Blogging

What is the best strategy for building a community around your website/blog? Forums have been, for a long time, the primary tool for building a community on a website. The downside here was that you needed considerable traffic (or heavy marketing) to get the forum going – nothing kills a forum more than a lack of participation. Message boards and IRC chat rooms provide a tenuous alternative (as do discussions in the comments section of a blog), and leave something to be desired for, especially on websites that are not popular enough to support their own forums.

Interactivity on most blogs is limited to comment conversations (read Chris’s views on tracking comments). It’s easy to say that this is sufficient, but is there any real need for a better solution? The questions I’m trying to ask here are:

• What can we do to improve the stickiness of a blog?
• Which tools are most effective in community building – especially for those blogs that do not (currently) enjoy the sort of attention Performancing or SEOBook does (in other words, 95% of the blogs out there)?

For my part, I’ll talk about group chat solutions. Hopefully other readers can shed light on what I’ve missed and on other techniques as well.

Group chat services such as Campfire and Tangler (read TechCrunch’s review on Tangler) are more suited to project based collaboration, event-specific conversations, Q&A sessions (Andy, do you think you could do one on link-building anytime soon?) and personal chats. Like instant messaging, group chat works best when the connections between people are personal – it would be more natural for the moderators of a forum to communicate via Campfire rather than a bunch of strangers who drop by my blog for the first time.

The real benefit of placing a group chat solution on your blog / website is that it can be equated to your blog having a chat-room, which in turn encourages readers to interact and discuss posts as well present their own comments.

Secondly, without allowing chat transcripts to be indexed, there will be little search engine value for such a solution. For a contrast, consider how useful forums are for building search engine rankings. Forums offer a phenomenal gateway into producing tons of fresh, useful content on your website in a short period of time. In return, forum posters get recognition and a chance to build their reputation (yes, some of us do it for the sake of helping others, but that is a small minority).

In the end, a major part of community building comes from giving your blog readers a chance to ask questions and interact with other readers. Group chat achieves that splendidly.

What do you think?

Hmmm… So i break my blogging silence of a week or so to post about bloody PageRank? Sheeesh, it just doesn’t get any funnier, or perhaps sadder heh! Out of all the many, many things that we can judge a blogs worth by, judge its meaning by, and it’s contribution to the ‘sphere, PR has got to be the stupidest.

Im just starting through an enormous backlog of RSS and of course am seeing all the “update!” posts. Good grief, what drivel;

It was useless 3yrs ago, and it’s still useless.

You’d have more luck judging digestion by turd length than trying ot work out how well your blog is doing by it’s pagerank 🙂

I remember in 2003-2004 having to hear from hundreds of people every month about “how blogs aren’t supposed to make money” and “your ideas are crap because bloggers can’t make money”. Allow me to say to those people now… I told you so. :p

So here we are, finally at the point where you can make money with your blog. It DOES work. This is great for us bloggers who have toiled away and taken our lumps over the years, but it also creates an entirely new dynamic for us as well, especially the new breed of bloggers who aren’t sellers.

See, to be a pro blogger, you need to start thinking like a seller. You’ve instantly become a publisher. It is now your job to provide not only what your readers want to read, but to also make money. Making money with your blog does not happen simply by writing good content, it’s way more complex than that.

The problem with this is that most bloggers aren’t sellers. They’ve never had a sales job. They don’t realize the things you need to think about and do when dealing with a customer, as opposed to a reader.

And if you don’t think your readers aren’t your customers… they are. They are the consumers of your content, the ones who allow you to put up your blogads and the ones who click on your Adsense ads.

So shouldn’t you be worried about customer retention just like everyone else? What are you doing to retain those readers and keep them? It’s time most bloggers started to think about these questions if they plan on keeping their blogging business going long-term.

Ken just started an excellent discussion entitled “Questions to ask before joining a blogger network”. While performancing members Nae and Raj have already given some excellent advice I thought I would butt in here and give my thoughts.

Any writing job involves the exchange of certain things of varying value, you provide

• time
• expertise
• intellectual property
• writing skill
• contacts
• creativity

in return for

• money
• exposure
• possible perks

You have to decide what you are willing to do for the amount you will get back. Also you have to determine how much you trust them to deliver.

At one early point in my career I did some writing in return for web space. I laugh at that now. Was it so different from writing for 14p a word? In the web space example I still owned my content, I ended up recycling the HCI/Usability articles many times afterwards, the 14p a word example I wrote for hire and they still own my work. As Raj says in the thread, who retains copyright could be a critical issue.

As Nae points out contracts are important, particularly if this person or these people are new to you. Contracts can be fair and balanced or they could be very one sided, only an expert in these things can tell you the difference usually. Don’t trust your friend down the local watering hole, get some legal advice.

That all being said, if your current blog isn’t exactly setting the world alight, they are offering good money or in lieu of that good traffic, and if it will not take up a lot of your time, perhaps it is worth having a go. See what the terms and conditions are. If you can cut your losses at any time it might be worth a shot.

Many blog networks while getting a ton of traffic will not make money right away. While I had been published before, I really got my first big breaks by writing for an already successful publication on a not very lucrative contract. The perception was that anyone writing there must be an expert. Sometimes publishers are very busy and sometimes not very bright, simple rules like that work for them. Automatically I was approached to do what I really wanted to do. By not getting all the rewards right away you might set yourself up for rewards later, the exposure alone could be enough. In blogging it is possible to use the profile and links to help yourself in future if you are smart.

What do you think? Continue this discussion at Questions to ask before joining a blogger network

As you know, Nick and I are currently in San Diego on Performancing business. It’s remarkable how well we can do all the things we need to do for the business even while travelling, it means we can be almost anywhere and still get the job done. If you would like to blog on the move you might be interested in how we do it. Also it gives us a chance to geek out about our gadgets!

Nicks Kit

Nick is using an IBM Thinkpad Laptop as his Gentoo Linux workhorse. While we have been here he has also snapped up a cool new Nokia 770 “Internet Tablet” that he has been lusting after for quite a while. This PDA-like device runs a version of Debian Linux and has Wifi and bluetooth capability. In addition to this he has a Plantronics DSP 500 Skype headset and a Motorola Razr phone for voice and to provide the Nokia tablet with GPRS connectivity via bluetooth (strange a Nokia product would not have cell features!).

Chris’ Gear

My equipment has a much more Microsoft flavour. My humble Samsung V25 laptop runs XP Pro, plus I have a O2 XDA Exec Pocket PC (a rebadged HTC running Windows Mobile 2005 for Pocket PC). For voice I have Skype both on my laptop (I use a $9 Skype earpiece/microphone, nothing so posh as Nicks headset) and also on my Pocket PC. The PDA is actually a phone, but I only use it for data and Skype as I have a Sony Ericsson K750i for normal cellular voice calls.

Connectivity

I was really surprised that here in San Diego there is rarely free Wifi. Perhaps naively I thought in the USA it would be overflowing with public bandwidth! Luckily lots of people do not secure their networks (finding a network called “default” is usually a good bet!).

Pay Wifi can be expensive, $15 an hour in some places. At that price, even my expensive 3G/UMTS data plan is more reasonable providing I am only doing email or IM.

When travelling and intending to blog it is worthwhile in addition to a wifi card taking along a spare network cable and a sync cable for your mobile phone. It is not yet the situation where you can rely on getting connected with Wifi even when it is supposedly available.

Software

Dissapointingly neither Nick or I can use PFF on our PDAs. Even though Nicks gadget is running Linux it does not yet have Firefox (though one is in the works), and there is definitely no Firefox for Pocket PC.

Thankfully though both machines have decent web browsers. The Nokia runs a version of Opera and has a 800×480 screen. It would need a USB keyboard if Nick wanted to avoid using the touch screen keyboard or handwriting recognition. The Pocket PC has IE and a 640×480 screen but does have an included keyboard.

Both machines can run IM software, mine using the bundled MSN Messenger plus Skype and Nicks his beloved GAIM. While the Nokia has a bundled RSS reader I use a web based interface which while fiddly works quite well and at least syncs with my desktop.

Summary

It is very pleasing that this company is not tied to geography, it truly is a virtual organisation. While already we were spread over countries and timezones, this trip proves we are quite capable of working while mobile. Blogging is very well suited to this kind of approach to working. There is no reason why a travelling blogger should not be able to keep up with events and maintain a good posting schedule, with good time management and planning of course.

How lucky are we that we can do something we really enjoy, find so rewarding, almost anywhere.

Do you blog on the move? Please do tell us about it.

Im on my way to San Diego again, yet another meeting with the dev team, but this time they have WIFI on the transatlantic flight from Denmark to Chicago, how cool is that?

Im supposed to be doing a little bit of work on some more serious stuff than telling you lot about how good the inflight internet is, but hell, i’ve not done this before and it IS cool heh… It wouldwould be fantastic for us to hook up with any members that are in the area though, so let me fill you in on the schedule for the next few weeks…

San Diego

So, im bound from Chicago to San Diego later today, and I have a whole week over there this time, with Chris joining me tomorrow sometime.

Do we have any Performancing members in the area that might like to hook up for a drink or something to eat? We’re dead pushed for time, but if anyone fancies it, i reckon a little time could be made for beers 🙂

SES with Andy Hagans

Im at Search Engine Strategies New York with Andy Hagans on the 1st of next month, where we’ll both be speaking at a session on tagging — the same one i had to miss in Chicago last year due to passport issues, so again if any one is going to be there, let us know.

New Communications Forum

After that, Im in Palo Alto for the New Communications Forum where i will be generally hanging out and catching up with a few folks. So again… if anyone is going from here, please let me know!

Im hoping to catch up with the folks from BlogHer, Tom Foremski and a whole heap of folks over the thursday and Friday, and will post about it seperately in the week as it really does deserve it’s own post!

As those that are paying attention to my occasional ramblings on travel will have guessed, we’re getting closer and closer to announcing our next tool for bloggers — when we’re ready, it’ll be on the homepage, so stay tuned…

We have mentioned a couple of times that we tend to have enormous feed subscriptions, despite our best efforts to keep the numbers manageable. Artem raised the question about how we manage these but no answers were forthcoming so I thought I would revive the topic here.

First my tool of choice

By now someone must have built the ultimate feed reading tool to beat all others?

I have been on a constant lookout for a great feed reader ever since I discovered RSS. Bloglines, sorry to the fans, just doesn’t do it for me. I use a web interface as a backup, not as my primary reading method.

Newsgator was ok but I found a better Outlook RSS plugin with Attensa. With Attensa I can sync with their web based service, this means my primary mode of RSS reading is available in addition to a roaming web interface, perfect. Well, almost. I had to spend a LOT of time with their very helpful staff to work out why it had nuked my Outlook install. All resolved now, happily.

How I manage my feeds

The one thing Attensa does not have that others I tried, such as Blogbridge and even Attensa’s own web based service, is the “river of news” view. If they added this to the Outlook tool I would be very happy in deed.

The way I work is to store my feeds in folders by “project” rather than topic. So feeds I read to find out the news that is relevant to Performancing go into a Performancing folder, good photography blogs go into my DSLRBlog folder, the best .NET blogs go into the folder for my techy blog etc.

I still have “second tier” folders for all the rest of the blogging news, but by shifting feeds into very paired down collections I am only looking at the good stuff, the ones I can really rely on. This saves me time as I am not wading through irrelevant stuff that might be fun but isn’t immediately useful.

An important folder contains all the non-blog feeds I keep up with, our BaseCamp projects, my Tadalists, etc. This is the main advantage of my feeds being in Outlook. I have outlook open all the time so if something new pops up I know right away.

Once I have got the important feeds out of the way and posted some (obviously brilliant and insightful) blog posts I can read the rest to keep abreast of news and catch up with what Dilbert is up to today and what is going to happen next on Battlestar Galactica.

If while looking through the other feeds I find a feed that looks like it will be useful I will move it. Looking through the feeds at this time also helps me find new blogs. I follow all the linked sources and have a look to see if I want to subscribe. Feeds I haven’t found useful for a couple of weeks get nuked. It’s like feed Darwinism, only the best survive.

You?

What software do you use and how do you manage your feeds? How many feeds do you subscribe to?

In my last post, I talked about how to find writing ideas using your web analytics package. Here’s a simple technique I used in Firefox, with the Performancing for Firefox extension, to set up several posts and increase my productivity.

Step 1: In your blog’s web analytics reports, find the one that shows the top search terms used to come to your site.

Step 2: Open up the PFF pane and make sure you don’t have a draft open.

Step 3: Highlight an interesting search word or phrase and drag it with your mouse into the “Title” field of PFF.

Step 4: Save the “stub” either by using CTRL-S or the “Save as Note” button.

Step 5: Now “Clear Content” and repeat steps 1-4 for the next search term that interests you.

I used this technique the last three days to drive up my productivity level – to as high as 14 posts (yesterday), over 4-6 blogs. What happens is that by building a collection of post stubs with suitable titles, you prep the background processes of your mind. You tell it that you are planning to write these articles, and your subconcious takes over  for your conscious mind.

If you use this technique often enough, and are clear on what you are writing about, it organizes your thoughts. Sometimes, you might even see an article in your head. Articles may appear to you immediately, or they may take a few days.

It has worked for me. I used this technique (without the PFF of course 🙂 about 4 years ago to produce ideas for 100 short stories, and 40 or 50 completed stories, in about a month, as well 900 pages of content for a computer programming book in 3 months, including editing.

It works, when I remember to use it. And with PFF, I’ve successfully used it for blogging. Provided you have a web analytics package, this is an effective way to drive up your blogging productivity while actually maintaining writing quality.