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Issues With Technorati: Could Be Hurting Your Blog’s Perceived Authority and Visibility

So I’m just like the rest of you. I treat PageRank updates like a sporting event. I also monitor things like the Dirt 100 which uses an algorithm to rank the top 100 Celebrity blogs (aside from a few major anamolies, it does a good job).

The one thing that kept sticking out to me is how PopCrunch was sitting below other sites with far less traffic. Perhaps the most glaring issue was the low Technorati score that PopCrunch was assigned.

So I went over to the EatonWeb Celebrity category rankings to see if PopCrunch was getting a bad score there as well. Indeed it was.

At EatonWeb, I have database access, so I logged into see what was depressing the score. Turns out that the Technorati API was returning a big fat 0 for both total links and total blogs. Ouch. I knew that this was wrong.

Then I went over to Technorati and saw that the PopCrunch Authority score was something ridiculously low like 88. Crazy. Didn’t make sense.

So then I started contacting Technorati support. The same guy probably got all five of my requests;-)

I never got a response. But within 24 hours, PopCrunch was showing a more appropriate Authority score of 617 and had found its way into the Top 5K. Further, the total links and total blogs number started returning some accurate figures.

I have no idea what was wrong. But the take home lesson is this: BlogJuice, EatonWeb, SEOMoz Page Strength and a whole slew of ranking tools (probably even GOOG itself) use Technorati data to evaluate the strength and authority of websites. And the temptation is to assume that a massive company like Technorati gets everything right.

Well that’s wrong. Today I found out that Technorati wasn’t tracking or storing data properly for at least one blog. I wonder how many others are out there with the same problem. You’ll only know if you look;-)

September 2007 Theme Sponsorship Now Open For Bids

Update: This theme is going to be the new theme on College Startup for at least 12 months. So the winning bidder not only gets a 12 month link on Performancing Themes but also on an established, authoritative blog like College Startup. Quite a perk in my opinion.

Since launching in June, we’ve had winning sponsorship bids on three great WordPress themes. Sponsorships are a win-win situation. They help Performancing continue to commission high quality themes and they help the sponsor get recognition for her production-level work in making the theme possible.

We’re excited to announce the September 2007 theme that’s now open for for sponsorship bids. Designed by Thord Hedengren, Estranged is a two-column theme that features large, standout headers, and easy-to read body and link text. The color scheme involves subtle shades of grey and red, with a bit of orange, and these add to that simple yet eye-catching look. The proportions of the columns and the headers are just right, making ample use of the rule of thirds popular among those in the visual arts. Contrast is just right–having adequate readability, but not at the cost of being too much of a glare. The theme also makes adequate use of white space, so the blog doesn’t look cramped.

Estranged is suitable for both personal and professional bloggers who prefer a clean looking theme with enough space for the essentials. The right sidebar is wide enough to accommodate square ad space (text links or images) up to 250 pixels in width. This is great for bloggers who would rather not stuff in too much information, but would rather present essential information in blocks. This is due to the fact that there is only one sidebar, and that the footer does not support lists or longer content than the copyright statement.

Estranged is set for release as this September’s Performancing theme for WordPress.

Bids can start in the comment section.

Planning a New Blog – Get Started Already!

When planning for a new blog, you might take a few days to think over it, ask a few knowledgeable friends, research the industry, etc etc. The ‘planning’ phase for a new blog can take you time, right?

Bollocks.

I’m telling you right now that a blog launched based on 5 minutes of brainstorming will do just as well, if not better, than a blog that is started after a week’s worth of meticulous research.

How come? I say this because there is only one question you need to answer before you get to the LAUNCH phase, where you put your blog up and THEN start dealing with all the small issues that come up at the time. Sure, it’s nice to have all the answers before you start, but it’s not necessary. And if you’re already very busy with other work and have a limited period of time in which to start this new blog, you need to save time and with that, everything unnecessary (such as taking out time beforehand to answer a myriad of questions whose answers you won’t need till some time later) is a waste of time.

The ONLY question you need to answer at this point is:

Why do you want to blog?

In a previous blog post I talked about why people blog, and some might say I was cynical about it. However, that discussion brought out a variety of different views about why people blog. This is fascinating for me because for every blog that I’ve started or written at, my actions on it and surrounding it were guided by the answer to this question.

Why do you want to start this new blog? Is it:

To make money?
To share your knowledge?
To change people’s lives and opinions?
Just for fun?

Your answer – make sure it’s just one thing (if you’re split between sharing and fun, pick the one you want to do the most) – will be your guiding light for the lifetime of your blog (you’re free to change this midway, of course).

So how does knowing the answer help? Here’s a personal example:

There’s a blog that I want to start – a blog about social, economic, political and religious issues in Pakistan (it’s a given that when you’re ‘planning a new blog’, you already have a rough idea of what you want to talk about).

I’m starting this blog so that I can change the lives and views of people in Pakistan and build a platform through which I can build support for social projects in Pakistan. It’s a rough idea, but the key factors here are social mobilization, non-commercial and aiming to influence.

Right now these are very rough ideas in my head, but already this has given me direction in how / what I want my blog to be like.

For starters, while it’s a non-commercial project the blog has some big targets to achieve, and as such it’s a serious venture that will require a lot of personal time. Unless I have the money lying around, or I have an automated money-making solution already working for me (no to both of them), I have to either make a lot of money first so I can dedicate time to this project or (more likely) get help. For me, it’s a case of looking around in my circle of contacts and picking out those people who are passionate about this subject.

Also, we know by default who the audience is – the internet-savvy segment of the Pakistani population, especially those people who will be willing to participate in this venture. As well as taking out time to profile your audience, you should match your content to your audience’s needs and emotional triggers (if you want them to take action, you must tap their emotional wells and charge them up). In this case I can bank on personal experience but it always pays to do a good brainstorming session with one or two other friends and get your ideas clear.

But to be honest, you can ‘tune’ your content and your focus later on, once you’ve launched. As long as you have a basic idea of your audience, you are good to go.

The last point I want to raise is how important this blog is going to be to you personally and whether you can take time out for it. If you are starting a blog for fun or for sharing info, usually it’s understood that you’ll only spend your spare time on it and as a result it’s not a professional undertaking. On the other hand, if it’s a serious social project or a commercial venture, then you have to look at your time management and figure out if you have the time for it.

In most cases, the new blogs that we want to start take us away from the stuff we really should be doing – and while you might disagree, I tend to quash 90% or more of my ‘new blog’ ideas, simply because there’s not enough time for it and I’m not going to take on a new time commitment on a whimsical idea.

Sometimes though, you might have a project that you feel very passionately about, or you might be in a position where you are just starting out on pro-blogging for the first time and are going for a money-making blog. In these cases, accept that the site will only flourish if you work your ass off (Gerard explains this very well here). If you can’t do it, don’t have the time to do it or aren’t willing to commit, don’t bother starting.

What Next?

If you’re planning to start a new blog, I’d like you to take a couple of minutes out and share your answers to the following points in the comments section

What are you blogging about?
Why do you want to blog?
Who’s going to read it?
Who’s going to write it?
Do you have the time to work on it?

It doesn’t take a lot of time to figure this out – 5 minutes at best, because the truth is that usually you have already spent some time thinking about your blog and these ideas are already floating around in your head.

My approach at this point is – once I have the answers, I move to the launch phase. Get things out of the door fast and start applying your ideas, and as a result you’ll solve those pesky unforeseen problems early, and overall, get things done today as opposed to think about doing them tomorrow.

So what are you waiting for? If you have a blog that you want to start, and you have the time to work on it, get started.

News Theme

News Theme for WordPress preview image The News Theme is one more classic Performancing WordPress theme. The theme intends to mimic the look and feel of a print magazine or newspaper, with paper-like upper and lower edges, which is quite suitable for blogs that want to put forth a newspaper-y type of image (aided by the display of the current date on the masthead).

The color scheme uses subtle shades of grey and blue, with the sidebar standing out with orange tints.

News Theme is a two-column theme with a horizontal navigation bar at the header, and space for details and links at the footer. This gives the site a clean look and feel, with a wide fixed-width main body and a sidebar wide enough to accommodate long link text or banners. The space on the header can also be used for horizontal banners.

The theme was authored by Design Disease in cooperation with Performancing. Support is available at the Performancing theme support forum.

You can see a live preview here.
You can download the theme here.

Update: News Theme has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.

Announcing the News WordPress Theme from Performancing

I’m proud to announce the latest WordPress theme from Performancing, the News Theme.

The theme intends to mimic the look and feel of a print magazine or newspaper, with paper-like upper and lower edges, which is quite suitable for blogs that want to put forth a newspaper-y type of image (aided by the display of the current date on the masthead).

The color scheme uses subtle shades of grey and blue, with the sidebar standing out with orange tints.

It’s a return to the traditional 2-column format with the header able to pack in plenty of links and information while looking clean and professional. The background color in the sidebar panels is a nice touch, although for the blog I’ve got planned for this theme, that’s the first thing I’d change.

The sidebar is wide enough to accommodate graphic ads or text links, and the 3-column footer gives it a very nice balance.

The News Theme also fits almost all the criteria I set out in the ‘what makes a WP Theme great’ post last month, and overall I’m thrilled to have this theme come out, and I’ll be launching a new site using this theme soon which I’ll announce here in this thread.

Hope you guys like the theme – let me know what you think about it and how (if) you think it can be improved.

Also see: Performancing WordPress Themes

Disclaimer: My website, Soccerlens.com, sponsors the News Theme.

Types of Subscription: Four Questions for the Performancing Community

Most of you know that I’m lazy and that I don’t adopt new web apps and technology unless I’m convinced that it will be around 12 months from now. I usually just go with a minimalist approach to everything and it seems to work well (otherwise I’d be bogged down trying every new thing under the sun and wouldn’t accomplish any real work).

I figure that there are lots out there like me. You take your time before adopting new methods and new technologies. That’s why I created the weekly “Four Questions for the Performancing Community” series of posts. I figure that together we can probably come to a consensus about important issues more easily than on our own.

This week’s 4 questions surround reader subscription models.

1. What forms of subscription do you offer on your blog (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc) and how do you encourage subscription signups?

2. Do you, or do you plan, to monetize your subscription base?

3. If you offer multiple forms of subscription (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc.) do you worry about spreading your subscription base too thin for monetization?

4. Do you worry that RSS subscribers avoid your website and are thus less monetizable? How do you plan to rectify the situation?

Announcing the Blue Laptop Theme

Cousin to the Dark Laptop Theme we are pleased to launch the Blue Laptop Theme for those of your looking for a softer, gentler version of the Dark Laptop Theme.

If you look closely, Blue Laptop is a deep, rich theme with about six different shades of blue spread throughout. Because of its emphasis on blue, the theme is instantly welcoming and naturally attractive. The unique design makes this destined to be a classic WP theme that people are still using three years down the road.

Personally, I think that both the Dark Laptop and Blue Laptop themes are among the most professional and original looking free WordPress themes available. They give you exactly what you need to stand out from the crowd of bland, squared-off newsy themes that are so pervasive.

Designed by GeekWithLaptop and produced by RideLust Cars, Blue Laptop is the perfect theme for any topic in entertainment, technology, literature, or even professionals in fields such as counseling or law.

Download the Blue Laptop Theme or Click here for a live preview

View the official support forum for the Dark Laptop theme

How and Why I Customized the Performancing Modernpaper Theme

I have a blog called The Big Chorizo which runs on WordPress and is all about Spain. I customized Brian’s Modernpaper theme and someone from the performancing community saw it and liked it:

Hiya, great blog and I love the template. I saw your post in the performancing forum and just wanted to let you know that I think the customization you have done are exceptionally good. I was curious if you ran into any trouble setting the colours of the nav-bar text (the pages: comment, about, etc.) with the template? I can’t seem to get it right. Also, as a newbie, I wanted to ask about some of your most succesful monitization plans on your blog (you hav several really nice ones, like the Amazon store, the RateMe button, etc.). Anyhow, sorry about all the questions but I think that your blog’s a benchmark for me, so I just wanted to find out a bit more. Cheers,

Suitably flattered and with apologies for taking so long to finish this write-up, I thought it was time to give something back to the performancing community and any other interested bloggers by explaining what I did to Brian’s great Modernpaper theme and why.

Colours

Spain is not black and blue. Spain is red and yellow. Actually, Spain is lots of colours and there is an abundance of greens, yellows and browns in the buildings and surroundings but red and yellow are the colours of the Spanish flag and once I’d finished the re-design I took a look at a fellow Spain blogger’s site and realised he’d come to the same conclusion.

Typography & Layout

Understating wildly, I’m not any kind of design expert but I don’t do so badly at looking at bits of other websites and working out how to fit them into what I want to do. This happened with the typography and layout of the text bits of the posts. Go and check out a page on Spanish business newspaper eleconomista.es an you’ll see where I got the inspiration. I found the CSS for the site by looking in the source code of an article page for the URI and tweaked it to fit my blog.

WordPress Plugins

Add Meta Tags
AdSense Deluxe
Aksimet
Category tagging
Fancy excerpt
Flickr Photo Gallery
Get Recent Comments
Google Sitemaps
Subscribe to comments
Viper’s Video Quicktags
WordPress Database back-up
WP Contact Form
WP Cron
Yes WWW

Discarded Plugins / Ideas

another photo gallery thing – very complicated and sometimes it didn’t work properly
amazon aStore – easy to set up, but nearly no-one followed the ‘shop’ link and total referrals after 2 months or so were a big fat 0.
postalicious – still not really sure about the whole aggregated del.icio.us links as a relevant post affair. I’m coming round to the thinking that it’s much better to hand craft this type of post and add comments that readers will appreciate;
random image – it worked for while but then I decided to streamline the individual post pages;

Monetisation

Making money from a blog is intriguing, of course, but neither this blog nor any other of mine (for the moment) has ever been a big earner. It doesn’t do badly for now and I think with more traffic it will do well especially with adsense as the CTR is reasonably good I think.

Google Adsense: reasonable CTR as far as I can work out from others commenting on forums and it reaches the adsense minimum payment of 100$ every 3 months or so, almost without trying or posting, so I’m hopeful that with some more posting, networking and traffic build up that this could be developed
Amazon contextual links: nice idea and easy enough to set up, the referral rate exists which is a start, but hasn’t yet produced any income. One of the things that I’ve always thought that bugs me about amazon referral programmes (please correct this if it’s wrong) is that it’s normally only possible to send them to .com or .co.uk which confuses people both at the decision stage and the buying stage. Clicking things and being paid is much simpler for everybody;
Review me: an e-mail glitch meant that the only review that’s been asked for so-far this year was spotted after the 48 hour expiry period. I still think it could be a good idea though once traffic picks up.
Google Referrals 2.0: I’ve only just spotted this but it looks very interesting, Maybe for another blog I’ve just started. Using it on The Big Chorizo will depend on whether or not they have any Spain or Spanish related products;
Affiliate programme: I have a great (I think) affiliate programme in mind for The Big Chorizo – it’s called Don Quijote and is all about learning Spanish. The school behind the programme seems to have a good real-world organisation and the support people were quick off the mark when I contacted them a while back. It’s also being used by a fellow Spain blogger who I respect so that’s a good indication.

A Short Background

I started The Big Chorizo in April 2006 after wondering whether or not it was worth the effort for a couple of months. I have lived in Spain for the last 10 years ago and had often thought Spain in English would make a good blog topic.

I thought at the time (after having a good look around) that there were not many people doing Spain in English as a blog topic. It turns out that there are around 20 of us spread all over the country who put in some type of regular effort. ‘Meeting’ them and reading their blogs has been one of the nicest parts of the adventure. I am still looking forward to meeting several of them in person one day.

The Big C has gone through a couple of designs in the last year, including one great one whose biggest problem was that it was based around the whole images next to Adsense thing that was squashed by the Adsense team at the end of last year.

Then it went to a really skinny design with almost no click options on the page other than the Adsense ads which wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing and nor did it include many of the multimedia elements I was keen to introduce.

Then came a 3 month blog silence as I concentrated on getting a real-world company off the ground.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought as I waded through invoices and tax forms, to one-day redesign The Big Chorizo and make it look more like one of those modern news sites and emphasise videos and photos and comments.

…then I opened my feedreader and saw Brian’s Modernpaper theme on performancing and decided to kick start The Big Chorizo out of its apathy.

What I wanted to emphasize

I had been happy from time to time with one or another of the following things but had never managed to come up with the answer to all of them at the same time:

Information Architecture: categories or not, categories displayed or not, what about reference articles/pages. Standard WordPress navigation is not particularly optimal from a search engine or user point of view;
Adsense & Income: the no images next to the ads sentence killed the best design I’d come up with so far on this front;
User Comments & Participation: conversations with readers are one of the things I most enjoy about blogging;
Multimedia: there are hundreds of people all around the world who read The Big Chorizo and it’s so easy to do photos and videos these days so that readers can experience and/or remember Spain that bit more;
Subscriptions: to the RSS feed.

The Future

4 months or so after finishing the main parts of The Big Chorizo redesign and after tweaking a couple more things, I’m happy with the results. The way I know I’m satisfied is that I no longer have urges to change its design again to try something else.

My blogging challenge for the future is not one of style or design but one of regularity of posting: I’m currently the Managing Director of a brand new (6 months) small business that I’ve discovered takes a lot of effort. It’s a lot of fun and very rewarding but it has meant that The Big Chorizo has had to take a back seat twice this year for more than a month each time. Going from being self-employed to having a new limited company and employees to take care of is a responsibility I will never take lightly.

As from this month though, I slowly start to manage the company more than work in it and that will give me more time to blog at The Big Chorizo, on our company’s blog, which will be all about languages and communications and another more general catch-all blog I’ve started to get other things off my mind.

I would also like to start doing interviews, reference articles and maybe some podcasts about Spain.

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