Blogger

I was pondering Nick Wilson’s post “Call for Performancing Authors”. I had not really thought about posting on this blog account, but I guess it is as good as any! I do most of my blogging elsewhere.

Among other things, I have been using Squidoo (which is a site that makes it easy to collect infomation that you think might be useful to others). About a week or so ago, I posted one of my Squidoo lenses to digg. I actually got a comment back! Apart from bad grammar and spelling, he basically said that it was mainly a self-serving site used to promote my own interests.

It hit me. Isn’t that what most blogs are? When it comes down to it, most blogs have sometype of self serving or self promoting interest. The company does it to inform and get customers; the politician to get the word out, etc. Even the more diary oriented ones or those that are informative are still being done to promote something — if for nothing else than inflating the blogger’s ego. I do it for a number of reasons, keeping customers up to date, floating ideas, creating a Squidoo lens to highlight kids’ cancer because of someone I know.

I do not like to think that I am a narcissist, but at some level I guess I am.

Don’t get me wrong…I think they are very useful and I have way too many blogs of others that I try to track, but I also do mine because I want to (at some level) be validated.

Thoughts?

(Side Note: I really like Performancing, most of my posts are done using it!)

Burning the candle at both ends is something we are becoming accustomed to at Performancing. As Nick mentioned yesterday, as well as a new release of Performancing for Firefox, we have a whole new treat in store for you lucky bloggers! While rushing mad headlong into work is always exhilarating, it’s important to maintain at least a tenuous grip on sanity so you don’t end up a useless burnt-out husk of your previous self.

There seems to be a lot of it about. I have been reading with interest D’Arcy Normans blog where he has been talking about bloggers going on hiatus, and about trying to recover some sort of balance between real world relationships and online ones. This is quite a common theme, and I can only see it becoming more so. “Meatspace”, especially to geeks like me, can be more difficult in many ways than the virtual space we inhabit. It is so tempting to give up on the real in favour of the virtual. Heck, I barely get out of the house now!

The other aspect is the amount of effort we put into blogging at the expense of everything else. It can be so rewarding, so engrossing, that we begin to forget there are other things that need to be done. For those of you with careers outside of our blogging, where blogging is a fun distraction, this can be quite threatening to the mortgage payments so be careful!

My body is telling me I am doing something wrong. I have had a cold since before Christmas, I have aches and pains and my sleep patterns are crap. I think it is about time I took the hint! I know Nick hasn’t been on top form either, to the point where he nearly had an unfortunate gastric accident at SES NY.

A sense of balance is all it takes. Even if you need to schedule time to make it happen, we need to touch base with the important people around us. Spend some time away from the computer. Especially in my case, get some fresh air and some sun.  Perhaps even (shock!) some exercise. A fresh body and mind, with healthy relationships, it has to translate into 100% more success overall.

Do you ever feel like you have the balance all wrong and you are running yourself into the ground? What do you do to manage it?

Chris gets it right when talking about affiliate tips for bloggers. But… what needs to be discussed more and more is how bloggers will react to the rev-share model, instead of the cost-per-click (cpc) they’re getting from Chitika and Adsense.

That is the bigger question for the future of pro blogging, and one that I believe is all about education and practice and results, over time. In my opinion, as you’ll read below, there will be a dramatic switch in how pro bloggers look at how they make money online (already happening).

I’ve written about this issue extensively, having come from an affiliate background myself, and being one of the first bloggers out there who was using affiliate programs on blogs (way, way, before Adsense). Here are some links.

1. ReveNews: BlogKits Survey: Blogs Embrace Affiliate Marketing Techniques – 73% of bloggers surveyed indicated they were ok with using affiliate marketing techniques in their blogs. While only 27% of the remaining bloggers being either neutral or in disagreement with the statement.

The CPA model seems to be growing into the mainstream tactics of the publishing world as bloggers and even large online newspapers and magazines (yes, they do it, they just don’t like you to know about it) realize the potential for CPA to vastly out perform traditional models such as CPM and Google Adsense, if done right.

2. BlogKits: Google Adsense For Bloggers: Why It Doesn’t Work…For Everyone – Forget Adsense, Bloggers are better served creating custom partnerships or sponsorships with advertisers. In arrangements of this nature, a blog with niche-specific content, that is straddled with low traffic, has the opportunity to earn much more by converting less.

3. Problogger: Why Adsense Doesn’t Work…For Everyone – The discussion continues over at Problogger.

How’s that for “meat”??? :p

That’s what it says in our press releases, and on parts of the Performancing blog, and you know what? It’s true. We now have close to 2000 active members, all here to help each other find and perfect ways of making income from their passion, blogging.

It’s not the end of the story though. Many people have asked us over the last few months about our business model, and how we plan to monetize our website.

Whereas we’ve always been a little reluctant to give away the entire plan, I think the time has now come to fill in at least some of the details.

The Performancing Business Model

We’re still not quite ready to give away every detail. Despite there being a worrying trend among the digirati to shout their plans from the rooftops before they’ve even built and posted to a website, that’s just not for us. Performancing LLC is a business, and as such have invested what we would consider a lot of money in our model, and although the time will come when all will be revealed, that time is not now.

That doesn’t mean I can’t give you some idea of where we’re headed, and the thinking behind what we’re doing though. Im going to try and do that right now.

First a Little History

The original idea for Performancing was to build an ad network. Not another Adsense clone, and not another text link ads clone (my partner Patrick already runs the largest company in that market), but something we felt bloggers would really like, and that stood an excellent chance of success.

Somewhere during the planning out of that network came the idea that it might be better, if we involved the blogging community in what we were planning more. After all, if we really want you guys to like what we do, who better to help plan it?

Of course you can’t do that unless you have some folks to talk to about it, so we figured we would do the sensible thing, and start blogging on subjects related to advertising, making money, writing compelling copy and all other aspects of what we would consider “professional blogging”. By building up a community of like minded bloggers, bloggers like ourselves, that were interested in making money from their blogs, we would eventually have a great bunch of people to bounce ideas off of, and help us shape the money making end of this business.

I hope that makes sense. My point is, that we think YOU are the best people to decide what you want from an ad network, not us.

So, we started posting, and unsurprisingly, found some great folks that were willing to share their experiences and skills with the community to the benefit of us all. (dont think for a moment that I, Chris or anyone else here knows all there is to know about blogging, that just isnt possible heh..).

Then along came Performancing Firefox

Whilst dreaming up ways to get our site noticed, I came up with this small idea to build a neat firefox extension. A little harmless “linkbait” to help get a new blog off the ground, and noticed by some of the big kids.

That extension has become a monster! To this date, its the most fun thing I’ve worked on, and has gone a long way to prove my belief that involving the community in the production of tools and services for the community is a strong idea.

So Where Are We Headed?

Well, for starters let me clarify a few things:

• We will continue to post, and to encourage you, our members, to post, and continue to build the worlds largest community of professional bloggers.
• We will continue to develop Performancing Firefox, we love it ,and so apparently do you 🙂
• We will almost certainly not produce any revenue oriented products this year. For 2006, we just want to focus on the community, and the free tools we make available to it.
• Our free tools will remain free, forever. Your use, enjoyment, and participation with those tools/services will NOT be hampered in any way by the revenue generating side of our business.
• When we do start work on the revenue side of the business, it will almost certainly be advertising related, and you will definately have a say in how it develops.

The next step for Performancing is our next free tool/service. We are due to launch this month, and I know for a fact that it will just blow you away, seriously. Whereas Performancing Firefox was an idea we turned around quickly into a reality, the new tool/service has been in development for months, and is quite literaly stunning.

I can’t wait to announce, but as I said above, despite current trends, we’re just not in the habbit of making empty announcements or promises. We’ll show it to you when there is something to show.

After that, the Performancing blog will be about 3 distinct, but related topics:

1. Professional Blogging, as always.
2. Development and support of Peformancing Firefox
3. Our new tool/service

Toward the end of the year, we will start developing our revenue generating products. Again, I’d like to state that these will not interfere with your use and enjoyment of our free services and tools. They will be strictly opt in, and you can take them or leave them.

Clearly that is a little way off though, and the time frame is large part of the reason why I can’t be more specific. A lot can happen in a year, the competitive landscape could change entirely, and whilst we are concentrating on the community and our free tools and services we don’t feel it would be sensible to lock ourselves into any course of action that far down the line.

At this point, it just seems sensible to remain as flexible as possible.

Questions?

If you have any questions, or suggestions, we’d love to hear them! So do post a comment and let us know, we’ll answer anything we feel we can do without breaking our core philosophy of not blabbing before there is something to blab about.

In particular, I’d love to know what you guys would like to see posted on the site. What is it that you’d like to see happen here that we’re not already doing?

Thanks everyone, I hope that all makes sense and that it answers at least in part some of the questions that come through from time to time about the Performancing business model.

Ok, so first Blaine, now Patrick in IM and a couple of others are badgering me to bring back author pics after our opening up of user blogs. Should i crumble and do it?

Over in the Performancing blog forums there’s the beginnings of a great discussion on the fate, and viability of Chitika for bloggers. Gary poses the question, and members are weighing in with their thoughts. So far, the news aint good…

Want to comment? Join the debate!

I recently got the chance to grill senior Google engineer and webmaster relations chappy Matt Cutts on some issues specific to bloggers. Matt took his sweet time getting the interview done, but it was well worth the wait. In it, he talks about Google’s problems with splogs on Blogger.com, and their efforts to solve the issue, aswell as giving advice to bloggers on ranking in Google and how bloggers can use Google to find and organize information. Grab a coffee, sit down and enjoy, it’s a good’un — thanks Matt!

Q. Reputation within the Blogosphere could be the one and only area that Google noticeably trails Yahoo! We’ve seen some promising moves from Google to provide bloggers with tools and service, such as Google Reader, but what other areas should bloggers be looking to you for in order to find and organize their information? Should we expect further news that will excite bloggers in the future?

I think Google actually has a pretty good story to tell here. Blogger provided one of the first easy ways to set up a blog. Google Reader lets you keep up with the feeds o’ your choice. And blogsearch.google.com is a good way to prowl the blogosphere, and it lets you do persistent searches and get the results as RSS or Atom. Google News provides alerts and also lets you get RSS or Atom feeds of persistent searches too, plus you can customize it for the topics you’re interested in. You can also load your own custom feeds into Gmail now as well. You can turn the clip feature off if you want, but it’s neat to have RSS sliding in above your inbox.

Lots of people might not know that My Search History lets you save your searches: you can bookmark/star a result and then add labels (tags) in there; you can also remove searches as well. Google Desktop Search has saved my bacon several times when I wanted to blog something and forgot where I saw it. Plus you can argue that AdSense was one of the first ways that bloggers were able to generate money from a site that might otherwise only be a hobby.

I think if you think of bloggers as a really hip subset of people who deal with information all day long (and that are often site owners too), some of the recent releases are useful. Sitemaps and its webmaster console is really interesting for debugging crawl problems, and Analytics is going to be good for people who want to get a handle on their visitors (e.g. repeat vs. new visitors). I can’t talk about future projects, but there’s 1-2 exciting/fun things that I’ve seen at the plex that make online life easier for people that spend their whole day dealing with information.

Q. Recently, Google’s Blogger service has been under increasing pressure to deal with it’s “splogs” problem. This has prompted some small engines to stop indexing Blogspot domains, and there’s been rumour that Google have stopped indexing them. Is this true, and what more can be done to curb the problem?

Google definitely hasn’t stopped indexing Blogspot domains. The Blogger team has been doing a ton of work on this, and I’ve gotten to see a lot of the steps that they’ve taken (e.g. more use of CAPTCHAs in suspicious situations) to improve things. They’ve made it a lot harder to create a lot of splogs, and the response time is also way down when something does slip through.

Just as an aside to readers, one of the things that Nick has dinged Google for in the past is a lack of communication. I think Jason Goldman, Pal, and the rest of the Blogger team have really done a good job at talking about the concrete steps that they’re doing to improve things. If you haven’t checked the Buzz blog that Blogger maintains, check out the posts that they’ve done about splogs:

• a post talking about a recent streak of splogs
• the initial response to that incident
• more refinements soon afterwards
• tightening up the posting API

They’ve also rolled out a lot of new features like comment moderation. And there’s still some things like flag-as-objectionable that may also prove helpful.

Is the splog problem “solved” on Blogger? I definitely wouldn’t call the issue done, because there are a lot of people out there trying to create fake blogs. But the Blogger team has done a bunch of stuff in response to this issue, and the team has made a lot of progress.

That one incident that generated such a flurry of posts was (I believe) mostly because of a batch of fake blogs that mentioned popular bloggers. I thought it was smart of the Blogger team to post a list of all the splog accounts that they deleted as a result of that incident.

I think there’s still some things that can be done to curb the
problem, but I think the Blogger folks are taking the right steps regarding splogs.

Q. Bloggers are becoming increasingly more interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and unfortunately this is prompting some rather spurious posts from “experts” whose information is often years out of date. If Bloggers need to know how to rank well in Google, where would you recommend they get solid information?

I think everyone should sit down with Google’s webmaster guidelines and just read it all. It will only take a couple hours, but the time is well worth it. Make sure you subscribe to the official search engine blogs. I have a lot of respect for Danny Sullivan, and there are some real experts at WMW and TW. If you’ve got any kind of coding experience, try to build a search engine yourself. You’d be amazed
what you learn. Take random info out on the net with a grain of salt unless you know something about the poster’s credibility.

Q. Can you give the Performancing readers a few tips on ranking in Google?

I wouldn’t bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I’d just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url. Don’t try to
rank for a huge phrase at first–pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up. Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility. I think you attract more links with a conversational style, humor, and doing your own research to produce new insights or tidbits of info. In my opinion, just commenting on other blogs isn’t as useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences. A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links. Original information or research is great bait to attract links. 🙂

Q. Adsense has become the #1 monetization choice for Bloggers, and for good reason. It’s a simple, powerful, and (mostly) relevant way of showing ads to readers, and monetizing blog archives. One thing many
blogs suffer from however, is adverts for “blog related” products and services. This sucks if you’re not talking about blogs, but *are* posting on one — is there anything we can do about that? Is there anything Google can do to help blogs avoid that kind of ad?

That’s a stumper. I asked around about this. One thing I love about the AdSense team is that they’re so open to feedback. Several people got a thoughtful look on their face and starting brainstorming about how to prevent blog-related ads from showing up too often in the future. The most concrete immediate advice I heard was a reminder about section targeting. Here’s more info about it.

In essence, you can mark out the heart of a page with your post and suggest that the ads tailor to that. You can also specifically carve out sections of the page to ignore. So if you’ve got a navbar or section that has lots of bloggy words like “blogroll” or “linkblog” then you could exclude that section of the page. I’ll keep you posted if I hear other good suggestions.

Q. Performancing has gotten some great reviews, and links this last week or two, people seem to like what we’re doing — can we get a mention on the Matt Cutts blog? 🙂

I’ve got my eye on it; I’m waiting for the right post to come along. I’ve enjoyed the articles so far. It’s got a nice amount of technical crunch to it. 🙂

Yesterday saw the news that Yahoo! and MovableType have partnered to provide a simple hosting solution for bloggers. The code in MT has been jigged to work better with FastCGI (that Y! servers run on) and is said to be a lot faster than a regular MT intall, and Jeremy tells us that “you don’t need to be a small business to use it. Individuals and Big Business can use it equally well”. The question now is, how viable a solution is Yahoo! hosting for the professional blogger?

The first question that I had was “how much control does the blogger have?” – I mean, it’s all very well having fast hosting, but what about the templates, can i run ads, can I run Adsense?

I spoke to Ginevra Kirkland at SixApart, the company that owns MT, Typepad and LiveJournal and she told me that yes, you have full control of templates, and to make it easier, the StyleCatcher plugin, which helps manage styles and templates comes pre-installed.

So ok, good news on the control front, but do you want to host with a Search engine? Some time back I’d have said no right off the bat, being a slightly paranoid type that dislikes the idea of placing business sites with a company that ALSO runs a Search engine that affects my traffic, and may very well provide income via it’s publisher network in the near future. Reading Jeremy enthuse about their hosting, and taking into account his bias of course though, makes me think that it may be worth exploring when it comes online.

There’s also a rumour going round that they may add WordPress support aswell – and THAT is what would probably tip the balance for me.

Anyone here think likewise? Anyone going to try it?