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Conversational Advertising

Somewhere during the struggle to reconcile the need to bring in revenue, and maintaining the “purity” of the medium, some bright spark thought she’d ad comments to ads. This idea grew a little, and we eventually had “story ads”. Neither of these attempts to take advertising into the conversational space is particularly groundbreaking. Its a painfully obvious step toward breaking out of interruption advertising and truly engaging the reader, but it is necessary.

My friend kpaul recently got a nice write up from Steve Outing over at Poynter about his efforts in this field at the Muncie Free Press

Mallasch, who describes his strategy for the site as coming from the “Craig Newmark school of business” (a reference to Craigslist’s founder), says he’s had some success recently selling “advertorials” along with banner ads — “basically, a story page labeled as an ad where customers or potential customers can comment.”

And he seems to be doing a little better than I. We played with this over at Threadwatch a while back (I ran that site untill Performancing for those that didn’t know) and although it was fun, and personally I felt, and still feel it has promise, didn’t have a lot of success with it.

Inherent Problems

The biggest problem with running story ads is that as a group, advertisers are a lazy bunch, they want the world, and expect it for little or no effort on their part.

That could be a fault of ours, of mine, us the bloggers, who’d like to show ads that engage our readers, keep our content relevant and fresh and STILL bring in the $$$’s.

Unfortunately we’re a lazy bunch too. We don’t appear to be taking steps to change the advertisers opinion, to coax them over their fears of (omg!) the prospect of public criticism but like the advertisers, we still expect it to work, and at least for my part, are dissapointed with the results.

Solutions?

Im not sure. It really is a tough one for both advertiser and blogger, neither has the luxury of an effortless success, both risk public criticism and it’s a hard balance to strike with regular readers.

I don’t have an answer, but im all ears if anyone would care to offer one.

Some random thoughts I’ve had on this in the time its taken me to get to this sentence:

Could advertisers be bloggers? Guest bloggers?
Could the lure of the giveaway overcome the fear of a “bad comment” and keep readers relatively positve? // Do we want that?
If not story ads, how else can we engage the reader, without overstepping editorial bounds?
Perhaps we need to push editorial bounds, no pain, no gain

Interesting challenge isn’t it?

Questions To Ask Before Joining a Blog Network

Ken just started an excellent discussion entitled “Questions to ask before joining a blogger network”. While performancing members Nae and Raj have already given some excellent advice I thought I would butt in here and give my thoughts.

Any writing job involves the exchange of certain things of varying value, you provide

time
expertise
intellectual property
writing skill
contacts
creativity

in return for

money
exposure
possible perks

You have to decide what you are willing to do for the amount you will get back. Also you have to determine how much you trust them to deliver.

At one early point in my career I did some writing in return for web space. I laugh at that now. Was it so different from writing for 14p a word? In the web space example I still owned my content, I ended up recycling the HCI/Usability articles many times afterwards, the 14p a word example I wrote for hire and they still own my work. As Raj says in the thread, who retains copyright could be a critical issue.

As Nae points out contracts are important, particularly if this person or these people are new to you. Contracts can be fair and balanced or they could be very one sided, only an expert in these things can tell you the difference usually. Don’t trust your friend down the local watering hole, get some legal advice.

That all being said, if your current blog isn’t exactly setting the world alight, they are offering good money or in lieu of that good traffic, and if it will not take up a lot of your time, perhaps it is worth having a go. See what the terms and conditions are. If you can cut your losses at any time it might be worth a shot.

Many blog networks while getting a ton of traffic will not make money right away. While I had been published before, I really got my first big breaks by writing for an already successful publication on a not very lucrative contract. The perception was that anyone writing there must be an expert. Sometimes publishers are very busy and sometimes not very bright, simple rules like that work for them. Automatically I was approached to do what I really wanted to do. By not getting all the rewards right away you might set yourself up for rewards later, the exposure alone could be enough. In blogging it is possible to use the profile and links to help yourself in future if you are smart.

What do you think? Continue this discussion at Questions to ask before joining a blogger network

Blog About What You Love, The Money Will Follow

Any of you who write – or plan to write – more than one blog probably know what it’s like to chase topics around to blog about. Since I launched my problogging-in-training career last June, I’ve mostly ignored those topics that I know about the most and thus can write about the most passionately. Even though I check my blog/ web site statistics regularly to see how my blogs are doing, I didn’t consciously realize I was ignoring the topics with the most potential, for me, until recently.

Years ago, my father gave me a book, by American author Dr. Marsha Sinetar, called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow. After reading that book a few times, I bought several copies and gave them away to friends. It’s one of those few gems of writing that are truly inspirational, timeless, and widely applicable to anyone who is having trouble settling on a career, or thinking of a change. It’s level-headed and doesn’t build up false hope.

The book has served me in good stead several times during my willing and unwilling career changes. It’s helped me have the courage to launch a print magazine (now defunct), as well as send my writing out to editors, with a fair bit of success, including international magazines, a book, and the front page of the technology section of a national newspaper (in Canada).

I re-read the book regularly every few years, including recently. In the past few months, I’ve cast my blogging net wide in terms of topics I’ve been writing about, hoping that I could find a few that might spell a relaunch of my writing career, which has suffered fits and starts. Cracking this book open again has helped remind me that when you do what you love, you are passionate it about it. People feel that passion, whether they realize it or not, and therefore not only return but bring their friends.

If you have the patience, you can carve out a career – assuming that there is a market for what you are doing, or that you can create a market. However, Dr Sinetar does say that your passion itself will often help create the market; although it may take time. With the Internet as a delivery vehicle, this is more true for niche topics than ever before. While you may not necessarily make 5-figures per month in ad and affiliate revenue or product sales, I still strongly feel that you can eventually carve out a career blogging. That is, provided you put in the necessary effort, and have the patience to nurture your project until it starts to bear fruit, and well beyond.

And in case you haven’t yet figured out the true value of regularly checking your web statistics and absorbing what they are telling you, it’s as much to give you hope and motivation as to keep track of the health of your blogs. As proof of what I am saying, I’ve noticed that most of my active blogs are steadily showing improvement in both traffic and ad revenue. They don’t make very much money yet, but my analysis of the statistics suggests that they could by late this year or early next year. Those blogs that are not showing any improvement after 1 year will either be incorporated into related blogs, revamped, or possibly ditched altogether. Those that are doing “well”, of course, motivate me to nurture them and thus help improve them even further. It’s a positive cycle that you need to create for yourself.

Reference: www.marshasinetar.com

10 Tips for Attracting More Comments

Your blog can be thought of in many ways. As a pulpit, a soapbox, a magazine, a platform, a newsletter, a diary. A lot of bloggers focus on the “broadcast” aspects, getting their message out. While great content is essential, never neglect the community element of your blog. As we have shown your audience can be your best asset. Here are some tips for attracting participation.

First of all, as we have said time and time again, you must answer comments that are made on your posts. It is not only the polite thing to do, it also encourages more comments. If people see they are treated with respect and they will get answers they will comment more. It still surprises me the amount of bloggers who post then sit back and ignore the feedback they receive.

I’m hoping you will be able to add to my tips or correct me if I have something a bit off. Will be pretty ironic if my post about attracting comments goes without being commented on!

On with the tips.

Ask! – Ask for people to comment, you are more likely to get comments if you ask for them. Sometimes people do not know it is ok to comment. Just because there is a comment form does not mean people automatically feel worthy to post a comment. The higher the profile of the blog or the less the person feels they “know” the blogger the less likely they are to comment. By “giving permission” they will feel more entitled to comment.
Seed – Like a tip jar, people sometimes need a hint, get friends to comment to start the ball rolling and you might open the floodgates. On some blogs people like to be first, on others there is a hesitation period where they do not want to expose their opinion to early.
Ego – People like to talk about themselves, provide the opportunity. They might not be experts in the topic but we are all experts in our own experience and we all know what we like. You know the famous phrase about everyone having an opinion. Sometimes it is nice just to give people the opportunity to brag.
Links – Bloggers and webmasters are always on the lookout for link opportunities. They might not be your ideal kind of comment but they might encourage others that it is ok to feedback. Allow link drops in your blog comment settings and do not use nofollow so the link visibly has value.
Hint – Open questions are the best to get great quality answers, ie. “What do you think?”, but they can be intimidating. If you struggle to get comments it might be easier to give simple leading ideas for what people should say, eg. “Do you agree?”, “Are you for or against?”. “Yes, no, me too” are not great responses but at least they are a sign of life!
Restraint – Resist the urge to make your posts too complete if you want to receive community input. That’s one of the great things about top ten lists, you have to stop at 10! Don’t put everything into the post, especially if you know your audience has certain expertise they are bursting to share!
Usability – Sometimes people don’t comment just because they can’t! Make sure the comment form is obvious and easy to use. Also do not take the visitor to a different site in order to comment. The very worst culprits for this are the hosted services that not only take you to another site, they use a popup to do it. Why not inflict actual pain while you are at it?
Open – While a blog with a true membership is more valuable, if you are having difficulty getting comments open up your comment settings to allow comments with out registration. We can get away with requiring registration because we knew we would get the comments, consider carefully if your blog can get away with it too, many can’t.
Topic – If you want to attract comments then you have to pick your subjects. Some subjects people just do not have an opinion on, others you can’t stop people talking about. Current affairs are good but it needn’t be contraversial, politics and religion get people talking but can also send your blog down a path you might not want to go down. Press peoples buttons. You can endlessly recycle some topics, others are shortlived.
Observe – Note the topics people often comment on, there might be a trend. Just be observant. Be on the lookout for topics people comment on and write about them.

Not every post needs to get a ton of comments but if your blog hardly ever gets a single comment then it will look unpopular and start a downward spiral. Hopefully using some of these tips you will turn it the other way and create a positive community snowball affect.

Now your turn, what do you think of these tips? Have you any other ideas? What has worked for you? Is there a topic that consistantly gets comments on your blog? Let us know!

Choose Your Friends Wisely

You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their friends. The same is true of blogs, the choice of who they link to, who is on the blog roll, who their sponsors and advertisers are. What do your blogs “friends” say about you?

One of my blogs has been getting far more attention from me than the others, it is a labour of love on a subject I really enjoy (photography) but I would like it to pay for itself. Another of my blogs hasn’t been updated for years because I don’t get a kick out of the topic (ASP programming) but despite being a mess still gets reasonable traffic and gives me a moderate adsense income.

The first of the two is brand new and so I am busy making friends and connections and building up traffic. I am conciously doing the things that made the other a success in its day.

Looking back I think the reason why the ASP site worked was because I was very much part of the community. My site was regularly referenced on email discussion lists and programmer forums. At one point even Microsoft staff would point to certain articles in official newsgroups. You can’t buy that advertising.

By referencing my work it was giving it authority, each link was a vote of confidence. Nowadays people do not reference my site quite as much, why would they there hasn’t been new content in over two years, but a trickle of traffic still comes from the old links. Many of the best links dissapeared, naturally because of lack of live indexable email and newsgroup archives or because my articles have been superceded by more up to date content. My sites friends have moved on to new friends, it is not in their social circle any more.

Who you link out to says a lot about your blog. One of the first things I did when I set up my photography blog was to talk to a guy I knew with a digital camera ecommerce store and discuss him sponsoring the site. Ideally I don’t want to run adsense on my blog at all, eventually just run it through sponsorship or sponsor plus CPM ads. The ideal will be top quality community and content first with monetization second. I was really pleased that my sponsor said yes.

Funny thing happened almost immediately. I started getting traffic for the sponsors company name. Cool, I thought, that’s a bonus!

What I didn’t know was they were seeking him out because they couldn’t get in touch any other way. Not good for an ecommerce site. Then some promises from him were not delivered. I realised something was dreadfully wrong. What finally cleared up the mystery was several comments complaining about the sponsor. Sometimes I am slow on the uptake, I never checked out the guy to see if his operation was something I should associate with. His business was in trouble and reviews of his company on the web were not pretty.

I had linked my brand new blog with a company with a bad reputation.

The guy is still a friend, and the troubles his company was facing were not his fault, but I really should have done at least a little research. My blog could have been made to look guilty by association, effectively I was still recommending a company that could not possibly deliver what they were promising!

Who links to you and who you link out to can have very unexpected ramifications but there is no secret to doing things properly. It just underlines what we often say here, emerse yourself in the niche you are targetting. Don’t just write about it, be part of it. I would never have made my mistake with the ASP blog, the company would have already been on my RADAR, with the camera blog I am still on the outside looking in and I almost suffered the consequences.

Mobile Gadgets – Blogging on the Move

As you know, Nick and I are currently in San Diego on Performancing business. It’s remarkable how well we can do all the things we need to do for the business even while travelling, it means we can be almost anywhere and still get the job done. If you would like to blog on the move you might be interested in how we do it. Also it gives us a chance to geek out about our gadgets!

Nicks Kit

Nick is using an IBM Thinkpad Laptop as his Gentoo Linux workhorse. While we have been here he has also snapped up a cool new Nokia 770 “Internet Tablet” that he has been lusting after for quite a while. This PDA-like device runs a version of Debian Linux and has Wifi and bluetooth capability. In addition to this he has a Plantronics DSP 500 Skype headset and a Motorola Razr phone for voice and to provide the Nokia tablet with GPRS connectivity via bluetooth (strange a Nokia product would not have cell features!).

Chris’ Gear

My equipment has a much more Microsoft flavour. My humble Samsung V25 laptop runs XP Pro, plus I have a O2 XDA Exec Pocket PC (a rebadged HTC running Windows Mobile 2005 for Pocket PC). For voice I have Skype both on my laptop (I use a $9 Skype earpiece/microphone, nothing so posh as Nicks headset) and also on my Pocket PC. The PDA is actually a phone, but I only use it for data and Skype as I have a Sony Ericsson K750i for normal cellular voice calls.

Connectivity

I was really surprised that here in San Diego there is rarely free Wifi. Perhaps naively I thought in the USA it would be overflowing with public bandwidth! Luckily lots of people do not secure their networks (finding a network called “default” is usually a good bet!).

Pay Wifi can be expensive, $15 an hour in some places. At that price, even my expensive 3G/UMTS data plan is more reasonable providing I am only doing email or IM.

When travelling and intending to blog it is worthwhile in addition to a wifi card taking along a spare network cable and a sync cable for your mobile phone. It is not yet the situation where you can rely on getting connected with Wifi even when it is supposedly available.

Software

Dissapointingly neither Nick or I can use PFF on our PDAs. Even though Nicks gadget is running Linux it does not yet have Firefox (though one is in the works), and there is definitely no Firefox for Pocket PC.

Thankfully though both machines have decent web browsers. The Nokia runs a version of Opera and has a 800×480 screen. It would need a USB keyboard if Nick wanted to avoid using the touch screen keyboard or handwriting recognition. The Pocket PC has IE and a 640×480 screen but does have an included keyboard.

Both machines can run IM software, mine using the bundled MSN Messenger plus Skype and Nicks his beloved GAIM. While the Nokia has a bundled RSS reader I use a web based interface which while fiddly works quite well and at least syncs with my desktop.

Summary

It is very pleasing that this company is not tied to geography, it truly is a virtual organisation. While already we were spread over countries and timezones, this trip proves we are quite capable of working while mobile. Blogging is very well suited to this kind of approach to working. There is no reason why a travelling blogger should not be able to keep up with events and maintain a good posting schedule, with good time management and planning of course.

How lucky are we that we can do something we really enjoy, find so rewarding, almost anywhere.

Do you blog on the move? Please do tell us about it.

Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic

Do you know why some entry pages are so successful? How much time do you spend to find a good title for a blog article? Are your headlines and static archive filenames containing your blogs ‘keyword cloud’?

If I check the statistics for my entry pages I see that there are always pages which are more successful than others. Two important points beside the body keyword density and the tagging are the article title and the filename of the archived static page!

Many blog authors tend to be very focused on the body part of their content. But beside the main content it is very important to attract readers and search engines with a brilliant title. Just pushing the ‘Publish …’ button after writing that awesome article means to give away a good chance to optimize your blog article for reader attraction. The same is true for SEO … titles and file names are highly relevant to search engines!

Readers following many feeds are just skimming the headlines in their feed readers to find relevant articles. If you don’t have an attractive headline they are not going to click!
Article titles and archive pages containing your main ‘keyword cloud’ means a better listing in search results!

Continuously checking your search results and the adword possibilities with a following concentration or widening of your key density is a very successful and not very time-consuming way to optimize the success of your blog articles and titles.

Last but not least your title and your archive page name and path are showing up everywhere where somebody is linking to your article. This is the easiest way to gain keyword competence and relevant links.

Lovely trap number one: Don’t change the publishing date of your article because most blog systems will then change the path of your archive page.

Lovely trap number two: Blogger creates a new name for your edited archive page if you change the title of your article. (But they also keep the old version … hmmm) So better take the first chance to generate a good page name!

Both traps may result in broken external links! I have just tested it again on Blogger and now have to update the appropriate del.icio.us links manually. If you lose all incoming links and trackbacks to an article because of these little traps … well I would be angry … and nobody to blame except myself.

It’s just another version of “The fish has to like the taste of the worm … not the angler”. As a result you will get more inbound traffic and higher listings in search results.

Technorati Tags: blogging, article, content, title, writing, SEO

Breaking News

Of all blogging tactics the most difficult must be “news”. If you want to be on the frontline of blogging and really make a name for yourself then being at the forefront of what is hot has to be the way. If anyone is crazy enough to consider it though let me give you a word or two of warning.

There are a few services that will tell you what people are interested in right now. We have Technorati, Flickr and Google just to mention three big and popular examples. How useful is this information for bloggers?

The “Zeitgeist” as Google calls their service tells you the most popular searches for a period of time. Be that a week or a year. You can see what the popular searches were for the week of February 6th for example.

Technorati and Flickr on the other hand aim to be more current, they show what is “hot” right now. With Technorati you can see both popular searches and popular tags. This is important as what people are searching for is not always in sync with what people are writing about. As I write this lots of people have posted about Valentines day but the top searches are about Dick Cheney …

Flickr gives you the most popular tags in the last week or 24 hours. Again right now Valentines is very much the theme, for the last week NorthernVoice made a good showing (hardly surprising, Flickr is particularly popular with bloggers and Canadians so a Canadian blogging conference is going to be news).

So we have this information, all we have to do is blog about what people are looking for right?

Well here is the problem. What people are looking for now is not necessarily what they will be looking for tomorrow. What you write about now might not be found until tomorrow, particularly in Google which is notorious for not picking up fresh content. Technorati is a fair amount more quick on the uptake of course.

Bottom line, you are almost guaranteed to be behind the news.

The second issue is more difficult. If by some chance you do hit on the sweet spot of breaking news that lots of people are interested in right now, it might be a one shot thing. Anyone who has posted about “Dick Cheney Buckshot” is not likely to get long term traffic, just a spike and only then if you are lucky to actually appear anywhere for the term.

What you need is to know what will be popular, not what is popular right now. Unfortunately unless you have a backdoor into a search engine or a time machine you are out of luck.

So you can’t rely on online tools. You need sources and you need to create the news, and news people will be interested in at that. Rather than following a trend you have to be a leader, that means being the first, or at least among the first.

Two problems with this, one where do you get your sources and two how do you know if they are reliable. There is a certain catch-22 that you will not get sources until you have broken some news and you can’t break news until you have reliable sources. If you do get sources though then you are on to some real gold. The Drudge Report and Aintitcool were both basically built on exclusive news.

You know what? It sounds exciting but I think it is too much work. If you have access to reliable insider information, go for it. For me though I would much rather stick to evergreen topics even though you do not get the same fame or adrenaline rush!

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