Professional Blogging

I added the Performancing feed to my RSS Reader almost from the very beginning and have read and watched from the sidelines during its growth. As Fall 2006 approached I was beginning to think about contributing to the community blog. It was also at that time things began to change. The awkward silence on the blog during November and December was so thick that even as a virtual outsider I could feel the tension and the pain. I don’t need to revisit the history of the last four months. I am sure I was not alone in wishing for the best yet fearing the worst. I read through the comments of recent days and I realized how helpful Performancing had been to so many people, myself included.

Now that Performancing has had its white water period, what will be the key to Perfomancing’s success?

1) User Contributions – Nick has already brought back the ability for community members to contribute to the Performancing blog. The future of Performancing exists in its ability to continue to provide quality content to help bloggers succeed. Nothing more, nothing less.

2) The Performancing community needs to contribute – While Nick has made it possible again for users to contribute, it won’t mean squat unless people actually do it. I am sure some people are upset at what has happened over the last few months. I am sure others are laughing or even mocking. However, to those that feel Performancing can continue to have a voice, you must be the ones who step forward and not only write a comment or a forum post, but actually create content.

3) Keep it Simple – Metrics, PFF, and Partners were all cool. However, the future of Performancing may not be in the cool tools or widgets. It may simply be the content. I still firmly believe, even in the age of web 2.0 cool tools and the social web, that content is still king and will forever be. Keep it simple. Focus on the content.

4) Focus on value – Sites that create value are the ones that will still exist next year and years thereafter.

5) Stay away from bunny trails – While it may be tempting for Performancing to go off and chase rabbits in hopes of finding some quick way to rescue the site, it must avoid doing so. The success of Performancing won’t depend on quick fixes but on the long term value (see #4).

6) Build a better community – with a base of members already in hand, Performancing can move forward to build a better community. What if we all had better profiles? What if we could search those profiles so that we could connect better with each other? Another website community I read regularly is actually posting tasks in their monthly newsletter for members to accomplish. These tasks are simple: complete your profile, complete a survey, etc. The purpose of these exercises is to build their community. Performancing needs to do the same.

7) Learn from the past – While portions of the past might have been extremely painful, I am sure there are lessons to be learned. It would probably be helpful to all of us, if at some point, those lessons were shared.

8) Grieve the losses, but build on hope – It’s ok to be upset and disappointed over losing Metrics and Partners. Some extensively used Metrics and others had high hopes for Partners. Sure we could all ask “What could this have been?”, but we should press forward, learn our lessons and say “Let’s move forward to something better.”

9) Be Thankful – as a user it is easy to complain. We bitch and moan about everything. We seldom take the time to be thankful for the word processors and text editors we use to write our blog posts, even if they are a bit clunky.

10) Carpe Diem – Now is the time for Performancing to seize the day, doing it six months from now will be too late.

There’s no doubt in my mind that blogging will be an important marketing communications profession going forward. When it comes to having a good presence in the social media universe, there are simply too many benefits for a business to ignore.

But most businesses will not have a clue how to actually create that effective presence. And that’s where the opportunities begin for you, the savvy business-minded blogger.

Having blogging skills that not only attract attention and traffic, but also translate into sales, is the key here. That’s why I advocate copywriting techniques as the ideal way to accomplish both with a blog.

Professional Business Blogging is a Business

Beyond those valuable skills you’ve been developing, you’re going to have to also market yourself to curious (but not yet convinced) business decision makers. And that’s where the typical freelance blogger will step into trouble.

Freelance writing communication professionals typically make three business errors that tend to hurt them in business:

1. They devalue their own work. If what you do creates sales, revenues and profits, then you are worth your weight in gold. But many people for various reasons don’t believe in themselves.
2. They take on lame projects that they not only don’t enjoy, but the work product itself does nothing to further the writer’s career.
3. They wait for work to find them, which puts them in the position of having to accept those lame projects just to create some income.

I’d like you to consider looking at professional business blogging in a different way. Why not view each business you work with as a partner, rather than a client?

Partnering for Profit

Let me share an example that I believe applies to the business blogging world as well.

When it comes to developing information products, I employ a joint venture model. I find a compelling demand that needs to be met, and then find a person with the right credentials to partner with and jointly develop the product with them, which I then sell online. If I do take on fee-based copywriting work, it’s because I see an opportunity to do bigger and better partner deals down the road, and I want to establish a relationship.

This same mentality can and should be applied to pro business blogging. Find someone who is doing exciting cool stuff offline, and approach them with your pitch to increase their revenues with a blog online.

Whether you seek a fee or a revenue share is up to you—it’s the mindset that’s important.

How to Become a Rich and Famous Professional Blogger

The way to become successful as a marketer is to be a successful marketer. In other words, what you sell is just as important as how you sell it.

If you take on blogging projects from any poor soul who happens by, who you know doesn’t have a chance of succeeding, why do it? Just for the quick money?

That’s incredibly short-sighted. You want to associate yourself with winning companies that have killer products and services, and a great story just waiting to be told with a blog that you produce.

That’s how you raise your profile as a pro business blogger. That’s how to have people banging down your door to get you on their team. And that’s how to make a lot of money in this type of business.

So, choose your clients carefully, and always be proactive. Only take on projects that you are genuinely excited about, and you’ll never feel like you’re working.

And if your choices are on the money, you’ll be in the money.

Today’s addition to our ever-growing list of blog software reviews is Pivot, a database-less blog system written in PHP. Not needing a database could be an advantage in the ease of installation stakes, let’s see.

I always think it is odd when people build blogging software or blog-related products and do not have a blog. At the very least an obvious way to to subscribe to a news feed is useful. Thankfully Pivot has both a blog right on the product homepage and a full feed to subscribe to for news updates.

Installation

First you need to decide if you are going to try the beta software (which in theory ought to have better features but possibly also bugs) or stick with a stable release. Just to be fair to the others in these reviews I chose the 1.24.3 release version.

Once you have downloaded and extracted the zip and placed the extracted files into your web space you simply launch Pivot in your browser and set your admin password in the form that appears. That’s it, installed. Pretty cool. I wish all blog software was this easy.

Usability

Pivot, once you get into it and have a poke around, is quite easy to use, if a little quirky. The configuration and administration is neat and tidy and the defaults are sensible. Posting is made a little bit easier than the norm with the inclusion of an optional WYSIWYG editing box rather than a plain text area. There is also the option to use textile formatting as well as convert breaks to HTML line breaks.

Comments

You can turn comments on or off and there is a capability for semi-threaded comments (you can reply to someone else’s comment) and you can limit how many links people are allowed to drop. While users can register and log in, as far as comments go this only allows you to change the way registered users comments appear. There is quite a decent IP banning feature for if comments get out of hand.

Search

Search is included. If at first a search does not work it may mean you need to rebuild your search index. I had to rebuild my index even though I had the option “Auto update Search Index” set.

Ping and Trackback

Pings and trackbacks are featured and you have freedom to choose which sites you wish to notify in a free text area. You can also set trackback pings as you post an entry.

URLs

Using Apache you have the choice of friendly URLs but there is little flexibility in the formatting.

SE Friendly

As with most of these blog packages, depending on how you configure it and which template you use there should be no search engine problems.

Templates

While not as well supported with template designs as WordPress or Movable Type there are a few templates to download to get you started. Even Kubrick yet again makes an appearance. Changing templates requires rebuilding pages for every change you make, lots of small changes could be a hassle.

Static Pages

While static pages are not directly supported a few users have come up with solutions in the forum such as this one.

Categories

When posting you can choose multiple categories but nested categories are not available. Configuration is quite comprehensive apart from that, you can have categories that are only available to registered users, set permissions for which users can post to a category and hide categories from archives. Bizarrely you can set up a category that you yourself are not allowed to post to.

Extensibility

Pivot extensions are the equivalent of plugins in other packages. They are almost hidden out of the way but there are quite a few extensions listed in the forum.

Support

The main developer seems to have his hands full just building the thing so support is mostly achieved through the online documentation and the forum. Even though the community is not as big as for the big name platforms there is still quite a following for this package. Perhaps because of the main developer (Bob den Otter) being from the Netherlands much of the buzz and raving fans seem to be from Europe.

Feeds

There are feeds for posts and comments, and you can have RSS or Atom. I can’t find how you would have category feeds but it might be possible.

API

While the base install does not support blogging APIs, the community has risen to the challenge and produced solutions.

Stats

The package used to include referrer stats but the developer decided that referrer spam was more trouble than it was worth so there will not be any stats included going forward.

Multi Author

Out of the box you can have authors and sub blogs. In the interface you can quite simply create a new blog and you just need to set the file locations. This is not the most comprehensive multi blogging tool but for basic needs this might suffice.

Summary

If you are looking for a blog tool that is easy to setup, or you do not want to pay more for the hosting plan with MySQL support, then this is for you. It has no major bits missing and works pretty well. I am not entirely sure I would want to host a blog with a possibility of massive traffic using flat files as a datastore, I would be more inclined to go with a relational database. With a database too you have the possibility of more flexibility, such as “most popular posts” and sorting options which are a little trickier to achieve with text data.

This is a good package though and one to watch. It might not have the polish or masses of support of MT or WordPress but it is quite certainly nipping at their heels.

Blosxom (pronounced “blossom”) is another blog package that was kindly suggested for me to review by a couple of readers after the last round of blog software reviews. It is billed as

a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind

Let’s see how it compares.

So the key thing about Blosxom seems to be the simplicity factor. I am all for simplicity, so I applaud them for striving for it. The website certainly lives up to this goal being a minimal experience. It is a little jarring though to hit “news” and be taken to a completely differently formatted blog. A minor problem, I am sure I will get over it, heh.

Installation

Again, as many of these blog packages are, Blosxom is open source therefore free to use. Unlike many of the others it uses the filesystem rather than a database. All it requires is a web server running Perl.

Mac users get an installer, and there is one for windows on the way (maybe). For now if you are not using a mac then you need to download the zipped .cgi script and change a couple of settings. Things will I am sure be much improved when installers are universally available!

The instructions are all very well written in a kind of tutorial format.

Usability

As blog software goes this is quite unique. Rather than having a blogging interface to create posts you use a text editor. Any text editor. The first line of your new text file is the post title and the rest is the post body. Simply by saving text files in your blog folder creates the posts.

Comments

Comments are available through a plugin. There wasn’t any support that I could see for user registration or anti-spam features.

Search

There is a plugin to allow searching plus a couple of other plugins for integrating with third party searches such as Google and Lucene.

Ping and Trackback

Ping and trackback implementations rely on plugins. There is at least one plugin that allows ping of weblogs.com and another XML-RPC plugin that allows ping of other sites.

URLs

You can create a static blog where the URLs being static files are completely friendly. Otherwise URLs are kind-of friendly. They all use the blosxom.cgi rather than true friendly URLs. You have a choice between date formatted or path formatted URLs after that.

SE Friendly

It is all very neatly search engine friendly, there is nothing here really to get in the way, especially if you produce a static blog.

Templates

By default you get a basic black on white vanilla template. Template themes are called “flavours” in the world of blosxom and there are a few available out in the wild web. Thankfully my personal favourite has been translated. The templates are very simple but being simple lack some of the power of other more complete templating engines.

Static Pages

There is no support for pages other than blog posts. Having said that there is no support for creating blog posts either, creating static pages is the same as creating any other pages in this system apart from the fact you would need to add the headers and footers.

Categories

Categories in the world of blosxom are in fact directories in your file system. If you want to have a category called “catpictures” you simply create a folder with your file in it. How bizarre is that? It oddly makes sense though.

Extensibility

For such a slimmed down piece of software it is richly supported by plugins. Installing plugins is simply a case of downloading it to the right place, but you do need to configure the plugin directory in the config for it to find them. It’s a good job as the base install comes with only really the most basic bare-minimum functionality.

Support

Bosxom seems to be mainly supported through the Yahoo! Group but Googling around I did see good support and discussions elsewhere.

Feeds

By default your content is syndicated as RSS but it is possible to create your own formats as “flavours”. You can have a feed produced from any part of your hierarchy, so you can even subscribe to a feed of posts from a certain month or year. There is a plugin if you want to provide Atom feeds also.

API

API support is again through plugins, there is a metaWeblog API plugin for example.

Stats

There is a plugin for recording referrers but you will really need a third party solution or to analyse your web traffic logs.

Multi Author

If you want to have multiple authors you can simply give them access to your folder structure. You could also decide that each of you will only “post” to your own folders. Quite a difference from the other packages in our reviews.

Summary

As the software is meant to be simple it seems a little harsh to knock Blosxom down. It definitely achieves the simple goal, no doubt about that. For someone who wants to use their own favourite text editor to post, for a Perl geek, or if you want to integrate blogging into another Perl-based package this might be a nice solution but for anyone else I would look look at the other packages before before deciding.

If you have any suggestions for future reviews or have an idea how these reviews could be improved please do speak up. Also if you have experience using the software and disagree or have an answer to any questions I raise please do add them in the comments.

While I was posting our previous round of blog system reviews several people suggested packages I had missed out. Well, we can’t have that can we? So here we are with TextPattern, the first of our next round of reviews. The difference this time round is we have a champion to beat in WordPress …

I must admit up until TextPattern was suggested I knew pretty much zero about the software so I was going in completely in the dark. I can’t say I am much of an expert now, mind!

The website says TextPattern is

A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.

So it’s not particularly aimed at bloggers but it can be used as a blog, a fact they demonstrate with their own blog. Good enough for me.

Installation

TextPattern like the majority of these packages needs PHP and MySQL to run. You are also advised to use Apache but IIS apparently works also.

Also like many of the packages I reviewed earlier Textpattern is open source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. A blooming good job else these reviews might have got very expensive!

Installing involves unzipping the download and opening the setup page. This is what we like, a helpful “wizard” type install. Odd then that it asks you to create a config.php file, albeit supplying the text for you to paste in. Surely this is something the setup script could do? That minor quibble aside, installing is pretty nice and easy.

Usability

Setting preferences and bouncing around the administration side is pretty nice. If you are unsure what anything is there are little contextual help buttons next to each item. Everything is well laid out with tabs for the sections and suchlike. It looks a little formal but everything works as it should.

Comments

There is moderation for comments but there is no registration.

Search

The search facility is much like any other but it is there and it works.

Ping and Trackback

TextPattern does not support trackback but on purpose, they feel it is too open for spamming. When you post you can ping pingomatic and textpattern.

URLs

You have several options for URL formatting if you use Apache web server but there is no option to create your own pattern that I could see. The choices available should suit most needs though and you can override the end filename part of the path when you post.

SE Friendly

The blogs you create with this package seem well constructed and search engine friendly.

Templates

There is an interface for editing templates in the admin and looking at the structure they seem straightforward enough. If you search you will be able to find plenty to download, there are a whole bunch of them at textpattern.org.

The default package only comes with one lame style and using and selecting between third party templates is not as easy as with the other blog packages, a shame.

Having said that I did manage to get it to play nice with my usual design based on a version of Kubrick with a little help from a Google search.

Static Pages

You can create pages and also organise your blog into sections. I could not see a way to format your page URLs on a page by page basis other than the option to set the filename. You can though automatically have your section name included in your path so you need to choose between section and date type URLs if you want to maximise full use of the section capability for creating static content.

Categories

A post can be in one or two categories, I didn’t see a way to have a post in more than that or how I could nest categories. Of course TextPattern has the sections also which might explain why they feel more than this is not necessary.

Extensibility

The community site lists quite a few plugins and mods. It seems the community has patched most of the problems with the default package with some quite clever solutions. It is possible there is something to overcome any of the points I mark down in this review if you can be bothered to dig them out.

Support

As previously mentioned the community site, textpattern.org, seems well populated with code and tips, plus a forum.

Feeds

Initially it looked like you are stuck with the default RSS and Atom feeds but with a bit of messing around with the URLs you can also get section and category feeds also.

API

Out of the box there doesn’t seem to be any support for API access. If you want to use a desktop posting tool you will need to look to third party hacks.

Stats

No stats are included so you will need either a plugin or more likely to use a third party stats service.

Multi Author

TextPattern does support multiple authors but there is no support for multiple blogs. To have more than one blog you will need multiple installs.

Summary

So not a bad outcome. This is quite a neat package. As a blogging tool though it falls down on some fundementals, no API, not great on themes, categories could be better, but having said that I would say it is one to watch. The TextPattern community seems well up for patching the default install so if this looks like a package you would like to use I have no doubt you will be able to create a killer blog with it.

We can easily get caught up in the planning stages of professional blogging but it’s time to get practical. Once you have chosen and qualified your niche, planned your chosen blog monetization strategy and invented a great blog name, next job is to find your blog a home!

What you need

You absolutely need your own domain name and to be able to earn money which means adding advertising and stats code at the very least.

You need excellent uptime and customer support, whenever the site is slow or unavailable you are losing money. The hosting solution also needs to be able to cope with a sudden influx of visitors, for example if you get slashdotted. There have been many cases where what should have been a joyous event, something to take a blogger to the next level, instead turned out a disaster. Usually their ISP pulled the plug and slapped them with grotesque bandwidth charges.

For your blog to be entirely your own and completely unique you will need to be able to edit the code and add modules. While many might disagree, here at Performancing we believe you really do need to have complete control over your blog to make it the very best it can be.

Beginner Option

While we would definitely encourage you to go with your own hosting, initially it may be enough for you that you can have your own domain and tweak templates to include advertising. Hey, it’s your blog. Even Andy uses this route and (other than a hiccup earlier) is quite happy with it.

The blog service with the most control seems to be TypePad Pro account which gives you unlimited weblogs and full HTML editing.

At $14.95 a month though you really ought to consider your own hosting arrangement, read on and you will see it sounds harder than it really is.

Hosting difficult? Too geeky?

It doesn’t have to be difficult and you do not necessarily need to bring in your pet geek right away. If you take a look at your choice of blogging software website there will be a section pointing you to hosts who either give you easy wizards (such as those hosts incorporating the Fanstastico system) to set up the blogging package for you or will help you do it. Many are offering all in one packages that include registering a domain name, setting up email and installing your blog, you just need a credit card.

Power Option

While you can have your own domain and select from a choice of templates on a free or “premium” service from the blog companies these will not give you 100% control. Finding an ISP and setting up the software exactly how you want it is the only way to have a blog that is completely how you want it.

• You are in control – this is the most important reason to go with your own hosting agreement. You choose a host that is right for you with a price and SLA you can live with knowing full well that if it doesn’t work out you can switch within 24-48hours.
• You can switch software – with a bit of redirection your visitors and webbots do not need to know which software you are using so it might be a hassle but you can change your mind about what software you run.
• Upgrades happen when you want them to – if you want to run the latest beta it’s up to you, you haven’t got to wait for everyone else to be happy to upgrade.
• Complete customisation opportunity – as you can see from Performancing, if you have the skills on hand why should you stick with a generic install when you can have it exactly how you want it?
• As many blogs and bloggers as you like – many blog host packages restrict you to how many blogs or user accounts you can have or charge a lot for unlimited. With your own hosting you can have as many as will fit your space allocation which usually runs unto hundreds of megabytes even at the lower end.
• As robust as you can afford – if your blog empire really kicks off simply upgrade to a better SLA, better backups or even webfarm hosting.
• Add non-blog additions you might not just want a blog, you might want to have all the features of a big web community such as subscription area, ecommerce, forum, gallery etc
• Whatever webstats you choose – many blog packages don’t have any webstats, with your own hosting you get your own log files and included stats, plus the flexibility to use whatever you like.
• You get to choose geography – for some search engines the geographical location of your hosting can determine if you rank in a local search engine. Also you might want to have your tech support in your own time zone for quicker response.
• No tie-in to one provider – once your blog becomes popular on a fully managed blog host they have you by the nuts. They can put up prices, close down, change the software .. and there won’t be anything you can do about it.
• Attacks – with your own hosting you can usually ask or control the banning of IP addresses to prevent denial of service or spamming attacks

How to choose

Looking around the blog software vendors sites will give you some early ideas but don’t just select the first on the list then go. Ask around. Personal recommendations will always be best, after that ask on the forums.

You can’t really trust testimonials and even forum responses might be more motivated by potential affiliate income than good advice. Get many recommendations before you go with an option and see if there is a trial period available. Within the trial period make sure you get everything working and you use the technical support. Even if the hosting is in a different country you need to get a quick response to any problems, just imagine your site is down, do you want to wait 48 hours? Also make sure they explain things clearly and politely.

Be wary of hosts who offer unlimited bandwidth. This could mean that any one user of their service could slow down everyone else. I would rather be capped at a good generous level or throttled knowing everyone else was but your mileage may vary.

Summary

Hosting can often cause arguments (what is new, heh) but I hope I have given you some things to think about when next selecting where to host your blog.

How did you choose your blog host and are you happy with your choice?