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10 Reasons Why Blogging for PR and Marketing Works

Just like the early days of the internet where people wanted to keep the capitalists out of Usenet, and history repeated with the web, even now it seems there are still people who want to keep marketing out of blogging. For me this is just daft, the web is a reflection of the real world and the real world contains people who want to buy and sell products and services. Get over it.

So those concerns aside, should companies look at blogging as a marketing channel? Any company should at least look into blogs. I really believe that, and in fact I have recommended blogs as a solution a couple of times even during my brief spell away from the marketing world. What is this belief based on?

Are you a Blogger for Hire?

After having to find a good copywriter for a project I have no time to write for myself, it occured to me that maybe there were a few bloggers for hire in the Performancing audience.

Actually, im guessing there’s quite a few. The position was filled, satisfactorily, but I’d really like to know who’s out there for hire, and what your background/experiences being a blogger for hire are.

Do you get regular work?
How do you find new clients?
How do new clients find you?
What is the most difficult challenge you face in your work?

So, come on, if you’re for hire, let’s hear about it. No ads please, but do tell us about your experiences being a hired blogger…

Yahoo’s Lame Feeds

UPDATE: See here for the details, but the short version is it’s an old feed not being redirected: Newer feeds are full text.

Speaking of Yahoo, i was reading my feeds this morning, when not for the first time, I got terribly irritated with the Yahoo Search Blog. Irritated because to actually read the story I was interested in, i had to click through to the damn web page!

Sheeesh…. I have my Feed reader, deliver appropriate content to it. Include ads if you wish, i won’t mind — but man, Yahoo of all companies should be delivering full feeds shouldn’t they?

WordPress Give Insight into Monetization Strategy

Matt Mullenweg has just announced two new interersting additional features to WordPress.com

Just launched some pretty major features at WordPress.com: private blogs, store, and custom CSS.

I am more interested in the insight into their monetization strategy though.

So the idea is you buy credits at $1 each. For the new Custom CSS (and only so far) product it will cost you 15 credits, so that is $15 a year for the privelage of tweaking your theme. If only a percentage of users take this up that is plenty of cash into the coffers and I expect this to be the first of many small, cheap upgrades that together will probably add up to a pretty sum.

My first reaction was this seems a pretty lame first product if you ask me, I can think of others I would have preferred. After thinking on it a while I think this is a good move. This nicely introduces the WordPress.com user base to the idea that it’s not all free without holding a gun to the users head saying “pay up or lose out”. Anyone using WordPress.com just because it is free will probably not miss this functionality, those who are interested in a more unique look will not be overly put off by the price tag.

What I would have thought though, if this is the route they are going as a business strategy, would have been the option to use your own domain. Perhaps that will be next? WordPress.com users would probably pay extra to get Javascript ability, allowing for third party advertising and Performancing Metrics.

This will be interesting to observe. Good move Matt and co, I hope it is well received.

Find Out What Yahoo’s YPN Ads are Really Like

My friend Loren Baker over at SEJ has commited to a 7 day test of Yahoo’s YPN contextual ad system. That post, from his third day in the test, makes for pretty interesting reading if you’ve not tried YPN on your blogs.

Loren asserts that the contextual targeting improved from dismal on day one, to pretty damn good on day three. Talking about day one he says…

“If we had not made the commitment to stick with YPN for one week we would have probably switched back to Google AdSense”

Apparently the quick turnaround on targeting was due to some pretty spiffy customer service, but it makes you wonder how that’s going to scale when Y! finally open the doors and let the rest of the world play

Ms. Holland shot me back an email early that morning stating that the relevancy problem had been fixed and she would be monitoring Search Engine Journal throughout the day to enhance the contextual targeting. Now that my friends is excellent and swift customer service!

I can’t imagine that happening when they have hundreds of thousands of users in the system…

I’d be interested to hear the Performancng publishers points of view and experiences on YPN, so if you’ve tried them, or are currently using them, tell us about your experience.

Laura Scott: BlogHer, pingVision & Drupal – Part 3

Laura Scott, President of pingVision LLC is a graphic and interactive media designer with a background in print production, television and web. On the eve of the 2006 BlogHer conference and just after upgrading the BlogHer site I posed some questions to Laura and she has provided some great insight. This interview discusses a little about Laura, Drupal and her work with the BlogHer community site.

This is the third part of the interview. Part 1 and Part 2 are also here on Performancing. If you’d like clarification from Laura on any of the points feel free to ask them in the comments and Laura and I will do our best to get you an answer.

As to why this part is so much shorter – just blame my inability to divide properly… 😉

What features in the next Drupal release seem exciting to you?

You mean in terms of the next major release around the end of this year? Well, the improvements in caching and query structures being discussed right now on the development list are quite exciting. Drupal’s power can come at a cost in terms of demand upon the server, not so much in the basic core but when you start adding the additional modules and functionality that most websites need these days. It will be great when the code is made even more scalable, so that we can build more complexity on the same hardware.

But most interesting to me are the continued developments in the theming system. Right now, there’s a lot in a Drupal page that is pre-formatted by the system itself — especially in some of the contributed modules. As a designer, that has driven me crazy more than once. I’m most interested in the changes planned to move this all into the theming, so that what you see is totally governed by the theme and the theme calls up the data in a way that is best for that particular site. We’re still limited by web standards and all the various ugly hacks you have to do to make websites work in Internet Explorer, but there’s still a lot we can do.

I’m also loving the new contributions in the rich media area. With the spread of broadband and the newer video codecs available, you can get some pretty high quality video on websites, even in Flash. And same for the music world. We’re just finishing development on a grassroots independent music community site that would not have been possible on that budget just six months ago.

And all this is changing everything. It’s an insurgent economy being born, and Drupal is right there in the thick of it. It’s great! Really, I’m just glad Drupal is there with such a great community of developers. I take the surprises and API changes as a given, just part of the price of working with free open source software. But considering that nearly all these changes end up making Drupal even better, I can’t complain. I’m hoping that once we get staffed up we’ll have more time to contribute to the community effort. Right now, it’s just one website after another — but that’s great, because they’re all really interesting projects that take us into different directions.

Women Bloggers – BlogHER or BloggER?

Back in January, we had a great discussion about women in blogging, and try as I did, I still didn’t manage to get much female representation here on Performancing — a great shame, as I know we have some awesome bloggers (who happen to be women) in the Performancing membership.

Today, i see Kathy Sierra of “Creating Passionate Users” posting what I’m sure will become a much talked about piece called I am not a “woman blogger” — In it she makes some fine points:

I am “one who blogs” (among many other things). I happen to be a woman. But I am NOT a blogHer, and my male co-author is not a blogHim.

I write code. But I am NOT a programmHer.

I write tech books. But I am NOT a writeHer.

I ride horses. But I am NOT a rideHer. (sounds vaguely sexual… never mind)

I am NOT a skiHer or a skateboardHer or a runHer.

I work on ecological causes, but I am NOT an enviHERmental activist.

And I am NOT typing this on my computeHer (even if it is, I must say, a sexy-yet-adorable black MacBook)

These are my passions, but they reflect the part of me that is about horses, running, skiing, skating, the environment, writing, or creating. If I relabel them to reflect my gender, I believe both (my gender and the labeled thing) are diminished by the “Her” qualifier.

And in talking about the coverage of the recent BlogHer conferance, Kathy has this (among much else) to say, and its what clinched forgoing an early coffee to quickly get this post out the door — Im dead keen to hear what the women of Performancing have to say….

I’m tired of being told things about myself that sound as foreign to me as they might to a space alien. I am tired of others describing what it’s like to BE me. I’m tired of being told what others think of me. And I’m especially tired of being told how naive I am, and of having my accomplishments diminished by women who insist that to have visibility as a “Woman Blogger” I must have done something, um, special. And by “special”, I mean… sucking up, kissing up, or otherwise catering to the “male establishment that’s oh so determined to keep me “invisible.”

The professional and semi-pro blogging women I know of at Performancing tend to fly low under the radar here, but they’re just as industrious, just as savvy, as anyone else making a living from blogging — I like to think of the whole of the Performancing membership as containing members of the real blogosphere, those bloggers not all puffed up with their own self importance, busy bellowing their opinions into the echo chamber, but those bloggers quietly getting on with the business of blogging.

Men and Women alike.

Tell us what you think…

Psst… Wanna Test Drive the New PFF?

Im posting this from the latest version of Performancing Firefox, the #1 blog editor (which just happens to be free! aswell…), and though it’s a more subtle update than some others, it’s about to introduce a whole new level of power to users, designers and programmers…

http://performancing.com/files/performancing-1.3rc1.xpi

Grab the BETA version of 1.3, and let us know what you think, or if you find any last minute bugs — we’d really appreciate your help in spotting anything that needs fixing ahead of a general release!

Main New Features

Support for Addons — PFF can now be extended
Support for Themes — If some enterprising blog designer doesn’t spot the obvious opportunity here…
Localization – We have just the one language in so far, Arabic, complete with Right to Left support, but there’s much more to follow as we start contacting all the kind folks who’ve offerend to help — much more on the tremendous effort of our Arabic partners on general release.

Of course there are a number of bug fixes and stability enhancements, but i’ll let Jed talk you through the details when we release in full — there will also be a number of cool tutorials on how to extend and theme PFF 1.3

For now, enjoy, and please let us know what you think, or if you find any last minute bugs!

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