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Don’t Write For the A-List

One of the topics of conversation that pops up every so often is the “A-List”. There are people who want to be in this exclusive club, people who envy them, people who love or hate them (without knowing them). I have seen many complaints this week alleging that the A-List only link to each other. Why this obsession?


Who are the A-List anyway? I am not even sure what the strict definition is. Is it the Technorati Top 100? Or is there some hidden committee somewhere with secret handshakes and rituals that decides?

Whoever they are, it seems these are the people who get a lot of traffic to their blogs. I’m convinced though it is not the traffic per se that people get all worked up about. I think it is the need for “fame” that gets bloggers panties in a bunch.

I am not knocking bloggers for wanting to be famous. Personally I would rather have a popular blog and be personally relatively unknown, but hey whatever floats your boat. What I do take objection to is when people write posts specifically and only to get an A-List bloggers attention. (This is why in this post I will not mention any bloggers by name, heh). This says to me that they would rather ignore their real audience to achieve an audience of one.

It might well be a technique that works, I expect it does to an extent. Once you have that bloggers attention though, then what? They might comment or link, yes. Great stuff if they do. But what will your main audience think of you? And if you have put all your effort into building a pitch to one A-Lister, will your archives have enough meat that your new found friend will want to subscribe?

Here’s a better idea. Get attention by doing good work. Attract A-Listers to link to you as a side-effect of having a great blog and something interesting to say. Remember todays A-Lister could be tomorrows “remember him?”, and they all started out somewhere. The audience you are ignoring could be tomorrows A-List.

If you want to be famous online then it is no different to getting famous offline, do something to get noticed. You just have to be a big enough self publicist and eventually you will get there. Be prepared though if all you have to offer is attention-seeking then you will soon drop out of the spotlight. A lot of the top blogs maintain their position because they offer something real and valuable every day. Attention whoring would only get you so far.

For me, success in this game isn’t so much about making some list but having the best blog or blogs you possibly can and really serving the audience you identified very well. I don’t know for a fact but I have to believe it is so much more satisfying than chasing after attention. And wouldn’t it be so much nicer if you did get that attention for doing something worthwhile?

How Many Blogs do You Wanna Track?

If you own a blog network, or just have more than one blog – be it 5, 10 or 300, you’ll be glad to know that you can add as many blogs as you like to Performancing Metrics when it is launched in public beta next week

Own a Network? Want to Start One?

When I told you earlier that PMetrics had a little more bollocks to it than your average stats package, I wasn’t kidding. We’ve built this with professional bloggers in mind. We know you have more than one blog. We know you’d like to track all your blogs from one place….

And that’s not all, we know you’d like to see aggregate stats for your entire network right?

It’s coming, and it rocks.

Aggregate functionality is still in development, but during the beta period (maybe 2wks from now..) it will be added, and you’ll be able to get an excellent feel for the health of your network in one place.

How cool is that?

Performancing Metrics

Some months back when the ideas for this site, it’s community and it’s tools were still being formed, we took a long hard look at blog statistics, and thought we could do something different, something better. Something with a little more bollocks.

Several months later, we’re nearing the public beta of a world beating blog statistics service designed by professional bloggers, for professional bloggers.

Performancing Metrics

We’ve been in closed alpha, with a trusted group of friends for a few weeks now, and even as we speak, the system is still being tweaked based on their invaluable feedback, feedback we’re hugely grateful for. We want that to continue with our beta.

As with all our tools, our site, and our services, Performancing Metrics will be shaped by you. As it stands, it rocks, but with help from you guys, it’ll only get better.

I’ll be posting a few more details over the coming days, in the meantime, if you have questions feel free to ask them here in the secure knowledge that they may well go ignored untill nearer the date 🙂

Finally im happy to say we’re out of 007 mode on this, and cant wait to open the public beta next week!

Blogger Burnout

Burning the candle at both ends is something we are becoming accustomed to at Performancing. As Nick mentioned yesterday, as well as a new release of Performancing for Firefox, we have a whole new treat in store for you lucky bloggers! While rushing mad headlong into work is always exhilarating, it’s important to maintain at least a tenuous grip on sanity so you don’t end up a useless burnt-out husk of your previous self.


There seems to be a lot of it about. I have been reading with interest D’Arcy Normans blog where he has been talking about bloggers going on hiatus, and about trying to recover some sort of balance between real world relationships and online ones. This is quite a common theme, and I can only see it becoming more so. “Meatspace”, especially to geeks like me, can be more difficult in many ways than the virtual space we inhabit. It is so tempting to give up on the real in favour of the virtual. Heck, I barely get out of the house now!

The other aspect is the amount of effort we put into blogging at the expense of everything else. It can be so rewarding, so engrossing, that we begin to forget there are other things that need to be done. For those of you with careers outside of our blogging, where blogging is a fun distraction, this can be quite threatening to the mortgage payments so be careful!

My body is telling me I am doing something wrong. I have had a cold since before Christmas, I have aches and pains and my sleep patterns are crap. I think it is about time I took the hint! I know Nick hasn’t been on top form either, to the point where he nearly had an unfortunate gastric accident at SES NY.

A sense of balance is all it takes. Even if you need to schedule time to make it happen, we need to touch base with the important people around us. Spend some time away from the computer. Especially in my case, get some fresh air and some sun.  Perhaps even (shock!) some exercise. A fresh body and mind, with healthy relationships, it has to translate into 100% more success overall.

Do you ever feel like you have the balance all wrong and you are running yourself into the ground? What do you do to manage it?

Fighting Mobile Bandwidth Costs with RSS

Nick recently talked about full-text feeds and why he felt that they were good. I approached the issue from a different angle: the cost of bandwidth for those of us reading feeds from a PDA/ cellphone/ smartphone. I’m happy to report that a partial solution to the problem exists: offloading.

I use the term offloading in the sense that you offload content to a PDA, after you’ve downloaded it to your desktop. As I found out a couple of days ago, the cost of data bandwidth for a smartphone is immensely higher relative to what a DSL line might cost, monthly. So a simple solution is one that’s actually been in use for several years: offloading.

There are also a number of RSS readers for mobile devices, however, all of them either use a browser or cost money. I know, I know. What’s the big deal with spending a few bucks for software when you’ve spent several hundred for a spiffy new device? Well, a lot of things. Sure I use commercial software, but I mostly try to stick with OpenSource. And I’ve not yet come across such a mobile RSS reader.

I have, however, come across Plucker, which is an OpenSource file format, and Plucker Viewer. Unfortunately, Plucker is only available for PalmOS-based devices for now. The Plucker Desktop and other tools will work on MS-Win, Linux, and Mac OS X desktops/laptops. Maybe someone will help produce a Plucker Viewer for devices running other OSes.

Plucker Viewer runs on your PalmOS device by letting you scroll through Pluckered text/HTML documents, much like an ebook viewer. Plucker Desktop lets you define channels for mobile editions of websites, schedule channel updates, and convert to Plucker format. You then hotsync the document(s) to your PalmOS device.

What Plucker cannot handle yet is RSS feeds. (It supposedly handles RDF feeds and PDF documents, but I saw no proof of this in the help files.) So in comes Sunrise Desktop (which also runs on MS-Win, Linux, and Mac OS X). Sunrise Desktop is very similar to Plucker Desktop, except that it can convert RSS feeds to Plucker format, as well websites and local text files.

I’m happy because I can download my (partial-text) webfeeds when I’m planning to be offline, then offload the resulting Plucker files to my Palm Treo. But hopefully, Plucker usage will spread and someone will help out so other devices can use the Plucker format. The interesting thing is that Project Gutenberg is now offering some of their free e-texts in Plucker format, so I’m guessing there are more PalmOS-based

Even if you cannot use Plucker Viewer, there are software tools that download mobile editions of websites for whatever OS your PDA uses. So you can still use this technique to save yourself the cost of going online with your PDA. However, you should be aware that downloading more than a few pages of a site all at once classifies the software you are using as a spider/bot. Overdoing the updates may get you banned on some sites. This may or may not be true for RSS feeds.

Technorati Tags: offline content, mobile browsing, plucker, sunrise

Time for Team Blogging?

Once a blog becomes successful, or at least starts getting busy, you soon realise there is more involved in professional blogging than just writing. I was thinking this morning about all the hats a pro blogger has to wear in the daily blogging routine. Here are some “blogging hats” that I came up with …

  • Entrepreneur – the ideas, the vision, motivation and drive
  • Salesperson – brings in the advertising, sponsorships, does the deals
  • Bookkeeper – keeps the numbers in check
  • Editor – controls the output, checks and amends for quality, final decision on topics
  • Researcher – investigates stories and information for articles, gathers facts
  • Writer – does the actual writing, possibly based on the researchers gathered materials
  • Designer – keeps the blog looking great, formats posts so they look their best
  • Organiser – admin, project management, to-do lists, calendars, diaries …
  • Tech Support – backups, fixes things when they go wrong, hosting, software upgrades, modules, ad serving …
  • Mentor – impartial wisdom and advice, been there got the t-shirt
  • Network manager – for when the enterprise grows from one blog to many, someone needs to run the farm
  • …

I think it would be fair to say that it is a rarity that one person encompasses all the qualities required to an excellent degree. I can get by in most areas but my designs will never win awards, I can sell but find it daunting and bookkeeping? Well maths has never been my strongest point …

In the “Beermat Entrepreneur”, Mike Southon and Chris West proposed that any business, as well as the Entrepreneur requires four “cornerstones”. These cornerstones have backgrounds in technical, delivery, finance and sales. If you see your blog(s) as a business (and you should if you want to be “pro”) then these roles do directly relate to hats a blogger needs to wear.

This says to me that as professional blogging matures there will be more and more team blogs. Blogs will become more akin to online magazines than online diaries. Note I say “team blogs” rather than “multi-author” blogs. While these blogs might well have multiple authors, the distinction I make is there will be essential team members who do not post.

Part of the success of Performancing, and Threadwatch before it, in my view is the element of editorial control.  Writers might come and go but providing the “vision” is consistent  the blog remains on form.  Then there is the business side.  While it might not be visible right now there is very much a business side. It is very important for any business to be well run in the “back office”.

Of course there will always be solo efforts, and they will probably still do very well some of them. I can only see blogging getting more complex, more business-like, and taking more ground from the mainstream media juggernauts.

Perhaps now is the time to put your team together?

Profitability: a Game of Inches

I finally broke down (thanks to my partner Jimbo’s pressuring), and took a bit of time to sort out my company’s to-do list. (“Small business productivity”) While I’ll miss seeing the snazzy Notepad interface smiling up at me, the gains of using Ta-da list are already impressing me.

The thing about me is, I’ve never ever had a “great idea”. All I ever have is little 2 minute ‘slight improvement’ ideas. You know, those quick chores you think of when you’re surfing (and hopefully get around to later). These are the details that make a decent Web site good, and over time make a good Web site great. And they also make a mildly profitable business much more profitable (if you commit to doing them over a long period of time).

The problem being, during the course of a day I think of a dozen of these things that need to be done, and I either:

a) email it to myself or Jimbo to be done (and half the time we never get around to it because there’s no follow through), or
b) just plain forget about it.

Recently Jimbo made the jump to fulltime blog overlord, and he has a lot more hours in the day to actually do all the things we want to do. So rather than continuing to half-a** it, we finally got (semi) serious, and setup an account at Ta-Da list. (Neat little app by the way, but I’m not ready to name 37Signals the ‘next big thing’ quite yet).

Our productivity gains have been staggering. I finally have a clear overview of what work’s being done by whom, how long it takes, and where our strengths and weaknesses are. Which, if I’m getting real about building a business, is a necessity.

There. I did it. I made a post about productivity. See that transparent haze floating away? That’s my soul 😉

Build Your Own Ad Network

Last year, Darren wrote a great article on what he wants from an ad network, and I’ve been re-reading that post this morning as I jot down some ideas and fancies of my own. I’d like to revisit the topic today, and ask Performancing bloggers what they want from an ad network?

Its a difficult topic. It’s easy to grumble about adsense, or moan about blogads, but it’s quite another kettle of fish when it comes down to actually working out a better system….

Right now, there are two things that I really want out of a network. Actually there are lots of things, but these are the big ones:

  1. For it to be a good earner
  2. To be treated as a business partner, not another number in the system

Have a read through Darrens post above, it was written right at the start of Performancing and likely you haven’t seen it. Then, help me get this conversation started by telling me what it is YOU want from a network.