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Archives for January 2010

3 Reasons Bloggers Should Read Books

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Reading a book seems very low tech in this current digital age. But don’t underestimate the words on a physical page.

While many bloggers do their reading online, you can gain an advantage by shutting off the computer and reading a book offline. Here are three reasons to head over to your local bookstore.

1. To Improve Credibility

Books are still perceived as trusted sources of authority. If you become well read that you quote books often, your credibility will increase. I felt that Brian Clark of Copyblogger knew what he was talking about because he quoted the classic advertising and copywriting books. He was someone who had real expertise because he had learned from the giants in the past.

2. To Go Deeper in a Niche

Online content by nature gives you a shallow perspective. The content is short to please the short attention span of the average internet user. On the other hand, reading a book allows you to concentrate more deeply and really learn about a topic. This prolonged exposure to a topic helps you create more in-depth posts than your competitors.

Also, books can give you topic ideas for evergreen content. Online content especially blog posts are many times about current issues or news that will fade away soon. However, books are usually about topics that have more lasting value.

3. To Differentiate Your Content

For many bloggers, their only reading is done online. So if you’re reading books, you’ll be exposed to content many of your peers are not consuming.

This will help you avoid the “echo chamber,” a phenomenon where the bloggers in a niche are all talking about the same thing. You’ll be drawing inspiration from different sources so your content will be different from your peers.

Over to You

How often do you read books?

Have you ever drawn inspiration from a book for your blog?

How does you offline reading time compare to your online reading time?

Performancing offers blog management services.

2010 Reminder: Test the Monetization of Your Blog

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Monetization can get lost in all the blogging activities we have to juggle. Let’s face it, there’s a lot that goes into blogging. Content, marketing, and building relationships take up a lot of our time and it can be easy to forget about monetization. But if you want to make money with your blog, you can’t ignore, well, the making money part 🙂

I believe that content and traffic comes first, but after you generate a healthy content and traffic base, there comes a time when you must focus on optimizing your monetization. Otherwise, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.

So, at the beginning of a new year, I thought I’d remind you to look at your monetization tactics and see how you can improve on them. How can you get conversion rates and make more money with the same amount of traffic? I’ll share two examples from my sites.

There are various ways to approach the monetization process but basically it boils down to testing. In other words, try different ways to make money. Then, let them run at the same time and after a couple weeks, analyze the results and pick the best method.

Testing AdSense

I’ve been testing the AdSense ads for a dating blog I co-own with my sister. The blog reached a respectable level of traffic a few months ago, so I started optimizing the ads since they were the blog’s primary income source.

In my first test, I created two different ads and placed them above the fold and below the fold. Then, I let them run for a couple of weeks. During the testing period, ad #1 ran half the time and ad #2 ran in the other half. After the test, it was pretty clear what we needed to do to make more money. Above the fold, ad #1 made almost four times as much money as ad #2. Below the fold, both ads made the same amount of money but it was very small amount.

Based on the results, we kept ad #1 above the fold and discarded ad #2. The money from the ads below the fold was so low that we scrapped them to make the site less cluttered.

Giving Up on a Strategy

Sometimes you have to drop a monetization strategy since it’s clearly not working. For example, I’ve tried multiple ways to get AdSense working on my gaming blog. The biggest program was the irrelevancy. AdSense kept showing irrelevant ads even when I tried to tweak my posts. Because of this, the dating blog makes 30 times more than the gaming blog yet it has half the amount of traffic. I understand that dating is probably a more lucrative niche than gaming but not 30 times more!

Therefore, I scrapped AdSense and found a couple related affiliate programs. It’s still early, but the numbers have been better than AdSense.

Continual Improvement Through Testing

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much time to set up a monetization campaign. Most of the work is just setting up a test and that can be done in a couple of hours. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to check it until a couple days or weeks have passed. Then, you spend a couple more hours to analyze the results, make the necessary changes, and setup a new test.

But you do have to remind yourself to continually test every couple weeks or so. Again, it’s easy to forget since you can get lost in all content generation and marketing so put it on the calendar as a reminder.

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Stop Being Boring (and Why You Probably Are)

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bored-faceI’m boring and you’re probably boring too.

I just listened to this interview with Seth Godin. He gives really good advice about how to successfully run a business. You should definitely listen to the whole thing if you want to make more money with your blog.

One of the things Seth said that struck me is found at the 38:30 mark. He said, “If people aren’t talking about you, they’re not talking about you for a reason. And the reason isn’t that they dislike you. They’re not talking about you because you’re boring.”

These are harsh words, but the first step to solving a problem is admitting that it’s there.

If you don’t fit Seth’s criteria, if people are talking about your blog, congrats. Keep doing what you’re doing. But I think for most of us, people don’t talk much about our blogs.

So, what’s the remedy? Seth recommends being different.

Stand Out From the Crowd

If you want to be more interesting and less boring, you need to do something that the other blogs in your niche are not doing.

At the 39:34 mark, Seth tells an anecdote about a street in New York City with 18 Indian restaurants. One of the Indian restaurants claimed that they had the spiciest curry in the city. They had a deal that if you could finish a bowl, you got it for free.

Guess which restaurant had the most customers? The one with the spicy curry offer.

Yes, this advice of being different is not new at all. In fact, it’s become a cliche in online marketing circles. But how many of us are actually different from our competitors? If we’re honest, our blogs are very similar to other blogs.

We underestimate how similar we are to our competitors. Consider the following experiment.

Take a post from your blog and a couple posts from other blogs in your niche. Blank out the names and print the posts without the formatting and blog design. With just the printouts, would people be able to tell which post is yours?

Take Risks

To be different, we’ll have to be risk takers. It’s risky to break away from the crowd and do things differently. But like the Indian restaurant, we need to figure out our own unique offer. We need to find something to stand for.

Taking risks will leave us open to criticism since there’s always a group of people that doesn’t like change. Innovators have always had their critics but the critics shouldn’t keep us from taking action. As long as we have enough supporters, we’ll be fine.

My Application

Like I said, I’m boring. After listening to Seth, I realized that most of the content on my gaming blog can be found on other blogs. The main reason I still get a lot of traffic is because my competitors don’t do keyword research.

But that’s hardly a competitive advantage.

There are a couple blogs with much lower traffic that have more influence than me. They have more natural links, Twitter followers, and comments.

I tried to apply Seth’s principles and I came up with these three action items.

1. Narrow my blog’s focus.

I cover too many topics. This is a consequence of just being lazy and not taking the time to figure out the core of my blog.

I realized I’m only really interested in two topics, so I’ll only write about those. This should differentiate my blog since most blogs cover a lot of topics. My niche is pretty big so I should still have a big enough audience to support a business from the blog.

2. Cover a topic that doesn’t get talked about a lot.

One of my topics doesn’t get much airplay, so I was hesitant to write about it. But after some research, I think there’s a market for the topic.

I’ll probably have to sacrifice some short-term traffic. People are not searching for keywords on the topic and I get most of my traffic from the search engines. But by covering the topic, I hope to create my own keywords and make them popular.

For example, a couple years ago seo book was not a popular search term until Aaron Wall saw a market for a book and released his SEO ebook. Once his book was released, the keyword started to pick up and now it’s popular.

3. Sell my future product at a higher price point than the norm.

I’m working on a membership product that I hope to release in the next couple of months. I was going to charge the same price as other membership products in the niche. But I always felt those prices were too low. Also, my product will cover the topic that doesn’t get much coverage, so I should be able to charge more.

Over to You

Are you different from other blogs in your niche? If you are, please give specific examples on how you are different. If you’re not, how can you stand out from the crowd?

Performancing offers blog management services.

4 Reasons Why I’m Loving iStockphoto.com

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istockphoto-logoIn last 30 days, I’ve been using the images from the stock photography site iStockphoto and it’s been a great experience. It all started with a client who need content for a new site. I created a bunch of text pages for them, but then they said they wanted images on each of the pages.

I usually get my pictures from Flickr and Stock.XCHNG but I couldn’t find relevant images for many of the pages. The client is in the business-to-business marketing niche, which doesn’t lend itself well to pictures – at least not at first glance. So, I looked for another picture site. After some recommendations, I started exploring iStockphoto.

I soon found the pictures that I needed and I was able to finish my project with the client.

Also, one of my blogging jobs changed their writing guidelines and added a requirement to have pictures on the posts. I write about SEO, which also doesn’t lend itself very well to pictures. I couldn’t find relevant images on Flick and Stock.XCHNG so I went to iStockphoto. I was not disappointed. I easily found relevant pictures for my posts.

The images from iStockphoto added so much to the content I that I decided to use the site for this blog and the blogs I own. The site has now become a regular part of my blogging workflow.

Here are 4 reasons why iStockphoto has been great for me.

1. High Quality

One of the problems with Flickr and Stock.XCHNG is that you often have to wade through low quality pictures. Flickr allows anyone to upload photos including unskilled photographers. Stock.XCHNG checks each picture for quality but their quality requirements are not as high as iStockphoto.

Every photo I’ve seen on iStockphoto looks like it was shot by a professional.

2. Reasonable Price

Their prices are not too expensive. I paid $1.50 per image and you can get a cheaper price by buying a more expensive bulk package. I still go to Flickr and Stock.XCHNG to save money since they are free. But $1.50 for a relevant image is reasonable considering you’re getting a professionally produced photo.

Unless you post many times every week, you shouldn’t have to pay more than $30 each month. That cost seems worth it because images add a lot to your blog. The add emotion and life and they make your blog look more professional and less boring.

3. Great Selection

They have a ton of pictures to choose from and they have a great search function. It doesn’t take me long to find a good image. I usually find a couple relevant pictures to choose from within a couple of minutes.

4. Fun

This was surprising. It was actually fun to look for pictures to match my content. There are so many interesting images. I was impressed over and over by the creativity of the photographers to create images that fit different niches.

Oftentimes, I don’t really know what kind of image I want. Using the search box and exploring the site becomes an enjoyable treasure hunt – for treasure that I’ve never even seen! The expectation of finding something unique is

Because of iStockphoto, looking for images is now something I look forward to.

Over to You

Do you include images in your posts? If you do, where do you get your images?

Have you ever tried iStockphoto?

Performancing offers blog management services.