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Announcing the News WordPress Theme from Performancing

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I’m proud to announce the latest WordPress theme from Performancing, the News Theme.

The theme intends to mimic the look and feel of a print magazine or newspaper, with paper-like upper and lower edges, which is quite suitable for blogs that want to put forth a newspaper-y type of image (aided by the display of the current date on the masthead).

The color scheme uses subtle shades of grey and blue, with the sidebar standing out with orange tints.

It’s a return to the traditional 2-column format with the header able to pack in plenty of links and information while looking clean and professional. The background color in the sidebar panels is a nice touch, although for the blog I’ve got planned for this theme, that’s the first thing I’d change.

The sidebar is wide enough to accommodate graphic ads or text links, and the 3-column footer gives it a very nice balance.

The News Theme also fits almost all the criteria I set out in the ‘what makes a WP Theme great’ post last month, and overall I’m thrilled to have this theme come out, and I’ll be launching a new site using this theme soon which I’ll announce here in this thread.

Hope you guys like the theme – let me know what you think about it and how (if) you think it can be improved.

Also see: Performancing WordPress Themes

Disclaimer: My website, Soccerlens.com, sponsors the News Theme.

The Only Way to Beat Bloggers’ Block

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For some people, blogging is as easy (and fast) as talking. These people are rare – good conversationalists AND good bloggers (or maybe they just appear that way?).

For the rest of us though, blogging is NOT as simple as saying our ideas out loud, simply because our ideas are NOT clear enough.

Blogging, especially good blogging, can be excruciatingly painful when you just cannot transform the thoughts in your head into a post in your blog editor.

There are many reasons why this could happen – stress, whether from being over-worked or just poor health and distractions can jumble up our thoughts and leave us grasping for the thread that can unravel the mixed up thoughts and turn them into a post so we can get it over with and move on to something else.

It doesn’t work that way always, and we get even more stressed out.

The way to beat it is a ‘Duh’ method – one that you’d say is so obvious that I shouldn’t even put it in words (but if it were that obvious, why are we still struggling over what to write?).

The only way to beat Bloggers’ Block is to:

Just Start Blogging.

Don’t fret about the 40 other post ideas you have written down that you want to put up (are you nuts?), or the affiliate code that you have to add to your older posts (is it worth your time?), or that OTHER blog that you haven’t been writing on for the last two weeks and you’ve fallen way behind on your work quota… etc etc.

As a society, we think way too much. There’s a time and place for everything – but when you’re working, you should be working, not thinking about it. At the end of the day, you might take out 3-5 minutes to review and perhaps another 5 minutes to plan for the next day, but apart from that, does it really help you if you go over the same pros and cons 300,506 times?

So the next time you’re stuck and don’t know what to say, open up a notepad file or something and start writing. Take action – put yourself under a deadline and force yourself to get things done before that deadline comes.

We all need to kick ourselves in the backside now and then – it’s good practice, I assure you.

3 Reasons Why People Blog

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Why do people blog?

In my view (you may wish to add to the list), there are 3 main reasons why people blog:

To get attention, to make money and to influence others.

Blogging for Attention

Blogging is an attention-seeking platform by nature. It is positive and negative – just as you seek attention for positive causes (raising money for charity), you can also seek attention for negative causes (as an extreme, attacking a religion).

If you’re a new blogger, attracting attention may seem like your first (and most important) step but it can’t be your end goal. All that attention is useless unless you have the means to convert it to your advantage, whether you are looking to make money or to change people.

Blogging for Money

Blogs are publishing platforms, and information publishing and networks are always a good source of income if you have mindshare and a profitable business plan.

We have talked a lot about making money and attracting attention here at Performancing – see the Blog Monetization and Blog Promotion sections in the Best of Performancing section.

Mind you, as Ryan said earlier, that blogging doesn’t scale well as a source of income unless you outsource it and focus your time on management.

Blogging for Influence

Attracting attention and making money off your blog is, in comparison, simple. Influencing public opinion, whether you are trying to change the views of an industry or of a society, is a different game.

While attracting attention and making money are themes that are often discussed in blogging, we don’t often talk about acquiring the power to influence others. Simply put, very few people / bloggers have the means to influence a mass audience, and it starts with the most basic of things – getting attention and holding peoples’ interest.

So tell me – why do you blog?

7 Steps to launching a Great Blog

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In the ‘Ask Your Blogging Questions Here’ thread, franky asks:

How do you really start a new (niche) blog? Many times the ’10 articles’ and ‘establish yourself as an authority’ is managed, but what pace to set during the first period?

There are two established strategies to successfully launch your blog – the big bang model or the bootstrapping model – and these differ in terms of resources available to the blog owner.

The Big Bang Approach

If you have any one of these two:

  • a lot of money
  • plenty of good contacts in the industry

This is the ideal way to go. You can write a lot of quality content in advance (around 30-50 articles), and around launch time either spend big or network big and get the word out as quickly and as widely as possible.

Lots of good content + a lot of eyeballs generally translates into a good, successful launch, but there are two factors that you have to cater for.

One, make sure you’re working in a profitable niche.

Two, make sure you have a ‘phase 2’ – a plan for what to do and how to manage your blog after the launch. It won’t be possible to maintain the same blogging rhythm as during launch, and you’ll have to find a solution that scales and not just eats up your time.

Bootstrapping Approach

Best if you don’t have much time or money. Simply start blogging, putting out 1-2 articles per day and posting them on your blog. Promote your blog but at this stage focus on the key activities – attracting attention of the top blogs, writing linkbait, getting links from trusted sources, etc.

The key here is to focus on what you can do with the resources available to you – so if you’re the only blogger and you can’t churn out 5 articles a day, don’t go down that road, it’s not sustainable or scalable. If you can’t spend 4 hours a day promoting your blog, ruthlessly eliminate all but the most important of promotion activities and spend just 1 hour.

Cut down using the 80/20 rule and focus on what’s really important – quality content, picking a good niche and promoting through the right channels.

A 7-Step Checklist to Launching A New Blog

This checklist is based on the strategies I used to launch my own blog, Soccerlens (see the DBT face off here).

  1. Provide resources that can be linked to, downloaded, read, discussed, etc. Do this at the start, and if possible prepare them in advance.

  2. Get initial links from high-PR, high-trust blogs such as Performancing and ProBlogger by participating in blogging contests and writing articles about your own blogging experiences. I’d add Marketing Pilgrim, Blog Herald and Daily Blog Tips to the list while Chris Garrett and Mark Ghosh do roundups as well. There are probably more that I’m missing – bottom-line, pro blogging sites are a good source of links.

    Think of all the people who’ve removed ‘no-follow’ from their blogs’ comments!

  3. Establish and settle into a blogging rhythm as quickly as possible. Don’t fret about writing 20 articles in advance – just start writing them one by and one and put them on your blog.

  4. Apply to be editor in Dmoz and BOTW Blog Directory for your niche’s category. If you’re accepted, build up those sections and add your site too 🙂 JoeAnt accepts applications automatically, so consider signing up there as well.

  5. Make a list of the top bloggers in your niche and collect as much info as you can about them. Read their blogs daily and understand what type of stories interest them and what they link to. Then for each author, tie in their interest in a couple of your articles and ping them the URLs (without asking for anything in return). Your goal is to get them to be regular readers, links will come by themselves.

  6. Remove all obstacles that prevent your readers from subscribing to your feed, from commenting on your blog, from sharing it with others, from linking to it and from finding things on your blog. This means not asking for ‘registration’ before commenting, showing your RSS feed (and email subscription box) above the fold, a prominent search box, a clear listing of site categories, social bookmarking icons (done subtly they look really good), etc.

  7. Have fun and be yourself – without these two things, your best work will come across as ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’. If your readers don’t see your passion in your writing, how are they going to respond? In kind, by not getting excited about what you’re writing and drifting away.

    Thanks Liz for teaching me this.

  8. Bonus Tip: I used the thought of beating my competition as motivation to work harder. Fretting about stats isn’t an ideal habit but if it helps you make your blog better then it does have some value.

It’s ok to start slow and build things up, but it’s important not to lose momentum once you’ve built it up – nothing is worse than taking your site to the top and then getting lazy and allowing it to fall back down in rankings, earnings and readership.

Also Read:

Starting a Professional Blog – Choosing a Niche
Starting a Professional Blog – Qualifying your Niche
Blogging Mistakes – Launching on an Empty Shell
How To: Launch A New Blog The Easy Way
Planning A New Blog Venture
10 Business Models for Bloggers
10 Key Ingredients of A Great Blog
Positioning Your Blog
10 Step Plan To A Profitable Blog

If you have any questions related to search marketing, blog promotion, WordPress or blogging in general, ask me here.

What Makes a WordPress Theme Great?

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In the last hour or so I’ve been scribbling notes for what would make an ideal WordPress theme. It occured to me that any successful theme would have to meet 2 main objectives: proper structure, and focus towards a particular audience.

By structure I’m talking about the basic building blocks of themes (or even websites):

  • Code must validate – adherence to web standards

  • Cross-browser compatibility

  • Should follow basic usability guidelines / requirements

  • Uses modular, easy-to-customise code

  • A focused channel for theme support and upgrades

  • Follows WordPress coding standards

A website will be limited by the imperfections in its foundation – so if you’re building a theme that will be as popular as Cutline or K2 (or even more popular), then you must lay the proper foundations.

The second condition is focus – and knowing which audience you are designing the theme for.

Designing a general-purpose theme is hard than one focused towards a specific audience. It’s easier to plan the layout of a theme for a photoblog or a car blog than it is to plan the layout of a theme that could be used in a thousand different ways. You have to allow for the design to be immensely flexible and at the same time include the basic elements that would be needed by and be useful to everyone who takes your theme for a spin.

For the sake of discussion, let’s work on building a general-purpose theme.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different decisions to make when doing a layout of a theme. Most of these though, are personal preferences, using the 80/20 principle and focusing on the core factors, I ended up with the following list:

  • Banner + horizontal menu at the top

    Personally I’m not happy with restricting a theme to this option but the thing is, this setup works well for a majority of blogs

  • Multiple options for columns

    Instead of restricting the theme to a single column pattern (2 column right-sidebar), I think it’s a better idea to go Semiologic’s way and build a system in which the blog owner can easily change the number and alignment of columns through the WP Admin area

  • Extended footer

    the 2 or 3 column footers seen on several WP themes are an excellent means of organising information – while the theme may appear bottom-heavy if there’s no banner at the top or if there’s not enough content in one post, the multi-column footer technique can work well and should be used.

  • Advertising

    Some basic concerns when building a theme with advertising in mind – 3-column versions of the theme should have a content area wide enough to show the 300px AdSense block / 468px AdSense banner, and the 2-column versions should have a sidebar that’s at least 270 px wide to accomodate 2 columns of graphical ads

  • Navigation / above the fold elements

    A reader lands on a random page of your website – how does he orient himself and what does he do there? Another reader lands on your blog’s main page – how do you provide them direction through your blog and how can they, in a few seconds, find all the key areas / functions of your blog?

  • Make it fully customizable

    I’d prefer a theme that can be completely customised and turned inside-out using the same building blocks

  • Static home page

    What is the main purpose of your blog’s front page? What is the main purpose of any category archives page on your blog? Chances are, the two answers are different, so why would you keep your front page looking the same as a category’s archives? A static front page helps you plan and implement a proper landing page for prospects and direct readers to different sections of your blog

Questions

  • What color scheme should be used?
  • Which plugins should have built-in support?
  • What changes would you make to the structure discussed above?

Comments are welcome – let me know what you guys think.

How To: Put The Right Price On Your Blog

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How do you put a price on a blog?

The free valuation tools commonly available suck – you cannot place a value on your blog by counting links and PageRank and at the same time not considering actual revenues, site traffic and a dozen other factors that are relevant to blog valuation.

To be honest – there’s no perfect formula for blog valuation. What I can do is share the factors that I consider important (these may change depending on specific cases or on the buyer’s goals) and discuss one way of calculating the value of a blog. Feel free to jump in and share your own views here.

Valuation Factors to Consider

Niche Potential

Used to evaluate if a blog is making less or more than the average in that niche for a blog with that amount of traffic. If a blog is under-monetized then it gives the buyer leverage in the buying process. On the other hand, if the blog owner knows that his blog is under-monetized he can then focus on attracting advertisers and adding different revenue streams to his blog prior to putting it up for sale. Fatten the cow, so to speak.

If a blog is in a highly profitable niche this will have some impact on blog valuation, but this is only in relation to whether the site under-monetized or not.

Expenses

What does it cost to run the blog? Hosting, blogger time, promotion, administration – take everything into account.

Revenue Analysis

How much is that site earning?

How much did it earn in the last 6 months (month-by-month breakdown)? Take the average and that is a more realistic revenue estimate for the blog.

What are the major revenue sources? If it’s just one, it’s a risky proposition and the buyer invariably has an advantage in negotiations. On the other hand, if you have 3-4 or more sources of revenue and they all earn reasonably well, you have a very business and the price invariably goes up.

Traffic Sources

Does the blog have high search engine rankings?

How many feed subscribers?

Is there a mailing list / newsletter?

Is the comments section active or passive, and is there any value in the discussion (or are people just saying ‘this sucks’ and ‘that rocks’)?

Does the blog get mentioned regularly on other websites? Does this bring in traffic?

Premium

What is the site design worth?

What would the domain name alone be worth (think of branding, established reputation, etc)?

What is the content worth, if anything (search engine rankings and traffic matter here)?

Social Reputation

Some niches are more easily polarised than others (for example: pop culture and sports) and it’s easier to offend segments of the audience through them.

Is the blog recognised in its niche as a leading blog? Do fellow niche bloggers read the blog (a big, big positive)? Does the blog enjoy a negative reputation for past actions?

Anything positive is just bonus, but if the blog has a negative reputation it may become difficult to make it grow beyond a certain point.

On the flip side, how big a brand is this blog in its niche? Does it have media recognition? Is it recognised in non-niche circles as the leading blog in its niche (as Danny’s SearchEngineLand is)?

Blog Branding

Is the blog attached to the personal brand of the lead blogger or is it all about the content?

TechCrunch and MarketingPilgrim are two examples of blogs that were built on the personal reputation of their lead bloggers but have successfully moved away from personal branding and towards building the blog as a standalone brand.

If the blog relies strongly on the main blogger to relate to the community, it becomes difficult for new owners to run it with the same amount of success and as a result the price can go down.

How Do You Value a Blog

What are we going to do with these factors? I use a simplified valuation formula that works like this:

Blog Value = Premium + ((Monthly Revenue – Monthly Costs) x Multiplier)

The Premium is established based on the value of the content, site age, design, established rankings, community, etc. Revenue – Costs is a straightforward calculation.

The key difference where people have issues is the multiplier.

As Andy Hagans has discussed here, there’s a wide discrepancy between offline businesses and online blogs – whereas blogs often go for 1x or 2x their yearly profit, real-world businesses often go for 10x on yearly profit (plus premium).

The challenge here is to build defensible traffic, to have multiple monetization methods, to build a great brand, to have an active community and to make your blog indispensible to your niche.

The better you are at all of the above, the higher you can push that multiplier.

If your blog gets traffic exclusively from Yahoo, only earns from AdSense and is unknown outside your niche, it’s not going to get more than a 1x multiplier.

On the other hand, if your blog is the ProBlogger of its niche, you could name your asking price and easily charge a 5x or 10x multiplier.

A Few Problems

The problem with establishing a Premium and a Multiplier is that these decisions are subjective and as such the valuations of two experiences domainers will almost always differ. Because of this it’s always a good idea to have 2-3 people independently value a blog – whether you’re selling yours or looking to buy one.

Putting a price on your blog (and developing a blog exit strategy) is always a good idea no matter at what stage you are with your blog.

Have you valued your blog? If so, please share your methodology and what factors you considered most important.

7 Steps to A Profitable Blog Exit Strategy

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Currently I’m in discussion with bloggers for starting four different blogs – and in each case, the author was stumped when I asked him the following question:

Where do you see yourself and your blog in 2 years?

This isn’t about setting goals for yourself – it’s about knowing what you want to achieve with your blog, and planning for your exit if circumstances require you to do so.

Why you should ALWAYS have an Exit Strategy:

  • You might lose interest in the subject

  • You may need the extra cash

  • You could get a dream gig at another blog

  • You might start a new blog / business that needs more of your time

  • The niche / blog is peaking and you’d want to strike gold while the the iron’s hot (apologies for mixing metaphors there)

  • You’ve fallen ill and can’t blog at the same pace / volume any more

Your reasons for leaving / ending a blog could be positive or negative – the idea is to be prepared so when the time arrives, you are prepared to hand the blog over to someone else, sell it off or further ‘automate’ it so that it takes less of your time.

Done right, you could stand to make good money from your blog in a couple of years.

7 Components to a Blog Exit Strategy

1. Don’t plan to quit

A contradiction – but the fact is that to make a blog successful you need to work smart and put maximum effort where it’s needed. If your heart’s not in it and you’re doing this with the big payday as your goal, you’re not going to get the desired results.

2. Get other bloggers on board as soon as possible

Whether you have to hire them, find like-minded friends or bribe them with fame and fortune, aim to turn your blog into a multi-author blog (or one with substantial guest contributions) asap, preferably as soon as you start.

This way the blog doesn’t become over-dependent on the voice of one person, and it is a lot easier to transition to new owners.

3. Multiple Monetization Methods

This is sound business advice as well as a must if you want to be able to sell your blog in the future – having a business reliant on just one source of revenue (such as AdSense) is risky. Find affiliate programs, sell advertising, sell products / services if possible and find alternatives to AdSense (TLA, Chitika, Intellitxt, Auction Ads, Amazon, etc).

4. Know your costs

There are many hidden costs of running a blog that bloggers often ignore. The biggest one is the cost of the blogger’s time – if a new owner was to come in and hire someone to blog regularly, how much would they pay them?

Other costs include hosting costs (if you are hosting multiple blogs on one server then your personal costs are averaged out but it might not be the case for a new owner), cost of paying your guest bloggers (even if they blog for free now) and the value of time / actual money spent in promotion / administration.

If you subtract all your costs from your revenues and you realise that you’re turning in a loss instead of a profit, it’s time to rethink your business strategy.

5. Treat your blog as a business

You’re here to make money, so don’t kid yourself – get serious and focus on those activities that will bring in advertising dollars.

And remember that without quality content and a strong community, advertising won’t come to your blog.

6. Build a strong community

Internet marketers are fond of saying that ‘the money is in the list’. The parallel in blogging is that a strong, active community around your blog is a monetizable audience and as such is very valuable.

Start a newsletter. Provide free reports to capture email addresses. Develop a community and establish multiple lines of communication with them.

7. Diverse Traffic Sources

If you have a sizeable audience then you are not reliant on search engines.

But are you reliant *just* on the community?

Having regular readers, search engine traffic, constant referrals from other websites – all are important components of building site traffic and you shouldn’t ignore any one of them.

The beauty of preparing for exit is that once it focuses you to develop a business model that is efficient, has optimal monetization and is capable of running without you being involved in day-to-day decisions.

While preparing for your exit, you’ll also have built a hands-off, self-reliant, stable and automated business.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Why Software is More Useful than Books

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As bloggers and site owners we often focus on quality content and providing value to our readers. Unfortunately, our ‘quality’ content is NOT providing maximum value to readers.

They might be loving it, and it may make you a blogging rock star, but are they using your advice? And materially benefiting from it?

Really?

Three years ago I was strapped for cash and in a fit of desperation, turned to the Internet for ways to make money. Through RentACoder I started picking up writing projects, and soon I met a guy who wanted a writer for his email newsletter. He was selling software through his one-page website, and the newsletter was geared to compliment and support the software.

Over the next year and a half, we tested and tracked the responses of two specific types of articles – a how-to article discussing a specific SEO strategy and a how-to article that used the software to demonstrate an SEO strategy.

The software-oriented articles won every single time, hands down.

The takeaway lesson wasn’t that a piece of software is more attention-grabbing than quality content.

The lesson is that if you give your readers a systematic way to do things and show them how to do it, you will get a much better response.

A reusable system that ‘just works’ every single time is a valuable resource that will keep your readers coming back for more and more.

Why is software more useful than books? Because 99% of the time, the software is a blackbox through which you get your regular tasks done. The book, on the other hand, explains how the blackbox works, which makes for fascinating reading but doesn’t really build a blackbox for your readers.

A simple example – the book Getting Things Done is wildy popular because GTD is a system, and the book showcases that system. If Paul Allen had just listed productivity tips, he wouldn’t have had 1/10th of the success he has now.

For books and blogs and writing to be as effective, they have to be usable, day in and day out. Sell ideas like you would sell software – as a system of doing things and thus making it easy for people to use your ideas.

A few tips for making your blogs and blog posts more usable:

  1. Remember that not everything you write will be a ‘system’ – sharing ideas and offering advice is part and parcel of the game.

  2. When offering advice on how to do something, write it up in a series of actionable steps. The step-by-step, handholding approach is popular precisely because that style of instructions is easy to follow.

  3. Keep your ‘tasks’ short and manageable. Don’t cram a crash course in how to do blog SEO in one big article (a report is a different thing) – break it up into segments.

  4. Provide a route for feedback so readers can report their experiences and get help if necessary. Forums are great for this, but comment threads do just fine.

  5. Add tools / services to your blog – you might be surprised at how much more valuable readers find such things as compared to quality content.

  6. Yes, your ‘how-to / system’ posts can be used as resources / tools as well.

Bottom line: if you tell people what to do, chances are that they’ll acclaim you for being wise but not get busy doing anything that you’ve said. On the other hand, if you can show people how to do it, you’ll get a better response.

So what are you aiming for? Building a fan club by impressing people with your knowledge or effectively teaching people how to do what you do?

Update: An excerpt from the first page of Mark Joyner’s book, simple*ology (buy it on Amazon), does a great job of explaining this concept.

Let’s face it: books are old school.

I love to hold a book in my hands. I love the way it looks on my shelf. But if I really want to master something, I need to engage myself in its application.

Reading is one thing. Understanding is another. And proper application is a whole ‘nother thing entirely.

Well said Mr. Joyner.

To apply what you learn, you need a system – whether a how-to, step-by-step guide or a software – that helps you apply what you have read and understood.