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Announcing The 2007 Performancing Blog Awards – Call For Nominations

Performancing is all about encouraging bloggers to make good blogs. And this year, we’re going to recognize the best blogs in the business with the first annual Performancing Blog Awards.

Starting today, we’re opening up nominations for the best best blogs or bloggers in each category. You are free to nominate your own blog, but we’d also encourage you to nominate others…blogs and bloggers that you truly believe in.

In addition, why not help spread the word about the Performancing Blog Awards by making a post on your own blog. You are free to hotlink the image and also include the following categories that are up for nomination.

Each category will have a single winner, two runners up, and possibly some honorable mentions. Our goal is to highlight the very best that the blogosphere has to offer, and we appreciate any tips/help that the Performancing community can provide to help us make our decisions:

Official Categories For The 2007 Performancing Blog Awards:

  1. The Best Overall Blog
  2. The Most Influential Blogger
  3. The Best Blog Design
  4. The Best Blog Typography
  5. The Best Blog Name
  6. The Best New Blog
  7. The Best Blog Community
  8. The Most Improved Blog of 2007
  9. The Best Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of
  10. The Best Blog Podcast
  11. The Best Use of a Corporate Blog
  12. The Best Video Blog
  13. The Best Writing/Blogging Blog
  14. The Best Science/Technology Blog
  15. The Most Controversial Blog
  16. The Best SEO Blog
  17. The Best Celeb/Style Blog
  18. The Best Business/Money Blogs
  19. The Best Photo Blog
  20. The Best Sports Blog
  21. The Best Blog WebHost
  22. The Best Family and Parenting Blog
  23. The Best Political Blog
  24. The Best Food/Health Blog
  25. The Funniest Blog

    26. It’s the people’s awards afterall…

  26. The Best Travel Blog
  27. The Best Education Blog
  28. The Best Entertainment Blog (Music, TV, Movies)

The awesome Performancing Blog Awards logos were designed by Randa Clay, the official graphic designer of Performancing Services.

Legal Issues of Posting E-mail Correspondence on Blog

My question is simple:

If someone takes private email correspondence and, without asking permission, posts the other person’s email message to a blog, what is the legal status of that content? Does the person who has not granted permission have a legal case to bring against the person who posted the content of the e-mail message?

Twitter as Popularity Contest

I love Twitter. Of course I didn’t always, I have both loved and hated it with equal measure. It can be an incredible waste of time but if you are careful about who you follow there is just the right mix of socializing and signal v noise that I am kept involved.

The funny thing is the service today has been taken over by talk of the “Tweeterboard” which ranks users based on their conversations by counting how many times their name is referenced. Will this turn it into a popularity contest?

It seems if today is any indication, a lot of people are trying to game their rankings. I do hope this is a one day aberration.

What do you think? Do you Twitter? Will this spoil it for you?

SEO Works Well Because Others Are Not Doing It

SEO works so well because most sites on the web do not actively practice effective SEO.
(SEO Book, pg. 43)

It seems like most bloggers don’t do SEO on a consistent basis. They might build a link or two once in awhile but for the most part, bloggers want to blog instead of implementing an SEO strategy.

Of course, you can do whatever you want on your blog, but if you don’t do SEO on a continual basis, you’re missing out on a lot of benefits.

Reasons to Try SEO

Here are some reasons to do SEO for your blog.

  • The vast majority of online traffic is sent by search engines.
  • Unlike PPC and other marketing methods like blog commenting, SEO leads to recurring traffic. Once you get a first page ranking for a keyword, it doesn’t take much work to keep the ranking yet the first page ranking will send you traffic every month.
  • By targeting relevant keywords, you can target the most relevant audience for the most relevant page on your blog. Relevancy leads to higher conversions and better visitor experiences.
  • Other webmasters use search engines. As they find your blog through the search engines, they’ll often link to you and network with you.
  • A first page ranking for a highly searched keyword improves how people perceive your brand.
  • SEO helps you understand your niche better. Keyword research, a foundational SEO activity, is market research. By researching the keywords that people use to search your niche, you get a better idea of what your niche audience is looking for.
  • You can use the keywords found in your research to improve the navigation and usability of your blog.

But the biggest reason in my mind to do SEO is most sites are not doing SEO. Sure, there are a few competitive niches where many of the sites have an SEO strategy, but for the large majority of niches, most sites don’t do SEO.

As I’ve dabbled in a wide variety of niches, I’ve found that the majority of bloggers have not done keyword research. I can tell this because they don’t have relevant keywords in their titles. Also, they aren’t building links. They subscribe to a “build it and they will come strategy”. However, with the large numbers of blogs on the web, it takes marketing to get people to visit your site. And search engine marketing is a great way to attract a steady stream of visitors every month.

This lack of SEO among bloggers means that it will not be difficult to achieve high rankings for relevant keywords.

SEO Doesn’t Have to be Complicated

With everything that goes into creating and maintaining a blog, it’s easy to forget about search engine traffic. However, there are many effective SEO tips that don’t have to take too much of your time and effort. Also, even if you do one SEO activity week (like building a few links or finding juicy keywords to target), you’ll be way ahead of your competitors.

Your SEO strategy doesn’t have to be complicated to outrank other blogs that are not doing SEO. Most of my work as an full-time search marketer is simple. Yet I’ve helped my company gain some great rankings. It just takes a little time and effort.

I’ll be going through SEO basics in the next couple weeks, so watch this space to increase your search engine traffic.

Feedback

How much time do you spend a week on SEO?

Performancing Interviews The Gaffer


Interviews rock because they show us the brilliant people behind the usernames. Today, Performancing is excited to share with you this interview we got with The Gaffer… a guy living in Florida, originally from Wales, who runs the very successful EPL Talk soccer blog, podcast and video show.

1. How’d you get started as a blogger?

I did things a bit backwards really. In 2002, I launched a corporate blog on an intranet where I was the director of internet marketing for a brick and mortar company. Then in 2005 I got the bug to write about my first true love, soccer, and EPL Talk began. I’ve always been a writer so it came naturally to me.

2. What’s the key to being a successful soccer blogger. How do you stand out from the crowd?

Differentiation is key especially with more than one million blogs worldwide on the topic of soccer. With so much competition (both from the international press and blogs), I focus on the world’s most popular sports league which is the English Premier League (aka EPL). I target the readers from around the world who experience the league via their TV sets. As a result, the topics I cover on EPL Talk are quite different such as the quality and quantity of TV coverage, the commentators and TV presenters who the viewers see and hear on a weekly basis and my colorful opinions regarding what happens on and off the pitch.

The key to being a successful soccer blogger is to remain impartial and to keep the content remarkable. It’s easy to say but difficult to do.

[Editor’s Note: The Gaffer also stands out by differentiating his soccer blog with a Podcast and YouTube video show]

3. Do you blog primarily for money or for passion?

It has to be passion. If I blogged for money, I would have quit a long time ago.

4. Tell us about the biggest mistake you’ve made in blogging and what you’ve learned from it.

The biggest mistake I made was deciding to host the blog on the Blogger platform. Blogger’s ease of use was wonderful, but I invested so much dependency on Blogger where I drove a ton of traffic, built a respectable Google PR and generated a ton of links to a site that wasn’t even hosted on my domain. If I had to do things all over again, I would set up a WordPress blog on my epltalk.com domain, which is precisely what I just did and it was something I should have done two years ago.

5. Do you see yourself still blogging in 2 years, 10 years?

I don’t foresee a time where I’ll stop blogging. In the past two years, I’ve launched an EPL Talk podcast and vodcast but both continue to take so much time and energy, and are quite tedious. In contrast, blogging is such a joy to accomplish and a wonderful release. All I need is an Internet connection, a blogging platform, an idea and the words just flow.

6. List your three favorite blogs (the ones that you read the most).

Funnily enough, the blogs I read most often focus on technology rather than soccer. The top three that I read religiously are TechCrunch, Sphinn and Scobelizer. All three of them give me a ton of ideas of how EPL Talk can continue pushing the envelope in its coverage of soccer.

7. What do your family and friends think of you blogging? Do they even know?

Most of my friends and family are aware of my blogging but few of them truly understand what it really is. The biggest thrill I had was finding out that my parents had printed one of my blog posts and read the story with genuine interest even though they both have no interest in soccer.

8. Has Performancing helped you? Do you think that we offer useful information that’s helpful for soccer bloggers? In what ways? And, do you think it will continue to help you?

I was turned on to Performancing after hearing Chris Garrett give a presentation. I’m still a relative newcomer to Performancing so I haven’t had the opportunity to benefit from the site as much as your veteran readers have. But I can see the value for fellow soccer bloggers especially in the tips that Performancing provides. As long as that continues, the site will always be a valuable resource.

9. If you could meet any blogger who would it be and why?

Without a doubt, it has to be Seth Godin. The man has so much clarity. He continually amazes me with his remarkable ideas and has been an inspiration for me since the first day I read his blog in 2002.

10. Which ad networks have been most profitable for you?

I’ve tried several but I keep on coming back to Google AdSense just because it’s the easiest to implement, the most dependable and provides a steady stream of revenue. The other advantage is that they’re pretty efficient at cutting checks and sending the money.

11. How much time do you spend blogging (and on blogging-related activities) every day?

Including research and writing, I typically spend 3 hours a day working on EPL Talk. That doesn’t include time watching soccer, which can easily be 7-10 live matches a week. It ends up being a big investment of time, but it’s something I enjoy doing. For me, it’s the perfect combination of my interests which are writing, internet marketing, coding, search engine optimization and watching the beautiful game. Who could ask for anything more?!

Performancing’s Harry Potter Blog For Sale – All Proceeds Go To Charity

The Blog: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
http://harrypotterthedeathlyhallows.net/

This blog was started as a Performancing experiment to raise money for charity. We only sold about 85 books (not bad, but not great) which didn’t even cover expenses.

We’re putting the site up for auction in order to raise some money for a great literacy charity. Because of this, the starting bid is $1000.

Details:

Top of page 2 in Google for a search on the book (and forthcoming movie) title. At one point it was in position 5 on the front page. With a little SEO TLC, you can get it right back into that position.
http://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+and+the+deathly+hallows

There’s a killer marketing opportunity here for the person who wants to jump in and build a strong Harry Potter related site and capitalize on the movie release in a few years. If you work at it, it should not be hard at all to build the site into a strong HP community that’s thriving within a few months.

Homepage – PageRank 4
Internal – PageRank 3/4

Backlinks to Homepage: 3,938
Backlinks to the domain: 24,166
(these numbers are quite inflated in Yahoo because most of the Performancing backlinks are no longer in place – still, there’s a nice strong set of diverse backlinks)

Starting Bid: $1000
All proceeds to go to charity.

10 Forum Software Links – Btw. PhpBB 3.0 Dead From The Press

After five years of development PhpBB 3.0 is available.
Already about 500 extensions available.

For some blogs a forum can be an essential add-on!

PhpBB 3.0 ‘Olympus’ comes with many new features and improved security. The new features include UTF8-Support, better treatment of search engines, temporary banning of users, multiple anti-spam features, better log and reporting functions, guidelines for user names and passwords, attachments, speed increases by using multiple caching mechanisms, and loads of other improvements. The number of available translations increased from 50 to 61, including languages written from right to left.

Let’s check the PhpBB 3.0 news and see some other nine solutions…

PhpBB 3.0 Comparison And Feature Set

Very impressive feature list but:

Negative killer argument: PhpBB does NOT support RSS!

If you take a look at the BlogBridge forum which is powered by PunBB you will see that you can subscribe to RSS feeds for every forum category and for every single forum. From my personal experience I know that I don’t follow forums where it is not possible to follow all discussions and complete threads via RSS. PhpBB 3.0 not offering RSS feeds is a very big NoNo!!!

Semi RSS feeds are no answer. I also follow (read: try to follow) the Gregarius feed aggregator forum which is powered by Vanilla 1.1.2 and Vanilla only offers a castrated feed. The RSS feed does not show new discussion items but only the very 1st item. At least you know that something is happening but I definitely don’t want to load each thread in the browser every time somebody posts a ‘me too is having the same problem’ item.

Sorry PhpBB 3.0, a dead horse is a dead horse is a dead horse! Integrate RSS feeds in your forum software and I might look again.

If I have a blog and I want to integrate forum threads then I must have the possibility to update content blocks on my blog via RSS!!!

Linklist: Alternative Forum Software

I did not check all links and I did esp. not test the different forum software but here are some links extracted from the comments in two German Pro-Linux articles: 1st beta of PhpBB 3.0 and PhpBB 3.0 published In ascending alphabetical order:

Bonus: More Forum Software Comparison Pages

Well, as a blogger you should definitely not only look at the feature list. More important are questions of how to integrate a forum into your blog. Somebody willing to write an article? My two word article would be ‘Take Drupal’ (and start from scratch).

Somebody willing to shoot with the social networks canons(s) to promote this little list?

Controversy Versus Content – Live!

My thoughts on controversy are that I would much rather have low traffic with a good brand than massive traffic and a poor brand. But that is just me, others believe the traffic is worth whatever backlash and all publicity is good publicity. Who is right? Well, we can see what happens as it happens as a story is just ending over at 1938media …

Step 1. Release a video that causes a blog storm.
Step 2. See stats have dropped back to normal levels so hatch a scheme to get them back up
Step 3. Release another controversial video

Step 4. Stir it up even more by banning a whole country
Step 5. Bask in your traffic
Step 6. ???
Step 7. Profit!!

Results are already coming in. You can see on Twitter and blogs “Loren who?”, “Racist?”, “Racist!”, “Not racist!” … Not the kind of publicity I would want, probably a text book case of exactly what you DON’T want brand-wise, but it is certainly bringing in the traffic.

What do you think?