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Now Tracking 5000 Blogs!

In one week, Performancing Metrics has become the Blogosphere’s largest blog specific, free statistics service. Not bad going for a beta eh?

We’ve had our ups and downs, but largely thanks to the excellent feedback we’re getting in the Metrics forums from you, we’re slowly ironing out all those little things that you just can’t see untill you have a lot of users on a system.

Coming Soon…

Shortly, we’ll be rolling out and announcing the following on Performancing Metrics:

Public Stats
Public API

Both are taking time to test before they hit production, but both are worth waiting for, trust me 🙂

Please do not post support requests or bug reports in this thread, use the Metrics FAQ first, then the forums.

Thanks for all the feedback folks, please help us spread the word!

Adsense Blogs vs Sticky Blogs

One of my theories for a while has been that Google Adsense is bad for blogs and bad for bloggers. Chasing Adsense clicks leads bloggers into making changes that are not good for the audience, the blogger or the long term good of the blog. Metrics is providing what I think over a longer term might be conclusive evidence with my favourite blog.

Since I first started testing Metrics with my blogs I have seen a trend that other than one or two exceptions, the best performing posts for Adsense clicks were the worst performing for comments. It seems on my blog at least I have to choose between “ad clicks efficient” and “stickiness”. Does this sound familiar? Take a look at your metrics and let me know.

In my case the posts that achieved the most clicks were very product detail focused. I am talking about reviews, gossip about future products, technical details of products and product feature glossaries.

What about the maximum comments? They are posts that spark discussion, controversial, interesting news, posts where people have ideas or opinions. They don’t get any ad clicks but the comment threads have lasted long after the initial post has gone from the homepage. They tend to be light on product details and heavy on “what does this mean to us” – not great contextual advert keyword fodder.

So should I change my blog to attract more Adsense clicks? In theory I just need to post more about products?

Well even if I wanted to go down that road for a start Darren Rowse already well serves that part of the niche very well. He posts most days an excellent round up of the product news.

Secondly I didn’t start the blog to attract adsense income, although every little helps, it was mainly a way of growing my knowledge of the subject and keeping my hobby interesting to myself and my friends. Changing to suit Google performance does not fit well with that aim.

Most importantly though from an advertiser perspective a blog that has an audience that is interested, loyal, vocal and knowledgeable has to be a good thing. These people return day after day to see something other than product details. They are very into their photography hobby or profession, passionate about what might seem trivial to outsiders. Believe me these people spend a fortune and enjoy spending. They have disposable income and they know how to use it. It seems Google Adsense just does not reach them. That isn’t the fault of my content.

The answer isn’t to change my content, it is to change the advertising. Rather than serve Googles needs, I need advertising that serves mine.

HOWTO: Metrics As An Early Warning System

Unsurprisingly with the amount of activity around Performancing Towers I have been neglecting my personal blogs recently. As a consequence looking at my Metrics for my favourite blog this morning makes for depressing reading. There are several features of Metrics that can be used as an early warning system though, perhaps my blogs are not doing as badly as I initially think?

When you first go into your blogs Metrics reports you see the Dashboard. This gives you an overview of what is going on with your blog. I can see right away my photography blog is in poor health. Initially all your small graph widgets will be set to 1 week. To get a picture to see if my traffic is in fact declining or improving I need to “zoom out” to two weeks, three weeks or four weeks. On the two weeks I can clearly see my traffic peaked the thursday before last and has been in steady decline ever since. Hmm .. not good. On the three week view it seems last week was slightly ahead of the week before overall, maybe some hope? Oops, no, on the four week view Week 1 was way ahead; my traffic has been declining all month, that one good day must have been a temporary rally. The Visitors graph set to a duration of a month shows an overall decline with a peak on the 9th.

Before I jump to conclusions I need to see if the rest of my Metrics agrees with these symptoms. Next thing I look to other than raw visits is comments. This months average per day is 3.75 with an average per post of 2.42. Last month had an average per day of 3.86 and average per post of 2.45. So slightly down on comments. As well as less visitors my blog is less “interesting”. Great.

So it seems I have done some damage to my blog. Thankfully I know why, I haven’t been posting and have left the other members of my blog to keep it going. While one member has posted every day (the picture a day challenge) he is very new to blogging and his grammar is … well sometimes it is very hard to understand what he is saying. Without me editing his posts or posting up good content my membership is starting to slide. Anyone was originally attracted to my blog will be mightily bored by this apparent change of direction. In theory though the remedy is for me to get back writing again.

How could I have prevented this happening?

First off I should keep posting or get the other members of my blog up to speed on what constitutes interesting, quality posts. This is a time management and training issue. Ideally I should have done this before I had decent traffic.

Secondly I should have been monitoring my metrics and making myself aware of what the numbers should look like. It is important to get a feel for the “pulse” of your blog. I do know my best day is Thursday and my worst days are the weekends even when all things are good. If the traffic does not go up from Wednesday to Friday right away I should know something is going wrong. Same with comments, I should see several comments a day and overall that number should be increasing, if comments slow I should pick that up before rot sets in.

Your visitors will tell you what they do and do not like, don’t let them get to the point where they have to vote with their feet like I have!

10 Tips for More Blog Traffic

Mary Nicklin brought up the thread about Basics on building traffic. I wrote two extensive answers which gave me the idea of writing a summary with the focus on side kicks.

What are side kicks? Side kicks are all aspects of generating traffic through external links, social bookmarking, article tagging, creating external services and using old school emails to inform about your services opposed to the work you invest on your Blogs main content.

Side kicks are an important aspect in your daily schedule decision compared to the effort for ‘just’ writing another article. I’ll try to motivate you to invest some time in side kicks because of their great impact on traffic in the short and in the long run!

Right now there are numbers around that every day 70,000 new blogs are created. How can somebody develop a strategy to build up traffic or improve the traffic stream coming to his website? “Produce a lot of fresh content” is one of the standard answers. It is true! But don’t believe that writing 15 articles a day gains incredible more inbound traffic than just one or two. And the Blogger Burnout will be coming to you pretty soon!

Side notes: some recommended number crunching from Dave Sifry (Technorati):
State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

For a better overview I will not list the classical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) approaches for websites like page title, page name,
meta description, keyword optimization, directory entries, … there
are so many nice articles on performancing.com or on the Internet about
basic website SEO which you should use.

“My cooking recipe for fast SEO results“. The approach is that you can use the support of modern blogging technology as a side kick to gain inbound traffic and fast search engine attention:

Claim your blog at services like Technorati. Fill in all keywords for every single blog!
Use Ping services like PinGoat (important changes announced!) or Ping-O-Matic. These two and more are optional services are integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
Use FeedBurner for your RSS publishing. They offer nice optimization, publishing and statistical features.
Bookmark every article at del.icio.us (and other appropriate bookmarking services). That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). As PFF is not giving the option to fill out the del.icio.us ‘notes’
field it is a good idea to edit that bookmark manually and add some
excerpt to it! The question came up if linking every article to del.icio.us would be
aggressive? Remember that you post your article link to your personal
del.icio.us profile. What can be wrong about that?
Use extensive tagging and keywording inside your articles and on services like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us bookmarking and Technorati tagging is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). I get pretty much of my traffic through people who are subscribing or
clicking on certain tags and also some traffic from certain tags in my
personal profile.
If blogging about another blog or linking to other blogs try to send them a trackback. The trackback URI is normally published in public somewhere on blogs which support it. That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
Use Flickr for your public photos. Link to the articles in your Flickr descriptions. Again: use extensive tagging and publish to groups and picture competitions!
If using a photo from somebody else (from Flickr or other sources) for one of your articles always ask for permission and after publishing the picture add a comment with a link to your article. It is polite to add the photographer as contact and to make the used picture a personal ‘favorite’.
If linking to somebody always send them an email about your new link and how to find the link. If it fits your niche always ask them to actively inform you by mail if they have something interesting for you to blog about. That way you will build up your network.
Whenever possible you should add a link to a keyword in Wikipedia in every appropriate language.

A more advanced and time consuming practice is to create some secondary blogs and recycle your content there with
links to the original page. This is sometimes very useful because some
hosting services are accepted differently by different search engines.
Especially if you want to reach foreign markets it is good to find a
free blog solution which is hosted in that target area. This paragraph is not on the list above because many of the mentioned methods ARE already secondary blogs even if they don’t look like!

If you have money to spend and you want quick success you might even think about buying traffic for certain keywords and phrases through the Googels AdWords program. This paragraph is not on the list above because in my opinion it needs a lot of experience to get real value for the money.

All this promotion gives you a realistic chance to be picked up early by the SEs and that your blog starts with a nice range of links. On my new ‘local newspaper’ project I made the experience that Google kicked in almost immediately without any sandbox delay.

As a resume of all this writing I draw the conclusion that it is my recommendation is to NOT post articles in a high frequency. Instead invest that time in creating appropriate side kicks!

A last word about productivity with side kicks: Create a checklist for your specific side kick workflow! Every time you are planning to publish an article
open or print that checklist and do it step by step. By developing a routine for all these points the process will accelerate and the results will get better.

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, website, Blog, blogging, promotion, sidekick, traffic, SEO, del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, workflow, performancing feedburner, pingoat, ping-o-matic

Attack of the Blog Clones

After Christmas I started planning my next blog. I had a vague sense of what topics I would cover so started subscribing to RSS feeds so I could see what sort of content is posted to the niche. Since then as you can imagine things got a bit hectic so that is as far as I got. I just reviewed the blogs I subscribed to and I was shocked by what I saw.

I must have subscribed to around 20 blogs that broadly cover my potential niche. Of those 20 about 2 had original content on a regular basis, 1 had mostly unoriginal content mixed in with the occasional journal type post. These aren’t on the face of it bad blogs either, they are well written, look nice and are seemingly well maintained.

Is it a case of “follow the leader”, laziness or spam? Hard to say. Each case is probably different.

The sad thing is we have all seen this in other niches. Nick and I used to talk about it a lot in the SEO field. The SEO echo chamber is particularly strong, to the point where you would feel an urge to post about something everyone else was talking about just to not be seen as missing out on the story.

When selecting a subject for a blog, sustainability is very important. Not just is there a ready source of content, can you sustain the content with original material? I suspect a lot of these bloggers launched their blogs hoping the rest of the blogosphere would carry them. Linking out is not a bad policy, in fact it is good to introduce your audience to interesting content, but if 9/10 of your posts are linking to BoingBoing there is something deeply wrong.

So how do you stop your blog becoming just another a clone?

First step is when you do link out, add value. Add your own thoughts. Are you for or against? Why? Are there pieces of information missing that you could fill, make sure each story has all of “who, what, where, when, how”.

The best remedy is to create original content. You have your own experiences and thoughts to draw on. Look back, imagine the future, talk to people, interview people, brainstorm, start challenges, hold a competition.

Cast your net wider, if you only read a small pool of blogs then you are restricting your capacity for new ideas. Add more blogs to your feeds but also read magazines, books, watch television, get out and meet real people.

In the end if your blog can only follow others it might be worth ending it or changing the niche. Just another clone is not doing you or your audience any favours.

YPN Continues to Disappoint

Yahoo!, when you announced YPN, I, and a million other Adsensers, jumped for joy. With another “real” contextual ad solution, the rewards of publishing on obscure topics (potentially) go way up, while the risk goes way down (two baskets for your eggs).

You started slow, fine, no sweat. We were promised improvements, and we waited patiently.

But somehow, EIGHT months later, YPN is still a huge dissapointment for me. It just amazes me how terrible their offering is.

Internartional? What’s that thar? Section 11.1
Abuse of Services. You agree not to:
display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;
The short tail From a WMW thread:

I am seeing vonage ads all the time while my site has nothing to do with vonage.

So far, the targetting is terrible: lots of generic “Mortgage Loan” and vonage ads. I would say that, if I’m lucky, one out of 4 ads in a skyscraper is at all remotely targeted to the page. Usually, none are.

i got rid of the vonage adds, but I agree about the florist and ftd ads, they are still there after a couple days and I’ve blocked every url (including ftd.com/folder, ftd.comfolder, ftd.com/folder/ etc. w/ and w/out the www)

Of course, some pub’s are making more with YPN, but that’s not because YPN is a more efficient market (HA yah right)… it’s because YPN is too stupid to use any type of Smart pricing, which is only going to sour advertisers completely on YPN (even more than they are with the Google contextual network).

[Not that I have a problem with pub’s using this inefficiency to its full potential — hey milk it while it lasts!]

Maybe it all started with Overture

I think one of the problems is that Yahoo’s CPC offering (based on the old Overture) is still clunky and annoying. With YPN built on top, it can’t help but inherit the problems of its parent.

Yahoo!, perhaps you could hire a usability consultant (or three) to take a look at your CPC program and interface?

And when you’re done with that, please hire a business consultant to take a look at YPN (someone who knows what the “Long tail” is, and why having it is the critical success factor in contextual ad platforms).

And then switch the “International button” to ON.

…

Sigh. Google “gets it” 90% of the time. Yahoo, please, please get your head out of your arse. Otherwise you may find your contextual product to be #3 behind MSN’s. And that’s just plain humiliating.

Metrics Development Community

Well Metrics has only just emerged blinking into the sunlight but already we are seeing great community support. We have community members working on ways Metrics can support blog software not already listed, lots of suggestions for new features and members helping each other set up their blogs. Exactly what we hoped would happen, thank you all.

Any time soon you should expect to see the first release of our Metrics API which will allow developers to create some cool plugins, reports and widgets that work with Metrics data. Before we release the API I thought it would be good to point out a great example of a WordPress plugin you can get already.

Dave Reid has built a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add the Metrics code to your blog.

Features:

* Only one click or enable/disable.
* No need to digg around and modify your template files and no additional configuration needed.

Compatibility:

PMetrics works with WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.

As well as this plugin, James had put together a wordpress theme for metrics but it seems he has pulled it while he works on it. Petition him to bring it back if you like, heh.

Do let us know if you know of something or you are working on something that we have missed and thanks to everyone who is supporting us!

The Other Way to Launch in the Blogosphere

There’s lots of talk about how to launch products in the blogosphere, particularly much conversation around 37Signals book, Getting Real which details how they do it. It’s a damn fine read by the way, but there are definately other ways of doing a product launch.

The Web2.0 Hype Launch

I see several product launches a day, I’m a true technophile, and love to follow all the cool stuff (and all the shit stuff too) that people are trying to get out there into the ‘sphere. The “established” way runs something like this:

Make a few hints
Invite a few mavens into the fold
Suck up to, or buy your way into “web2.0” sites hearts
Launch invite only
Pray that someone buys you before the app cripples under the weight of popularity

That’s a very generalistic list, but you get the point right?

The Community First Approach

The way we launched both Performancing Firefox and Performancing Metrics was somewhat of the reverse. We knew who are target audience was, so we decided that rather than risk not being able to buy or slime our way into the right crowd to get coverage of our launches, we’d develop our own crowd, first.

It runs something like this:

Pinpoint the audience and start writing for them
Do all the normal things you do to promote a blog, including a little strategic advertising to kick start if you can.
Develop the community, put them above all else.
Invite key members of the community into alpha’s, beta’s etc. Develop a sense of ownership before launching
Launch and let your community be the first evangelists for your product

Again it’s generalistic, and much detail and caveats are missing, but it’s an approach that’s working well for us.

It’s not without it’s downsides. What if you spend all that time and money developing a community only to find that you’ve called it wrong, and they hate your products? How about time frame? It’s certainly slower this way…. One major caveat is that aswell as all of the above, we still send out traditional press releases, and email folks outside of the community we think our stuff will be interesting too.

But for me, and for Performancing in general, the community has always been central to success. And you know what? I don’t want to have to suck up to various folks in the web2.0 crowd to get them to write about our products. Fuck ’em. I’d rather stick my head in a bucket of cold sick.

I’m much more comfortable letting the people that help us shape our products, help us get the word out. Launching to a ready made audience that YOU identified, and that YOU targeted in every blog post that you wrote, is a lot nicer than spinning the wheel and hoping that a few folks like you enough to help you build the buzz you need to gain critical mass.

So far so good…

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Coming Soon…

Maybe it all started with Overture

The Web2.0 Hype Launch

The Community First Approach

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