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Dee Barizo

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.

Productivity Tips For Bloggers From a Bestselling Author

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productivity-graph2Steven Pressfield is great example of perseverance for anyone in the creative field including bloggers. His first couple novels never saw print. But he kept at it and 17 years after his college graduation, he finally got a book published and received a paycheck. His later books became bestsellers.

In this podcast interview, he gives a couple productivity tips that have really helped me in my blogging.

The Writer Life is a Battle

At 1:41 of the podcast, Pressfield talks about the writing process as a war. To succeed, you have to have similar qualities of a good warrior; qualities like courage, patience, and long-suffering. He brings up the image of an infantryman that’s gaining ground on the enemy slowly but surely. In the day to day struggle, writing is like that.

This principle has helped me realize that blogging is hard work. Sure, there are days when the words come easily and I knock out a quality post in a couple of minutes. But those days are few and far between. Usually, it takes me awhile to get going. My first few sentences are pretty bad and I have to struggle to stay focused on finishing the post. By the time the post is done, I’m satisfied but I’m mentally tired.

Resistance is the Enemy

At 14:25, the interviewer quotes Pressfield’s book The War of Art:

There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t and the secret is this: it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Pressfield goes on to talk about Resistance as the negative force that rises up whenever we want to start a creative task. Resistance shows up in many forms: procrastination, self-sabotage, excuses we make up, reasons we give ourselves that we’re not good enough, self doubt, etc. The most important thing for a writer to do is overcome Resistance.

Pressfield says that Resistance comes to us in negative voices. Our task is to ignore the voices and realize that they are bulls**t. They are keeping us from making progress.

I found this principle very helpful because it showed me that I’m not alone in the creative struggle. If a bestselling author has to deal with Resistance, then I will have to deal with it too.

Also, by identifying the enemy, Pressfield helped me not to be surprised by Resistance. I am prepared to deal with it because I know it’s there.

Turn Pro and Stop Being an Amateur

At 25:00, Pressfield gives a great metaphor for overcoming Resistance. He says we have to “turn pro.” When we see ourselves as amateurs, we will yield to Resistance when our circumstances become tough or distractions come up.

But if we think of ourselves as pros, we’ll have the mindset to carve out daily time to pursue our creative endeavors. As pros, we won’t give in to external influences.

Pressfield brings up Kobe Bryant. During the season, his knees may hurt and his back may be sore, but he still suits up and plays in the game. Pros like him don’t make excuses. They see their task as a job instead of a hobby.

Pressfield says a mysterious thing begins to happen when we turn pro. Inspiration starts to flow regularly as we persevere and make it a habit to work on our craft daily.

Further Information

Make sure to listen to the whole interview where Pressfield has more advice for writers. Check out his book The War of Art for an in-depth treatment about productivity and overcoming procrastination in the creative process. Also, he started a new blog, which includes writing tips.

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Sustain Inspiration in Blogging

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idea-light-bulbJason Fried from 37signals talks about sustaining inspiration in this speech at around the 19:40 mark.

He suggests that inspiration is perishable. He contrasts the lifespan between the actual idea and the inspiration for the idea. The idea lasts forever but the inspiration can go away.

He likens inspiration to a perishable good like milk or fruit. Like these goods, inspiration has an expiration date and it doesn’t stay fresh very long.

He advises that if you’re inspired about something, if you motivated to do something, you need to take action as soon as possible. If you wait to do it later, you won’t be as motivated. Every day you don’t take action, your inspiration starts to rot and go away.

Also, you’ll have the most creative energy during that initial spark of inspiration.

Blogging and Inspiration

In blogging, I’ve found Jason’s theory to be true. I have many ideas for blog posts that I came up with in the past. At the time of idea conception, I was excited about the ideas. However, a couple weeks went by and I still hadn’t turned those ideas into blog posts. Now when I think of the ideas, I’m not excited about them and I wonder what ever happened to my inspiration.

On the other hand, if I come up with a good idea and then work on the post right away, writing is much easier and I have a good amount of creative energy and motivation to complete the post. This is why it’s a good idea to read only when you have time to act on it.

You’ll be more productive and your content will be better quality if you’re inspired and motivated rather than trying to “force out” a post after the inspiration has gone away.

Over to You

How do you sustain inspiration? Have you ever experienced “rotting inspiration”?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Improve Your Blog’s Brand by Creating New Jargon

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new-jargonYaro Starak has some great advice for bloggers in one of his recent posts. He advises us to create new jargon for our niche. This strategy builds the perception that we are experts who know what we’re talking about. Also, a new term or buzzword can function like other branding elements such as a logo, blog design, or writing style since the term will remind people of our blog.

Borrow Terms From Other Niches

You don’t necessarily have to create something completely new. You can take jargon from other niches and apply them to your niche.

For example, Bill Simmons is a sports writer that’s famous for an NFL playoffs gambling guide. I think one of the reasons his guide became popular is because he gave it a unique name. Instead of just using a generic name like “A Guide to the NFL Playoffs”, he called it “NFL Playoff Manifesto”.

The word “manifesto” is typically used in politics, arts, and technology, but Simmons creatively used it for American football. The unique name of his guide differentiates it from other guides, which gives him an edge in perception and branding. Plus, “manifesto” sounds more authoritative than “guide”.

Help Your Readers Understand Abstract Concepts

Not only does new jargon brand your blog, but it can help your readers understand abstract concepts. For instance, consider Seth Godin’s term purple cow. He invented that term to help online businesses understand the classic marketing concept, unique selling proposition, or USP. USP can be a difficult concept to understand but the metaphor of a purple cow standing out in a field of regular cows makes the concept easier to understand. Also, the concept sticks better since it’s hard to forget a mental image of a purple cow.

Keep Important Ideas Fresh in Your Readers’ Minds

Sometimes a term gets overused and becomes cliche. You can give it a fresh, new name to keep your audience’s attention. For example, some of the basic advice for bloggers is to “write quality content”. We get told over and over that “content is king”. Yaro created a new buzzword, pillar article, to remind us the importance of quality content. Also, his term helps us think about quality content in a more concrete way. Chris Garrett and Brian Clark have similar words, flagship content and cornerstone content, respectively.

Make Your New Concept More Memorable

If you come up with a totally new philosophy or idea, you’ll definitely want a short, catchy buzzword to quickly describe it. A short phrase is much more likely to spread virally than a long-winded explanation. Consider Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. He uses the term lifestyle design to refer to his philosophy of escaping the 9-5 job and living your dream life. And he calls the people who are successfully implementing the philosophy the new rich.

Give an Unnamed Concept a Name

Finally, you don’t even have to actually develop the concept. You can take an existing but nameless concept and give it a memorable name. (Of course, give credit to the original source.) For instance, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term 10,000 hours rule, which states that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve expertise in a skill. But he got the concept from chess. Studies have shown that it takes at least 10,000 hours of chess practice before you can become a grandmaster. Gladwell took this concept and applied it to many different fields in his best-selling book, Outliers.

Over to You

Have you ever created a new buzzword?

What are some ideas for new jargon that could work in your niche?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Why Being Self-Centered Can Actually Help Your Blog

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Brian Clark from Copyblogger recently released a free report entitled The Lateral Action Guide to Becoming a Creative Entrepreneur. I just finished reading it and like most of Brian’s stuff, it was very good.

I was surprised though at one of his recommendations. He advised aspiring entrepreneurs to be self-centered.

He pointed to 37signals, a popular software company that’s become very successful by only creating products that they themselves would find useful. On page 14, he quoted the CEO, Jason Fried:

We just build stuff we want to use. If we need it, they need it.

It was surprising to see this principle from Brian because one of his main tenets is focusing on the needs of your audience. I was a little confused but as I read on, Brian demonstrated that self-centeredness and focusing on your audience doesn’t necessarily contradict each other.

If you’re like many bloggers, you’re in a niche that you’re passionate about. Therefore, you are part of the audience you aim to serve. If you can create something that will help you, it will probably help your audience too.

Consider one of Brian’s products, the popular Thesis theme for WordPress. As a writer that’s not skilled in tech or design, he could sympathize with the barriers writers face when publishing online. Therefore, he partnered with a designer to create an easy-to-use, attractive theme.

Here’s another example. Pat Flynn setup a blog as a reference tool to record his notes for an upcoming architecture test. He was not looking to make money. But because of his notes, his blog attracted traffic and multiple readers told him he should write an ebook. He wrote an ebook based on his notes, did some research about online marketing, and then started selling his book. Soon, his blog was earning him a full-time income. You can listen to his story here.

I read somewhere in an interview that Perez Hilton, the popular celeb gossip blogger, blogs for himself and doesn’t really focus on traffic. He said he would blog even if no one was reading his site. That’s how much he enjoys writing and following celebrities. And there must be many other celeb gossip fans since his blog is one of the most trafficked sites on the planet.

I looked back at my best posts on various blogs and found that I wrote many of them as warnings to myself. For example, I reread this post when I’m tempted to overextend myself and manage too many blogs. And I wrote this post to increase my patience and to remind myself that successful blogging is a long-term project.

It can often be hard to figure out what your audience wants. But if you consider your own needs, you might just find that they are similar to your audience’s needs.

What do you think about the self-centered principle?

Performancing offers blog management services.

A Blogging Case Study: Covering a Big Event in My Niche

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A couple days I tried an experiment in which I covered a big event in my niche.

My blog is in the gaming niche. More specifically, I write about Magic The Gathering (MTG), a popular trading card game. MTG recently had their World Championship Tournament. This tournament happens once a year and take four days to complete. It is the most prestigious event on the calendar with over a quarter million dollars in the prize pool. This year the winner received a $45,000 check.

I knew that many players would be following the tournament online so I did my best to cover it myself. My hope was to get a lot of traffic by ranking for the relevant keywords that would come up as the tournament progressed.

I was pretty happy with the results 🙂

big-event-traffic-graph

The graph above shows my visitors from the last 30 days. As you can see, my traffic had basically plateaued in the first 25 days. But during the tournament, my traffic grew sharply and the two days after the tournament I had my first ever days with over 1,000 visitors.

In the rest of this post, I’ll share what I did specifically. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own blog and get traffic spikes too.

Improve Your Speed

Speed is important because most of the topics from a big event are time-sensitive. The interest for the topics is high during the event but after the event finishes, people will quickly move on to the next big thing.

I found this out the hard way earlier this year. I was doing some work for the sports section of a site. The Super Bowl had just finished so I started working on an editorial piece about the game. I finished the piece five days later and sent it to sports blogs to see if they would link to it. I got a couple of links but some of the blogs said the Super Bowl was already old news so didn’t link. They said if I had published a couple days earlier, I would’ve gotten a link.

Once you find out some noteworthy news from the event, publish a post about it as soon as possible. Otherwise, the news will get old and you’ll miss out on the traffic from the initial buzz.

For the Worlds tournament, I published my posts within 12 hours of the news being released.

Work Long and Hard

You may have heard that writing more posts results in getting more traffic. That is usually true and the traffic is magnified when you write a lot of posts about a big event.

Typically, I only write 1-3 posts per week but during the tournament, I wrote 7 posts.  Those 7 posts totaled about 7,000 words. This was a big change since I usually only write 750 – 1500 words a week. Needless to say, I sacrificed some sleep to keep up with the tournament and write all those words.

Therefore, if you want to get a lot of traffic from big events, make sure you have enough time to cover various issues and news. And be willing to work hard during that time period since you’ll have an increased workload.

Add Value

I don’t think it’s not enough to get people to visit your site. If all you do is cover the event, they may not have incentive to become a repeat visitor. There are going to be other blogs that cover the event too so you need a way to differentiate yourself from them. You need to give your new visitors a reason to come back to your blog. You can increase your chance of turning them to repeat visitors by adding value in your coverage. Instead of just rehashing the news, figure out a way to add something extra.

I tried to add value in a couple of ways.

During the tournament, the hosts interviewed players on video and asked them about their strategies. The videos did not include notes, so I took notes of the videos and added them to my blog. My hope is that people will bookmark my posts for reference since text is generally a better reference source than video.

Also, since I’m a winning player and I keep up with the tournament scene, I made sure to give my thoughts on the various strategies being used in the tournament. Instead of just reporting the strategies, I evaluated them. My hope is that people will come back to my site to see what I have to say about new strategies that get developed in the future.

Use Relevant Keywords

If you want to get a lot of traffic from the search engines, you need to discern the keywords people will be searching with. Then, include those keywords in the titles of your posts. I think most bloggers get too “cute” with their titles or don’t pay enough attention to keywords and post titles.

For each post, I identified a couple related keywords on the topic and included them in the title. For example, the winning player had unique strategy which he learned from a friend, who was not in the tournament. His friend had an interesting name for the strategy. He called it “Naya Lightsaber”. I used that term in the title of one of my posts.

The winning strategy always gets a lot of attention and I was fortunate enough to get #1 spot on Google for naya lightsaber. My post on the topic is only three days old but it is already one of the top 10 most trafficked posts on my blog for the last 30 days with over 1,000 pageviews.

Need help covering the big events in your niche? Performancing offers blog management services so you don’t have to do all the work.

Is Your Blog Bloated With Unnecessary Stuff?

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If you observe the business world, you’ll often see companies releasing new products in a different sub-niche or niche. These products can be closely related to their existing products. For example, M&M’s stayed in the food niche when they entered the ice cream market. Other companies will enter a market that’s not related to their existing niche. For instance, Harley Davidson, the maker of powerful motorcycles, created their own brand of perfume in the 1990s.

The term for this strategy is called brand extension. Brand extension can work out well and increase the sales of a company but in many situations, the new products are failures and they dilute the company’s brand.

Harley Davidson bikers did not like the company’s perfume and they let the company know about it. Harley Davidson was forced to admit their mistake and they stopped producing the perfume.

A similar phenomenon called feature bloat or software bloat occurs in tech products. For example, a product manager for a cell phone being developed will keep adding features to the phone. He subscribes to the philosophy of “more is better”. But the final product ends up having way too many buttons and features that the average cell phone user is turned off since the phone is too complex and hard to use.

Why do I bring these things up in a blog about blogging? Well I think bloggers can fall into the same trap of adding new things that don’t really make their blog better. Instead, the new things dilute the blog’s brand and cause their readers to be confused and overwhelmed.

There are many ways a blog can get bloated with unnecessary stuff. Here are some of the common pitfalls.

Content

I realized recently the content on my gaming blog was getting bloated. I blog about strategy and news because most of the other blogs in my niche do the same. However, I found out I didn’t like writing about the news. Therefore, my strategy content was much better than my news content since I was motivated to write about strategy but not about news.

To keep the overall quality of my content high, I simply stopped covering the news. At first, I felt bad about doing this, but my comments and stats show that I made the right move. I’m getting more comments from people that enjoy talking about strategy and my repeat visitor traffic has increased.

Passion is a good guideline on what to write about. Also, it makes sense to create content based on your experience and knowledge.

For example, you start a productivity blog since productivity is one of your passions. More specifically, you know a lot about time management and getting organized. However, as you look at the other productivity blogs, many of them cover things like health and tech products. You think your blog should be more comprehensive so you decide to blog once a week about health and tech products.

But after a couple of weeks, you’re running out of stuff to say in those two areas. You realize you don’t have enough experience and knowledge to consistently create quality content in those topics.

The best move then is to stop writing about health and tech products. You may like you should keep going to keep up with the other blogs, but your readers will see your lack of knowledge and experience. Also, you can still expand your topic areas in the future after you’ve gained the necessary experience and knowledge.

Social Media

I’ve already talked about being active on too many social media sites. Feel free to read my post on the topic: Maximize Your Social Media Marketing by Focusing Only on a Few Sites.

Features

Unnecessary features can come in many forms. You could have a Twitter feed on your sidebar that hasn’t been updated in over a year. Or you can launch a forum on your blog without the necessary traffic.

A blog in my niche started off really well and had a the thriving community in the comment section. It would get around 6-8 comments per post including a handful of regular commenters. However, the blogger killed the community by adding a forum that replaced the comment section. The vast majority of the commenters did not register on the forum so now the blog rarely gets any responses.

How to Fight Bloat

The first thing to realize about bloat is that it will creep up on your blog. It’s just human nature to try new things. Consider your purchasing decisions. Have you ever bought something you didn’t need? A quick look at our closets or garages shows that bloat is a part of the human existence. We want new things in our lives and on our blogs.

New things can improve your blog, so obviously the solution is not to avoid new things. Instead, the solution is to consistently evaluate your blog to see if you have unnecessary stuff and then cut it out. Every month or every couple of weeks, evaluate your blog. Consider the new things you’ve tried out and ask yourself whether or not they are really helping your blog.

Over to You

Does your blog have bloat? Is there any fat you need to cut from your blog?

Performancing offers a blog reboot service to improve your blog. We’ll help you cut out the bloat and develop your brand.

How to Get User Generated Content for Your Blog

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One of the things that’s fascinated me is how blogs can get their readers to create content for them for free.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that user generated content (UCG) can be a great boon for your blog. UCG allows you to have more content for less work. Once you start getting submissions on a regular basis, you don’t have to worry about posting frequency.

UCG turns your blog into a community site. This is a great thing because we humans are social creatures. We like to participate in content as well as consume it. Instead of the blog being just about you, it becomes a site about a group of people. You’ll get free marketing because those people are invested in your blog. They will want recognition so they will tell others about your blog.

A couple blogs in my niche have started to get user generated content so I investigated them to see what they were doing.

Comments

Many of the blogs I looked at had an active comment section. Getting feedback seems to be one of the best incentives for attracting UGC. Your readers have something say but they also crave interaction with other readers. They want to know what other people think  about their content. They want an audience for their posts.

It’s not just the number of comments that matters. The blogs I looked at had a good number of regular commenters. These commenters created a close-knit community. If you were a regular reader, you felt like you knew them as friends. This adds even more incentive for UGC since it’s usually more enjoyable to create content for friends rather than complete strangers.

Social Proof

One blog I looked at has an interesting strategy. They started off as a podcast. As they grew in popularity, they started syndicating all the other podcasts in the niche. Soon, others readers thought creating a podcast was the thing to do, so they created podcasts on their own. They wanted an existing audience for their content so they submitted their podcast to the blog. Now the blog has a thriving podcasting community and the podcasts are getting started every month.

Now you can’t just syndicate written content because of copyright issues, but other bloggers may not mind having their content syndicated on your blog as long as you have a good audience and give proper credit. It doesn’t hurt to ask bloggers if you can syndicate their content.

Social proof is all about generating momentum. Once you get the first couple of people to create UGC regularly for your blog, their content will attract other people to create their own content. So, a possible strategy is to hire one or two writers to demonstrate that your blog is open to UGC.

Ask Your Readers

Some people will need a little bit of prodding to produce UGC. And if your readers don’t know you’re looking for content, they may never offer their help.

Once you have an active comment section and an audience of many repeat visitors, setup a page with your submission guidelines and then blog about it asking your readers to send in their content. There’s a very good chance you’ll get some UGC.

Want more traffic? Performancing can increase the traffic to your blog with our social media marketing services.