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Chris Garrett

AOL/Netscape Take On Digg

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Another social bookmarking site for you to take note of, what makes this an important contender is the company behind it is AOL and the site in question is the made-over and pimped-up Netscape

Jason Calacanis had this to say

Of course, in the first hour of being open we get tested by a bunch of DIGG users who voted up a story about a horrible AOL user experience–to the second position!

We’ve started doing metajournalism on the first wave of stories already… this is a real test of our integrity.

It is indeed going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Digg is going to have to respond to this. Of course the most loyal Digg users are going to knock it and they will be laughing their socks off that a negative story got to number one. Regardless of what the Digg fans think AOL is big enough that they don’t need their approval nor particularly want it. AOL plays to the mass market and have the budget to make some big waves.

Already they are drawing criticism for alleged “sneaky linking” (ie. not giving full and obvious link credit). I think this sort of thing will be soon remedied.

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10 Step Plan to a Profitable Blog

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I was talking last night to a guy I haven’t seen in months. Around the same time I did he stopped focusing on SEO and affiliate sites and started developing a blog. When I was just about to say how cool that was he said he was giving up on blogs and was going to go back to creating mini sites to generate adsense and affiliate income. His decision was based on his conclusion that “blogs are not profitable” and he asserted that I should give up on this blogging lark and “make some real money”.

When I asked him what had made him think this way, he sent me a link to a forum thread containing two huge Adsense cheques. I have to say I have never received a cheque with that many digits before. For a split second I thought I might agree with him. Then I remembered why I left doing the sort of thing he was going back into, I never felt good about the sleazy snake oil part of the internet marketing business, I want to produce something of lasting value. I told him so but he was set on his path, had already bought the domains and his plans were in motion. Good luck to him. Did get me thinking though.

Masses of people get into blogging because they want to get rich, while we have said over and over that blogging is not a magic wand for generating instant riches there is no harm in wanting to earn an income providing your expectations are realistic. That is you might not become a millionaire but it’s very doable to earn a couple to few hundred dollars a month from a moderately popular blog. Enough to pay for your time and buy you some toys, help pay off loans or assist with the mortgage.

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How To Turn Link Posts Into Linkbait

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Darren at ProBlogger has pointed out an insight from Andrew Garrett (no relation); “No-one links to the linkers”.

By deluding myself that being a human news filter I was adding value, I
was avoiding doing ‘real’ writing. Sure, I was writing a
bit here and there. but not enough to be a draw card.

Audiences are like governments – you get the one you deserve. I haven’t yet deserved an audience.

How ironic that I am using  this link as as a starting point for a post, hah. While I do agree with the sentiment I think it is worth digging into the subject a little further to add some insights I think I have learned about it from our experience here at Performancing but also Threadwatch where Nick and I had conversations about link posts before.

I actually follow one of Andrews blogs, Digital Shot, and I had noticed his link style of posting. If you look in his archives most of his posts are like this one; “here is something you might be interested in, here is what I think about it”. On other blogs I follow a similar pattern and for the most part Threadwatch was like that too. What is different about Andrews blogs where he feels they are not as successful as they could be?

There are quite a few reasons for Threadwatches success, primary I think is the knowledgeable and outspoken audience that Nick managed to attract, the comments were a draw as much or more than the post. So that is the first insight you can take away and it dovetails nicely with Andrews comment that you need an audience first, to a point. Only Threadwatch was like that from the start so there must be another element missing.

The second element I think must be is the link the content or is the commentary the content? If all you are doing is sending people away, as Andrew suspects, then you need to tweak your style somewhat.

At Threadwatch many of the posts were

  • informative
  • inflammatory
  • funny
  • unique
  • useful

Think about this for a bit then figure out how they follow Nicks “Linkbait hooks”. You can link to news, you can link to something just to complain or make fun of it, you can point to something useful or point to something people should be aware of. You can do these things and make a linkable post providing the link is just the start, the rest needs to come from you and that part is the Linkbait.

Many of the useful posts were formed in a “here is some news, here is a tip about it” way. By taking a piece of news and imparting some valuable advice the posts became doubly informative; something you didn’t know that was happening AND what to do about it. These sorts of posts gave the audience a competitive advantage.

Unique is an important one; if you are the original source of the link you will get linked to as a “via”, well, by ethical bloggers anyway. Look at BoingBoing, no shortage of inbound links there right? That is because every day you can count on them to link to great stuff before anyone else. If they do link to something already being linked to I don’t care, I can just read one blog and see everything worth seeing. People link to the blog probably as much as individual posts.

If you can’t find unique content to link to then you need to make your post unique content. Rather than “go look at this” have more of “this gave me an idea, here it is”. I hope that is evident in the post you are reading! Another related approach is instead of linking to one resource create a page full on the same topic, gather together all the content you can on the subject so your post becomes the definitive launch point for it.

My final piece of advice is about your motivation for using this style and I don’t think I really need to spell out my thinking. Are you posting this way to save time or because you believe your posts will be useful? …

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Is Blogging Your Dream Job?

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Apparently Scoble has left Microsoft. This isn’t about that news, I am sure if you are interested there are plenty of places you can find out more (most of it rumour and speculation). No, this post is about my initial reaction to the news; has he given up the best job in the world?

For a geek like me Roberts Microsoft gig was like giving a kid a trolley dash round the candy store. The boxes were all ticked, freedom, gadgets, conferences, travel, profile. He got to talk to cool people, play with fun tech stuff and then write whatever he wanted about it, within NDA restrictions obviously. Who wouldn’t want that job?

The more I thought about it though the more I realised that his role at Microsoft wasn’t perhaps my dream blogging gig. I have a pretty plum role right now as a matter of fact. Scoble rightly or wrongly is a lightning rod for a pretty high profile big company. It can’t be easy being flamed on a daily basis for stuff that is not your fault. I think it is way more fun to write about whatever you want to without corporate overlords looking over your shoulder and only getting heat for stuff you had a hand in.

The main litmus test for if something is your dream job I guess is “would you still do it if you didn’t have to?”. That is, if you dropped a big lottery windfall would you continue doing what you are doing? I would. I have no doubt if I won the lottery I would still blog. It might morph into a blog about my lottery win but I would still do it. Would you still blog if financial incentives were no longer an issue?

There is a flip-side to this test also; would you still enjoy it if you had to do it. This is the opposite to the lottery win, if you had to do something for money would you still get joy out of it? When you go from doing something whenever the mood takes you to having to do something every day whether you feel like it or not how does that change your perception? I used to really love programming but working for companies with working environment, structure, projects and management that, uh, were not ideal kind of killed off any joy I got out of it. Only escaping that environment got me back into loving it again. Having to do something can stop it being fun sometimes. Could you still enjoy blogging if it became your job rather than your pastime?

I’m glad to say knowing I had to post this morning did not fill me with dread, I enjoyed writing it and I look forward to posting for the rest of the week. On top of this Nick and I are working on an exciting Performancing project which is starting to show progress. Life is good, I don’t think I will be making any calls to replace Scoble at Microsoft!

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Layering Interest

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Going through my email and RSS this morning I skimmed over a photography blog and was struck by an idea that photographic composition is quite close in concept in some ways to blogging. Stay with me, it is not as lunatic as it sounds. Probably.

The tip in the photography post was to add layers of interest. Good advice in photography but also I was thinking in blogging. In photography you are taught to have a focal point, an object of interest to draw in your audience. By adding additional zones of interest you can keep the viewer engaged for longer and produce more lasting value. The alternative is “eye candy”, a fleeting pleasure that is soon forgotten. Some of the best works of art through history can be gazed at endlessly, and you never tire of them.

Blogging is the same, you need something to capture your audiences interest, something useful or fascinating enough to pull them in. You are looking at first getting noticed, then holding that attention. This could be through a scenario such as:

  • A great headline or Linkbait pulls in the reader
  • The first article attracts the reader to take more notice
  • Great archive posts show there is more meat to be had in this pie, not just gravy
  • Consistently interesting posts are served daily in RSS

What would have happened if the reader had been attracted by a catchy headline but when arrived found the content was insubstantial? Or found one great article but nothing more? That is what I call a Teflon blog; attractive but not sticky.

Blogs have a spectrum of stickiness. At one extreme is the Teflon Blog, at the other is a full-on daily addiction. Many blogs manage to do one-hit-wonders, which are easily recognised by a spike in traffic never to be attained again. More hit on to a popular topic and milk it for all its worth, those graphs look like a hump then a steady decline. Obviously what you want is the graph to be steadily increasing and improving, that is not only sticky but spreading word of mouth; double-whammy.

As you will no-doubt realise we have worked hard out our stickiness and word of mouth here at Performancing, we also have worked to create various routes that you might find out about us and want to stay. I will leave what those tactics are as an exercise for the reader, I am sure you will work them out for yourself …

Technorati Tags: blog, tips, promotion, writing

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Blog Metrics API 2.0 Released!

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The main feedback we had after the last API announcement was that people wanted to be able to retrieve more detailed information, particularly information on recent visitors. We also were asked questions about how features might be achieved, such as a Google Maps mashup or show most popular links, etc. Our aim for this release of the API was to add additional functions that hopefully meet those needs while also being a jumping off point for many other cool ideas.

We would love to hear from you if you do produce something with our Metrics API, you might get your moment of fame on the Performancing homepage plus we have a page in the handbook to promote your Metrics services, blog plugins and tools.

As always, refer to the API handbook for reference but now I will go through the new functions and what they do.

New API Functions

  • getgeodetails – Returns which countries your visitors are coming from and their percentage of total, eg. USA: 65%
  • getpagedetails – Returns detailed information for a specified URL, such as views, clicked links, referrers, comments etc
  • getvisitordetails – Returns detailed information for visitors such as IP, language, browser, resolution, etc plus the pages they visited

Do have a play with these new functions, particularly the last two are very powerful as you will see when you start using them. I’m sure you will be able to think of some very interesting applications for them …

There are also two changes that have been made

  1. You do not need to go through the Auth process if the blog is setup in Metrics to have public stats
  2. Many functions that return repeated rows now have a “Limit” parameter that allows you to limit how many rows are returned

Example Code

The following example returns a list of the most popular links for a particular page of your blog.

“, ““))
{
if(!strstr(GetElementByName($node, ““),$domain)) $links[GetElementByName($node, ““)] = intval(GetElementByName($node, ““, ““));
$data = substr($data, $pos);
}

/*
** sort the array
*/
arsort($links);

/*
** output the array as a list
*/
foreach($links as $name=>$value)
{
print “

  • $name #$value”;
    }

    /*
    ** function to return a specific XML element contents by name
    */
    function GetElementByName(&$xml, $start, $end) {
    global $pos;
    $startpos = strpos($xml, $start);
    if ($startpos === FALSE) {
    return FALSE;
    }
    $endpos = strpos($xml, $end);
    $endpos = $endpos + strlen($end);
    $pos = $endpos;
    $endpos = $endpos – $startpos;
    $endpos = $endpos – strlen($end);
    $tag = substr($xml, $startpos, $endpos);
    $tag = substr($tag, strlen($start));
    return $tag;
    }

    ?>

    First we set the start and end dates, domain, url and how many links we want returning. With that information we can go to the API and grab our XML.

    The information we want is embedded in a series of “Link” tags, we want the “URL” and “Clicks” data and place them in an array. To get at these specific pieces of information I use a function called GetElementByName. If you wanted to display everything returned from the XML you might find it more efficient to just process it as you read it.

    Once we have our array we can sort it, my preference is for descending, and loop through the array either processing it or in the above example just output it straight to the user.

    Over to you!

    Already you have produced some great apps, modules and plugins, as I say above, our hope is that you will take these functions and really surprise us all.

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    • Permission to Launch

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    Has anyone else noticed recent launches do not seem to have created the buzz they might have once before? Is it possible that the web has come down with a bad case of “launch fatigue”?

    At one time all you had to do was get a few well-placed mentions and you could ride the rollercoaster of IPO all the way to the bank. Now it seems much-boosted web2.0 launches, even with big money backing and brown paper envelopes well deployed in all the right bloggers pockets, do not seem to have made anything near the usual impact.

    Take Sphere for instance. Have you even heard of it? Techcrunch have given them air-time, Time.com are in bed with them in a significant way, supposedly it makes up where Technorati leaves off.

    If that is the case, why is nobody I know using it? Have you done any Sphere searches?

    Actually do try it out, it’s not bad. I don’t mean to single out Sphere as I am sure they are doing good work. Just it seems good work, a bribed blogger or two and venture capital are not enough now.

    This might hint at a larger issue that the web now is truly resisting the “broadcast” approach. Superbowl ads are just not the ticket now for launching a web service. We have talked many times before about word of mouth being the best form of advertising, and permission marketing being the most effective way of informing your customers while retaining loyalty. Perhaps we are seeing the evidence of this now.

    There is little chance that we have gotten everything right but I am glad our launches were done the way we did them. Building an audience, working out what they need then trying your best to give it them, while tweaking as you go. Seems the right approach to me. At least this way we succeed or fail on what we do rather than what people are saying about us

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    Web Design Glossary, Nice Resource, Better Linkbait

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    I was just pointed to a nice glossary of web design terms. Old hands might find they know everything in there (you might be surprised) but they do take suggestions if there is something they have missed.

    Rather than just have the term and a definition they have obviously worked hard to provide enough detail to be truly useful, with proper explanations that really describe the meaning. Where the source of the material is from outside they do give credit, only time will tell how much of it is original as surely the originator will come looking!

    I have never heard of “Motive” before but now I can guarantee a lot more people now have this New Zealand web firm on their radar, if anything this shows how with a little bit of work you can get some great attention and links without having to go begging or spamming.

    Have a think if your niche could do with something similar …

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