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When Blogs Bite Back: Managing Reputation

Suppose that you have a personal blog (like many of us starting out in blogging do or did at a time) and that you learn blog marketing by promoting your own blog (site optimization, link building, etc). Then sooner or later you move on to professional blogging, where there’s a need to be more formal and impersonal (you can’t talk about your problems or swear on your business blogs).

The only issue is, thanks to your efforts in building links and trying to rank your personal blog for your name, you end up in a situation where a potential client comes across your business blog, sees your name and decides to Google you. He finds your personal blog, reads your latest rant on dog poop (or whatever), forms a negative impression of you immediately and decides not to do business with you.


The same thing can happen with potential partners and competitors – if the search engines know you because of your personal blog, then that’s what people will find – and that can be, in this case, a hurdle in building your professional reputation online.

My specific situation – I’m starting a business consultancy blog very soon. Only problem is that in this field people often do a background check on you to find out who you are and what you’ve done. If my personal blog comes up on top of the results (full with a rant on some obscure issue), how will that look? I would have (probably) been judged by a potential client negatively for something that is totally unrelated to what I’m providing, but because at this point the search engines know me through my personal blog, that’s what the people get.

My question is – how do you “hide” your personal blog from the eyes of your readers? I shudder at the thought of sanitizing my blog, but then again I wouldn’t want most of my readers from my business blogs to go over to my personal blog and read about what I did today (or whatever).

The obvious answer here is to not post anything that you wouldn’t want other people to read online, but that’s not a solution anymore. You can try to get yourself de-listed from the search engines, but that takes away a lot of your traffic (and if no one’s reading, why are you writing?).

How do I deal with this? Any suggestions?

Note: I know this has been discussed by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger and Nick here at Performancing, but I want to talk about this from a blogger who is just starting to gain ‘traction’ in the pro blogging field.

Intuitive Navigation with Tag Clouds

In the thread The Real Blogosphere Kim Krause Berg is interested in

finding someone who can make archives more usable. They are a blog nightmare, I think, for long-time blogs with years of archives. All those pages of posts could be little gems of history, links, and information, with ads and text ads on them to bring in revenue. Blogger sorely lacks ways to deal with sorting blog posts for example. Some software offers categories, which is a big help. Most blogs are immediate resources which could be changed if there was a way to drill into them deeper.

Kim is asking for a solution for existing pages/archives but the whole sub-thread got me thinking about optimizing the intuitive navigation for new visitors. Every first time reader always has to face the problem to handle a new site design and some kind of the blog owners personal content strategy. BTW I responded pretty arrogant that “this (problem) sounds exactly like somebody made the wrong decision for the wrong system architecture” – which I believe is true but not a real answer. So how can we get a flexible solution which suites many platforms and has good usage values for the king – our readers?

I think for big pages tag clouds are a very intuitive tool to understand and to use in these cases. Their look & feel is kind of ‘universal’ and the information compression rate is impressive. I did not implement tag clouds on my pages yet but right now I start to think that this is a good idea. What do you think? How are your experiences with good navigation on huge blogs?

Just today I got a recommendation for zoomclouds.com from a famous German blogger. He has a site with many articles and is pretty proud of his tag clouds. He only uses it in the article view and he said that he restricts single clouds to his individual WordPress category feeds which caught my curiosity. What you could do with that is to integrate different clouds on your archive page or on a specific ‘tag cloud page’. Textpattern i.e. offers the template tag txp:feed_link which can be used in templates to create different feeds. Of course you can also use external RSS feeds with zoomclouds to offer more content on your page.

I only checked zoomclouds.com very roughly but it looks promising. Basically they read RSS feeds and you can restrict the time window from ‘actual feed’ over ’24 hours’ in some steps up to ‘forever’. They offer an API, design customization, design templates, tag filters, tag click statistics and you can create more than one tag cloud. One disadvantage though is that every click on a tag first leads to the zoomclouds page so you risk to loose visitors but that’s the rule of the game. For Textpattern I could have a general tag cloud on the front or archive page and I could also easily customize the individual TXP section template pages to have different tag clouds for every section of the site. I believe tag clouds could be a good additional feature maybe combined with a ‘related posts’ block.

Are you using tag clouds? What is your experience? What are the best tag cloud services on the Internet? I am really interested to hear more about that subject!

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What’s Wrong with Yahoo Tech?

Is it just me, or is there nothing that makes you want to click on this newly launched tech site from Yahoo?

I don’t think they could have got it any more wrong if they’d tried.

It looks like it’s entirely made out of ads. On close inspection i can see that some of the ads are actually links to content (they appear to be, im not clicking on general principle heh..) but if this is supposed to be Y!’s entry into the lucrative tech content space then I’d say all you gadget bloggers out there lucked out.

Cos that’s just shite.

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Timing Content Creation to Match Interest Peaks

Identify the waves of interest for your content niche! Every content niche basically has High-Interest Periods and Low-Interest Periods (Hip and Lip :-). This short article will just show an example and mention some reasons and how you can make sure that you don’t miss the ‘waves of interest’.

To answer the last question first … it is simply a question of ‘if, then’ realization. If you realize that you have found a High-Interest Period, then make sure to have a workflow for repeating events in place. Following Nicks 80/20 rule you are of course allowed to ‘borrow’ High-Interest subjects which do not belong to your niche i.e. ‘christmas gifts’ 🙂 The best tool to manage High-Interest events is a simple calendar solution or for more complex issues a project manager software. Act in advance!

The reason to react to High-Interest Periods (in advance) is pretty simple. One reason is that every spontaneous reader might transfer into a regular visitor. This way you will build a kind of stairway to the higher levels of visitor traffic. Another reason is by reacting in advance to High-Interest Periods you proof your competence in that content niche. Not to mention quotes and backlinks you get in advance of the event!

The last three weeks I have seen an example live on my ‘local newspaper’ website. In detail I announced the date for a yearly repeating local street party a while ago. Then I realized the increase in interest through my PMetrics search engine statistics during the last two weeks and covered it again as a medium size note. Finally I wrote a single complete full featured article only for that event three days before and watched my traffic rising higher then ever expected for that date. Check out the Google search for “Bunte Lange Reihe” – My site and the sidekicks cover the results three to seven and are the first results for 2006! Traffic is still rolling in because people want to see pictures or comments on that event – I should cover that interest too but I don’t but I will be prepared next time to do so 🙂

One very important reason to have a structure of ‘advanced coverage’ is the raising of interest followed by a good publishing timing. If you publish the article with all whistles and bells too early then you might not be in place when the peak of interest occurs! Follow the basic structure: announcement, notice and a single final full featured article followed by a critic and preview for the next occurrence.

To make a long story short … be prepared to cover High-Interest Periods and announce coverage for that in Low-Interest Periods in advance!

How do you identify and deal with High-Interest periods?

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Low Traffic Blogs and Adsense

In case you miss it, there is a terrific discussion on low traffic blogs and how to monetize them going on in the Performancing Forums. The upshot is that Adsense is a poor choice at this stage, but that doesnt mean it can’t be done, and if you’re looking for advice on what to do with low traffic blogs then head on over and join the discussion…

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The Real Blogosphere

I was talking to a friend this week about who I consider to be the core target audience of Performancing, the people that really matter to us, and the people that define who we are. I like to think of this group as “the real blogosphere”.

It’s not about a small group of noisey people in palo alto that think they’re at the center of the universe. It’s not about big media houses jumping on bandwagons. It’s about real people, quietly getting on with the business of blogging. It’s about people from all over the world striving to write about subjects they’re passionate about, using tools that help make their lives easier and wanting to earn money from their weblogs.

It’s about you, and it’s about me.

It’s about real people.

One thing that came up is how quickly Performancing has grown. With well over 12,000 members now, our combined influence is not inconsiderable right? We got there by ignoring (mostly) the blog snobs and the pretenders, and focusing on the real blogosphere, by promoting our members and their interests and by listening to the community.

Now though, it’s time for some more direction.

With work on the upcoming ad network going well, I wanted to find out what more we might do to help the community. What features, services or products we should look at developing.

One thing that came up a little while ago, suggested by Ahmed I think, was a forum for commercial exchanges. People looking to buy/sell service and start/join blog networks for example.

Let us know what you think, and what you’d like to see eh?

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Best Advice for Combating Comment Spam

There’s a ton of advice out there for dealing with comment spam, but when it comes right down to it, the best advice is pretty simple. Darren has an outstanding post on spam this morning that talks about the cost of ignoring trash on your blogs. In it, he says this:

My main piece of advice for bloggers is to use up to date blogging software and to use the built in spamming solutions that many of them have built in or available with plugins.

And there you have it, it’s not foolproof, far from it, but it IS good advice. So, if for no other reason at all, make sure your software is up to date, and that you subscribe to whatever update mechanisms your software/plugins have for keeping you current.

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AOL Muscles in on Financial Blogging

In what can only be seen as a “tip of the iceberg” move, AOL have finally made their next play in the blogosphere. Tipped off byHeather Green posting for BusinessWeek I see AOL’s new BloggingStocks.com, a weblog about, yes you guessed it, stocks.

Heather has the details:

Bloggingstocks.com is a unique idea. AOL hired bloggers to write about product announcements, earnings releases, and commentary on 8 stocks initially. On its first day, the network will do live blogging of the Microsoft earnings call, for instance. (Good luck!)

So, what about the $64,000 question? Can the bloggers hold the stocks they are writing about?

Indeed. In fact, AOL encourages them to be stockholders, if not necessarily in the companies they’re writing about.

It’s the first big move since they bought AOL and like Heather, I’d expect to see a lot more. The fact that the “big boys” are starting to move into lucrative keyword areas in the blogosphere means that it’s probably only a matter of time before regular commercial bloggers start to really feel the pinch. And that IS interesting. What’s more interesting right now though, is if those “sponsored links” they have on the right (currently empty) are going to be straight, or condomed?

Afterall, GOOG now own 5% of AOL right? So we wouldn’t want anyone doing anything as dreadful as shoing text links for other sites now would we?

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