Blog

The Dangers Of Working At Home – Monitor Your Health

You wouldn’t think that working from home would be such a bad thing, right? I mean, you wake when you want, sleep when you want, work when you want. You can excercise whenever, take a stroll with the dogs, stay out of traffic. What’s wrong with that?

Of course, you have to learn to budget revenue, to deal with the ups and downs of contracts. But if you have a bit of business sense, you should be able to learn that lesson. The more serious issue, which is very easy to forget, is health. Bloggers who work from home seem to be increasingly reporting a variety of health problems, or are more prone to them given the change in lifestyle.

Flu – though this isn’t due to working at home, bloggers have been reporting serious cases of illness. I was lightheaded for a few hours today, but it passed. Last year, around this time, I was sick for days – something that hadn’t happened to me for as long as I can remember.
Obesity – I’ve definitely gained weight working at home full-time for nearly a year now. I know it’s bad, it’s just not always easy to do something about it without a concerted effort.
Diabetes from obesity and inactivity. With diabetes becoming an epidemic, weight is something to watch very closely. I’ve tried to eat less per meal, but sometimes I end up snacking too often since it’s easy to do so at home.
DVT – Deep vein thrombosis from inactivity or sitting in a cramped position for long hours, over extended periods. If you’re over 40, or have had surgery or recently had a baby or surgery, or are susceptible to any number of risk factors. It’s typically a traveller’s disease but does strike people with sedentary lives.
Stroke or heart attack from DVT or other reasons.
Headaches from lack of fresh air.
Insomnia – especially if you work and sleep in the same room/ studio.
Hoarseness of throat, due to not speaking all day. Unless you conduct a lot of phone calls from home.

These are only a few ailments that someone working at home could be prone to. That’s not to say that people working offline are not prone, but when you work at home, it’s easy to forget to exercise or even leave the house for fresh air on a regular basis. Now, the question is, how do we remind ourselves to actually take a break when we’re thinking, “I’ll do it in a minute.” Any suggestions? Scheduling your time like a regular job might be the key.

Domaining For Fun And Profit?

Last month, I talked about buying websites for profit and SEO ranking. Of course, you could overdo it and end up with too many blogs. Well, what about investing in domains. I’m talking about domains with no websites attached.

Aviva Directory is a general purpose site with some interesting content. One article, how to get started as a domainer, gives some suggestions on how you can get into domaining, what tools to use, how to pay for it all, and how to make money at it.

The primary difference between blogging and domaining is that the latter does not require as much investment in time, and can be automated to a degree. Domaining can earn you a lot of money, if you do the necessary domain name research, and there are a number of strategies for doing so. Some strategies are getting a bit dated, replaced with newer methods. A few methods:

Free parking, which brings in contextual ad revenue, split with the parking host. Under this strategy you might only make a few cents per day, but if you have hundreds of domains, you could earn a few hundred dollars or more per month.
Automated bulk buying, which amounts to buying hundreds of “interesting” domain names and then selling the lot for a small profit per domain.
Flipping, which is usually done with domains that have been around for a while. You buy it on speculation, thinking that in the near future, it’ll command more than you paid for it.
Traffic gathering. If you have a weblog or site that covers a general topic, you would have a number of domains whose names would have keywords relating to your site’s topic. Each domain would redirect to the main site. This way, you probably have to rely on type-in traffic.

I’ve only very recently started into domaining and it’s yet to make me a cent – but only because I really haven’t put in the time. If you’re interested, the potential profit can be more than the average blogger might make. Check out the Aviva Directory article for a list of tools, tips and resources. If you’ve been domaining, do you have any tips you can add?

Nightlife Theme

nightlifeimages After a lot of work we are proud to announce the release of our first theme Nightlife For WordPress.

It’s a custom creation by Brian Gardner our in house design guru here at Performancing.

This site is your how-to guide for Performancing themes for WordPress, all rolled into one stylish package! By taking advantage of the information offered here, you’ll be able to maximize the potential of this amazing and unique theme.

We want you to enjoy Nightlife as much as we do, which is why we’ve created this site to support the growth and maturation of the themes. Think of this place as a living, breathing set of instructions for Nightlife and other Performancing Themes. You want an answer? Ask a question. You want to contribute? Share the love in the comments, or head on over to the Performancing Community Forum.

Update: Nightlife has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version now.

Click here for a live preview of Nightlife.

Introducing Performancing Themes

After a bit of work and some coordinating I’m proud to announce to Performancing Themes, free and ad supported themes for WordPress.

Our first theme was done by our very own Brian Gardner. Head on over to Performancing Themes and download the latest. Our head on over to wordpress themes in our navigation.

You can also get free support for the themes from the Performancing Community Forum. If you download and install it you can also get access to our Performancing Metrics Beta.

Feel free to leave comments if you are a designer and want to contribute, or have suggestions.

Blogger. Know Your Readers — 10 Traits

It never failed. When I worked in publishing training editors, it didn’t matter what their background was. They could be college grads or ex-teachers. One thing nearly everyone had to learn was how to write for an audience of readers. So many people seem to write same email for a stranger their own age, the CEO of a major company, their boss, and their best friend from childhood.

What we write isn’t about who we are. It’s about who we want to communicate with. End of story.

As a blogger, we need to focus on our readers. That means knowing how they think, so we know how they are likely to interpret what we say. Here are 10 traits that are typical of bloggers that I’ve talked to, and you might know that I talk to at least one blogger a day.

10 Traits of Blog Readers

Blog readers are always clicking. They will click in to see us and just as quickly click away if we don’t show that we know them.clarity.
Blog readers are fiercely independent. Like most customers in any industry, we can’t force readers to behave as we might wish they would.
Blog readers range in temperament from the shyly introspective to the wildly notorious. Our readers tend to reflect us in some traits, but not every one. We need to remember that every reader is an individual, not part of a group of identical “anythings”.
Some blog “readers” are spammers in disguise. It’s sad to approve a comment only to find that another one comes in from the same “person” saying the same thing on another heavily spammed article.
Blog readers have their addictions. Readers have favorite blogs. Find out your readers favorites and you’ll get significant insight into how they think.
Blog readers have to be earned back every time we write. The Internet is hard on the eyes. Readers don’t relax with the screen. They have to want to read, or they’ll skim and click right past what you’re saying. Even my most loyal readers have on occasion gotten caught commenting in some way that showed they didn’t read the entire article.
Blog readers don’t tolerate pretenders. On the Internet the only safeguard we have is that we have tacitly agreed to be forthright, authentic, and transparent with each other. Be a fake, and readers will figure you out. Then they will never trust what you say.
Blog readers like lists, but not lists of unexplained or un-researched links. In the same way that we wouldn’t serve bad food to our guests or offer them a plateful of random raw food we hadn’t checked (or worse plastic fruit), readers want content that we pre-select. What we offer speaks to who we are. A list of links with no descriptions is like a tray of styrofoam popcorn — empty and most useful for taking up space.
Blog readers have a voice worth listening to.

The fact that they read our blogs is a good sign that they read other blogs. That means they know tings about us in relation to other bloggers that we do not. If we listen, they will tell us what they know.

Blog readers will be generous in proportion to the generosity we show, but we have to go first. If we show that we know what we’re blogging about and who we’re blogging for, our readers will appreciate us for appreciating them. Everyone likes to be cared about.

That’s a staring point — 10 Traits of Blog Readers. how long can we make the list? More than that, how will we use it to center our blogs around our readers?

Liz Strauss

What Do You Think Of Twitter?

Twitter is a relatively new online social phenom whereby you can update your goings on by the minute or even seconds. Some people call it microblogging, and some love it, some don’t. As I mentioned the other day, Nick Wilson decided to unsubscribe from 100 blogs in favor of following a select few Twitter feeds. He’s also using his Twitter microblog to promote ScribeFire, the new incarnation of the PFF (Performancing for Firefox) editor.

Has anyone got any comments re Twitter? Kathy Sierra at Headrush/ Creating Passionate Users asks is Twitter too good? To me, it seems highly counterproductive to regular blogging. I certainly wouldn’t want to follow a constant stream of updates from multiple parties – especially when some of it seems of the old diary blog style. On the other hand, someone has created Twitter Fiction, a site that posts snippets of fiction, 140 characters or less at a time. And you can participate.

I’m being diplomatic here (for once) regarding Twitter in general. So, yeah or nay for Twitter? What do you think? Is it something you’d use? Or are you staying far away?

SEO’s – don’t neglect your hardware

We’ve been doing a lot of SEO Tool evaluation around here (it’s that time again) and it started me thinking … while so much attention is paid to the Software, it seems that little is paid to the hardware anymore, right down to a comfortable chair (we SEO’s spend a lot of time at the screen).

Desktop switches are pretty cheap and help off-load long reporting cycles to other machines, you can just switch over and check the status of your reports from time to time and continue to work on other things.

I can’t imagine how anyone can live without at least two monitors these days, I certainly could not. I think our new policy around here will be one per website (our CEO is gonna love that idea … not!). This is why I never recommend laptops for this kind of work. I’ve seen folks working in pretty cramped conditions and I can’t see how they do it. BTW, if this stuff was uncomfortable work for me … then I wouldn’t be doing it … period. I don’t want to digress too much but the other day I found myself explaining to a client that I was his SEO not his Web Designer … while I did the design for him, it takes away from more important SEO things like Keyword Research, Link Building etc. I did it because I enjoy it … it’s just doesn’t feel like work to me. I enjoy the thrill and chaos and the clandestine nature of ‘spying’ on competitors. I never liked the term ‘spying’ tho … more like sizing up the other runners during the race, it’s not like I’m sneaking into their offices late at night to boost trade secrets from the safe behind the Picasso or “the velvet painting with dogs playing poker”. For the most part it seems it’s all out in the open … you just can’t beat experience, good planning, caution and patience if you want to make them bots happy.

Continuing on … I use this Logitech Trackball that I found years ago and haven’t seen one like it in a long while. Funny, most folks who come and sit at my screen can’t seem to get the hang of it, I just pray that it never breaks because I could never go back to a ‘mouse’, I like it because I can control the resistance with my thumb, anyone who has ever had trouble dialing in 455 pixels with a mouse will understand.

Speaking of hardware, I keep my guitar and amp right next to my desk along with my green hurricane lamp … hey, it’s a creative process and I gotta have these things in my space.

Software IS important but truth be told, I could probably run everything with free online tools (naturally, there are some exceptions), in fact I actually use some of the tools on our site (imagine that). There are some really great offerings Today, I’ll save a discussion of them until after we have finished our evals but every one so far has its shortcoming, if the true all in one ‘Swiss army knife’ SEO tool becomes available … we’ll be the first to pull out the checkbook (or click the ‘Buy Now’ button).

So here we are looking at all the software available out there and, of course, I’m thinking of ‘something completely different’, it just drives folks nuts around here. I guess I think this way because my background is engineering
OK, so who the heck am I? I’ll tell you that RELAX was born because a few engineers had nowhere else to go after the engineering crash of the late 90’s. I had done this kind of work before, just to fill in, and I liked it … it was perfect; you get to use cool software, hardware, and help folks. We picked up a banking contract and we were off. Certainly they had choices … Bruce Clay is just down the street from here … but they chose us and we have always been grateful for that start. We have a new website (we just never needed one before) and it would probably interest some to watch our progress … maybe even lend a hand with a quality link or an interview/podcast.

Dave
CE – PSEM – RELAX SEO Services
www.relaxseo.com

How Do I Link Thee, Let Me Count The Ways

When your site gains links from other sites, its authority and ranking can increase. I say can because the authority of sites linking to you has some influence on the ranking you receive (though there are many other factors). I’m not going to claim to be an SEO. Still, it’s safe to say that linkbuilding is something you want to do, and regularly.

Many bloggers have covered ways to build links to your site. I’d like to discuss it in the hopes of hearing what you have tried and whether it’s worked for you. Here is a shortlist of linkbuilding techniques. I’m not commenting on whether or not I think these are any good because I’m hoping you’ll say what’s worked for you.

Comments.
Some sites apply a nofollow to links in comments, so you may not benefit SEO-wise. However, your comments, if intelligent (or sometimes controversial), will draw visitors. If these visitors are bloggers, they might link to you after visiting. (Use tools to track comments.) Unless of course you’re an anonymous commenter.
Trackbacks.
Trackbacks are an automated technology that most of the bigger blogging platforms have. If you write about and link to someone’s blog post, your platform will notify the other one. The other blog will then display a snippet of your post, with a link. While trackbacks are still prone to spam, they seem to generate less than comments might on some sites. (Yet some bloggers say it’s worse.) Blogs can have any combination of commenting and trackbacks turned on or off. Note that some trackbacks may have nofollow as well, and may be moderated.
Conversations.
The VoIP bloggers seem to have this down to a pratice. I write about VoIP (ghosted) and subscribe to something close to 80 blogs that discuss communications, mostly VoIP. There’s a small group that regularly write posts that bounce off of topics another one of them wrote. So they link to each other almost daily. Personally, I think they should diversify their outbound links, but that’s their call. Liz Strauss has talked about link leaking on her Successful-Blog, and I’m definitely a link leaker, linking to relevant posts on as many blogs as possible, hoping to strike up a blogversation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. (It helps if you do it from a blog where your name appears on each post – not so much if you ghostwrite.)
Purchased reviews.
In addition to PayperPost and ReviewMe, there are also at least LoudLaunch and SponsoredReviews, and others I’m forgetting. Some people are using these for linkbuilding campaigns, by paying people to review their site. For example, fans of John Chow have been purchasing reviews from him through ReviewMe.
Link exchange/ request.
While not everyone is comfortable doing so, people sometimes just ask for a link or offer a swap. Darren Rowse tells you how to go about requesting links.
Purchased links.
This amounts to either offering a blogger money for a link, or doing it indirectly through a service like Text-Link-Ads or Text Link Brokers.
Linkbait and social bookmarking.
This is combo technique. Publish compelling flagship content, including linkbait, then have someone “seed” the URL on a social bookmarking network such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Fark, etc.
Blog carnivals.
Blog carnivals are an incredbly good way not only to get known in your niche but to also get and give links, and build visitors.

Did I miss anything? Which of these have you tried? Did it work? Which technique do you prefer? Which one would you like to try but are not sure how to go about it?

Skip links

Blog

10 Traits of Blog Readers

Footer