by ryancaldwell
My friend Rob over at businesspundit.com recently started a new web TV show called The Daily Idea. I couldn’t resist sharing this video with you as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday.
Oh, and if you like this video, why not share it with the Digg crowd.
http://www.digg.com/videos/comedy/Family_Therapy_Dealing_With_Thanksgiving_Relatives
by Raj Dash
No doubt with the new Google PR rollout, there’ll be some laughing and some crying. If you fall into the latter category because your ranking dropped, it might be because you didn’t maintain your site. Thing is, it’s tough to come up with fresh content all the time. Even the most prolific of us can’t always maintain the productivity. Sure, you can fire off a bit of content every day, but if it doesn’t inspire you, it’s probably not your best work. However, there are numerous web tools – many of them free – that you can use to add a bit of life to your website or weblog, almost regardless of topic.
The one I’m focusing on lately is SplashCast, which I think is brilliant. It’s skinless, so it fits in very nicely on any web page. You can use any of the dozen or so size configurations or specify your own. Each slide or frame of a SplashCast can have documents, images or video. How’s that for versatility? I’ve been using the tool like mad, and now you can too. I’ve set up a new splashcasting tutorial at Tubetorial on how to create your own Internet music TV channel, and have also given an example Pearl Jam Splashcast (embedded below). Of course, you can use the same method to produce any kind of SplashCast on pretty much any topic. And word from SplashCast Media is that new features are being rolled out very soon.
So get to it. Don’t let your blog stagnate. Create a SplashCast or something similar. Most humans are visually stimulated. While there are still purists who want the web to only have text, the rest of us like visual content. It’s now easier than ever, and getting involved like this might just spark your interest back into writing. And if you don’t have any of your own content, you can always borrow some from Flickr or YouTube until you do.
by PhillipK
Not entirely.
In my previous posts, I’ve mentioned from time to time my disdain for blogs (and ‘probloggers’) relying almost exclusively on free content from article directories. (Disclosure: I own an article directory.) Two reasons why I think public domain articles do more harm than good for our blogs:
However, when used judiciously (and infrequently), free articles can get you out of a rut, provide you with keyword-rich content, and can be another way to showcase your expertise in your industry. Here’s what you can do with free articles on your blogs:
Finally, if you don’t know your way yet around the article directory scene, let me point you to several great sites. EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com are good places to start, and I’ve been submitting articles to them for nearly a year already. You can also visit ArticleCrux.com, which I own and carefully maintain.
That said, the list above can’t build you a problogging career. You’ll still need to start where all good probloggers started – with highly original and helpful content.
by ahmedb
To mark the launch of ChrisG.com, Chris Garrett, ex Performancing CTO and good friend of mine, has released a new, free eBook called Killer Flagship Content [pdf].
Having spent the last year working with Chris, im sure it will be Killer!
Let us know what you think….
by nickw
Greg Linden of Findory has an interesting, funny, and nail hitting take on the future of user generated content. In it he says…
Now, many are building their own playgrounds for community-generated content, miniature versions of the World Wide Web. As the experience of the Web shows, we cannot expect the crowds to selflessly combine their skills and knowledge to deliver wisdom, not once the sites attract the mainstream. Profit motive combined with indifference will swamp the good under a pool of muck. To survive, the goal will have to shift from gathering content to uncovering good content.
The experience of the World Wide Web as a whole should serve as a lesson to those building the next generation of community-powered websites. At scale, it is no longer about aggregating knowledge, it is about filtering crap. We need seek the signal in the noise and pull the wisdom from the din.
How true. Even on a relatively small site like Performancing admins spend more time removing dross than writing themselves. Im quite fond of the Digg style of user votes, but ultimately im not certain if those models of content aggregation are sustainable.
A good candidate for quote of the day I think eh?
powered by performancing firefox
by markusm
As Chris pointed out in “Do Something Different – Mix it up” there are moments when you are stuck in routine and enthusiasm is going down.
Are you always more willing to create new projects instead of hanging with the old ones?
But how to get the new content?
My tip: Use valuable content you have already published and renovate it.
I am going to mix the two subjects ‘motivate yourself’ and ‘recycle content’. I’d say that you can reach these two goals with one action. Start a new platform and use the ‘old’ content to speed up your new project. A speed booster factor of two or three should be normal compared to creating all content new from scratch. The result still can be doubled by taking care of two publishing platforms – the old one and the new one.
Side note – ‘meta articles’: If your content is ‘news’ or ‘product’ … no big problem with ‘content recycling’ … it’s a question of the mix and your editorial capabilities … old news make wonderful keyword rich ‘overview’ lists. Just use your archive (= old content) as the research source for new articles. Create ‘meta’ articles like ‘what did I get for 500 bucks two years ago compared to today’. Do heavy linking to the old articles! Don’t forget the title tags and the bookmarking and tagging!
The editorial and technical trick is ‘content enrichment’. Let’s say you still have an old PHPNuke platform hanging around with nice content but the site itself is not state of the art anymore. You are seriously motivated to switch to a new platform because YOU would like to use all that geeky new stuff (active sidebars, RSS feeds, Javascript includes, …). Well, I’d say so do your readers! Don’t try to tune your old platform to be fit for all that geeky stuff. You could do so but I promise you will not reach that ‘motivate yourself’ goal. It’s just work. Instead of tuning the old platform just open a new system and enrich old content with new features on the NEW platform. The fresh design and the new features will attract old and new readers (like switching from PHPNuke to a more modern blogging platform).
Now you are playing around with your new system. That’s a lot of fun. But how to get the ‘content issue’ solved? If you follow your statistics and see that you have many new readers then renovating the old content (on both systems!) is still a good and valuable editorial ‘trick’ (newspapers do it by publishing their archives to the web). Take content from the ‘old’ page and do some renovation. Let’s say you have a photo blog … the pictures itself don’t get ‘bad’ just by hanging around in the archives of the other site. Just publish them again on a new article on your new site. You must find your own way of ‘refreshing’ the content!
BTW, if your articles on the ‘old’ site are in the archive for like six months think about to bring them back to the front page in a renovated new version and attach advertising for your new site (trap!: don’t just change the article date, please see “Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic”). Call it ‘refreshment’, ‘update’, ‘follow-up’ or whatever … the goal is to get changing content on your front page and to draw readers to both sites. The old page can pretty comfortably hang around online for as long as you want it. Nobody forces you to switch or migrate from one day to another.
Talk to your readers about the new site. Ask for comments. If you do it right and polite you will gain new readers on both platforms. That is a third goal which comes in handy through the back door.
Regarding the better productivity … it should be obvious that you can’t use old content 100% but you can have a ratio up to 90% old content to 10% new content. Your primary self motivation is the fun to create the new platform. Instead of solving the content issues with ‘lorem ipsum’ text you do some heavy copy and pasting plus the very important ‘content enrichment’. I’d say that only costs you the amount of 20% to 30% of the work you would have to invest for newly created content.
Reading this article I must admit that it is a pretty rough ride ‘concept wise’ … not as clear and straight forward as I would like it to be. But I just wanted to paint a rough picture … pretty ‘bloggish’ isn’t it 🙂 Let me know what you think? Did you do ‘content recycling’ yourself before? How was the success?
Copyright © Markus Merz 2006 – All rights reserved
Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, blogging, content, management, recycling, productivity, writing, publishing, archive, editorial
by andyh
We’ve posted before that link exchanges are stupid. That doesn’t mean you don’t need links, though. You do need links. The more the merrier.
But why exactly do you need links so badly? And how can you get them without being cast into to a slow, tedious, link building hell?
Links can be the difference between the life and death of a site, but they are especially important for a professional blogger, for three reasons:
My point is that links are critical to blog success, and you do need them. That doesn’t mean you have to waste your time doing crappy link exchanges though. I think the easiest ways for bloggers to get good quality links are:
What are some other (non-tedious) ways to get good quality links for a blog?
by nickw
I’ve held for a long time, that when starting a new blog, post frequency needs to be high. Performancing is no exception. There comes a point though, when you are no longer starting a new blog.
By way of explanation and announcement, let me walk you through what we’ve done here at Performancing and what we plan next.
Phase 1 of the Performancing content plan was simple. To spend all of the company’s time and resources building reputation and reach as quickly as possible by posting exceptional quality content 6-8 times a day. We augmented that with a mix of traditional advertising, and blog marketing.
It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was bloody hard.
We had the rough goal of around 1000 feed subscribers to acheive before we would move onto phase 2. Now we’re there at around 1200 or so, it’s time for us to slow down just a little bit, and take more time over the posts we’re writing in order to maintain the kind of quality I hope you’ve come to expect.
The quality of posts in phase 1 were grade A++ by my reckoning. The Performancing authors typed thier fingers to the bone over the last month whilst, astonishingly, managing to keep to a seriously high standard.
The funny thing is though, we’ve actually had complaints that we’re just posting too much information for people to digest — as complaints go, that’s a pretty cool one eh? heh!
So with our credibility well on its way to becoming established, it’s time to do two things:
And what I mean by that is that we should be seeing 2-3 posts a day, rather than 6-8, but for those posts to be (if possible) more thought provoking and further reaching. Essentially, we want to allow authors to spend more time researching their stories, and readers more time to digest and discuss those stories.
There will be short posts also, but as with phase 1, quickies aren’t really on the radar here. We’ll post news stories if they’re big enough to warrant air time, but we lean toward news analysis rather than trying to be first to break a story.
As part of phase 2, I’d like to extend our open invitation to bloggers to post stories here at Performancing. You can check out the submission guidelines here or email me direct at [email protected] to talk over an idea you have a post.
Remember, the question you have to ask yourself is “will this help bloggers succeed?” — And contrary to what I told one author recently, we will indeed consider posts aready published to your blog, providing we dont think everyone here has already read it 🙂
As some of you are aware, we wil be releasing a fantastic Firefox extension shortly, an extension that’s sole purpose is to “help bloggers succeed”. Or at very least, to make their lives easier and more productive.
I’ve been talking with the developer and UI designer tonight, and I can tell you that it’s an absolute KILLER tool for FF users, so look out for that late next week — it’ll be available to members only while we do our first beta, then released in public beta when we’ve ironed out any issues (we hope there will be none at all, but that’s probably wishful thinking).
So, as Performancing moves into phase 2, with it’s content refined, and the FF ext on it’s way, I really hope you guys continue to enjoy what we’re doing here, and that some of you will join us.
I’d love to hear what you think of our plan, aswell as ways in which you approach content on your own blogs, so do tell us about it!