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Introducing PerfCast: A weekly podcast from Performancing

Today marks the official launch of Performancing’s PerfCast, a weekly podcast on blogging and monetization. The show features a weekly conversation between Chris Garrett and Ryan Caldwell (that’s me) and many of the shows will also include a guest.

Our hope is to share some of the knowledge we’ve acquired in our own experiences with the greater blogging community. So if you have any ideas for topics that we could cover, please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments.

In the first episode Chris and Ryan talk about How to Build a Powerful Blog.

Be sure to let us know what you think!

Problogging Tips: Follow a Budget

Are you amongst the slice of bloggers who make a living online full-time? What about part-time? Or are you just aspiring to be blogging full-time as a career? It’s a fact that most aspiring bloggers are not full-timers, nor will they be. I’ll not get into the reasons here, as this has been discussed at length all over the blogosphere. What I’d like to focus on is budgeting for those of you that are/ will be successfully blogging part- or full-time.

Who Are You?

“Why budget?” Let’s look at it this way. If you blog for yourself, you’re basically running your own business. If you blog for hire, you’re a freelancer. That means that income can be unpredictable. Smart business owners and freelancers learn how to budget. It’s crucial to financial survival.

“But I don’t need to budget!” Sure you do. Let me take a guess and say that you fall into one of the following categories:

  1. You have never been a business owner or freelancer.
  2. You have never had a full-time job and recently went into blogging after graduating from college.
  3. You are in a career transition and want to become a full-time blogger.
  4. You are a part-time blogger earning some income online.
  5. You are already a full-time blogger, either freelancing or running your own web properties – possibly both.
  6. You have some previous experience owning a business or being a freelancer.

If you’re in the latter two categories, you probably already have some sense of how important budgeting is. If you’re in one of the other categories, you might not have any true sense of business budgeting. If that’s true, you’d better learn.

More Reasons Bloggers Should Budget

It’s already being accepted the United States is currently in a recession. Even if you don’t live there, the American economy affects the rest of the world. I’m already seeing repercussions. Hopefully this is a short-term effect and things will look up, no matter who becomes the next U.S. president.

So budgeting becomes even more important right now. Just because you’re riding high with some web work or a popular blog does not guarantee that will continue. It seems to me that web work is still highly unreliable and income subject to a lot of external factors:

  1. Topical trends, and your ability to keep up and write about them at the right time.
  2. Success in search engine results for various keywords. (This is not wholly beyond your reach – sometimes – but may take considerable effort.)
  3. Google search engine algorithm changes. Let’s face it – they’re number one in the search space, and we’re affected by their rules.
  4. Google AdSense payout changes. (Because even if you blog for pay, it’s quite possible that the person paying you is relying on this income.)
  5. Seasonal trends – though that affects offline businesses as well.
  6. Success at social media sites. This isn’t always easy for new blogs, whereas highly favored sites sometimes get tons of votes for crap content. Well-researched content is not always going to succeed in getting traffic or backlinks. What’s more, some topic-hater might bury you just because they can, or because you had the audacity to write something that disagrees with their view of the world. Or a vindictive competitor might do this because they forget that succeeding online requires networking and making friends.

How many of these factors would affect you if you were running an offline business or freelancing/ consulting? Very few, is my guess. At least, that was the case when I was a consultant. Maybe you can see why I feel that earning a living online is still an iffy prospect for most people, thus fueling the need for budgeting the money you are earning. If you don’t, it could lead to some very difficult times.

How to Make the Best of Inconsistent Income

Long experience of making a lot of business/ consulting mistakes leads me to the following rules of self-employment success:

  1. Ability to differentiate between “want” and “need”, when it comes to business or even personal purchases.
  2. Discipline enough to save up at least a few months “operating” expenses before making any large-ticket item purchases.
  3. Applying the 70/30 (or 80/20) rule to work opportunities. The gist of this is that one client or personal project is always going to be more valuable to you than all the others combined. That means that that client/ project should get the lion’s share of your time.

As you can see, I’m not one for sugar-coating things. There are many aspects of pro blogging that I love and many that I hate. If you’re getting into pro blogging, it’s important that you know and really understand both sides.

Should You Blog For Yourself or Freelance?

Do you have dreams of making a living working online, possibly through blogging? Do you have a plan for how to achieve that? This year marks three years of serious blogging for me, though I have been a freelance writer and published author for much longer. Since becoming a committed blogger, the tough decision has always been whether to blog for myself or to freelance. Both have their positives and negatives.

Here I am nearly three years later and still mostly freelancing, not putting enough time into my own web properties. But in general, I’m questioning if there’s any future in pro blogging for the average person wanting to be a web publisher. Don’t get me wrong. I’m almost never short of opportunities for paid work online. But some months are real downers, or the stakes per project are high. So if I miss a deadline or cannot complete a project, there’s that much more to lose. There’s no half-billing if I only finish half of a project. But my own properties are so neglected that they earn very little. Quite the dilemma.

If you’re just starting out in the blogosphere, what should you do? Short answer: learn the good and the bad aspects of both blogging options. Here are just a few of both that come readily to mind.

Pros and Cons of Blogging For Yourself

  1. Freedom to blog whatever topics you want.
  2. Lots of choices for ads and monetization.
  3. Might take a long time to build enough traffic.
  4. It’s easy to get discouraged when traffic doesn’t come, and yet another blog on the topic pops up.
  5. You brand your own web properties.
  6. Your income is not limited to a per-article or per-project fee. If your site’s earnings increase, the money’s all yours.
  7. A lot of the highest-earning niches are often very saturated or tough to crack the cliques.

Pros and Cons of Blogging For Hire

  1. You might build your reputation and personal brand, but not on your own web properties.
  2. There’s a market for bloggers, with lots of opportunities.
  3. The pay isn’t always enough for the amount of effort.
  4. The pay isn’t always enough to quit a “real” job, and income can fluctuate significantly.
  5. If your contract ends and you’ve invested time in learning a niche, it may not always be easy to replace the work. You may have to switch niches.
  6. Freelancing in a niche might require that you maintain your own blog(s) in that niche, as part of promotional efforts.
  7. Freelancing full-time leaves you little time for your own blogging.

Conclusion?

My preference is to follow a mixed schedule of freelance work and my own projects, but it’s not easy. To build your own web properties – and your reputation – it takes a lot of initial effort. I used to believe it’s an exponentially decreasing curve of effort, getting easier each year. Well, that’s true, but only in very minute amounts. I am spending less and less time blogging (including research) each week, but my overall monthly average income doesn’t seem to want to budge.

Now, all that said, I don’t want you to go away with a picture of doom and gloom. My father’s favorite saying when I was a kid was, “where there’s a will there’s a way.” What’s more, my experience will not necessarily be yours. My health affects the amount of time it takes me to write, and it’s a catch-22 for me. I can’t get better unless I get out of my chair and become active again, but if I do that I’m worried that I won’t get my work done. (Though as I’ll discuss in the future, this is a self-imposed illustion.)

Still, I’m gravitating back to offline work in the next few years – not because I think there’s no hope for online careers but because I actually miss the social aspect of working offline. But for those of you dedicated enough to do what’s necessary, blogging can be rewarding.

Visual Thesaurus 3 Desktop Edition Review

A professional blogger tends to use a vast amount of words. A great vocabulary can create a better experience for the reader. Therefore, increasing vocabulary is something vital to personal development as a professional blogger. You should consider putting in an effort to learning new words as well, and while it might not be to the extremes that I go to, it certainly can’t hurt. Normally someone would just go to Thesaurus.com to find related words, but I have been evaluating an application for the past month that makes the experience a whole lot more interesting.

Visual Thesaurus 3 Desktop Edition by Thinkmap, Inc. provides a new perspective of finding related words. Surprisingly, it makes this task a visually pleasing and fun experience. Type in a word and you will be treated to a graphical map of related verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives. It is a powerful application, but most might under-estimate it.

How does it work? You type in a word and you are presented with related words — it can’t get much easier than that. However, if that was all this application did, it wouldn’t be much worth discussing. It is great because of the amount of customization that is available. There are also many filtering features; however, I have been very satisfied with the default settings.

The interface is really nicely done. It is a result of the application being organized in a way that makes sense. It might take a few minutes to completely understand what the word maps really represent, but once you do, you quickly realize the power this tiny application has and why it was setup that way.

You can navigate the word maps with your mouse, and you could even change it to be in a 3D environment (but most people will prefer the 2D). The interface uses lines and bubbles to signal relations and definitions of words. You can simply hover over or click on the various elements to receive information.

Now, I was trying my best to find something I didn’t like about this application, but it just works. I think the value would be better at around $25, but other than that, nothing to complain about. There are a few things I wouldn’t mind seeing added in the future: I think it would be cool if you could change the color scheme of the application itself or have additional settings for the way the maps are setup. But even then, those are just hopeful additions for the future.

It is $40 for the desktop edition of Visual Thesaurus 3, but it certainly could be worth the cost if the right person uses it. For many of you, this might seem to be a little too steep for a program that does such a specific thing, but if you are like me, you will have it open every time you are writing an article. It is a great tool to assist and enhance your writing.

Check out VisuWords for a free online alternative. My only gripe is that the online application seems to be very processor intensive.

Practical Blogging Tips: Check Your Typography

Are visitors coming in to your blog – which you feel has great content – but they’re not returning? Maybe your typography is at fault. Bad font choices (family, size, color) make for a poor reading experience.

I’m surprised at how many of my colleagues don’t realize that their blog is difficult to read. Most of them don’t mind my saying so because it’s constructive criticism. (I’ve had a long love affair with the printed word and with typography in general, though I am not a designer.)

So if someone, maybe me, tells you your blog posts are hard to read, don’t be offended. They took the time to tell you. It doesn’t mean your site is not otherwise visually appealing, just that good web typography might make a significant difference in your site’s success.

Here are the regular culprits:

  1. Poor font choice. It’s an unfortunate fact but Serif fonts such as Times Roman just do not suit the computer screen. Microsoft spent a lot of money to find out that the Sans Serif fonts Verdana and Helvetica are best for body text on computer screens. Just keep in mind, however, that Sans Serif fonts make large blocks of text very difficult to read for prolonged periods. You need to break up your text.
  2. Small text. Using a very small font seems to be a trend amongst younger bloggers. As I’ve said before, that’s fine. Just don’t expect me to be a regular reader. (Or maybe you’re adopting Kurt Cobain’s motto of not trusting anyone over thirty – or something like that.) It’s not like you have to worry about the cost of newsprint, so I don’t see why this is such a popular option. (Just wait a few years and you’ll know what I mean. Eyesight decreases once you hit thirty, if I recall.) So please consider 11-14 pt body text.
  3. Colored fonts. No!! Well, I’m a design minimalist (most of the time, though it’s harder on monetized websites) who believes in function over form. Colored fonts are most likely to reduce contrast on your web pages. What’s worse than colored fonts is this incredible urge by so many bloggers to use light gray text. Some web designers aren’t helping things because I see this most often on their sites and newly-released themes. It’s fine if instead of straight black text you use a dark gray text. However, light gray makes it difficult to read blog posts – especially at night time. Low contrast text can cause eye fatigue, which in turn can produce headaches for some people.
  4. Colored backgrounds. Please, no! This is not a typographical issue, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen otherwise great blogs with colored backgrounds and small, light gray text. The worst part is that many of my fave bloggers (also colleagues) do this. It’s a shame that I have to stop reading them. (I no longer use RSS readers. At least I suddenly realized I haven’t for about six months, maybe longer.)

Obviously, you’re free to do what you like, but if you don’t make it easy for readers to actually read your content, don’t expect all of them to return. If after reading my pleas, you decide to commit these typographical offenses anyway, then here are a few suggestions that you should follow:

  1. Break up your text into sections with subheadings. (Sans Serif body text and Serif headings can help build contrast.)
  2. Use bold text for visual contrast.
  3. Use bulleted lists, which inherently add white space to your posts.
  4. Use pull quotes, which also add white space and visual punch.
  5. Do anything that increases white space or contrast, and generally makes it easier for the eye to concentrate on your content without fatigue.

On a related note, one WordPress theme that I’ve come across recently with very nice typography is designer Chris Pearson’s Neoclassical.

And now, once we find a Drupal designer, Performancing could do with a bit of an overhaul.

Practical Blogging Tips: Jazzing Up Your Images in WordPress

In my followup research after posting 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress, I came across Jason Schuller’s new WP Elements blog. Jason has some very cool WordPress plugins, an excellent free magazine theme, Massive News, and another theme for a video gallery on the way.

Two things caught my eye on Jason’s blog: the Fancy Zoom plugin and the Featured Content Gallery plugin. The latter is a plugin version of the gallery box that appears in his Massive News WP theme.

Both plugins can really jazz up your WP blog’s images.

Fancy Zoom

Fancy Zoom is a sexy variation to other “lightboxed” image plugins. The basic principle is this: show a relatively small image on a post and link it to a larger version. With Fancy Zoom installed, you’ll see an animated “zoom” to the larger version without a browser refresh. When you close the lightboxed image, you’ll see an animated close. (Watch out; clicking can be addictive.) Here’s a screen grab after a click, but to see the full animated effect, go visit Jason’s 32Eighteen site and click on one of the images in the middle column.

Featured Content Gallery

Have several feature articles on your site and want to make them prominent? Jason’s Featured Content Gallery plugin lets you set up a sequence of images, each one linked to a feature article. The result is visually stunning. Here’s a screengrab, below, which doesn’t do it justice. So go visit the plugin page for an example.

The gallery, while very attractive, has a drawback: updating the gallery is awkward. That is, if you intend to add new images and remove older ones on a regular basis, it’s a tedious process. Increasing the number of images in the gallery set is probably less work, but you have to manually tweak the plugin files – which cannot be done from within the WP admin panel.

Notes:
(1) You do not have to link the showcase images to articles. You can simply showcase images.

(2) Showcase images can very likely be linked to off-site pages, though I haven’t tried. If you own/run multiple blogs, this could be a nice way to use a “hub site” to showcase feature articles on your other sites.