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To Build Lasting Relationships in the Blogosphere, Behave Yourself

We bloggers are a friendly breed. We are always looking to find new readers, and do whatever it takes to build relationships with other bloggers.

Regardless of what people say about online relationships, I believe that online friendships can learn a thing or two from the real world relationships. It’s not like online relationships are a mere networking between faceless computers. There are real people behind computers who share this 3 dimensional world with us.

Considering how difficult it is for many bloggers to make friends through blogging, I’ve made a list of things to do and avoid that will help you make new contacts in the blogosphere.

Things to do and avoid on your blog

Don’t speak authoritatively – Although I believe that having authority in your voice is vital if you want others to take you seriously, it is not wise to assume that you are the boss. It’s your blog, all right, but your readers are not your employees. Whether they visit your blog or not is their personal choice. Nothing is stopping them to quit visiting if they find your words condescending. After all, you don’t pay them to visit.

Be polite and friendly if you want your readers to treat you as a friend. No one really likes to befriend bullies.

Reply to every commenter in person – It ticks me off when I make a comment on a blog (especially when I ask a question) and the blog owner does not care to reply back to me. Comments section on blogs are there for a reason – use them to interact with your readers. There are bloggers who have turned off the commenting option for some silly reason they give, but it’s still understandable. They tell me straight away: read this and move on. No comments allowed. But if you have enabled commenting, you should consider replying to those who take the time to comment on your blog.

As I said, virtual world is not a whole lot different from the real world. In real world, if we talk to someone and get a blank stare in reply, we assume that either that person is too arrogant or a bit on the other side of sanity. This is exactly what I think of the bloggers who don’t care about my comments. I think of them as too proud or too reserved. So, on I move.

Speak in a conversational voice– As opposed to conventional writing, blogs are supposed to be conversational. None of your formal business-like writing rules hold anymore. Therefore, if you want to elicit replies from your readers, talk to them as you would talk to them in the real world.

This is the beauty of blogging. You can be conversational and yet avoid the mistakes you make in real world conversations. It’s writing because you can edit your words and decide what to say and what to hold back. It’s a conversation because you are talking to your readers and you want them to respond to you. You get the best of both worlds!

Call your readers by name – Hearing someone say our name makes us all tingly with excitement. And believe me, this rule holds even in the online communications.

Whenever you reply to your commenters, use their name freely, e.g. “You are right Chris”, “Are you sure Matt?” This gives your comment a human touch, and your readers are delighted to see that you care about them.

Sometimes a commenter leaves his website name instead of his own name, so to find out his real name, visit his website and look under his post titles, in the post meta-data section, or go to his ‘About’ or ‘Contact ‘ page to dig out his real name. Come back and address him by name!

Kick off discussions – Most bloggers do reply to comments but they don’t push the discussion forward. The discussion pattern in comments usually goes like: comment-reply, another comment-reply and so on. If you reply to a commenter and he replies back to you, this is what I call a discussion, or a conversation. But how do you do that?

Simple. Ask questions. Encourage them to reply back, ask them to clear up a point, solve a riddle, expand on their previous comment, etc. This way, you get to know your readers better, pile up comments, make relationships, and get all other social benefits associated with comments.

Things to do and avoid on other blogs

Don’t leave short comments – It’ll only take a moment longer to come up with something worthwhile to say. Comments like “Nice post” and “Good tips” are not helpful. If you are out there to network and build relationships with other bloggers, you’d better add value to their blog.

Reply back – You go out in the blogosphere in commenting frenzy, leave comments on tons of blogs and never check back to see if someone replied to you. Not nice. When you reply to a post, you engage in a discussion, and it becomes your responsibility to keep up with the discussion till the end, or at least as long as others are replying to you.

Return the favor – If a blogger adds something valuable to your discussion, you go and add something valuable to his discussion. If a blogger has been voting you up on all social media/bookmarking sites, you should check out his blog and return the favor. If a blogger has been linking to many of your posts, you should mention his blog in one of your speed-linking posts (if you don’t do such posts, do them). You’ll enjoy giving back as much as you do receiving.

Blogs are platforms for discussions, and the social web thrives on the give and take rule on equality basis. To make friends, and have successful relationships in the blogosphere, you have to be a giving, caring, listening, and a talking human being, not a mere bot who types away post after post incessantly in a hope that people would come in hordes and form a fan club around you.

What’s been your experience in terms of building relationships through blogs?

Mohsin writes at Blogging Bits.

Public Service Announcement: No ‘Short’ Posts Today

Bloggers Everywhere: If you can do one thing today, please do NOT write a ‘short’ and ‘to the point’ post.

Just don’t. You’re probably doing it wrong (there’s nothing unique / interesting / useful / powerful / likeable / discussable about your post) and not only is it adding to the noise, it’s also turning potential readers away from your blog once they find you talking about the same thing you’re reading elsewhere.

In other cases, there’s no meat on the bones – instead of raising a question and leaving it fashionably open-ended to allow for interesting conversation, the blogger leaves the slate blank with only a few scribblings that pique interest but leave the reader disappointed and feeling empty.

Exceptions

In some situations, short posts work. If you’re a leading news blog, then short posts work wonders because you are the news breakers, not the ones regurgitating it. However, to reach this level requires a certain level of audience, which you’re not going to build by regurgitating news from other sources (who do you hit first in the day for your sports news – ESPN or a blogger you’ve never read before?).

Build Your Audience Through Quality

Quality does not mean quantity, so don’t think that I’m advocating 2400-word blog posts (those work, for sure, but there are less painful ways too).

Instead, quality means two things:

One, sending your readers away with something to remember and talk about later in the day (and if you’re lucky, tomorrow). In the sea of noise you must stand out and stick in the reader’s mind – your job’s a bit easier because they’re already reading what you’re writing, but you will be forgotten if you cannot produce something that they will remember.

Two, consistently pushing yourself to improve. Let’s face it, we’re not the best bloggers in the world, you and I. But we have the opportunity to observe those around us who ARE ‘great’, and push ourselves not only to match them but eventually to be better than them. It’s not a question of whether it’s possible or not (you can’t actually be Steve Pavlina) but it’s definitely a question of how much you want it and how hard (and smart) you’re willing to work on it.

So, please – if you’re going to blog today, don’t do the usual short post. Think of how you can best serve your readers, and give them something to remember for the weekend.

Warning: Read This Before Starting A News Blog

I don’t have anything against news blogs. There is always a place for news blogs in any niche that has a lot of news. However, the problem with news blogs is that they are easy to copy. By their nature, news blogs are basically saying the same things.

You may have heard of the “echo chamber”. This phenomenon occurs whenever many of the blogs in a niche begin to link to and talk about a popular news story.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course. However, oftentimes, the bloggers just write a general post about the story. They don’t add unique commentary or a unique angle. So, when you browse through the blogs, they’re all just “echoing” each other. There is no real difference between the posts. They all say the same thing.

That’s the problem with news blogs. If you are going to start the next Engadget , why should I visit your blog instead of Engadget? If I can get the same basic information from Engadget, why should I read your blog?

Unless you have the advantage of getting the news before the other bloggers, it will be tough to be successful. Only a couple news blogs per industry will be successful. These blogs will get the bulk of the links and traffic because of their branding and their dominant positions in the search engine results pages.

Be Different

If you have a news blog, strive to be unique. Do things that will set you apart from the crowd. Write more opinion pieces. Write with a unique angle. Get an attention-grabbing blog design. Add interesting commentary of the news.

Even if you only create one unique piece of content a week while the rest of time you just report the news, that content will go a long ways in setting you apart from the rest of the news blogs.

Exceptions

There are exceptions to my principle. Here are a couple of them.

Big market
Who knows? Maybe the tech industry is bigger than I think. Maybe because of it’s huge market size, there is room for another news tech blog to be successful.

Low competition
If there are only a few quality news blogs in your industry, you could be successful.

You’re already established
Your news blog has been around. You get a lot of traffic. Many people in the industry know you. Your blog is branded well. My advice is not for you. 🙂 My advice is for people who are thinking of starting a new news blog.

For New News Bloggers

Don’t think as a new blogger, you can just enter a niche and expect to get traffic because you’re doing what the other news blogs are doing. Remember you’re competing against them. They’ve had time to build their brand, build a lot of links, build relationships with other webmasters, and age their site (Google likes old domains). Be unique and you’ll increase your chances of being successful. Also, if you’ve got the money, one of the best ways to enter a market with a news blog is to buy an established one.

Feedback

What do you think of news blogs?

Who said guest blogging was worthless?

[Note from Ryan: This is a guest post about the success of guest posting;-)]

…or why guest bloggers are good for your site.

By Yan Fortin (Kiltak)
[GAS] Technology News

Last week, when Ryan from Performacing.com offered to have some of his bloggers guest post on 20 blogs, I jumped on the opportunity and added my name to the hat. Considering the number of readers Performancing.com has, I can’t really understand why only around 50 people or so subscribed to the contest, particularly since it was a great occasion to get some amazing content from new voices that have never been heard on participants’ sites.

I had the incredible chance to have David Peralty guest blog on [GAS]. David wrote an interesting piece titled “Cheap Wireless For Your Xbox 360.” After publishing it, I started ~~spamming~~ promoting the article to some of the most well-known DIY/gaming sites around, and boy was I surprised by the result.

Barely an hour after I started promoting the post, hits started trickling in: Lifehacker, xboxscene.com, stumbleupon, maxconsole.net, which resulted in the post being featured on del.icio.us/popular and many, many other sites (about 150 different referrers).

Here are some basic stats:

I wouldn’t be surprised if these numbers double in the next 48 hours since another big referrer has added itself to the list since I took that screenshot.

David, the author, was as surprised as I by the results, particularly since he thought that the subject he wrote about was common knowledge. We can look at this experience as a lesson: Never the thought of a subject as something widely known prevent you from writing new content about it.

When writing articles for their blog, most people only do the first part of the publishing process: they create content, and let it sit on their site for their readers to admire, hoping that someone, somewhere will pick it up and point back to it. The second lesson to be learned from this experience: Oftentimes, if you don’t get the word out, no one will notice you.

Writing a press release to get the word out.

I can’t stress enough how important this is. If you’ve published a piece that you are particularly proud of, compose a brief message letting potential sources know how your content may interest them. Don’t tell them to link back to you! Just provide the facts.

When you’re done, head over to Technorati and search for blogs that fall under the category of your post. In this case, I searched for xbox, xbox 360, games, gaming, and technology. I then compiled a list of the most popular sites that may be interested in David’s piece, and sent them my press release. Overall, I contacted around 20 sites, and five of them got back to me letting me know they would link back to us.

And what about the advantage gained by guest blogging?

If you decide to guest blog on other sites, you’ll reach a new audience, which means potential new readers for you. Depending on the size of the blog where you write, this may mean dozens or even hundreds of people flowing over to your site. It can also increase your reputation and build your profile as a blogging professional, which could result in paying gigs.

To wrap up, I’d like to thank David for guest blogging over at [GAS]. He did a fantastic job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we got the best results out of the 20 blogs that hosted the performancing guest bloggers.

Getting Buried at Digg: Why does traffic still flow?

My article Dealing With Stupid People Online made it to the front page of Digg.

And within 10 minutes it got buried.

Sources tell me that a story is most likely to get buried if it hovers on both the digg.com (technology) and digg.com/all front pages in the top 3 positions for several minutes. If it goes below the top 3 quickly enough, it stands a really good chance of hanging around for a few hours. Goes to show that human behavior, even of the democratic type, is quite predictable.

But what I’m really interested in is the anatomy of a “Digg bury” – what exactly happens.

For the longest time, I assumed that for a story to get buried meant that wit would effectively become invisible at Digg.

But this morning has proven that to be false. Immediately when the story hit the front page, I started monitoring it via pMetrics. When I noticed a slow down, I went over to Digg and discovered that the story had been buried (by stupid people, no less;-)

What surprised me was that traffic continued to flow from digg.com and digg.com/all

What can we make of this? Well, I’m not completely sure. I have three hypotheses.

Digg employs a cache, and many visitors are seeing a cached version of the front page that has yet taken the bury into account
Getting buried on Digg is like being sent to purgatory. Most people no longer see your site, but Digg displays it at some predefined rate (once ever 25 pageviews)
Upon hitting the front page, a bunch of Digg monitors like popurls indexed the front page article, referencing back to Digg, which shows up in the pMetrics referrals

The first option doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Traffic continues to flow 30 minutes later and Digg can’t possibly be spitting out cached versions of its dynamic front page 30 minutes later.

The second options is a live possibility. In fact, I wonder whether it’s possible to “resurrect” a buried story if it gets enough subsequent votes. This would be very interesting. Let’s say that Digg gives a story a second chance by taking a random sampling of viewers and seeing whether they find the story interesting enough for a vote. That would be way cool.

The third option also doesn’t seem to hold up to much scrutiny, primarily because many of the referral URLs are not sub-pages of Digg but the actual front-page. If the third hypothesis were true, then I’d primarily see referrals from the Digg story URL:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Dealing_With_Stupid_People_Online_Ignore_engage_insult

Dealing With Stupid People Online – What are your strategies? – Ignore, engage, insult?

So lately I’ve been encountering a lot of stupid people online. And I’m testing out different strategies for how to deal with them.

The intent of this post is to collect as many strategies and thoughts in one place about how to deal with stupid people online. Because there are plenty of them. And, because the more successful you become, the more of them you will encounter.

So what makes a stupid person?

As I use the term, a stupid person is a person who meets one or more of these characteristics:

Rather than positively contribute to a community, they prefer to attack people who are smart and successful
They have a hard time thinking outside of a binary mode (either you are for us or you’re against us)
They are closed to complexities and possibilities that take a little brain work (i.e. stick to simple and obvious)
They spend their lives wishing they were someone else (often letting jealousy take root)
Instead of acting, they wish

Some examples of stupid people

In the last few months, I’ve been dealing with a lot of stupid people. One such person decided to accuse one of my writers of contributing blog spam. The fact of the matter is that this stupid person didn’t take the time to read the article. He read the headline, which was about pain medications, and using the principle of induction, assumed that the article was another instance of blog spam. In fact, the article was written by a professional psychiatrist who has a genuine interest in helping people with chronic pain. The principle of induction works a lot of the time, but stupid people use it all the time.

Another stupid person has been emailing me asking for a permanent link on the front page of College Startup for $80. That’s a permanent link…for the life of the site…for $80. I don’t think that I have to comment much on this to make the point. It is self-evidently stupid.

Another person emailed me asking for a link. When I made a counter-proposal, the dude accused me of being a little guy with a little penis. The working assumption was that he was doing me a favor by offering a reciprocal link exchange…that his site was more popular than my site. Seeing that my counter proposal had been made in full knowledge that my site was probably 10x more successful than his, and seeing that he proceeded to insult me…well, I take it as an act of stupidity (probably combined with ignorance).

Yet another person responded to a very specific ad that I posted for a writer. The position, admittedly, didn’t pay extremely well. However, my intention was to create an opportunity for someone who was looking to establish him or herself as an SEO expert. The person who contacted me has proceeded to go on a raging campaign against me telling lies about how I pay most of my writers. The fact is that most of my writers get paid very, very well. Most of the time, when I start a website, I take a financial hit for the first 6 months, for the sake of my writers. Instead of taking note of this glaring fact, this disgruntled individual has ignored the evidence and instead is taking a single advertised position out of context; a position for which she wasn’t even qualified, and now acts as if I treat my writers poorly. She tells others that I do this too. Stupid. Disgruntled stupidity.

So what’s the point

The point of all this is twofold. First, it should be clear that stupid people will ultimately fail. Stupid people either have nothing to offer others or they have more poison to offer than solid food. In either case, they will become isolated and alienated.

But the more important question that I’d like to address in the comment section is this: how should smart, friendly, good-willed people react to stupid, disgruntled, mean-spirited people?

Do you ignore? Do you engage? Do you insult (as in this post)?

Using Video and Audio to Build Your Brand

I’m telling you that the only way to find success long term is to focus on building a brand.

I was browsing through Performancing’s archives and I came upon the above quote mixed into and lost among a bunch of comments. Not only do I stand by this comment, but I think it applies even more now than when I wrote it.

Though this has been my working principle now for about nine months, I was surprised to find that I hadn’t really written an article on what I see as the number one strategy for blogging success: building out a brand.

That’s going to change. Because I believe that developing a brand is critical to success, I’m going to write several articles on the idea, with the hope of giving some concrete tips for doing so.

Text content just doesn’t cut it anymore

Yes, your base of content needs to be text. And yes, if you are bootstrapping, you should probably start out with a text-only approach. But if you’re serious about building out your brand, and capturing an audience, then text should not be your final goal.

The fact of the matter is that you face your fiercest competition in textual content. Text is the easiest form of content to produce and in most niches, the supply far exceeds the demand. This fact is even more pronounced with Google’s recent emphasis on authority sites in the SERPS. Exact key-phrase matching is no longer the holy grail of the long tail. Goog has given the long-tail back to the rich and trustworthy.

Develop your brand with audio and video

Podcasting and video shows are a great way to start differentiating your brand from most of the rest, and to build a dedicated, demographically predictable audience (what advertisers value most).

While neither format directly monetizes as easily as textual content at this point, we can probably expect that to change as Google looks to turn YouTube into a Cash Cow rather than Cash Pig. Plus, the value of podcasting and video shows aren’t necessarily in immediate monetization. Brand building isn’t about immediate gratification. It’s about building long term equity and a large, growing audience community.

So how do you start?

The answer to that varies, but my best advice is to just jump into the deep end and try it until it works.

My friend David from Xfep not only has a great radio voice, but he also runs an entertaining weekly podcast that focuses on blogging. I’m willing to bet that David didn’t know how good his voice would sound on podcast before he tried it. But now his podcast is paying dividends as hundreds of people come back to listen each week. The Xfep podcast does wonders for setting David’s blog apart from all the “make money online” and “problogger wannabe” sites out there.

Similarly, I’ve been trying to think of ways to build the PopCrunch brand. While PopCrunch does very well with traffic and monetization, my ultimate goal is to build the PopCrunch brand into a household name (and as some friends would mockingly tell you, I’m aiming for triple digit Alexa). So what am I going to do to get there?

Well, my goal for 2008 is to launch a weekly TV Show (The PopCrunch Show) that’s similar in theme to The E! Network’s Soup. Additionally, I’d like to launch a monthly TV Show for Style Crunch, a weekly show for TV Crunch and a weekly show for HipHop Crunch.

Wait. I almost forgot;-) Just today PopCrunch launched a weekly show for HipHop Crunch, affectionately called “The HipHop Crunch Show” – and while the first episode isn’t perfect, it’s certainly damn good. And things can only get better, right? That’s what you call jumping into the deep end and coming out on the other end a pretty good swimmer. I even had my own theme song produced! This gig just gets more fun every day.

So now what?

Ah, now for the tough part. I’m already having video produced for the HipHop Crunch show (3 months earlier than I had planned). But what good is video if no one knows about it? Ah, this is where I long for the good old days of textual content and exact phrase matching. But, alas, it’s time to look for new and unique distribution channels. iTunes. YouTube. and… well, it’s time to go on an adventure;-)

WordPress Theme Release: Estranged from Performancing

After a month’s hiatus, Performancing is excited to bring you its latest wordpress theme, Estranged. Designed by Thord Hedengren the theme utilizes large, crisp fonts to create a simple yet eye-catching theme design.

As a two column theme, some people might be turned off by the presence of only one sidebar, but as a problogger, I can confirm that all of my most successful sites are actually single sidebar designs. Why is that? Because the best way to monetize a blog is to highlight the content, and then monetize within the content. Sidebar monetization is way oversold. Trust me.

On a personal note, I love this theme so much that I am already personally using Estranged on several of my blogs including Psych Grad School and plan to eventually modify it for use on College Startup, my home blog.

With a unique color scheme and big, bold font, the Estranged theme can literally work for any blogging environment. I personally like it in the college/education niche, but I know at least one person whose going to be using it for a left-leaning political blog and another whose going to use it for a health related blog. The fact is, the theme is perfect for any site that takes it’s content seriously.

To see a live preview of the theme, click here.
To download the theme, click here.

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