We’re currently in the process of revamping the Performancing Hive, Performancing’s paid subscription community. Like the current sign-up page says, Hive “exists to provide you the help you need to increase the performance of your blog.” As we take steps to improve Hive and re-examine the focus of the community—not to mention Performancing itself—we would very much like to hear from you. [Read more…] about So What Should the Performancing Hive be Really About?
Archives for October 2009
Case: Measuring Word of Mouth via Bloggers
Back in 2007, I partnered with a PR agency that handled a french inspired fast food company serving mainly breads and pasta. They were looking into doing a “blogger meet up” and experiment with the idea of measuring word of mouth. They were in the process of launching a new product, which happened to be a special blend of spiked coffee; one of those amaretto or Bailey’s infused mixes.
[Read more…] about Case: Measuring Word of Mouth via Bloggers
Australian Court Gives Permission to Live-Tweet Proceedings
In what could be an important development in how social media affects just about any industry and field, an Australian court was recently reported to have allowed live tweeting of proceedings. Judge Dennis Cowdroy states that tweeting was fine as long as it did not disrupt court proceedings. He believes that the public “has a legitimate right to be fully informed of proceedings, particularly proceedings such as (the iiNet case), which have attracted considerable public interest. Twittering can serve to inform the public in a more speedy and comprehensive manner than may be possible through traditional media coverage.”
This has precedence in previous cases in the US. While live reportage of legal proceedings are usually at the discretion of the presiding judge, not all jurisdictions might allow direct discussion of ongoing court cases.
As with any discussions held on Twitter or any social medium, readers are advised to check and verify the information and the veracity of the sources before retweeting, blogging or otherwise helping spread information online.
Blogging With Purpose
One of the most important things you can do as a blogger is blog with purpose. In other words, you need to know what you hope to accomplish with your blog. Do you want to make money? Do you want to land a job? These questions control what actions you should take when blogging.
It’s also important to have a specific point that you want to make with each of your blog posts. Before you publish your next post, make it a point to read through it and make sure that the post makes a clear and concise point. This main point is often referred to as your thesis when writing papers, articles, or documents.
I personally think a lot of people struggle to find purpose, especially when just beginning. When I first started my personal blog, it did not have a specific purpose other than giving me the ability to write out my thoughts and adventures. This made it rather difficult for me because it was hard to monetize it since it did not have any specific goal.
Once I realized that, I knew how important it is to create a goal from the start. This makes it much easier to make a plan of attack since you know where you are trying to get to. So the best advice I can give a new blogger is make sure to sit down and think about your purpose. Figure out exactly what you want to do with your blog and you will make the road ahead much easier for yourself.
How Well Do You Know Your Readers?
If you have a blog, you most likely have at least a few readers that love to check out your new content. You might even have a few thousand devoted daily readers. Regardless of the number, my question to you is how well do you know your readers?
Have you ever set some time aside to scan through and read all of your comments? What about visiting the blogs of your fellow commentators? By doing this, you can get a really good idea of WHO your readers are and what they are about.
Another great tool is analytics software. You can see where your readers are from, how they found your blog, and how long they typically spend there. This is a ton of useful information that can really help understand your readers.
Why Is This Important?
The main reason why it’s important to know your readers is because they are the people that benefit from your blog. These are the people that use your content in some way, shape, or form. If you know who they are, then you can target your content directly at them.
If you plan to monetize your blog, knowing who your readers are is crucial. Not only will you know your demographics for potential advertisers, but you will also know what type of products and services would benefit your readers. That way you can target your advertising directly at your readers.
This works way better than pasting some random ads into your sidebar or below your blog posts.
So take the time to get to know your readers. It will not only make your blog better, but they will appreciate the fact that you took the time to do so.
Blogging More Efficiently by Doing What Works
I often meet bloggers that think that blogging is about doing certain things. They’ve read a couple blogs about blogging and find out that there are many different blogging activities they can do. So they create a checklist and methodically try to complete every activity on the checklist. These activities may include:
- Twitter marketing
- Guest posting
- Blog commenting
- Submitting to article directories
- Creating list posts
- Doing interviews
- Writing humorous posts
The problem with the checklist approach is that different activities will yield different results. Guest posting may send more traffic than blog commenting. Or list posts may attract more links than interviews.
As you manage and promote your blog, if you’re watchful, you’ll see that certain activities will be more successful than others.
Once you’ve made that realization, you should move more time and effort to those successful activities.
Sometimes the first thing you do provides very good results, so there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time on the other activities.
The 80/20 Approach
Instead of the checklist approach, I suggest the 80/20 approach.
With this approach, you spend 80% of your time on activities that have worked well for your blog. If being active on Twitter has brough a sizable increase on your RSS subscriber base, then you spend a lot of time of Twitter. If funny posts have been well received by your audience, then you set aside much of your time to create those posts.
With the rest of the time, you use it to try out new things or the activities you like that don’t provide the best results.
The 20% is there so you don’t get bored. It seems to be human nature to try new things. Plus, by trying out new things, you could find an activity that works even better than your current best activities.
Different Activities for Different Blogs
One thing to note is that certain activities work well for some blogs but not for others. Just because article marketing works for your pet blog doesn’t mean it will work as well for your travel blog.
This means you should spend time testing different activities to see which ones work for each blog.
For example, I used to do a lot of article marketing but I found that it didn’t work that well for many blogs. For many niches, article marketing is very saturated and overdone. Your articles don’t really get much traffic because there are so many competing articles.
But I submitted some test articles for a new blog in the gaming industry. These articles did well since surprisingly the gaming industry is not active on the article directories. Therefore, I spend most of my marketing time doing article marketing for the gaming blog.
To recap, through testing figure out which activities work well and then spend the bulk of your time and effort on those activities. This strategy will improve your blog as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Performancing offers an authority builder service to help you discover which activities provide the best results for your site.
What Are Your Favorite Social Media Tools for Mobile?
Bloggers are relatively mobile individuals. Some of us who earn directly or indirectly from blogging or writing most probably are not stuck in an office all day. Instead, we usually go about town looking for interesting things to write about, attend events, or just simply get ideas and inspiration from our environment. In some cases, we’re constrained with not being able to bring our laptops around, but there are a lot of alternatives to being connected.
Inspired by a recent Blog Herald post by Darnell Clayton on iPhone video blogging tools, I’m now listing a few tools I use myself in getting connected while on the move. [Read more…] about What Are Your Favorite Social Media Tools for Mobile?
Performancing Jobs Now Online
The Performancing team is proud to announce that the Jobs board is now back.
Since the migration of Performancign from Drupal to WordPress, we’ve had to momentarily drop a few things that were heavily reliant on Drupal, such as the forums and the job board (which is actually a thread in the forum), among other things. Just recently, we’ve installed a plugin that can support job listings from right within WordPress.
Do check it out at performancing.com/jobs.
Submissions are free, and each entry will stay online for seven days. For better visibility, though, you can subscribe to a premium listing for $20, which will be displayed at the top of the list for 30 days.
The job board supports listings for jobs and offers for writing, blogging and related services.
If you have an opening for a writing or blogging job, please feel free to add it to the list. Same goes for freelancers who want to offer blogging services for a fee. Be sure to include your contact information and even links to your existing portfolio, to make application easier. The plugin usually asks for a location, but we understand that most blogging jobs are probably virtual office or freelance in nature. Still, some blog networks or employers might want to hire writers or bloggers as in-house staff, so this is still applicable.
Good luck with finding the ideal job, or the ideal blogger, as the case may be.