Blogger

Unfortunately, sometimes the logical thing to do and the “technically right” thing to do are polar opposites. Such is the case with those little tiny links at the bottom of your WordPress blog that send your reader into the pits of your archives. One must make a choice here… should I link to “page 2” of the blog archives using the words “previous posts” or “next page”?

Technically speaking, they are indeed previous posts. One would think that while a person is browsing the articles on your blog, they would naturally know what “previous posts/entries” meant, and would consequently know intuitively which link to click when presented with the options.

One would be wrong.

In fact, yours truly has been so indoctrinated by habit (and perhaps through digg’s “next” link) that I found myself more times than not, actually not reading the text of the link, and simply clicking based on the position of the link, and the direction of the arrows.

This was not acceptable. All my free themes, as well as the customs I had done, all had “previous entries” and “next entries”.

No, I haven’t gone back and changed them all yet … but I have implemented a new policy … and wrote some simple code to get them displaying correctly. Wanna see? OK…

The first challenge is getting the WordPress code working right.

The code for the “next page” link looks like this:





It seems as if WordPress wants us to use the “next page” phrase 🙂

But there’s also the “previous page” link to take care of. No problem…





Notice that we are using the « and » symbols to indicate next and previous. Again, this is just because it makes sense and it reinforces the idea of true forward and backward navigation. So currently, there are actually 2 links siting side by side, probably aligned left, with little or no spacing between them. With a little CSS magic, we can take care of that. Here’s the code in full … then I’ll give a brief explanation:

I embedded the CSS to save room, but feel free to name your divs and do this in the stylesheet. Basically, what I’ve done is calculated the width of the parent div (in my case, it was 450px) and divided the width by my 2 navigation divs. That way, we get one link on the far right of the parent, and one link on the far left (further reinforcing the idea of going to the next page or previous page). All this code does is floats the “previous page” link to the left, and aligns the text left, and floats the “next page” link to the right, and aligns the text right.

Presto! Now you have logical navigation links at the bottom of your archive pages. Feel free to insert this code in any WordPress template page that needs navigation.

Hope that helps! I know it saved me some frustration 🙂

Performancing is happy to announce a forum dedicated to legal issues that bloggers face. In addition to stock DMCA notices and cease and desist letters, Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today will be offering advice and conducting research into specific issues.

The forum will focus primarily on content theft, but also other issues that a blogger may face including, defamation, trademark, free speech issues, privacy and more. If Jonathan does not know the answer he will research it for you and provide an opinion.

We hope that this resource proves to be helpful to the blogging community, especially as many of us are “on our own” so to speak without the standard legal resources that an incorporated business might have.

Jonathan has written an introductory post to get things started and we hope that you’ll all welcome him to the Performancing community.

Are you afraid of sending readers away from your website?

As a blog consultant, I’ve come across many fellow bloggers and site owners who refuse to link out to other blogs / websites because they believe that ‘you should not send readers away from your website’.

Now I’m not saying that you should drive people off your blog by plastering links all over it. If your blog is a quality resource, people will read it, like it and come back to it.

But not linking out under the pretext of not wanting to send readers away is stupid, and ranks just below that crazy lady who threatened to sue people for linking to her website.

And under the right conditions, it’s good value for your readers if you link out to other blogs and blog posts from time to time.

My view on this is that on blog or website cannot possibly contain ALL information that a person wishes to share with his readers. It’s not a scalable option and frankly, after a certain point the amount of information you have to deal with makes this approach impossible.

So there are two things you can do:

• You can either limit what information you provide to your readers or
• You can link out to other blogs and resources that offer additional information

At the end of the day, if you are hoarding readers you’re operating under a negative mindset and you’ll be limiting yourself in terms of how much value you can provide through your blog to your readers.

Let’s face it, your readers are not blindly loyal – they are going to go to other sources regardless of whether you link to them or not.

The challenge is not to prevent readers from leaving your blog. They will do so, no matter what you do.

The challenge is to make your blog so good that even after leaving it, readers will come back for more. Part of the process in making your blog kick ass is to offer as much value through it as you possibly can.

The only way it’s possible to do that is to link to other quality articles and websites.

It’s Friday evening, 6:30 pm and you’re furiously tapping away at your laptop, churning out the first of many articles / blog posts / linkbaits that you were supposed to write this week. The deadline is Monday morning, your procrastination hasn’t paid off and now your weekend (and your nerves) are wasted as you slave away to cram 5 days of work into 2.

If the above (albeit a bit exaggerated) sounds like you, then don’t fret – there’s hope, and in the process you will also be a better blogger.

Darren talked last week about the value of establishing a blogging workflow. While I think that Darren’s is mightily disciplined and a rare case, there are still a lot of good habits we can take away from the whole process.

I’m going to let you read the inspirational articles – the day in the life of a problogger series (1, 2 and 3) – but first, let’s get you started with the 3 basic habits you can adopt right now to channel your time into those areas of blogging and making money where you are most needed.

Tip #1: Chunk your flagship content together

Darren, in his blogging workflow post, talks about how he takes one or two mornings and writes all his flagship content for the week during that time.

This requires some planning ahead of time, so what I’d suggest is that you keep gathering ideas during the week so that come Monday, you DO have plenty to think and write about. And if you have to do some research, do that before hand as well, so that when the time comes, all you have to do is write.

The other obstacle that people sometimes face is that they want to write too much about ‘current’ news and not enough flagship content. I face this problem myself, despite reading Darren and Nick and Chris talk about this for over an year and despite consciously practicing writing flagship content on my blogs.

The thing is, once you start reaping the rewards of flagship content, there really is no looking back. On one of my blogs, a simple practice of creating such a resource led to site traffic tripling over the course of two weeks and then steadying itself after that.

That was a home run of sorts, but it made me realise the value of long term gains as opposed to short term gratification.

Want to double, triple, quadruple your blog traffic? Start writing flagship content.

And learn to schedule it for a specific time on a specific day of the week, so that the rest of the week you don’t have to worry about writing on your blog and you can focus on marketing and managing your other work.

Tip #2: Focus on less writing, more management

For a blogger whose main weapon is his pen / keyboard, asking them to write less feels blasphemous. Also, many bloggers blog because they enjoy writing about a particular subject. I could probably talk / write about soccer all day long, probably the same with blogging and marketing. This is what I do, what I know and what I enjoy.

But writign too much is not good – it’s not good because it tends to take you away from other, more important activities.

For example, let’s say you have 3 hours per day to give to your blog.

On Monday, you spend those 3 hours writing 6 ‘flagship posts’ for the week. For the rest of the week, with the writing out of the way, you can spend perhaps an hour blogging (putting up the newsy items) and the other 2 hours managing the blog, talking to advertisers, marketing / building links, tweaking your theme, launching a new blog (why not), hiring writers, etc.

In short, once you’ve done your blogging for one site on Monday, you have 4-5 days more in which you can work on anything else you want to – other blogs (I wouldn’t recommend more than 2-3 blogs to write on regularly) or blog-related activities. The key is that you have the option to make a choice – and the time to send traffic to your new flagship content.

Tip #3: Hire/Get help

When possible, delegate.

If you’re starting out, this won’t be possible. If you’re already successful, delegating tasks is the simple process of placing an ad in Craigslist or the Performancing blogger jobs forum and farming out the day-to-day tasks of news reporting, comment management and basic promotion and email handling to a junior editor.

But if you’re somewhere in between, it’s difficult – you know you need to delegate in order to move to the next level, but you don’t have the funds to hire someone for the job.

One way to get help in this case is to first work hard on building your community and then asking that community to contribute to the blog. I’ve done that with variable success over the last year, and the key here is to build that community before-hand – once you’ve got a large pool of readers, asking and getting help becomes easier.

The other way to get help in this case is to hand pick one or two readers and offer them a share of the revenues / small payment in return for sharing the load of a few ‘editorial’ duties (such as comment moderation and news reporting).

What’s important to remember is that you shouldn’t scrimp in compensating for help – if you’re offering money then be generous, otherwise you have no right to expect good work and you will most likely not get the best possible out of the hired help. If readers pitch in to work for free, respect their time and find a way to thank them or reward them by linking to their blogs or promoting their articles, etc.

But make sure you get help – if you want to create a big, vibrant, successful blog, it’s easier if you delegate.

If you’re managing more than one blog, then delegation becomes necessary.

Be a better Blogger

Learning linkbaiting, SEO, theme design and having your site pimped out with the latest widgets can help make your blog better and more popular, but all that is wasted if you don’t maximise it.

And that comes from being a better blogger. It doesn’t take much – just some time management, attitude adjustments (towards blogging) and the discipline to work on your long-term goals (flagship content) instead of slaving after short-term results.

And in case you were wondering, this post IS written on a Friday evening and I AM rushing to finish a couple of projects by tomorrow morning. We can’t be perfect at all times, but we can surely try 🙂

If you’ve been in this game for a while you know that, for most blogs, traffic and revenue go down in the summer.

It sort of parallels the stock market. Many investors think the market peaks in March-April, dips through August, and then starts another upswing in October. So many investors buy from September-January, then reap their harvest from March-April and take the summer off.

While I don’t subscribe to this short term seasonal investing practice, mainly because I think there are still plenty of good stock buys out there in the summer, I am wondering whether there’s any place for seasonal blogging.

If you’re like me, you treat pro-blogging as a full time job and you often work just as hard on a Saturday as a Tuesday. But did you know that the impact of your work on Saturday might not be as substantial as the work you do on a Tuesday?

There are far fewer eyeballs looking at your blog on the weekends, not to mention the summer. So how should a blogger respond to this fact?

Part of the art of blogging is maintaining a certain level of momentum. But do you really lose any momentum by taking the weekend off? What about taking an entire week off? What about posting less frequently in the summer?

Obviously I don’t have answers to these questions, but since the return on investment isn’t very good in the summer, is there a way bloggers can down-shift a bit to avoid the disappointment that less traffic naturaly brings?

Liz Strauss has a fabulous article over at the Blog Herald entitled The Two Webs: Information or Relationships? I recommend that all Performancing members read it and savor it.

The basic gist of the article is that there are two webs: one structural, the other relational. The structural web is the one that a person considers when doing an analytical measurement (e.g. total links, etc.). Unlike the structural web, the relational web is the one that consists of human relationships.

Human relationships can sometimes be represented by the structural web, and algorithms rely on this sort of representation, but the structural web isn’t good at differentiating structural aspects that indicate true human relationship, as opposed to manipulated structure.

The take home point of the article for me was this: those of us who are ultra-analytical tend to place excessive value in the structural web to the neglect of the relational web. We are prone to doing whatever we can to manipulate the structural web (e.g. buying and selling links), while ignoring the reason the structural web acquired value in the first place.

So why does the structural web have value? Because of the way it has been used to measure human relationships and human interests.

Ok, So what…

Well, after several years on the web, it’s my view that you can ultimately achieve more success at the structural level by focusing on the relational level. Sure, focusing on the structural level is easier on the surface, but in the end, I think it takes more work, more man hours, and is a self-perpetuating monster (buy more links to sell more links).

What can you do

Here’s my tip. Get the attention of high profile bloggers in your niche. That should be your number one focus for the first 12 months of blogging on a site. Screw the SERPS. Screw Google. Screw Yahoo. Screw Live. Well, not really, but don’t pay attention to them. Really. Ignore them altogether.

Instead, make it your only priority for one full year to do whatever it takes to get the attention of at least one high profile blogger in your niche. Spend the 10 hours each week you would have otherwise spent on artificial linkbuilding to 1) write good articles and 2) make insightful comments on blogs in your niche.

A Recipe For Success

Focus all your energy on the following:

1. Write good original articles
2. Link out to other blogs in your niche in *every* post
3. Write articles that provide commentary or opinion on articles from other blogs (include link)
4. Comment your ass off at 3-5 other blogs in your niche (but make the comments snappy and good).
5. Once a month, write a great article that deserves to be emailed to a *great* blogger or two in your niche for critical feedback (what do you think of this article?) – Then send the email(s).

I think that with these 5 steps, you’ll locate yourself definitively within the web of online relationships, and become much more successful than with mindless SEO. Sure, mindless SEO gets you a few visits here and there, but unless you are one of the best there’s a terrible ceiling for what you can achieve by trying to do everything within the structural web.

In fact, even the best SEOs have gotten there, in my view, by networking and getting the right friends at the right time, and this can only happen in the relational web.

So here’s to 2007 becoming the year of relationship building and networking! And here’s to your success!