We thought we’d spice-up our pMetrics affiliate offering and give a full 50% on all referrals. That’s 50% for the life of the sign-up.
Now you can make up to $25 per sign-up. Sign-up 10 people per month and you could be looking at a steady $250/month. Not bad!
To celebrate the new affiliate offering, we’ve created a new affiliate image that we think will help you promote pMetrics more effectively:
Just make sure to replace the “6” with your own affiliate code.
I generally subscribe to 3-5 new blogs per month. Maybe they’re not new, but they’re new to me, because I’ve never heard of them or read them before. But trying to quantify the features of the blogs I subscribe to is hard to do. Why do I subscribe? Is it the content? The design?
Because I’m a curious guy, I decided to take some inventory of the blogs in my reader. It was actually a pretty fun experiment. I was surprised to actually see the design of some of the blogs. Since I read exclusively from my reader, I didn’t even remember what the design looked like 🙂
Here are 5 features I’ve found to be effective to convincing me to subscribe.
1. Would it be cliche to say that content matters?
I don’t really care if it’s cliche or not, content matters! If you don’t have regular decent articles, or at the very least articles that encourage lively discussion, then don’t even bother starting a blog. I’m dead serious. Blog content, to a person who reads 80+ feeds, is of paramount importance. Don’t even think about softball articles.
2. A clean, simple, aesthetically pleasing design
If you can’t design a site for your blog software, pay someone to do it. We are professionals. This is what we do. You can’t ignore the fact that if your design sucks, you won’t get as many readers. I’m partial to sites with the content on the left and two well used right hand sidebars, but that’s just me.
3. Readable Text
If your readers are like me, then they will bookmark your site before subscribing to it. Normally, I will bookmark the blog in del.icio.us and come back once or twice a week and check the content. I use this time to see if the site is worth a spot in my reader. So…. that means for at least a week, I will be reading your content directly on your site … which means you need readable text. For me, that means either Arial or Trebuchet MS fonts. If you use Lucida Grande, I’m gonna be pissed. I just thing that font is unreadable. If you use a Georgia or Times New Roman font, you might be pushing the line. It better be a big font with lots of space. Serif fonts, without good spacing, can be unreadable as well.
4. Prominent Link to Your RSS Feed
I like to reward good bloggers by subscribing directly to their feedburner feed … if they have one. The joy of seeing new readers in your stats is a good encouragement … something you don’t get if I subscribe to your blog’s feed address. So, don’t make me hunt for your link. If it takes me too long to find the link, I’ll just click the RSS button in the address bar of FireFox. Normally, that will give me your blog’s feed, not your feedburner feed. Worse still, if I’m in a bad mood and I can’t find your link, I might not even subscribe at all, out of spite for the time you made me waste. Think about it.
5. Comment on My Blog
OK, OK, this has nothing to do with your design, but it will get me to read your blog. My personal blog is religious in nature. I like to find good bloggers in my niche. The way I do that is by checking who my favorite bloggers link to, and by checking the sites of the people who comment on my blog (also, linking to me gets you lots of love). If you can contribute to the conversation in my comments, I will probably assume that you can contribute to the conversation on your own blog. Nearly every single one of my regular commenters holds a place in my feed reader. That’s not a coincidence.
What about you? What makes you subscribe to a blog’s feed? Be honest and asses the blogs that hold a place in your reader and ask yourself why you subscribed. Was it the cool design? The great content? The ease of process? Did they comment on your blog? What was it? Let everyone know in the comments!
I’ve put together a viral email message for the Harry Potter Charity Program that’s part of our Performancing experiment.
I’d really appreciate any constructive criticism so that we can hold this up as a successful model for creating legit viral email campaigns and also make our charity effort successful. Once I’ve gotten everyone’s feedback, I plan to get this ball rolling and I’ll ask all Performancing members to help out too.
Subject Line:
One Million Harry Potter Books For Charity
Message:
Hi! I’m helping raise money for charity and want your help. All you have to do is buy a Harry Potter book.
Pretty simple, huh? The only requirement is that you’ve got to buy the book by through the following website:
http://harrypotterthedeathlyhallows.net/
When you go to that site, you’ll actually be buying the book through Amazon. However, it is extremely important that you first go to the website listed so that your book purchase is counted.
With your help, we can raise over $1,000,000 for charity. For every Harry Potter book, movie or video game that is purchased through this site, they are donating $1 to charity.
If you could forward this email to at least three friends, then together we can help raise over a million dollars for charity.
$500 to the first “killer” widget/plugin (as determined by Ryan) developed for pMetrics
Last night, Sean announced the launch of the pMetrics API.
The API opens up whole new possibilities for interpreting and displaying blog statistics. In the spirit of moving the pMetrics community forward, we are sponsoring five $100 prizes for the first five “fun and useful” widgets to be developed.
Here are the guidelines:
Of course, “fun” and “useful” are subjective criteria, but we think you get the point. No widget nonsense, please;-)
You should submit your widgets in the pMetrics Widget Forum. The order in which you submit your widgets is the order in which they will be evaluated.
So let the fun begin!
As they say in dieting, these should be lifestyle changes; not just short-term quick-fixes.
If you’re like the average blogger then you live in a bubble. You are content to just write posts on a consistent basis and you feel as if the world is watching your every move. Think again. Chances are that you’re being ignored. So how can you change this state of affairs?
Below I list five surefire steps that will get you noticed, get you traffic, and ultimately make you some money. These aren’t easy to implement, and if you’re lazy like me, they probably seem daunting. But just like there’s no easy way to lose weight, there’s just no easy way to get and keep readers for your blog. Make a lifestyle change now, and the benefits will start compounding like a snowball rolling down a hill.
[Read more…] about 5 Surefire Steps To Increase Readership 300% (or more)
pMetrics just got a few new features. To your left is the new cloud view, which is available for every “popular items” page (links, content, downloads, searches, search engines, etc). Any time you see those three little icons in the top right corner (click the shot to see them), that means you can view the current data as a cloud and/or export it to CSV, in addition to the old boring bar graph. Yes, you read that right! We now have data export as well.
If you are unfamiliar with clouds, they are very handy. You can fit more data in less space, and the size and color of words cues you to their importance, or weight. It also puts the “long tail” more up front and in your face, since it is ordered randomly when you first load that view. Don’t underestimate the importance of the long tail. Our clouds also show you the “raw” numbers (hits and percent of total) if you hover your mouse over any of the items, so they don’t just look pretty – you can extract real data from them too.
Whatever site, content, and date range you are viewing…. clicking between those icons will give you the exact same data, in three different formats. The bar graph shows your top 50, as it always has. Clouds show your top 100. And data export gives you your top 500. Clouds and export even work with FeedBurner items and clickthroughs! The only areas that don’t have these new features yet are the dashboard, visitors, and actions. Actions would make no sense, visitors might work to show you who has been most active on your site recently, but I’m not sure we’ll do that. Data from the dashboard will be available eventually.
Clouds are available to everyone. Data export is also available to everyone for a few weeks, but it will eventually become a Pro only feature, as has been stated here and on the upgrade page for a while now.
Enjoy!
Each year a few clear patterns emerge among content producers and marketers. As the net changes, so do its dynamics, and so do the best ways to make money.
In the past we’ve had the year of the blog (when blogs made their first big splash), the year of article submissions (before article submission succumbed to over saturation), the year of the linkbait (when the search engines got smart, and organic links became a necessity), and so on.
2007 is turning out to be the year of branding and consolidation. Not that branding and consolidation haven’t been important in the past. But I’m seeing clear signs this year from several independent corners of the web that the dynamics of the web (probably thanks to a combination of information saturation and Google’s push to measure quality indicators) have put pressure on web publishers to consolidate content and build brands. This is a real world observation.
The days of easily squeezing dollars out of AdSense by putting up an article on thirty different blogs, every 2 days, is on its way out. Why? Because with thirty different blogs, the economics of time and money are no longer in place to do proper SEO on each one, and because of information saturation, you can no longer rely on the Search Engines to send you enough free traffic to get the clickety-clicks that you need. The skinny is this: the time and effort required to make this model work is going up, while the monetary returns are going down.
If you’re a single individual (not a company) and you own lots of blogs, don’t despair. Take your five most successful blogs and ask yourself “which of these three do I enjoy the most.” Keep them and focus all your energy on them. Maybe focus all your energy on just one to begin. Whatever feels right.
Then consider all of your other blogs. Would they consolidate smoothly into any of the three that you’ve chosen to focus on? If so, consolidate. If not, then muster up your will-power to sell them off. By selling off your worst performing blogs, you will feel a huge burden lifted from your shoulders, will gain capital to leverage and focus in the direction of your focus blogs, and will gain the freedom to finally create some great works of monetizable art.
The key is to stop thinking of blogging as a chore, with content to crank out, and start working on only a few projects that you’re passionate about. You know, the one’s that make you proud. The one’s that excite you. By doing this, you’ll naturally create great, brandable sites.
I say all this perfectly aware that there are some brands that aren’t worth creating from a monetization standpoint, so if you’re in this for at least partially for the money like most of us, then you should definitely stick with monetizable niches.
In my view, the movement towards consolidation and branding is a great trend for the overall health of the web. The dynamics are now in place so that bloggers have more incentive to create a few great blogs rather than lots of tiny, borderline spammy blogs. When humans are able to focus their energies on one or a few creative projects, the end result is almost always a better work of art.
And that’s what you should be doing. Put your energy into making great, brandable works of art. By standing out in a vast sea of mediocrity, you stand a much better chance of surviving as a problogger earning a full-time wage.
I’ve been running a number of experiments over the last few months and closely monitoring the effects of various types of links for new blogs.
Here are my conclusions:
1. Always start out your link campaign with a week’s worth of article or page level links.
2. Never start off with run-of-site links
3. Leaving your link in the no-follow comments section of a blog works wonders, especially if you do it on about 5+ blogs
4. Only add run-of-site links if you’re desperate
5. A few good page level links can get you killer results
6. Too many run-of-site links can literally sink the short-term effects of you linkbuilding campaign
7. A mix of about 35/65 between main page and deep links seems to work very well.
So there you have it. A recipe for quick linkbuilding success (in terms of SERPS not PageRank) consists of getting about 10 main page links (within fresh content…not old, retrofitted content), 20 deep-links, and participating in the comments section of 5-10 thematically related blogs.
The order of your linkbuilding campaign should be something like this:
* Start by getting deep links in fresh content on other blogs
* Next participate in the comments section of a few blogs where your name on each comment links back to your main page
* Next get a few main page links
* At this point, you might start doing some social media promotion via Netscape, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon.
And for God’s sake, only do run-of-site links as a last resort (if SERPS are your main concern).