Every blog needs a loyal audience. How do you stop your blog becoming a revolving door and instead keep visitors on board for the long term. Let’s take a look at the blog loyalty ladder and how it helps us think about converting visitors into advocates. [Read more…] about The Blog Loyalty Ladder
Make Your Posts Viral
Your blog could be the best in the world but nobody will know unless people get to hear about it. How can you maximise the chances of your ideas spreading?
There is a lot said about viral marketing, Seth Godin is probably the best known expert due to his excellent “Unleashing the Ideavirus” book. The concept is simple though. It just word of mouth in a new medium. A message spread via the internet though is much more so maybe it deserves another name (ignoring the lame “word of mouse”, ew!).
Word of mouth blog style
Compared to traditional word of mouth, spreading ideas via your blog has
- greater reach – ideas now spread worldwide as easily as locally
- greater speed – say something online and people see it right away
- less friction – it is so easy for someone to link to you, forward an email, etc
- no barriers – in the past only the famous could spread ideas this well, now any Joe in their underwear can reach a sizable audience
- staying power – would you buy a kryptonite lock even now? and just look at those chain letters that are still going round
Making your ideas spreadable
A post will have more of a viral effect if it is
- Easy to understand – I am as guilty as the next blogger for writing long posts but I do try to break them up into simple bite sized chunks. Plain language, short sentences, one idea/theme per post.
- Is “remarkable” in some way – You will not get buzz from your post if it is same-old. Think different.
- Easy to receive and pass along – How many blogs still make it tricky to find the permalink? Send to friend links are good. Bookmarking service links work.
- Easy to remember – Soundbites work. Tell stories. Use pictures.
- Beneficial to pass along – Even if the blogger just gets kudos from mentioning your post they and their audience have to get something out of it.
.. Lastly encourage forwarding, you don’t get if you don’t ask!
Summary
Keyword: Easy – Make it easy, worthwhile and pleasurable to spread your message and your message will spread.
I have tried to stick to my own advice here, I hope it worked! Let us know, and if you like this post, please do tell someone :O)
Starting A Professional Blog – Choosing a Niche
If the posts on Performancing have inspired you to start blogging professionally then you are going to need to decide the subject you are going to blog about. Let’s look at some ideas for choosing a niche . [Read more…] about Starting A Professional Blog – Choosing a Niche
Starting A Professional Blog – Qualifying Your Niche
In the previous blog niche post we created a long list of subjects that you might consider blogging about. Now we need to find the one subject on your list with the best chance of success. [Read more…] about Starting A Professional Blog – Qualifying Your Niche
Looking at Adsense’s On-Site Advertiser Program
Google have announced a new scheme where your Adsense blocks now can invite advertisers to sign up and advertise on your site. What does this mean to you us as publishers?
What’s this all about?
If you log in to your adsense account now you should see a little caption that says
NEW Gain new advertisers for your site directly from your pages with Onsite Advertiser Sign-up. See our What’s New page for details.
The idea is a potential advertiser will happen across your site, read the content, think “this is perfectly targetted for my prospects” and sign up to advertise.
starting within the next two weeks, advertisers will be able to bid for placement on your site right from your web pages. With Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, a new feature of AdSense, your AdSense ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’
Great stuff, why didn’t they have this sooner? That’s not all! They have set it up so the link…
takes interested advertisers to a page which you can tailor for your business. On this page they can see your details about your site and the Google AdWords program.
A personalised landing page! This is great stuff Google boys and girls. Attracting more advertisers to your site has got to be a good thing. So, where is the problem?
Minor hitch
Not a major problem but still a problem all the same. Do you have more than one blog or site running Adsense? If so you might end up confusing the advertiser if you do customise the landing page..
At this time, we only offer the ability to customize one landing page for each account. Advertisers will access the same custom landing page from ad units on any of your sites.
So while it is a great feature to be able to personalise the landing page, thus getting more conversions, you will either need multiple adsense accounts (against the TOS I believe, unless you sign up once for you personally and another for your business) or will have to wait until the multiple landing page feature becomes available.
Do I have to do this?
If you’d prefer not to participate in Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, you can opt out before it starts by visiting the My Account tab.
Unfortunately the opt-out is by account, not by site. Shame that as you could have left your best blog opted in and opted out all the others to get around the per-account personalisation.
What does this mean?
Advertisers can already target advertising at your site so that part is not new. You do not receive any credit or kick-back for gaining new adwords customers through this either, in fact they can not even tell you if anyone has signed up. No stats!
At this time, we are not able to provide details about how many advertiser sign-ups are made through your links
If you already directly approach advertisers or run a program with a “advertise here” button you might want to consider the revenue implications. I expect your own efforts will reward you better.
Co-blogging, Finding Your Blog Buddy
Blogging need not be a lonely profession. Perhaps you would get more fulfilment, and produce a better blog, if you found a writing partner?
An immediate benefit to finding a blogging partner, as I mentioned in Top 10 Blog Disasters and How To Deal With Them, is if you need to be away from blogging for any length of time the blog still gets updated. There are more benefits though
- Fresh ideas – to keep a blog going for any length of time you can’t run out of ideas. Another brain to bounce off might be just the thing you need to get creative. Brainstorming is more effective and more fun with someone else!
- Proof reading – it’s easy to miss your own mistakes, having someone else read your content and understand it is very valuable. Yes your readers would pull you up but it’s nicer to catch mistakes early and fix them before too many people see.
- Different perspective and experience – a different background means a different understanding, new ways of looking at things, different stories to tell, a different world-view. These all add colour, depth and texture.
- Variety of tone of voice – one way of saying things could get monotonous so another voice on your blog can spice up the conversation a little.
- Sounding board – if you are in any doubt or concerned about something you have someone on hand who understands the work and can offer advice.
- Stabilising influence – if you are prone to wacky ideas, thinking of packing it all in and going travelling, or other spur of the moment craziness your writing partner can help settle you back into reality.
- Motivator – sometimes we have trouble getting started, on occasion a bad piece of feedback really upsets us, a blogging buddy can help you get back into the flow and push us to achieve greater things.
- Second opinion – we don’t always get things right first time.
- Shared responsibility – sometimes a job is easier when you share it with someone else.
- Research workload halved – if you are going to seriously cover a niche there is always lots of research to do. Everything from keeping up with the news to detailed investigation. We can’t all know everything that is going on in our niche or have the depth of knowledge on every topic required. With someone else on hand you can split the subject matter between you.
- Double the expertise – related to the research point above but once you have done your reading one or the other of you will be able to answer any questions thrown your way .. hopefully!
- Someone to celebrate or moan with – sometimes we just need an insider who understands and can share in the joys and lows. Misery loves company and champagne tastes better when shared.
- ..
I am sure you could think of more.
The key is the partnership is mutually beneficial. You don’t necessarily have to write for the same blog but I think that model has the best chance of working.
Finding your Blog Buddy
So the first task is where to look. Second is what to look for. The two are very closely related. Your writing partner needs to be
- Knowledgeable
- Reliable
- Honest
- Flexible
- Good writer
- Excellent communicator
- Compatible
I was once given the advice to not go into business with friends or family. I find it very difficult to not become friends with people I work with but it might well be good advice, after all money can cause arguments.
You might find someone who comments on your blog a good fit. Perhaps there is another blogger in your niche. There could be just the right person on a forum you visit. These are good places simply because you get to see samples of their writing.
Trial period
Kind of like dating, some people dive straight into marriage, others date for a long time or have a long engagement. I guess there are promiscuous bloggers too, heh. A trial period might be a good idea if you find someone who is OK with it. There is bound to be a settling in period. We all have grumpy days (apart from me, I am a complete angel) so try to give each other a bit of slack.
Start as you mean to go on
A good idea would be to set out from the start ground rules and stick to them. How will you split the rewards and how much work do you expect off each other. In your space what constitutes a good post? Will you have word count quotas, number of posts, quality, traffic counts, revenue?
Make a plan and set goals. You don’t necessarily need to achieve each goal you set but do make them semi-realistic. The main point is to align the way you are heading so you are both aiming for the same target. Otherwise one of you might want to be famous and the other be a adsense kingpin. Review your progress regularly and celebrate your achievements.
How about you?
Do you blog alone, do you have a partner or even a team? Does it work or is it a nightmare. Please tell us about your experience..
Blog Software Reviews at a Glance
As the observant will have noticed I have been posting reviews of blog software. This is exam results day, let’s see who graduated with honours and who flunked..
| CityDesk | MT | WP | bBlog | DasBlog | CS | Drupal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Win | Perl MySQL | PHP MySQL | PHP MySQL | .NET | .NET MSSQL | PHP MySQL |
| License | $ | $ | OS | OS | OS | $ | OS |
| Installation | 5 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 3 |
| Usability | 3 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 4 |
| Comments | 0 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| Search | 0 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Ping | 0 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 |
| URLs | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| SE Friendly | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Templates | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Static Pages | 5 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 5 |
| Categories | 0 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| Extensibility | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Support | 3 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 |
| Feeds | 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| API/Email | 0 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 |
| Stats | 0 | 3 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Multi Author | 3 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 5 |
| Score | 37 | 69 | 75 | 56 | 68 | 71 | 74 |
MT = Movable Type, WP = WordPress, CS = CommunityServer, $ = Commercial Software
Static vs. Dynamic
It is quite clear, despite the small speed advantage of static pages, dynamic blogs have feature advantages that give them the edge in terms of templates, functionality and extensibility. You just get so much more with a scripted template I wouldn’t want to go back.
Installation Story
Of course though, with dynamic blogs comes a more complicated install. I am not sure my parents would have been able to install any of these packages apart from CityDesk. Some of these systems assumed you were not only technically savvy but a developer, used to installing language modules and databases. Bloggers != Developers necessarily, bad blog developers – bad! The best had nice little install wizards. I would like to see future versions of these packages do more in the installer and have the blogger do less hand editing please. I expect good things from the CommunityServer boys in this regard.
Non-blog pages
Why do so many systems make it hard to have content outside of blog posts? Do they not realise that bloggers like to have about pages and articles?
Docs
Documentation is very important, those who had default template Wikis scored low. It’s not just the content (though that is critical) but the information architecture and instructions that are out of date or incorrect is just unforgivable – its your first impression of the software so trust is lost.
Features
I wasn’t too concerned about blogging via email but it is vital that you can search and have category feeds. Comments are also very very important, as is protection from spam. Good template available was high on this list but more important was that you could tweak them without learning a whole new book worth of code. Thankfully there were few disappointments in that regard. Drupal had a buffet of choice with template engines!
Single and Multi
While primary concern was individual blogging, the way things are going many people will want a second or third blog and have other bloggers help out so we had to discuss these issues. Drupal just edged out communityserver because of ease of use but both are VERY capable platforms and I would recommend either.
Conclusion
In the final analysis WordPress pretty much kicked some serious bottom. I must say I was slightly surprised seeing as on paper it ought to be the lesser professional seeing as fully fledged corporate companies were behind some of the other solutions. Something for the Movable Type guys to think about.
Read the detailed reviews:
- Introduction
- CityDesk review
- Movable Type review
- WordPress review
- bBlog review
- DasBlog review
- CommunityServer review
- Drupal review
Comments!
Have I got anything wrong? Missed anything out? Have I been unfair to your favourite? Let me know..
Finding The Time To Blog
I must admit, I haven’t got this time management concept completely cracked. When I am writing time seems to warp, I appear to go from 10am to 9pm without blinking. Because of this affliction I have been trying to find some ways to make my use of time more efficient, here is what I have managed to come up with so far.
My first job in the morning is spent catching up. Over night I will have a few dozen emails, hundreds of posts to read in my feed reader, advertising accounts, revenue stats, etc etc. This can take anything from an hour to two hours. Next if I haven’t been inspired already by what I have read then I need to think up ideas for post topics. Nick has already corrected us that too much RSS reading can be self-defeating so I am trying to moderate how much feed reading I do, or at least stick to the quality stuff.
I like to post a couple of in-depth posts here, between a thousand and two thousand words each. The reviews took half a day each because they were so labor and research intensive but I can do about a thousand words an hour on average. You can see that doesn’t leave much time for the rest of my commitments. As they say, time is money, I would say with professional blogging it is almost literally true!
My tips can basically be narrowed down to three steps:
1. Prioritise
I’m sure you will agree I need to gain control and be more efficient. First I need to drop any unnecessary tasks. Out go the off-topic and fun blogs from my main OPML (can read those at the weekend). My adsense account doesn’t grow so quickly I need to check every ten minutes.
A good tip from time management experts is to keep track of your daily activity in a log, you will soon see where your time is going.
Don’t give up everything that gives you pleasure, reading the Dilbert cartoon isn’t going to break your time bank! You just need to judge what you do based on
- Essential
- Non-essential but Beneficial
- Waste-of-time
Be strict with each activity and place it into one of those three containers and act on the feedback it provides you with.
2. Delegate
Are there jobs that you are doing that do not make sense for you to do? There might be tasks that take a lot of time that are better or more cheaply done by others. Many people pay for their content to be written and place their own role as editor. If you are better at selection and improving rather than creating from scratch you ought to consider it. I have delegated looking after admin, such as taxes and bills to my wife. It also means she can be paid a wage so between us we pay less income taxes – double benefit!
If you have a leaky roof then it probably needs looking at right away but rather than fix it yourself you would be better paying an expert, you might find their hourly rate works out less than yours and can do a better job! I often say “if a job is worth doing it is worth paying for” ;O)
3. Negotiate
Make sure everyone knows when you are working and that you need to work. Negotiate with your family, friends and others who call on your time. Yes you need quality time with people (otherwise you will just go quietly mad) but they can not barge in and interrupt any time the mood takes them.
People tend to see their own needs as important or urgent. Find out if something is absolutely necessarily got to be done when they say it has. Amazing how often something they need to discuss right away really doesn’t, often the task is not even necessary.
Do you need to be the one who does the household chores? Would it hurt for them to be put off and scheduled to a later date?
Summary
Using these techniques I am just about coping but my situation is far from ideal and only likely to get more demanding. You can tell I am by no means an expert time manager so please give me the benefit of your experience, how do you manage your time?