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Archives for September 2009

A Proofreading Tool For WordPress

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You’ve just finished typing up a great post for your blog and you’ve made sure all your links work. You’ve also made sure to break up the text using various heading sizes so the readers can easy scan through your document. Now you’re ready to click the publish button and send it out to the world. But wait! Did you proofread your post?

And I don’t mean scanning through it using the spellchecker to make sure all your spelling is correct. Did you actually go through and make sure your sentences make sense? Did you use the proper instance of every word (there, write, etc.)?

Proofreading Is Important

While spending a lot of time reading blogs, one thing I often notice is poor grammar. It can make the best post in the world seem less credible. Luckily, there is an awesome tool for WordPress that can help you. After the Deadline is an easy to use plugin that will scan through your post and look for any spelling or grammar mistakes. If it finds any, it will underline it with the appropriate color.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action:

After the Deadline

As you can see, it’s easy to use. Simply click on an underlined word and it will give you recommendations.

It doesn’t catch everything, but it definitly helps find things you normally would overlook. I highly recommend using it on your WordPress powered blog. If you blog with WordPress.com, you already have the tool built in to your blog. You just need to click the green check mark to start using it.

How to Blog With Emotion

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Have you ever noticed that some of the most popular blog posts are the ones that are filled with emotion. When you read them, you can sense a lot of emotion.

They might read like a passionate rant or a sad lament. Some are very positive and you can quickly tell that the blogger is very happy.

No matter what emotion a post reveals, emotion is a great way to attract readers. Emotion makes you more personal to your readers.

It helps you relate better to them. See we are emotional creatures. And as behavioral studies show, we usually use emotion to make decisions rather than logic including purchasing decisions.

On the contrary, think about blogs that read like boring college textbooks. If you’re like the vast majority of people, you don’t read these blogs regularly.

So, how can you portray emotion in your blog posts?

Adding Emotion to Your Blog

Think of areas in your niche that triggers an emotion.  If you’re passionate about your industry, you should have topics that make you happy, mad, sad, or any other emotion.  As you write posts on these topics, your emotion should shine through in your posts.  You can even try the basic tactic of just writing why that topic makes you feel the way you do.

For example, the following type of posts are often winners:

Why I Love Traveling to Paris
7 Reasons Why Microsoft Makes Me Mad
A Tribute to Heath Ledger, RIP

Sometimes it’s hard to get emotional, so you’ll have to find an emotional trigger. One of the best ways to do this is just to keep up with the content in your space. If you do this, you find something that stirs you emotionally. This could be a forum post, an article, a video, a podcast, a Facebook message, or a blog post. If you have a robust online network, you probably receive emails that trigger an emotion.

Once you run across one of these triggers, respond with your emotion, or save the link and then find time later to respond.  However, in my experience, it’s much better to respond right away – even if you only have time to craft a couple of sentences.

Then, take your response and use it as the basis of a blog post.

Much of our communication online is great fodder for quality blog content. Yet, many of us will communicate ideas through sites other than our blog but those ideas never make it to our blog.  Don’t be afraid to recycle those ideas.

For example, I’ve been active in the last couple of months on a forum for my gaming blog.  I’ve found it much easier to create content on the forum because forums naturally lend themselves well to responding to others.  While browsing the forum, I’ll usually find a forum thread that causes me to respond because I want to share my opinion and expertise.

After a while, I realized that I should recycle my content on the forum and publish the same ideas on my blog. This strategy has helped in overcoming writer’s block.  I’m publishing blog posts more regularly and the posts are more emotionally driven and personal.

Finally, write like how your talk. When we’re talking to others, our emotion naturally comes through.  We can’t hide it unless we try.  But something happens when we write.  Emotion can often get stifled by writing.

Therefore, try these tactics for having a more personal voice.

  • Read your posts out loud and edit the parts that seem too robotic and bland.
  • Try using voice recognition software.
  • Think about the question that your blog post is trying to answer.  Then, pretend that you’re in a chat room, when someone asks that question.
  • Pretend you are sending an email to a person.
  • Separate the writing process from the editing process.  The editing process can slow you down and stifle your fresh emotion.  I sometimes close my eyes while I type if I find myself trying to edit while writing.

Over to You

How do you let your emotion come through in your blog?

Want to spend more time writing emotionally driven content and less on marketing? Performancing offers link building and social marketing services so you can focus on creating content.

What Do You Do When People Turn Your Blog Into a Forum?

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Don’t you just love it when your blog ranks #1 on relevant search queries? I do. Of course, the drawback here is that when a blog post becomes sticky in the number one spot, sometimes you tend to get too many visitors who are not too familiar with the format of your site being a blog. They turn the comment section into a question-and-answer forum.

Take for instance my post about Filipino economists dated four years back. It is, by far, one of my more best-read posts. It just consists of about four intelligible sentences. Thing is, that particular post has been getting dozens and dozens of inquiries from students asking for help with their assignment. It goes as far as these folks asking for the finished product itself!

I’ve actually updated the post to point prospective researchers to better resources, but many just ignore the note and ask ahead. Perhaps the presence of a comment thread and message box makes it seem as if it’s an online forum, which can be one good way of seeking feedback and posing questions online.

But what do you do when things get out of hand and people treat one particular blog post as a forum? Here are a few things I can think of.

  • Close the comment thread. Things could get out of hand, and comments might tend to be off-topic anyway. So you an always disable feedback for this particular post. Or, you can run a plugin that closes comment threads when a post reaches a particular age.
  • Participate in the conversation. This can be particularly useful if the post is about a hot topic, and if the discussions are still highly relevant even after dozens and hundreds of comments. Why not enjoy your post’s popularity?
  • Update your post. If people are looking for information, and others contribute in the comment thread, then you can update your post to include these relevant information. You could then hope that readers will get the idea, but of course users who are too lazy to really read through an article will still keep on asking questions even if the answers are right in front of them.

On my posts that get this much attention, I usually try a combination of these. But of course, I still get a ton of comments in which the reader is asking for something that is already there.

Will Online Micropayment Systems Help Save Newspapers?

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NewspaperNewspapers are not dead. Even with the Internet providing free content on just about anything, people still do read newspapers for a variety of reasons. These days, though one big challenge faced by newspaper publishers is how to bring their mainstream business online while still being profitable and sustainable.

Newspapers–and other periodicals–are said to have a three-pronged approach when it comes to revenue streams. It’s comparable to a tripod, in which if one leg fails, the whole thing collapses. First is the subscriptions: the good number of businesses, establishments and individuals who pay a subscription fee to receive copies of a paper or magazine regularly. Second is advertisements: sponsorships are a lifeline of the publishing industry. Third is newsstand sales: these are people who are not regular subscribers, but buy off the stand anyway.

The argument here is that the three-tier revenue scheme provides a good check-and-balance system for the focus of the publication’s editorials and content. If one only relies solely on advertisers, then a newspaper stands to lose editorial integrity. If one relies only on subscribers, then content tends to be monotonous. If one relies only on newsstand buyers, then you tend to focus on sensational news to get people to buy each issue.

The challenge with bringing content online is that users tend to prefer “free,” and so a publication is therefore effectively taking out the newsstand revenues from the picture. There is therefore a heavy reliance on advertisements, and to some extent regular subscriptions. If newspapers find a way to bring the newsstand to online readers, then this might bring back the balance to its revenue streams. In a proposal by Google to the Newspaper Association of America, they propose a micropayment system that will allow users to purchase content.

Fast Company discusses the implications of this proposal.

As newspapers seek to generate new revenue channels by switching to online publishing, there’s a fabulous business opportunity opening as the provider for their payment systems. The micropayments system will apparently share revenue in a similar fashion to the iTunes App Store, and Android Marketplace, so it’ll be a profitable system for Google as well as the newspapers. The upshot for Google is that it will remain at the core of the process (a position it loves to be in) and able to monitor its user’s habits in the hope that it can glean more information about them–useful for tailoring its own operations, selling advertising and so on.

Google, after all, has been digitizing content for some time now, and therefore it is not new to the game of bringing us content from books and even old newspapers. But to the end-user, what makes this different from existing checkout or subscription systems, such as those powered by PayPal and the like? Perhaps it’s the trust factor that the Google brand brings in. Perhaps it’s Google’s ability to aggregate content from various sources and bring these together under one portal (think Google News).

And so with a system for bringing the newsstand right at your fingertips, do you think this will help newspapers thrive in the ever-competitive world of distributing content online? To me, if it’s a matter of paying a few cents to access a newspaper or magazine issue, then it will be all right. But the clincher here is whether it will be an easy enough process, and whether the price will be reasonable enough.

Then there are the pros and cons of having all your content in digital format. First, there are the green implications. Less paper means less trees cut down, less ink used for printing, and less material to recycle. Being fully digital also means I can access the content from anywhere–my computer, my smartphone or even an e-book reader. Content is now also more easily searchable than physically printed material. On the other hand, paper is sometimes more convenient to use, and there are people who prefer the actual feel (and sound, and scent) of paper.

For now, I’m still content with buying my weekday paper from the newsstand each morning when I drive the kids to school. I still read my share of online news from various sources. This means I get a mix of digital and print content in my daily consumption of information. The question is how easy will it be for me to fully make the move to digital?

Image credit: flickr/inju

Avocado Theme for WordPress

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Avocado Theme

Green is the in thing today. We do want to save the Earth and the human population from a radical change in climate. The Avocado Theme reflects this philosophy, both with the green-themed color scheme, and with how the editorial and design team of Performancing strive to be green in the way we live and work.

The Avocado Theme uses a three-column layout with rounded corners. The green-dominated background and sidebars are highlighted with orange headers and icons. The theme is optimized for use with WordPress 2.8 and above, and supports various features like threaded comments, post classes, image captions, galleries, and drop-down menus.

We have included in the theme ZIP file the Photoshop file and font used for the header, should you wish to use the header image for your title or logo.

The Avocado Theme is a classic theme release from Performancing Themes for WordPress, and is another collaboration with designer Sophia Lucero, who has likewise designed other themes, like Too Newsy and Rubidious.

Download Avocado Theme

Download the theme file here.
See a live demo here.

5 Ways to Make Your Blog Timeless

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Blogging is immediate, particularly for niches that rely on breaking news realtime. Thus it’s easy to forget that readers will visit your blog and read posts months, years, and even decades after they were written. Here are five ways to keep visitors engaged with your content, and prevent them from bouncing after they scratch their heads in confusion over your outdated blog posts. [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Timeless

5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization

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By now you probably know that simply plastering ads all over your pages and prominent donation links don’t really work. There really are no get-rich-quick schemes in blogging; turning your blog into a reliable income generator requires hard work, experimentation, and patience. Those are three aspects common among the five methods I share in this post.

Clipart of bills and coins
Image via Wikipedia

Optimum Ad Placement

Like it or not, your average visitor has learned to ignore parts of your website that seem like ads—even elements that really aren’t ads! The kneejerk reaction to this reality is an in-your-face approach towards ad layout, sacrificing readability for the sake of ensuring your ads are front and center.

If you’re committed to building a long-term quality audience however, you’ll need to find a good balance between content and ad visibility. [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization

Do you feel that your readers own you?

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“Can you give me a list of all your recipes?”

“Why are you putting ads on your site?”

“I think you should stop posting about fashion and concentrate on your make up tips instead.”

“Can you write about that new steak place that opened in the city?”

The new phone is out. How come it’s taking too long for you to post a review?

Do you often get these kinds of comments? When you started writing, you probably, and I sincerely hope, did it for the passion. Time passed, and your readership scaled and you blog grew up faster than its neighbors. All of a sudden you received email from PR companies, and yeah the freebies started to pour in as well. Event invites, blog roadies, and yes there were the haters as well.

All of a sudden the passion started to fade and you felt disillusioned, looking back at something you started as sharing your passion in reckless abandon which turned into a chore you needed to do once, twice, thrice a week. Sometimes everyday.

At one point, did you feel that your topics were dictated not by your own personal accord, but by your readers who demanded your time?