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pMetrics to relaunch this week

For those of you who have been following the new soap opera “pMetrics”, let me put things in context. The management structure of Performancing did not have enough built-in redundancy, and with David Krug’s sudden and surprising extended absence, there just wasn’t an emergency plan in place, so pMetrics suffered as a result.

That’s not an excuse. We accept responsibility for the mistake and are taking the steps to ensure that Performancing operates as a redundant, decentralized team so that its operation doesn’t depend on any single person.

While those steps are in motion, we are happy to be able to announce that pMetrics will be back in operating condition this week. The getclicky team is phenomenal and we are superpsychked (new word?) to be hooking up with them on this venture. We hope you’ll stick with us and enjoy the fruits of this collaboration.

On a related note…

Is there any interest from the Performancing community in having the old pMetrics software opened up for community development? Any thoughts?

How To Squeeze More Income Out Of Your Blog

Let me tell you a little secret. In this day and age of Text Link Ads monetization, the key to squeezing income out of your blog is setting up discrete partitions.

When I first got started in blogging, I would dedicate a whole domain to a single blog. And often I still do this to get started. But as a long term strategy, I no longer limit each domain to a single entity. Once a domain is established, I utilize its strength to create new monetizable sections.

New monetizable regions of your site can come in the form of:

1. Directories
2. Sub-domain or sub-directory blogs
3. Paid press releases
4. Paid services (e.g. classifieds, rental listings, etc.)
5. Recommended products (affiliate)

And I’m sure there are more. The important thing is to set up your site so that it is structurally optimized for monetization.

Ok. So that’s the theory. Let’s get to some practical examples.

Identifying Potential Regions

Let’s say that you have a moderately successful poker blog that’s pulling in $400/month, but which has plateaued in its income growth. What do you do? Well, for starters, you could start a paid poker directory. The directory would draw income from paid submissions plus be a discrete unit for monetizing via Text Link Ads. No need to start a new blog from scratch, do link building, etc. If your current domain is strong, you’ll have much faster success by sticking with that domain then starting with a new one.

The paradigm shift that I’m asking you to go through here is to not think “one service per domain” but to think “how can I squeeze as many worthwhile services onto the domains I already own.” If you have a blog and you’re chomping at the bit to find ways to earn more monthly income, you should seriously consider capitalizing on the property you’ve already built rather than trying to build a new property from scratch. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. But I find that far too many people think that they need to start something like 50 new websites to make a living wage as a problogger. By maximizing a few domains, you can achieve your immediate goals faster, and build stronger equity at the same time (your property becomes more valuable with more services and more sources of income).

Capitalizing on recent success

One way to capitalize on the success of your blog is to build out your brand by introducing new blogs on sub-domains. In January, my company hired a new writer at PopCrunch. She took the blog from making $3/day to making over $100/day in the matter of a few months. So how did we capitalize? By starting three new blogs as subdomains under the PopCrunch brand (a hiphop site, a style site and a television site). The subdomains we used were “hiphop” “style” and “tv” – each of these sites is now blossoming into success, and the cool thing is that each will eventually be separately monetizable via Text Link Ads.

Another Example: This time from scratch

To see my new philosophy on monetization in action, let’s take a look at the most recent site my company began developing, called OneBigMaine. As a rule, we’ve found that location based travel and real estate sites offer mucho bang for the monetizing buck.

But let’s take a look at our strategy in developing this site (which we’ve not fully implemented yet). In the past, as bloggeres, we might have just thrown up a WordPress blog and cranked out content, hoping to generate a mix of AdSense and TLA income 6 months down the road. That model is quite limited, though. It’s limited by its structure: a single discrete section.

Instead of just throwing up a blog, we’ve decided instead to strategically maximize the site’s earning potential by planning for as many discrete monetizable sections as possible. We’ve identified five:

Region 1 is the main page (i.e. the home directory) and it will serve as an informational guide (i.e. articles) on the state of Maine (property buying, history, vacation info, etc.). Region 2 is a blog about Maine, focusing primarily on Maine related news. Region 3 will be a property and rentals listing section of the site where people will pay an annual fee to list their Maine vacation homes. Region 4 will be a OneBig feed list and will serve a dual function. First, it will be a huge PageRank boost (getting linked in from more than 10 other sites in the OneBig network). Second, it will serve as an informational source showing up to the minute Maine related blog headlines. Region 5 will be a Maine related niche directory.

We haven’t implemented all five of these sections, but you can get a glimpse of our mindset. There is no reason to limit yourself to a lone blog per domain. When you develop your next blog, think about how the blog might fit into a broader, more monetizable context.

Moving Server. Please take Metrics off your sites. Apologies!

Just a note to let people know that Performancing is currently being moved to a new server. While the blog, themes and forum will quickly be back in action, it may take us a while to get the metrics back up- so we recommend that you take down Pmetrics from your sites for now to avoid 404s. We are working as hard as we can to sort everything out and are sincerely sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Images: Another Problogging Ace Up Your Sleeve

As I mentioned in my first Performancing post:

While words are the pillars of blogs, don’t forget the images. Think of your blogs as magazines rather than academic publications. Heck, the latter even have diagrams to break the text.

Ever heard of the maxim that you’ve got less than a second to grab the attention of the reader? Aside from a captivating headline and lead sentence, there’s another blog element that can reel in readers — images.

Where to Look for Images?

Adding one image to a post doesn’t take much time, and can be extremely rewarding. If you’re having problems looking for free images on the Net, my usual haunts might be of help:

  • stock.xchng – Check each image’s license to be sure. For example, if it states that the author needs to be contacted first, please do so, as it is basic courtesy.
  • Google U.S. Government Search
  • Wikipedia – Contrary to popular perception, not all Wikipedia images are free; also, some images require attribution to the original author of the work (e.g. this one, which I uploaded). Check below the image (often after the image summary) for the licensing information.

Speaking of Wikipedia, it has a comprehensive list of public domain image resources which you can use.

Images and SEO

Images don’t only work for human readers — they help in search engine optimization as well. Make sure the name of the image file is keyword-rich. Include the alt and title tags in the HTML code, and fill them in with keywords as well (don’t overdo it, though, as there’s a thin line separating keyword-rich content from outright spam).

If your competitor blog does not use images (or uses them but doesn’t care about the SEO), that means you’ve got one area where you can soundly defeat him in traffic building. In my early blogging days, I didn’t give much thought to images, but when I noticed a daily stream of traffic to my blogs thanks to an ‘accidental’ optimizing of one image, that’s when I took the practice seriously.

Caveats

A word of caution: don’t go about sprinkling tons of images on your blog posts (photo blogs are an exception, of course). The phrase “everything in moderation” wasn’t concocted for nothing; too many graphics will slow down your blog. If you’re not yet an A-lister, new readers will be turned off by your site’s slow response time. If you’re already famous (to an extent), having lots of images will eat up your web hosting plan’s bandwidth and storage allowance.

One last thing when you’re using images in your posts — don’t ever, ever hotlink! Save the image on your computer, then upload it to your server or free photo hosting service.

Blogger Tools: SplashCast, Slide, ThinkFree

SplashCast

SplashCastMedia offers their SplashCast video slideshow device, which is quite possibly one of the most interesting and robust available. Each slide can be a document, image or video. You can search for and selectively include images from Flickr and videos from YouTube, or upload your own. You can compose text documents in their SplashCast console. The alternative to a customized show is to specify either a Flickr or YouTube RSS feed. You don’t have control over the items, however, a new release is coming, with many more feed-based features. You can see examples at 901am.

Slide

Slide has standard web slideshow features, allowing you to build a presentation with a sequence of images you choose. You have a several viewer options in terms of size, shape, skin, and type of transition. Where Slide differs from most similar packages is that you can give it the URL of any RSS feed where each item contains an image and produce a slideshow out of those pics. That means you can use custom feeds from, say, Yahoo Pipes or other Web 2.0 mashup tools.

ThinkFree

ThinkFree has a viewer plugin for the WordPress blogging platform which supports various Microsoft Office files (documents, spreadsheets, presentations). Clicking on an appropriate link brings up the display of the file in question.

To incorporate ThinkFree in other web applications, there is a viewer API. [via Mashable] The plugin itself supports ThinkFree files, which are compatible with the above-mentioned Office files.

The only drawback I see from using this plugin is that your “office” content may not get indexed by search engines. Although I haven’t tested it yet, so I may be wrong. On the other hand, if you upload Office files to your web server and link to them from your blog posts, those files will definitely get index by most of the major search engines.

New Performancing.com Writer, Signing On

Hello everybody. I’m Phillip, Performancing.com’s new resident writer. I have been a Performancing user for nearly a year now, so when I was approached to regularly write blog posts for the site, I couldn’t have been a happier man.

I’ve been blogging for more than two years now, and problogging for nearly a year. Needless to say, I love blogging, and being able to earn something from it inspires me to further hone the art (yes, it’s an art, not merely a trade!).

Hopefully, my experiences in blogging and writing in general will be of help to fellow bloggers, especially those who are just starting to dip their toes into the water. The water might feel frigid at first, but trust me, once you’re wading neck-deep in it (neck-deep in a backlog of blog posts and hopefully volumes of traffic, that is!), it will be far from frigid.

You’ll see more of my posts in the coming days, but for now, let me leave you with a pseudo-appetizer — some of the pseudo-rules I observe in blogging.

  • Blog content is king. Words are king. Oft-mentioned to the point of being cliché, but sometimes forgotten by bloggers. I’m guilty of that, too; several times I fell into the trap of spending too much time on blog layout, ad placements, traffic generation, and the like while forgetting about the content.
  • Blogging is not just about earning money. You can go into blogging with dollar signs imprinted on your eyes, but don’t feel disheartened when the dreams don’t turn into reality. There are other things you can get from blogging. More on this in a future post.
  • While words are the pillars of blogs, don’t forget the images. Think of your blogs as magazines rather than academic publications. Heck, the latter even have diagrams to break the text.

Write for Readers not Link Listers if You Want to Have an Audience

Back in the olden days when I first started blogging. The words “Content is king,” were said so frequently that you couldn’t read ten blog posts without coming across them. You still see that sentence, though not quite as often.

Yet another word was said alongside that sentence that I don’t hear much at all these days. The word is relevant. Relevant was what made content quality. Anchor text showed how one link was relevant to another. How relevant a blog is was measured by things like Google pank rank.

We seem to be losing track of relevancy.

I haven’t said much about link lists. But I’m starting to see blogs of young friends that are build around contests or link lists every week. There is no ongoing content. The blogs are made solely to attract link after link.

This situation troubles me in a deeply serious way.

No content means that there are no readers in the audience only folks there for links. Inherent problems come with this.

  • The audience is bought by links. They will disappear when the “payment” does.
  • The blog is not for readers and therefore provides no service but to falsely inflate blog rankings that are link based.
  • There is no conversation, nothing to discuss.
  • Easy links like easy money bring out the lottery mentality.

When you see a meme or link list that offers nothing but a reason to pass on links so that others can collect link love, do the blogosphere a favor. Let it sit there. It won’t add value to your blog. Your readers aren’t getting anything from a list of blogs you haven’t checked out personally.

Write solid content, rich in key words, high in quality with insights and a clever take on the idea. That will bring you natural links. Content will last and be worth something and be worthy.

To say it another way . . . when was the last time you stayed up until 3 in the morning to finish reading a compelling list of links? I thought not.

Write for readers — not for link listers — if you want to be a problogger. Writer for readers, if you want an audience who reads your blog.

Liz Strauss

Managing Multiple Blogging Projects

Are you at the point where you’re getting multiple daily blogging projects but not sure how to manage them? Many people have trouble managing multiple projects, often feeling overwhelmed. I’m sometimes amongst that group, and I find myself changing my project management methodology to suit my mood, environment and deadlines. Some are more ideal than others for when you’re blocked and can’t seem to complete your work. I’m highlighting here two ways that you can approach a group of projects, regardless of the size and frequency of each. The second method, multi-tasking, is in my opinion more productive.

The SplashCast below consists of two frames. The first is an image of the way that people usually complete a group of projects: focus on project 1, complete each step, then move on to the next project. In this mode, you don’t really think of each task as being distinct – the task is the entire project. I’ve diagrammed each project as consisting of sub-tasks, then.

The second frame shows an alternate tactic that requires a bit more thought and organization. Instead of completing one project fully before moving on, you split each up into actual sub-tasks and interleave the whole lot of them any way you feel comfortable. In this case, I’ve shown the completion of each step 1 across the projects before moving to step 2. This lets ideas brew in your mind while still letting you get some work completed. If something new pops into your mind, you can then refine your work by editing what you’ve written.

Note: to advance to the second frame, press the start button, then hover your mouse over the SplashCast area and click on the advance arrow at top right.

I’ve left out the “research” step for simplicity, to focus on the writing tasks.  The reason for the second approach is that it helps seed your mind with article ideas and lets the “background processes” of your brain mull them over while you work on another task. This is especially ideal if for whatever reason (ADD, hypothyroid problems, anxiety, stress, guilt, laziness) you cannot focus on a single project before moving on to another one.

As well, I also find that if I “sleep” on articles at least one night before they’re posted, they usually turn out better – less typos, more cohesion, etc. What’s more, if I’m feeling overwhelmed with the work, breaking the projects down into tasks allows me to focus on a little piece at a time while feeling a degree of control. Also, if I only have a partial story, sleeping on it usually gives me ideas on how to complete it.

Here is my ideal approach for completing a batch of daily posts:

  1. Browse my feed subscriptions.
  2. Take note of potential references and write down tentative article titles.
  3. Write the outline of each article, or just a few bullet points to jog my memory. (However, if I’m completing each project before moving on, I may not use this step.)
  4. Write rough drafts, then leave for a few hours or sleep on it.
  5. When you return (i.e., in the morning), edit each draft. Now add external and internal (deep) links, if you haven’t done so. If you’re short of the word quota, search your archives for related stories and see if you can’t work in a relevant summary tied to the new story.
  6. Post.

Now, this “ideal” approach works best – for me anyway – when applying method 2, interleaved tasks. If I feel up to completing a single project before moving on, then I do so. However, I always feel that the interleaved method allows me to be more productive without sacrificing quality. It’s not foolproof, and sometimes you’ll still feel blocked – at which point you maybe need to get up from your desk and go for a walk.