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Blog Content from Article Directories: Evil?

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:

Free articles circulate widely on the Net, which means you’re not alone in using them. The duplicate content might merit you a penalty in the search engines, especially Google.
It speaks ill of the blog owner if he can’t produce original entries with his own tone/voice.

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:

Combine the strongest/most interesting points from different related articles. You’ll be relying on quoted text here, injected with your own opinions.
React to the article. Found the author’s points misleading or downright erroneous? Correct him in your blog. Found the article to be the most info-packed content written in 400 words you’ve seen in a while? Praise and suggest it to your readers.
Discuss the article in the context of a previous blog post. This won’t be hard, especially if you’ve been writing tons of posts on your blog and your topic is a popular article category (e.g. internet marketing, pet care, travel destinations).
Compare and contrast the article’s points with those of a blog post from an established blogger in your industry. Not only will you attract the attention of your fellow (and quite famous) blogger, this type of blog post might turn out to be good linkbait.
Add images. What better way to visually spice up a blog post than by inserting an image? Since you’ll be using free articles, it won’t hurt to use free image resources, as well. (See my related Perf post, Images: Another Problogging Ace Up Your Sleeve)

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.

Pre-Announcement: pMetrics Re-Launches

This is the announcement before the announcement. The pMetrics site analytics package has relaunched. Get it now for your blog!

Working in coordination with Sean from Clicky, we have put a scalable server infrastructure in place to provide a stable pMetrics site analytics solution to the wider blogging community. Use and enjoy.

A more comprehensive announcement is forthcoming, along with suggestions of what you can expect to see in a pMetrics API for widget development, additional analytic plugin features (AdSense tracking anyone?), public exposure (read: linklove) for successful sites, and more.

Again, this is the announcement before the announcement, but for those of you who have been patient with us, we thought you deserved to know as soon as possible. So now’s the time to get back in the game.

For those of you looking for a sweet analytics program perfect for blogs, check out what pMetrics has to offer. You’ll like it:

http://pmetrics.performancing.com/

Problogger: Hate or Love the Title…

It doesn’t matter.

Ia Lucero’s post on the Perils of Problogging is an interesting read for Performancing.com users, who more or less look to earn money from their blogs. The post has also been picked up by a couple of other blogs, most notably by The Blog Herald.

In the post, Ia raises a lot of points, ranging from bad site monetization choices to blogs being given a bad name by the numerous unoriginal “money mills” out there. My attention was piqued by one line she wrote (emphasis added):

With the abundance of article sites out there, amateur probloggers (what a paradoxical term!) think they can get away with posting unoriginal content, an especially attractive tactic since minimal effort is required.

Hmm, “amateur probloggers”? Does that pertain to Z-listers earning mere Adsense cents a week, or part-time probloggers? Heck, what makes a problogger in the first place?

Darren Rowse has a guest post by David Wilkinson about it, and so does Michael who talks about it in a country context. For me…

I don’t really care. If someone blogs and makes money from it, whatever the method or ethics, then he can trumpet to the world that he is a problogger. I’m hoping he doesn’t give the ‘job title’ a bad name by filling his site with content o’ junk and loads of poorly placed ads, but really, that’s out of our control. Why, how many people regard lawyers and salesmen with suspicion? (Not to offend our lawyer and salesmen friends out there.) For every profession, there’s somebody out there who thinks it’s make-believe or a joke. We’ve got to live with that.

I believe the best way to approach the word “problogger” is with guarded recognition, especially during the blogging industry’s formative years. It’s a title that is secondary. Because before you blog, you might be already a freelance writer, journalist, corporate executive, web designer, comic artist, and so on. I guess this is why many people – even those who already earn substantial amounts from their blogs – go “Huh?” when given the word “problogging”. They see blogging as just a supplement to their incomes and an extension of their main jobs. This POV in turn conflicts with full-time bloggers who eat, breathe, and live by their blog earnings.

Now, I’m really interested in hearing your feedback on this one: Do you call yourself a problogger? Do you get weird reactions from friends and relatives when you tell them you are one? And what alternative job titles do you use or suggest your problogging comrades use?

Me: I call myself a problogger; it’s proudly displayed on my tech blog’s sidebar. Yes, I’ve gotten dozens of “Whaa?” faces, especially from those who own only LiveJournals and other diary-type blogs. More recently, when somebody asks me what I do for a living, I simply say, “Writer”. (Many think it’s too generic, but I believe it’s just one of the most elegant titles in the world.) And if the person who asks me looks like a Net user, I chip in, “Website owner” or “Webmaster”.

How about you, guys?

Funding Good Writers With Text Link Ad Revenue

Text Link Ads have been on my mind ever since The Link Nazi made it public that Google would be cracking down on sold links.

Many individual bloggers make the majority of their income from Text Link Ads. But I want to talk about another virtue of Text Link Ads: they can generate the revenue that publishers need to hire better writers.

If you’re like me and you own a large number of blogs and websites, then you also know all about the economy of content creation. For those of you who don’t know, let me educate you.

The fact of the matter is that search engines have yet to create the algorithm that can distinguish keyword rich crap from literary greatness. Since AdSense has been the main driver of content monetization, and since traffic is the key AdSense monetization, website owners have often resorted to buying lots of keyword loaded crap in preference to a few high-quality articles written by professional writers.

For $100 you can buy 1 or 2 excellent 500-1000 word articles or for $100 you can buy about 30 pieces of just legible English written by not quite fluent non-English speakers (not to offend any of our not quite fluent non-English readers). That’s just a fact and the explosion of crap content on the web is directly attributable to the economy that Google AdSense has created. It is Google’s monster. There’s no doubt about it.

Enter Text Link Ads. The TLA economy doesn’t directly depend on traffic, and so doesn’t depend on squeezing pennies out of the long tail. There is far more pressure from AdSense to create lots of crap content then from TLA. In fact, I’d argue that TLA creates an environment in which owners of blog networks, or multiple sites are freed up to migrate from content churning to actually being proud of the content they commission.

In my own case this is certainly true. TLA has finally gotten me to a place where I have the luxury of paying a premium for the content I commission. Rather than pursuing bulk content, I’m pursuing quality content. Worshiping the long-tail, in the name of almighty AdSense is no longer a priority. Creating good literary content is.

Because of TLA I now feel like a legitimate publisher, whereas before I had to wash my hands of AdSense blood each night before I went to sleep (well, not really, but you get the point).

If you were to measure a website’s momentum, how would you do it?

In a post from last week, I made reference to the need for a momentum metric to buffer the standard strength metric that we get in PageRank. If a PR 8 site hasn’t been updated in 9 months, and is completely blank, that should be reflected in some publicly accessible data.

My question for this post is how would a momentum metric be best accomplished, taking into account the variety of sites that exist. In the comments section of that post, Phillip gave us a start:

Maybe it could be a rating that combines the separate metrics of today, i.e. this number of percentage points is given to Alexa traffic rank, this for PR, this for the number of Technorati mentions, and so on. The question of who gets the biggest weight in the rating would surely be cause of debate.

So why don’t we hack this out in the comment section of this post. Here are the questions to consider:

1. Momentum is a measurement of relative strength over time, and as such requires that we take “snapshots” – what is an ideal frequency of snapshots? One day? One week? One month?

2. To answer question 1, it would help to know the data that we’ll be considering in measuring a site’s momentum. Afterall, why take a daily snapshot if our data is only updated once a week or once every 3 months for that matter. So what data is relevant? Backlinks? Alexa? Technorati? PageRank?

3. How much weight should each of these data points be given?

If you have some ideas on how this topic, feel free to comment, but for answering these 3 specific questions, I propose the following format:

Once a week

Alexa – 25%
Technorati – 25%
PageRank – 15%
Backlinks – 30%
Delicious Votes – 5%

Want to Problog? Be Interactive!

There are many ways to problogging gold and glory, such as writing great content that keeps people coming back for more, being patient with SEO, getting the ad placements right, and so on. I’ll remind you of another one: your willingness to interact with your readers — fans and detractors alike.

Let me explain.

Before I was a blogger, I was a creative writer first. For the early part of my writing days, I kept all my works to myself and a handful of friends. As with all people who mature oh-so-slowly over time, I realized something: to take writing to another level, a writer should be ready to receive both solicited and unsolicited advice, to bravely participate in literary workshops (where one’s art might get criticized and manhandled), to readily admit his mistakes while reminding himself not to repeat them. Basically, to interact with fellow writers and a wider reach of readers. Depending on the writer’s persona, all of these things might be big steps out of the writer’s “shell”…but he needs to take them, nonetheless.

In my opinion, the same principle applies to blogging. To take your blogging a step further — professional blogging — you’ll need to:

Open your blog to reader interaction,
Engage the reader when he does interact, and
Be sure of yourself when you engage the reader.

Item number one is easy to check off — open your blog posts for comments. If you can’t for one reason or another, leave a contact form or your email address. Yet, I’ve seen bloggers who are ‘experts’ of this-and-that industry (as claimed by their header or sidebar text) whose blogs don’t have any of the above-mentioned.

I’m not saying the lack of reader interaction undermines a blogger’s credibility; rather, it would be better if the readers’ reactions and thoughts could give the blogger much-needed feedback if he 1) is doing a fine job sharing his expertise and helping others a great deal, thus affirming his being an expert, or 2) needs improvement, which might be an understatement or not.

Item two — here’s where the going gets tough for some. I’ve dropped by some blogs with commenting on, all right, but where the blogger is absolutely picky as when to reply, or never replies at all.

It’s possible that the blogger replies to each comment by email instead; still, the other visitors would like to see the discussions between the blogger and the past commenters. (You can email and place the reply on the blog, too, though that will eat more of your time.) During a seminar’s Q&A section, whom do you prefer, the speaker who answers questions via the microphone for all the audience to hear, or the speaker who writes down his answers on pieces of paper to be handed discreetly to the inquirer?

Finally, item three. Every blog post of yours is a product of your pen (or your keyboard). It is yours*, and you better show that you care for it. If someone likes it or finds it helpful, express gratitude. If someone ridicules it, take a stance and whip up a response worthy of true statesmen (a witty retort might also do!). If someone points out a mistake, give the reader the benefit of the doubt, analyze his points, and admit the error if indeed it is. If someone seeks advice, be as helpful as you can be. Don’t discriminate among real-life friends, long-time blog-mates, or new visitors. Engage everyone with the same enthusiasm.

*On a side note, if a monetized blog’s thousand or so entries are all merely public domain articles or echoes of news feeds/other blog posts, then I believe that the blog owner practically doesn’t own his posts. He has no business as a ‘professional blogger’. Rather, he is a professional waster of bandwidth and server space.

Spearheading Open Source pMetrics

We’re looking for a few dedicated volunteers to help us spearhead the Open Source pMetrics project using the old code and documentation. The goal of the project will be to improve and restructure the old pMetrics code with the following desiderata:

Decentralize the server infrastructure
Collect common, anonymous data that will benefit the entire Performancing community

In other words, one of the main issues with the old pMetrics was cost of operation. If we can distribute the operating infrastructure to the community, but still collect a minimal set of common data, the community could really benefit.

Anyone want to be actively involved in this project whether at a decision making level or coding level?

Measuring Momentum: A Temporal Metric For The Web?

Here’s a PR 8 page: http://www.corante.com/loom/. That page has been dead since June 9. 2006 when the author started writing for a different company, on a new domain.

According to Google, this outdated, non-updated page is more important than The Drudge Report which has a PR 7.

We all know that PageRank is easy to manipulate and a poor reflection of a site’s value. We also know that Google has moved on from PageRank to include things like TrustRank, traffic data, etc.

Despite it’s low-resolution, ease of manipulation, and inaccurate indication of a site’s worth, PageRank continues to capture people’s imagination. It drives the economy of Text Link Ads.

Admittedly, I buy and sell PageRank. Less so now then when I first got into the game. But I’ve always used discretion and have tried to hedge my bets towards sites that are poised for growth, rather than those that are in the process of decline.

In other words, for the savvy text link ad buyer, market pressure actually encourages investment in quality, growing sites, as opposed to sites with artificial PR injection or sites on the decline. That’s a virtue of the TLA market in my opinion. The savvy buyers go after legit, growing sites.

Which brings me to another point. There’s very little market pressure from AdSense to make quality websites. Not all quality sites translate into high AdSense earnings (many spammy sites make lots of AdSense revenue). On the other hand, any site that is growing and making progress has a product to sell in the TLA market.

But alas, I digress from the main point of this post: we really need a solid, diversified metric to measure a balance between site strength and site momentum. PageRank measures brute link strength. Alexa gives us a rough indication of a site’s growth over time, but it’s an easily manipulated, one-dimensional metric.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a single metric that gave us a realistic picture of the health of any given website? Not just brute link strength(PageRank), and not just an indication of relative traffic (Alexa), but a measure of a site’s overall presence, growth and significance *at this moment*?

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