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Community Reboot: Monetize Performancing

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Ok. Let’s keep this simple. Over the next month, I’m going to be heading up an effort to monetize Performancing. I’d love your help, especially if you can think of creative ways that both Performancing *and* our community members can jointly profit without crapping the site up with junky ads.

While you brainstorm in the comments section, keep in mind our 2 main services right now, pMetrics and WordPress Themes. There may be ways to monetize them *in addition to* the main Performancing site.

So without further ramblings:

If you ran Performancing, how would you monetize it?

I’m Lazy, Do I Need To Give My Links A Title?

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Here’s a question for all you linkbuilders.

The fact is that I don’t see much benefit to throwing in the title attribute to a link tag:
[a href=”http://performancing.com” title=”blogging, on the rocks”]Performancing, we chill bloggers off[/a]

What benefit is there to introducing the link title and why the hell is there a title for links anyway? Someone care to explain? Because I’m lazy, and I hate putting titles in my links.

On the other hand, I completely understand why you’d want to put alt attributes into your img tags. That makes a lot of sense. You’re basically tagging your images, telling the search engines what the image is about. But with links, isn’t your anchor text supposed to do that anyway?

Reboot Your Own Blog

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Performancing offers a blog rebooting service, and its always great to see what Ahmed has to say. I always find a take home lesson to apply to my own blogs.

But this post isn’t about having someone else reboot your blog. Rather, I’d like to suggest that you do your own annual portfolio reboot.

If you own multiple blogs, or even if you just own one blog, consider how much you learn over the course of a year. If you’re a full time blog operator, then you learn little tricks throughout the year that can make your blog more successful. Why not spend one or two days each year applying and optimizing all the new things you’ve learned?

In my last article on WordPress plugins, you’ll notice that my #4 plugin suggestion was for “related posts” – after I wrote that, I went around and looked at all my blogs and realized that the majority of them did not have a related posts plugin. In fact, it looks like the only blogs that had the plugin were ones I was trying to resurrect.

So how have I responded? Well, by trying to think about all the little tricks I’ve learned over the last year, writing them down in list format, and then applying them, one by one, to each of my blogs.

It’s absolutely amazing to go back and do a little maintenance on some of your older blogs. If you’re like me, you’ll be embarrassed and surprised by the stupid mistakes you made, the dumb decisions, the things that everyone was raving about but didn’t work, etc. You’ll probably even notice a few things that did work.

But I guarantee that if you haven’t done any “under the roof” maintenance, save for a WordPress upgrade or two, there’s plenty of improvement to be had.

Here’s a list of things I’ve discovered so far:

1. Missing related posts plugin
2. Using old-school [hr] tags to accentuate AdSense instead of pretty little CSS div tags
3. Missing internal navigation between posts (can you believe it?)
4. Missing search box
5. Bad placement of ads
6. Lots of ads that make no money
7. Ads without any tracking (no channels, etc.)
8. No link back to the home page (except on the header image, which isn’t intuitive for everyone)
9. Nondescript categories that serve no purpose but to crowd the sidebar
10. Full posts listed on front page rather than excerpts

The list doesn’t end there. But that’s plenty of evidence that we could all use an annual blog reboot or two. So plan on it and set the time aside. It’s worth it.

Top Five WordPress Plugins

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Everybody has their favorite WordPress plugins. I thought I’d share my five favorite plugins and ask you to do the same. One thing we should all be clear about: there are always better plugins in the pipeline, and many of them have already been released. Let’s focus on the plugins that have already made a huge difference to the way we run our blogs. If you’ve got suggestions for better plugins that serve the same function, feel free to suggest them in the comment suggestion:

1. aLinks from Sean Hickey

aLinks is a flexible plugin that automatically generates links within your blog posts. One of its best features is the ability to specify keyword phrases and the corresponding link that should be placed on those phrases. The plugin is well polished, and gives you a great deal of control (e.g. the total number of links per posts) and includes a click tracking mechanism.

aLinks can be used to interlink your own content or to create automatic affiliate links.

2. WordPress Database Backup

When’s the last time you’ve backed up your blog’s database? Come on…be honest. If you’re like me, you put database backup off because you don’t want to login to phpMyAdmin for every single one of your blogs. The good news is that you can backup your database from within the WordPress dashboard, and even have the database sent directly to your Gmail account, for long-term storage. A definite must.

3. FeedList by rawlinson

It’s not perfect, especially with it’s handling of non-standard encodings in WordPress titles (the ? often replaces the ‘) but it’s great for creating a common, interlinking sidebar between networked sites. You can see me using it over in the right hand sidebar at TenFootSquare.

4. Semiologic’s Related Posts

Deep linking doesn’t just involve getting links from other sites. You need to have deep internal linking too. Any good related posts plugin can make a big difference in your link building efforts. On more than a handful of situations, I’ve used “related posts” to jumpstart a stagnant blog revival. Without a related posts plugin, your average post is likely to have 2-3 internal links. With a related posts plugin, you can expect to see incremental growth in internal links to any given post. The more posts you have, the more internal links each post will have. There are many good related posts plugin. Another one is Contextually Related Posts.

5. iMax Width

This plugin resizes all uploaded images to fit a max width. If you have a photo based blog, a plugin like this can be priceless to avoid breaking your theme or overlapping images with other div sections.

So what are your favorite WordPress plugins?

Founders Friday: Resurrecting Killer Articles From the Founders of Performancing

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Reading Ahmed’s recent blog reboot reminded me of something I’ve wanted to do for a while. From here on out, I’ll be highlighting one of the many timeless Performancing articles from founders such as Nick Wilson and Chris Garrett.

The post that first drew me in as a Performancing reader was Nick Wilson’s The Art of Linkbaiting. Nick’s main point in the article is that if you want to succeed at linkbait, you need a hook.

The fact is, if you want to succeed on the web with white hat principles, you need to give people what they want. Not only do individual linkbaits need hooks, but your entire site needs a hook. You should always aim to differentiate your site and offer something interesting or useful to your site visitors; something they can’t get anywhere else.

At the end of the day, hooks only work when they are original, interesting, substantial or useful. Top 100 lists work better than top 4 lists. But a top 100 list that borrows 98 items from another list just doesn’t cut it.

Be the first to get the scoop on the Barack Obama Sex Scandal and you’re golden, but tell me that Bush is the worst president in American history….well, I agree, but I’m snoozing.

Give me a simple but extremely useful web app that works 99% of the time and I’ll use it, but give me a powerful but bloated web app that only works 25% of the time, and I’ll go somewhere else.

So what’s your hook? How does your site differentiate itself and get people’s attention?

Expert on Directories and Directory Submission Wanted

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I’m looking to hire a blogger to write linkbait for a new, high-profile directory that I’m helping to launch. You should be familiar with directories and directory submission and have lots of tips to share. This position carries a lot of weight and will look uber-good on your blogging and SEO resume.

Pay is $200/month for 10 quality, diggable posts. Please PM me for more details.

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Edit after the fact:

It was pointed out to me that my rate for linkbait is too low.

So let me change the terms:

3 linkbaits per month and standard directory related posts.

10 posts total, but only 3 hard core linkbaits.

This Week’s Blog Reboot Coming Soon!

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This week’s blog reboot is a bit delayed, but rest assured that it’ll be here by tomorrow. I for one am looking forward to what Ahmed has to recommend (selfishly of course!) so that I can implement some of it on my own blogs.

A Blogger’s Priority: Finding a good webhost for your blog

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I’m in the process of transferring about 25 blogs away from Dreamhost. I’ve completed about 10 sites so far. Why am I transferring my blogs away from Dreamhost? Well, because they suck.

You really can’t put it any other way. I have blogs on three different Dreamhost servers. All three of those servers slow to a ridiculous crawl every day. All three of those servers go down at least once a week. All three of those servers disable vital backend WordPress functions when the servers are under stress (more often than not).

So Dreamhost sucks. That’s a fact and it’s not disputable. I wish I had known that they sucked last May when I first started using them. I wish I had taken the early warning signs more seriously. But I didn’t. I was seduced by low prices. And now you can learn from my lesson.

The fact is that crappy hosting cuts into the bottom line. I’m already seeing about an 8% jump in my AdSense earnings on the sites that I’ve moved away from Dreamhost to a fast, hoppy server. So much for all that money I saved with cheap hosting. The fact is that I’ve lost money. Now I’ve got to move on.

Ask yourself this question. Do you find yourself frustrated with your web host on a weekly basis? Do you notice slow load times on your blog at critical times of the day? Then suck it up and take on the task of migrating your blog to a quality blog host.

In the comments, let’s discuss 1) how to find a good webhost and 2) how to ensure that your webhost isn’t going to oversell their servers and 3) what are some of the consistently good webhosts out there?