Written on July 28th, 2005 at 06:07 am by David Shawver
Chinese Blog to List on NASDAQ
China Economic Net has an article on a Chinese Blogge, Fang Xingdong, who is looking at listing his blogging business on the NASDAQ.
‘One of China’s most well-known bloggers hopes to ride the current boom in personal online journals and transform his blog site into a U.S.-listed Internet giant.
“We are building a blog-based portal and we will be the first blogger ever to list on the NASDAQ,” Bokee.com chairman and chief executive officer Fang Xingdong said.
Fang, who previously made a living as an online commentator, or blogger, said the company would receive US$10 million in financing next month from three American venture capitalists, Hong Kong-based venture capitalist Softbank Investment International and a mainland investor. He declined to name the individual investors as the transaction has yet to be finalized.’
The mind boggles at the massive potential readership of Chinese blogs and the numbers of bloggers that a country of that size could generate. The opportunities are definitely there and dwarf most of the blog projects that many of us in the West hold up as ‘big’. It’s a story to watch!
Written on July 28th, 2005 at 03:07 am by David Shawver
How To Be A Blogging Idol Instead Of An Idle Blogger
Todd Mintz writes a very worthwhile article at How To Be A Blogging Idol Instead Of An Idle Blogger which I think is a must read for bloggers wanting to start out in ProBlogging.
Whilst I don’t completely agree with everything Todd writes (I’ve never entered into a link exchange program or never bought a text ad for that matter) the article is brimming with useful information that Todd learnt in experimenting with blogs on the topic of American Idol contestants last season of the show. In particular he has had some success with the Bo Bice Blog.
Among Todd’s more useful tips are:
‘Have a narrow focus: The quickest way to drive traffic to your blog is through excellent search engine rankings. If you blog about lots of unrelated topics, you won’t rank well for any of your key terms….
Press Releases: Online press releases are an excellent way to generate notice for your blog. I created a press release announcing the launch of the blog, and once I decided to “Actively” blog Bo, I wrote a release each week recapping the show and featuring highlights from the blog….
Involve Fans: When my blog reached a consistent 500 visitors a day, I decided to Actively solicit posts from Bo’s fans. Sure, most blogs give readers the ability to post comments…but I thought that if I ran the comments as actual posts, I could create a “buzz” about the blog and generate large numbers of repeat visits….’
I subscribe to each of these tips and many of the other things Todd writes and think they apply not only to fan sites like the one he runs (keep in mind fan sites are hard to monetize…. I’ve been trying for a while now) but to most blog topics.
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 11:07 pm by David Shawver
Yahoo! Publisher Network Coming Soon?
There’s an interesting post over at SEO RoundTable that speculates that the Yahoo! Publisher Network could be Coming Soon which will definitely bring something of a shake up to Google’s stranglehold on the contextual advertising market through Adsense. They write:
‘Nick at ThreadWatch then wrote a thread, Yahoo Publisher Network to Debut in August? In that thread, he uses some logic to determine that it is very possible that YPN will be here in August. The logic comes from the announcement by JenSense about the recent listed panel on the SES San Jose 2005 Contextual track Earning From Search & Contextual Ads. On that panel is an individual by the name of Will Johnson from Yahoo! Search Marketing.’
So the question is - who will be tempted to move over from Adsense to Yahoo’s publishing system? Will you be tempted to give it a go or will you stick with Adsense? What would convince you to switch?
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 08:07 pm by David Shawver
Can you have too many inbound links to your blog?
A well known Search Engine Optimization strategy that most serious bloggers keep in mind is that the more links that you have pointing to your blog from other sites the higher your page will be ranked in search engines like google. This is a generally accepted strategy for building the profile of your blog and is in fact one of the strengths of blogging (as at the heart of our medium is the linking that bloggers do to one another).
But can you have too many inbound links pointing at your blog?
The growing opinion of SEO experts is that you can. In fact a recent patent by Google indicates that sites that have big increases in inbound links to them in short periods (especially young sites) can actually be treated as spam sites by Google’s algorithm.
You see a common strategy of spammers is to add masses of links pointing from many sites to their money making sites in order to fool Google into thinking they are popular and therefore worthy of a high page ranking.
It is increasingly becoming accepted that when launching a new site that the best way for it to grow in it’s search engine ranking is to accumulate inbound links in a slow by steady way - gathering links in what is considered to be ‘natural’ patterns.
So next time you launch a blog don’t link to it from every page on all your other blogs at once or buy masses of text links or even enter into lots of link exchange programs - rather let your blog grow in it’s own time. You might want to nudge it along slowly from time to time - but the best way to do this is simply to write great content that lots of other sites will naturally link up to.
There are many articles on this topic around the web (including others on enternetusers - but you might want to read Do too many links hurt your web site? as one of the latest articles to do the rounds on the topic.
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 05:07 pm by David Shawver
Google introduces RSS to Personalized Pages - An Opportunity for Bloggers?
Many bloggers have been commenting on Google’s addition of RSS feeds to their personalized home page (see Steve Rubel and John Battelle for starters) but I’m yet to see anyone suggest that adding your own RSS feeds to your personalized Google page could be good for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.
Longer term readers will remember the tip I posted a few months ago regarding how adding your RSS feeds to a MyYahoo! account seemed to get you indexed quicker and better in Yahoo!
As soon as I heard about Google’s move to add RSS to it’s personalized home pages my mind went back to this post and wondered if the same thing might be true for improving one’s rankings in Google. Needless to say that yesterday I added every RSS feed I have to my own Google page and am waiting and watching to see if it has any impact on my ranking in Google. Nothing to report yet (and I’m not sure how I’ll know if it does have an impact - unless it’s dramatic) - however it can’t hurt can it?
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 02:07 pm by David Shawver
Manolo’s Shoe Blog - Turning Columnist
Here’s a blogger success story - anonymous shoe and gossip blogger Manolo has just started up as the Washington Post Express’s newest columnist.
Manolo has always intrigued me as a blogger. For one they write in the third person - secondly they combine two rather odd topics (shoes/fashion and gossip) and thirdly when they started they did so on a very basic blog - from memory it was a blogger blog with one of the standard default templates. Even to this day the blog is very simply designed and quite eccentric in many ways.
Having said this, Manolo has carved a niche and attracts around 4000 daily readers (and a pretty high participation rate looking at comment levels) which brings with it the ability to charge $220 per month for a Blogad Ad.
The blog is definitely one with income potential with many affiliate links deeply linked into the blog. I’m surprised their is no adsense ads on the blog though - perhaps there isn’t many ads for shoes?
I’d say it’s a prime example of how someone can do some amazing things through their blogging and still retain some real uniqueness and individuality.
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 12:07 pm by David Shawver
MyBlogLog Update - Track your Outbound Links
In March this year I posted about a service called MyBlogLog (affiliate link) - an online service that tracks where people go when they leave your blog by looking at the outbound links that they click.
I originally used their free service which tracks just the most popular outbound clicks each day but have more recently upgraded to the full Pro service ($25 per year) which tracks outbound links in real time.and gives a longer list than just your top ten outbound links for the day.
Whether you go for the free or Pro version this is a very useful service that could really change the way you blog.
At first I just found knowing where people go when they leave my site interesting but didn’t do much with the information - but then I started to take a more strategic look at the information MyBlogLog supplies and realized that it had very useful applications.
For instance I found quite quickly on one of my blogs that many people were leaving my site to a dead link (not good). I also discovered that the most clicked upon links on my blog were in a certain position on my blog and changed my layout to maximize the return of this position.
I also discovered a couple of other site that I was sending significant amount of traffic to without knowing it. I was able to deepen my relationship with these sites as a result.
It was also useful to track the performance of some of my text links with advertisers and report back to them that their ads were doing well (or not) in relation to other text ads. We tweaked a few ads and found wording that performed better.
All in all the $25 outlay was well worth it for me and I’d recommend the service as being very useful (even the free one - especially for lower traffic sites). I have heard of other outbound link trackers that are free but haven’t tried anything else that is this easy to use.
My only real continued wish with MyBlogLog is that they’d be able to track Google Adsense links as well as other links and that they’d somehow track which pages on my blogs (I have thousands of pages) the links are coming from.
I hope the recommendation is helpful for readers.
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 09:07 am by David Shawver
Blogging Rhythms 3 - Daily Rhythms
This Blogging Rhythms post should be a little shorter than the others (famous last words) as it’s focused upon a shorter rhythm - one of just 24 hours, the day.
Each of us have our own daily rhythms, times for waking up, eating, bathing, relaxing etc. Blogs often have up and down times during their day also.
For most of my blogs the most Active times (in terms of traffic) tends to be while I sleep here in Australia and when Europe and the US are up and about (and surfing the web). This is of course a little different for my blogs on Aussie domains which have a nice busy time during the Aussie morning period when both Australia is awake and the US are having their early evenings.
So the question I’ve heard many bloggers ask is should such daily cycles impact the way they approach their blogging or should they just blog on regardless of who is up and surfing the web when?
My theory is that it’s worth considering when you post - but that it’s not worth getting obsessed by it.
My approach tends to vary from blog to blog. Let me unpack it a little:
Loyal Readers Blogs - a number of my blogs have a readership that is largely made up of repeat readers who check into them either from bookmarks or via RSS. They like what I write and check in regularly to see what I’m up to (some of them daily, others even more often). enternetusers.net is one of these blogs. As a result of this regular repeat readership I tend to think about my daily posting schedule and tend to spread my posts out throughout the day. There are a number of reasons for this:
1. I don’t want to overwhelm my readers with information. Some days on this blog I write as many as 10 or so posts - if these were to all go up on the site within a few hours readers would not be likely to read each post in much detail. Spreading them out over 24 hours seems to give each post room to be spotted, read and digested in its own right.
2. Such an approach also increases repeat visits to the blog - especially by those who follow it via RSS. I often notice that the hours after a post tend to have significantly higher traffic levels than periods of inactivity. Sometimes comments are left within minutes of posting (and its not just a fluke because it’s always the same people!). Of course it’s not just RSS readers who come to a blog numerous times in a day when you post frequently. Once you get a reputation for it others will get into the habbit of multiple visits in a day.
The exception I make to spreading stories out on these blogs is for ‘breaking news’ stories. My approach when a story is hot is to post it ASAP as timeliness of posting can mean the difference to being linked to by others and not.
The way I spread my posts out on these blogs is a combination of blogging at different times in the day (I tend to do a batch f posts in the mornings, another in the afternoon and another before bed) and using the ‘advance posting’ feature of WordPress (which allows you to post something but not have it go live onto your site until the time you nominate). I try to time these advance posts to go live during peak traffic times (or just before them).
Search Engine Traffic Blogs - I tend not to worry quite so much about spreading posts out on blogs that get the majority of traffic from search engines. On these blogs I have less loyal readers monitoring the blogs via RSS and therefor just post to them as the news comes to hand. This might mean I post on some of these blogs numerous times within and hour and then not again for 24 hours. Whilst I could spread such posts out I actually believe this could work against the blog as breaking news stories would be ‘old news’ by the time they went live onto the blogs.
So that’s my theory - what is your approach to blogging on a daily level? Do you spread out your posts, advance post or just post as news comes in? What impact does that have?
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 05:07 am by David Shawver
Blog Clutter
Heather Green over at Business Week Online’s Blogspotting also noticed Jeremy’s call for bloggers and asks some interesting questions about blog clutter:
‘Seems like not a week goes by without the announcement of a new network that’s doing podcasting, video blogging or traditonal blogging startup. And even the mainstream guys, like CBS, are jumping and adding these outlets.
But what do you think? With millions of bloggers out there, can there really be a scarcity of people to sign onto these networks?’
I’m interested in the response to the question Heather asks. Whilst internet usage continues to grow (and blog writing and readership grows with it) there is increasing talk of clutter on the web. New media puts publishing into the hands of the individual which is a wonderful thing - however one of the consequences is obviously that the world is filled with individuals - billions of them.
We’re also now seeing thousands and thousands of mass produced, automated blogs being launched at the moment which further clutters things.
Where it all ends nobody really knows. What do you think - is blogging getting too cluttered?
Written on July 27th, 2005 at 01:07 am by David Shawver
Blogging Rhythms 2 - Seasonal Rhythms
Another Blogging Rhythm that it’s useful to be aware of is the yearly rhythm.
Just last week I had an email from a reader asking me to take a look over their blog which they said was ‘in decline’. Ever since June they’d been gradually losing readers even though their Page Rank in search engines hadn’t changed and they were posting at the same rate as normal.
Northern Hemisphere Summer - After looking over their site I made the diagnosis that their blog was probably suffering from a variety of blogging seasonal depression disorder.
Traditionally traffic on the web (it’s not just a blogging thing) slows when the northern hemisphere hits summer. It’s not rocket science really - people take holidays - they go for walks in the sun - they play and watch sport - they’re not online quite as much and as a result traffic goes down.
Holidays - Another time of change in traffic is often holidays. The recent 4th of July weekend illustrated this perfectly and was a slow few days for many bloggers (combined with summer and the London Bombing). Of course some blogs reap the benefits of holidays (perhaps if someone had a fireworks site they might have had a bumper weekend?) but this is usually specifically due to their topic relating to the holiday at hand.
On the other hand some holidays traditionally can be very lucrative to bloggers targeting some topics. Christmas is obviously a very worthwhile time for blogs covering any products or services that make good gifts - other holidays with a commercial spin aspect such as Mothers day, Fathers day, Valentines day, Easter, Thanksgiving all have different opportunities associated with them depending upon the topic that they cover.
Events - Lastly there are events that happen every year that from blog topic to blog topic will bring peaks and troughs in traffic. Trade shows, sporting and political events, movie and book releases etc all have the potential to bring fresh readers to your blog.
So What? - Ok so most blogs have a natural yearly rhythm that from year to year will follow some sort of pattern. On one level it’s just nice to know what is behind some of the fluctuations but can knowing this information actually help improve our blogging?
My theory is that it’s handy not only to be able to explain the fluctuations but that it might also be useful to predict them. Like a surfer watches the horizon to see what waves are building a blogger should always have their eye on the future to see what waves of traffic they could position themselves to catch.
For each of our blogs this will mean something different - for me I’m now starting to think about the oncoming Christmas rush that many of my blogs experience. This means adding appropriate deep linking affiliate links, thinking about keywords that will be searched for and even considering new blogs that are worth experimenting with.
It also means preparing to cover trade shows at different times of the years that relate to my different blogs (ie I clear my diary for the big ones so I can blog around the clock to cover new product releases).
Lastly it also means keeping one’s finger on the pulse of culture and watching for oncoming (both distant and near future) events that are bloggable and trying to predict them.
As I always write (I fear I sound like a broken record sometimes), ask yourself what people will be searching the web for in a few weeks or months time and try to provide useful content for those things. This doesn’t just happen - it takes practice to pick what will work and what won’t and also means putting time aside for watching and listening to the rhythms of culture around you.
What seasonal rhythms impact your blogging and how do you (or do you at all) respond to them?
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