by lower quality content. Now, I admit, it is necessary to let your readers know you are alive, but why give your readers with content that is just as bad as most of the other content they are subscribed to? Is it really worth it?

Future Demands

If I were looking at this situation from a competitive standpoint (which I don’t), I would be delighted with the fact that people believe they need to put out content every day. It’s those very bloggers who will be linking to my content and passing their readers onto me. This is what I want; this is my edge. If everyone worked as hard as I did to create original content, there would be little chance that I could make a living doing this.

I’ve previously stressed the fact that, in the future, people are going to want original content in the future. Those blogs that simply link elsewhere are in serious trouble, and I am even more convinced as I have experienced that same situation. No longer is it just enough to simply offer an opinion; it requires hard work to create impressive content.

It’s easy to search through hundreds of feeds and find great content to share with your readers—you might even offer some insight to the existing content, but this way of commercial blogging is going to come under pressure. Tools are already being developed which will render those types of blogs ineffective.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you believe that quality content is better than the amount of content the blog publishes?

Blogging Tactics: Tips for building reader participation

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Welcome to the first installment of a brand new series here on Performancing called Blogging Tactics. This series will tackle a number of different subjects related to blogging and will offer up tips, suggestions and tactics to accomplish a specific goal. Today’s goal, building reader participation.

When I started blogging, it took quite awhile before people would stop by to simply leave a comment. This seems to happen with every blogger. At the beginning, it’s like yelling down an echo chamber. Getting people to comment can be a frustrating task as you can’t control whether someone spends the time to do so or not. Outside of commenting, there are other ways in which you could encourage participation which we’ll cover later in this article.

Commenting:

Blogs are a two way communication medium. It is the one aspect of a blog where new interactions can take place, where new relationships are born. There are numerous ways in which to create that commenting atmosphere:

Be Controversial – Writing content that is controversial opens the door for more possibilities, as the controversial subject usually doesn’t have a black or white answer.

Be Outlandish – Writing something outlandish can generate either positive or negative comments, depending upon how outlandish the content is.

Ask Questions – This tactic has been proven to work time and time again. Asking questions gives the reader a chance to really digest your content and encourage thoughtful participation. Although, this doesn’t work all of the time. There are many bloggers who ask questions all the time which go unanswered. It’s been known that if you are passionate about what it is you are writing about, you’ll naturally ask questions that matter.

Be Wrong – I really don’t like this method of generating comments as it could have a negative impact on your credibility. If you write content that is blatantly wrong, people will stop at nothing to let you know about what it is that is wrong while also giving you a beating. Only use this as a last resort if you are really that desperate for comments.

Be Open Ended – Content which is written in an open ended format tends to do very well with generating comments as it leaves room for the reader to expand upon the initial set of thoughts. Writing content which ends up being a complete thought is an excellent way to keep people from leaving comments. SO DON’T DO IT.

The Comment Form:

The design of your comment form on your blog can also play a role in whether someone comments or not. For example, most blog themes highlight the number of comments which have been left on a particular article. If there are 0 comments, does your comment form ask readers to chime in? A few examples I’ve seen include blogs which state “Jump In And Leave A Comment”, “The Waters Warm, Come Join Us”, “No One Has Commented Yet, Be The First”. Although some of these leave a lot to be desired, giving readers a warm invitation to be part of the conversation is the method that works best.

How easy is it for readers to comment? Do you have 30 different CAPTCHA methods that humans must jump through just to have there thoughts published on your blog? Thankfully, Akismet and other anti spam measures have really stepped up their game and have allowed bloggers to have an open comment system without much in the way of CAPTCHA systems. Having one CAPTCHA system in place could be on too many. If implementing a CAPTCHA system, make sure it’s something that is not insanely difficult for humans to decipher. Don’t add more than one different system. These are just added hoops for your readers to jump through and believe me, unless they are seriously devoted to you, readers will move on to the next blog.

Continue The Conversation

If your content generates comments, the worst thing you could do is not respond. This in turn would end the conversation. Answer questions presented by the commenter’s, further the discussion by conversing with those who took the time to stop by and contribute to your thoughts and expressions. Too many times I see blogs in which the author writes incredibly juicy content only to have the stream of comments stop because the conversation grinds to a halt from the failure of the blog author responding to the comments.

Forums:

Forums are another way of increasing participation. Users can register their own account, start up their own conversations and participate in the discussions already taking place. Unlike a blog, the audience isn’t confined to the thoughts and expressions of one author.

Blogs are usually niche content related websites while Forums open up the conversation to discuss a number of different subjects. Using a blog in conjunction with a forum has some differences. The first being that a blog is used as a broadcast medium. Once you publish a post, that post is out their for the world to see and is open for discussion. With forums, the posts are on a one on one basis. Because forums are groups of registered members generally with the same interests closed from outside participation, they become one on one conversations.

Bloggers can use forums to expand upon their subject matter. Or, you can use blogs to expand interaction with your content while at the same time, giving the users a chance to create content of their own. Forums are one of the best ways to give a sense of community to a blog, but be warned. Just because a blog is successful and rakes in a number of comments does not mean the same result will take place with your forum.

Join A Social Network

There are so many different social networks now available on the web, there is bound to be one or two that are dedicated to your niche. These social networks are communities of people with the same interests. Joining a social network pertaining to the subjects you write about on your blog is an excellent way to expand your audience.

Join A Social Bookmarking Service

Social bookmarking services are those services centered around bookmarks being shared by users across the net. These bookmarks are sites in which a user as deemed useful, or quality content to come back to later. Social bookmarking services such as Ma.gnolia, BlinkList, del.icio.us and Technorati are all good ones to start out with. Use these services to your advantage to spread your content to a wider audience. Also, make it easier on your own blog for users of these same services to share your content.

Join A Related Forum

This still works. Joining a forum related to the topics you cover on your blog can help you create new one on one relationships with people of the same interest. Many forums also allow you to link to your own content as long as it relates to the forum thread being discussed. Also keep in mind that you can use the SIGNATURE line in forums to promote your site. This will come in handy when you write good quality forum posts and become a prominent member of their community.

Commenting On Other Blogs

I can attest to this technique working. Find other blogs related to your niche and comment on them. I’m not talking about the “great article, visit my site” type of comments. I’m talking about the comments which could just as well be a blog post. Writing informative comments on blog posts can do wonders for your own blog. Ever have someone write an excellent comment on your own blog? I bet you visited the URL they linked to within their comment. I’ve used this method to spread the word about my blog while also discovering new blogs/websites which were worthy of subscribing to.

Create A Live Podcast

Using services such as Talkshoe or BlogTalkRadio.com, you can create a live interactive podcast. I’ve been doing this for quite awhile now with WordPress Weekly and it’s been a big success for me. It’s generated inbound links, conversation in comments but also conversation in audio form. I’ve had people call in and discuss the news of the week with me, talk about their experiences ect. Podcasts offer an incredible opportunity for readers of your site to communicate with you in a different medium. It’s almost like audio comments.

Live Blog

Although this would work out great to live blog events as they are happening, you don’t need an event to happen in order to live blog. James did a great job showcasing another aspect of Live Blogging the other day when he showcased the Cover It Live service. Instead of covering an event, schedule a live blogging time and start blogging live for an hour or so. Give your readers a chance to interact with you in real time. Have a discussion with them. It’s your chance to tap into your audience without any lag time. Shoot the bull and answer their questions.

Conclusion

This post could go on and on for days, perhaps years in terms of how to get more participation out of your readers. By now, you should have a good idea (or two or three) on how to increase reader participation for your own blog. Treat comments like gold. The majority of bloggers are lucky to see 10 comments in a week, let alone 100 in a day. Keep the creative juices flowing by sharing your thoughts and ideas on how to increase reader participation.

Let me know what you would like to see covered within the Blogging Tactics series. Next up, Blogging Tactics: Start your posts off with a question