Written on February 19th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:02 am by Darren Rowse

Google Page Rank Update Underway

Search Engine Optimization 58 comments

Tim just alerted me to the fact that it seems Google are doing one of it’s periodic Page Rank Updates. These updates take a little while to show up on all data-centers around the world so it could take a day or two to shakedown - but you can read more about it in Digital Point’s PR Update has begun discussion and at WMW’s PR update Started.

Unsure what Page Rank is? You might find my Page Rank Explained post of some help.

If you want to see how the different data-centers are raking your page you might like to use the Future Page Rank Tool that I have on a previous post.

On a personal note - I put a lot of weight on PR except that on those site’s where I sell text links it does help in securing more money per link. My own blogs have been pretty steady in this update (so far). I was hoping for a PR 7 here at enternetusers with the massive amount of incoming links to it over the past 6 months but we’re still on a 6 (nothing to complain about really). update: actually a couple of data centres are showing enternetusers at a PR of 7 after all. Time will tell I guess.

How is the update impacting your blogs?

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Written on February 19th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

Using Titles Effectively on Blogs

Writing Content 20 comments

My Mum drilled into me at a young age that first impressions are important.

Outside of the design of your blog (that’s a whole other post) perhaps the best way of creating that impression is though your post’s title.

Titles are so important on many fronts - including:

• Grabbing Attention in Search Engines - Head over to Google and type in virtually any word you can think of and you’ll often find millions of results. The interesting thing is that for most search results in Google (and other SE’s) there is very little for readers to go by in deciding which result to click on. There is a title, a short excerpt and a URL. The most highlighted of these is the title and I believe it is key in getting SE referral clicks.

• Getting RSS Readers Attention - in a very similar way titles have the ability to grab the attention of those following your blog via RSS in news aggregators. Even if your feeds are full post feeds rather than excerpts it’s likely that most news aggregator readers scan the titles of posts for things that interest them rather than reading full text. The same principle is true in other indexes and directories like Technorati, del.icio.us, digg etc

• Loyal Readers - Good titles also impact the way your loyal readers interact with your blog. As I’ve already mentioned - web users scan pages and one of the best ways to make them pause as they roll their eyes down your site is to capture their attention with a good title that intrigues them enough to slow down their frantic web surfing and actually read some of the content that you’ve pour time and energy into.

• Search Engine Optimization - While there are many factors that contribute to how search engines ranks a page of your blog, one of the most powerful onsite factors are the words that you use in the title of that page. This means making sure that the titles of your posts end up being in the <title tags> of your page (something I’ve blogged about previously here). Also important for SEO with respect to titles, in the opinion of many, is that your post titles form the basis of your URL structure and that your titles are live links.

Using Titles Successfully

There are many strategies that successful bloggers use to draw attention to their posts with titles. There is no real right or wrong and as with many aspects of blogging what is a ‘good title’ is a little subjective. Having said this - you might want to consider these six factors in writing titles for your blog posts:

1. Keep it Simple - Most research I’ve seen into titles seems to argue that the most effective titles are short, simple and easy to understand. While breaking these rules can help grab attention (see below) they can also confuse, frustrate and put a glazed look in the eyes of potential readers. Shorter titles are also good for Search Engines - keep it under 40 or so characters and you’ll ensure the whole title appears in search results.
2. Grab Attention - Good titles set your posts apart from the clutter around them and then draw readers into your post. Grabbing attention might happen using tactics of ’shock’, ‘big claims’, ‘controversy’ or even ‘confusion’. While these tactics do work at getting people in - it should also be said that they can do more damage than good if the rest of your post doesn’t live up to the promises your title makes. By all means try to grab attention - just just ‘trick’ your readers into thinking you’ll provide them with something you can’t give them.
3. Meet a Need - An effective title draws people into reading more because they feel you’ve got something to say that they NEED to hear. Indexes like del.icio.us illustrate just how effective this is. Quite often the articles that get to the top of the list are ‘how to…’ or ‘tutorial’ type articles that show readers that they will learn how to solve a problem or need that they might have.
4. Describe - Some readers will be drawn into a post by a cryptic title that doesn’t tell them much about what they’ll be reading - but the majority of readers need to know something about what they’ll find if they read further. Titles should describe (in a word or few) what readers will get in the main post.
5. Use Key Words - As I mentioned above - titles are a powerful part of SEO. If you want to maximize their power you need to consider using the keywords that you want your post to be found with in your title in some way. This of course is challenging when you are attempting to ‘keep it simple’ and to also ‘grab attention and intrigue’ - but it can be done. Words at the start of titles are thought to be more powerful than words at the end when it comes to SEO.
6. One last tip on titles - Take your time with your titles. Many bloggers pour a lot of effort into writing engaging and interesting posts - but then just slap any old title onto it without realizing that in doing so they might be ensuring that their post is never read.

Treat your title as an mini advertisement for your work. Take at least a few minutes before hitting publish to not only make sure your post is in order - but that your title is going to do everything it can to maximize the chances that people will engage with what you have to say.

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Written on February 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 10:02 pm by Darren Rowse

Speed Linking

Pro Blogging News 1 comment

• Scott Jangro writes MonoBlogs and DiaBlogs
• Trevor Butterworth writes another blogging is dead type post as does Daniel Gross (via Henry)
• Ted Demopoulos writes a post on how blogging can help local businesses (via Kevin)
• Matt from WordPress writes that someone out there is impersonating him and trying to get sensitive information from unsuspecting people. Be careful.

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Written on February 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:02 am by Darren Rowse

Promote your Blog through Rojo’s FeedShare

Blogging Tools and Services, RSS 14 comments

If you’re looking to promote your blog through advertising but don’t have a budget for it you might want to look at a new service that Rojo (a feed reader) is rolling out called FeedShare. The system is basically an automated ad swapping service where you place an AdSense like piece of code on your blog and advertise others blogs for them (and their RSS feeds) and in return get impressions on other people’s blogs. They explain it like this:

‘You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see example above) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers.

You then create a listing for your OWN blog and for every impression you donate to the network on your blog, you will receive a listing on someone else’s blog or in Rojo.com. The goal is to help build the feed subscriber base to your blog, increasing awareness and traffic to your site.’

Keep in mind a few things before rushing in:

1. Each ad unit you show has two ads on it. One is part of the ad exchange program, the other is a paid ad - the proceeds of which go to Rojo and are not shared with you. They do say in their FAQ that if you want to be paid instead of getting your blog promoted that you should let them know.

2. I can’t see anywhere in their information explicitly whether these are contextual ads. From what I can see in the set up both advertisers and publishers need to add keywords for ads to be triggered by. This COULD be seen as contextual advertising and if it is you will not be able to run these units on the same page as AdSense ads. It might be well worth clarifying this with the AdSense team before getting into this.

3. When people click on the title in the ad they are not taken to your site - but to your RSS feed - in the Rojo feed reader. This means people are two clicks from your blog - something that I think works against this system. The reason Rojo is says they are doing it is to build RSS subscribers to your blog - but I’m unsure that anyone would subscribe to my blog without actually coming to it first rather than just reading my last few RSS entries. Also from what I can see it’s not easy for people to subscribe to the feed via other news aggregators from within Rojo (I find that 40% of my blog’s readers use Bloglines and very few use Rojo - unless they know the Rojo system the chances of them subscribing to my feed after being taken to Rojo are slim). I can see why Rojo would do it (they are wanting more people to use Rojo), but it’s one of the reasons I’m probably not going to use the system.

update: after a little more investigation I can see what happens if someone clicks an ad who is not a Rojo user - they are taken to a page where they are given the option of subscribing to your blog via Rojo or other feed readers - including Bloglines (see screen cap below). This partially answers some of my concerns - but I still feel being taken to the blog concerned would be a more preferable option as I wonder how many people will subscribe to a blog based upon the blog’s name and a 60 character description of it.

Here’s a partial screen cap of the page that someone who is not a logged in Rojo user goes to.

Thanks to Thomas for the tip (he was the first of a quite a few)

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Written on February 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:02 am by Darren Rowse

ClickBank adds Search to Marketplace

Affiliate Programs 6 comments

There was some good news for Clickbank Affiliates on their ClickBank Web Log a couple of days ago. They’ve added search capabilities to their Marketplace area (where affiliates go to find products to promote). This has been a much needed feature and something many will be very happy to see.

If you’re unfamiliar with them you might be interested in reading my review of the ClickBank program.

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Written on February 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 08:02 am by Darren Rowse

Granular (One Topic) Posts

Writing Content 6 comments

One topic per post - We’ve already spoken in this series about choosing a niche topic for your blog, but another strategy of many successful blogs is that in addition to having an over arching niche topic they tend to have each post focus upon a more tightly targetted topic.

On some levels this is a fairly natural and logical thing that most bloggers naturally do - but occasionally I come across a blog post that seems to want to answer every question known to humankind in a single post. The result can be a long, unfocused, rambling post that doesn’t really go anywhere.

Instead of feeling you need to stuff everything into one post - a strategy that often works better is to be more ‘granular’ in the way you post (ie break it down into grains).

In effect you end up with a blog that can be visually show like this (click to enlarge):

Niche Topic - Your overall Blog has a Niche topic or focus - something we’ve talked about extensively here.

Categories - Within the niche you have categories which break the overall topic up into smaller parts (ie here at enternetusers I have a category for blog design, writing content and blog tools). These categories are important for many reasons including:

• Readability - Some of your readers will not be interested in the whole niche that you are writing about but instead will want to only look at part of it (one or two of your categories). Categories pages become, in effect, like a mini blog within your whole blog which can help readers find and follow the elements of the topic that they are interested in.
• SEO - Search Engines like information that is clustered together and linked to other information like it. This is one of the reasons why niche blogs work well in Search Engines. Categories help this further - with category pages often ranking well in SE’s. They also help the SE bots that come to scan your site to get around easily (important for getting your whole site indexed).

Posts - Your Categories will then be broken down even further into posts. Each post will not cover the whole category (unless your categories are very small) but will cover an element of it. Tightly focussing your posts on different elements of your category will help you to round out your whole niche topic.

This structure is quite similar to that of a book which has an overall topic, chapters and then sections.

NB: Of course the above diagram doesn’t describe every blog. For instance some blogs have another subcategory layer between categories and posts (especially blogs with a wide or complex niche) and many blogs assign posts to multiple categories). Also keep in mind that some blogging platforms (eg blogger.com) don’t come with categories as a standard feature.

Benefits of Granular Posts:

• Ease of Use - I’ve already talked in this series a number of times about how people don’t stay long on websites and have short attention spans. Granular posts help with this. They are shorter and punchy and go directly to the point.
• SEO - Pages with single topics help search engines to work out what your post is about. This helps them to rank you accurately for the topic you’re writing about.
• Contextual Ad Relevancy - Similarly having only one topic helps contextual ad systems like AdSense determine what you’re writing about and serve relevant ads for that topic.
• Ease of Writing - This is more of a personal reflection than anything - but for me, I find it easier to concentrate on one topic at a time - I’m much more productive in this way.

Granular does not equal Short - One of the criticism I’ve seen of the idea of Granular Posting is that some people like longer posts. I would argue that granular posts need not be short at all. Some of my most popular posts are tightly focussed upon a single topic, but are quite long. For example my recent post on Choosing a Blog Platform is one of the longest I’ve written for a while - but is all focussed upon the one topic. I could have chosen to break it down even further - but felt it worked better as one unit.

Different Strokes for Different Folks - I can hear the comments to this post already and know that there will be some bloggers write about how smaller/granular posts are just not their style. My reaction to this is - ‘different strokes for different folks’. Each blog needs to find it’s own style and I’m sure there are some bloggers who break this rule and still have great blogs - however I think in most cases a more granular approach works well. If you do choose to go the ‘anti-granular’ route I would recommend that you don’t do it for every post. From time to time a large sweeping post can be quite effective, but doing it every day might end up frustrating your readership.

Utilizing Series of Posts - One option for those bloggers who find it difficult to write in this granular style is to break their longer, general posts down into a series of posts. In fact this is what this current series of posts on the larger topic of ‘Blogging for Beginners’ is. I started writing a post on the topic and found that it’d be much to long and diverse to be read all at once.

Do it Both Ways - Another option for those of you who like the mega post that covers a lot of ground is to go granular AND mega. For instance I wrote a series of posts a number of months ago on the topic of Search Engine Optimization for Blogs which was originally presented as a series of short, tightly focused posts each focussing upon a different element of SEO. At the end of the series I compiled each of the posts into this one mega post so that readers who preferred to see the full topic at once could do so.

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Written on February 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 04:02 am by Darren Rowse

Post Length - How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

Writing Content 25 comments

We might as well continue exploring the topic of writing good content with a topic that has been debated by bloggers rather hotly over the years, the length of the optimum post. There are a number of ways of looking at it:

• Reader Attention Span - It is pretty well documented that the typical web reader has a short attention span when it comes to reading content online. My own little investigation into length of stay on blogs found that average blog readers stay 96 seconds per blog (I’ve seen other more scientific tests that show similar results). What ever the number - it’s generally not long. As a result many web-masters purposely keep their content length down to a level that is readable in short grabs.
• SEO - There is a fairly strong opinion among those considered experts in Search Engine Optimization that both extremely short and extremely long web pages are not ranked as highly as pages that are of a reasonable length. Of course no one really knows how many words are ideal - but the general opinion seems to be that a page of at least 250 words are probably a reasonable length. Similarly, many advise keeping pages under 1000 words.
• Quantity of Posts - One theory that goes around is that shorter posts allow you to write more posts and that more posts are better for generating readership with RSS and in Search Engines. While I don’t know their strategy personally, some believe this is what sites like Engadget and Gizmodo do with their high number of short posts which make up the majority of their content.
• Topic/Genre - The type of post that you’re writing will often determine it’s length. For example when writing a review of a product you’ll generally write a longer post than when you write a news related post where you link to something someone else has written.
• Comprehensive Coverage of the Topic - Ultimately this has to be the main criteria that bloggers go with. I can’t remember who advised this but at some point in the last year I read someone saying that you should write enough to comprehensively cover your topic and then stop. Long posts for the sake of them are not a wise move - but so are short ones that don’t cover the topic well.

In the end you need to find your own way on this. Here at enternetusers I tend to mix it up a fair bit. I try to write at least one longer post per day that gives readers a bit of meat to chew on (whether it be a tips post, a review post, a rant etc) but I also throw in ‘newsy’ posts throughout the day.

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Written on February 18th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

Writing Good Content

Writing Content 33 comments

I’d now like to swing the blogging for beginners series onto the topic of writing content with a series of posts exploring different elements of quality content. By the way - Peter mentioned in the last post in this series that his part 2 piece on blog design would be posted today - unfortunately he’s been unwell and the post will be delayed.

List after list have been compiled by bloggers on the things that make blogs successful - but on every one that I’ve ever seen has been a statement about content being the ultimate key. ‘Content is King’ is a catch cry that has echoed through the blogosphere for years and while at times I think it’s been used to the point of ignoring other aspects of what makes a successful blog - it really is what a good blog boils down to.

What is Good Content?

Ultimately defining what is ‘good content’ is a subjective exercise (perhaps in a similar way to defining what is a ‘good book’ or a ‘good movie’) and so a post like this one is likely to cause a little debate as each person will define it differently depending upon their personality, their needs, the topic that they are talking about and perhaps even their ethics. Not only will bloggers themselves each have a different view on what is ‘good’ content - but readers tend to also. I know that every time I ask for feedback on enternetusers and what I write more about I get a real spectrum of responses.

Future posts in this series is an attempt to unpack some of the elements of content that might go towards making it good - or not. At most points along the way there will be debate but hopefully out of it readers will be able to mix and match the elements and identify what works for them.

So without any more introductory remarks, lets get into it with the first element of writing quality content:

Usefulness and Uniqueness - As this post is a part of a series of posts that get back to the basics of blogging and so I will start unpacking the topic of ‘writing good content’ with perhaps the most basic and obvious point of all:

‘for a blog to be successful your content needs to be useful and unique to your readers’

As I say - it’s not rocket science but it’s a factor that I think bloggers need to continually be asking themselves about as they review their blogging. Is your blog useful?

Back in the days when I studied marketing I remember sitting in lecture after lecture getting more and more frustrated as I heard my lecturers drum into us the same thing time after time. Although they said it in different ways, the lessons that they communicated was largely the same in every instance and boiled down to this:

‘Start with the customer - find out what they want and give it to them.’

This is a good lesson for bloggers also.

While I would also recommend that you start with yourself as a blogger and blog out of your own passions, experiences and knowledge - it is essential that you are aware of your reader and that you create content that will add something to their lives. Give them something useful.

What is ‘useful’ content?

Of course ‘useful content’ to me is different from what it is to you, but could be any of the following:

- Entertainment - increasingly blogs are being used as entertainment. People are going to them for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
- Education - some blog readers are primarily interested in learning something about a given topic.
- Information - many successful blogs are built on the thirst that some have to be informed on an issue, product or topic
- Debate - some blog readers want a place that they can have a good old fashioned dialogue, debate or even a fight over an issue
- News - many blog readers just want to be kept up to date in a field
- Community - I’m aware of some very successful blogs that tap into the need that people have to connect and belong. Quite often the topic is secondary to these connections.

This list could of course be a lot longer (feel free to add to it in comments). Each blog has the potential to be ‘useful’ in a different way and it would probably be unwise to start a blog that tried to be all of these things at once (although many blogs do do a variety of these things at once).

Research your Readership

Perhaps the best advice that I could give on developing useful content is to research your readership (or potential readership). If you already have a blog do this by surveying your readers (either formally or informally) or by asking for feedback. I regularly seek out the opinion of my blog readers to find out what their needs and desires are in the topic I’m talking about. If you don’t have a blog already then you’ll need to work a little harder to research your potential readers. I tend to survey friends, look a lot at other people’s blogs on a topic (especially their comments section to see what types of questions people are asking) and particularly look hard in forums and discussion groups on topics where there is usually a lot of question asking going on. As you do this you’ll begin to put your finger on what people are wanting and what you might be able to provide to meet these needs.

Unique Content

Another factor to consider when thinking about ‘good content’ is whether it is ‘unique’.

With a blog being created every second and with blogs on virtually every topic you can think of, the challenge for bloggers is to build a blog that stands out from the crowd. I see blogs every day that provide ‘useful’ content that have no readers simply because people are finding that information in other places.

Distinguish yourself

My advice to new bloggers trying to break into a topic where others are already blogging is to take a surf through the other blogs and websites in your niche and do some analysis upon what sort of content that they are producing. In most niches you’ll find that sites are all presenting very similar information in pretty much the same voice, tone and style. As a new blogger on the topic you have a choice - you can either replicate what they are doing and try to do it better (difficult as they will already have loyal readers and unless you’re brilliant at it you’re unlikely to convert these readers over to you) OR you can distinguish yourself in someway from what others are doing.

This might mean tackling a slightly different topic (perhaps a sub-niche) but could also mean writing in a distinct voice (take a look at Manolo’s blog for an example of a blogger who has grown a cult audience by writing about an odd combination of topics as an anonymous blogger writing in the third person). It might also mean writing in a different genre of posts (ie if everyone else is writing ‘newsy’ posts you might like to write more ‘opinion’ type posts).

Bring together the elements of both Useful and Unique content and you will be one step closer to a successful blog.

Original Content - You will notice that I have chosen the world ‘unique’ instead of ‘original’ in this post. There is mixed opinion in blogging circles on whether original content is always best. Regular readers of this blog know that not all my posts here are completely ‘original’. There are some posts where I use short excerpts (quotes) from other blogs as part of my blog entries. For example in a earlier post in this series on ‘what is a blog‘ I used a number of quotes from other bloggers as part of the post. As a result that post might not be classified as ‘original’ as such - but it is somewhat ‘unique’ (and hopefully useful) as I put them together in a way that they had not been used before (side by side) and then added my own comments to them.

My main advice on ‘orginal’ content is that writing is generally best as it won’t be found anywhere else in that form - however clever and fair use of other people’s content (always giving credit for it and using it within a ‘fair use’ way - ie only using short quotes’) CAN be worth doing IF you use it in a way that is useful to your readers.

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Written on February 17th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 09:02 pm by Darren Rowse

Gawker Media Launch Text Message Subscriptions

Pro Blogging News 5 comments

Just yesterday I was speaking with a friend who is in telecommunications about how I thought that one of the areas bloggers would explore would be syndicating their content to cell phones and today I see that Gawker Media have just announced that very service for two of their blogs, Gawker and Defamer. They write:

‘Gawker and Defamer proudly present the next step in content delivery evolution: Gawker and Defamer daily text alerts. Subscribe today for a daily injection of pure, unfiltered gossip, sent directly to your mobile phones and free of the traditional time-wasting trappings like pictures and full sentences. When your marriage proposal is interrupted by a poorly timed anecdote about Kiefer Sutherland acting drunk, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them!

The cost of the subscription is $4.99 per month and for that price subscribers get 15-20 alerts per month.

This was always going to happen and I suspect will be something that more blog networks will position themselves for in the year ahead.

found via Gawker

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Written on February 17th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 02:02 pm by Darren Rowse

E-Blogging

Pro Blogging News 8 comments

A post by Devin Reams came up in my referrals stats today that I thought was has an interesting way to thinking about the ways that people blog. He talks of the 5 E’s (Ease) of Blogging as being:

• Educate
• Entertain
• Emote
• Engage
• Earn

I’ll let you read about them in his post - but what ‘E’ do you primarily concentrate upon in your blog? Can you think of any more? (I wonder whether ‘Evangelize’ might be a good one for business bloggers.

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