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Simplicity, Your Blog and Desirable Products

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Do you see your site as a product? Are you blogging about products?

First of all your website is a product. People buy your blog or they don’t. Have you ever thought about that aspect? Earlier today I wrote a comment on Nicks article Blogs Could be Key to Brand Building that “The meaning of marketing is to bring the product to the client.” I stumbled about two articles this morning which give a lot to think about how the marketing of a product or blogging about products should work. Especially if you combine both aspects to make your blog more desirable.

Is your blog a ‘kick ass’ product?

Simplicity – Google and Yahoo compared

Let’s travel back in time and follow the development of the Google and the Yahoo homepage. The reason why Google became such a big success can also be seen by their user centric web design approach. The motto is ‘simplicity’.

Take a look at Yahoogle! – Simplicity is about staying simple brought to you from the MIT media laboratory. Click on the picture in the upper right corner.

I am a long time Yahoo user but in 2000 I turned away from their homepage. The picture shows the reason why in such a crisp clear visualization that it hurts to see the ongoing wrong development of the Yahoo homepage.

Conclusions? How is your website developing?

High-Quality Product?

“If a company makes a high-quality product, but user’s don’t find it sexy or appealing, does that product exist?” is the challenging question of Kathy Sierra.

Let’s start with the last sentence first:

Desirability does not necessarily mean we’ll have passionate users, but it’s a crucial first step. The more desirable the product, the more likely the user is to want to spend more time with it getting better. And it’s the getting better and better part–the learning and growing–that is the foundation of passionate users.

Well, the article Schrodinger’s Products tries to illustrate “ten ways to be desirable” with some funny relation to Schrödinger’s cat (more) which is a mind wobbling paradoxical thought experiment from quantum mechanics but the ten rules still prove to be pretty simple and hard to reach. Instead of a cat Kathy takes a user to illustrate a products undefined, hot or dead state.

Hot or Dead – What value has your product?

  1. Pay attention to style.
  2. Pay attention to the emotional appeal.
  3. Show it in action…with real people.
  4. Don’t use pictures of generic shiny happy people that have become cliches.
  5. Make sure it’s clear to prospective users how this helps them kick ass.
  6. Appeal to as many senses as possible.
  7. Make it meaningful.
  8. Make it justifiable, so the user doesn’t have to feel guilty.
  9. Support a community of users.
  10. Never underestimate the power of fun.

More explanations to every point in the mentioned article.

Do you recognize your website in some of the points? The same list can be used to reflect on your blogging style if you are writing about products. Sometimes its the simplest things that are the most difficult.

What do you think?

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, marketing, product, Google, Yahoo, quality

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A Look at BlogBridge’s Blog Directory Software

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A week or two back, BlogBridge announced the release of the BlogBridge:Library (Demo). It offers the possibility to store, structure and showcase your blog recommendations.

The BlogBridge:Library (BBL) comes as a piece of software and does NOT offer content. The content, design  and user rules are defined by the organization where BBL will be used. BBL is NOT an RSS feed aggregator but a library or directory.

So what? What’s the problem covered by the BBL solution?

Will the BlogBridge:Library be interesting for the performancing.com audience? The first answer to all these questions is a counter question: Does YOUR audience understand OPML and RSS?

Right now you are (maybe) using a blogroll in the sidebar and you are offering a linklist (maybe) for the convenience of your readers. In the ongoing developing info-junkie-nature of the blogosphere and the Internet itself it will be relevant for your blog niche to offer structured and easy to consume meta informations about other sources which will be ways beyond todays linklists. You will need some piece of software which will help you to roll out those recommendations in a way that readers will understand intuitively the service you are offering as an add-on to your website (the structure). The next point to cover is the solution how to use those meta information. This is where RSS and OPML start to play their mighty role … the BlogBridge:Library will offer direct links to the RSS feeds of the recommended sites and BBL will offer OPML files for your recommended structure. This way you can cover specific fields of interest and give your readers the choice to subscribe to one specific ‘river of news’ by importing the OPML file into their news reader.

The idea: The organization and structure of your BlogBridge:Library will reflect what’s of interest to your users. You will become the feed master.

The BlogBridge:Library features

Just a quote from an announcement:

  • Categories and subcategories – All the feeds, reading lists and podcasts are organized in a fully customizable multi-level category structure. Each category can have a distinct owner to whom control has been delegated by the librarian.
  • Cross Listing – As not everything wants to fit in a hierarchy, any category can be cross listed elsewhere in the library in one or more other categories.
  • Built in announcements blog with rss feed – As we hope a customer’s BlogBridge:Library will be an active and dynamic place, we have provided a blog where the librarians can post announcements and other information for the visitors.
  • All categories and subcategories available as OPML Reading Lists – OPML is generated dynamically to allow any capable aggregator to subscribe to all the feeds in a certain category and stay up to date with any changes made there by the librarian.
  • Comprehensive user management – User profiles contain their name, email, photo and access level. Access levels are: “Administrator”, “Librarian”, “Author” and “Reader”
  • Bulk import of account info for enterprise integration – BBL allows the administrator to bulk add a large number of accounts to facilitate deployment inside organizations.
  • Organizations – Each user can be the member of some organization. Organizations are defined by the librarians.
  • Recommendations – The librarian can assign some folder to contain recommended feeds for each organization. When a user logs in, they are shown whatever recommendations exist for them.
  • Top 10 and Top 100 List – BBL automatically monitors the number of users looking at any feed and dynamically compute a Top 10 and Top 100 list, each of which is available as an OPML Reading List.
  • Tree and List display of categories – Librarians can choose to display the contents of a category in either a tree or list display.
  • Ajax animation and asynchronous display of user interface – This is just coool!

Every category and subcategory of feeds in BlogBridge: Library is also available as an OPML Reading List. You can try before you buy. You can see the aggregated set of posts currently available on those feeds. A river of news.

I only publish a blog? What is my revenue?

Some basic scenarios:

  • Self promotion: Just make sure your own blog (section, category, keyword) is in every OPML file. Promote your OPML files as valuable content packages.
  • Affiliate marketing: Pretty obvious you only have to include your affiliate code into every link.
  • Internal use: Use the BBL to create your own ‘Intranet’ blog directory solution.
  • In general you can of course use every generated RSS feed or OPML file to generate your own ‘river of news’ pages or feed it to the known aggregator services.

Please feel free to add a comment about more scenarios.

What does the BlogBridge:Library cost?

I have no idea! The information given at the moment is only pouring out drop by drop. As they are already offering trial installations this might be a product where the BlogBridge team is trying to get some revenue from companies and organizations interested in offering these directory services. If there will be a version with some limitations? Again, I have no idea at the moment. But the product vision is fascinating and offers an attractive and totally new service for websites and bloggers.

For promotion, marketing and feedback reasons it would absolutely make sense to offer a free version.

Other directory or library solutions?

Do you know about other software solutions (!) which offer this kind of service for your website?
Would you be interested to include BlogBridge:Library into your website? Why?

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags:

Markus Merz, 2006, BlogBridge, BlogBridge:Library, RSS, OPML, publishing, directory, library, software, service, tool

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Multi-Blog platform LifeType 1.1 Available for Testing

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As written down in Development snapshots of LifeType 1.1 on 27. Apr. 2006 a new feature complete version of the  pretty nice multi-blog solution LifeType is available. Nightly snapshots are offered for testing purposes. In the article you will find more explanations and links. If somebody is looking for a multi-blog solution or an easy to setup blog-network using sub-domains on one server this is a solution I would recommend to look at.

If you don’t know LifeType (formerly known as Plog) … there are at least two big mediahouses in Germany realizing their attached blogs with LifeType: Financial Times Germany (ftd.de/blog/) and Burda/Freundin (http://blog.freundin.de/). But they for sure did some changes …

Basic info:

LifeType supports multiple blogs and users, media management,
generation of standard content, clean URLs and support for subdomains.
LifeType is released under the GPL license, and requires PHP and MySQL to work.

Basic links:

I have also installed it on/attached it to my site and it was pretty easy to start. The available templates are medium quality and the summary page for all blogs must be customized. It’s a good and stable multi-blog solution (speaking of 1.0.3).

Installation / Upgrade (don’t forget the backup :-):

In order to install this release, please use wizard.php as with
any release so far. If upgrading from LifeType 1.0.x to LifeType 1.1,
wizard.php will also take care of adding all new tables as well as of
making changes to currently existing tables. In order to upgrade from
an older development snapshot of 1.1 to a newer one, just upload the
newest files to the server and overwrite the old ones except your own
version of the configuration file (config/config.properties.php)

For your comfort … some of the LifeType 1.1 links:

That’s the newest info on LifeType.

PS: If you are running a  1.0.3 … there is an update to 1.0.4 available.

Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, LifeType, multi, blog multi-blog, Plog, update

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Intuitive Navigation with Tag Clouds

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In the thread The Real Blogosphere Kim Krause Berg is interested in

finding someone who can make archives more usable. They are a blog nightmare, I think, for long-time blogs with years of archives. All those pages of posts could be little gems of history, links, and information, with ads and text ads on them to bring in revenue. Blogger sorely lacks ways to deal with sorting blog posts for example. Some software offers categories, which is a big help. Most blogs are immediate resources which could be changed if there was a way to drill into them deeper.

Kim is asking for a solution for existing pages/archives but the whole sub-thread got me thinking about optimizing the intuitive navigation for new visitors. Every first time reader always has to face the problem to handle a new site design and some kind of the blog owners personal content strategy. BTW I responded pretty arrogant that “this (problem) sounds exactly like somebody made the wrong decision for the wrong system architecture” – which I believe is true but not a real answer. So how can we get a flexible solution which suites many platforms and has good usage values for the king – our readers?

I think for big pages tag clouds are a very intuitive tool to understand and to use in these cases. Their look & feel is kind of ‘universal’ and the information compression rate is impressive. I did not implement tag clouds on my pages yet but right now I start to think that this is a good idea. What do you think? How are your experiences with good navigation on huge blogs?

Just today I got a recommendation for zoomclouds.com from a famous German blogger. He has a site with many articles and is pretty proud of his tag clouds. He only uses it in the article view and he said that he restricts single clouds to his individual WordPress category feeds which caught my curiosity. What you could do with that is to integrate different clouds on your archive page or on a specific ‘tag cloud page’. Textpattern i.e. offers the template tag txp:feed_link which can be used in templates to create different feeds. Of course you can also use external RSS feeds with zoomclouds to offer more content on your page.

I only checked zoomclouds.com very roughly but it looks promising. Basically they read RSS feeds and you can restrict the time window from ‘actual feed’ over ’24 hours’ in some steps up to ‘forever’. They offer an API, design customization, design templates, tag filters, tag click statistics and you can create more than one tag cloud. One disadvantage though is that every click on a tag first leads to the zoomclouds page so you risk to loose visitors but that’s the rule of the game. For Textpattern I could have a general tag cloud on the front or archive page and I could also easily customize the individual TXP section template pages to have different tag clouds for every section of the site. I believe tag clouds could be a good additional feature maybe combined with a ‘related posts’ block.

Are you using tag clouds? What is your experience? What are the best tag cloud services on the Internet? I am really interested to hear more about that subject!

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Timing Content Creation to Match Interest Peaks

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Identify the waves of interest for your content niche! Every content niche basically has High-Interest Periods and Low-Interest Periods (Hip and Lip :-). This short article will just show an example and mention some reasons and how you can make sure that you don’t miss the ‘waves of interest’.

To answer the last question first … it is simply a question of ‘if, then’ realization. If you realize that you have found a High-Interest Period, then make sure to have a workflow for repeating events in place. Following Nicks 80/20 rule you are of course allowed to ‘borrow’ High-Interest subjects which do not belong to your niche i.e. ‘christmas gifts’ 🙂 The best tool to manage High-Interest events is a simple calendar solution or for more complex issues a project manager software. Act in advance!

The reason to react to High-Interest Periods (in advance) is pretty simple. One reason is that every spontaneous reader might transfer into a regular visitor. This way you will build a kind of stairway to the higher levels of visitor traffic. Another reason is by reacting in advance to High-Interest Periods you proof your competence in that content niche. Not to mention quotes and backlinks you get in advance of the event!

The last three weeks I have seen an example live on my ‘local newspaper’ website. In detail I announced the date for a yearly repeating local street party a while ago. Then I realized the increase in interest through my PMetrics search engine statistics during the last two weeks and covered it again as a medium size note. Finally I wrote a single complete full featured article only for that event three days before and watched my traffic rising higher then ever expected for that date. Check out the Google search for “Bunte Lange Reihe” – My site and the sidekicks cover the results three to seven and are the first results for 2006! Traffic is still rolling in because people want to see pictures or comments on that event – I should cover that interest too but I don’t but I will be prepared next time to do so 🙂

One very important reason to have a structure of ‘advanced coverage’ is the raising of interest followed by a good publishing timing. If you publish the article with all whistles and bells too early then you might not be in place when the peak of interest occurs! Follow the basic structure: announcement, notice and a single final full featured article followed by a critic and preview for the next occurrence.

To make a long story short … be prepared to cover High-Interest Periods and announce coverage for that in Low-Interest Periods in advance!

How do you identify and deal with High-Interest periods?

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10 Tips for More Blog Traffic

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Mary Nicklin brought up the thread about Basics on building traffic. I wrote two extensive answers which gave me the idea of writing a summary with the focus on side kicks.

What are side kicks? Side kicks are all aspects of generating traffic through external links, social bookmarking, article tagging, creating external services and using old school emails to inform about your services opposed to the work you invest on your Blogs main content.

Side kicks are an important aspect in your daily schedule decision compared to the effort for ‘just’ writing another article. I’ll try to motivate you to invest some time in side kicks because of their great impact on traffic in the short and in the long run!

Right now there are numbers around that every day 70,000 new blogs are created. How can somebody develop a strategy to build up traffic or improve the traffic stream coming to his website? “Produce a lot of fresh content” is one of the standard answers. It is true! But don’t believe that writing 15 articles a day gains incredible more inbound traffic than just one or two. And the Blogger Burnout will be coming to you pretty soon!

Side notes: some recommended number crunching from Dave Sifry (Technorati):
State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

For a better overview I will not list the classical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) approaches for websites like page title, page name,
meta description, keyword optimization, directory entries, … there
are so many nice articles on performancing.com or on the Internet about
basic website SEO which you should use.

“My cooking recipe for fast SEO results“. The approach is that you can use the support of modern blogging technology as a side kick to gain inbound traffic and fast search engine attention:

  1. Claim your blog at services like Technorati. Fill in all keywords for every single blog!
  2. Use Ping services like PinGoat (important changes announced!) or Ping-O-Matic. These two and more are optional services are integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
  3. Use FeedBurner for your RSS publishing. They offer nice optimization, publishing and statistical features.
  4. Bookmark every article at del.icio.us (and other appropriate bookmarking services). That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). As PFF is not giving the option to fill out the del.icio.us ‘notes’
    field it is a good idea to edit that bookmark manually and add some
    excerpt to it! The question came up if linking every article to del.icio.us would be
    aggressive? Remember that you post your article link to your personal
    del.icio.us profile. What can be wrong about that?
  5. Use extensive tagging and keywording inside your articles and on services like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us bookmarking and Technorati tagging is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). I get pretty much of my traffic through people who are subscribing or
    clicking on certain tags and also some traffic from certain tags in my
    personal profile.
  6. If blogging about another blog or linking to other blogs try to send them a trackback. The trackback URI is normally published in public somewhere on blogs which support it. That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
  7. Use Flickr for your public photos. Link to the articles in your Flickr descriptions. Again: use extensive tagging and publish to groups and picture competitions!
  8. If using a photo from somebody else (from Flickr or other sources) for one of your articles always ask for permission and after publishing the picture add a comment with a link to your article. It is polite to add the photographer as contact and to make the used picture a personal ‘favorite’.
  9. If linking to somebody always send them an email about your new link and how to find the link. If it fits your niche always ask them to actively inform you by mail if they have something interesting for you to blog about. That way you will build up your network.
  10. Whenever possible you should add a link to a keyword in Wikipedia in every appropriate language.

A more advanced and time consuming practice is to create some secondary blogs and recycle your content there with
links to the original page. This is sometimes very useful because some
hosting services are accepted differently by different search engines.
Especially if you want to reach foreign markets it is good to find a
free blog solution which is hosted in that target area. This paragraph is not on the list above because many of the mentioned methods ARE already secondary blogs even if they don’t look like!

If you have money to spend and you want quick success you might even think about buying traffic for certain keywords and phrases through the Googels AdWords program. This paragraph is not on the list above because in my opinion it needs a lot of experience to get real value for the money.

All this promotion gives you a realistic chance to be picked up early by the SEs and that your blog starts with a nice range of links. On my new ‘local newspaper’ project I made the experience that Google kicked in almost immediately without any sandbox delay.

As a resume of all this writing I draw the conclusion that it is my recommendation is to NOT post articles in a high frequency. Instead invest that time in creating appropriate side kicks!

A last word about productivity with side kicks: Create a checklist for your specific side kick workflow! Every time you are planning to publish an article
open or print that checklist and do it step by step. By developing a routine for all these points the process will accelerate and the results will get better.

Copyright © Markus Merz 2006 – All rights reserved

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, website, Blog, blogging, promotion, sidekick, traffic, SEO, del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, workflow, performancing feedburner, pingoat, ping-o-matic

Just installed a Wiki … a DokuWiki

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I have just installed a DokuWiki. Wow, that was easy doing. After ten minutes I had the first article with my freshly uploaded self portrait online. After 20 minutes the site had changed to a nice ready-made template with a sidebar and some little CSS changes. Looks like a professional website now and no wikipedia style at all. Now I only have to work out some content structure and some user group rights to shelter internal content before both gets to messy. Looks very easy … the admin section only has two points 🙂

I just want to have it for some shameless self promotion and for getting hold of my online documentation which is always way behind. It’s definitely not worth comparing it to a CMS but it is so fast to publish and to set it up. And the whole style of Wiki versioning (a nicely colored diff view) is a great feature. Plus a lot more …

Maybe it will grow to a three level communication tool: promotion site, group project documentation and a kind of private personal just-throw-things-at-it.

The easy creation of namespaces (= categories with optional user rights management) and according links is really ‘wiki wiki’ magic … write down the new internal link [[newproject:activity]] in your to-do list, publish and click on it and a new page in the new category newproject is created. It’s a little bit like mind mapping the wiki style.

I wanted to install Trac (Wiki with subversion support) but I ended up
with DokuWiki. I wasn’t willing to fight with subversion … a typical
lazy KISS decision.

A new toy … I am happy 🙂

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Wiki, DokuWiki, tool, tools, publishing, webdev, promotion, happiness 🙂

Productivity: Content Recycling

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As Chris pointed out in “Do Something Different – Mix it up” there are moments when you are stuck in routine and enthusiasm is going down.

Are you always more willing to create new projects instead of hanging with the old ones?
But how to get the new content?

My tip: Use valuable content you have already published and renovate it.

I am going to mix the two subjects ‘motivate yourself’ and ‘recycle content’. I’d say that you can reach these two goals with one action. Start a new platform and use the ‘old’ content to speed up your new project. A speed booster factor of two or three should be normal compared to creating all content new from scratch. The result still can be doubled by taking care of two publishing platforms – the old one and the new one.

Side note – ‘meta articles’: If your content is ‘news’ or ‘product’ … no big problem with ‘content recycling’ … it’s a question of the mix and your editorial capabilities … old news make wonderful keyword rich ‘overview’ lists. Just use your archive (= old content) as the research source for new articles. Create ‘meta’ articles like ‘what did I get for 500 bucks two years ago compared to today’. Do heavy linking to the old articles! Don’t forget the title tags and the bookmarking and tagging!

The editorial and technical trick is ‘content enrichment’. Let’s say you still have an old PHPNuke platform hanging around with nice content but the site itself is not state of the art anymore. You are seriously motivated to switch to a new platform because YOU would like to use all that geeky new stuff (active sidebars, RSS feeds, Javascript includes, …).  Well, I’d say so do your readers! Don’t try to tune your old platform to be fit for all that geeky stuff. You could do so but I promise you will not reach that ‘motivate yourself’ goal. It’s just work. Instead of tuning the old platform just open a new system and enrich old content with new features on the NEW platform. The fresh design and the new features will attract old and new readers (like switching from PHPNuke to a more modern blogging platform).

Now you are playing around with your new system. That’s a lot of fun. But how to get the ‘content issue’ solved? If you follow your statistics and see that you have many new readers then renovating the old content (on both systems!) is still a good and valuable editorial ‘trick’ (newspapers do it by publishing their archives to the web). Take content from the ‘old’ page and do some renovation. Let’s say you have a photo blog … the pictures itself don’t get ‘bad’ just by hanging around in the archives of the other site. Just publish them again on a new article on your new site. You must find your own way of ‘refreshing’ the content!

BTW, if your articles on the ‘old’ site are in the archive for like six months think about to bring them back to the front page in a renovated new version and attach advertising for your new site (trap!: don’t just change the article date, please see “Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic”). Call it ‘refreshment’, ‘update’, ‘follow-up’ or whatever … the goal is to get changing content on your front page and to draw readers to both sites. The old page can pretty comfortably hang around online for as long as you want it. Nobody forces you to switch or migrate from one day to another.

Talk to your readers about the new site. Ask for comments. If you do it right and polite you will gain new readers on both platforms. That is a third goal which comes in handy through the back door.

Regarding the better productivity … it should be obvious that you can’t use old content 100% but you can have a ratio up to 90% old content to 10% new content. Your primary self motivation is the fun to create the new platform. Instead of solving the content issues with ‘lorem ipsum’ text you do some heavy copy and pasting plus the very important ‘content enrichment’. I’d say that only costs you the amount of 20% to 30% of the work you would have to invest for newly created content.

Reading this article I must admit that it is a pretty rough ride ‘concept wise’ … not as clear and straight forward as I would like it to be. But I just wanted to paint a rough picture … pretty ‘bloggish’ isn’t it 🙂 Let me know what you think? Did you do ‘content recycling’ yourself before? How was the success?

Copyright © Markus Merz 2006 – All rights reserved

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, blogging, content, management, recycling, productivity, writing, publishing, archive, editorial