Archive for the ‘The Net’ Category

Are Bloggers Unaware?

Monday, July 21st, 2008

I’ve been reading Blogging Heroes by Michael Banks and I’ve noticed that throughout the 30 interviews (I’ve read 28 of them so far.) that there are a couple of common themes that all of these professional bloggers tend to come back to. Some of the folks that are interviewed include Mary Jo Foley, Gina Trapani, Chris Anderson, Philipp Lenssen, Frank Warren, Steve Rubel, Gary Lee, Robert Scoble, Peter Rojas, Rebecca Lieb, John Neff and Brad Hill.

This book is worth reading! If you’ve ever felt alone as a blogger, ever felt that no one comments, or that the only ones who do are hurtful, this is the next book you must read. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, the first step is reading here (or my book, of course. ;) ). If you’ve ever wondered what sort of person it takes to build a successful blog, this group provides an excellent measure.

The themese are:

  • passion
  • monetization - and the split view on this point

    • Probably the biggest theme that everybody mentions is being passionate about your topic, and you have to be passionate or it’s going to chew you up and spit you out. If you are not passionate about a topic you, will run out of energy very quickly. To me this is fairly obvious, although I suspect many people getting into this for the first time struggle due to the newness of blogging. Its something that overcomes any forward thinking on the idea of “Do I have the stamina to actually carry this out?“. The real challenge is that every day you have to think of something to talk about, to continually put it out there to build an audience. As readership grows, the demand seems to get greater and greater, and how do you manage that?

    While these bloggers (in one case I believe one of the people in this book actually comes from professional journalism background) came into blogging from different angles and with different back grounds, the real meat of their message is that you have to continually stay on top of whatever your unique topic is. This point is really critical, as well selecting the right topic. Again we’re back to being passionate about it. This is absolutely critical in order to be successful.

    So one of the biggest things I’m noticing in relation to this the book is that I think as a search marketer and as an online marketing professional. I take for granted, for example, the notion of monetizing a blog or website.
    To me the idea of not monetizing a blog or website is foreign. Too many of those interviewed for this book, completely the opposite is true. Many started with blogs simply for the sake of spreading a common word or the own point of view. Many have started blogs and grown blogs to the point where readership exceeds hundreds of thousands of people per month. When I see such growth I cannot help but see dollar signs! Though, I do completely understand their point of view, and having to deal with the question “Is this a moral issue?”

    So my personal opinion on this obviously is monetize, monetize, monetize! I come from a background of online marketing and I understand the inherent value of unique content and the traffic it can bring. I also understand the idea of having a return on this – the time invested. This isn’t simply a hobby. This is something where you do get to share knowledge and expertise as well as developing a return on the time you’re putting in. The time you’re putting into this hobby, you’re not getting back. So you need to be very careful that the time you put into blogging as a return of some in some form for you.

    Overall I am a bit lukewarm with some of what’s talked about in Blogging Heroes as regards the perception of SEO. Many of those being interviewed see SEO as an adjunct, maybe something to be avoided. In a few cases, some of those being interviewed in this book actually feel SEO is meritorious and that it is worth pursuing; that there is a return on this approach. One of the common themes on the topic of SEO is the idea that it’s very simplistic and that you needn’t put a lot of time and effort into it. I actually agree with this wholeheartedly. The core of SEO is built around usability and that in and of itself leads you straight back to the content you’re producing and the format in which you are showcasing it to your users. Many blogging platforms, such as Wordpress, make this very simple to manage.

    Blogging is the ideal platform for actually showcasing content in a manageable way. Being a writer (good or bad) or being a subject matter expert, or even simply someone who is keenly a interested in a topic, the blogging world and the platforms themselves enable you to quickly showcase your information. By managing very basic SEO points such as having correct titles, by ensuring that unique descriptions exist on pages, by managing your trackbacks properly, by using images and ALT tags properly you can help a blog to really become much more search friendly. Probably the one of the biggest pieces of advice that leads to a search friendly layout is that of managing your URLs effectively. By actually going in and selecting your URLs be shown as postnames in the platform, you’ve taken a big step forward in ensuring that the search engines can very quickly and effectively understand what the post is about. By managing this one item, you will change your URLs from a series of numbers to the actual words used in the title that you wrote for the post.

    The title of this post is “Are Bloggers Unaware? “ I believe for the most part they are aware. They are aware of their reader’s responses. They are aware of their own subject matter knowledge. There are aware of their own passion for the subject.

    I’m not sure that beyond that -passion- a lot more is needed, for most blogs. In fact, if you are passionate about a topic, it will show through in your writing and in your presentation. That passion alone will draw readers to your space. So whether you are blogging for business, pleasure, a hobby or any other reason, bring your passion for the topic to the forefront. Do not enter into blogging if it’s on a whim, for a quick win, or if you simply feel like trying to make some money quickly.

    The bottom line is making money online does not happen quickly.

    Comments

    About the author:
    In-House SEM
    SEMPO BoD member
    SES speaker

    In addition to volunteering time on the BoD at SEMPO and co-chairing the in-house SEM committee, I also moderate at www.searchengineforums.com and I write in-house focused articles for www.searchenginewatch.com.

    Sometimes I offer consulting for clients and I’m currently writing a book due out this fall on blogging and making money (McGraw-Hill publishing).

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    Posted in The Net | 1 Comment »

    Problems With Blog Metrics And How To Solve Them

    Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

    Like most bloggers, I struggle with true metrics for my blog. The problem isn’t so much about technology as it is about understanding what is useful to know about my blog to make it better and attract more of an audience. I’ve got lots of metrics that I can look at today, from my Technorati ranking to where my blog is on the Power150 list. I can check the number of comments I get, or look at the number of daily or monthly impressions. There are several big problems with any of these approaches, though:

    1. RSS skews most metrics - When readers are consuming your posts through RSS, most of the time they don’t need to visit your site. While this may reduce your page views and monthly visitors, it can often lead to a greater engagement and wider distribution. 
    2. Inbound links aren’t all equal - Perhaps the greatest injustice of many metrics systems today is that they reward “linkbait listing” (the activity of listing a large number of blogs and links in the hopes those sites will also link back to you). As a result being part of some of these lists, some blogs can be propelled to higher numbers of links and authority without producing any quality content to earn it.
    3. Content expires though it may still be relevant - One of the most frustrating things about Technorati as a tool is that it expires older content. There is lots of good content that is getting ignored simply because it was written over six months ago.
    4. There are multiple ways to measure engagement - Looking only at links to a post or comments are incomplete measures. People use different sites and different ways to engage with content, from commenting to saving it.

    In a sentence, the real challenge for blog metrics is to find a more comprehensive way to see if people are really connecting to the content on your blog. Melanie Baker, the community manager at yet another smart Canadian startup called AideRSS emailed me last week with a very interesting solution to this challenge of measuring “social engagement.” They have created a system using what they call “PostRank” to measure the engagement of any individual blog post. Posts are ranked from 1.0 to 10.0 with the top score going to those posts that generate the most activity. Instead of just focusing on inbound links, their ranking system looks measures such as comments, number of saves on del.icio.us, number of Tweets mentioning the URL, and how many Diggs a particular post gets. Then an aggregated score for your blog is calculated based on the individual performance of your blog posts. This is brilliant for a number of reasons:

    1. It separates metrics into blog posts instead of one big number. This means that you can get a better sense for which blog posts are really working and driving engagement and which aren’t.
    2. By allowing you to view your entire blog in terms of your top, best, great and good posts, you can start to spot trends in what content is the most viral.
    3. As the name suggests, the site can be used to make your RSS subscriptions more useful by helping you to filter all the posts you get into just the top posts which are the most discussed.

    There are only two slight limitations in their model that I can see. The first is that it only looks at a small subset of sites where engagement can happen so some large sites (such as a social network on Ning, or a Facebook group) where there may be lots of discussion can get ignored. The sites AideRSS uses are also very US-centric, which means that significant international discussions could often get ignored. The second limitation is that some of the blog-wide metrics that could complete the picture of blog influence, such as number of RSS subscribers or affiliations of a blogger are missing - so it’s not a complete picture of blog influence.

    Still, the idea of using PostRank to filter posts and judge the quality of a blog overall is one worth taking a look at. Particularly if it could be easily combined with a tool like Alltop which pulls in RSS feeds by category to make reading blogs and finding the highest quality blogs in a particular category easier.  Any service that can give bloggers a better idea of how to produce higher quality content AND help readers to more effectively decide what content in their flood of RSS subscriptions is most worth reading http://gr.aiderss.com/ should be a big hit.

    If you haven’t visited this site yet, you need to check it out. A great place to start is with Melanie’s blog post where she remixes Viral Garden’s list of Top 25 marketing bloggers in order of “social engagement.”  Also, in case you’re curious, here’s what AideRSS came up with as a list of my top ten posts from the last year:

    My Top Ten Blog Posts:

    Google’s Blogger Gets New Features

    Friday, June 27th, 2008


    Embedded comments, and star ratings

    Google’s Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are:

    • Star ratings: Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box.
    • The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post. Blogger’s old comments functionality had very low usability for a couple of reasons; one of them was that it took you to a separate layout when you wanted to comment. To enable this change bringing better integration, switch to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve. Who would’ve thought the day would come…
    • Integration into Google Webmaster tools. You can now follow a dashboard link reading Webmaster Tools. Automatically, all your Blogspot blogs will be added to the tools suite, though they still remain to be verified. With Google webmaster tools, you can utilize statistic information and diagnostics, for instance.
    • Exporting and importing your blog. Google announced you can now export all of your blog posts into a single (Atom-formatted) XML file to allow for a backup… or perhaps, to allow to move to another blogging system, or do something else with the data. Reversely, you can also import that file back into your system. To give this a try switch to the Settings page for your blog; you’ll find the links “Import blog” and “Export blog” on top. Exporting will trigger a download named e.g. “blog-06-27-2008.xml” (this might fare better with the ISO date format yyyy-mm-dd).
    • A new post editor. The new post editor has a different image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Also, the HTML editing mode saw a couple of improvements; <br>eaks won’t be added automatically, and there will be a clearer formatting with new lines for generated HTML.

    These features are also further detailed in the Blogger in Draft blog. If you don’t want to always visit the special draft.blogger.com URL, you can now also make the Draft mode your default mode; look for the checkbox reading “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” at the top of your dashboard.

    [Thanks DPic and Mrrix32!]

    Comments

    About the author:
    Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.

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    Posted in Blogging, The Net | 5 Comments »

    How To Style The First Post Of Your Wordpress Blog

    Thursday, June 12th, 2008

    I got several emails when I had published my new site design about how to style only the first post of the blog in Wordpress. This tactic can be handy to call out the very first post so that the readers attention is on the most recent topic for your blog. It is actually very easy, and may not be the best PHP in the world but it works perfectly.

    Now the only problem with using this method is that you will have every first post on every index page styled this way. I haven’t played around with how to avoid that because that is the way I intended to design it. Perhaps someone has an idea on avoiding that if it is needed.

    In your index.php file for your Wordpress theme you want to find your post container div (or whatever markup wraps your entire post). In the class area of this post you want to add a space after the first class (assuming you have a first class) and use the following PHP:

    What this PHP will do is check to see if the variable $post is set with the string “set” and if it is not set with that string then it will echo out the class “firstPost” and then set the variable. Once the variable has been set each post afterwards will not echo out that class. Thereby creating a unique class for your first post that you can style however you want.

    May be a little sloppy for the PHP gurus reading this— but it works.

    Comments

    About the author:
    Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.

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    Posted in Blogging, The Net | 1 Comment »

    New WordPress SEO Blogging Software

    Friday, May 9th, 2008

    What a difference 24 hours make.

    A few days ago I was honestly prepared to rip a product to shreds. It wasn’t that it was a bad product, but it wasn’t as well prepared as it should have been, and from what I can tell it was due to an honest communication error between a well respected online marketer and his programming team.

    But before I talk about the product itself, I am going to give you a little history lesson.

    Wordpress Elite

    A few years ago I purchased a script called WordPress Elite. It was pretty useful, and allowed you to point the software at a server, and create WordPress blogs based on a default configuration plus you could select various parameters.

    I even sold a couple of copies as an affiliate.

    It didn’t do everything, you still had to log into the WordPress blog and activate the plugins, configure them etc, and at the time I was an SEO newbie… some would say I still am ;)

    The marketer however sold the business, and the new owner didn’t do anything with it. He got some new subscribers. He asked the list once for new features, then nothing was released, and the script never really supported 2.x very well.

    Wordpress Super Installer

    I managed to pick this up really cheap when it was first released, and I soon forgot that WordPress Elite was going through some teething problems.
    Unfortunately development pretty much stopped at the beginning of 2007.

    First, as with any newly released version of software (including wsi) there are bugs and anomalies that need to be worked out before the version is completely stable. I know one bug in particular reported to Wordpress about v2.1 is it’s lack of compliance with the xmlrpc standard. Xmlrpc is what most of the blog content auto-posters use to post content to your blogs via remote methods (as apposed to logging in a posting something manually).

    Though the newest version of Wordpress may have some advantages over the previous versions, I don’t feel for the sake of building blog farms to achieve back links to your money sites that it makes sense to quickly jump on-board a new version, just for the sake of having a new version.

    The last update I received from Randy Rhodes (not Randi from Air America) was at the end of July 2007.

    WordPress 2.0.x is still maintained because it needs to be for Debian inclusion, thus if you don’t need all the fancy features of WordPress 2.1 or above, it is still a good choice, especially if you are fed up of things breaking all the time, or have tons of WordPress blogs to maintain.

    Other Scripts

    There are other scripts out there, plus various services that promise to install WordPress on your behalf. I must admit I am not that keen on forking out more money, changing business processes, and then for another script development to grind to a halt.

    I would never trust an automated service to install WordPress packages for me. There are a few cropping up again, there have been a few in the past, but why reveal all your niche sites to a 3rd party hiding behind a website, even if you trusted them to do the installation, and have access to your server.

    WordPress Packages

    If you are not too reliant on 10s of plugins, you can get by just creating WordPress packages. Include a set of standard plugins and themes that you have tweaked, upload, switch on the plugins, and configure them to your liking.
    Or you can create a process, and pay someone else to do it for you.

    SEO Optimized WordPress Package

    Jeff Johnson has just released a special package for WordPress SEO

    The installation is painless

    Setup your database as always
    Edit your config as always
    Upload
    Enter your blog name and email address
    Log in
    Select a theme

    So what is done for you?

    Permalinks

    Plugin Activation
    Plugin settings (though I am not sure how much they differ from default)
    Ping list

    Shall we coin a new phrase… the “4 Ps”

    The themes are also relatively well optimized, so you have H1s where they should be

    Pretty useful?

    WordPress SEO Plugins Installed

    All In One SEO Pack
    Google XML SiteMaps

    Sociable (the new official version with nofollow)

    also Akismet and Simple Captcha

    Why Was I Going To Slam It?

    This problem was exasperated by many of the themes Jeff Johnson decided to include in the package, some optimized themes from MyType.com who basically take fairly average WordPress themes, optimized them a little, and then stick 5 spammy links in the footer to various pages on their domain, many seem to be paid client blogs.

    (disclaimer: MyType.com currently rank first for WordPress SEO and I have a post blocked by robots.txt ranking on the same page - it is not exactly a competitive search term, doesn’t bring much traffic, but it probably takes 100s of spammy theme links to rank for it now)

    In addition Jeff had included a few links on the default blogroll, and a badge in the sidebar.

    When you added up the total number of external links per page, and it came to 14 without the WordPress default links etc, it couldn’t really be looked at as a good recommendation for SEO, especially if people download it who are less experienced.

    So I emailed Jeff, and within a few hours I had a reply that it was going to be fixed. I think I may have been the only one who was concerned.

    It Is Not Perfect

    I don’t like some of the sites on the pinglist they use - lots of .jp sites - my personal pinglist for “quality” blogs consists of just one site, Feedburner, and I let them handle the pings to other places.

    sidenote: I keep seeing Pingoat listed on ping lists - last time I checked Pingoat hadn’t been accepting pings for 18 months, maybe that is now closer to 2 years. Web pings only. Maybe John Reese when he purchased the site switched that function back on and didn’t tell anyone (such as update the Pingoat blog) - looking at recently updated blogs on Pingoat, it seems like the Poles might be using a script to spam the hell out of it.

    I would use a different plugin selection, though I am sure the version of WordPress Jeff provides to his clients has a more comprehensive feature set. That being said, you really want to minimise plugin use if you are hosting a lot of blogs on a single server.

    The themes are better than the originals, though you might want to look for replacements.

    As they stand, if lots of people use this WordPress version for blog farms and datafeed sites, they have a bit of a heavy footprint. They still have a lot of nofollow links in the footer, plus 2 blogroll links and a banner

    It Is A Time Saver

    Even as it stands, for an experienced WordPress users it represents a time saver, and for someone less experienced who has problems with the basic steps of setting up plugins, permalinks etc it is a good resource, especially if the package gets improved over time.

    Jeff is providing lots of instructional videos on how to install the package, though effectively it is the same as any WP installation. He does recommend using this only for new blogs, though there is a procedure that can be used for existing sites.

    It Is Free

    Whilst I started off with some real concerns, what concerns remain can be cured with very simple hacking. I expect this to be well maintained.

    Thanks Jeff, great value for money - download it here.

    p.s. I am not sure how long Jeff will have this available. It is just one of many things he is providing free of charge as part of a product launch, and these bonuses tend to disappear from public display once a launch has completed.
    My advise would be to download it and test it on a few spare domains, tweak it for your own use and feed the blogs you create with some content.

    Comments

    About the author:
    Andy Beard - Niche Marketing - Blog search engine perfomance, Wordpress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips

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    Posted in The Net | 13 Comments »

    Clean Up Your Blog

    Monday, April 28th, 2008

    I’m a regular reader of Fred Wilson’s blog. Fred posted an article today that he is planning to clean house on his blog. He will remove many (if not most) of the widgets that adorn his site.

    There was much rejoicing!

    I can understand why Fred installed all these widgets in the first place. He’s got a natural curiosity and he’s a venture capitalist by trade — and invests in this stuff. There’s no better way to get to understand a technology or trend than to actually use it.

    But, I’d argue that very few of his blog readers appreciate the widgets (except, perhaps the people that developed them).

    Benefits Of Widget Removal And A Cleaner Blog

    1. It focuses readers on the core content, which is (hopefully) why they’re there.

    2. It makes pages load faster. Think of the bandwidth saved across the web!

    3. Search engines like Google appreciate fast-loading sites (and possibly reward them with higher rankings).

    4. It makes things simpler and more likely to load across a variety of browsers. (Yes, yes, I know things are supposed to work — but they often don’t)

    So, if you’re a blogger, follow Fred’s lead and clean things up a bit. Your readership will thank you.

    Comments

    About the author:
    Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
    widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
    for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
    of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
    businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.

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    Posted in Blogging, The Net, social media | 8 Comments »

    Improve Google AdSense Ad Targeting On Your Blog

    Thursday, April 17th, 2008

    I have a couple of blogs (using Blogger) that are monetized using Google. But, the ads that appear are often completely unrelated to the content - sometimes embarrassingly so. Is there any way of getting the ads to be more relevant? I do use tags, but that doesn’t seem to help. Sigh.

    Dave’s Answer:

    This is a great question, actually, because I see so many bloggers who don’t think about giving the AdSense engine clues about what’s on the page and have the same result of poorly targeted ads and, no surprise, very low revenue. Worse, and this is something to really think about, if the AdSense engine can’t figure out what you’re writing about, odds are very good that Google’s search engine spider can’t either, which means that you’re not going to get very good search engine results placement (aka “SERPs”) for your blogging efforts.

    The most common reason for this is that you write about too broad and diverse a range of topics. Since many blog layouts have multiple entries on a page (especially the home page), if the topics are too diverse it’s impossible for any targeting to succeed.

    This is why it’s hard to have a commercially successful blog when one entry is a review of your latest cellphone, the next is a complaint about seating in the local movie theater, and a third entry is an ode to your Mom for Mother’s Day.

    Another common reason I see is that you just aren’t writing enough about the specific topic at hand for AdSense / Googlebot to figure out what’s important. Imagine this: if you just looked at the words on your Web page, ignoring all graphics, design and layout, how many words comprise your navigation and supplemental content versus how many words are you using for your actual blog entry? If your ratio is 80:20 with your widgets, sidebars, blogroll, navigation, copyright, etc., being the 80%, you have a serious problem, and every time you write a 2-3 line blog entry, you’re making it impossible for the system to figure out what’s really important on the page.

    There’s a third thing that happens with blogging that can undermine your efforts too, and it’s a bit more subtle. Instead of using explicit nouns in your writing, most people succumb to more informal usage with “it” being quite common. Scan back through what I’ve written here about AdSense targeting and you’ll see I don’t do that: I explicitly use “AdSense” or “Google AdSense” or similar time and again. It’s a slight tweak to your writing style that helps search engines and automatic page analysis tools correctly identify the main theme and topic of the page.

    Google also has a nifty little device you can use to help identify which portions of your page are intended to be fodder for the AdSense targeting engine: AdSense Section Targeting. You can learn more about it on my tutorial page: How to target your AdSense ads with AdSense Section Targeting.

    Notice how many times I used the proper noun in the previous paragraph? It’s a tiny bit redundant, but if you can live with the slight change to your writing style, it really can pay significant dividends with both search engines and ad targeting engines.

    I hope these suggestions help you make tweaks to your Blogger weblog so that your ads are better targeted to your content, and, dear reader, if you have additional ideas or suggestions, please add them below as a comment!

    Comments

    About the author:
    Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
    internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
    Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
    startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
    seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
    is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
    programs.

    AskDaveTaylor.com
    http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

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    Posted in The Net | 3 Comments »

    Should You Upgrade to Wordpress 2.5?

    Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

    If you’ve been following the developments on the WordPress blog, you’d know that the new official release of WordPress 2.5 is out.

    Besides better image handling - the new version has a pretty comprehensive built-in gallery (WordPress head developer honcho Matt Mullenweg did a preview screencast of the new gallery), it also has features like an enhanced in-built tagging feature, integrated analytics (so you get a better idea of your traffic picture without having to go to Google Analytics), a redesign of the user interface that should allow for more intuitive posting.

    What’s uncertain is if embedding videos and other code requires having to muck around with the blog settings, because WordPress hasn’t really “played nice” with PHP, javascript and flash files in it’s previous incarnations.

    Also, there’s a big question mark about the compatibility with WordPress plugins (generally developed by third party and independent developers) designed for earlier versions of WordPress.

    -

    So the $64,000 question (or perhaps in today’s context, the $1million question…) is as an Internet Marketer - either you promote other products as an affiliate or you have your own products - should you upgrade to WordPress 2.5 now?

    Here’s my personal take…

    If you started out with the later versions of WordPress 2.2.x or WordPress 2.3.x and your blog works ok now, you should not have too much difficulty with the upgrade. Maybe 1 or 2 plugins might stop working, but you might be able to get along without it.

    If on the other hand, you started out with WordPress 2.0.x or 2.1.x and you use more than 20 different plugins, you can expect some pain during the upgrade process.

    I know specifically if you’re using SEO-optimization type plugins and affiliate marketing plugins, and one of them breaks in the process (especially since WordPress has gone from a category-based data management system to a taxonomy-based one), you might want to hang on for a moment, and wait a couple of weeks before the dust settles.

    From what I’ve seen from the notes, it doesn’t look like the ability to post video on the blog is a huge priority at the moment, so podcasters, video bloggers and lifecasters might experience some difficulty during the migration.

    Whatever you choose to do, be sure to backup your MySQL database, and copy and paste important settings and information into a text file for reference later in case something goes awry.

    There’s nothing more “fun” than doing a one-click upgrade of your blog, only to spend the next 24-48 hours trying to undo it.

    If you have the ability to, you might even want to duplicate your existing blog on another domain or a sub-directory and upgrading that instance of your blog. The major bugbears may take a couple of days to show themselves though.

    Whatever you do, tread carefully, especially if your blog brings in daily income!

    Comments

    About the author:
    Andrew Wee is an Asia-based Internet Marketer focused on blogging, social traffic generation and affiliate marketing. Previously rated as one of Asia’s top technology journalists, Andrew covers breaking news and industry developments at WhoIsAndrewWee.com

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    Posted in The Net | 7 Comments »

    Making Content Sharing Easier

    Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

    Making it easy for readers of your content to share that content with others is one of the ways that you can make your blog or RSS feed ever more useful to those readers.

    Plus it benefits you, the content creator, as your content gets wider visibility.

    For quite a while, I’ve been using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare service which adds a number of links to my blog posts and RSS feeds, like this:

    That was ok, I thought, although it seemed kinda flaky at times on blog posts. Sometimes the links would disappear for no reason I could ever figure out.

    There’s also the often-lengthy row of pretty icons approach quite a few sites take, like this:

    I’ve always found that approach distracting. Too much bling, it seems to me. Plus I never knew what half the icons meant.

    So I’ve resisted doing anything other than the feed flares which, as text links only and in the same typeface as the content, didn’t distract that much from that content.

    Yet I’ve sometimes thought that maybe the links I have weren’t the links people would find useful. Or, rather, weren’t enough of those links.

    But I didn’t want the bling approach.

    I’ve found what I think is the most useful solution in the form of ShareThis, a WordPress plugin developed by Alex King that adds this unobtrusive little graphic and link at the foot of each blog post:

    So if you want to let someone else know about something you’re reading, clicking on the link gives you this little popup:

    Then you can choose which part of the social web (nice phrase) you want to share the content with.

    If you click on the ‘Send’ tab, you get a form where you can enter email info to send via that means, or by SMS or instant message.

    Very flexible.

    If you use a platform other than WordPress, such as Blogger or TypePad, there are also plugins for those.

    The first thing I noticed with Share This was that of all the social web elements available to include in the choices you offer, there’s a now-glaring omission - Twitter isn’t one of the choices.

    I often use the Twit This! browser bookmarklet; with one click, it’s very useful to flag up to your Twitter community something you’re reading right at that moment. The easier it is to do that, the more likely you will.

    There is a Twit This! plugin for WordPress that adds a ‘Twit This’ link at the foot of each post. I don’t like it, frankly: too much in-your-face. Plus it defeats the objective of why I’ve added Share This.

    Maybe ShareThis can include that somehow, or something like it.

    There’s more to ShareThis than purely a link with a pretty popup, though. Stats, for instance. Details on the website.

    I like ShareThis and I hope you find it useful. Do tell me if you don’t. Or if you do.

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    About the author:
    Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

    Neville is a UK-based communicator, blogger and podcaster. He helps companies use effective communication to achieve their business goals. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

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    Posted in The Net | 10 Comments »

    How Do You Interview People For Your Blog?

    Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

    One question that I encounter occasionally from neophyte bloggers is about one of the most powerful methods of building content and also (shhhh) one of the best ways to build up some very high quality inbound links for your weblog: interviews.

    Now I’m not talking about bringing your camera crew and lining up some local production team to help the “location shoot” look great (though if you’re at that level you doubtless already know what I’m talking about) but more the humble interviews built around either email or phone-based question and answer sessions.

    Standard approach is to identify a half-dozen or so celebrities or highly visible people in your market and ask them directly if you can interview them. Generally, this is a good place to slip in an ego stroke or two, like “I’ve been talking about your new book for a year now, it’s so great” or “really appreciate your insight on the current bond market” or “I’m really interested on how you gained your sharp perspective on politics”. Think of it as grease on the wheels, perhaps.

    Why approach more than one? Because some folk will just ignore your request or reject it, sometimes because they want to be paid and other times because they’re either buffeted by these sort of queries or just uninterested in you and your project. No worries, lots of other people say ‘yes’ so you should have success!

    As part of your invitation to be interviewed, I encourage you to highlight that you’ll do the production work (formatting the final document, editing the audio, whatever) and that you’re then happy to make that available for their own promotional purposes. This gives them a further incentive and since there’s no cost other than time, if you flub it up horribly, they can always skip referencing it on their own site / newsletter.

    Making participation easy and efficient is a definite win and will increase the chance of you succeeding in your fledgling interview efforts.

    I prefer email interviews, personally, because I’m a text guy so I’ll tell you that my secret here is to ask if I can interview them, then send them a list of 10-12 questions and highlight “if you don’t like these questions, edit them, skip ones that aren’t interesting and add new ones if you’d like”. This lets them help move the interview towards areas they want to highlight and I can always mail back “one more question” if they are skipping an area that I think is of particular importance. More importantly, since I’m not seeking a Pulitzer for investigative reporting, it lets them retain some control of the interview too.

    For a phone-based audio interview you can use the same general approach by emailing questions in advance of the call. This also lets you ensure that your interview goes well because your subject has had a chance to prep and perhaps pull together some notes. You can do the same: have your homework in front of you so instead of saying “you have a big company” you can say “Your company sold $35.3 million worth of widgets last year…” or similar and sound smart. And that’s undoubtedly a good thing.

    Finally, when you are done, spend the time and effort to clean things up, edit for coherence, spelling and grammar (as appropriate), clean up audio passages to chop out the ums and ahs, the interruption from the cellphone call at minute 13, etc. Then send a copy of it to the interview subject simultaneous to publishing it, with your gracious thanks for their participation.

    For bonus points, you can also ask them if they have any colleagues who would enjoy being interviewed, and if so, whether they could perhaps send out a quick introduction for you. That can open doors that you might otherwise never even know are there.

    Finally finally, a quick example: my interview with Spain Dad, which came out of us connecting and me being surprised at the level of personal information he published on his blog. I think it’s an interesting interview. Do you?

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    About the author:
    Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
    internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
    Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
    startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
    seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
    is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
    programs.

    AskDaveTaylor.com
    http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

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    Posted in The Net | 4 Comments »