Written on January 20th, 2007 at 01:01 am by Darren Rowse
Are Newspaper Blogs Really ‘Booming’?
I’ve seen a lot of people quoting the recent Nielsen//NetRatings study which shows how newspaper blogs have seen 210% increases in traffic in the last year.
While I think it’s an interesting thing I also do wonder whether it’s as big a deal as some are reporting it to be (ie I’ve seen a few ‘newspaper blogs are booming’ headlines going around. Perhaps I’m a little cynical but I think this has been a little blown out of proportion for two reasons:
Normal Blogs Grow at Similar Rates
From memory, most newspapers that started experimenting with blogs did it within the last 18 or so months (quite a few even more recently).
From my experience of blogs - it generally takes them 12 months to really hit their straps in terms of traffic. They need that long to establish a profile, get search engine ranking, build incoming links to them etc.
It’s little surprise then that they’ve seen growth in the last 12 months - I’m only surprised that it’s not been bigger as many blogs of a similar age that I’ve been involved in consulting with would expect 210% growth at a minimum.
The Raw Figures - Impressive?
My reading of the stats is that in December the top 10 newspapers blogs had 3.7 million visitors. That means on average these blogs had 370,000 visitors each - or 11935 visitors per day.
Now I know many enternetusers readers would like 11935 visitors coming to their blogs each day - but keep in mind that these are the biggest newspapers in the US and that they’ve been blogging for over a year. Compare them to the biggest blogs going around and the figures are smaller than the 210% headline might indicate.
I’m also surprised that the numbers not bigger because the domains that many of these blogs are hosted on should generate some serious Google Juice for the blogs concerned. I know if I were to start up a blog on some of my established domains that they’d do pretty well in search engines fairly quickly.
Perhaps I’ve misread the study or am being overly cynical - but I’m a little less than impressed than some seem to be.
Don’t get me wrong - I think it’s great that such studies are done and I’m all in favor of mainstream media experimenting with blogging - I also think it’s great that they are seeing some success - but perhaps it’s not the headline news that some are reporting it as.
Written on January 19th, 2007 at 08:01 am by Tony Hung
Understanding The Rules of Great Content
In your quest for creating excellent content, you may have come across the following dilemma: I would love to create something important for my blog, but how do I, as a “mere” blogger contribute to that conversation at large? If I don’t create something de novo, will it be worth posting?
To answer that question, let me tell you about the 1 / 9 / 90 rule — and, in my humble opinion, its a rule that every blogger ought to live (and subsequently), die by.
A few months ago when I started blogging, I came across the transcripts of an SEO conference, where someone was overheard to have described how individuals (read: bloggers) create and interact with content.
1% create content
9% enrich content
90% consume content
I don’t know how much of this is true, but I take the spirit of it to BE true. Namely, that only a tiny fraction of us will actually create novel, ground breaking stuff, whether its reporting on new news that nobody else has found, or publishing research that no one else has done for example.
And I touched upon this in a prior post last week, but because only a tiny percentage of bloggers will create novel content, we ought to console ourselves with the knowledge that yes – it is “ok” to not be in that “1%” all the time.
Because we don’t all have the time, energy, contacts, or resources, to create that kind of novel content. And in the day-to-day swing of things, with the usual challenges of regular and daily postings, I would even suggest that you NOT let those kinds of posts interrupt your usual blogging activities.
While quality should never be sacrificed by quantity, keeping up a certain regular posting frequency is crucial to your blog’s success. Having said that, its clear where you OUGHT to be, if you can’t be in that 1% all the time — and that’s in the 9% … enriching existing content.
Its sort of like how the game of basketball has been described to me: talent might get you baskets, but defence is all about the hustle. Similarly, I view creating novel content the “talent”, and enriching the content, the “hustle”. So, what do I mean, by “enriching the content”? Its only the recognition that MOST of the time, novel content is created by others — but that you, as a blogger, have something worthwhile contributing to the conversation.
At its most literal level, its the permission to, heck yes, report on other content. But, keeping the spirit of “enrichment” alive, it also doesn’t mean mindlessly contributing to the echochamber.
How can you do this?
Its real simple.
Whenever you find something noteworthy someone else has already written about, whether its news,tips, or what have you, do NOT simply regurgitate what they’re saying in your own words, or, God forbid, simply “quote” them and leave a “for more information, go here” type of link with a one liner on your opinion.
(and yes, you should ALWAYS attribute your sources).
If you do, you’re not enriching content at all … merely parroting what someone else has done. This creates Bad Content, and demonstrates nothing about your knowledge, and perpetuates the stereotype that bloggers know nothing, contribute nothing, and merely quote other sources.
So, what can you do?
Use that original source as a springboard to your own thoughts, ideas, and commentary. So, specifically, what does this mean? Here are some suggestions:
If its news:
1. Comment on your own experience with the ideas on the source material
2. Put the news into historical context
3. Discuss how the source material might affect the rest of the industry at large
4. Connect how seemingly unrelated news might affect an industry
5. Summarize the prevailing news related to the source (with links)
6. Explore reasons why the news is good / bad above and beyond the scope of the article
If they’re tips/how’to/lists:
1. Add your own suggestions (i.e. give another 5 items for a list):
2. Discuss how some tips aren’t actually worthy of the list — and give reasons
3. Review your own history with these tips
4. Comment on if these tips are actually useful
5. Implement these tips, and report on your results
6. Create a related list on an issue that you think is even more important (that the authored missed)
If its a review:
1. Describe your own exeriences with the product — agree, disagree, with original review
2. Do your own review, with the original review as a springboard
3. Comment on what you would have liked to have seen reviewed
4. Put the review in an industry context; what were people expecting? Did it meet expectations?
5. Compare it to an existing line of products
6. Explore where the product or service might lead to developments in the future
So, what am I advocating here? That to produce good content, yes, of course you cannot rehash stuff that is everywhere else. On the other hand, its unrealistic to believe that you’re going to create new stuff out of thin air — all the time. You can’t let that desire consume you, or stall your blogging efforts.
Rather, a regular part of blogging will require you to take the time to create content by enriching others content. There’s a way to do it and to do it intelligently. And yes … it *does* sound like I’m suggesting that perhaps there was some use for that critical writing class back in high school.
Because that’s all that “enriching content” means … providing a critical perspective and commentary to existing content.
And if you do that, you’ll be on your way to hustling your way to the top, rather than languishing your way to the bottom.
*Tony Hung guest blogs every thursday. He usually blogs at Deep Jive Interests
Written on January 19th, 2007 at 06:01 am by Darren Rowse
What is Linkbait?
Over at the YPN blog Rand (a guest poster) writes a useful post on Leveraging Linkbait. Nice to see some exploration of the topic on an official Yahoo blog. For more on linkbait you might also like to read my mini-series on the topic:
- Introduction to Linkbaiting
- Motivations for Linkbaiting - Why Links are Good for Your Blog
- 20 Linkbaiting Techniques
Rand also links to another few relevant articles:
- Linkbaiting or Link Baiting? - SEO Book
- Linkbaiting for Fun & Profit - Search Engine Journal
- The Art of Linkbaiting - Performancing
- Just What is Link Bait Anyway - High Rankings Forum
And a few more from Google
- SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting - Matt Cutts
- What is Linkbaiting? - Modern Life is Rubbish
- Linkbaiting, How Hard is it? - ISEdb
That should keep you busy for the weekend :-)
Interested to hear your definition of it too!
Written on January 19th, 2007 at 02:01 am by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - 19 January 2007
- LifeDev writes a post titled Think for Yourself, And the World Will Follow - it’s written about business ideas but I think could be applied pretty well to blogging too - originality counts for a lot.
- ShoeMoney shares his favorite WordPress Tricks and Plugins - two plugins I hadn’t seen before that look useful are Brians Threaded Comments and PodPress.
- Blog Bloke shares How he got Custom Domains to work with New Blogger - has anyone else tried it yet?
- Neil Patel talks sense (in my opinion) with his post Why too many little icons can easily distract your visitors.
- John Chow writes a post about post length and post frequency
- Alister writes a reflection on his last month of blogging in a post How to grow your blog by over 2000 in one month
Written on January 18th, 2007 at 02:01 pm by Darren Rowse
AdSense Updates Policies - Some Publishers Will Need to Make Changes
JenSense has a nice compilation of the changes that AdSense has made to it’s policies today.
There are quite a few but the ones that caught my eye are:
Referrals - you could previously have four referrals products per page but could only link to each one once.
Now you can use up to two referrals links/buttons per referral product - I can see this being very useful!
Use of Images - they’ve now updated their policies to reflect what they’d previously announced - ie that you cannot use images next to ads.
Copyrighted Material - the policy now reads:
“Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
Great stuff for those of us who are getting our content scraped! Now how do we enforce it?
Competitive Ads and Services - this is a significant one that I know some publishers are going to have to make some changes with. They are tightening up on publishers who have ads on their sites which have ’same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site.’
This means you need to be very careful about running ads that resemble AdSense ads on them - anywhere on your site.
The policy now states:
“Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.”
This means that if you are running YPN text ads on one part of your site and AdSense on another that have the same colour palettes you are in violation of this policy (or if you’re rotating AdSense and YPN ads as I know some publishers do).
Jen writes a helpful post on this change here. As she writes - you now need to ensure that your different types of ads don’t resemble each other (ie change colors, add borders etc).
While I understand why they’re doing this (it’s a defensive move against other ad networks) it is going to cause a lot of publishers time and work - especially as it is a sitewide thing.
I know of many publishers who run AdSense on one part of a site and YPN on other parts and who rotate ads - looks like they have some significant work to do in the next day or two to comply.
I’ve already heard from a number of publishers that if given the choice between AdSense and YPN that they’ll jump to YPN because of the less stringent requirements - this change has put one too many hoops to jump through in front of some publishers.
Written on January 18th, 2007 at 08:01 am by Darren Rowse
Are Your Comments Being Filtered as Spam at enternetusers?
A number of enternetusers readers have been emailing me of late to say that comments that they are leaving here are not appearing and that it seems they are being marked as spam incorrectly.
I use Akismet and have noticed this happening a little more than normal lately. I’ve talked to the team at Akismet and they have told me that my blog is in the top few in terms of quantities of comment spam and that as a result there have been a few more false positives than normal. Due to the thousands of spam comments that they filter each day it was impossible for me to scan through them all looking for such mistakes.
If your comments have been filtered out in this way could you please let me know. I just noticed that Akismet have added a search function which allows me to search for email addresses, URLs, names etc. Of course I need to know what I’m looking for - so if your comments are being filtered here please contact me with the name, email address and URL that you use in comments and I’ll look for them and mark them as ‘not spam’ which hopefully will fix the issue.
Feel free to test whether you’re being marked as spam by leaving a comment below.
I’m not sure when the search functionality was added to Akismet (it could have been there for weeks as I’m not one for details) but it’s a welcome feature!
update: I should also mention that in addition to Akismet I also have some manual moderation to do - particularly for first time commenters who all go into the queue for my manual moderation. So if this is your first comment it doesn’t mean you are being filtered as spam. If in doubt - contact me.
Written on January 18th, 2007 at 01:01 am by Darren Rowse
Crediting Sources of Stories - Do You Do it?
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been having a conversation with two bloggers about when and how to link to sources of the news that you write.
The conversation emerged out of my observation that these two bloggers were posting very similar news stories to ones that I’d been posting on one of my blogs.
Now at a first look I didn’t think anything of it - after all it is natural for blogs in a similar niche to report the same news as each other - however on a closer look I began to suspect that they were using my blog as the source for many of their stories.
Their posts would appear within 24 hours of mine with the same links, same quotes, same pictures (with the same file names) and same post structure (ie points in the same order, the same opinions, the same paragraph structure etc).
The actual content had been re-written in their own words but the bones of their posts were very similar to mine and this was happening on a daily basis. In fact it was very obvious that they were using my own posts as a basis for theirs - however there were no links back or mentions of the sources of their stories.
I began getting emails from a few readers asking if I knew knew I was being ‘copied’ by these blogs and so decided to email the bloggers concerned to ask for an explanation. I did so feeling very awkward and in two minds. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter (I’ve got more important things to worry about) - however I was curious about why they did it and wanted to let them know that I (and others) had noticed.
The email conversations that resulted from my email have been interesting to this point and highlights our different approaches to sourcing stories.
The main blogger that I’ve since chatted with took my email very well and in the spirit that it was intended and confessed that while he did find some of his stories on my blog that he didn’t want to link to the blog he found the story on (mine) but instead linked to the original sites that I was linking to. In a sense he saw what he was doing as cutting out the middle man and felt it was legitimate.
He explained that he did this to ’save his readers time’ as if he did link both to me they’d end up just reading the same basic news more than once.
On some levels I can see his point. Sometimes it can be frustrating as a reader to see the same story rewritten everywhere in much the same way. I’m sure some readers just want the news and don’t really care where it came from.
However my approach is to always attempt to link to the story itself as well as the person who tipped me off about it.
While it might ’save the reader time’ to not to link to sources I find that most readers who are interested in a story do like to see what others have to say about it - both other bloggers and those who have commented on the story.
I also think linking to sources also is a good practice for your blog in a number of ways:
• search engines - many SEO experts talk about how outbound links can actually help your own blog’s ranking if you’re linking to relevant pages. Linking to the places you find stories shows your site is connected to relevant parts of the web.
• profile in your niche - you can help your reputation and lift your blog’s profile with other bloggers in your niche who see the incoming links to their blog and check out more of what you’re writing. In linking generously to other blogs you’ll find they’ll be more likely to link back to you which is good for traffic generation and SEO.
• readers - I find that readers respond well to seeing how widely you read and how well connected you are. While too many links might overwhelm them a few well placed ones can show that you know what you’re talking about and that you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the niche you’re writing about.
• accountability - Lastly I think linking to sources adds a level of accountability and transparency to a blog that can actually lift it up a notch in terms of quality. I know that if I’m reporting a news story that I’ve found elsewhere that I’ll often put more effort into writing the story as I know people will compare what I’ve written to what my source has written.
But that’s just my approach and the conversation with these other bloggers is highlighting to me that bloggers take different positions on this and argue for them strongly.
I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of others:
Do you always credit sources of stories? Are there some times that you don’t? Why/Why not?
Written on January 17th, 2007 at 07:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Do you Maintain Email Newsletter Lists?
Reader question….
Do you have newsletters attached to your blogs? Why/Why Not?
If so - are they effective ways of finding traffic and building community for you?
Written on January 17th, 2007 at 01:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Interview Available for Download
The interview that I did with Jeremy Schoemaker this morning is now available for download or to listen to here.
Also on the call (right at the end) Jeremy announced that I’ll be one of the presenters at the next Elite Retreat in San Francisco on 19-20 March. I enjoyed this morning and am really looking forward to meeting him, Lee Dodd, Aaron Wall in person!
Written on January 17th, 2007 at 08:01 am by Darren Rowse
Live ‘Net Income’ Interview in One Hour
Just a quick reminder - I’ll be appearing on Jeremy’s radio show (Net Income) in an hour at Webmaster Radio. I hope you can drop by and say G’day in the IRC room or even call in with a question.
For those unable to listen in live - there will be an archived version go up sometime after the show.
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