Blogger

The EatonWeb Blog Directory is looking for a part-time blogger who knows a thing or two about SEO and blog submission.

The blogger will be responsible for regular updates at the EatonWeb Blog: http://portal.eatonweb.com/ewblog/

The position will pay $100 per month for any of the following services:

A) Four 800 word columns
B) Two 800 word columns and four 400 word columns
C) Eight 400 word columns

This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to establish a strong, notable voice in the SEO space.

To apply, either PM me or send me an email to [email protected]

At Performancing and especially after working with Ryan I’ve become a fervent believer in being lazy AND in experimenting and finding new ways to give myself and my blogs an edge over the competition.

It’s not a contradiction – If you’re lazy, you’ll wait and pick out the techniques that give maximum benefits for the least amount of effort (on the other hand you can’t be good if you don’t practice hard, so you’ll always be in a situation where you have to work hard, which kind of sucks and again underlines the need to pick the stuff that really, REALLY works).

My goal today is to give you a surefire, money-in-the-bank method to be a better blogger. And since ‘better blogger’ is too vague, let’s pin it down to the holy trinity that bloggers crave:

• ClarityYou have to get your point across, or you are wasting your time (worse, you’re wasting your readers’ time).
• ImpactWhat you say must matter to your readers, otherwise you’re wasting….you get the story.
• The Velvet CordIn direct marketing / sales writing circles (where I first heard this, and I know I’ve probably gotten the term wrong), the velvet cord is that thread, that plot line, that ties the whole sales pitch together. In story terms, it’s the unifying theme, the binding idea, the basic gist. In blogging terms, it’s the purpose of your blog (knowing “why you’re blogging” is very important).

If your writing doesn’t get your message across, if it doesn’t have an emotional impact on your readers and if it’s not in sync with what you aim to do with your blog, you’re wasting your time, etc etc.

How to get these three skills nailed down to the exact centimeter?

Tell Funny Stories.

When bloggers tell you that blogs are conversations, they’re not joking. What they’re probably not telling you though is that blogs are usually akin to a stage performance – where one person comes on stage and talks to the audience. Depending on how interesting / entertaining the speaker is, his audience will grow. Depending on how engaging he is, the feedback he gets will grow. Depending on how clear and powerful his stories are, his audience will learn from him and hopefully apply what they’ve learned to their own lives.

So why should you tell funny stories? I’m not asking you to be a standup comedian (which, by the way, if you can manage it, will make you a black belt blogger. Seriously.), not yet at least. But what I AM asking you to do is to improve your story telling skills – and to practice those skills on your social circle (if you don’t have friends and THAT’S the reason you’re blogging, you’re fucked). You could try telling stories on your blog, but it’s not as effective. You need to feel the response, the energy (or lack of it) in the room, read the body language of your audience).

Practice. Find a way to get your point across, fast and with just the right amount of details (too few and they won’t picture it, too many and they’ll have trouble imagining it). Learn how to say the things and use a tone of voice that evokes strong emotional responses from your audience (preferably non-violent). And throughout all this, remember that your job is to entertain – if you can’t do that then you’re failing yourself and your friends.

Sounds rough, especially that last bit, eh? If you think that’s rough, you should think about the pressure that blogging for the best blog in any niche brings to its bloggers. Long story short, if you want to be the best, you have to set the bar higher than anyone else and that means, for a start, that you have to deliver on what your blog promises every single time, in spades. And trust me, if you can handle (and deliver) under the pressure of being entertaining at all times, blogging (and great blogging), will become second nature to you.

I’ve read books on being a better writer (and I believe they helped for a while, too). I’ve read countless articles on being a better blogger. I get it, there are just 56,701 different things I have to integrate into my personality to reach that high level of blogging wisdom.

I don’t buy into that bullshit. There is ALWAYS a faster, smarter way to the top, and it almost always requires you to do something that 99.9% of the other population is unwilling to go through. Here, you have to learn how to be funny, all the time. Do that, and you’ll be a blogging celebrity / rock star, THE king of your niche and yes, you could easily pick up chicks through your blog too.

You know, we should run a ‘entertain me’ type of blog competition here on Performancing, where members submit entertaining stories and readers rate them. Except I don’t think that many people will jump to the chance of proving themselves to be entertaining, either because they’re scared of failing or because they’re not willing to try hard enough (it’s the same thing, actually). And the one person who dares to do it, is probably a better blogger than me. Figures…

It is possible that there has never been a better time to be alive when it comes to the proliferation of platforms out there that can be used to blog: WordPress, Movable Type, Typo, Livejournal, Myspace, tumblelogs like Tumblr and Content Management System platforms like Drupal and Joomla. Firmly nestled in amongst these platforms is the much maligned yet often adopted Blogger.

What I hope to provide here is a simple balanced argument as to the merits and otherwise of what is still one of the most popular ways to publish a blog – Google’s Blogger.

I am not going to attempt to answer the question: “With so much choice available, why do people still use Blogger?” As someone who maintains and contributes to several Blogger blogs, I do have my own opinion on that which I will save for another time. I am also not going to enter into a WordPress vs Blogger or any other [insert platform of choice] flame war. I simply do not have enough experience in the wide range of options to make an informed choice.

With the formalities out of the way, I present to you the pros and cons of using Blogger as newbie blog writer.

The Pros – why Blogger is good for newbies

• It is simple to use with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface that allows anyone familiar with a word processor to navigate the Dashboard and get started. It is unintimidating and provides little to no barriers to entry.
• It is part of the Google stable of products and integrates very smoothly with a number of complimentary free Google owned and/or branded products that are perfect for blogging such as Feedburner (to monitor statistics on readers of your news feed), Google Analytics (to monitor statistics on visitors to your blog) and Picasaweb for hosting pictures for your blog. Having said that, there is nothing at all stopping you from using these tools with non-Blogger sites.
• Speaking of Picasaweb, using Blogger gives you access to up to 1GB of space to use just for pictures. There are other options such as Yahoo’s Flickr (which provides free unlimited storage with other usage restrictions or a paid Pro account), but Picasaweb (and Picasa on the desktop) works seamlessly with Blogger in a way even your Grandmother could work out. You also have the ability to upload your video direct to your blog and the video is hosted on Google’s servers.
• Blogger provides free domain name hosting for all blogs. If you don’t have a name, it will hold your hand through the process of acquiring one. This is a very nice added feature.
• The might of Google is squarely behind the development and maintenance of the product. One benefit that might not be high on the list of newbie bloggers (but probably should be) is that Blogger is hosted on Google’s own servers, making it almost impervious to Digg and Slashdot like effects where sudden high levels of traffic can bring other servers to their knees in seconds flat.

The Cons – why Blogger is bad for newbies

• The low barrier to entry encourages mediocrity. This might sound harsh but it is true to some extent. I’m not advocating that everyone should return to hand coding their blog by candlelight, but I have found in my own experience and in talking to other bloggers that when you have to put some effort in to make a post, you are more likely to make a considered post rather than just rapping off some words to fill the space.
• It is a locked platform and it can be difficult to move your content off Blogger if you decide in the future to move to another platform. The onus has shifted to other platforms to work out ways to import Blogger content rather Blogger providing an easy to export content (eg allow all posts to be exported in an XML file).
• It lacks many “add on” features enjoyed by other platforms such as strong theme development communities, plug-ins and trackback capability. These are all things that other platforms such as WordPress take for granted. You may find the greatly reduced number of options a liberating constraint, but if you are like me and many others, you will find yourself hitting the limits sooner rather than later, which can be a very frustrating process.
• The small numbers of the Google development team can never hope to compete with the many thousands of interested weekend hackers who work to further develop and extend the open source platforms like WordPress or Drupal (and soon, the latest version of Movable Type).

Conclusion – a zero sum game?

It’s not easy to declare that newbie bloggers should or shouldn’t use Blogger. While Blogger is frowned upon by “serious” bloggers, it does have some significant benefits in free hosting, 1GB of free storage for images, storage for video and industrial strength armour-plated servers that can survive most any traffic burst. Free domain name hosting also goes some way to counteracting the snide remarks and indignant sniffs whenever a blogspot.com domain name enters the picture.

On the other hand, Blogger has a limited feature set that will restrict the serious blogger as they begin to mature and adopt loftier aims (and if you’re reading this on Performancing, no doubt this includes you!).

While it comes down to personal preference, the above is my contribution to helping newbie bloggers do something I didn’t do when I started – make an informed choice.

WTF NOOB originally uploaded to Flickr by gws. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike 2.0 licence.

A while back I wrote an article called 5 Surefire Steps To Increase Readership 300% (or more) and I remember being personally challenged by the article.

The fact is that some of those steps don’t come naturally to a lot of bloggers, including me.

Since writing that blog entry, let’s count how many of the “suggestions” I actually followed:

1. Interview Other Bloggers

Well, I haven’t really done a single interview in the 2 months since writing that article. I am in the process of changing this by interviewing David Krug about his new approach to online business. Keep an eye out for the interview over at businesspundit.com

2. Offer To Guest Blog

Nope. Nada. Haven’t done it. Guess I was waiting for an invitation.

3. Run A Carnival:

Nope. Not me. But Raj has started the Carnival of Internet Pros which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Let’s hope we can keep that up.

4. Encourage Reader Participation

Hmmmm. I guess I’ve done an alright job with this at Performancing by asking the community some questions.

5. Become a Listener

Terrible. Terrible. Embarrassed. What else can I say. Well, that’s the point of this post:

Listen and Participate

Today I asked an SEO friend, Dee Barizo, how he’d recommend launching 8 new websites that I’ve just started. His response? Submit to social media sites? Nope. At least not as the main strategy. Old fashioned linkbuilding? Nope, not exactly. Here’s what he said:

I would have bloggers spend a lot of time commenting on other related blogs even if their content production drops. The web is becoming more social and getting those blogger contacts is gonna be more and more important, since they can give powerful contextual links (the best kind of links, by far)

Got that? Even if content production drops. Keep paying them. But redirect them to focus on building social nets that will lead to readers and niche-relevant links.

And now to satisfy the title of this post….

Three Things Bloggers Should NOT Neglect

1. Participating, daily and over long periods, in the comment sections of the popular blogs in your niche.

2. Linking *in every article* to at least two other relevant articles on related niche blogs.

3. Developing conversations with readers and other bloggers by asking questions, participating in debates, stirring up controversy, or whatever it takes.

And stop the damn monologue already;-) kk?

As I reassess my own blog designs, I have come to the conclusion that clutter is a state of mind that doesn’t just stop at your desk. It is virtual too, and it has a big impact on how I as reader perceive other writers’ blogs. I have begun studying other people’s blogs for design ideas and I have come to the conclusion that there are 3 main culprits for blog clutter. I’m probably not sharing anything new, but the following often detract from my reading experience:

1. widgets
2. long posts
3. too many ads, or ads in the wrong places

Keep in mind that I’m not perfect and I’ve often been guilty of the first two. It is by making these mistakes that I am learning to be a better blogger.

1. Widgets

I don’t have a problem with widgets as an idea. Some of them are quite useful and I understand that WordPress, for example, is so strong partly because of its range of useful add-ins. However, it’s all about the context. If the widgets don’t help the story your blog is trying to tell, should it really be taking up valuable real estate? For example, if you have a tech blog, do you really need a widget keeping everyone up to date with your latest Jaiku or Twitter micro-post?

2. Long, long, posts

Use expandable post summaries. Please. I know not all platforms use them (Blogger for one doesn’t, unless you are prepared to have a half-useful XML hack-around), but if your chosen platform permits it, use them. Large chunks of text make it very difficult to scan the front page looking for relevant material. Post summaries allow the casual reader access to a wider range of your content, which can only be a good thing.

3. Too many ads, or ads in the wrong places

Ads are fine, but place them nicely. If you want them in the sidebar, that’s fine. If you want them between each post, okay. If you want them in the header or footer, go for it (although if your page goes off the screen, I may not see any in the footer), sure, why not. What clutters the screen is when all of the above options are exercised. I understand why you have put the ads there, but I’m here to see your content, not to have third parties try to sell me something.

While I’m on the topic of ads, if the ads are too large and intrude on the reading, I’m just going to switch off. If you look like you’re trying to sell me something I didn’t come to buy from you, I’m switching off. If every post is divided with ads, splitting up the content inside a post, ruining my reading flow, I’m probably going to surf away. Keep the ads simple and relevant and I’m much more likely to click through on a couple. Flashy, intrusive and all over the place is likely to just push me away.

What pieces of virtual clutter distract you?

Here’s a quick poll that I’d like everyone to fill out in the comments. Is that cool? Would you do just this one favor for me?

Ok. So Performancing is about helping bloggers succeed. Whatever that means, right? Well, for most of us, success amounts to a combination of factors including 1) building a community 2) having created something good 3) making money for our efforts

This poll is designed to help with 3 (which we hope you’ll use to leverage for 1) and 2) !!!

Three Questions:

1. Would you use an ad program that guaranteed a minimum monthly payout? If so, what would that minimum monthly payout have to be to catch your attention?
2. What’s most important to you: A) making more money from less ads B) being paired with highly relevant advertisers C) having a new way to make money that doesn’t overlap with your current ads?
3. Have you had any success with affiliate ads? Would you be interested in an affiliate program that guaranteed monthly payments?

For some people, blogging is as easy (and fast) as talking. These people are rare – good conversationalists AND good bloggers (or maybe they just appear that way?).

For the rest of us though, blogging is NOT as simple as saying our ideas out loud, simply because our ideas are NOT clear enough.

Blogging, especially good blogging, can be excruciatingly painful when you just cannot transform the thoughts in your head into a post in your blog editor.

There are many reasons why this could happen – stress, whether from being over-worked or just poor health and distractions can jumble up our thoughts and leave us grasping for the thread that can unravel the mixed up thoughts and turn them into a post so we can get it over with and move on to something else.

It doesn’t work that way always, and we get even more stressed out.

The way to beat it is a ‘Duh’ method – one that you’d say is so obvious that I shouldn’t even put it in words (but if it were that obvious, why are we still struggling over what to write?).

The only way to beat Bloggers’ Block is to:

Just Start Blogging.

Don’t fret about the 40 other post ideas you have written down that you want to put up (are you nuts?), or the affiliate code that you have to add to your older posts (is it worth your time?), or that OTHER blog that you haven’t been writing on for the last two weeks and you’ve fallen way behind on your work quota… etc etc.

As a society, we think way too much. There’s a time and place for everything – but when you’re working, you should be working, not thinking about it. At the end of the day, you might take out 3-5 minutes to review and perhaps another 5 minutes to plan for the next day, but apart from that, does it really help you if you go over the same pros and cons 300,506 times?

So the next time you’re stuck and don’t know what to say, open up a notepad file or something and start writing. Take action – put yourself under a deadline and force yourself to get things done before that deadline comes.

We all need to kick ourselves in the backside now and then – it’s good practice, I assure you.

In the last few days there has been a lot of press about the prospects of a labor union for bloggers and/or writers. The conversation really took off yesterday with the TechCrunch article Is Blogging Ready For a Unionized Workforce?.

The basic concern is that most bloggers are working for pennies an hour while a handful of probloggers and blog owners are raking in the dough. In other words, most bloggers are working at slave wages. So maybe a union would help raise wages?

David Krug at Telegraphik suggests the need for massive reform in the way blog networks are run:

Bloggers are fed up with payrates, we want insurance, and we want to be able to set standards on how this industry — online publishing is run.

One of the issues that particularly has troubled me in the last few years is how blog networks pay their bloggers. Most of them offer a percentage of profits that a blog makes rather than paying by the post, or one of many what I consider more ethical alternatives.

Krug is voicing a concern with the way the free-market blogging industry has panned out. He wants to see some institutionalized method for improving the quality of life for bloggers.

I don’t see these reforms being successful through a traditional labor union (Note: traditional labor unions do not discriminate based on quality, and that’s the fundamental problem as I see it). In fact, I don’t think that the goal should be to improve the quality of life for *all* bloggers who want to join a labor union.

Rather, I do think that the free markets could willingly support and encourage the development of a “Premium Blogger Collective” that organized the very best bloggers on the internet into a union-like collective and then served as an authoritative central location for businesses and high quality publishing firms to find quality bloggers at premium rates.

Not only do I think that a free-market would support such an endeavor, but Google itself has now put in place the infrastructure to encourage the economics of quality. As a friend of mine put it, they’ve turned the “authority” and “quality” buttons way, way, way up on their search algorithms.

The key to such a collective would be to place high thresholds on blogger entry, ensuring quality bloggers, and gaining the confidence of publishers who are willing to pay a premium for good writing. If the collective were to be successful, it would handle billing and blogger payments, while using some of the profits for important things like insurance.

Despite my suggestions, I do want to provide the following warning. It is my view that the economics of blogging and even SEO just don’t scale well for the aspiring entrepreneur. If you’re serious about getting rich, then you need to become an owner, and you need to start hiring other people to do your work for you. The key to becoming rich on the Internet is putting your assets to work for a strong recurring revenue.

To back up this idea, let me leave with you with the following brief article from Andy Hagans where he diagnosed the fundamental economics of blogging and SEO with an elegant reference to investment guru Warren Buffett. The fact of the matter is that blogging and even SEO are, at a very deep level, bad business models. They simply don’t scale well. And in my view they certainly don’t scale well enough to give every blogger the kind of labor union support that Krug is calling for.

If you really want insurance, then start acquiring good assets and get yourself in the position to hire others. It’s that simple. That’s how business works.