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Types of Subscription: Four Questions for the Performancing Community

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Most of you know that I’m lazy and that I don’t adopt new web apps and technology unless I’m convinced that it will be around 12 months from now. I usually just go with a minimalist approach to everything and it seems to work well (otherwise I’d be bogged down trying every new thing under the sun and wouldn’t accomplish any real work).

I figure that there are lots out there like me. You take your time before adopting new methods and new technologies. That’s why I created the weekly “Four Questions for the Performancing Community” series of posts. I figure that together we can probably come to a consensus about important issues more easily than on our own.

This week’s 4 questions surround reader subscription models.

1. What forms of subscription do you offer on your blog (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc) and how do you encourage subscription signups?

2. Do you, or do you plan, to monetize your subscription base?

3. If you offer multiple forms of subscription (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc.) do you worry about spreading your subscription base too thin for monetization?

4. Do you worry that RSS subscribers avoid your website and are thus less monetizable? How do you plan to rectify the situation?

Announcing the Blue Laptop Theme

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Cousin to the Dark Laptop Theme we are pleased to launch the Blue Laptop Theme for those of your looking for a softer, gentler version of the Dark Laptop Theme.

If you look closely, Blue Laptop is a deep, rich theme with about six different shades of blue spread throughout. Because of its emphasis on blue, the theme is instantly welcoming and naturally attractive. The unique design makes this destined to be a classic WP theme that people are still using three years down the road.

Personally, I think that both the Dark Laptop and Blue Laptop themes are among the most professional and original looking free WordPress themes available. They give you exactly what you need to stand out from the crowd of bland, squared-off newsy themes that are so pervasive.

Designed by GeekWithLaptop and produced by RideLust Cars, Blue Laptop is the perfect theme for any topic in entertainment, technology, literature, or even professionals in fields such as counseling or law.

Download the Blue Laptop Theme or Click here for a live preview

View the official support forum for the Dark Laptop theme

The Business of Blogging: What do you do with your earnings?

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Over at College Startup I wrote an article this morning entitled Five Effective Ways To Re-Invest Your Profits. The basic point of that post is that the best way to become rich off the Internet is to slowly exchange roles with your money: put your money to do the work that you used to do.

Writing that article got me wondering what the average blogger does with his or her earnings. Do you keep 100% and use it for spending money? Do you reinvest 30% and keep 70% as salary? Or vice versa?

So let’s use the comment section to share our personal strategies for handling the money we get as (pro)bloggers. I think it will be helpful to all of us to get a picture of how other bloggers use their earnings and maybe “borrow” a few tips;-)

Performancing more important website than Drudge Report, Google confirms

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The DrudgeReport has been assigned a PageRank of 6 in the latest PR toolbar rollout. Performancing has a PageRank of 7. According to an official at Google (we’ll call him Tim “the toolbar” Thomas for the sake of confidentiality), “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of [a website].”

According to Google, Performancing.com is more important than DrudgeReport.com.

Congratulations Performancing staff. Job well done;-) The most powerful company in the world has spoken, and you’ve come out on top!

pMetrics Debuts With PageRank 6, Advertising Rates Go Up ;-)

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pMetrics looks like it has been assigned a strong PR 6 in the August 2007 toolbar rollout. That means that the early-bird advertising rates have now expired.

But don’t fret. You can still get great deals on both text links and graphic ads on a subdomain that has over 885,060 backlinks. Leverage our 4,000+ pMetrics users and massive backlink strength to jumpstart your business quickly and efficiently.

Pro and Blogger pMetrics members can pick up a link for $45/month. Non-paying pMetrics users get a link for $59/month. Everyone else can get a link for $79/month.

Just get in touch with me at [email protected] to get your ad campaign started today.

The Only SEO Graph That Matters

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With all the fuss about the pending August 2007 PageRank Update, I thought I’d try to refocus all the SEOs out there on the only thing that truly matters in SEO: search referral growth. It’s plain and simple. The ultimate goal of SEO should be to increase search referrals. This is often lost on those who focus their SEO efforts completely on building PageRank.

The golden rule of SEO: PageRank does not translate into Search Referrals.

So how have your SEO efforts been going? Not your PageRank building efforts;-) Your SEO efforts? When’s the last time you looked at a graph like this:

A Bloggers’ Labor Union?

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In the last few days there has been a lot of press about the prospects of a labor union for bloggers and/or writers. The conversation really took off yesterday with the TechCrunch article Is Blogging Ready For a Unionized Workforce?.

The basic concern is that most bloggers are working for pennies an hour while a handful of probloggers and blog owners are raking in the dough. In other words, most bloggers are working at slave wages. So maybe a union would help raise wages?

David Krug at Telegraphik suggests the need for massive reform in the way blog networks are run:

Bloggers are fed up with payrates, we want insurance, and we want to be able to set standards on how this industry — online publishing is run.

One of the issues that particularly has troubled me in the last few years is how blog networks pay their bloggers. Most of them offer a percentage of profits that a blog makes rather than paying by the post, or one of many what I consider more ethical alternatives.

Krug is voicing a concern with the way the free-market blogging industry has panned out. He wants to see some institutionalized method for improving the quality of life for bloggers.

I don’t see these reforms being successful through a traditional labor union (Note: traditional labor unions do not discriminate based on quality, and that’s the fundamental problem as I see it). In fact, I don’t think that the goal should be to improve the quality of life for *all* bloggers who want to join a labor union.

Rather, I do think that the free markets could willingly support and encourage the development of a “Premium Blogger Collective” that organized the very best bloggers on the internet into a union-like collective and then served as an authoritative central location for businesses and high quality publishing firms to find quality bloggers at premium rates.

Not only do I think that a free-market would support such an endeavor, but Google itself has now put in place the infrastructure to encourage the economics of quality. As a friend of mine put it, they’ve turned the “authority” and “quality” buttons way, way, way up on their search algorithms.

The key to such a collective would be to place high thresholds on blogger entry, ensuring quality bloggers, and gaining the confidence of publishers who are willing to pay a premium for good writing. If the collective were to be successful, it would handle billing and blogger payments, while using some of the profits for important things like insurance.

Despite my suggestions, I do want to provide the following warning. It is my view that the economics of blogging and even SEO just don’t scale well for the aspiring entrepreneur. If you’re serious about getting rich, then you need to become an owner, and you need to start hiring other people to do your work for you. The key to becoming rich on the Internet is putting your assets to work for a strong recurring revenue.

To back up this idea, let me leave with you with the following brief article from Andy Hagans where he diagnosed the fundamental economics of blogging and SEO with an elegant reference to investment guru Warren Buffett. The fact of the matter is that blogging and even SEO are, at a very deep level, bad business models. They simply don’t scale well. And in my view they certainly don’t scale well enough to give every blogger the kind of labor union support that Krug is calling for.

If you really want insurance, then start acquiring good assets and get yourself in the position to hire others. It’s that simple. That’s how business works.

Blog Post Tagging: Four Questions for the Perf Community

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I’ve learned a lot from the Performancing community since becoming an active member in April. Some of my favorite threads have been the ones where I ask questions and seek your thoughts and opinions.

Collective knowledge is usually the best knowledge. Consensus usually develops around what works and what doesn’t work. So my hope is to make this a weekly feature at Performancing.

This week’s 4 questions are related to tagging:

  1. Is it still important to use in-post tagging (besides category tagging)?
  2. If so, do you automate this or do it manually?
  3. For maximum effectiveness (i.e. technorati), do tags need to show up on the main page and category pages instead of just the post pages.
  4. What plugins/tools do you use to make tagging an efficient process and strategically effective (targeted).