News

Rather than write a lengthy post, I’d like to create an open thread for Performancing members to hash out their thoughts on Feedburner. Here are a set of questions to answer:

1. Should every blog have a feedburner feed? Or are there only certain blogs that should?

2. Does having a feedburner feed lessen your control over your own feed?

3. Is it worth keeping a link to your own feed on your site, along with a feedburner feed (see here for example)?

4. Does anyone really make any money off feedburner, and if so, under what conditions (type of site, number of readers, etc.)

So you’ve started too many blogs on too many topics all too soon, and you find you can’t maintain them all after all. And you’re loathe to let go of your babies, even the free-hosted ones. What do you do?

I’ve struggled with this problem since getting heavy into blogging nearly two years ago. I have way too many sites and can barely find writers for the sites that earn a bit of money, let alone for the ones that could earn money. I’ve toyed with what to do with them, since if I have them, I feel compelled to do something. Here are some options for your extra blogs. I’m giving them a very superficial treatment, as prep for future discussions.

1. Ditch/sell them.
   Just focus on 2-3 blogs, with 3-5 posts per day per blog [updated]. Once they’re up and running, and you have a few guest/regular writers and regular readers as well as regular search engine traffic, you can expand to more blogs.

2. Go zombie.
   Let the extra blogs stagnate. If you’re running PPC (Pay Per Click) ads, get rid of them on the zombie sites so that your over all CTR (Click Through Rate) doesn’t drop. [Use some other way to record traffic – such as metrics code.]

3. Gift them.
   Maybe you know someone that can do something with the sites.

4. Park them. Ditch the hosting and park the domains for free. I use Sedo.com, but there are lots of others. I haven’t received any ad clicks yet, but I can still see how much traffic each parked domain is getting. So if want to sell just the domain, I have better gauge for the price.
5. Burn out.
   Be like me and try to do everything, burn out and get pissed that none of them are earning much money.

6. Turn them into forums.
   There’s both free and paid forum script code out there. While a forum is not easy to get kickstarted, if you choose a popular topic and luck out with some good members, the forum could run itself. You might consider doing a revenue share with members as motivation for participate.

7. Web 2.0 community.
   Slap on some suitable code and turn the site into a self-running web 2.0 community. Ning.com used to have an option where you could host a community on your own site.

8. Turn them into resources.
   Not every site has to be a blog. Decide to sacrifice the regular readership (if any) and go for search engine traffic. Build out the site with 50-100 pages (not posts) of solid content focused on a niche and let it loose. You can actually use WordPress as a regular CMS (Content Management System) to publish a non-blog website. [I’ll get into that in a future article, but if I forget, someone please remind me.] The beauty of this solution, if you execute it right, is that you can create authority sites this way that don’t need to be updated as regularly as a blog. Could you manage 10 or more sites this way, as compared to 10 or more blogs?

This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list, and I haven’t yet provided a lot of detail. That’ll come, as I manage to remember. Got any suggestions for what to do with excess domains/ sites? Have sites or domains to sell? Go list them in Performancing’s Blogger Marketplace. Just remember: you can’t sell blogspot.com blogs.

Snap’s Jason Fields has responded to my anti SPA post which got Dugg and consequently garnered unexpected, but appreciated support in the broader community.

In a nutshell, our product is intended to enable users to “look before leaping”, saving many people a wasted click. I will however be the first to admit that this is a product that some people don’t like, and this is why we have made sure to include a simple method to opt-out for those who don’t like it (click the ‘options’ menu in the upper right of the preview bubble).

While there are certainly others who agree with some of the comments here, there are literally thousands of people signing up for SPA every day AND we have served more than 100+ million previews since the launch of the product – and all of this for free.

We are improving SPA almost every week with features aimed at giving site owners and end-users greater control in how to implement (and indeed “if” to implement) and interact with SPA. In the weeks to come, we will be:

(1) Making improvements that will reduce the confusion about whether a link is SPA enabled, or not.
(2) Make it much easier for a site owner to point SPA to a particular type of link.
(3) Enabling the site owner to totally customize a link, image, css, etc.

We here at Snap are acutely aware of the issues described in these comments and we have several enhancements scheduled to release over the coming couple of weeks that, in different ways, will address them. Rest assured that your viewpoints have been informing, and will continue to inform, the ongoing development of this product.

This is all well and good Jason, but the inescapable truth is that popups are annoying., and no amount of hopeful evangelistic cosmetcs will change that.

In Nicks post about Mining Search Data with Metrics he talks about learning what users are looking for when they reach you. I thought I would also talk about the useful information in Metrics, but this time in the referrers section.

I love looking over my referrers. You might already have worked out that I am a stats junkie but it’s not just to look at the usual visitors and views, the referrers information is almost more interesting. These are the other bloggers and sites that are linking to you. Links are the currency of the web, very very important.

If you have trackbacks switched on you might already see some of the links pointing at your posts. Not all links turn into visible trackbacks though. Trackbacks don’t always work, you might not have them turned on, and they might have linked to your homepage. Search engines don’t report all links pointing at your blog and even if they did they are out of date.

Give thanks

One of the nice things to do with your referrer information is to go through and pick out special ones and thank the people who are linking you. You do not have to thank them all (although I guess it would be nice), you could just add a comment to their blog. It’s good to acknowledge people who link to you in some way.

What people are saying about you is always important to keep track of. Technorati does not always pick up all posts. It seems to have difficulty particularly with partial feed blogs. Your own referrers are the best source of tracing back what people are saying. If you find someone referencing your blog and talking about you take a look to see if there is something you can say on their blog. Even if it is just damage control, you are sometimes better keeping the conversation at their blog rather than your own. Of course if it is good news by all means post about it on your blog too “look at what they are saying about me, isn’t it great” etc, heh.

Goldmine

The very best aspect from my point of view is people linking to you are intersted in the same things. That means you might just have struck gold with a new source of ideas for your blog. Add their feed to your OPML and then dig through their archives.Find news you have missed and more ideas for content. If they are following the same niche you ought to find lots of things you can refer to and link to. You might not want to have too many links to the same blog all at once, there is no harm in drip feeding them over time.

Traffic sources

Obviously the main purpose of referrers is to discover your biggest sources of traffic (other than search and feed subscribers). Where your traffic is finding you can be important in how you further develop your blog. If all your traffic is coming from one bloggers blogroll you are not doing a good enough publicity job. What would happen if that blogger refreshed their links and dropped you? Also do your traffic sources change over time? I find if I write a good post I will get link traffic from that post for a little while then it trails off and I have to write another to replace it but there is the rare post that gives me sustained traffic from other blogs over time as those referrers remain strong. That is usually when the post is added to someones links list, eg. “my favourite articles on xxx”.

Forum links

A good result is when your posts are constantly referred to in forums, that means you have become a valuable resource to your niche community and are seen as an authority. One of my blogs was sustained for a long time purely out of that sort of traffic. It helped me ride the rollercoaster of search engine results changes, content theft, hijack attempts and all the rest of it.  You can make a start on this by getting involved in forums and dropping your own links where highly relevant. Track performance in your stats to see how successful you are.

You?

Do you monitor your referrers? Let us know how valuable you find them in the comments …

Of all blogging tactics the most difficult must be “news”. If you want to be on the frontline of blogging and really make a name for yourself then being at the forefront of what is hot has to be the way. If anyone is crazy enough to consider it though let me give you a word or two of warning.

There are a few services that will tell you what people are interested in right now. We have Technorati, Flickr and Google just to mention three big and popular examples. How useful is this information for bloggers?

The “Zeitgeist” as Google calls their service tells you the most popular searches for a period of time. Be that a week or a year. You can see what the popular searches were for the week of February 6th for example.

Technorati and Flickr on the other hand aim to be more current, they show what is “hot” right now.  With Technorati you can see both popular searches and popular tags. This is important as what people are searching for is not always in sync with what people are writing about. As I write this lots of people have posted about Valentines day but the top searches are about Dick Cheney …

Flickr gives you the most popular tags in the last week or 24 hours. Again right now Valentines is very much the theme, for the last week NorthernVoice made a good showing (hardly surprising, Flickr is particularly popular with bloggers and Canadians so a Canadian blogging conference is going to be news).

So we have this information, all we have to do is blog about what people are looking for right?

Well here is the problem. What people are looking for now is not necessarily what they will be looking for tomorrow. What you write about now might not be found until tomorrow, particularly in Google which is notorious for not picking up fresh content. Technorati is a fair amount more quick on the uptake of course.

Bottom line, you are almost guaranteed to be behind the news.

The second issue is more difficult. If by some chance you do hit on the sweet spot of breaking news that lots of people are interested in right now, it might be a one shot thing. Anyone who has posted about “Dick Cheney Buckshot” is not likely to get long term traffic, just a spike and only then if you are lucky to actually appear anywhere for the term.

What you need is to know what will be popular, not what is popular right now. Unfortunately unless you have a backdoor into a search engine or a time machine you are out of luck.

So you can’t rely on online tools. You need sources and you need to create the news, and news people will be interested in at that. Rather than following a trend you have to be a leader, that means being the first, or at least among the first.

Two problems with this, one where do you get your sources and two how do you know if they are reliable. There is a certain catch-22 that you will not get sources until you have broken some news and you can’t break news until you have reliable sources. If you do get sources though then you are on to some real gold. The Drudge Report and Aintitcool were both basically built on exclusive news.

You know what? It sounds exciting but I think it is too much work. If you have access to reliable insider information, go for it. For me though I would much rather stick to evergreen topics even though you do not get the same fame or adrenaline rush!

Are you stressing over your blog, are you endlessly tweaking your ads or searching for that one killer secret that will bring the cash flooding in? Do you worry you are wasting your time .. Are you chasing pennies?

I have lived in two different worlds many of you will be familiar with. One world slices the day into chunks with a pound/dollar value (WorkWorld), success is tasks done, money in the bank. The other, BlogWorld, seems to not have the same rigid concept of time as the rest of humanity. If it wasn’t for my daughter going to school five days a week I wouldn’t know what day it was let alone what time it is. Bloggers live on a continuum and measure the passage of time mostly as “how long is it since my last post”. If it’s not possible to value our hours, how do we bloggers put a value on what we do?

To further compound the problem much of what we do doesn’t seem that productive. I just spent an hour catching up on my subscribed blogs, commenting here, checking another blog hasn’t been defaced in the last ten minutes.. can you put a value on that time? Am I pouring pennies down the toilet?

Some posts can provide the main source of revenue for a whole blog. It is particularly gratifying when you see a post lovingly crafted bring in thousands of visitors, especially when you see the adsense stats ratcheting up higher and higher. A killer post too can have a knock-on effect for the rest of the blog, bringing in whole new rafts of visitors who become subscribers. How many of you remember the post that put you over your blog tipping point? But these successful posts can raise your own expectations and actually cause you more stress as you try to recapture whatever it was you got right.

The thing is you do not know at the time of writing if this work in progress is going to become your new darling. Every post starts out with the potential to be your new flagship.

Every post can’t beat the last, you can only make them the best you can. You must go into each post with a winners mentality and do not worry about if this post will not be as good as your last. While performancing is about achieving revenue from your blog you shouldn’t necessarily have money on your mind all the time.

Rather than trying to force each post to be a killer cash generator, just do the right things and the rewards will follow. Instead of chasing a big payday post, create a good blog.

My inspiration for this post came from the comment here from Elvira.

Another thing I do is virtually always respond to all comments individually. I dislike sites that never respond to any comments or don’t allow comments

This got me thinking, why isn’t answering comments commonplace? All I can think is many bloggers are of the opinion they are “too busy” for these simple courtesies. Got to get another post out. Got to start another blog. Got to tweak my ads. My thought is, who can afford not to be courteous? It could be the “little things” that make all the difference.

Your visitors are your lifeblood! Loyalty is so important, you need to care for your members! This means you need to spare some time tending your blog like a good gardner if you want to have a good cash crop come next year. It comes back to the point Andy made – do sweat the details.

Which brings me neatly to my point. Yes we have to think about money but if you think about cash to the exclusion of all else you will not create something of real value. See your blog as a whole. Don’t rush, don’t force it, don’t chase pennies. Do give your blog the care and attention it deserves, the rewards will be all the greater for it.