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When Should You Write That Next Post?

While I’ll let Lorelle explain when to publish a blog post, I see a question that pops up from time to time in the form of, “When should I write posts for my blog?“. The answer, whenever you feel like it. It’s no secret that I write for not only Performancing but for a few other sites as well. Coming up with unique original content for multiple sites is quite a challenge. That’s why I rely on my RSS reader for a crutch. I try my best not to write and publish a post just for the sake of doing so. When do you this, readers can tell. Instead, I’ll browse around the various categories in my RSS feed or I’ll monitor the links showing up on Twitter until I find something that resonates with me. Some of the best articles I have ever written have come from something else which acted like a spark. Not only will the article come across with a sense of passion, but writing the actual article becomes a heck of a lot easier since you then have something to say. There are a few types of posts that I look out for that usually trigger an emotion or thought process, they are:

Opinion pieces
News items that I have an interest in
Cool new discovery
Site or service that I’m interested in reviewing
Excellent resources worth sharing

My feedreader is filled to the brim with material and so, it serves as an excellent crutch for those times when I can’t come up with something on my own. If all else fails, ask your Twitter or social following a question in which you can compile the answers into a post. As a last ditch effort, you can publish one of those link round up articles. In general, don’t write just for the sake of writing. Let your emotions, passion, and creativity guide the way.

Do Your Own Thing

How many articles have you read this year on blogging which tell you not to be another spoke in the wheel? I know I’ve read a few and each time I do, I question whether they understand one of the greatest benefits blogging has to offer and that is, the ability to be heard.

Now it’s true, being unique in the world of blogging seems like an impossible task nowadays, but here is the thing. I believe that the large majority of people who blog are unique. Maybe not unique enough to have their own massive following, but unique enough to add to the overall conversation by means of their opinions or thoughts. For example, a major news story might break out and every blogger that has an interest in that niche will end up writing about it thus, making the sphere of blogging look like a giant echo chamber. However, upon closer inspection, I’ve noticed that just about everyone has a different take on the story and ends up adding their own two cents. This is the beauty of blogging.

Being unique is not hard. Just write what is on your mind. Don’t pretend to be someone your not, simply be yourself. There might be 1,000 blogs that cover the same subject as you and it might seem like an impossible task to rise above the noise but only ‘you’ can write exactly like ‘you’.

By the way, if you’re looking for a good inspiration piece, read this article published on Write to Done called, Trying To Learn To Be A Better Blogging Is A Waste Of Time.

Why You Should Read Stephane Grenier’s Blog Blazers

Last Friday I dropped by the post office to pick up my review copy of Stephane Grenier‘s Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets. And I can tell you so far that it’s a very interesting read, and I’m glad I didn’t postpone my trip to the post until Monday.

What’s great about Blog Blazers is that instead of outlining blogging success from a single source, the author decided to interview 40 successful bloggers using a fixed set of questions. That way, you have different perspectives on the questions at hand.

For instance, there’s a question of how to measure success. For many, it would be from traffic or readership. Yet for some, it’s about authority in a given niche. Then there’s the question of monetization. Some bloggers gladly inform us that they do directly earn significantly well from their blogs. But others would consider the indirect benefits as a better measure of success from their blogs.

There are a few common grounds, though. For one, most bloggers would advise against having crappy content. And most bloggers would advise having patience when building up your authority and your blog’s readership. And most interviewed bloggers think that blogging success depends on what goals you have set in your blogging career, and whether you’ve reached them.

The book is enjoyable for folks who has a very short attention span like me. The “chapter” divisions are essentially devoted to one blogger apiece, arranged alphabetically. But you don’t necessarily have to read the book from cover to cover. You can start with a chapter that perhaps covers a blogger you know, or you often read. You could read about Steve Rubel one minute, and Yaro Starak the next, and then Aaron Wall the next. You get short pieces of insights and revelations from one blogger at a time, and I think this can be good for reflection, especially in those times of blogger’s block.

One striking realization I have made when reading Blog Blazers is that perhaps the most difficult thing for one in the blogging industry such as myself could do is unlearn. We do learn every day, from the most mundane of ideas to the most profound of insights. But it’s difficult to just forget everything you’ve been told and keep an open mind, so you could start afresh. And this is exactly what I’m trying to do right now, especially with the Performancing Reboot at hand.

Blog Blazers is a book I’ll keep handy when I need blogging inspiration, and I highly recommend it.

Blog Blazers is priced at a very reasonable $16.95 for the paperback version and $12.95 for the ebook version. You can get a copy directly from the Blog Blazers shop.

Semantic Variance Redux

Semantic Variance is a concept that (I think) I coined to refer to simple idea of not repeating exact phrases over and over. Where do we repeat the same phrases over and over? I can think of four common places:

1. In the title of our article
2. In the body of our text
3. In the anchor text of the internal links within our site
4. In the anchor text of the external links to our site

Let’s look at a concrete example to get my point across more clearly. I’ll use a page on The Dog Guide to show you what I’m talking about.

Take a look at this article on the Affenpinscher breed. So the first thing to note about this page is that the title tag is not well optimized:

Affenpinschers: A guide to dogs and puppies of the Affenpinscher breed

Take note of how we repeat the singular and plural forms of the breed name: Affenpinschers and Affenpinscher. All indications are that Google sees this as keyword duplication and diminishes the value of the second instance. It turns out that since the Affenpinscher breed has a nickname, The Affen, it would be much better to reshape this title to replace one instance of Affenpinscher with Affen. Remember, the intention of SEO is not to cater towards Google but to cater towards the user. Many users will know the nickname of this breed, and we shouldn’t leave them out. Here’s a possible alternative title tag:

Affenpinscher Breed Information – A guide to Affen dogs and puppies

Not only is it better, but it’s a little shorter and gets an additional two keywords in as a bonus (“information” and “Affen”). As a general rule, you should always try to keep your titles as precise as possible while still casting a wide, relevant keyword net.

Ok. So we’ve taken a look at keyword duplication and semantic variance in HTML titles. Now let’s take a look at keyword variance in the body of text.

I did a quick search on the singular “Affenpinscher” and found 13 results. Then I did a search on the nickname and found 5 results. This isn’t terrible, to be honest. You definitely want to weight the keywords towards the official breed name. But one thing I did notice is that for every instance of “Affenpinscher” there was an opportunity to capture a longer search phrase. However, I only find a handful of instances where that is done:

Affenpinscher Skills
Affenpinscher Personality
Affenpinscher puppy
Affenpinscher Photos

A quick glance at google’s keyword tool reveals numerous other phrase combinations that have been neglected:

affenpinscher rescue
affenpinscher breed
affenpinscher breeders
affenpinscher info
affenpinscher information
affenpinscher temperament
etc. etc.

Since 9 of the 13 uses of Affenpinscher do not combine to make a longer phrase, there is opportunity for growth on this page.

Ok. We’ve taken a look at the HTML title and the use of keywords in the body of the text. Now let’s take a look at internal links on your site.

An internal link is any link from a different page on your website to the one you are focusing on. If every time The Dog Guide site was to link to it’s Affenpinscher page with the word “Affenpinscher” it would not only be wasting opportunity, it just might be hurting it’s search placement.

Look again at those keyword combinations I listed above. Those serve not only as recommended keywords to use in the text of the article, but also as phrases to use in the anchor text when linking to the page. In fact, if you have a the phrases both on the page and then in links to the page, you basically have the magic recipe for long tail ranking.

So, you should be intentional about following up the semantic variance that you place in the text with semantic variance in the links you place to the article. I should bring up one note of warning here: if you rely almost exclusively on Related Posts plugins to do your inter-linking for you, you are pretty much guaranteed to be committing the sin of keyphrase over-duplication where more than 90% of the links coming into your page are exact matches. The same goes for sidebar links.

There isn’t much more that needs to be said about external linking. Just be intentional when choosing the anchor text of an external link to match phrases on the page you are linking into. And don’t always use the same phrase. If you are targeting a 2 word phrase, then why not build a bunch of anchor text with 3 word phrases that contain the 2 word phrase you are targeting. Then you will be killing two birds with one stone.

Ok. So that’s it. I firmly believe in this stuff. I hope you can use it. I may be wrong. But at the end of the day, it’s all about trying your best to give as many users the information they are looking for. Google will take care of the rest.

7 Great Examples Of WordPress Threaded Comments

With the public release of WordPress 2.7, end users now have the ability to enable threaded conversations to take place on their blog. However, your theme must support this ability before you can turn them on. Within this article, I’ll highlight a few examples that can give you inspiration if you decide to style the way threaded comments appear on your site. Also, I’ll provide a few links as resources for more help on configuring threaded comments.

First up, Revolution 2. The following is a screenshot of the Revolution 2 Church Theme. This type of threaded comment design and layout has been applied to all of Brian’s themes.

One of the coolest implementations of threaded comments in WordPress 2.7 I have seen is on CDHarrison.com. By the way, he also has written a great post detailing the CSS classes that need to be added to a theme in order to style the way in which comments are displayed. Usually the Reply link is just that, a link. In this example, it’s more like a button.

Tarski is a free theme that now has support for threaded comments. This design is minimal in nature and also has a styled reply link.

Just Tadlock has announced that all of his themes now support comment threading with the exception of the Bliss theme. The following screenshot is how threaded comments look within the Hybrid Theme.

Maybe you’re looking for that white and gray look? Evening Sun by Spectacu.la should fit the bill.

Aeros 1.0.5 created by TheBuckMaker. A pretty extensible theme which now has threaded comment support.

The following screenshot is taken from the eVid theme which is part of the elegantthemes theme club. You can’t get it for free but you can be inspired by it.

Resources:

WordPress 2.7 Comment Enhancements
WordPress 2.7 Comment Style Starter 1
WordPress 2.7 Comment Style Starter 2
WordPress 2.7 Theme Enhancements Part 3 – Threaded Comments Edition
Make Threaded Comments Compatible With Versions Of WordPress Earlier Than 2.7

Conclusion:

While I had a really difficult time styling threaded comments on my own blog, the images shown within this post clearly demonstrate that it’s possible to control the look and feel of the way in which threaded comments are displayed. With more documentation being released and more people sharing their tips and strategies, I think I may go back in and give it another shot.

Will you be using threaded comments on your WordPress 2.7 installation? Know of any other great resources or design inspiration for threaded comments? Share them in the comments.

Do You Find Snowflakes That Are Falling On a Webpage Distracting Or Pretty?

WordCamp Chicago Now Has A Date

I just found out a few hours ago that WordCamp Chicago now has the confirmed dates of June 6th and 7th, 2009. The event will consist of a full day Saturday with Sunday being a half-day of presentations. Also in the works is a possible meetup before the event. The venue has yet to be chosen but once it is, it will be announced on the WordCamp Chicago website which has a spiffy design by the way.

As it stands, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Ghosh, Sarah James, and Jeremy Wright have been confirmed as speakers. The speakers list will be updated as they are confirmed so be sure to keep tabs on the Speakers List. In fact, it’s worthy of mentioning that the founders of this particular WordCamp are Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Brian Gardner, Wendy Piersall and Cory Miller, an all-star lineup if you ask me.

I bring this particular event up because I will be making every effort possible to be in attendance. I’ve talked with David Peralty and he too might make the trip. If you live in or around the Chicago area, mark this event on your calendar as WordCamps are simply a blast both in and outside of the event. If you don’t have an idea what a WordCamp is, check out this primer I wrote, What Is A WordCamp?

What do you say? Will I be seeing you in Chicago come June of 2009?

Perfcast Episode 16 – Managing More Than Forums With Patrick O’ Keefe

Patrick O’ Keefe, author of Managing Online Forums was our special one hour guest. In this episode we discussed a wide variety of topics related to managing forums such as:

A short checklist of things to consider before even thinking about starting a forum.
Describing the difference between managing a forum and managing a blog
How can one extend the skills they learn from managing forums to entire online communities
What do you think of gated communities like Hive or my own Branding David Members area
You are selling one of your blogs, what do you think of people selling “communities”
Should every major blog or site have a forum for community interaction
What is your best advice for someone who has set up a forum, but it hasn’t become a community

Those topics are just the tip of the iceberg! We also had quite a chatty bunch with us in the live chat room which was awesome to see. They provided us with a couple of great questions that Patrick had no problem answering. Although we simply couldn’t discuss everything we wanted to within a 60 minute time period, Patrick will definitely be on the show in 2009 to provide even more insight into the realm of forums and online communities.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: Jonathan Bailey Of PlagiarismToday to discuss content theft as well as his blogging career thus far

BLOGGING JOB OF THE WEEK: b5Media looking for bloggers who can write about Cars, Men’s Fitness, Cigars and Liquor and other manly topics. – http://jobs.problogger.net/view/1875

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