Written on October 13th, 2007 at 03:10 am by Darren Rowse

Sourcebench - a enternetusers Community Blog Consulting Project

Featured Posts, Case Studies 49 comments

It’s time for the first enternetusers Community Blog Consulting Session. I’ve explained what this is in my last post and would ask you to read it before you leave a comment below.

The blog that we’re going to look at this week is Sourcebench. Thorsten is the blogger behind this blog and his email asking for help said this:

My latest addition to the blogosphere is http://www.sourcebench.com. I invested a lot of time and money in this blog - into its content and the design but somehow i cannot get it reach that I want. I am stuck with around 300 visitors per day. Could you give me a clue what i am doing wrong or how I could improve?

As I’ve written in my previous post - I now want to invite you, the enternetusers community, to offer your advice, suggestions and constructive critique into the mix. I’ll then attempt to summarize our collective advice early next week.

To help you in your feedback - here are a few questions you might want to answer and some areas you might want to focus upon:

• What do you like about this blog?
• What could it do better?

Particularly - you might want to comment in these areas:

• Design - navigation, usability etc
• Content - including ideas for posts that might be worth writing that could go viral
• Promotion - what tips would you give this blogger for getting the word out there about this specific blog?
• SEO - could it be improved
• Monetization - what techniques might work better?

Try to keep your suggestions as constructive, practical and as specific to this blog as possible.

Looking forward to seeing your advice.

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Written on October 13th, 2007 at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse

enternetusers Community Blog Consulting

Case Studies 56 comments

Today I’d like to try something a little new here at enternetusers and want to invite you to engage in a little blog consulting and work shopping on a reader’s blog.

Let me explain why I’m doing this:

• I get asked to look at a lot of blogs - to give feedback - to do consulting and to help bloggers improve their blogs
• I can’t possibly do this for everyone - in fact these days I’m stretched to the point where I am unable to do any at all - even paid consulting
• Previously I’ve found that helping one blogger publicly actually helps not only that one blogger but those who read along - if one person has a problem it is likely that others are too
• enternetusers is read by an incredible group of bloggers with a diverse range of skills, experiences and expertise - collectively we know so much more than what we each know individually

How Will it Work?

The idea is that later today (in the next post) I’m going to post a link to a blog of a enternetusers reader that has asked for some help (I’ve got their permission to do this).

In posting this link I’m not going to give any initial advice or tips or critique - I’m simply going to post a link, a screen shot and a few words from the blogger who is asking for help.

Then I’m going to throw the consulting work over to you the enternetusers readership. In a sense it’s a type of case study or workshop.

Your job is to give advice, tips and constructive critique to the blogger. I’ll give you a few areas that you might want to divide your advice into.

I’ll leave you to do this for a few days - at which point I’ll then attempt to draw together some of the main themes that people have talked about with some of my own advice.

I don’t know how this will work - but my hope is that it’ll help one blogger improve their blog, that it’ll give those who participate and read on some tips on improving their own blogs and that those who give the advice might also help their own reputations a little by showing some of their expertise.

If this works I’d like to do it on a semi-regular basis - but we’ll see how the first one goes and take it from there (I’m sure that this process will evolve over time)!

All I would ask is that you keep your comments as constructive as possible. The blogger who has agreed to do this knows they’ll probably hear some negative feedback but is willing to do so because they want to learn and improve - however I’d encourage everyone to be supportive and constructive. The point of this is to help someone (us all) to improve.

How’s this sound?

Stay tuned for the first blog consulting project in the next few hours. update - you can see it here

Update 2: Thanks to everyone for participating in this and for your feedback. I’ve been inundated with emails asking to be included in future consultations. At this point I’m not taking any of these on - but want to see how this first one goes before deciding whether I’ll do it regularly and if so how that’ll work. I’ll post more in the coming week or so on how it goes and how we’ll proceed. Thanks for your interest in the project though - I hope we can consult with a lot of your blogs.

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Written on October 12th, 2007 at 07:10 pm by Darren Rowse

What would you do if you owned enternetusers.net?

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 47 comments

Mani got my attention with this post today - What would you do if you owned enternetusers.net?

There’s some great answers in the comments section - would love to hear more of your ideas!

PS: I actually think it’s a good question to ask others about your blog. In fact I asked this very question to two other bloggers this past week and the answers were really informative. Sometimes getting perspectives from outside your own blogging zone can bring a great new perspective.

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Written on October 12th, 2007 at 06:10 am by Darren Rowse

How to Become a Famous Blogger

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 41 comments

So you want to be a famous blogger?

Cartoon Blogger Dave Walker has the secret on how to do it:

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

via Blogging Expertise

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Written on October 12th, 2007 at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse

What I Learned Giving Away $60,000 of Prizes in a Week

Birthday Prize Giveaway, Miscellaneous Blog Tips 48 comments

A number of people have asked me to write some reflections on running the enternetusers Birthday Bash $54,000 Giveaway last week.

What were the results like? What did I learn? Will I do it again? How would I do it differently?

All good questions - let me share a few reflections (as much for my own benefit - so next year I’ve got some ideas on how to do it):

‘Results’ - Over the week we ran 18 giveaways. There were over 4000 on site entries (a few of the competitions called for people to enter in some other way so we’re not sure how many entered those). RSS subscriber numbers increased over the week by around 1500 (in a normal week it goes up by a few hundred) and site traffic was up by about 10-20% (depending upon the day).

The week wasn’t a massive success in terms of driving traffic - however that wasn’t my overall goal. The main thing that I wanted to do over the week was to add to the sense of community on the site - to have some fun - to get a few lurkers participating and to thank readers for being a part of enternetusers. In this regard the week was a big success with many first time comments and a lot of thank you emails from readers who seemed to enjoy it.

It’s was a lot of Work - when I first called for prizes for the giveaway I didn’t expect the response from sponsors that I got. Previously when I’d called for prizes I’d had 30-40 offers - but this time it ended up being around 130 (including a few late ones). I realized at this point that the event could be huge - but that it was also potentially going to be a logistical nightmare. The solution was to hire Lara to manage the project. This took a lot of the work away from me - however the week was still a lot of work for us both and left me feeling quite exhausted.

Get a Team to Help - one of the best things that I did was to bring Lara on to manage the project. A smaller scale giveaway would have been manageable for me alone - but with 100+ sponsors to coordinate and thousands of entries to sort through it would have been beyond me.

Reflections on Prizes - I am so grateful to those who sponsored the project. It was amazing to see them all listed. Having said that - there’s a few things that I’d do differently when it comes to prizes next time:

• Less Prizes - 100 prizes of such high value was great for creating a buzz about the project - however it brought a number of challenges. These included the logistics of making sure everyone who won one got one - but also giving sponsors value for their buck. 10 prizes would have meant that each sponsor got some serious attention - but with 100 it was difficult to give each their moment in the spotlight.
• Higher Value Prizes - having less prizes would mean that we’d be able to include just a few higher value prizes. This would hopefully keep the value of the competition high and give people incentive to participate
• More ‘On Topic’ Prizes - while I loved the fact that we gave away prizes with a lot of diversity (everything from scar treatment cream, to bunny slippers, to holidays) it made it also made the project challenging. I think next time I’d attempt to keep the prizes more blogging related - or at least to weed out some of the more off topic ones.

Less Giveaways - having less prizes would mean fewer giveaways. Over the week we ran 18 separate giveaways. While this gave a lot of people a chance to win something it was probably too many things happening over the week. At times we had two giveaways running at the same time (some went for 24 hours and some for 8). This caused some confusion and made it all quite hectic for us to manage. Next time I’d attempt to make the whole process simpler.

Weekdays not Weekends - we decided to run the bulk of the competitions over a weekend rather than during the week simply because it’d make it easier to manage it for us. The downside of this was of course that less people are around to compete on the weekend. We couldn’t really avoid this on this project - but next year I think I’d go for a midweek project.

Using Keywords for Comment Entries Was Genius - one of the challenges that we faced was that to enter people had to leave a comment on a post here at enternetusers. The challenge with this is that my comment moderating tool (Akismet) can be a little too eager on occasion and filters some first time comments as spam. While these can be retrieved - I get a lot of real spam comments and finding them all was going to be a challenge. However we decided to make entrants include a ‘keyword’ in their comment so that we could quickly track down comments falsely queued as spam. This saved us hours of work.

Distraction and Burnout - running a competition of this scale does have a downside. If you haven’t got it already - this was a lot of work and I’ll admit that it’s left me in the last couple of days with a bit of a hangover (what good party doesn’t). Next time I think I’d work harder in the lead up to a competition to have some posts written before the competition that I could use in the days following it to take some of the load off.

The other downside of any project that runs for a few days on a blog is that it can be a distraction from the main purposes of the blog itself. I attempted to combat this by keeping new ‘normal’ posts going up on the blog over the week. This helped a lot - but the blog did get a little crazy for a few days and on reflection a few less giveaways might have helped to keep the blog more on track. I think we did OK on this - but next time I think that a simpler competition with less giveaways might be better on this front also.

Overall I’d judge the experience as being a success. I definitely want to do another one next year - but will approach it a little differently.

What did you think about the week that was? I’m aware that it wasn’t perfect - but would love to hear your constructive critique and suggestions on what you thought about it and how you’d suggest we tackle it next year.

PS: Lara has written a similar post with some of her own reflections on the week of giveaways.

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Written on October 11th, 2007 at 08:10 pm by Darren Rowse

Melbourne WordCamp is a Go - 17 November 2007

Pro Blogging News 11 comments

If you’re in or near Melbourne you’ll want to block out 17 November from 12.00pm until 7pm (and perhaps a little longer for a drink or two) because the first ever Melbourne WordCamp is on!

Venue: WordCamp Melbourne will be held in the ‘Pavillion’ at the Watermark Bar, Victoria Harbour Docklands on Saturday, November 17th from 12:00PM - 7:00 PM.

Cost: $25 to cover the costs - any left over money will be put on the bar.

Program: looks like it’s up to us to create our own afternoon of learning! James is calling for presentation ideas and round table discussion ideas.

Full details are at WordCamp Melbourne. RSVP here.

I’m 90% sure I’ll be there - just got to coordinate with Mrs enternetusers and enternetusers Junior.

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Written on October 11th, 2007 at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse

Speedlinking - 11 October 2007

Pro Blogging News 26 comments

A few newsy items from the last couple of days:

• WidgetBucks have announced that they’ll be moving to reporting revenue per click and revenue in real time - starting today. This was one of the main concerns that I”ve been hearing about the ad network - while they will still apply an audit to figures (you’ll see a ‘pending’ status on figures for a few days) it’s good to see them improving things. On WidgetBucks - how are people finding it’s performing? My tests in a couple of positions are showing that it’s earning more than AdSense for me and as much as Chitika - this is on a product blog where I’d suspect it will work best.
• Over at b5media we’re really excited this week with the beta launch of our new Entertainment Gateway Spekked. It draws content from our Entertainment channel and we’re launching with a competition with some cool prizes.
• Google today announced that their Trends tool is now being updated daily. This is a great tool for tracking how many people are searching online for different terms - incredibly useful if you’re researching a new blog topic.
• 9rules has launched their next version and it’s fantastic. Congratulations to the team there!
• ChrisG shares some insights on the topic of buying and selling blogs and particularly on ascertaining the value of a blog.

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Written on October 10th, 2007 at 12:10 pm by Darren Rowse

AdSense: “BTW - That Video Product We Launched - It’s only for US Publishers”

Adsense 48 comments

<rant>Once again AdSense have alienated publishers not based in the US with an update to their blog post announcing their new video units with a short update:

“Video units will be live in AdSense accounts later today (10/9). Currently this feature is open only to publishers located in the United States with English-language websites.”

These US-centric product releases are incredibly annoying for those AdSense publishers situated outside of the US. Despite having sites which attract largely english speaking US based readers and despite our blogs usually being hosted on servers within the US we are penalized by our own locations.

Yes I know there’s probably a perfectly legitimate reason for it - but give us a break! By the time we get to play with these new ads the US dollar that we all get paid with for AdSense will be worthless and video will be SO 2007!

Just once I’d love to see AdSense release something that is exclusively for those situated in Asia, Europe or Africa.</rant>

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Written on October 10th, 2007 at 09:10 am by Darren Rowse

Can having too many Digg Using Readers Be a Bad thing for a Site?

Social Media 34 comments

A number of months ago I wrote a post titled How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog which explored a trend that I’d noticed on my blogs where getting on the front page of Digg once tended to lead to attracting other Active Digg users to your blog - which in turn led to more success on Digg - which led to more Digg using readers which led to more Digg success…. etc (see image to the left for a visual illustration).

It was something that I’d noticed happening on a number of my own blogs as well as blogs of others.

However in the last few months I’ve noticed another Digg trend. At this point it’s just a theory and I have no way of proving it - but I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps a blog can be penalized for having too many Active Digg using readers.

I first noticed this through chatting to other bloggers who would regularly get on the font page of Digg quite organically as a result of their readers submitting and then Digging theirs posts up. These blogs had medium to largish sized readerships (although none were A-listers).

After a few months (or longer) of getting semi-regular appearances on the front page of Digg these bloggers started to notice that their posts would do well for a few hours after being submitted by readers but that as they approached the top of the upcoming lists they would disappear.

While it is not unusual for some posts to be buried before hitting the popular page (not everyone on Digg will appreciate every post you write) these bloggers began to notice that it happened to every post - even their best ones.

I didn’t take a lot of notice of this at first - but after hearing the same story from 10 or so other bloggers began to wonder if there was more to the story.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed the same thing happening on my own blogs - blogs that quite often used to reach the front page of Digg completely organically.

My question to Digg (something I’ve asked via email - but which I don’t really expect a response) is:

Can having too many Digg Using Readers Be a Bad thing for a Site?

I understand why Digg needs to protect itself and ban sites who attempt to manipulate their system - however I’ve heard the above story/complaint from a number of legitimate and high quality bloggers now and wonder if perhaps Diggs algorithm or filtering system is being a little too zealous and weeding out quality and legitimate content simply because those sites have grown a readership that love and use Digg.

Now there is a weakness in my hypothesis - and that is that mega/A-list blogs who must have a lot of Digg users regularly feature on the front pages of Digg. Perhaps this is an indication that my theory is off - however I couldn’t imaging Digg banning Engadget, Gizmodo or Lifehacker (who all feature heavily on the front page of Digg).

It’s just a theory - but I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on the question.

Can having too many Digg Using Readers Be a Bad thing for a Site?

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Written on October 10th, 2007 at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse

Your first 10,000 Blog Posts are Always the Worst

Featured Posts, Writing Content 82 comments

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson - Photographer

I came across this great quote today and as a photography nut it rang true.

However I quickly realized that the quote could easily be applied to the medium of blogging.

“Your first 10,000 blog posts are your worst”

Like anything - blogging is something that the majority of us are not brilliant at in our early days. I look back at some of the posts I wrote in my first year of blogging and shudder with embarrassment. The mistakes were spectacular and frequent.

However with each mistake and failure comes a lesson, with every post comes comes a new skill and with each experiment comes a discovery of a technique that works (or doesn’t work).

If you’re a new blogger - don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t ‘click’ for you straight away.

Practice, Practice and Practice some more.

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