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Raj Dash

Hook, Line, and Sinker

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Nick talks about blog snobs in a recent post. As I learned a few days ago, there’s more than one type of snob on the Internet, and no matter what you do, they’re always right. So to really f**k’em up, I praise them for criticizing me, in the most honest way possible. (I’m not going to be more specific.) Am I crazy? Yes. But, well, how can anyone argue with you if you agree with them? It’d take a real nut job to do that.

Another thing that I’ve learned, as both Nick and Chris have said, is that there’s a real skill involved in writing linkbait or comment-bait. And I don’t have it. Cranky periods aside, I don’t particularly enjoy reading or writing those types of post. Reading them cranks me up (which is what a linkbaiter wants, of course). Writing them makes me feel like an arsehole. And you not only have to have thick skin, you have to know whether or not to continue any discussion that ensues.

I don’t know if it’s the screaming blue meanies of February, but I’ve recently engaged in several attempts to comment-bait, with relatively miserable results. (But it was pretty much my first time.) One attempt was here at Performancing, and generated more comments than for any of my previous posts – just not enough to have made the exercise worthwhile, considering I don’t plan to keep doing this.

But when it came down to it, I didn’t know whether to stir the flames more, or let it go. In fact, I’ll be honest. I didn’t even know how to stir the flames without really cranking up the heat. Which all leads me the conscious realization that I am for the most part an informational blogger. While I can intentionally include small hooks in my posts, linkbaiting just doesn’t work for me. I’m not saying that I’m not an opinionated SOB, that I haven’t engaged in live debates and wiped the floor with someone’s arse, but I just don’t currently have the skills for linkbait blogging.

Don’t Put All Your Effort Into Blogging

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If you visit Performancing regularly, I’m hazarding a guess that you want a career as a blogger. If you’ve put ALL your time and effort into becoming an aspiring problogger like I have, you run the risk of suffering from a number of ailments …

  1. Constantly refreshing your blog statistics, just so that you don’t miss when your report shows the next ten pageviews.
  2. Going through writer’s block because your mind is congested with which hot topic you could write about, instead of writing about something you know.
  3. Wasting hours and hours checking the hundreds of RSS feeds of blogs you’ve subscribed to but don’t really like, just in case they something that you could write about as well.
  4. Suffering from the screaming blue meanies (winter/ seasonal depression) because you only posted 5 entries today instead of 6, and worrying how that’s going to affect your pageviews. Or because you got 100 fewer pageviews this week compared to last week.
  5. Place your (least) favourite ailment here.

But seriously, if you haven’t learned how to weather the above ailments in the first year of blogging, all I can say is, get a job! At least until you’ve amassed a quantity of topical articles through part-time writing. Or unless you’re fortunate enough to have a financially supportive partner or family member. Even still, diving into full-time blogging can be an incredibly stressful undertaking. When you’ve got everything riding on a mostly untested medium such as the blogosphere, the pressure affects your writing in tone, quality, and frequency.

Fiction writers know this probably a bit better than journalists, as the latter are more likely to secure a steady job. As an example, both horror writer Stephen King and erotic humorist Tom Robbins had financially supportive wives. (Robbins once feigned a terminal illness so that he could persuade the publisher of his first book to give him back the copyright ownership. This was in the early 70s, when copyright principles were kind of muddy, and the advances were slim at best. But a $1000-2000 advance back then could buy far more than a $5000 advance today.)

Blogging, despite being closer to journalism in activity is closer to fiction writing in fnancial reward. Not everyone is going to succeed, and only a very few will become seriously wealthy from a career in it. But the difference between a publishing house and a blog network is that one top-selling author’s revenues (to the publisher) pays for the book advances of new authors. (Things have changed in the past 15 years, as the big book chains have it made it even harder for the average author to make a living because of the huge discounts they demand from publishing houses.)

There’s nothing like this money-passing with blogging, or even journalism. And no one can live on a few dollars per post without being a writing machine. This may or may not all change as blogging becomes a more acceptable career, and blogs become an acceptable advertising and entertaining medium. That is, as more money is invested in the blogosphere, there will be opportunities for good writers. (Barry Bell does an excellent job of discussing this in this post, and on his blog in general.)

One other possibility for bloggers who are starting to think that blogging is just too unrewarding is to consider non-blog writing. This includes e-newsletters, e-reports, e-books, or even just regular website articles that don’t impose a daily posting pressure on you.

Technorati Tags: blogging, writing, writing careers

Ads Are The Cost of Doing Business Online

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Warning: rant ahead. Nick talks about conversational advertising, one of the alternatives to regular advertising that some bloggers are trying out. The one thing that we constantly have to remind ourselves is that there really is no such thing as free anything. Advertising has to appear in some form. Everything costs something, somehow, sometime, somewhen. You may not pay for something directly or even in cash, but you will pay in some way. Sometimes it’s in cash, sometimes in reciprocal activity.

So let’s ask ourselves, what do advertisers want? Our cash, yes, but first they want our eyeballs (and ears for radio), and they’ll pay to get it. It’s always been that way. Early on in the history of TV, not every business person believed TV ads were worth it. But eventually, they realized the hypnotic power of TV, and the influence in purchasing decisions. TV is still the most expensive medium out there (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), because of the immense cost of doing business.

Of course, the Internet has had a similar effect, but which is still in its infancy. The right form of advertising online doesn’t exist, in my opinion. There are always some people who won’t like advertising, but it’s a cost associated with the distribution of any kind of information or entertainment. Even public TV broadcasting caved in North America, and to survive, allowed a few minutes of commercial advertising per hour.

While shows like Firefly or others just may be able to swing the production costs of an entire season just by pre-selling a future DVD collection, not everyone is going to manage this. When I was publishing my book/ film/ music review magazine, someone in the publishing industry once told me that some of the “best” books ever written would probably never see print (i.e., distribution). He’d taken upon himself to set up his own imprint and publish one or two quality literary hardcovers per year, when he could afford it, and whether or not he’d make a profit. (He would at least break even, but he had to maintain a high-paying job to manage this act of altruism.)

I did the same thing with demo tapes of select young bands that came to me and asked for a helping hand. This was after my print magazine folded, simply because I just didn’t have time to go sell ads, and couldn’t trust any of my ad people to do anything other than spend my money on lunch and parking. I struggled through 2 years of booking bands, putting on shows, paying for demo tapes, posters, stickers, and so on. Ultimately, the market didn’t support it, because during a time of recession, young people would rather pay $10 to listen to a half-assed, snotty DJ play tunes they’re familiar with than go see a new, talented but raw band for $5. That’s life, and you have to work around that, be innovative, or find something else to do.

So what’s the problem on the Internet and with everyone who thinks that blogs and websites and RSS feeds, and what have you, shouldn’t have advertising? Arguably, it’s the current generation raised from a very young age on the Internet who have been able to get so much for free, whether by hook or by crook, and believe that everything should be free and that they shouldn’t have to do anything in return. You know who you are. Nothing free can be sustained for long.

Sorry, but this just isn’t possible, and if you think otherwise, you’re delusional. That includes everyone who says that RSS feeds should be full-text. The bandwidth costs are too prohibitive for most small publishers, especially those whose sites or feeds aren’t yet earning what their content warrants. And in the case of full-text RSS feeds, far too many subscribers update their feed folders multiple times per day when it’s unnecessary. I won’t do the cost breakdown, but it’ll be prohibitive for most publishers.

It’s all very easy to say that if their content is any good, they’ll eventually earn money. The fact is, it’s easy to forget that money is simply a symbol, not the entity we’ve made it out to be. It’s representative of a transaction that’s happened or about to happen. That means that for my offering you a service, you must reciprocate in some way, whether it’s to buy something from me, or from someone else who in turn buys something from me, or by simply lending my sponsors your eyes (or ears). There really isn’t any other way around this.

I’d love to be able to offer you all of my blogging at no cost, but for the service I offer you (those that read my blogs), I have to somehow earn compensation, or throw in the towel. Unfortunately, online advertising has a ways to go before it reaches a maturity level and form that’s acceptable to the majority. But how exactly does that happen with a billion people online? That’s the question that has to be answered, obviously.

Oh, and while I’m ranting, for Robert Scoble and all of you who want full-text feeds at no cost, in subscriber fees or advertising, I say to you, learn how to use a feed reader properly. All it takes is one damn click extra to see the rest of an excerpted story. Are you that lazy? And to all of you online publishers b*tch*ng about your blogs or feeds not getting click-through to your permalink pages, write better titles and opening paragraphs ;>

Supplement Your Blogging Income With E-Reports

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Andy talks about RFIDNews.org and their paid archive subscription model. This is an excellent idea and a carryover from niche newsletters. I remember the newsletter craze of the early 1990s. Business, entrepreneurship, health, law, and financial newsletters commanded $97-1,000/yr per subscription, but had to be spot on with their articles. Just a few dozen subscriptions could sustain a business, and because such costs qualify as “professional fees”, subscribers can often use them as a tax writeoff.

If you have extensive experience in a niche industry, you could utilize your special knowledge by producing something equivalent to a newsletter.  For example, I’m working  on a hush-hush project with someone to produce a large series of free and paid e-reports (in PDF format). We’ll be launching a blog as well, which will excerpt/showcase the topics of the reports, in order to generate SE traffic. The paid reports will provide case studies, but the free material will cover most of the concepts. So there’s value in both.

This method, if you pick a suitable topic, could sustain a writing/ blogging career, without you having to beg for donations, or hope that someone clicks on your contextual ads. Now while we are not producing monthly reports per se, if you think that you can regularly produce ultra-high quality content weekly, biweekly, or monthly, you may want to look into offering subscription e-reports (PDF format). This is slightly different than the paid archives Andy discusses, and requires an extra time commitment. But the returns can be very sweet.

You will need free blog content and free teaser reports, and both will have to show that you know what you are writing about. If you have contacts with experts in your field, you may able to get some guest articles – although they’ll cost you dearly. But since you can typically charge $97 – $147 – $197 – $247 – $297/yr, it may be worthwhile, and a strong selling point. And industry professionals are likely to subscribe if you produce quality reports.

A series of one-off reports could also be lucrative, and would not require the same kind of commitment. If you plan a loose schedule of, say, 10 reports per year, and do not assign dates to them, a 50- to 100-page report could go for $27-47-97 or more, depending on the topics and how much of a niche you’re filling. You may not make a large amount of money in the first year on each report, but for 4 weekends of work, you may be able to supplement your blogging.

So if you sell 50 copies per e-report in the first year, at $27+ each, that’s 10 x $1350/yr = $13,500 minus advertising/ promotional costs. That’s not a lot, certainly not a lot to live on. But the long-tail phenomenon suggests that the sales per report will be exponentially decreasing over time, and that you may sell more copies in total in the “tail” of the life of a report than in just the first year.

If your topics are timeless, over 3-10 years you may earn some nice returns for 10-20 hours of work per month. So in the second year, you’ll have sales of new reports and older reports. In a couple of years, you could very well commit full-time and not have to rely on contextual advertising.

Blog About What You Love, The Money Will Follow

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Any of you who write – or plan to write – more than one blog probably know what it’s like to chase topics around to blog about. Since I launched my problogging-in-training career last June, I’ve mostly ignored those topics that I know about the most and thus can write about the most passionately. Even though I check my blog/ web site statistics regularly to see how my blogs are doing, I didn’t consciously realize I was ignoring the topics with the most potential, for me, until recently.

Years ago, my father gave me a book, by American author Dr. Marsha Sinetar, called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow. After reading that book a few times, I bought several copies and gave them away to friends. It’s one of those few gems of writing that are truly inspirational, timeless, and widely applicable to anyone who is having trouble settling on a career, or thinking of a change. It’s level-headed and doesn’t build up false hope.

The book has served me in good stead several times during my willing and unwilling career changes. It’s helped me have the courage to launch a print magazine (now defunct), as well as send my writing out to editors, with a fair bit of success, including international magazines, a book, and the front page of the technology section of a national newspaper (in Canada).

I re-read the book regularly every few years, including recently. In the past few months, I’ve cast my blogging net wide in terms of topics I’ve been writing about, hoping that I could find a few that might spell a relaunch of my writing career, which has suffered fits and starts. Cracking this book open again has helped remind me that when you do what you love, you are passionate it about it. People feel that passion, whether they realize it or not, and therefore not only return but bring their friends.

If you have the patience, you can carve out a career – assuming that there is a market for what you are doing, or that you can create a market. However, Dr Sinetar does say that your passion itself will often help create the market; although it may take time. With the Internet as a delivery vehicle, this is more true for niche topics than ever before. While you may not necessarily make 5-figures per month in ad and affiliate revenue or product sales, I still strongly feel that you can eventually carve out a career blogging. That is, provided you put in the necessary effort, and have the patience to nurture your project until it starts to bear fruit, and well beyond.

And in case you haven’t yet figured out the true value of regularly checking your web statistics and absorbing what they are telling you, it’s as much to give you hope and motivation as to keep track of the health of your blogs. As proof of what I am saying, I’ve noticed that most of my active blogs are steadily showing improvement in both traffic and ad revenue. They don’t make very much money yet, but my analysis of the statistics suggests that they could by late this year or early next year. Those blogs that are not showing any improvement after 1 year will either be incorporated into related blogs, revamped, or possibly ditched altogether. Those that are doing “well”, of course, motivate me to nurture them and thus help improve them even further. It’s a positive cycle that you need to create for yourself.

Reference: www.marshasinetar.com

5 Steps To Increased Blogging Productivity with PFF

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In my last post, I talked about how to find writing ideas using your web analytics package. Here’s a simple technique I used in Firefox, with the Performancing for Firefox extension, to set up several posts and increase my productivity.

Step 1: In your blog’s web analytics reports, find the one that shows the top search terms used to come to your site.

Step 2: Open up the PFF pane and make sure you don’t have a draft open.

Step 3: Highlight an interesting search word or phrase and drag it with your mouse into the “Title” field of PFF.

Step 4: Save the “stub” either by using CTRL-S or the “Save as Note” button.

Step 5: Now “Clear Content” and repeat steps 1-4 for the next search term that interests you.

I used this technique the last three days to drive up my productivity level – to as high as 14 posts (yesterday), over 4-6 blogs. What happens is that by building a collection of post stubs with suitable titles, you prep the background processes of your mind. You tell it that you are planning to write these articles, and your subconcious takes over  for your conscious mind.

If you use this technique often enough, and are clear on what you are writing about, it organizes your thoughts. Sometimes, you might even see an article in your head. Articles may appear to you immediately, or they may take a few days.

It has worked for me. I used this technique (without the PFF of course 🙂 about 4 years ago to produce ideas for 100 short stories, and 40 or 50 completed stories, in about a month, as well 900 pages of content for a computer programming book in 3 months, including editing.

It works, when I remember to use it. And with PFF, I’ve successfully used it for blogging. Provided you have a web analytics package, this is an effective way to drive up your blogging productivity while actually maintaining writing quality.

What To Write About – Finding Ideas

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In Chris’ “Learn, Blog, Earn” post, his first subheading is “Lots of people want to learn new things”. Truer words were never said, especially in regards to the Internet. So how do you figure out what people want to learn? The answer is actually a lot simpler than you might think.

If you already have a blog and are using any web analytics package, such as the free Google Analytics, there’s a goldmine of information available. What you need to do is find your referring source report. Google Analytics (henceforth GA) also provides breakdowns of each report. Start by picking the search engine or blog directory site that has given your site/ blog the most traffic. Then generate the keyword breakdown for that source. For now, focus on the top ten search terms from the selected engine.

People who used these search terms either did or did not find what they were looking for. If their search terms did not have double quotes, they may not have found what they wanted, since they didn’t use an exact search term. You have to ask yourself, have you written any post which might have any of the search phrases from the top ten? If you haven’t then you SHOULD! If you have, consider if there’s anything new that you can say about the topic. Maybe you have nothing new to say right now, but what about next week, a few weeks later, or even a few months later?

Do this for each search phrase in at least your top ten referring terms. Don’t forget that you’ll probably have a lot of similar referring terms, and over several engines and directories. Group the similar terms together, focus on the top ten, then try to figure out what visitors were really searching for.

While you do want to check your all-time referring terms, more important are your weeky top ten referring terms. This gives you a perspective of recent topics of interest. And to quote some rock’n’roll group whose name I’ve forgotten, give the people what they want.

It may take some discipline to get into a regular cycle of checking your web metrics, but doing so will give you a wonderful source of ideas for future posts. If you can get into the swing of doing this, there’s little reason you should ever have to go through writer’s block.

For those of you interested, I have a freshly-posted Google Analytics-specific version of this post on my blog about blogging.

Technorati Tags: web analytics, web metrics, writing, blog content, blogspinner, statistics, writing ideas

21 Important Blog Platform Features

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With the latest WordPress (2.0) recently released and appearing to be a seeming disappointment (at least to me), I sat down to list the features I look for in a blogging platform. With several clients and friends/ family currently asking me to set them up to blog, it became clear to me that their needs and my needs were markedly different, but that there was an overlap.

So far, for my own needs, I haven’t been particularly happy with any of the platforms out there. I currently use WP (1.5.2), MT (MovableType), Drupal (here), and blogger.com. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I think, ultimately, I’ll have to write my own blog platform – possibly jumping off from either Drupal, TextPattern (TP), or WordPress.

I’m listing (below) some of the features that either I or my clients need. My question to Performancers is what features do you want/ need that your current blogging platform(s) doesn’t have?

Partial list of ideal features: (in no particular order)

  1. Offline editing – I spend a lot of time off the Internet, and always wish I could generate the live pages that I need, for later upload.
  2. Auto-publish via FTP – If pages are being built offline, obviously they need to be published live at some point.
  3. Rollback – Some sort of auto-rollback feature might be handy, especially when you have an online community and something seems to have gone wrong. Under normal conditions, this feature probably isn’t necessary.
  4. Static permalink pages – Static pages get served up faster than dynamic pages that are generated on-demand from the database. WordPress claims that their 2.0 version improves database retrieval, but it still can’t beat static pages. On the other hand, static pages must be rebuilt every time a content change is made. As more pages are added, rebuilding the site takes longer and longer. But this is transparent to users. Blogger.com has this, but most of OpenSource platforms (MT, WP, TP, Drupal, etc.) don’t. Some have plugins to generate static pages.
  5. Drag’n’drop page elements w/ auto-code generation – Would it be nice to design a blog page template by dragging objects around, then generating the necessary final template code?
  6. Sub-tables – Within a story, sometimes I need an easy means of setting up a table and dropping in elements, such as a chunk of text or an image. (There is a Firefox extension that aids in this, and works with PFF, but it seems somewhat buggy.)
  7. Page type categories – I tend to produce hybrid blog/ websites.  My “site pages” need to exist with the same (or nearly so) page templates and navigation, but shouldn’t be part of the “recent posts” reverse chronology that blogs use.
  8. Template binding – Sometimes, I want certain pages (site or blog) to have a different template. For example, maybe post pages have a different ad placement, or different ad network. I want to be able to bind page type with a specific template. This may be as simple as one template for the blog home page, one for post pages (permalinks), and one for site pages. However, for documents such as text or PDF, I would not want any template.
  9. Navigation link sets – Different types of pages may need different navigation bars. If you have different sections of site pages, you may want sub-menu navbars that don’t appear on site pages in other sections.
  10. URL choice – I don’t like cryptic URLs. There’s much debate about whether there is a SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) ranking advantage with friendly URLs, but I simply prefer friendly URLs. WP uses “URL rewriting” to produce fake URLs that look like directory names. Drupal and other packages can do this as well. But Drupal can also produce a fake “.html” URL that actually causes a dynamic page to be loaded. My preference is still static pages, and thus URLs with .html in them. My next choice is something programmatic, such as .pl, .php, .asp, etc.
  11. Post (permalink) pages – These are pretty much standard in all blogging platforms, so this point is here for posterity.
  12. Excerpts on home page – Fixed-length teasers. These are great for many reasons. Firstly, it allows readers to scan over a blog home page and see several entry fragments. If they’re interested, they can “read more”. For a publisher, they increase page views, provided the teaser text and story title are effective. On the other hand, readers who view a blog that has long entries on the home page will likely leave in a hurry, intimidated by the imposing amount of text. It’s more inviting to have excerpts or summaries.
  13. Multi-column “recent posts” list – On occasion, I like to design a blog page template that uses 2 or more columns for the “Recent Posts” component.
  14. Multi-author moderation queue via RSS – The RSS part isn’t strictly necessary, but it makes it easier to moderate if you have loads of content from lots of authors that must be moderated.
  15. Auto-binding of thumbnails to full-size photo – In some of my blogs, photos or graphics are crucial to the content. I manually create a thumbnail to the desired size (although this can be automated through the use of GIMP or other image processing server-based packages). However, I’d like to be able to bind the thumbnail image to the full-size image automatically.
  16. Private ad network management – Not everyone needs this, but if your blog grows significantly in readership, you may seek out your own ad clients. Serving and tracking ads then becomes crucial.
  17. Multiple blogs/ single installation – WordPress 2.0 fell down on this. With all the blog posts and comments I’ve read since last June wishing WP could handle this, I’m surprised it wasn’t implemented. Drupal makes this simple (provided you can get the database access problems I ran into resolved.)
  18. RSS + Atom feeds – Come on. You’ve got to have this for your blog 🙂
  19. Shoutbox/ chatbox – These are more fun than plain old comments.
  20. Polls – Polls aren’t suitable for every time of blog or even an online community, but for my tutorial sites, they’re a necessity.
  21. Shopping cart – This is an important feature for all of my clients, and will be for me in the future.

Got any more features to add? Dispute any of this? Had problems with a particular blog platform regarding any of the points above?