Blogging

As I mentioned on Monday, today is the first session of Blog Reboot.

The basic idea behind Blog Reboot is to analyse different aspects of your blog (content, design, monetization, marketing and SEO) and offer advice on how to improve it in these areas. The advice offered here is free, and selection of the site to be reviewed is at our discretion.

The first site being reviewed is Throughball.com – a football (soccer for you Americans) blog run by Josh. In this case, I chose Throughball.com because I’m involved in the same niche myself and understand the challenges a football blogger faces.

So let’s get this started – I’ll be looking at 6 main points – Blog Focus, Content, Design, Monetization, SEO and Marketing.

1. Blog Focus

Who is Throughball.com’s target audience? Are you offering general football news, offbeat footy news, showing expertise in one league?

My view (and I have had Throughball.com on my RSS reader for the last month or so) is that TB is a ‘general’ footy blog without any particular focus. That doesn’t mean that TB doesn’t have a lot to offer – being a football fan (and blogger) I enjoy TB’s coverage but the main reason I read the site is because I run 2 football blogs and I rely on bloggers as much as the mainstream media to find interesting, off-beat news items.

TB is interesting, but it doesn’t have any particular appeal for me as a fan.

You can get away with being a general news site, but for that you need massive resources (or blog 10 hours a day covering all the news until you can earn enough money to hire people and grow). Examples of general footy sites : BBC Football, Guardian Football, Sky Sports.

Competing with the big media isn’t a smart idea – when you’re starting out (TB’s an year old) you want to focus on dominating a narrow niche first and then expanding into a broader, overarching niche if you wish to later on.

Sometimes general football sites work well – CaughtOffside.com is one example – but these guys are facing trouble as well. With so much news being generated everyday, there’s no way you can cover all of it. You have to focus – either pick a club or pick a unique angle.

101greatgoals.com is trying to corner the football videos niche, and doing a good job of it. You probably already know plenty of club-specific blogs – Arseblog is top dog where Arsenal is concerned, UnitedRant for Manchester United, ChelseaBlog for Chelsea, etc.

You have to decide for yourself what you want to focus on, and whether you want to focus on a club or find your own angle to football.

From what I gather, you’re US-based, so catering to US-based football fans (or should I say soccer?) would be an ideal first step. There are some US bloggers writing about football but they try to go after the same UK audience as everyone else.

Bypass all that, hit the US audience, and see what you can offer to them.

2. Design

I put Throughball.com through the blink test and the first thing I noticed was that the post headlines are downplayed because of the AdSense blocks above them and the subscription info in the center of the screen. I’m not saying that you should remove those two items – especially not the RSS subs info – but look at ways to make the post a more prominent part of the page.

One way to do this would be to widen the content area and reduce the space given to the two sidebars. Another way to do this would be to shift the content column to the center and take the first sidebar to the left. If you do that you’ll probably have to change the order of what you’re showing in the sidebars as well.

The 3 column approach isn’t bad, but to make it work you should give as much breathing space to your post / content area as possible.

I’m hoping Liz can add more to this section – Liz?

3. Content

With blogging it’s important to let your voice shine through instead of regurgitating what the mainstream media is printing – TB has a unique voice and viewpoint on football and that definitely helps attract readers.

The three things that I think you might want to look at are:

a) Content focus – this goes back to point 1 and what I’ve said there.

b) Timeless content – this is a bit hard to manage with football sites, but here are a few ideas:

• football videos – think niche and see if you can build archives (even if you’re linking to youtube).
• football images – like it or not, WAGs are popular with footy fans. Be care of copyright issues though.
• non-news items, such as player profiles
• event-related information – are you ready for Euro 2008? For the 2010 World Cup?
• Player transfer records
• Fixture schedules (copyright issues again, but there are ways around them).

I’d suggest that you try to move away from news items now and then and provide info that people can refer to in the future as well.

4. SEO

Your title tags and permalink URLs are fine, which is a great head-start compared to other bloggers. The other main thing blogs miss out on are Meta Description tags – and neither your main site nor individual posts show meta description tags.

Solution: Use the ‘head meta description’ WordPress plugin and follow the instructions on the plugin page. You might want to insert the meta description tag for the main page yourself. For individual posts, it pays to take out a minute and write a brief description in the ‘post excerpt’ box instead of relying on the plugin to insert the first couple of lines of each post as the meta description tag.

Second item on the menu – links. Throughball.com doesn’t show up in Dmoz, or BOTW (as far as I know). Submit to both these directories (BOTW blog submissions are free), and start looking at football-specific directories to see where you can get links from.

Of course, directory links aren’t everything – you also want links from other blogs. The football blogging niche is usually not too keen on linking out – you either have people too concerned with ‘sending readers away’ or engaging in circular linking.

The easiest way to get links here is to do blogroll link exchanges, but they aren’t effective at all, so it’s a tough ask.

The second best way is to linkbait the top blogs in your niche. Find bloggers, start reading their sites and get a feel for what type of news / sites they link out to. See if you can write a story that captures the same audience / angle, and once you’ve written it, mail them the link. Chances are, if your piece is good and relevant, they’ll link to it in a future post. You get a new reader, you get an in-context link from a popular blog AND you have a quality post on your blog.

Guest blogging on popular blogs is also a good way to get in-context links (and if you’re looking for blogs to write on, Soccerlens, a fan-based football news site, welcomes new writers (disclosure: I own Soccerlens.com).

Some on-page optimization advice – remove the ‘month-by-month’ archives from your sidebar. You already have the categories listed and from the SE point of view, showing topically-related content is better than showing content segmented by time.

Some more on-page advice – use keywords in your title tags and try to write posts around topics that get searched-for regularly. For example, during last year’s Champions League final my coverage got a lot of SE traffic. Ditto for the upcoming Manchester United vs Europe XI game.

Non-SEO advice – add a help page for the social bookmarking and RSS subscription options to help explain to readers what they are and how to use them.

I find that Newsvine is far better than Reddit or Delicious in sending traffic. Digg works too, but for that you’ll have to make it tech related. Try StumbleUpon as well.

5. Monetization

The fact is – football is not as easy to monetize as gadgets. Here are a few options for you to consider:

AdSense – you’re using AdSense right now but it’s not optimal. I’d suggest removing the sidebar panel (unless you move the centre sidebar to the right) and adding a rectangle ad above the comments in all your posts. You might also want to consider adding link ads instead of the small rectangle you have at the top of the page.

With AdSense you’ll never know what works best until you test. Even then, my personal experience is that in-context, large rectangles convert best, as do horizontal link ads.

Here’s a tip – ads relating to football betting and gambling pay out the most, so you might want to use the ‘google_hints’ optional tag to improve ad targeting. If you don’t know how to do it, email me.

Paid Ads – you already have sponsors, but since I don’t know what you’re earning from them I cant say if it’s good for you or not. You may want to consider Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers to sell link ads on your site.

Affiliates – There are plenty of options for you – football betting sites, football tickets, football jerseys, football equipment, etc. Find out what relates best to your site and audience, then promote them on your site.

Each revenue source doesn’t have to earn you thousands – but a couple of hundred from here and there can add up quite nicely.

6. Marketing

Who do you know in your niche? Are you commenting on / talking to the top blogs / bloggers in the football niche? It’s not what you know, it’s who you know 🙂 In football this is even more evident as something as simple as being the supporter of the same club can get you regular links (and thus a steady stream of traffic and readers).

In football,social media optimization (SMO) means using:

• football videos as marketing tools for your website.
• tech-related football news to leverage Digg.
• old-school word-of-mouth marketing techniques – goes back to ‘who you know’.

Are you listed on NewsNow? It’s full of spam and crap news, but it’s an excellent way to get readers to your website. I’ll be writing about NewsNow optimization some time in the future on BlogFC, so keep a look out for that.

Start guest-blogging on more popular football blogs. Also, invite readers to contribute to your blog (some will, and 1 or 2 will stick around for the long run, and it will make your blogging job a lot easier).

Wrapping Up

Phew…that ran over an hour, didn’t it? I couldn’t go into details about a few things (such as keyword research / link building) because of time constraints, but I hope I’ve covered as much as possible.

I’d love to hear what Liz has to say about design issues, and I’m sure Raj can contribute a fair bit on link bait strategies (hint hint).

Let me know what you guys think about the first Blog Reboot session here at Performancing 🙂

I spend a lot of time surfing the internet, and looking for new blogs to read. I must say that some of my favorite blogs are written by women, and I thought I’d share a few of my “must reads”. These blogs, in my opinion are some of the best in their field, and wanted to recognize some of the best bloggers in the world.

Dooce
For those of you who have never heard the term “dooced” before, you should read what it means. Utah blogger Heather Armstrong contributes in whimsical, sarcastic and sometimes vulgar way on her blog. And I love it. I do have somewhat of a risque side to me, and Heather touches on that almost every day. If you want a taste of how funny she can be, you should read her Frequently Asked Questions page.

Whoorl
Last year, this blog was basically prego mommy meets the OC. Blogger Whoorl (aka Sarah) spent a majority of last year pregnant with her adorable little baby Anders. She’s got a very simple blog layout, which is saturated with some spunk and wit. When I need a break from the real world, I check out to see what kind of recent discoveries of motherhood she’s going through. A fun read, especially for moms.

Building My Empire
I’ve been following this blog for some time now – talk about a woman who’s driven to make money online. Empress, as she calls herself, has been pimping her blog for a while now, and seems to be seeing the fruits of her labor. To be honest, I’ve never seen anyone try so hard to make money online, as she is with affiliate marketing. Loaded with content, her blog is a fine example of how to build a blog online, with the intentions of providing helpful tips, as well as how to make money.

Lastly, I wanted to share a few blogs I’ve seen over the past few months that are being used to showcase work. Many people are using WordPress to display their portfolios, which is a great way to utilize “blogging” for business. I’ll take that concept a step further in an upcoming article about businesses adding blogs, but for now, here’s a little eye candy created by women bloggers. Phokiss Photography, Expressions by Michelle, Beyond Ordinary are fine examples of photography sites, using creativity to mask their blog.

So if you’re new to the blogging world, take a look at some of these sites – they are successful, and I believe that we can all learn from them. They are really good examples of how to display content, how to encourage interaction and how to be creative with your blog.

Sharon Sarmiento writes over at 901am, 5 ways to work less and get more done online. This is good advice that may help you if you’re having a hard time managing your blogging schedule, whether you work full time at it or not. Particularly useful to me is point #1: restrict your work hours to increase efficiency. Kathy Sierra also talked about this over at the Headrush blog. If you’re trying to learn in limited time, check out hacking knowledge: 77 ways to learn faster, deeper, and better.

Now, I guess I’m bad for this. Since 2005, I’ve been putting in 10-17 hour days blogging. When I first shrank the time spent in late 2005, I found that I got my work done regardless. The trick is that I had to leave my workspace and go do other things. So sometimes I’d shoot off to the local Farmer’s Market or go see a movie or whatever. And I’d still get my scheduled blogging done (this was all my own work then). But when I started getting (ghost)blogging contracts in 2006, I started feeling guilty that I wasn’t spending more time for my clients. Big mistake. So I did, and I allowed all sorts of distractions, getting less done in more time. And so I ended up in the same 10-17 hr/day trap.

Part of the problem in work for yourself is that it’s easy to think you have the whole day to finish work. This is a mistake because your work will expand to fill that void, if you let it. You have to discipline yourself to structure your time – something I struggle with constantly.

Finally, as of two weeks ago, I got sick of blogging 7 days a week. How different was this when I was a workaholic in the “real” world? So I decided to shrink my work week to M-F, and leave Sat/Sundays for my own blogging. I just started this last week and it’s getting better — and I’m actually starting to get more work done than when I spent more time.

I experienced the same phenomenon when I designed and co-wrote a book on web programming in 2002. I was spending 16 hrs a day writing and feeling like I was getting nowhere – sometimes staring at the computer screen. When I told myself it was okay to go shopping, okay to see a movie, visit friends, etc., I found that not only did I get my quota of at least 3000 words/day of technical writing done, but I managed to do it in only 10 hrs per day, as well as fire off some programming and diagrams.

Change of scenery is especially important for creative endeavours such as writing, especially if you’re stagnating in ideas. I managed to produce 900 pages of text, code and diagrams in only 3 months, plus a month of editing. Had I not taken breaks, I doubt I would have produced that much content in that amount of time.

As for the here and now, my next step is to shrink down to an 8 hour/day schedule, then maybe 6 after that, so that I can start doing other activities that I’ve forgotten about. Like having a life outside blogging. I find that I have to try different scheduling and productivity techniques regularly, to see which method fits at the time. I’m great at planning and writing down what “needs to be done today”, as Sharon suggests, but when it comes to getting it all done, I often get distracted by the millions of administrative details that need to be taken care of.

But I am learning and at least trying, which ensure that I keep blogging as a profession. Save for a bit of overlap with Sharon’s tips, here are a few of my own tips:

1. Change the medium.
   E.g., switch from typing on the computer to planning on paper, or vice versa.

2. Change your viewpoint.
   If you have a laptop, try working in another room. Some experts suggest you don’t work in your bedrom, else insomnia may set in. But not everyone has the option.

3. Change stimulus.
   Listen to some music for a while, or the TV. (But do turn the TV off when you start to write again, else the visuals may distract you and reduce productivity.) I find that watching comedy for at least an hour a day helps me loosen up my writing style. If I’m suffering the screaming blue meanies (seasonal depression), I’ll watch two hours or more.

4. Change of scenery.
   Put down your laptop and go somewhere else, do something else. I’ll sometimes go walk in the forest with the dogs. Watching a movie at a theatre also very often helps me get creative.

5. Change your schedule.
   If your current schedule isn’t working, try something different. I’m a night bird, but when I can manage it, I like to do most of my reading either late night (after 10 pm) or early in the morning. When I was working solely on my short stories and novellas in 2002, I found that if I wrote at least 500 words before 10 am, I could often write 3000 words that day. But if for whatever reason I put off doing any writing (even just garbage doodling) until after that time, I usually couldn’t get more than 1000 words. Similarly, I tend to be ultra productive on some Saturdays, if I first spend the morning and afternoon in pure reading, with no distractions.

Not all of these tips will work for everyone, so you have to discover it for yourself. What blogging productivity techniques do you use that work for you?

One of the comments in the Reboot my Blog post talks about the need to have a checklist for blog review and evaluation.

I think that’s a great idea, so I’m going to try to build a basic framework for blog evaluation here, and if you have anything to add / improve upon, please let me know in the comments.

The Basic Idea Behind Blog Reboots

In many cases, people need help in tweaking their blogs rather than full-blown makeovers.

In other situations bloggers need guidance or a couple of nudges in the right direction instead of hands-on training.

This is not a paid review, so you can’t expect detailed how-to advice. However, we will try to fit as much info as possible into the time we spent reviewing your blog (30 minutes to an hour). That’s the equivalent of hundreds of dollars of professional consulting, so please follow the instructions 🙂

What can you expect out of getting your blog reviewed like this?

• You’re told what you already know, but don’t work on – you KNOW you need a better design, to write more flagship content, to get links from trusted sources, to get your basic blog SEO right, etc.
• You learn how to do it – when it comes to monetization, blogging strategies and SEO, there is a LOT of valuable information available for free online. All you need is to be pointed in the right direction.

1. Focus

A look at your target market and audience. If you focus on the wrong niche (not profitable, no demand, too broad, too narrow, etc), your blog will be at a severe disadvantage from the start. This will be based on the blog’s contents as well as what the blog owner says about their site when they submit it for review.

In most cases people write on topics that are too broad for their current reach and resources. Tightening your focus and improving content quality can go a long way towards building a loyal readership.

2. Design

The Internet is a visual medium and you have very little time to attract first-time visitors to stick around at your blog. But that’s only part of the problem. The other part is conveying the trust and authority (and reinforcing it on a regular basis) through your blog’s design. If you’re using the default Kubrick theme for your WP install, chances are you haven’t thought much about design.

There are many small things that go into making a quality design, one that attracts readers, conveys authority and emotionally communicates the blog’s central theme to the reader on a subconscious level.

Heavy, but necessary.

3. Content

Content is an abused term, so I’m going to use ‘information’ instead. A blog post is a source of input – it’s information that will immediately be evaluated by the reader as being useful / interesting or not.

• How interesting is your blog?
• How useful is it?
• Is it shareable?
• Is it actionable (Can I implement this right now)? Daily Blog Tips is the perfect example of ‘actionable’ information.
• Is it ‘timeless’? See Chris G’s Flagship Content post for a better discussion on this.

4. SEO

Search Engine Optimization is good for you, and as much as people might say that it’s a subset of marketing or ‘not necessary’ if you do your ‘blogging’ right, the fact remains that it IS a specialised skill and understanding how it impacts your blog traffic and success is very important.

Topics that should be discussed in this section:

• search engine visibility
• search engine friendliness
• on-site optimization
• link building

And plenty more…

5. Monetization

Perhaps the most common question on blogging is – “how do you make money from it?”

There are a number of ways, and the straightforward answer is that ‘it depends’ on what your blog is about.

A gadget / tech blog does better with Chitika (and even AdSense) than a blog on ‘learning spanish’. AdSense works well IF used properly, but it’s still ‘webmaster welfare’. Paid ads have a lot of stigma attached to them because of the Google / no-follow debate, but they are an option more and more blogs should be looking at. Affiliate marketing is there but is misunderstood and considered ‘too hard’ (it’s not).

Plenty of options available, and the underlying idea is to diversify your income while also maximising it.

6. Marketing

Have you heard the one about the tree falling in the forest but making no sound because ‘no one heard it’?

Your Blog’s existence is meaningless unless people KNOW about it. What should you be looking at:

• Blog networking (who do you know in your niche? who reads your blog? who SHOULD be reading your blog?) – your peers are your best audience
• Social Media Marketing – a fancy term that tells you to leverage online tools and communities for word-of-mouth marketing of your blog and its contents.
• Increasing your readership – your readers are also your sales force. Are they sharing your posts and talking about your work online?
• Strategies for increasing blog visibility

Blog Reboot

I’ll be using the above framework for future blog reboot sessions (the first one is probably going to be on Wednesday (7th March), so keep an eye out for that).

What do you guys think about this list? Have I missed out on anything?

We talk a lot about success in blogging – success in making money, in building communities, etc.

But where there’s the possibility for success, there’s also a possibility for failure.

And when you’ve invested your own hard-earned money into a particular project, it can be very painful to watch it go south.

Today I want to about how, if you are not careful, you can completely ruin a blog that you have just bought and instead of turning it into a profit-machine, you end up making it a liability.

If you want some advice on buying websites, please read Raj’s tips on buying websites for profit and SEO and my post on buying old websites.

Let’s say you buy a website that has a thriving community, good search engine rankings, under-monetized and a great brand to work with. You find out that the owner wants to sell, you get to him first, negotiate, bada bing bada bang, you own the site by next week.

And then your troubles start.

Did you plan for:

• Maintaining the community by following the same style as that of the previous blogger(s)?
• Changing as few things as possible (design, monetization, seo) in the beginning and to introduce them ‘slowly’?
• Spending plenty of time blogging on the new site to help your audience learn about you and trust you?
• Bring in new bloggers and ensure regular posting if you couldn’t manage it yourself?
• The fact that you might need to ‘bail out’ (and thus would need buyers to offload the website) if things don’t work out for you?

Giving lots of time, introducing changes (very) gradually), having a contingency plan – these three items should be on top of your to-do list for any blog that you plan on buying.

A new blog is like a new website – you need to put in the time to make it successful, whether it is monetization, or design or SEO or more content.

Hand in hand with this is the assumption that you need to know where to spend that extra time too – just blogging all the time or promoting the site all the time can’t cut it.

Are you giving your new blog plenty of time? For that matter, what about the one you just bought, or the one you’ve had for ages but hasn’t gone anywhere?

If things don’t work out, you should always have a backup plan.

Long posts or short posts, I’m sure you’ve encountered the question. Longer means more content to reed the spiders and the deep readers. Shorter means casual readers are more likely to stay longer and read deeper.

Readers, those readers, unlike spiders, can’t be configured to do what we think they are supposed to.

When readers glance or glimpse our blog page, we’ve got a blink to draw them in. A blink isn’t long enough to read, or even sample, the content. A blink is exactly that – a blink. We’re talking a matter of seconds.

Being Blind to the Old

If we’ve been with a blog for more than two weeks, unless we’re in a redesign, we’re used to how it looks. Our brain filters out what is no longer new, so that we can concentrate the changes in our blog environment that are useful to us.

This filtering is critical to survival. It keeps us from being over-stimulated by everyday information that would be disruptive –- it’s counter-productive to be as impressed with our template or our new cotton sweater as we were the moment we first saw it. If we were, we would constantly be being bombarded by information — never able to sort the old from the new.

Unfortunately that also means that we quickly become blind to how the things we see every day actually look.

Blink Test Your Blog

So how do you get a fresh look at your blog? Do a blink test. That’s what I call it. Read all of the directions below before you do the blink test. That’s so that you can concentrate on noticing where your eye goes and what your reactions are.

1. Open your blog fully on your computer in front of you.
2. Look away at the ceiling or a neutral color wall –- white is the best if you’ve got it. Try to look for 2 or 3 minutes so that you’re completely clearing your mind of any “cached” images.
3. When you look back at the screen notice where your eyes go, and notice how easy or hard it is to draw your eyes elsewhere.

Where did your eyes go? Most folks will find that their eyes went to some visual element. Often that element is the big orange feed button. It’s good that people notice your feed, but is it really what you want them to remember most?

I would think the visually strongest pull on your blog should be your blog’s title. Now, don’t necessarily make your feed button smaller, but rather make your title visually more prominent.

Using the blink test. Find the 3 strongest visuals on your blog. Make sure that they are in order that supports your goals. Next Week, I’ll be showing you a blog on which we did just what I’m talking about.

Meanwhile if you blink your blog and have questions, c’mon let’s talk.

Liz Strauss

Ah Raj,
We really outght tell them the rest of the story. . . . 🙂

If you’re thinking about being a problogger, folks don’t tell you everything you might want to know about it. You might see what looks exciting. Take a looke a little closer.

Glamour is only glamorous from far away. I sit at my keyboard writing this at 10pm tonight.

Those 940,000 hits I just looked up by my name on Google aren’t fun or interesting when I want play or read instead of write another post that’s due tomorrow.

If you become a problogger you will find

• that you have to explain what you do to every person you know over and and over and over and over again. . . . I tell my mother-in-law I write spy novels. It’s easier.
• that every job you get will take longer than you thought it would. I don’t know how this happens. . . . It’s a Murphy’s law thing.
• that occasionally folks who become your fans will send you email and expect you to stop your work to answer them over and over and over and over again. . . . . Unfortuantely, telling them you’re in the middle of blogging a spy novel won’t work with them.
• that you’ll still have the same problems with traffic and stats that you had before, escept they’ll feel bigger because now you think about losing money.
• that no one will be as excited as you are that you’re finally a problogger.

So Why Does Anyone Do It?

We do it because we can’t NOT do it. Blogging is something that makes us better. It makes a connection that is more than what people can see on the surface. We do it because

blogging connects us to our thoughts.

it forms an emotional bond between writer and readers.

it gives us a voice with which to become thought leaders.

it is communication in the newest, the fastest, and the broadest way invented.

it makes us part of a change in the history of the world.

it leaves out words indelible for the future, across time and spce to every corner of the world.

On top of it all, a problogger gets paid for that.

Okay, so it’s not so glamorous, but with a payoff like that the work is sweet, when you can get it.

Don’t just sit, there. Help them out. 🙂

Liz Strauss