I’ve just seen Darren talking about monetization, specifically about when to monetize. It’s a good post, and outlines the two major schools of thought on this, and also reminds me that last week we had a cracking discussion on the same topic in the Performancing blog forums.
If you’re looking for the lowdown on when to monetize, check out those two great discussions…
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A year and a half ago, i wrote a long post explaining why nofollow would not work, so it’s no great surprise to be proved right. This hasn’t just happened, it’s not suddenly stopped working: It never worked, and has only had the predicted detrimental effect on the web and the way we link.
Jeremy, a top bod in Yahoo! Search, who also supported this ludicrous idea, points to this post that lays the blame solidly at Google’s door. Im pretty sure I said so at the time, but if not, let me repeat my thoughts here: NoFollow was a “this will shut them up”, ill thought out, knee-jerk bandaid hurredly implemented to get bloggers and blog vendors off of Google/Yahoo’s back.
It could never work. As dylan points out, the economics of blog spam are that it is CHEAP to spam comments, and spammers don’t care if some of their efforts are in vain because it costs virtually nothing.
Since its enthusiastic adoption a year and a half ago, by Google, Six Apart, WordPress, and of course the eminent Dave Winer, I think we can all agree that nofollow has done … nothing. Comment spam? Thicker than ever. It’s had absolutely no effect on the volume of spam. That’s probably because comment spammers don’t give a crap, because the marginal cost of spamming is so low.
Spot on.
Jeremy actually has the best advice I’ve seen regarding linking, particularly in the context of nofollow from a Search rep:
Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.
Really, that’s a breath of fresh air.
Remember I called this a bandaid? More precisely it was a PR bandaid, hastily slapped on during a crisis when no real answers were forthcoming (not ones that would be popular anyway). I find it impossible to believe that Search reps like Google’s Matt Cutts, NoFollows most ardent supporter, and Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny really believed this would work.
When Search pundits like Danny Sullivan point out that it’s a non solution, aswell as a host of other Search bloggers (some of whom are linked from this thread), why is it that GOOG/YHOO were the only ones who couldn’t see it?
Note that the people saying this wouldn’t work are as enthusiastic, and as knowlegable about Search as most Search reps.
The only people that believed this was a solution other than the engines, (who as i’ve said, were only paying lip service) were a bunch of folks who didn’t understand Search or the economics of blog spam.
Can we have some real debate on solutions now? Is it time yet? Or do we need to hear a few more fairy tales first?
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Today, we’re pleased to unveil a new service that allows people to post new gadgets, plugins, services, sites and blogs aimed at the blogging community. Performancing Launchpad will be a great place to get your service or product peer reviewed by the Performancing audience, and kickstart a launch aimed at bloggers.
If you’re launching a new service or site aimed at bloggers, take a look at the Launchpad Guidelines then simply hit Create Content over on the right, and choose launchpad. Fill in the form, and away you go!
Launchpad is for anyone creating something cool for bloggers. It would suit the web2.0 crowd, aswell as new sites aimed at bloggers. It would be ideal for new plugins, and services that add value for bloggers in general.
If you’re unsure of whether your service fits the bill, you’re welcome to email me or Chris anytime (nick@, chris@).
Good friend of Performancing Chris Matthieu from Numly has been kind enough to kick the new service off prior to official launch, with a Launchpad for his new product Bookfob, so that should give you an idea of how it works.
All feedback gratefully received, and of course we’re all looking forward to seeing what you’re making out there!
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As a desktop Linux user for over 5yrs, almost 3yrs of which I’ve been using Gentoo, I find it annoying to say the least that the RSS readers I’ve encountered are less than wonderful. There are some interesting projects of course, but for someone that lives on his feeds, I’ve yet to find anythiing that meets the kind of standard I’d wish for in a reader.
The two main projects that I’m aware of are Liferea and Akregator, part of the KDE desktiop system.
Liferea hss been my reader for a long time, and it’s OK, but clunky and somewhat ugly. Akregator is something i’ve been meaning to go back to (the last time I tried it it was really not ready for primetime) and this morning I did. It’s better, but still lacks maturity and full keyboard navigation. It also (like liferea) takes a long time to mark a folder as read if that folder contains a lot of feed items. For now, I’m going to stick with Akregator for a little while and see how I get on as it does have some features I like (like an icon that sits in the system tray and tells you how many unread posts it has) and it’s much more “readable” for me. I have pretty poor vision so that’s a top priority.
Lets be clear: I won’t put myself at the mercy of an online service, I want a desktop reader.
When I first discovered feeds and blogs, I used Firefox’s Sage, which seemed ok till it started mangling my feeds, it seemed to top out at around 300 feeds and start going all wonky. I’d be very interested to hear anyones experience with that app recently.
Is Sage ready for primetime? Is it of industrial strength now?
Im not sure what else exists for Firefox, or if they’d be worth trying, so if anyone has anything to say about RSS reading in Firefox it would be appreciated. I already do all of my blogging using our own blog editor for Firefox so that would make some sense. Hell, maybe we should build RSS reading into PFF?
Anyway, your thoughts welcomed on the state of blog reading in Linux….
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When, inevitably you make a mistake, or a bad call, what do you do? Pretend it didn’t happen, hope it will just go away, wrap it in corporate speak and pray it just blows over before the boss gets back?
For those that missed it, there was some fun and games yesterday as O’Reilly got their knickers in a corporate twist over the copyright of “web2.0”. Sheesh, how un-web2 can you get?
Read the O’Reilly response to this PR fiasco then read Rick Segal’s excellent analysis and advice on how it should have been handled.
First, if you own it, step up, take the direct hit, and stay put to deal with the fallout. “Brady†on the O’Reilly web site does the standard our pr people released the following statement nonsense and off we go into corporate-speak dribble. Sara Winge didn’t personally get on the blog and say, I made this call. A VP of Corporate Communications should know better, should have anticipated the fallout and, even with Tim on vacation, should have known how to deal with this.
The post is a well deserved slam at O’Reilly’s corporate muppets, but also has some great advice for how to handle these things when they happen.
In contrast, in a fun post also from yesterday Nick Carr slaps Steve Rubel over a somewhat ridiculous post entitled I like companies that say “we suck”. I thnk there is a balance that needs to be struck between between showing accountability, and communicating clearly with your customers/readers/users and handling the day to day business of running a company.
It doesn’t pay to take these things too far, but they’re certainly best not ignored. As Nick point’s out, he’d rather deal with companies that spend their time creating better products than whining about how much they suck.
Friday food for thought….
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We’re getting pretty close to releasing the next version of Performancing Firefox, and it promises to be a significant release in that for the first time, users will be able to use the blogosphere’s #1 blogging tool in their own language. Provided we can enlist your help with translations of course.
When we release in new languages, it would be a good idea to be able to promote Performancing Firefox in the local language, and for that, we’re looking to team up with people and organizations that have a [insert language here] audience that will be able to let their readers/users know about the language release aswell as help us maintain the translation files and address the Performancing audience in that language in the form of an announcement here on the site.
In return, we would like to help promote you or your service to those of our memebers that speak your language.
If you run a blogging service, or a popular blog in your own language, please contact me ([email protected]) in english. We are already teaming up with some great folks for an Arabic version of PFF and would love to speak to people initially about other major languages before we start tackling smaller ones.
If you’re German, French, Spanish, Chinese […..] and do not run a popular site/service in your language, you can still help, and we’d be very very grateful if you would.
What we’d like, is to make contact with Performancing members that can help us reach the right people to team up with, and work with us as liasons to those groups. Again, please email me at [email protected]
We’d also welcome any comments and pointers or suggestions you may have on the subject in general, and the comments section of this thread is the best spot for discussion
Thanks everyone!
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I was reading this story about a new “web2.0” site called WineLog this morning, and had several thoughts on it that I’d like to share with you. Frankly I was a bit surprised at myself. Pre- seven cups of coffee and shower I’m not generally this thoughtful, but I think there’s food for thought, and fodder for discussion here…
When I saw the headline in my reader, my first thoughts ran a bit like this:
In the course of reading the article, and taking a look at the site, I managed to answer those questions and draw some conclusions. It’s those conclusions I want to talk to you about.
The first question was easy to answer: I simply don’t know, and really don’t care too much, I just wondered why such a mediocre idea had gotten a full write-up on TechCrunch — And the answer to that, is probably as simple as “they put a few web2.0ish things like comments (gasp, horror…) and RSS on the site and made a good pitch to Arrington.” Which led to the second question, and some thoughts on web2.0, Search engines and bandwagons.
There’s no doubt that dumb as we may find some of the web2.0 “oooh, i made a website!” silliness out there, if you pitch it right, and get a kick start from blogs like TC and others where the blog/web2.0 crowd is dense (pun not entirely unintended) you can get an awful lot of link love. And I’m thinking that if you’re smart, and build your site with Search in mind, you may just be able to jump the “tech gap” (the gap between your first 25k users and real users.)
If you’re a bit lost, go check out Om’s summary of the 53k meme that was doing the rounds a couple of weeks back.
So, you have your idea for a web2.0 site like WineLog — You want to get users submitting wines and commenting on them, and build a community of passionate wine buffs that will add content, buy wine and recruit thier friends. You don’t want much huh? Here’s how you do it:
If you do a good job on every step, chances are that you’ll be getting some serious Google love by the end of your first six months, and that should be enough to take you to phase 2 – Real Users.
By the time you start getting real users in though the front door(s) you’ve created using Search, — every page is your front door — you’ll need to start thinking about them in terms of revenue. Real users don’t want gimicks, they want simple things like:
Im not saying take useful features away, particularly not sharing features, but do go easy on the real gimmicks. At this point it’s all about usability, and ease of transaction. Think about the original web2.0 site: Amazon
Ok, so we’ve been talking thusfar about using the web2.0 bandwagon, and the link frenzy anything with a few AJAXy widgets on it can incite, but you do need to get the Search engine bit right in order to jump the tech gap in this manner.
There are other ways of jumping that gap im sure, but tech folks tend to share with tech folks, and though making it easy to email a friend etc etc are all things you should do, they’re not going ot get you real users (the non web2.0 crowd) half as quickly as using Search, and you dont want to be paying for your users or doing the PR dance with traditional media if you can help it.
If you go look at WineLog, the Search savvy among you may notice a few fundamental mistakes:
The biggest, and most obvious, aswell as damaging mistake is this: Individual wines DO NOT have individual titles. Eeek! In Search terms that’s a cardinal sin, and it’ll cost them big time unless they correct it.
The correct title for that page is: 3 Rivers Cabernet Sauvignon 2001 with possibly a ‘| WineLog’ at the end for branding. Titles matter a lot!
Oh boy, as a proponent of clean, standards compliant code, and a recovering SEO™ I was rendered near apoplectic by doing a “view source” on their pages….
Lets do this one by one:
3 Rivers Cabernet Sauvignon 2001
— it’s a tag that has no place in modern web standards, but worse, it should be an
Hmm.. well there’s nothing wrong with not having your keywords in your url. The benefit from such things is small, but when you’re making a bid for Search traffic, even small benefits are well, benefits right? urls like http://www.winelog.net/wines/Red are great, but http://www.winelog.net/wines/wine/963 is just a missed opportunity.
Tip: The reason keywords in urls DO make a difference, is not that Search engines think those urls are particularly more important than others, its becuase poeple paste whole urls on message boards and blogs that get turned into live links — those live links are gold, as they link to you with good link text.
I could probably go on, but im getting high blood pressure just looking at it heh…
By looking at where WineLog have gone wrong, you can (and so can they I hope) see what you need to do to get this stuff right. It’s not rocket science, there’s no seo-magic, (no seo is magic, its mostly either common sense or spam), just plain simple things you can do to increase your chances of coming up in the top 5 for 4/5 word key phrases on a community driven site like WineLog — which is, as this whole article has been about, the point.
Im sure the people from WineLog will read this, and I hope they correct these things and take the criticism as constructive and helpful.
The last thing I want to look at, is how you can do all of the above, every bit if ot, with almost no budget whatsover.
Remember my third question? “Wonder if they built that using Drupal?” Well, they didn’t. If they had, they could have avoided a lot of those Search mistakes without having to even think about them.
Having read some of their site, and Mikes review, the only thing they’re doing (planning on..) that may need some investment, is the “send to mobile” functionality. Even for that though there are relatively cheap web services that a drupal module could be built from easily. Everything else they’ve done Drupal can do pretty much out of the box.
Build a new module for the “wine” content type, and away you go, easy.
The funny thing, and it’s something that amuses me on a daily basis whilst reading about web2.0 startups, is that there is absolutely nothing new about this. It is NOT innovative to put comments and RSS on a site where people can submit reviews and send them to their friends — Amazon have been doing it for years.
But, this really is web2.0 — we’re doing a lot of the things we’ve already done, again. And this time, we’re doing it with new buzz words, and better communications (blogs) — it’s simply easier to spread ideas, and those ideas can spread very, very fast if you get the buzz right, and successfully hop on the web2.0 juggernaught as it motors by.
If savvy webmasters, bloggers and developers can weave a little Search mojo into their applications, then they may well be able to jump the web2.0 tech gap and actually make money.
Wouldn’t that be a shocker?
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You know from the 80/20 Rule of Headlines that the best way to get your writing read is to improve your headline. It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most people, even among those who subscribe to your blog, are not reading every post, but it’s not just you — it happens to us all.
So what was it about the headline of this post that got you to read this far?
Well, it’s not only that the headline makes a promise to deliver unique and useful information to my audience of bloggers. It’s also the way that it makes that promise.
The headline is very specific.
While certainly not the only method for writing good blog post titles, just about any headline can be made better by being as specific as you possibly can. Specificity increases credibility because specific details are simply more believable than broad assertions. Plus, a specific headline conveys more valuable information to a potential reader, which acts to draw them magnetically into the content.
Here are a few examples of ultra-specific headlines:
Of course, the single most important rule of ultra-specific headlines is that you need to be able to back up your assertions. And as I’ve done before, I break the rule in order to make the point (which is the true joy of writing a copywriting blog).
While I’m positive that being more specific in your post titles will increase the number of people who read your post, I have no earthly idea what the actual percentage will be for you. There are way too many variables involved.
So I really should have said:
How to Get More Readers for Every Blog Post Your Write
But that’s simply not as good a headline 🙂