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Elevenses: Chitka, 7 SIns, Asking for Links, More

There’s a few interesting stories and posts out there for your Monday morning elevenses, here they are in no particular order. If you have tips or links for performancing you can send them to [email protected]

Chitika on “Curiosity Clicks”
After Chitika’s ad unit tweaks to address “curiosity clicks”, they’re making an attempt to explain things on their blog. Interestingly, this opening paragraph just strikes a wrong chord with me:

So called “curiosity clicks” are those clicks generated by users more interested in checking out the eMiniMalls interface, or just curious about the products being promoted, etc., as opposed to clicks on merchant links leading to the respective merchant sites where users can directly purchase the product if they choose to.

Possibly that’s just bad wording, as i’d have thought that customers interested in checking out products was a pretty worthwhile click no? We have an interview scheduled to go out with the Chitika CEO Venkat Kolluri shortly, so watch out for that.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging
And they are?

  1. Using Free Blog Hosting Services
  2. Ignoring the Basic Principles of Good Web Site Design and Usability
  3. Being the Jack Of All Trades
  4. Not Posting Regularly
  5. Publishing Badly Written Posts
  6. Spamming and Stealing
  7. Failing to Establish a Personality

That post is an absolute gem, plenty of good advice in there — im particularly in agreement with #1 and #3

13 Tips on Asking other Bloggers for Links
Darren’s 13 tips are good, for me the trick is simple: Stop thinking about it from your point of view, and what you want, and picture it from the other persons perspective. Focus on what they want, and what you can give them. And sheesh, he’s so right (quoting Scoble) with this one: “Never beg a blogger for links. Say, instead, “here’s something you might find interesting.” That one absolutely nails it as far as drawing other bloggers attention to your posts goes.

Note the language “drawing other bloggers attention to your posts” — it’s soooooo much better than “asking for links” don’t you think?

W3C Feed Validator
Via Niall comes news that the W3C finally have a feed validator. It’s about bloody time!

Tehnorati Improvements
And finally, Dave Sifry posts on the recent improvements to Technorati. Now if they could only respond promptly to advertiser concerns, they’d have something…

How To Make Your Blog Sticky

One of the areas I feel most blogs fail at, is the concept of community. I know that’s an odd statement, as blogs are all about conversation, but most blogs seem to entirely miss the point of the “on site” community.

Sure you link to other blogs, and talk to other bloggers in your niche, sure you have comments enabled — in fact, in terms of distributed community blogs work really, really well. In terms of on site community however, they fail miserably for the most part. And it’s largely down to the blogger himself.

There are a few practical things you can do to foster your on site community, and trust me when I say that allthough the people that make up your community are mostly worthless in terms of monetization, they can be a core part of your blogs success. And with them, you can create something that goes way beyond the “one guy talking” approach many blogs take.

10 Ways to Make Your Blog Sticky

Here’s my list of top 10 things you can do to foster a sense of community among your readers.

1. Design for Repeat Visits

Forget all those stupid bells and whistles, useless navigation and other such “novelties”. When you design your blog, bear in mind that you want people to visit your site several times a week, or maybe several times a day. Use lots of white space, easy color schemes, large(ish) text and clear headlines and links.

Hint: Stupid mapping gimmicks are not sticky, they’re annoying.

2. Keep Advertising Minimal for Repeats

I wrote about time sensitive adsense last week. Try and extend the idea to showing less ads for logged in users — these people are NOT the ones that will click your ads, so make life easy for them.

3. Provide a Recent Posts List

And don’t just provide it, promote it! The recent posts list on Performancing is one of the most important links on the site. It allows users to track ongoing conversations much like you would in a forum. This is KEY to getting people to converse on your site. The idea of “comments” is good, but the idea of “conversations” is better, and by facilitating that, a post you publish today, could still be active weeks from now.

Often the value of our blogs is not in the original post, it’s in the conversation.

4. Answer Your Comments!

It’s an astonishing thing to have to say, but man, the amount of times i’ve commented on a blog, only to go back (i tag my off-site conversations as replies) and find that the author hasn’t even bothered to answer me, or aknowledge my comment in any way, is staggering. If you want people to talk to each other on your blog, you need to be part of the conversation.

5. Use the Right Language

It’s a small thing, but an important one I feel. Instead of talking about I, talk about We. Instead of talking about me, and you, talk about US. With me?

You need to give your readers a sense of ownership.

6. Post Frequently

And not just frequently, set a pattern and maintain it. If you plan on posting a few times a day, then post at similar times every day. It helps readers get a sense of momentum from your site, and gives them an indication of how often they should be returning or checking their RSS.

7. Private Message System

Either put in a private message system on your blog, to allow members to communicate amongst themselves, or make a link to a form to email other members without giving away their email addresses.

8. Allow Member Posts

Either on a pre moderated acceptance basis such as we do at Performancing or by inviting members to email you their news — give credit for submissions, and encourage those submissions.

9. Include Members in Decisions

And no, i don’t mean that you need to make site decisions via committee, I often say in these types of posts that i’ll most likely do my own thing anyway, but would appreciate some input on the subject. Including members in decisions about the site again fosters a sense of both community and ownership.

10. Don Neglect the Distributed Community

Dont ignore other blogs in your niche. It’s a mindset thing, but by not viewing similarly themed blogs as competition, but as friends, and linking to them generously, you’ll find it easier to keep your own members happy. Chances are they visit other blogs in your niche anyway, make it easy for them.

Any More Ideas for Making Blogs Sticky?

I’ve only listed 10 things there, there are undoubtably more ways in which we can foster a sense of community amongs our readers. Do tell us your thoughts in general, and specifically, what works for you.

Looking at Adsense’s On-Site Advertiser Program

Google have announced a new scheme where your Adsense blocks now can invite advertisers to sign up and advertise on your site. What does this mean to you us as publishers?

What’s this all about?

If you log in to your adsense account now you should see a little caption that says

NEW Gain new advertisers for your site directly from your pages with Onsite Advertiser Sign-up. See our What’s New page for details.

The idea is a potential advertiser will happen across your site, read the content, think “this is perfectly targetted for my prospects” and sign up to advertise.

starting within the next two weeks, advertisers will be able to bid for placement on your site right from your web pages. With Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, a new feature of AdSense, your AdSense ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’

Great stuff, why didn’t they have this sooner? That’s not all! They have set it up so the link…

takes interested advertisers to a page which you can tailor for your business. On this page they can see your details about your site and the Google AdWords program.

A personalised landing page! This is great stuff Google boys and girls. Attracting more advertisers to your site has got to be a good thing. So, where is the problem?

Minor hitch

Not a major problem but still a problem all the same. Do you have more than one blog or site running Adsense? If so you might end up confusing the advertiser if you do customise the landing page..

At this time, we only offer the ability to customize one landing page for each account. Advertisers will access the same custom landing page from ad units on any of your sites.

So while it is a great feature to be able to personalise the landing page, thus getting more conversions, you will either need multiple adsense accounts (against the TOS I believe, unless you sign up once for you personally and another for your business) or will have to wait until the multiple landing page feature becomes available.

Do I have to do this?

If you’d prefer not to participate in Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, you can opt out before it starts by visiting the My Account tab.

Unfortunately the opt-out is by account, not by site. Shame that as you could have left your best blog opted in and opted out all the others to get around the per-account personalisation.

What does this mean?

Advertisers can already target advertising at your site so that part is not new. You do not receive any credit or kick-back for gaining new adwords customers through this either, in fact they can not even tell you if anyone has signed up. No stats!

At this time, we are not able to provide details about how many advertiser sign-ups are made through your links

If you already directly approach advertisers or run a program with a “advertise here” button you might want to consider the revenue implications. I expect your own efforts will reward you better.

Amazon Beta Chitika Killer

Amazon have begun a beta program with it’s affiliates to test a system that will surely rival Chitika, but also IntelliTXT. No, im not kidding — popup JS windows that activate onhover on links linking to Amazon products. They show the usual suspects: Title, price, buy now, and could well be, if adopted and rolled out en masse, a killer way to monetize certain types of blogs.

Darren has more details on the new product including a screenshot.

With Navigation, Less Is More

The state of navigational links on blogs is getting out of hand. If you’re blog’s purpose is to make money, why do we insist on distracting our readers with hundreds of useless links?

Your blog should guide your reader to where she wants to go, or to allow her to discover where she wants to go. By placing huge lists of links in side navigation, or cramming the bottom of your posts with social bookmarking javascript links, you only make it harder for her complete her task.

Make Choices Simple

Give a child 2 things, and ask them to choose one. Now give them 5 things, and do the same. Now try it with 7. What generally happens, and i speak from experience, is the child gets confused by the choices, and quite often actually upset by not being able to choose.

Hopefully your readers are a bit more sophisticated than my 11mt old, but you see my point right? This works with anything: It’s easier to make a choice, if there are fewer items to choose from.

The Problem with Blogs

With blogs, i think there are two major problems:

  1. Template designers and blog systems have too many features — too busy playing catch up with competitors to realize their design choices are stupid.
  2. Bloggers get to make those choices. Im not saying bloggers per se are stupid, what im getting at, is the fact that faced with a lot of choices, an easy choice to make, is all of them!

Bloggers can be forgiven for not being design guru’s, im not one, and i doubt you are either. But template “designers” need to take a long hard look at design 101 and start producing templates that actually help readers, not overload bloggers with choices.

Some Things are Just Stupid

Let’s assume your blog’s purpose, or at least one of them, is to make you money. So we’re not talking about you livejournalers out there, or little jimmy’s cat blog, we’re talking about a website where every little decision you take can change the income you derive from that site.

Here’s some of the things i think in the above scenario are just plain stupid:

1. Blogrolls

Problem: People are getting used to blogs, sure, but they still expect a sidebar to be full of category navigation and contact details. Why the hell would a list of your favorite sites be a good candidate for that prime piece of real estate?

Solution: Put one link in your side navigation to a dedicated page of your favorite resources — hint: Make it a really great list of links, and it will add real value and attract links all by itself.

2. Archives

Problem: Again we find something utterly useless to most people taking up prime space on your blog and distracting/confusing your readers. This may have been all well and good 4yrs ago, before you started to try and make money on your blog, but now it’s just a waste of good space.

Solution: Create an archive page, if you must. Place one link to it from your side navigation. Use Categories as prime side navigation instead, people get it, and it’s not confusing.

3. Links at Bottom of Posts

Problem: It’s that whole “going overboard” thing again. There just isnt any need for a dozen different links at the bottom of every page. Contrary to what you might think, they are not helpful to most readers.

Solution: Decide what you do and don’t need. This depends largely on your audience. At performancing we think most of our readers are smart enough to be able to quickly copy a url and paste it into their email client, so no “tell a friend” for us. We also think many will have a bookmarklet or browser extension that helps them use things like del.icio.us – no need for one of those either then. You see my point right?

Try and chop that list of links down as much as possible.

4. Widgets and Gizmos

Problem: “Web2.0” is all very fun, but let’s face it, most of it is a useless bunch of drivel — putting these silly little mapping widgets, or social gizmos on a site that’s purpose is to make money is just moronic. Save that shit for personal sites, not businesses.

Solution: Realize that you don’t have to jump on every silly trend Steve Rubel posts about and that you actually have an opportunity here to really make something to be proud of. Make it simple, make it clean, and above all, make it pay!

Rant Over

Phew… as you can tell, that one’s been a long time coming heh! I do hope it makes some sense though, because really, the state of blog navigation is atrocious on the whole, and if making money is your goal, you really do need to avoid “feature creep” in navigation.

10 Business Models for Bloggers

Whether you’re blogging full or part-time, if you expect to make money, you need to have a clear business model. It’s no good just posting and expecting the cheques to roll in, you need to plan for how that cash will start flowing.

There’s a vast array of different business models out there that center around a blog. I want to look at what I see as the top 10 though, and get your thoughts on those, aswell as ones i’ve left out.

Here’s the top 10 business models i see out there currenty, in a very rough order of popularity.

1. Advertising

There are, as you might well imagine, several sub-sets to the advertising based business model. As a general revenue model though, it’s clearly #1 for bloggers — Adsense has made it possible for even the most low-traffic, uncommercial blog to make some money, but professional bloggers have taken contextual advertising to new heights with seriously targeted blogs, and well integrated ads.

There are a few types of advertising model though, it’s not all Adsense you know!

  • CPM based banner ads for broader, higher trafficked blogs
  • Niche advertising. Meaning pinpoint precision targeting and negotiated deals with ecom’s in that area
  • Sponsorship. Where you target a particular sector, and have a company “sponsor” your blog — not quite the same as regular advertising, as it’s very much a 2-way endorsement type of affair.

2. Affiliate Marketing

This could almost have been a subset of advertising, but really, done correctly it’s marketing not advertising. A typical affilite marketing based blog will be either:

  • A niche product / product group blog
  • A niche audience blog (no, not quite the same as above)

And will generate sales by sending traffic to selected merchants via in-post text links, banners and special offers. This seems to work great in product blogs, and if you combine it with some more regular advertising, you can start spreading your risk — one really good thing about affiliate marketing, is that if you get sick of the merchant, you can always just swap your links out for another, and it’s not uncommon to make bespoke deals with merchants in your niche.

3. Consultancy

Experts in their fields that provide consultancy, full time or outside of regular jobs can make a pretty good salary by blogging on their areas of expertise. It’s particularly common among PR companies themselves, marketing agencies and web based service providers such as Search marketing and business blog consulting.

4. PR Vehicle

This type of business model is very similar to #3 — Usually it compliments and existing model. Evangelizing your company or products on a blog can create a great way for customers, potential customers, other bloggers and press to interact with your company and products — thus selling more of them!

5. Lead Generation

Lead generation blogs are very much like consultancy blogs, in that their authors blog on areas of expertise, positioning themselves as experts in their field. The main difference is simply the end result. Whereas a consultancy blog will also “generate leads” for their consultancy offerings, a lead generation blog may very well take information sent to them and forward it to a company they have a standing deal with for completion, or perhaps nework for someone that can fill the request.

So, that was the top 5. The remaining 5 models are far less accurate in their ordering. Im really uncertain about a couple of them, and would welcome some feedback!

6. Product Sale

Possibly this one could belong further up the list, im not sure it does though. Thing is, it should do, as its a very effective model from what i can gather.

Focus on one product, or a small family of products and be THE site to go to for information on those products — Naturally, your blog will sell those products, either directly or indirectly using affiliate marketing or regular ads.

7. Donation

Probably the poorest excuse for a business model in the list in my opinion. I just can’t find anything to like about relying on the good will of readers for your income.

8. Subscription

If you publish an “expert blog”, one way to monetize it is to not publish all of your information. Make some of it, perhaps more detailed blog posts/reports or sections of the site by subscription only. You don’t see this a great deal, but it can be pretty effective in some areas.

9. Syndication

Syndication as a business model? Sure, works kinda like the consultancy or lead generation gigs. It’s not so common, but people do write specifically to get published in more traditional media, and on larger websites.

10. Ecommerce

This one, i have never spotted in the wild. Not yet anyway, because im 100% sure they exist! If you think about it, it makes some sense — im not talking about bolting a blog onto a shopping cart, im taking about turning a blog into a shopping cart.

It’s something i would personally love to expore more, so if anyone can add information to this entry, please do.

The way i see it is this: If blogs are conversation, and if links are speach, why the hell aren’t we talking about buying? Right there, in the blog — not pointing to a product page, posting about a product and writing your pitch as a blog post.

UPDATE: Thanks to Andy for reminding me about Woot! — not sure how i could have missed that, but i did, and it is an ecom blog imo…

Any More?

Come on, we all know i left out a whole stack there. What other business blog business models can we add to the list?