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Flickr as a Traffic Source

If you find you are not well suited to linkbait tactics then you are going to need to use alternative tactics. Here is a viral approach that is working for me right now, it might be an option for you too.

As bloggers what do we want? Attention? Revenue? Either way that translates into visitors, post views and links. The links bring in the visitors and also the google-juice that brings in more visitors by way of search engines. Then there is the “other PR”, the traditional PR of just getting your name out there, hopefully in a favourable light. Which could be described as “branding” too.


Link bait often takes the form of generating a buzz, debate, interest that draws links and comments from other bloggers. The focus is on your blog, focus being an appropriate word as the attention is focussed on your blog post.

The technique I am using is more distributed and viral. Your success depends on curiosity, peoples natural inclination and habits, but also unfortunately good photography. That last one might at first make it appear to rule a lot of people out from using it but hear me out!

It all started when I was contacted by another photography blog about a 30 day challenge. Their idea was to take a photograph a day and post it to their blog. They were going to use technorati tags to follow participation. I thought it was a great idea, still with my photographer head on.

Once I got into blogging mode though I realised there was potential to get a bit of publicity to my blog too. I added the promise of a prize, which required a voting mechanic (I will write a Drupal module to work with Flickr RSS for that) and an additional rule that participants need to use a Flickr tag which funnily enough contains the name of my blog, DSLRBlog-PAD.

So how does this bring traffic?

Photographers love taking photographs, and they like to be challenged. This challenge is hard but fun. Some great photographs are coming out of the challenge. Due to the way Flickr works, great photographs get a lot of attention and are shared in Flickrs groups. Each time these pictures are viewed the Flickr user will read the description “Here is my attempt for day 5 of the picture a day challenge” and follow a link, or at the very least will see the tags and be curious about the strange tagging that is going on.

This is when the viral nature comes in. If it looks like fun they will want to join in. When they see there is a competition attached there will be an additional incentive. If they are using Flickr to the maximum they will have contacts who view their photo stream or submit to Flickr groups the cycle will continue.

If the photographer is really good they will create a lot of traffic to their pictures and attract lots of Flickr contacts. A percentage of these will be drawn to your blog. Each photograph is like an advert for your challenge.

There is also a tendancy for online photographers to have their own blogs, going back to the original idea the participants had to post to their blog with a technorati tag. While the majority are linking to the original blog who started this challenge some are mentioning my prize. If you do this of course you will get all the link benefits!

So it all sounds good apart from the part about requiring good photography? The trick is you do not need to be a good photographer, you just need to get good photographers on board! You are running the competition or challenge, it is the photographers who spread the word and generate interest through their pictures.

We are just a week in and I am beginning to see the affects start to ripple in. Just one of my blog members had 379 views of one of his pictures so far, which brought him 20 new contacts. That’s one member and one picture, there is 20-some days left of the challenge. At the very least it is content for our blogs, thirty days worth of content.

Don’t get me wrong, my primary motivation for my blog and the challenge is a love of photography. The challenge itself was something I myself wanted to do. It’s an important factor that the thing has to be fun and appropriate or it will just not work.

If you are not into photography just think about this scheme and how you can apply it to your world and the niche your blog lives in. Is it possible to do something similar in online games, social networking sites (memes?) and video sharing sites like YouTube?

Have you got any ideas like this or done anything similar? Let us know in the comments …

Hook, Line, and Sinker

Nick talks about blog snobs in a recent post. As I learned a few days ago, there’s more than one type of snob on the Internet, and no matter what you do, they’re always right. So to really f**k’em up, I praise them for criticizing me, in the most honest way possible. (I’m not going to be more specific.) Am I crazy? Yes. But, well, how can anyone argue with you if you agree with them? It’d take a real nut job to do that.

Another thing that I’ve learned, as both Nick and Chris have said, is that there’s a real skill involved in writing linkbait or comment-bait. And I don’t have it. Cranky periods aside, I don’t particularly enjoy reading or writing those types of post. Reading them cranks me up (which is what a linkbaiter wants, of course). Writing them makes me feel like an arsehole. And you not only have to have thick skin, you have to know whether or not to continue any discussion that ensues.

I don’t know if it’s the screaming blue meanies of February, but I’ve recently engaged in several attempts to comment-bait, with relatively miserable results. (But it was pretty much my first time.) One attempt was here at Performancing, and generated more comments than for any of my previous posts – just not enough to have made the exercise worthwhile, considering I don’t plan to keep doing this.

But when it came down to it, I didn’t know whether to stir the flames more, or let it go. In fact, I’ll be honest. I didn’t even know how to stir the flames without really cranking up the heat. Which all leads me the conscious realization that I am for the most part an informational blogger. While I can intentionally include small hooks in my posts, linkbaiting just doesn’t work for me. I’m not saying that I’m not an opinionated SOB, that I haven’t engaged in live debates and wiped the floor with someone’s arse, but I just don’t currently have the skills for linkbait blogging.

Beware the Blog Snobs

Ever come across a blog snob? Sure you have, they abound in the ‘sphere, and they’re as annoying in the blog world as any kind of snob is offline. From the wikipedia definition for snobbery: “A snob, guilty of snobbery or snobbism, is a person who imitates the manners, adopts the world-view and affects the lifestyle of a social class of people to which he either belongs or aspires to.”

I keep coming across the blog snobs, I just can’t seem to avoid them. They’re the ones patting eachother on the back about “what blogs are”, and what they should be. Judging what others are doing with their blogs and pronouncing them unfit or suspect if they don’t fill the blog snobs particular view of how the web should work.

They’re arseholes basically. Arseholes in the blogosphere, and most likely aresholes in offline life also.

Dont Tell Me How to Blog

One of the truly great things about the blogosphere is its diversity. There are so many different kinds of blogger, from the personal blogger, to the professional blogger, to the business blogger and all manner of things in between. As far as im concerned, there simply isn’t any “right” way to do this, there are just lots of ways to do it differently.

For a personal blogger, blogging for friends and family to read, its easy to start a blog. It’s as simple as getting a WordPress account, choosing a template and starting to write. For a business blogger, it can be a lot harder, as there are all sorts of considerations to take into account:

  • Where should it be hosted?
  • Should the design match our company site?
  • How “edgy” can we be on this thing?
  • Dare we let the CEO near it?

For a professional blogger, one who makes a sole or partial living from their writing there are additional concerns over business models, advertising programs and many other financially related items.

Guess what though? They’re ALL bloggers.

There’s room for anyone who wants in, and no amount of echo chamber commentary from idiots who’re just trying to suck up to more popular snobs than they will change that. Blogs are for people, and people will be as diverse in their blogging, their motivation and their content writing as they are in all other aspects of their daily lives.

The particular inspiration for today’s little rant doesn’t even warrant a negative mention from this site, though i do thank him kindly for giving me something to be grumpy about today! heh…

The Bigger Question: Will Bloggers Embrace Affiliate Marketing?

Chris gets it right when talking about affiliate tips for bloggers. But… what needs to be discussed more and more is how bloggers will react to the rev-share model, instead of the cost-per-click (cpc) they’re getting from Chitika and Adsense.

That is the bigger question for the future of pro blogging, and one that I believe is all about education and practice and results, over time. In my opinion, as you’ll read below, there will be a dramatic switch in how pro bloggers look at how they make money online (already happening).

I’ve written about this issue extensively, having come from an affiliate background myself, and being one of the first bloggers out there who was using affiliate programs on blogs (way, way, before Adsense). Here are some links.

1. ReveNews: BlogKits Survey: Blogs Embrace Affiliate Marketing Techniques – 73% of bloggers surveyed indicated they were ok with using affiliate marketing techniques in their blogs. While only 27% of the remaining bloggers being either neutral or in disagreement with the statement.

The CPA model seems to be growing into the mainstream tactics of the publishing world as bloggers and even large online newspapers and magazines (yes, they do it, they just don’t like you to know about it) realize the potential for CPA to vastly out perform traditional models such as CPM and Google Adsense, if done right.

2. BlogKits: Google Adsense For Bloggers: Why It Doesn’t Work…For Everyone – Forget Adsense, Bloggers are better served creating custom partnerships or sponsorships with advertisers. In arrangements of this nature, a blog with niche-specific content, that is straddled with low traffic, has the opportunity to earn much more by converting less.

3. Problogger: Why Adsense Doesn’t Work…For Everyone – The discussion continues over at Problogger.

How’s that for “meat”??? :p

Hubs and Spokes in Practice

One of my first comments on Performancing was on an article by Nick Wilson on the idea of a ‘hub and spoke’ model for blog networks.

This would operate by having a central blog giving an overview of a topic, with individual blogs about specific aspects – for example a motoring central blog, with satellite blogs about Ford, Nissan, etc.

I mentioned at the time that a friend and I were setting up a blog network just like this and would let you know how we got on. Well, on 10th February we launched Real Life News so I thought I’d give an update on what we’ve done and why.

The model we have adopted is to create hubs around key topics and recruit fans to write individual blogs. Our first channel is Football (soccer), and the individual blogs cover English Premiership football teams and leagues around the world. All the blogs are run and hosted by us.

Some reasoning behind this:

  • by choosing fan-based topics we attract writers who are passionate about the area. We ask for examples of their writing so we can check their style (and sanity), but we go for passion over journalistic style
  • by going for start-up writers we don’t have to ‘buy’ blogs into the network, but we do have to start from scratch.
  • Although each writes about a specific team or league, there are good opportunities for overlap/cross-referencing. For example, the Newcastle United blog said the team were looking at a German manager, so the Bundesliga blogger wrote an article giving background on him.
  • The bloggers can also comment on broader football issues. We did an interview with the Football Association (the governing body in the UK) and published it on our homepage with no opinion, instead encouraging the bloggers to give their view of the interview on their own blogs.
  • We decided to have all the blogs on our site because we want to create a focal point for people wanting to read about the topic areas.

One question raised among the comments on Nick’s article, was how to start a hub and spoke network. Do you start with the hub or the spokes?

Our plan was to launch the hub along with a minimum 5 blogs. A hub on its own is just a blog and the spokes on their own have little or no benefit in terms of creating a community.

We set up on Blogger with posts focused on what we were trying to do – rather than about football – and used it as a landing pad for the recruitment. We managed to get 6 blogs up for launch so achieved our threshold. Now we have something live, we’re getting more interest from potential writers as they can see what they would be involved with. We’ve signed up 2 more since launch (to go live next week) and are talking to 4 others.

Moving into other subjects in future should be easier having existing traffic and some the credibility of a live site.

In terms of traffic generation the volumes are small – but bigger than we expected given that all the blogs are new. And because they are written by real fans and we’ve adopted a very open approach to other sites (viewed as part of the wider subject comunity rather than competitors), we’re getting good mentions on other football blogs.

So that’s where we are. We haven’t come across many blog communities (which I feel are slightly different to standard blog networks) so hopefully there is something others can take from what we have done.

Cheers

DavidM

Public Speaking Nightmares

It’s been one hell of a trip to SES NY. Apart from it just being a damn long way from rural Denmark, I had a “interesting” time speaking on Tagging during a session with Andy Hagans and Jeff Watts.

I’ve not spoken publically for some years, and the day just didnt start well when i woke up at 5:30am feeling pretty ill. I’d not had too much to drink the previous day, but man, it felt like I’d been on a week long binge!

The actual talk didn’t go too badly at all. I felt pretty rough which didn’t help, but Andy and Jeff both made excellent discussion points in their presentations, and after fumbling around with USB keys and pdf’s i did manage to present without too many problems.

What actually made it well worth while, was the Q&A with the audience at the end. We had some great questions and it was good fun and kind of educational to talk to a whole bunch of folks that for the most part, dont live and breathe blogging like many of us. Their level of familiarity seemed pretty low, and for many, sites like del.icio.us etc were brand new to them. Kind of refreshing in an odd way.

Chris’ Curve Ball

Chris Pirillo tried to throw a curve ball at us with “what is the future of tagging”. I said I had no idea whatsoever, because I don’t hah.. and that was kind of fun, he also caught up with me after the gig and did small interview which i guess will go out sometime soon (i got to meet ponzi too, and that was cool..)

Thanks to Andy and Jeff for carrying the show, it was a great session, and I enjoyed it despite feeling a bit queasy…

Shame to miss NewComm…

Clearly im not at the New Communications Forum today, I’d planned to be there thurs/fri but the trip got cut short due to some issues with our next blogging tool. Hopefully I’ll be able to get those resolved quickly from home, and we should have that out to you next week with a bit of luck.

There were some folks i would have really liked to meet there, but alas it was not to be, oh well, hopefully next year!

Does Blogging Have a Future?

Blogging is a relatively new thing. More and more people are joining in all the time but it is far from mainstream. In fact it isn’t yet even on the vast majority of web users radar. What should we do about that, and does it even matter?

It’s easy to forget how unimportant this blogging stuff is to the wider world. Sometimes we get so earnest about all the issues we care about as bloggers that we miss how trivial it might seem to the ordinary Joe on the street. Just now I was discussing blogs and blogging and we were talking about how few people outside of our online friends know what a blog is.


While you could point to your traffic and say “well thousands of people visit my blog so someone out there knows” in fact surveys, even surveys actually served from blogs, show that your ordinary Mr and Miss Joe Public just see blogs as websites, they make no distinction. They are “surfing the web”, it doesn’t make much difference to them if it is a website, a blog, a wiki, just as long as they get the information they want.

So what about the things we care about as bloggers? What about splogs, comment spam, copy theft, ethics ..

Outside of the blogging echo chamber they are just not issues. Beyond “good website” and “bad website” it seems the general web user does not make a distinction. And you know what? I am not sure they should care.

“Blogs” came from “Web Logs”, which were a kind of online diary. I am not sure when people started to make a distinction between “my website” and “my blog”.

What is a blog after all to the end user/reader?

  • A website
  • Descending date order index page
  • Conversational writing style
  • Sometimes mention “RSS” and other confusing jargon stuff
  • Can sometimes comment though not always sure how

Recently blogs seem to be leaking into the media a little more, newspapers and TV news mention them on occasion or have bloggers as part of discussion panels. Apparently blogs were mentioned on the new “Invasion” television series. These small occasions aside, it seems even after quite a few years blogs are not about to become bursting into common awareness. Perhaps we are going about it the wrong way?

The future of blogging is an important factor in the lives of people who want to be professional bloggers, our livelihoods might depend on getting this stuff right. Perhaps as pro bloggers we need to consciously educate our readers. Rather than expect our readers to know about this blogging stuff. Should we educate our readers or make it so easy there is nothing to learn. Should they be aware they are visiting a blog or is it not important? If this is the case, though what future is there in “blogging”?

Over to you, what do you think? Does blogging have a future, if so what is it? Will blogs just re-merge back into being just another type of website or will they further diverge into something unique and separate. Please give us your thoughts in the comments …

Don’t Put All Your Effort Into Blogging

If you visit Performancing regularly, I’m hazarding a guess that you want a career as a blogger. If you’ve put ALL your time and effort into becoming an aspiring problogger like I have, you run the risk of suffering from a number of ailments …

  1. Constantly refreshing your blog statistics, just so that you don’t miss when your report shows the next ten pageviews.
  2. Going through writer’s block because your mind is congested with which hot topic you could write about, instead of writing about something you know.
  3. Wasting hours and hours checking the hundreds of RSS feeds of blogs you’ve subscribed to but don’t really like, just in case they something that you could write about as well.
  4. Suffering from the screaming blue meanies (winter/ seasonal depression) because you only posted 5 entries today instead of 6, and worrying how that’s going to affect your pageviews. Or because you got 100 fewer pageviews this week compared to last week.
  5. Place your (least) favourite ailment here.

But seriously, if you haven’t learned how to weather the above ailments in the first year of blogging, all I can say is, get a job! At least until you’ve amassed a quantity of topical articles through part-time writing. Or unless you’re fortunate enough to have a financially supportive partner or family member. Even still, diving into full-time blogging can be an incredibly stressful undertaking. When you’ve got everything riding on a mostly untested medium such as the blogosphere, the pressure affects your writing in tone, quality, and frequency.

Fiction writers know this probably a bit better than journalists, as the latter are more likely to secure a steady job. As an example, both horror writer Stephen King and erotic humorist Tom Robbins had financially supportive wives. (Robbins once feigned a terminal illness so that he could persuade the publisher of his first book to give him back the copyright ownership. This was in the early 70s, when copyright principles were kind of muddy, and the advances were slim at best. But a $1000-2000 advance back then could buy far more than a $5000 advance today.)

Blogging, despite being closer to journalism in activity is closer to fiction writing in fnancial reward. Not everyone is going to succeed, and only a very few will become seriously wealthy from a career in it. But the difference between a publishing house and a blog network is that one top-selling author’s revenues (to the publisher) pays for the book advances of new authors. (Things have changed in the past 15 years, as the big book chains have it made it even harder for the average author to make a living because of the huge discounts they demand from publishing houses.)

There’s nothing like this money-passing with blogging, or even journalism. And no one can live on a few dollars per post without being a writing machine. This may or may not all change as blogging becomes a more acceptable career, and blogs become an acceptable advertising and entertaining medium. That is, as more money is invested in the blogosphere, there will be opportunities for good writers. (Barry Bell does an excellent job of discussing this in this post, and on his blog in general.)

One other possibility for bloggers who are starting to think that blogging is just too unrewarding is to consider non-blog writing. This includes e-newsletters, e-reports, e-books, or even just regular website articles that don’t impose a daily posting pressure on you.

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