Advertising

Well Metrics has only just emerged blinking into the sunlight but already we are seeing great community support. We have community members working on ways Metrics can support blog software not already listed, lots of suggestions for new features and members helping each other set up their blogs. Exactly what we hoped would happen, thank you all.

Any time soon you should expect to see the first release of our Metrics API which will allow developers to create some cool plugins, reports and widgets that work with Metrics data. Before we release the API I thought it would be good to point out a great example of a WordPress plugin you can get already.

Dave Reid has built a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add the Metrics code to your blog.

Features:

* Only one click or enable/disable.
* No need to digg around and modify your template files and no additional configuration needed.

Compatibility:

PMetrics works with WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.

As well as this plugin, James had put together a wordpress theme for metrics but it seems he has pulled it while he works on it. Petition him to bring it back if you like, heh.

Do let us know if you know of something or you are working on something that we have missed and thanks to everyone who is supporting us!

One of my first comments on Performancing was on an article by Nick Wilson on the idea of a ‘hub and spoke’ model for blog networks.

This would operate by having a central blog giving an overview of a topic, with individual blogs about specific aspects – for example a motoring central blog, with satellite blogs about Ford, Nissan, etc.

I mentioned at the time that a friend and I were setting up a blog network just like this and would let you know how we got on. Well, on 10th February we launched Real Life News so I thought I’d give an update on what we’ve done and why.

The model we have adopted is to create hubs around key topics and recruit fans to write individual blogs. Our first channel is Football (soccer), and the individual blogs cover English Premiership football teams and leagues around the world. All the blogs are run and hosted by us.

Some reasoning behind this:

• by choosing fan-based topics we attract writers who are passionate about the area. We ask for examples of their writing so we can check their style (and sanity), but we go for passion over journalistic style
• by going for start-up writers we don’t have to ‘buy’ blogs into the network, but we do have to start from scratch.
• Although each writes about a specific team or league, there are good opportunities for overlap/cross-referencing. For example, the Newcastle United blog said the team were looking at a German manager, so the Bundesliga blogger wrote an article giving background on him.
• The bloggers can also comment on broader football issues. We did an interview with the Football Association (the governing body in the UK) and published it on our homepage with no opinion, instead encouraging the bloggers to give their view of the interview on their own blogs.
• We decided to have all the blogs on our site because we want to create a focal point for people wanting to read about the topic areas.

One question raised among the comments on Nick’s article, was how to start a hub and spoke network. Do you start with the hub or the spokes?

Our plan was to launch the hub along with a minimum 5 blogs. A hub on its own is just a blog and the spokes on their own have little or no benefit in terms of creating a community.

We set up on Blogger with posts focused on what we were trying to do – rather than about football – and used it as a landing pad for the recruitment. We managed to get 6 blogs up for launch so achieved our threshold. Now we have something live, we’re getting more interest from potential writers as they can see what they would be involved with. We’ve signed up 2 more since launch (to go live next week) and are talking to 4 others.

Moving into other subjects in future should be easier having existing traffic and some the credibility of a live site.

In terms of traffic generation the volumes are small – but bigger than we expected given that all the blogs are new. And because they are written by real fans and we’ve adopted a very open approach to other sites (viewed as part of the wider subject comunity rather than competitors), we’re getting good mentions on other football blogs.

So that’s where we are. We haven’t come across many blog communities (which I feel are slightly different to standard blog networks) so hopefully there is something others can take from what we have done.

Cheers

DavidM

Warning: rant ahead. Nick talks about conversational advertising, one of the alternatives to regular advertising that some bloggers are trying out. The one thing that we constantly have to remind ourselves is that there really is no such thing as free anything. Advertising has to appear in some form. Everything costs something, somehow, sometime, somewhen. You may not pay for something directly or even in cash, but you will pay in some way. Sometimes it’s in cash, sometimes in reciprocal activity.

So let’s ask ourselves, what do advertisers want? Our cash, yes, but first they want our eyeballs (and ears for radio), and they’ll pay to get it. It’s always been that way. Early on in the history of TV, not every business person believed TV ads were worth it. But eventually, they realized the hypnotic power of TV, and the influence in purchasing decisions. TV is still the most expensive medium out there (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), because of the immense cost of doing business.

Of course, the Internet has had a similar effect, but which is still in its infancy. The right form of advertising online doesn’t exist, in my opinion. There are always some people who won’t like advertising, but it’s a cost associated with the distribution of any kind of information or entertainment. Even public TV broadcasting caved in North America, and to survive, allowed a few minutes of commercial advertising per hour.

While shows like Firefly or others just may be able to swing the production costs of an entire season just by pre-selling a future DVD collection, not everyone is going to manage this. When I was publishing my book/ film/ music review magazine, someone in the publishing industry once told me that some of the “best” books ever written would probably never see print (i.e., distribution). He’d taken upon himself to set up his own imprint and publish one or two quality literary hardcovers per year, when he could afford it, and whether or not he’d make a profit. (He would at least break even, but he had to maintain a high-paying job to manage this act of altruism.)

I did the same thing with demo tapes of select young bands that came to me and asked for a helping hand. This was after my print magazine folded, simply because I just didn’t have time to go sell ads, and couldn’t trust any of my ad people to do anything other than spend my money on lunch and parking. I struggled through 2 years of booking bands, putting on shows, paying for demo tapes, posters, stickers, and so on. Ultimately, the market didn’t support it, because during a time of recession, young people would rather pay $10 to listen to a half-assed, snotty DJ play tunes they’re familiar with than go see a new, talented but raw band for $5. That’s life, and you have to work around that, be innovative, or find something else to do.

So what’s the problem on the Internet and with everyone who thinks that blogs and websites and RSS feeds, and what have you, shouldn’t have advertising? Arguably, it’s the current generation raised from a very young age on the Internet who have been able to get so much for free, whether by hook or by crook, and believe that everything should be free and that they shouldn’t have to do anything in return. You know who you are. Nothing free can be sustained for long.

Sorry, but this just isn’t possible, and if you think otherwise, you’re delusional. That includes everyone who says that RSS feeds should be full-text. The bandwidth costs are too prohibitive for most small publishers, especially those whose sites or feeds aren’t yet earning what their content warrants. And in the case of full-text RSS feeds, far too many subscribers update their feed folders multiple times per day when it’s unnecessary. I won’t do the cost breakdown, but it’ll be prohibitive for most publishers.

It’s all very easy to say that if their content is any good, they’ll eventually earn money. The fact is, it’s easy to forget that money is simply a symbol, not the entity we’ve made it out to be. It’s representative of a transaction that’s happened or about to happen. That means that for my offering you a service, you must reciprocate in some way, whether it’s to buy something from me, or from someone else who in turn buys something from me, or by simply lending my sponsors your eyes (or ears). There really isn’t any other way around this.

I’d love to be able to offer you all of my blogging at no cost, but for the service I offer you (those that read my blogs), I have to somehow earn compensation, or throw in the towel. Unfortunately, online advertising has a ways to go before it reaches a maturity level and form that’s acceptable to the majority. But how exactly does that happen with a billion people online? That’s the question that has to be answered, obviously.

Oh, and while I’m ranting, for Robert Scoble and all of you who want full-text feeds at no cost, in subscriber fees or advertising, I say to you, learn how to use a feed reader properly. All it takes is one damn click extra to see the rest of an excerpted story. Are you that lazy? And to all of you online publishers b*tch*ng about your blogs or feeds not getting click-through to your permalink pages, write better titles and opening paragraphs ;>

I have just installed a DokuWiki. Wow, that was easy doing. After ten minutes I had the first article with my freshly uploaded self portrait online. After 20 minutes the site had changed to a nice ready-made template with a sidebar and some little CSS changes. Looks like a professional website now and no wikipedia style at all. Now I only have to work out some content structure and some user group rights to shelter internal content before both gets to messy. Looks very easy … the admin section only has two points 🙂

I just want to have it for some shameless self promotion and for getting hold of my online documentation which is always way behind. It’s definitely not worth comparing it to a CMS but it is so fast to publish and to set it up. And the whole style of Wiki versioning (a nicely colored diff view) is a great feature. Plus a lot more …

Maybe it will grow to a three level communication tool: promotion site, group project documentation and a kind of private personal just-throw-things-at-it.

The easy creation of namespaces (= categories with optional user rights management) and according links is really ‘wiki wiki’ magic … write down the new internal link [[newproject:activity]] in your to-do list, publish and click on it and a new page in the new category newproject is created. It’s a little bit like mind mapping the wiki style.

I wanted to install Trac (Wiki with subversion support) but I ended up
with DokuWiki. I wasn’t willing to fight with subversion … a typical
lazy KISS decision.

A new toy … I am happy 🙂

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Wiki, DokuWiki, tool, tools, publishing, webdev, promotion, happiness 🙂

The news that Kottke ditched the donations biz model he started a year ago comes as little surprise. At the time, I posted that I hoped he had a better plan than that and was none too kind about the whole ludicrous idea of expecting readers to support a blogger for just blogging. I don’t take any great delight in seeing Jason fail, I don’t know him, but Im certainly glad to be able to point to a great example of the models failure. Maybe now we can drop that silly line of reasoning once and for all.

We have talked about models where one would pay to get into the archives of a particularly useful blogs content, and indeed it seems to work well for some, but that’s a very different model to simply holding out your hand and hoping enough pennies come your way to feed the family.

Maybe it’s just me, though i suspect not, that finds the idea of the donation button repulsive?

Have you found your enthusiasm is waning? Are your traffic stats plateauing or even showing a downward trend? When you get comments are they from the usual suspects? Feel like you are living in an echo chamber with no new ideas or perspectives?

When blogging becomes routine it is very easy to get stuck in a rut. You read the same old blogs, talk to the same people, write the same  posts and stories about the same or similar topics. If you do what you have always done you will always get the same results. It’s time to mix it up a bit.

Decide to be different

In some cases it only takes the thought that you would like to make a change that causes the change. It’s a little bit quantum, heh. Just intending to do things differently could make all the difference.

There definitely is a comfort zone to blogging. In the early days of a new blog everything is new. Each post could feel like you are breaking new personal ground. After a while though things become familiar and that is when there is a danger of the familiar turning into the stale. Repeating themes can be a good thing, when you start sounding like a broken record it is time to take action.

New reading

First the easy stuff. Remember when you started your blog you went out and found the best sources of information? Do that again, find fresh new sources. Go to technorati, digg, del.icio.us, et al. New websites launch every day, if you have not been consciously looking they might have passed you by. In many niches it is so easy to only notice the a-listers when actually a lot of the original thinking is not in those echelons.

Use different search terms and decide to look for websites that deviate from your normal viewing habits also. This is not an exercise in more-the-merrier, you are trying to change the flavour not just improve or increase it. If you really struggle here is a radical idea; ditch your OPML and start from scratch. You might be surprised at how markedly different it turns out.

Go to the library or book store and browse the isles, and not just your favourites. You might be inspired by new topics or find a great brand new book for your existing ones with a new perspective.

Different blogs, different strokes

One of the good things about having multiple blogs is you are forced to be exposed to different themes, topics, social groups, etc. On my personal blog one of my favourite topics is all things related to Canada. Because of my “canadian connections” I also see news items that relate to my other blogging topics. For example I spotted a story about a photographer being stopped by police for photographing the Calgary LRT, this was a perfect story for my DSLR photography blog. These are things others in my niches are less likely to see, especially if they are only ever focussed on their particular niche for inspiration. Perhaps starting a new blog could freshen up your old one?

80/20

As Nick says, it doesn’t hurt to drift off-topic once in a while. When you do though, for best results make an effort to relate it somehow to your niche. Also make sure you tag your post very effectively. This will cast your net to not just a wider audience but a whole new audience where you ordinarily would not be on the radar. Try and think what different, but related, audiences would like to see. Put yourself in their shoes.

Change of viewpoint

It might be all it takes is to think with a different point of view. What would your niche look like in a different geography, or up-market or down-market. How would your topic be perceived by someone with less experience or more experience? Are there biases in your niche that could be explored from the other side of an argument? In some cases there might be dogma that can be investigated for their validity.

If all else fails you could consider bringing in fresh blood. Another brain and another voice might be just what your blog needs to keep fresh. New people have different ways of looking at things and their own ideas for what to write about and how things should be done. You don’t need to agree on everything, in fact it could be an advantage if you don’t.

You?

Those are my ideas for how you can keep your blog fresh, how do you keep your blog feeling original, fresh and new?

I just thought about how to auto magically save my textual work without all these file here, file there and how to name it aspects. Just auto magically save my work without all the hassle. All these nasty ‘did I really delete this text’ moments are gone with my solution.

Best of all … It works for absolutely every application because it uses a system wide available feature and it gives you chronological versions … primitive but very effective.

It is so easy … use a clipboard monitor!

What is a clipboard monitor? A clipboard monitor is a feature which exists in every good editor. A clipboard monitor automatically appends data copied to the clipboard to a file or draws it into an an internal application which manages clipboard activities. If you are lucky this file can be auto saved every n minutes. If you are very lucky both applications ‘monitor’ and ‘manager’ can run parallel and give you plenty of possibilities to monitor, manage and save your textual work just by the simple use of ‘copy to clipboard’. Ctrl-C becomes your backup wizard!

Open up the text editor of your choice, open a new file and activate the feature ‘clipboard monitor’ (if available). I am using and recommending two editors of my choice. In PSPad it’s in the menu tools / ‘clipboard monitor’ or can be activated with Alt-M. In Note Tab light it’s the menu Document / ‘Use as paste board’ or the shortcut Shift-Ctrl-P.

PSPad gives you the opportunity to manage every single clipboard entry but doesn’t automatically save the monitored content to a file. The ‘manager’ feature is very helpful because during a day you will have many messy entries and maybe just want to reuse a single one or a single version. PSPad does NOT SAVE the clipboard monitor entries if the application is closed (as far as I know)! This is totally fine for people who don’t need the storage feature of clipboard monitoring. Better use a second application which gives a more messy result but saves every copied text. Below I will explain how to do it with the free text editor Note Tab light.

In Note Tab light it is also very easy to get incremental versions of the saved files if you need it! How to activate and configure the Note Tab light text editor:

1. Open the general options in menu View / Options
2. Go to tab Files
3. Activate ‘make backups‘, backup type ‘incremental‘ and ‘every n minutes‘
4. Open a new file
5. Save it as ‘you-name-it.txt’
6. Activate menu point Document / Use as paste board

So, how to use it? For safety reasons I use to copy the version of my content always when switching views in i.e. PFF or an online editor. I do this automatically to makes sure I always have the latest version in memory in case the application is messing things up. (Side note: It’s also an often criticized AJAX feature if it is not caught by the developers … press ‘back’ and your text is gone!) That’s the old experience with software testing. I learned it the hard way 🙂

You have the choice … it’s a feature not a bug 🙂
In PFF text is copied depending on the viewing style. If your are copying from RTF view the source code is not saved but a text version of your content. If you are using the source code view … well, then the source code is saved.

The best thing is that you can use both applications parallel. Use PSPad as clipboard manager and use Note Tab light as storage device for all the great things you are copying to the clipboard.

Clap hands, spread it, link it, comment it and give feedback how YOU are saving your work!

PS: Paste without formatting … search for PlainPaste.ahk. A double Ctrl-V and formatting is gone …

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus, Merz, 2006, clipboard, monitor, manager, tool, cool, auto save, editor, PSPad, Note Tab, text, productivity, safety, storage, backup

Somewhere during the struggle to reconcile the need to bring in revenue, and maintaining the “purity” of the medium, some bright spark thought she’d ad comments to ads. This idea grew a little, and we eventually had “story ads”. Neither of these attempts to take advertising into the conversational space is particularly groundbreaking. Its a painfully obvious step toward breaking out of interruption advertising and truly engaging the reader, but it is necessary.

My friend kpaul recently got a nice write up from Steve Outing over at Poynter about his efforts in this field at the Muncie Free Press

Mallasch, who describes his strategy for the site as coming from the “Craig Newmark school of business” (a reference to Craigslist’s founder), says he’s had some success recently selling “advertorials” along with banner ads — “basically, a story page labeled as an ad where customers or potential customers can comment.”

And he seems to be doing a little better than I. We played with this over at Threadwatch a while back (I ran that site untill Performancing for those that didn’t know) and although it was fun, and personally I felt, and still feel it has promise, didn’t have a lot of success with it.

Inherent Problems

The biggest problem with running story ads is that as a group, advertisers are a lazy bunch, they want the world, and expect it for little or no effort on their part.

That could be a fault of ours, of mine, us the bloggers, who’d like to show ads that engage our readers, keep our content relevant and fresh and STILL bring in the $$$’s.

Unfortunately we’re a lazy bunch too. We don’t appear to be taking steps to change the advertisers opinion, to coax them over their fears of (omg!) the prospect of public criticism but like the advertisers, we still expect it to work, and at least for my part, are dissapointed with the results.

Solutions?

Im not sure. It really is a tough one for both advertiser and blogger, neither has the luxury of an effortless success, both risk public criticism and it’s a hard balance to strike with regular readers.

I don’t have an answer, but im all ears if anyone would care to offer one.

Some random thoughts I’ve had on this in the time its taken me to get to this sentence:

• Could advertisers be bloggers? Guest bloggers?
• Could the lure of the giveaway overcome the fear of a “bad comment” and keep readers relatively positve? // Do we want that?
• If not story ads, how else can we engage the reader, without overstepping editorial bounds?
• Perhaps we need to push editorial bounds, no pain, no gain

Interesting challenge isn’t it?