Advertising

Could you make a living out of creating how-to videos? According to New York Times, people are:

Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

It makes sense, in-demand content is the fuel of the web. More and more people are turning to the web for answers. Advertisers want to be where the eyeballs are.

What surprises me is all the coverage seems to be around people selling their videos to sites for $20 a pop, or sharing revenues with YouTube. Nobody is talking about the sites that are PAYING for these videos and how much THEY are making.

To me that is where the real action is.

Yes, $20 for a 5 minute video might sound like a fun way to make money, but think about this for a second. Buying a $20 video that could bring in tens of thousands of views consistently, an asset that lives on, seems like the wiser side of the deal.

How-to videos are not ephemeral like other topics. Fixing your plumbing air lock or building a scale model of a tank are pretty ever-green subjects.

Then there is the higher potential profits to be found in premium paid memberships.

It seems like video is well worth looking at if you have the skills or the willingness to learn them.

In my opinion, Reddit is the most consistently interesting social media platform around today. Despite being ridiculously simple and having the least number of hoops to jump through to register and submit, I think it offers the most interesting stream of Internet news around.

In addition to the main page of Reddit, one of the places I hang out the most is the page where all my friends post their latest stories:
http://reddit.com/r/friends/new?sort=new

I visit this page about 5x per day and vote for all the stories that my friends have submitted. And many of my friends do the same for me.

Why not post your reddit username in the comment section so that I can add you as a friend and vote on your stories.

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Shortly after posting about timeline tools for info presentation on the web, I came across another tool, My Timelines. This timeline tool is based on SIMILE Timeline, so it can be embedded into any website or blog platform. It’s similar to the Freshlabs SIMILE Timeline WordPress plugin in that it creates a river of news. But the difference with My Timelines is that you supply an RSS feed (or Atom or RDF) and it produces the timeline from the items. This is a much nicer way to scan a niche’s headlines.

Process

Here’s the general process for building a niche monitor using timelines:

1. Pick the blogs/ sites that you want to monitor.
2. Mash up the feed set into a superfeed.
3. Burn the superfeed’s URL at Feedburner. (See reason below, under Superfeed.)
4. Use My Timelines to build a river of news with the Feedburner superfeed.

Superfeed

I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to build a superfeed of some of the SplashPress Media sites related to blogging, design, podcasting, webworking, freelancing and loosely-related topics. (Because Yahoo Pipes generates a dynamic RSS feed for each Pipe, the URL has some parameters in it. This seems to clash with MyTimelines code, so I had to burn my Pipe’s URL in Feedburner before I could get it all to work. So to use MyTimelines, you must have a “straight” feed URL that uses no parameters.)

Here are the sites I mashed together:

1. Performancing (feed).
2. Blog Herald (feed).
3. Blogging Pro (feed).
4. Wisdump (feed).
5. Business Logs (feed).
6. Devlounge (feed).
7. Audival (feed).
8. Have Laptop Will Travel (feed).
9. Social Platform Journal (feed).
10. Tubetorial (feed).

The superfeed is sorted reverse chronologically, with no limits on the number of items from each source feed. I’ve used my Yahoo Pipes pipe to truncate the superfeed size to 50 items (the most recently published across all the sites). So the sites that are most active will be the ones with the most prominent news items.

Sample Timeline

The irony is that I don’t have admin access to the Drupal theme of this site. so I cannot do a live embed in this post of the resulting timeline. What I’ve done is included a snapshot, below, which links to a live embed on one of my test sites. Also, somewhere in this post, near the bottom, you’ll see a link for an attached HTML file. I’ve created a sample page with the timeline embedded. You can use this page as a guide for how to do your own timeline embedding. (If you want to add a timeline to a blog page, you’ll need to insert some code into your HTML header. Just follow the instructions at MyTimeline.)

Here is a snapshot of the resulting SplashPress superfeed timeline:

Depending on your browser, you might notice that, unlike most timelines, the display is synced up to the first news item of the current day in your timezone. This isn’t necessarily the most ideal setup. It might actually be better if MyTimelines had synced on the most recent news item at far right. Though I guess it depends on your browsing style. Note the little vertical ticks in the bottom bar, which show instances of other news items, extending to the left and right. Use that as a guide to know when to stop scrolling. (Tip: Double click your mouse cursor to either side of the clear “window” in the bottom band to get partial scrolling in different directions.)

Summary

A timeline built using MyTimelines is a far simpler solution than any of the niche monitors that I’ve discussed previously. It’s arguably also easier to consume news items because of the visual approach.

FOOTNOTE: I’d said in the previous timelines post that I’d talk about how to use WordPress to build custom timelines. I’m just putting the finishing touches on that article, and it’ll appear some time early next week.

Today started bad and only got worse. It’s days like these that make me want to escape to a log cabin in the mountains somewhere far away. Ever feel like that?

It started with me feeling nauseous and only got worse with me making someone angry, which then made me feel physically sick.

This isn’t the first bad day on record, nor will it be the last. Quite a few of you will have much more valid bad-day reasons than my small troubles. But the woe we feel is real to us, even when trivial to others.

So it’s not new, we all get those days, and if we are going to get anywhere we have to keep plugging away.

What keeps us going?

A big boost came from my twitter followers sympathy and cheer-ups. They didn’t judge me, they didn’t tell me how they had it worse (while I expect many do), they just sent me some good vibes. That makes me smile.

The lesson there is be nice when you are riding high and things are going well now because some day you might want some nice back.

Next booster is knowing what I am in this for. My daughter came home from school. She lit up the room. Kind of puts things in perspective. It often helps to look at the big picture, think of what will be important to you next year or ten years from now.

How do you deal with the off days when everything you touch turns to poo?

Linkbait is content that has been created with the intent to draw backlinks. With writing, these types of articles usually require a significant amount of effort to complete as they are intended to be quite impressive and informative, and they usually require a great amount of research. It is a recently popular trend to write linkbait for blogs, and I have had plenty of experience with doing just that as it was my primary job back when I wrote for Mashable. Now here at Performancing, this post is essentially a guide for all of you future expert linkbaiters in the making, and I used (and still do use) this to create and evaluate all my previous linkbait as well.

Topic

A great linkbait will have a specific topic. Just like blogs, the more specific the focus, the better chance there is to have a great amount of interest generated. It should be something catchy and interesting, but it should also appeal to a specific niche. Common sense will apply here, but as I will repeatedly say, knowing your niche will help. Once you create the topic, you then must determine if it is even worth pursuing the task of researching and writing the linkbait.

Uniqueness

People like stuff that is new, creative, and unique; a great linkbait should have all of those qualities. Social news sites like Digg are really a double edged sword as it can be a great way to expose your ideas, but it also means that most of the stuff people think up has already been done. You must ask yourself what you can create that will quench the reader’s thirst for information and entertainment. If you have the answer, then you are well on your way to creating a new great linkbait.

Usefulness

There is little point of putting in the work to create a linkbait if it is not useful to those that put in the time to read it. The success of the linkbait depends on how useful the article is, and if it is, people will link to it as they will believe that others could find it to be useful. If everything goes as planned up well, the article will continue to grow in popularity as more people discover and share it (i.e. the domino effect). Knowing your blog’s niche will make this easier.

Quantity

How long or short should a linkbait post be? That depends on what you are covering; however, most people have a short attention span, and just because you have a lengthy post does not mean it is a great linkbait. Instead of trying to add as much content as possible to make an article appear impressive, try adding only the content that most relevant to the initial topic.

Quality

Finally, a quality linkbait should be, what else, 100% superb quality. As I mentioned before, a quality linkbait takes a nice chunk of time and effort to complete, and you should plan it all out before even starting. You should take the time to ensure that all the facts are correct, the article is properly edited, and the flow of the content is great. After all, what could be worse than spending so much invaluable time to create a sub-par article.

Hopefully these tips make your first or next linkbait article worth the time and effort. There are many more in-depth resources on the web, but these should be the stepping stones for any great link-gathering masterpiece.

Did you know that Performancing Services can write and promote great linkbait?

Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I’m relatively sure that I’ve identified a patterned mistake that Google’s algorithm makes.

Here’s how it goes:

• You write a really interesting article and it makes the front page of Digg
• Your article is provocative enough to draw a steady stream of comments for the good part of 1 week
• You gain dozens if not hundreds of solid, editorial backlinks to your article from reputable sites
• A week after publishing, your article disappears from Google’s index, while many of the articles referencing yours remain

So I’ve noticed that with my last five articles to make the front page of Digg (i.e. a pattern), the article disappears from Google’s index completely, even on an exact search for the article title:

http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Ten+Worst+Job+Interview+Questions+Ever

The interesting thing to note is that on such a search, 70-100% of the first 10 SERP results return articles that reference the original. In such a case, you’d think that Google would clearly know the source of the article.

But apparently some penalty filter gets applied. Now, you might think that it’s a duplicate content penalty. But hear me out, I don’t think so.

Here’s my theory:

I think that Google will often put a penalty on a web-page that changes it’s content too much. In the example I used above, the source article received over 300 comments. In other words, the content changed drastically from when Google first indexed the article to when Google subsequently indexed the article multiple times in response to the 100’s of backlinks that the article received.

So my theory is basically that too many comments, which, in human terms, is almost always a good sign, can actually hurt your site from an algorithmic perspective (both in terms of content dilution and content transformation).

Google’s algorithm balances a number of factors, and if backlinks were the only indicator, then articles that get widespread attention, hundreds of backlinks and front page Digg recognition would clearly be at the top of any exact-match title search.

Since a large volume of comments is normally a sign of vitality (unless you’re getting spammed), Google needs to find a way to reward such vitality rather than punish. Unfortunately, despite claims of a looming “true AI” algorithms still make critical mistakes and punish good online phenomena.

Suggestion: Create an html tag that publishers can use to identify *primary* content and another tag to identify *secondary* content. This way, the transformation of content that the comments section naturally produces can be differentiated from the content that originally drew such a reaction in the first place.