Written on January 11th, 2007 at 06:01 pm by Tony Hung
How To Market Your Blog in 2007
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It breaks my heart to see blogs with great content languish in utter anonymity, devoid of comments, saddled with a seven-figure alexa traffic ranking, and rotting in pagerank purgatory.
Well, no more, I say!
For those bloggers out there who have decided to start their blogs, or launch their blogging careers, in 2007 I salute you — and present to you with 41 ways to kickstart your marketing efforts. Kick back, grab a cold one, and check it out. And if, in a year’s time, you’ve cracked the Technorati 1000, don’t forget where it all began! :)
Get Your Own House In Order
- Write well, write consistently, don’t give up: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.
- Become an expert on something: Develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will grant you this informal title; bloggers will seek you out, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted (see below)
- Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 Wordpress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.
- Get Your SEO On: An entire post in and of itself — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.
- Publish full feeds: A controversial topic. Publishing full feeds puts you at the mercy for content scrapers who will scrape your RSS feeds and repost your content, create traffic, and reap adsense bucks. On the other hand, some data suggests that it can also increase your traffic, and a few pundits swear by it. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.
- Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.
- Break important stories: See the post on how to find news. Long story short: if you have an interest in an area, it is still possible to do this as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.
- Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.
- Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and “publish it”. For fun, I asked myself “How many of the Top 30 Diggers actually blog?” And I just went through their profiles and created a table of how many blogged. I then talked about what it meant, and tried to answer the question “why?” [answer: not many do blog, its because being a top 30 digger requires a huge time investment]
- Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)
- Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.
- Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: Of course you have enabled comments on every post, right? So, when you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend and contact.
- Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.
- Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way): MyBlogLog — know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has the potential to explode all over the blogosphere. The two sentence run down is that it offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can “add” friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages. I wrote a complete review over here.
Getting the Word Out
- Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.
- Join blog network: Between 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one. Goes back to tip #1 — don’t forget to keep up your blog.
- Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog
- Participate on larger blogs in comments: Like number three, except that by participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site (”hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … “). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.
- Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. That’s right, you could get a post syndicated on Reuters. Trust me — it can happen . Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your mom that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top100 publishers only.
- Participate in Darren’s contests: He has enough of them, and often publishes links to all of the participants.
- Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.
- Submit to Google sitemaps: Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster. Tip: for Wordpress fans, this plugin is particularly useful.
- Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.
- Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.
- Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news. Hint: some news aggregators will actually accept submissions if you ask them nicely; double hint: try and get listed by linking to a top story within your first 100 words.
- Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.
- Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.
- Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com
Connect, Connect, Connect
- Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of “networking” (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more “adds” into their MyBlogLog network, more “ads” into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.
- Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.
- Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.
- Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional “doors” … because now that you’re getting paid? You’re a “pro-blogger”, mate!
- Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. Remember, you didn’t know me before enternetusers, but I met Darren in person at a function in Toronto that played a part in me writing this. Think about that.
- Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.
- Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.
Make Social Media Work For You
- Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. But, unlike other social networks (as far as I know), you can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead? Update: Myspace also allows this function, i believe.
- Join Helium: Helium is a new site that is Actively looking people to head new categories of content. Think a paid “about.com” — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.
- Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a “signature” is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent “gaming”, but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.
- Create a Squidoo
PageLens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog. - Use MySpace Marketing: Far beyond the confines of this post, but in a similar fashion to Squidoo, the idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic.
- Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously. ‘Nuff said (for now).
[Yes, I excluded “create viral videos”, because I thought that extended beyond blogging and into video casting — which, I’ll admit isn’t tremendously different, but hey … gotta draw the line somewhere. ]
And at this point, we open the floor to comments, questions, cheers and jeers. If you have any further tips, share’em so we can all learn together! :)
*Tony Hung is the guest blogger for the week, and he blogs at DeepJiveInterests.com
Written on January 10th, 2007 at 04:01 pm by Tony Hung
How To Find News For Your Blog
In your quest to find interesting things to blog about, you may want to consider blogging about The News. Sure, there are loads of ways to create great content — interviews, tips, opinion pieces, research and so on, but blogging about news items can be particularly useful.
Why News is Good for your blog
First, because it can be an easy way of injecting fresh content — particularly if its a unique tidbit that no one knows; second, because when done well, you can demonstrate your own thought leadership in a given category; and third, it provides the opportunity to get The Scoop — the first blog to recognize a particular bit of news, and the potential for being explosively linked to (i.e. “link bait”), bringing traffic, comments, all of those precious inbound links, and the recognition that your site has done well.
Now, Its Actually Ok *Not* To Break The News
Unless bloggers have deep connections within any particular industry, most bloggers are not in the position to report on breaking news in any fashion. This is ok. Almost all A-list bloggers do this. Blogging magazines do this. And quite frankly, mainstream news organizations do this. In fact, most “news” is simply repeated ad nauseum between different networks and across different media (think about how many stories are going to be repeated in your local television news casts). Most bloggers will therefore need to comment on existing news that other mainstream organizations, or bloggers have discovered, or actually created (such as newsworthy research) first.
The trick, therefore, is to actually find news that’s worth commenting on.
And here’s how I do it.
Become a news junkie
In your quest to find something that’s newsworthy and appropriate for your blog, you’ll probably be looking through lots of news. And as you get into the swing of things, the number of sources you’re going to pick up will increase. To perhaps hundreds of sources a day. Some will be bloggers, some will be mainstream news sources, and others in some pretty strange areas, indeed. But if you’re serious about blogging about stuff that happens that is relevant to your blog, many times you will find yourself drawn to finding more and more things to read. This is good, because you’ll start getting a feel for who the main players in any given industry are; what their positions are for popular issues; and over time, you’ll start developing a sense of context and history of events that play out. All of these things will help you write intelligently once you actually find news. But back up for a second — hundreds of sources? How is it possible to read hundreds of websites a day?
Feeds, feeds, feeds — understand them, love them, embrace them.
If you blog, you already know about RSS feeds. You almost certainly publish your own feeds so that people can pick them up and read them easily in their own newsreader. For the uninitiated (or those contemplating blogging), RSS feeds are a way of publishing information — almost any information, and this isn’t the exclusive purview of blogs. The data is in a simpler form so that special news reading programs can read them. Feeds are really the key to digesting all that news fast and efficiently, because on the reader-end of things (not the blogger-publishing side of things) they provide an easy way of aggregating news from a multitude of sites (hundreds, thousands)– and enable you to scan a huge number of websites from a single vantage point in a very easy fashion. That is, you won’t need to go to every single news site individually in your browser; rather, you will be able to “pull” information from those feeds into a single location, your news reader, so they can be read very quickly. And you’d be surprised how many sites publish their own feeds (look for the rss “symbol”, or a link to “feeds”), and these include newspapers, news sites, magazines, and even trade journals.
Get a good feed reader
Now that you know what feeds are, you’ll need to get a good feed reader. Most, if all, are now free, so its just a matter of deciding whether or not you want a software based feed reader, or a web based feed reader. Its sort of like the debate between a software email program (like Outlook Express), or a web based email program (such as Gmail). There are lots of popular feed readers, but Google has a particularly useful feed reader that has recently allowed you to view some of your own viewing statistics (which is nifty), and share your feeds very easily. Personally, I tend to favour a web based feed reader, as they allow you to read feeds wherever there is an internet connection. Moreover, I have a particular fondness for services such as Netvibes or Pageflakes. These are feed readers which are particularly useful as you can add feeds in little boxes that get displayed like an online “desktop” that fills your browser; you can view the headlines of many, many, many feeds all at once (rather than one at a time) and for someone who is visually inclined, it is a tremendously efficient way of reading your feeds.
Start subscribing and sharing your feeds
Now that you understand what feeds are and you have a feed reader to use, you need to start gathering feeds to start reading. Newspapers, blogs, magazines, or journals — start hitting them all up in your browser to find exactly if they publish RSS feeds, and secondly what their feed details are so you can put them in your feed reader. Now, you might be asking — isn’t there a faster way to do this? Well, there is, actually. A format was developed for people to back up and / or share their feeds all at once. Its called “OPML”. If you had a list of feeds that you wanted to share with me, for example, all feed readers will be able to ‘export’ your list in a format called “OPML”. Then, you could send it to me, and I could “import” your OPML list into my feed readers, and la voila! I have all of your feeds. If you have friends who have similar interests you could share each other’s OPML’s. Sometimes you can find OPML’s that are publicly shared on the web, but these are few and far between (if anyone can tell me different let me know). Sometimes people will also publish their feeds through Google’s feed reader. Share.opml.org is another great resource — but not for finding OPML lists per se. Rather, its a way for you to share your OPML files, and in turn, actually discover what other feeds people are subscribing to, and in turn, who is subscribing to which feeds. Since there is a way to see which users have similar interests you can actually lists from individuals who have a feed list like your own.
Go beyond subscribing
Google Alerts / Technorati / Blogpulse / TailRank
So, you’ve got your feeds that you’re scanning every day for news. Isn’t there a better way to do this that might find information from sources you don’t even know about? Sure there is. There are a few services that will Actively monitor and scour the web for certain tags or key phrases, and return news results on them. The exercise here, however, is picking those key words; however, if you’ve got a sincere interest in a particular domain of news, you’ll likely be better off in generating a larger list of newsworthy items and paring them down over time. You might choose staple news items in your domain, but also people, places, and organizations you want to keep track of. You might even add your own blog to see if people are writing about you; or, your competitor’s blogs, to see what people are writing about them. Google Alerts is a great example, where you essentially tell Google Alerts to monitor different “key words”. Every day (or less frequently, depending on your preference), Google Alerts will send you an email with the results. As it monitors blogs AND mainstream news outlets, you’ll get some surprising results, sometimes from some interesting, unique, and local sources (I know i have). A couple other monitoring services which tend to monitor only blogs are also tremendously useful in finding blogging sources you might not already know of. Technorati allows you to punch in a keyword, and grab the RSS feed of the result — allowing you to monitor the results on an hourly basis (and also based on a blogger’s authority). Similar services which allow you to monitor the blogosphere for keywords of choice include Tailrank, BlogPulse, and Google’s own Blog Search. All of them will allow you to “subscribe” to a feed of the result, allowing you to monitor those results over time in your own feed reader.
Find the hidden, unique and cool with social bookmarks
Digg / Reddit / Netscape / Del.icio.us / Furl
If you’re seaching for news that is more off the beaten path, perhaps in a search for finding something “first”, why not mobilize an army of people who are looking for stuff in the first place? Of course, I’m talking about social bookmarking sites such as Digg. What’s social bookmarking? Its merely a service which allows individuals to share sites that they’ve bookmarked. Similar to services like Google Alerts, the key here is the keyword list you generate, as the right list will generate the right kind of news and sites that people are tagging and bookmarking. While many social bookmarking sites double as “news” sites, given how they popularize and list the top sites that have been bookmarked, just like Technorati, you can search for keywords, and follow the result in your feed reader. Unlike Technorati, however, it tracks more than blogs. And unlike Google Alerts, however, it tracks more than just the news. People will bookmark anything. Pictures, video, articles, corporate websites, frequently asked questions, and much more besides. Using a social bookmarking tool to help you discover “stuff” really broadens your search, but you’ll also be able to find a great many hidden gems, particularly if use your keywords intelligently. Many social bookmarking service are also highly dependent on the commmunities which power them, and as such, may vary greatly in the kinds of stuff that are bookmarked. For example, Digg has a great deal of young tech males, and as such, you will find an abundance of news on Windows, Apple, technology, science, and gaming. Reddit often has a political focus. While there are many social bookmarking sites outside of the very popular ones, they are probably not worth your time as they don’t have the critical mass of users to make it worth your while.
Keep on top of big issues with news aggregators
Google News / Techmeme / Megite / Newsvine / Topix
To get a birds eye view of news in a particular category (or many categories), such as the category that your blog occupies, you might wish to start frequenting news sites which use a mix of computer algorithms and human involvement to produce a list of the news. Google News is a great example of this. Many of them are updated every few minutes, and will balance and re-order the news based on how popular and worthy some news content is. The best part is that many of them will list their “sources”, whether they be mainstream news or bloggers. Using news aggregators is a great way of keeping on top of the big topics, and they are particularly useful if you’ve decided that its important for you to follow it for your blog (because your goal is to be a leader in your corner of the blogosphere with respect to that topic). Since sources are listed, you’ll also get an idea of who the major “players” are, when it comes to blogging news, and as a result, a list of who your potential competitors are — or, potential allies. News aggregators therefore, are useful not just to keep track of the major topics in a given area, but also who the major opinion makers are — and who you should be keeping track of. Once you know who they are, you’ll be able to follow their opinions, leave comments, leave trackbacks, and really get yourself involved in a part of the blogosphere that you might not have been aware of.
Well, this is only the way that I use the tools available to scan, read, digest, and ultimately find news to comment on and blog about. What do you find useful? If you have anything to add, or comment let me know and let’s get the discussion going!
* Tony Hung is the guest blogger for the week, and blogs at DeepJiveInterests.com
Written on January 9th, 2007 at 05:01 pm by Tony Hung
The Rules Behind Creating a Great Blog
So in your quest to dominate your corner of the blogosphere, you might be wonder about higher order questions. How does one blog? What are the “rules” behind creating a great blog? Is there anything universal that connects the very stuff behind the truly great blogs irrespective of their content? What does a great science blog have in common with a great celebrity blog? And can corporate blogs, be great?
Well, if yesterday’s post was about the habits of being a successful blogger (I seemed to dwell on time management, didn’t I?), today’s post is on what what truly great blogs have in common, and a few exercises that you can do to try and bring your own blog up to par (if it isn’t already at par!).
1. Transparency: Great blogs are blogs that leave no question of their motives, who their parters and affiliates are, and who their authorship is. Transparency means that no matter what the blog is about, the readers know what they’re getting into. Because transparency is really about trust. Great blogs have earned the trust of their readers through their posts, their opinions, and their engagement. But they are also not misrepresenting themselves, or the reason why they’re blogging in the first place. At the end of the day, trust is the only real currency in the blogosphere, and people who read blogs have the expectation that they’re getting at the truth — in whatever form the truth is to them. And because there is the presumption of truth, readers will often react in an intense fashion to being manipulated, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled.
ACTION: Do reveal as much as you can about yourself in the about page; Do reveal potential influences on your blog, particularly the monetary ones; Do communicate how advertising and content are separated; Do communicate when your content isn’t because its sponsored.
2. Authenticity: Great blogs are ones which are startlingly “real”. They give the details and the raw juicy information in a way that only the author is able to deliver. In that way, authenticity is really about delivering a uniquely fascinating experience — with the emphasis on “unique”. And being the unique experience means that its the sum of all of the elements on your blog which are part of the authentic blog; and beyond the literal parts, such as the logo, the color scheme and the wordpress theme (if you’re using wordpress), it also reaches deep down into the special content that bloggers are privvy to, the voice that they communicate in, and the personality that the blog exudes. Authentic blogs are blogs with a great deal of unmistakable personality that you just can’t find anywhere else.
QUESTION: What is the blogging landscape that your blog lives in? Where does your blog fit in? Do you know what your voice is? What can you bring to your blog that no one else can? What kind of personality does your writing project? How can you make your entire blog congruent to that personality and voice? Where can you find content that is uniquely reflective of your own experiences?
3. Integrity: Great blogs know what they stand for, and what values are meaningful to them. Integrity means standing up for those values when the winds of change might call for any blog to be challenged by them. Often times, it means saying “No”, when everyone else is saying “Yes, Yes, YES!”, and the courage to do so even if you risk the chance of being unpopular. Having integrity can be particularly challenging when you’re starting out, as when you have the feeling no one reads your blog, you tend to devalue it yourself. Devaluing your own work is a step away from making all kinds of concessions because you start thinking that no one is looking — or no one will know. But if you’re in it for the long haul, caving in can have disastrous consequences as the record will exist for perpituitiy, and the blogosphere will remember. Blogs are funny that way. They’re derided as mentally delayed cousin of other more mainstream media, but even amongst their own, are often held to a higher standard. Whether its paid advertising from a company that you’ve called out on, entering a partnership with a blogger you’ve publicly denounced, or suddenly changing your value judgement on a critical news piece, integrity has a funny way of calling attention to you in a most unappealing light. Great blogs are able to stand tall for what they value, and have justly earned their respect for doing so.
THOUGHTS: What does your blog stand for? What does it NOT stand for? What are you willing to compromise for the sake of more publicity? Traffic? Money? Would you ever cave in “real” life if someone made the same offer to you? Why would your blog be any different?
4. Passion: Great blogs are written with an incredible passion for the topics at hand, and much like great sex, it can’t be faked. Passion and intensity for your topic is something that’s palpable and energizing, and what I call the “X-factor” behind a great blog. And its the litmus test behind your blogging efforts. If you find you can’t work up the energy and enthusiasm to get excited about your own blog, maybe its time to start asking yourself some hard questions about whether you need to change your goals (or blog). Because if you’re not excited, your readers will know — and they sure as heck won’t be. Passion is the energy of emotion. Its what motivates righteous anger and incandescent outrage. But it also adds verve to thoughtful insight, compassion to solicitous pleas for help, and a quivering sense of excitement behind a long awaited piece of news. Passion is what elevates blogs that have otherwise stale nonsensical content into something immenently readable, and it shoots into the stratosphere blogs that have something fresh, innovative, or insightful to say.
REFLECTIONS: How excited were you about your last post? Were you bored? Did you sound bored? Do you think your readers noticed? How many of them wrote comments to tell you what they thought about your post?
5. Engagement: Great blogs live in an ecosystem of thoughts, opinions, ideas and personalities, and are Active participants in those relationships. They are engaged. Engagement means Actively participating on other blogs. It also means replying back to emails and comments. It means growing and cultivating your own readership. It means contacting and creating relationships with like minded (and sometimes not) bloggers. And sometimes (often times), using your blog as a platform to rebut, support, or even start opinions on a given issue. Blogs that can afford to exist in vacuums are blogs that are powered by individuals who have fame or fortune outside of the blogosphere, and are bringing that to their blog. However, for the rest of us who are not celebrities, our blogs need to grow organically, using the rich loam of networks and relationships to grow, and the collegial debate of ideas to encourage it to be strong and resilient.
CONSIDER … the scenario when your blog gets big and popular enough that you get bored by comments and questions. Could this happen to you? How could you prevent it from happening? And if it is already happening what is it doing to your readers, colleagues and fellow bloggers?
Transparency, authenticity, integrity, passion and engagement are what I find great blogs have in common. You might have your own opinions, so let’s hear’em … and get the “engagement” going! :)
* Tony Hung is the guest blogger for the week, and blogs at Deep Jive Interests
Written on January 8th, 2007 at 05:01 pm by Tony Hung
5 Prerequisites For Blogging Success
In the time that I have been blogging, I have noticed that there are a few things that “successful” blogs have in common. And I am defining “success” in every way — monetary terms, absolute traffic, but more importantly, in robust and continued growth. With 2007 here and many New Years Resolutions on the cusp, I thought we would start things off with what I believe are 5 things that are necessary to grow one’s blog.
1. Putting in the Time and Commitment.
One of the things that I didn’t fully appreciate is what a time commitment blogging is. I’m not including all the time it takes to literally set up a Wordpress installation, or taking the time to tweak your theme just right, or even answering the buckets of email you may (or may not) have. What I am talking about is the time it takes to actually write.
If you’re a gifted writer, all the best to you. Skip the rest of this tip. For the rest of us who were not born with a pencil in their mouths, it literally takes time to write something really meaty, interesting, and worthy of your blog. The stuff that makes people fascinated and can’t wait to want more. It takes time to research stuff you don’t know about, to find a block of uninterrupted time to actually sit down and write the blasted piece, and then actually get it out in a form that you feel comfortable with.
And for people who have a semblance of a life — husband/wife, kids, a job, other Responsibilities — it can actually come as a bit of a shock, because in the blogging world no one really talks about how long it takes to actually create something you’re proud of.
For the literal minded (who have not yet started to blog), what this means is that at a post a day, it might require one extra hour of your life to produce that single post alone. Are you going to take that hour away from television time? Time with your family? Time to sleep? For most folks, their days are packed to the gills doing Stuff; taking the time to commit to blogging will often mean taking time away form something else.
What can make it doubly hard is in ADDITION to writing regularly (which is what we all should be aiming for), is that when one starts out, one must make the commitment to blog consistently for a stretch of time. Its insufficient to blog regularly for a few days, then stop for a few weeks. Put yourself in your readers shoes; how fast would you drop a blog if they stopped writing for weeks at a time? Needless to say, if you’ve been convinced blogging is Work, then one of the first hurdles one needs to overcome is the notion that blogging is for the short term. In fact, to grow your blog, you need to write for the intermediate-to-long term to see some kind of return on your time.
Beginning bloggers ought to plan to blog for at least a few months consistently before throwing the towel in. And there are some fairly concrete reasons for doing so as well. Having a body of work allows Google and other Search Engines time to find you (and get out of the Sandbox); it allows you to build a body of work that “proves” to your readers your in it for the long term; a body of work will also “prove” to your readers you know what you’re talking about; the time will also allow you to market your blog (see below) to create other streams of traffic back to your site.
At the end of the day, the reality of blogging, is that to be successful, you’ve got to write regularly and consistently, and you’ve got to find the time to do it.
For some it might mean being more efficient with their time, both with blogging, and the time around blogging; and for others it might mean reprioritizing their evening’s actvities. But no matter what you do, if you can’t do what it takes to give yourself the time to produce something on a regular basis, your blog will start to flag — and it certainly won’t grow.
The blogosphere is growing at a prodigious rate; every blog has a great deal of competition for your reader’s feed reader, and ultimately their attention. They deserve your best — and it takes time to create your best. Finding the time to do it, and do it consistently, is one of the greatest challenges most bloggers will face.
2. Willing to Market The Blog
Even if you’re willing to put in the time and energy to blog, and blog consistently, it will do you no good if you’re not willing to market your blog. There’s no question that blogging in the oblivion of anonymity can be hard; but you are deluding yourself if you’re stuck in the “if I build it, they will come” mentality. There’s no question that Google or other Search Engines might find you, but to grow your blog at any kind of velocity will require you to not only write for your blog, but spend some (more) time promoting it. There is no shortage of articles on this (and I will be contributing to Darren’s own body of work in the next few days), but to create a successful blog, you’ve got to willing to put the effort into making sure people know about your blog.
And I find the most basic strategies are actually the best. Sure, there’s all kinds of other methods, such as blog carnivals, getting your blog Dugg and so on, but if blogging is about conversations, you’ve got to be willing to participate in those conversations yourself. Get involved in the comments section of other bloggers. Respond on your own blog. Link like mad to other bloggers and their posts. Putting in the time to do these basic kinds of “marketing” methods for your blog can pay huge dividends, as all blogging communities are in a state of flux, with older bloggers leaving, and newer bloggers joining in the conversation. And that next one just might be you!
3. Be Interesting
“Interesting” doesn’t mean being something your not. Nor does it mean trying to be “funny” or “clever”. Interesting, is relative, and is relative in particular, to your readers. If you’re writing about a given topic, hopefully you’ll know something about the people who are similarly interested; these are the people who you should be writing for. The content you write should be fresh, unique, passionate and relevant. And it can take many forms (variety, as they say is the spice of blogs). Interviews, lists, news, it goes on. If you’re writing about the same old stuff every day, in the same way every day, or, echoing what everyone else is saying, then stop. Because you need to give people a reason to read your blog once they’ve actually heard about your blog.
4. Realize Its Not About You (its About Them)
Blogging has a reputation amongst the mainstream media and many of the uneducated masses that it is STILL the providence of self indulgent teenagers who are create vanity puff pieces for themselves and their three friends. They’re confusing it with MySpace. Although blogging may have its roots in that kind of mentality, its come a long way. And certainly the kind of blogging you want to do is not about you at all. Its about Them. I’ve alluded to it plenty of times in this very article, but blogs that are successful, popular, and growing are not ones centered around their authors. They are centered around news and information that is interesting to their readership.
But what does this also mean? It means ask yourself and Them, how you can make yourself better to serve their interests. It means, changing your content to make it wildly interesting to Them. It means ask yourself if the next Big Change your going to do on your blog will cheese them off or encourage more feed signups.
It also definitely means being accessible, and getting into the conversations that you generate. Once your blog is up and going, turn your comments on, and try and reply to as many as you possibly can. Sometimes the ensuing discussion is even more important than the actual post that spawned it. And if you’re growing your blog, you may leave an indelible mark on other bloggers who are commenting on your site, creating more fans for yourself.
5. Focus
Blogs that are fascinating, regular reads, that are also are reader-centered do best when they are also focused like a laser. And I mean “focused” and consistent in every single way. Focused in their identity and writing style, focused in their content, and focused in their intent to serve their reader. Blogs that are wishy-washy, who don’t know who they are, who change their kind of writing “voice” repeatedly, who vascillate on their opinions, who introduce nonsensical and unrelated topics are blogs that will find it difficult to succeed.
It is possible to be so fascinating about everything that it requires no focus. But blogs like those that have succeeded tend to be blogs that have been around for a long time. The blogging environment that baby blogs are born into today is a chokingly competitive one. Whether its celebrity, business, law, or crocheting, to earn continual growth requires that every day, in every way, people know what to expect from your blog.
The other benefit of focus, is that irrespective of your actual authority, people will inherently trust, and believe you to be a thought leader in a given area, if you consistently blog on a particular area of interest for a long enough period of time in an intelligent enough way. Thought leadership is important, because when people will look for opinion makers, they’ll turn to you. When they’ll want partners they’ll turn to you. When the mainstream media is interested in a quote, they’ll turn to you. And when other bloggers need guest bloggers, they might turn to you too.
Heck, look at me. A doctor blogging about blogging on one of the biggest blogs in the blogosphere. Who would have thunk it? :)
* Tony Hung is the guest blogger for the week. He blogs at Deep Jive Interests
Written on January 8th, 2007 at 09:01 am by Darren Rowse
Introducing Tony Hung - Guest Blogger
As you read this I’ll be driving down the freeway toward one of my states lovely beaches for a short vacation.
In my absence I’m pleased to introduce to you my guest blogger for the week - Tony Hung. I first came across Tony on his blog Deep Jive Interests shortly after he started it in March last year but since that time have been pleased to see him added to the team at Blog Herald where he’s recently taken over the assistant editor’s position.
Tony is also a Doctor of Medicine, a Father (recent) and when I was lucky enough to have a beer with him in Toronto in November he came across as a really nice guy who was one of the more interesting people that I met there (and I met some great people).
When Deep Jive Interests became a part of b5media recently I also asked Tony if he’d be willing to do a week’s stint here at enternetusers while I was away because I find him to be a guy who knows what he’s talking about but who is also thought provoking (his opinion pieces are great).
So now having built him up to a point that we’re all expecting the Messiah - I’ll toss the enternetusers keys over to Tony and step away from the blog. I hope you’ll all welcome him and encourage him as he blogs this week. Be nice to him and enjoy the change - because I’ll be back in a week!
Written on January 8th, 2007 at 03:01 am by Darren Rowse
Does AdSense Suck for Bloggers?
Nik Cubrilovic picks up on Guy Kawasaki’s posting his revenue and concludes that
‘AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads - all this results in a very low CPM rate.’
While I don’t have time for a detailed post on this (I’m supposed to be packing as I write this) I would say that Nik’s conclusion is pretty spot on…. when it comes to Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
Guy writes to a pretty tech savvy audience (who tend to not click ads), he writes on a fairly broad range of topics (AdSense would have trouble honing in on what ads to serve him) and he doesn’t generally write about products or specific services (again making it hard to get him high paying and relevant ads).
As a result I’m not surprised that Guy was earning relatively small amounts from his blog from AdSense (when he was using it).
However - just because Guy’s blog doesn’t make much money from AdSense doesn’t mean that it sucks for all blogs. In fact I’ve surveyed my readers three times on their AdSense earnings (here, here and here) and while the poll showed the majority of bloggers don’t make much from AdSense it also showed that some definitely do.
Llast time I did the survey 24% of respondents said they earn over $500 a month (some quite considerably more) and a further 21% earned over $100 for the month). I would suspect that the vast majority of those had less traffic than Guy.
How can this be so?
From my own personal experience of blogging and from watching others I would guess that the majority of those earning more than Guy did would be doing so because of a number of factors:
- Topic - more focussed and possibly on a more commercially viable topic (ie product related). This leads to higher paying ads and higher relevancy of ads (and higher click through rates).
- Readership - while Guy’s readership is probably quite aware of what an ad is and isn’t and will Actively avoid them - in my experience the average web user (the non blogging/web 2.0/geek crowd) is not as adverse to clicking ads.
- Ad Positioning/Design - I can’t comment on how Guy had his ads positioned and designed - but it can be the difference between great and terrible AdSense performance.
Of course I’m not suggesting Guy change his topic, readership or blog design. However this might help explain why he didn’t earn as much as other bloggers are from AdSense.
How else could Guy Monetize his Blog?
Let me explore a few options:
Indirect Income Streams - Ultimately the way Guy should (and probably is) monetizing his blog is indirectly by building his own profile. In a sense he’s advertising himself and as a result is building a loyal audience for future books, speaking engagements and consulting work. More on indirect methods of earning money from a blog here.
Private Sponsorship - I think a better model for Guy to earn money from his blogs would be private sponsorship or a privately arranged CPM campaign. He still could have problems with this however because of his broad topic - but if he could find someone who had a product or service that was relevant or that matched his readership demographic he could be onto a good thing with his readership levels.
Affiliate Programs? - Another possible revenue stream that would probably do well for Guy would be affiliate marketing. The products that he promoted would need to be of a high quality, products that he’d personally used and genuinely recommended and he’d have to be careful about pushing them too hard - however if he found the right products I suspect his loyal readership would react well it (especially with his ability to sell) - and if he picked the right product (of a high value) he could earn some nice coin form it too.
Other Ad Programs - Text-Link-Ads would do well on Guy’s blog as it’s got a good SE ranking. I suspect they’d earn more than what AdSense did each month. Similarly BidVertiser, Performancing Partners and either Feedburner’s Ad network or TLA’s Feedvertising would be good ways to monetize his RSS feeds (nb: some affiliate links in this paragraph).
Again - it’s the indirect money making methods that I suspect Guy is focussing upon most and will ultimately do best with (unless he turns his blog into a product blog).
Update: just checked and Guy does use Feedburner’s Ad Network in his feed already.
Written on January 8th, 2007 at 01:01 am by Darren Rowse
The Kenny Rogers Guide to Getting People to Read Your Whole Posts
I never thought I’d quote Kenny Rogers on this blog but here’s something he said to a contestant on American Idol this series:
“the first word that comes out of your mouth helps people to decide whether to listen to the next word, which in turn helps them work out whether to listen to the next word, which helps them work out whether to listen to the next one… and so on and so forth…” (paraphrased)
When I heard it I was immediately reminded of a message that Joseph Sugarman comes back to again and again in his book Advertising Secrets of the Written Word when he’s talking about the headlines or titles of advertising copy.
Throughout the book he drums this into his readers (again a paraphrase):
“What is the purpose of a heading or title?
To get potential readers reading the next line of your ad.What is the purpose of the first line of your ad?
To get those who’ve read it to read the second one.What’s the purpose of the second line?
You guessed it - to get readers to read the third….”
Kenny and Joseph’s advice is much the same. The first things you sing, say or write in any form of communication are of vital importance when it comes to engaging people well.
The way you open a song, advertisement, book, speech or blog post often determines whether people will track with it.
If you want people to still be with you at the end of your post work hard at attention grabbing, intriguing, captivating and desire creating titles and openings.
Written on January 7th, 2007 at 10:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking 7 January 2007
- Tubetorial does it again with another helpful video tutorial - Back Up Your Blog or Risk Losing It All
- Yaro asks is Professional Blogging a Sustainable Business Model? - I think so, but not for everyone.
- The Diva Marketing Blog has a fun (and useful) posts - 22 Blogging Tips. There’s sure to be enough on it to last you for a while.
- SEO Scoop asks (and answers) How can you become an authority Site in your Niche?
Written on January 7th, 2007 at 01:01 am by Darren Rowse
How to Find Your Reader’s Questions and Improve Your Blog
103 bees has added a very useful tool to their search terms analysis system.
Previously they enabled users to track what keywords people were using to arrive at your blog but now they’ve added questions analysis.
They’ve worked out a way to tell if a search term is a question or not. As they write on their blog ‘questions carry a lot more valuable information on what the target audience is looking for than just a few keywords do.’
So at enternetusers when I check to see what the latest questions are I get this:
How useful is that? In effect just by analyzing these 11 questions that brought people to enternetusers in the last 2 hours I could quite easily have found 11 new topics to write about in upcoming posts.
You’ll notice the ‘page’ link next to each result. This is a link to the page that the question led the reader to on your blog. This is useful to know as it will help you to analyze what you did well on that page in terms of SEO and might even give you some hints of how you might want to optimize that page to increase your SE ranking for such a question.
The ‘ToDo!’ link allows you to make a note of this question in a to do list so that you can follow up on it later.
The only thing I’d love to see added to this feature is some sort of a compilation of the list to see what questions are asked more than other questions. As you can see by the times on the above list - here at enternetusers there are ALOT of questions that readers seem to be asking to find the blog - too many in fact to fully digest. To see a list of the top questions would be extremely helpful.
I guess until then I’ll need to put some time aside each week to scan through the latest ones and hope that they are representative.
Written on January 6th, 2007 at 04:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Australian Financial Review on Microsoft Laptop Saga
The Australian Financial Review has a short piece on me and the computer that Microsoft sent me this week. The article also features a comment from Trevor Cook.
AFR’s website is a little bizarre so I’m not sure how long the article will be up and I can’t copy and paste an excerpt from the article so if you can’t access it I’ll include a screen capture of the first part below (click it to enlarge).
One quick correction on the article. While initially there were ‘no strings attached’ on what I did with the machine Microsoft subsequently asked me to either return it to them or give it away (I was already intending on giving it to a charity). They made this request once the laptop was on its way to me.
Just an update on my feelings on the whole Microsoft laptop story:
I don’t have a problem with what Microsoft have done in giving products away for review - but I do hope they’ve learnt a thing or two about how they do it in future. Like I’ve said previously - I think a better approach would have been for them to initially insist upon disclosure of laptop receipt in reviews (they’ve since asked bloggers to do this) and/or to make the machines loan machines.
I do wonder (and told the reporter of this article) why it was necessary to give laptops away with Vista to reviewers. It does make me wonder about how Vista runs on older and slower machines.
My own review will be a couple of weeks away. I’ve only just received it this Wednesday and next week we’re away for the week (remember Tony Hung will be guest blogging here from Monday) and I won’t be taking the laptop (or any computer) with me.
I also will still give the laptop to a charity at the end of my time reviewing it. I’ve chosen the charity (thanks to the many emails from bloggers saying that they’d like it) but still need to confirm with that charity that they need/want it.
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