A few days ago, I mentioned that Perfcast was coming back. In that post, I said our first episode would air on Wednesday, August 27th. This date has changed to Thursday, August 28th. This is to accommodate my schedule as well as Davids. Be sure to tune in live next week for our first live episode.
If you would like to be on the show either as a special guest co-host or as an interviewee, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me via email. jeffro at jeffro2pt0 dot com.
The topic for todays social media bootcamp was: The Secrets Of Digg Success. Till this day, I have yet to appear on the Digg frontpage. The closest I have been to the front page of Digg is an article which received 35 or so digs. In todays bootcamp, I learned that it is not just a matter of catering to the Digg crowd but that there is much more involved in a successful Digg post.
Apparently, human psychology has a lot to do with many of the posts that are successful on Digg. There are two points which Ryan brought up during the bootcamp which I thought were points to keep in mind.
1) It’s not just about quality content on Digg. It’s about quality content that fits the average Digg user’s sensibilities
2) It’s not just about quality content on Digg. It’s about quality content promoted by a variety of somewhat independent networks.
Andrew then brought up an excellent question. What makes up the average Digg user? According to members who attended the bootcamp, the typical Digg user is someone who love technology, is an early adopter, enjoys sticking it to the man, and contains at least a higher than average intelligence level. Although that last point could be argued based on the comments published on Digg articles. With the psychological profile in mind, you can then write content which pushes those buttons.
Other topics we discussed included the use of digg buttons, the placement of the share bar where social media buttons are displayed (top or bottom of the post), types of content which always seems to be a hit on Digg, techniques on getting articles dugg and, combination of social media (digg, reddit, SU, all at once).
If you couldn’t attended the bootcamp, you can view the entire transcript within the hive. Be sure to stay tuned for the next social media bootcamp. Rumors are, that the next event may focus on Yahoo! Buzz.
The word “Nitrous” has a motorsport connotation to it, given the use of Nitrous Oxide (or N20) in increasing the power output of engines, and hence giving that all-important boost in acceleration and speed in times of need. This is the concept behind the Nitrous Theme for WordPress. Nitrous is a fast-loading theme that gives you straight-cut, no-nonsense presentation. The design loads fast, with use of lightweight images. The grey and blue color scheme also contribute to that European touring car feel. I can almost feel the wind in my hair!
One interesting feature of Nitrous is that nested pages are automatically added to the top navigation bar as nested dropdown menus. This way you have easy access to your static pages–including the nested ones or the “subpages”–without cluttering up the navigation area with text.
Nitrous is yet another collaboration between Performancing and Brian Gardner, released as a free monthly theme by Performancing Themes.
Update: Nitrous has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.
Click here to preview the theme.
Click here to download the theme.
That Buzz you hear is not coming from The Hive but instead, is the sound of Yahoo! Buzz opening up to the public. Yahoo! Buzz is a social news site like Digg where users can vote or in this case, Buzz items. Yahoo determines which topics people are searching for on their search engine and then they showcase the most popular stories within those topics on the buzz page where users can vote up or down.
The way in which Yahoo! Buzz used to work is that, you needed to be a select publisher in order to submit your articles to the Buzz voting system. With Buzz now open to the public, anyone can submit a story. However, the question that remains to be answered is, will links that show up on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? According to Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, they don’t believe they will.
At the time of this writing, the Buzz front page showcased 5 out of 15 articles on the Top Buzz list which were stories that were produced on Yahoo powered sites. As Marshall points out, there has been no evidence which links highly voted stories on Buzz to their actual display on the front page. Unlike Digg, Buzz appears to have editorial control over what is displayed on the front page which may be one of the reasons behind the sites success. Just about everyone I’ve talked to agrees that having editorial control on a social news voting site not only cuts down on spam, but also slims down the chance of gaming the system which is still readily apparent on Digg.
With Buzz now open to the public, those of you who use WordPress can install a plugin called WPBuzz which will add a BuzzThis! button to your posts. The plugin was created by Travis Johnson. Installation instructions can be found for the plugin here.
Will you be ditching Digg in favor of Buzz? What are your thoughts on Buzz becoming a Digg killer? What do you think is the recipe for success when it comes to appearing on the front page of Buzz?
Our most popular free theme releases of the past have been Brian Gardner designed themes (yes, the Brian Gardner of Revolution fame). So all WordPress theme conoisseurs will be glad to know that this month we’re releasing Brian’s latest theme, Nitrous.
Besides it’s ultra-clean look, perhaps the coolest feature of Nitrous is the way it can auto-generate drop-down navigational menus using your WordPress pages and sub-pages. This allows you to give your readers lots of navigational options, without cluttering up the nav bar.
Nitrous comes with a built-in header image, but this can easily be swapped out to fit the theme of your blog.
Click here to see what Nitrous looks like on a live blog.
Click here to download the Nitrous theme.
Katy over at I’m Blogging That has published a great article that goes in depth on choosing a monetization strategy. Her post covers various monetization strategies such as banner advertising, choosing an ad service, ad placement, and much more. Of particular interest to me was Katy’s thoughts on pricing.
Everyone that comes to you for banner advertising will do so for different reasons. Because of this, there should be some things you take into consideration when choosing how to price out your banner advertising spots.
- How many banners will you have in one area?
- Will banners be rotating?
- Will you be using the no follow attribute on links?
- Do you have traffic that will click on banners/links?
- What is your PageRank?
- What is your Alexa Rank?
It’s only my opinion that the more banners you have in one area, the less you charge for them. If you choose to rotate banners in a single position, the charge should be even less.
I’ll be trying to monetize my own site in the not to distant future and Katy’s article serves as a good primer into the realm of monetization. Other articles related to this topic on Performancing include:
How to create Intelligent Blog Ads
How to create Intelligent Blog Ads – Part 2
How To Squeeze More Income Out Of Your Blog
Supplement your blogging income with e-reports
Six Apart, the creators of the publishing tool MoveableType have recently relaunched their domain, Blogs.com. Blogs.com is labeled by Six Apart as "The Best In Blogs". Asides from having a killer domain name, especially in this day in age, Blogs.com serves as a human edited blog directory with one large post a day dedicated to the hot topic of discussion. The directory contains around 1,200 different blogs from which to search for content.
You may remember when I reported on Rojo, a free RSS and Atom Feed reader went belly up, only to be replaced by something else in the future. That ‘something else‘ is Blogs.com. Rojo was acquired by Six Apart in 2006 and much of the team as well as their ideas for Rojo have been implemented into the site.
Right now, Blogs.com contains a directory filled with blogging celebrities such as Marc Andreessen and Chris Anderson. In my opinion, the bloggers who don’t make much noise won’t see much benefit from being listed within the Blogs.com directory, at least not yet. Anil Dash claims that:
celebrity Top Ten lists let some of the best-known bloggers on the web guide us through the sites that influence them, helping dig up some undiscovered gems you might have missed.
That may be true, but in all honesty, the big boys and girls in the blogosphere all seem to follow each other in their feed readers so I’m not sure how helpful it will be to publish top ten lists from these people. A better alternative would be to publish top 10 lists from those bloggers who never appear on the radar. This would really give visitors a chance to check out some gems. Thankfully, Six Apart plans on rapidly introducing new blogs into the index and even provides bloggers an opportunity to submit their site to them. I’ve already taken them up on their offer and if you blog, I encourage you to do the same by filling out their simple submission form.
As a side note, if you are looking for ideas on top 10 posts, Blogs.com has an entire section on their site for recent top ten lists.
Blogs.com is no Technorati and they don’t rely on any algorithms to determine which content is highlighted on the front page of the site. However, how can you display hidden gems in the blogosphere without looking like you are irrelevant. There always seems to be a group of stories which make the rounds from one blog to the next, if Blogs.com doesn’t publish blog posts highlighting these stories, why will anyone care about the directory in the first place?
Last but not least, there appears to be a few bugs circulating their MovableType Pro installation. As I was searching for more blog posts on the topic of Web 2.0, I received this error:
Overall, I think Blogs.com is just another place for popular bloggers to become even more popular while lesser known bloggers are thrown into the rubble. Considering Six Apart plans on adding new blogs into the directory, I hope this becomes less of an issue and provides lesser known bloggers the chance to appear on the podium. I like the idea that the directory is human edited by a staff of people which will cut down on just about any spam. As for discovering gems and getting the best out of blogs, I think bloggers who know how to use RSS/FeedReaders do a good job of this on their own. With algorithms on Technorati, POPurls, and other popular data aggregation points, why bother with a hand edited directory in the first place? Are these algorithms not doing a good enough job in presenting the webs best content?
It will be interesting to see where the directory stands six months from now. I’ll be interested in the total amount of blogs within the directory as well as the different categories covered. If you have given Blogs.com a look through, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought. Do you think being accepted into this directory will gain you much in the way of traffic?
BloggerTalks.com, headed by Thord Hedengren has published an inteview featuring our one and only Ryan Caldwell. The interview covers PerformancingAds, the redesign of Performancing.com, the Hive and much more. Here is a sample taken from the interview:
Selling ads is hard, most bloggers have understood that by now. Why will Performancing Ads bring in more money than, say, Google Adsense or Text-Link-Ads?
I think that the question goes in the wrong direction. It should be “How will PerformancingAds compliment and possibly exceed AdSense and TextLinkAds?” The fact of the matter is that we didn’t want to compete with current sources of income, but provide an additional stream that was substantial.
Two of the benefits of being part of PerformancingAds as a publisher is that 1) you get exposure in our marketplace and 2) we have a direct ad sales team working to sell ads for your site.
Be sure to check out the interview and let us know what you think.