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Typepad Crashed Again, I Must Be An Idiot

Remember when Typepad’s hosting took a nosedive last month? In general, TypePad customers were forgiving as the company seemed sufficiently apologetic (and they gave us a cookie).

Here’s what I said about it then:

I have generally liked Typepad, but it made me think–do I really want to be dependant on this company for a core service? On the other hand, other web hosts are not immune to problems like these, and sometimes they’re a lot worse. Typepad at least owned up to their problems, and are trying to make it right.

Well let’s be honest, I’m a freakin’ idiot for staying with these goofs. It was out again and this time even InformationWeek covered it.

So will this finally push me over the edge and force me to make the switch to self-hosted Movable Type? Or will I continue to be lazy and stay with a hosting company that isn’t living up to its commitments?

(The smart money’s on my continued laziness.)

Typepad users, are any of you fed up enough to leave?

Blogging Community Forums Launch Today!

The most important link on Performancing, the recent posts list, is about to get a whole bunch more important. Today we officially launch the Performancing Member Forums, where, you, and we, can ask questions, post opinions and generally chat about blog related topics. The best way to track what’s going on in those forums is of course the recent posts link, that you’ll find on the right hand menu.

Performancing Member Forums

Aswell as providing support for our Firefox extension, and other tools that you’ll hear about next year, we wanted to address the need for bloggers to have a place, a community in which to ask questions, get advice, and chat with like-minded people.

There’s a whole ton of things i wish I could just “ask” almost every day, and judging by the amount of questions that come through the feedback form alone, I think im not the only one 🙂

You’ll find posting guidelines linked from each individual forum, though they’re pretty much the same as the general site guidelines and are pretty “common sense”.

Navigation Changes

If you check the right hand menu, if you’re registered and logged in, you’ll see some new links – one to the forums, and “create content” – which is a shortcut for posting forum topics aswell as homepage stories.

Expanding

We’ll want to expand the forums to cover specific subjects in time, but for now, as nobody likes a ghosttown, we’ve kept the forums very general — you’ll find forums for the general topics of:

  • Content
  • Design
  • Promotion
  • Revenue
  • Software
  • Member Lounge

The last one is particularly neat I think, as so long as it’s blog related, and not political/religious we can talk about pretty much anything we please in there — with a bit of luck it will provide a nice spot for getting to know eachother and talking about things not covered in the usual Performancing content.

Introduce Yourself

To kick us off, take a few moments to introduce yourself here. It’s a nice chance to get to know everyone a little better.

Hope you enjoy the new forums, a little help kicking off some of those topic areas would be greatly appreciated!

Avoiding Link Tedium Hell

We’ve posted before that link exchanges are stupid. That doesn’t mean you don’t need links, though. You do need links. The more the merrier.

But why exactly do you need links so badly? And how can you get them without being cast into to a slow, tedious, link building hell?

Links can be the difference between the life and death of a site, but they are especially important for a professional blogger, for three reasons:

  1. Direct, recurring traffic. – without traffic, what is the point? Links give you the most stable form of recurring traffic.
  2. Google juice. – It had to be said (as if you didn’t know it already). Links will help your site get more love from major search engines.
  3. Gaining authority. – If Doc Searls links to you, well then you must know something right? A link is the most basic form of recommendation on the Web. The more recommendations you get (especially those from authoritative people), the more authority you have.
    Authority = readers = bookmarks = more links = google juice = super happy ultra fun show!

My point is that links are critical to blog success, and you do need them. That doesn’t mean you have to waste your time doing crappy link exchanges though. I think the easiest ways for bloggers to get good quality links are:

  1. Create link bait. – Nick’s posted on this one before, and I won’t rehash it. Creating link bait on a regular basis however is probably the quickest route to strong growth.
  2. Send personalized emails to other bloggers pointing out specific posts that you think they may find interesting. – Again, I’m not advocating crappy link exchanges (most bloggers will not respond favorably to these anyway), however sometimes showing someone good content, and asking politely for a (non-reciprocated) link can do wonders.

What are some other (non-tedious) ways to get good quality links for a blog?

Self Sustaining Blogs

Wouldn’t it be nice if your blog ran itself? No, I’m not talking about “splogs”, I’m talking about letting your members run the show, and just sitting back and watching the ad money roll/trickle in. I have one blog like this, and wanted to throw the idea out there this morning to see what you guys think, and if we can improve upon the model. [Read more…] about Self Sustaining Blogs

Adsense: Which Blogs Rock, Which Stink?

Scrivs recently asserted that Adsense is a beginner’s first option, but a professional’s last. I found his analysis to be overly simplistic (he later admitted that there are exceptions to this).

The question I’m interested in, is when is Adsense likely to be a site’s primary monetization vehicle? And when is the right time to “go direct” with your ad sales?

I don’t have it in me to write a long post today, so I’ll get right to it:

Blogs centered around topics with high CPC bids are usually going to do well with Adsense. For instance, take the target of yesterday’s Monetization Makeover: Tom Keating’s VoIP Blog. If you go to the Overture View Bid Tool, you’ll see that the top bid for the keyword “voip” is $7.54. That “turns me on” contextually, if you know what I mean. *cough*

Blogs centered around topics with low CPC bids are usually going to do poorly with Adsense. Take the Pope Watch. Fire up the Overture View Bid Tool, and what do you get? The top bid for “pope” is $0.21. Remember, that’s before Smart Pricing, and before Google gets their cut… which doesn’t leave much for you.

Blogs which don’t have a particular theme, or that are “personal” type blogs, are usually going to do poorly with Adsense. Take a site like BoingBoing. It doesn’t have a particular theme except for “funny, interesting stuff”. “Funny interesting stuff” related keywords are not going to get bid on by advertisers, so contextual advertising won’t yield much here, but that brings me to my next point…

Blogs with exceptionally large traffic and name recognition, or who are viewed as the authority in their niche, are more likely to sell direct sponsorships. A site like BoingBoing is famous enough (and delivers enough impressions) to interest ad buyers in advertising directly. This is a case where advertiser interest would justify going to the trouble of contacting advertisers, holding their hands, invoicing them, tracking impressions, etc. (managing advertisements can actually be quite a bit of work).

Exclusive: Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank

I recently got the chance to grill senior Google engineer and webmaster relations chappy Matt Cutts on some issues specific to bloggers. Matt took his sweet time getting the interview done, but it was well worth the wait. In it, he talks about Google’s problems with splogs on Blogger.com, and their efforts to solve the issue, aswell as giving advice to bloggers on ranking in Google and how bloggers can use Google to find and organize information. Grab a coffee, sit down and enjoy, it’s a good’un — thanks Matt!

Q. Reputation within the Blogosphere could be the one and only area that Google noticeably trails Yahoo! We’ve seen some promising moves from Google to provide bloggers with tools and service, such as Google Reader, but what other areas should bloggers be looking to you for in order to find and organize their information? Should we expect further news that will excite bloggers in the future?

I think Google actually has a pretty good story to tell here. Blogger provided one of the first easy ways to set up a blog. Google Reader lets you keep up with the feeds o’ your choice. And blogsearch.google.com is a good way to prowl the blogosphere, and it lets you do persistent searches and get the results as RSS or Atom. Google News provides alerts and also lets you get RSS or Atom feeds of persistent searches too, plus you can customize it for the topics you’re interested in. You can also load your own custom feeds into Gmail now as well. You can turn the clip feature off if you want, but it’s neat to have RSS sliding in above your inbox.

Lots of people might not know that My Search History lets you save your searches: you can bookmark/star a result and then add labels (tags) in there; you can also remove searches as well. Google Desktop Search has saved my bacon several times when I wanted to blog something and forgot where I saw it. Plus you can argue that AdSense was one of the first ways that bloggers were able to generate money from a site that might otherwise only be a hobby.

I think if you think of bloggers as a really hip subset of people who deal with information all day long (and that are often site owners too), some of the recent releases are useful. Sitemaps and its webmaster console is really interesting for debugging crawl problems, and Analytics is going to be good for people who want to get a handle on their visitors (e.g. repeat vs. new visitors). I can’t talk about future projects, but there’s 1-2 exciting/fun things that I’ve seen at the plex that make online life easier for people that spend their whole day dealing with information.

Q. Recently, Google’s Blogger service has been under increasing pressure to deal with it’s “splogs” problem. This has prompted some small engines to stop indexing Blogspot domains, and there’s been rumour that Google have stopped indexing them. Is this true, and what more can be done to curb the problem?

Google definitely hasn’t stopped indexing Blogspot domains. The Blogger team has been doing a ton of work on this, and I’ve gotten to see a lot of the steps that they’ve taken (e.g. more use of CAPTCHAs in suspicious situations) to improve things. They’ve made it a lot harder to create a lot of splogs, and the response time is also way down when something does slip through.

Just as an aside to readers, one of the things that Nick has dinged Google for in the past is a lack of communication. I think Jason Goldman, Pal, and the rest of the Blogger team have really done a good job at talking about the concrete steps that they’re doing to improve things. If you haven’t checked the Buzz blog that Blogger maintains, check out the posts that they’ve done about splogs:

They’ve also rolled out a lot of new features like comment moderation. And there’s still some things like flag-as-objectionable that may also prove helpful.

Is the splog problem “solved” on Blogger? I definitely wouldn’t call the issue done, because there are a lot of people out there trying to create fake blogs. But the Blogger team has done a bunch of stuff in response to this issue, and the team has made a lot of progress.

That one incident that generated such a flurry of posts was (I believe) mostly because of a batch of fake blogs that mentioned popular bloggers. I thought it was smart of the Blogger team to post a list of all the splog accounts that they deleted as a result of that incident.

I think there’s still some things that can be done to curb the
problem, but I think the Blogger folks are taking the right steps regarding splogs.

Q. Bloggers are becoming increasingly more interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and unfortunately this is prompting some rather spurious posts from “experts” whose information is often years out of date. If Bloggers need to know how to rank well in Google, where would you recommend they get solid information?

I think everyone should sit down with Google’s webmaster guidelines and just read it all. It will only take a couple hours, but the time is well worth it. Make sure you subscribe to the official search engine blogs. I have a lot of respect for Danny Sullivan, and there are some real experts at WMW and TW. If you’ve got any kind of coding experience, try to build a search engine yourself. You’d be amazed
what you learn. Take random info out on the net with a grain of salt unless you know something about the poster’s credibility.

Q. Can you give the Performancing readers a few tips on ranking in Google?

I wouldn’t bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I’d just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url. Don’t try to
rank for a huge phrase at first–pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up. Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility. I think you attract more links with a conversational style, humor, and doing your own research to produce new insights or tidbits of info. In my opinion, just commenting on other blogs isn’t as useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences. A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links. Original information or research is great bait to attract links. 🙂

Q. Adsense has become the #1 monetization choice for Bloggers, and for good reason. It’s a simple, powerful, and (mostly) relevant way of showing ads to readers, and monetizing blog archives. One thing many
blogs suffer from however, is adverts for “blog related” products and services. This sucks if you’re not talking about blogs, but *are* posting on one — is there anything we can do about that? Is there anything Google can do to help blogs avoid that kind of ad?

That’s a stumper. I asked around about this. One thing I love about the AdSense team is that they’re so open to feedback. Several people got a thoughtful look on their face and starting brainstorming about how to prevent blog-related ads from showing up too often in the future. The most concrete immediate advice I heard was a reminder about section targeting. Here’s more info about it.

In essence, you can mark out the heart of a page with your post and suggest that the ads tailor to that. You can also specifically carve out sections of the page to ignore. So if you’ve got a navbar or section that has lots of bloggy words like “blogroll” or “linkblog” then you could exclude that section of the page. I’ll keep you posted if I hear other good suggestions.

Q. Performancing has gotten some great reviews, and links this last week or two, people seem to like what we’re doing — can we get a mention on the Matt Cutts blog? 🙂

I’ve got my eye on it; I’m waiting for the right post to come along. I’ve enjoyed the articles so far. It’s got a nice amount of technical crunch to it. 🙂