Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging, blogs, and companies involved with blogging.

Adsense Doesn’t Suck For Blogs. I Think? Right?

January 8, 2007 1:24 am / 5 Comments /

I love it when the blogosphere gets worked up and makes generalizations from one piece of data. In this case, that data is Guy Kawasaki’s post about his blog’s performance over the year which includes his Adsense statistics.

The discussion coming out of that post has many people saying that Adsense sucks for blogging, and that blogs and Web 2.0 companies hoping to make big money from it are in trouble.

As with most things in life, it isn’t that simple. Luckily I get to work with web publishers all day, and I have access to a lot of statistics where I can see their results from different ad networks. You can’t just come out and say it doesn’t work for blogging. That just isn’t true.

First, it depends on what your goals are. If Guy Kawasaki’s goal was only to make a few thousand dollars in the year, then Adsense didn’t suck for him. If his goal was to make 50 thousand, then yes it did. The question would then be if his goal was realistic. Adsense, and any advertising for that matter, depends largely on numerous factors that affect how much money you can make from it.

1. Audience
The quality and demographics of your audience can really affect the amount of money you earn. Is your audience valuable to advertisers? Do they react to ads? Do they click? Do they convert? Guy’s audience really is valuable for who they are, but Adsense is only based on the click, and his audience is probably too wise to click much.

2. Site Topics
Ads for products and specific industries pay much more than other products and industries. In Guy’s case, he blogs about numerous subjects and I’m not sure any of them really result in high-paying topics. It’s also harder to get targeted ad buys when your site is somewhat general. Sites that are focused and on a specific topic are often more attractive to advertisers.

3. Traffic Level
I hate generalizations, but most blogs don’t generate enough ad impressions and clicks to make a lot of money from Adsense or other ad networks. If your goals are modest, this is fine. If your goal is to get rich, you’re going to need a lot of traffic, and the blog medium just doesn’t seem built for massive traffic generation. Even the blogs at the top of the Technorati rankings aren’t really getting much traffic compared to a lot of standard web sites out there. I work with sites every day that you’ve never heard of who blow the top blogs out of the water when it comes to unique visitors and ad impressions.

4. Ad placement and ad type
There are a lot of tips and tricks that can be used to double or triple ad revenue depending on the site. Testing various ad locations, colors, sizes, and styles can lead to much better results. It doesn’t sound like Guy was doing any of this, so I’d estimate he could have at least doubled his revenue if he had.

The bottom line though is to branch out to multiple ad sources and revenue streams as Darren Rowse, John Chow, myself, and others have suggested. It’s the best way to grow revenue, and not have all your eggs in one basket.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Blogging, Publishing, Random

FeedBurner Integrates Web Analytics with RSS Analytics

January 4, 2007 11:58 am / 2 Comments /

Fred Wilson points out that FeedBurner has now completed their integration from their acquisition of BlogBeat to add web site anaytics with the RSS analytics they already provide for publishers. I’ve activated the stats for my account and will give a review of it shortly, but I was a fan of BlogBeat before FeedBurner acquired them so I anticipate liking what they provide.

The main thing to like here is that it’s a company taking a step to integrate two different types of statistics publishers are interested in together in one login/account. One thing I’ve complained about in the past is that there are numerous different types of data a publisher wants to look at to evaluate their web business. Having to login to multiple accounts all the time is rather annoying, so I applaud FeedBurner for integrating two of the different types of data I want to look at.

Posted in: Blogging, Random, Web Analytics

5 Things About Me

January 3, 2007 4:20 pm / 1 Comment /

Pete Caputa tagged me with one of the annoying yet interesting blog memes going around about letting people know 5 things they probably didn’t know about you. I usually stay away from email forward chains and the like, but since this is the first time I’ve been tagged for a blog chain I feel like I can’t resist. So here goes:

  1. I started coaching high school basketball only one year after graduating from high school myself, and did it for about 7 years until I had kids. I miss it now, but it’s not worth missing time in the evenings with my family.
  2. I’ve lived in Eugene, Oregon my whole life except for six months right after college when I worked for an internet startup in Los Angeles.
  3. I generally don’t like white sauces. By this I mean Ranch dressing, mayonnaise, cream cheese, sour cream, etc. Alfredo sauce is a notable exception.
  4. I can’t cook, at all. I once put butter on the outside of a bagel and then put it in the toaster. In my defense, I was much younger then. Luckily growing up my mom, dad, and brother all could cook really well, and my wife is an excellent cook. It probably is only a year away before my daughters can cook better than me.
  5. I started buying domain names with a buddy way back in 1995. You’d think this would make me rich many times over, unfortunately the best domain we bought was iceweb.com because all the others we were searching for were “too generic”. Yes, I kick myself on this one.

I’m tagging Cam, Travis, Marshall, Robbin, and Cale.

Posted in: Blogging, Personal, Random

Testing Different Ad Networks Helps

January 1, 2007 11:27 pm / 1 Comment /

I recently posted about setting up a website for monetization with advertising and talked quite a bit about the need to work with different ad networks or ad providers and to test which ones work the best for you.

John Chow backed up my point on his blog with a report on his December blog earnings. As he says himself:

If I had stuck with only Google AdSense, the blog would have made just $693.36 instead of $2,790.05. It is a mistake to put all your eggs in Google’s basket. You should always be on the lookout for other ways to monetize your site.

Exactly John, try out and continue to work with as many providers of advertising or other revenue streams as you can without overwhelming your visitors. Hopefully you’ll end up like John and almost quadruple your revenue.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Blogging, Publishing

More On The Success of Fast Loading Websites

November 24, 2006 2:22 pm / 1 Comment /

I covered Marissa Mayer’s talk at the Web 2.0 Summit that focused on how Google has really learned the value of speed in their web applications. It seems as if there was much more said about this topic years back when everyone was on dialup modems. However, Chris Beasley at the Website Publisher Blog talks about his quest for a quicker loading site and the positive effect it’s had on his forum registrations. He’s essentially seen a tripling of monthly registrations since doing tweaks and investing in a powerful server.

That seems extremely worthwhile. Even though many of us are on fast connections now, quicker sites are still noticeable, and I think they provide a better experience for users, maybe even at a subconscious level. It’s a good reminder to keep working at making your site as quick to load as possible. Of course this is something Fred Wilson is consciously choosing to ignore, but it’s his blog so he can deal with it as he wants. He does provide a stripped down version of his blog somewhere, but I can’t seem to find the link to it. Also, blogs can be read quickly through RSS, so it’s a little more understandable.

Regardless, I need to continue to audit RMX Direct and this blog to make sure we keep working for speed.

Posted in: Blogging, Publishing

Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit

November 14, 2006 1:02 am / 3 Comments /

After a weekend to reflect, I’ve come up with the Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit that was put on by O’Reilly and hosted by John Battelle.

1. Google likes it fast.
While the results and point of her talk wasn’t surprising, Marissa Mayer did an efficient 10 minute talk with great examples proving that the speed of a web application is one of the most important things to users, and it often has a very direct correlation to traffic and revenue.

2. Everybody is chasing Google.
Essentially every interview and session I attended featured a question along the lines of “How can you/we beat/compete with Google?”. Again, not really groundbreaking, but when you see numerous CEOs and powerful people at all the major web companies trying to answer that question without really having a great answer, it makes it all too clear that nobody knows yet how to deal with the 800-lb gorilla.

3. Jeff Bezos is on to something.
Amazon’s recent move into web services has befuddled analysts on Wall St., but after listening to the energetic Bezos talk about their new initiatives on this area you can see that it is a good opportunity for Amazon, and one they intend on dominating at. I like the move.

4. Advertising is being thrown on it’s head.
The Advertising 2.0 session, as well as other sessions and talks helped show that advertising online is far from being set in stone. Ideas are still coming from everywhere, and many large players are still not yet embracing some of the new and better ideas. Video advertising is a big opportunity that’s being attacked from many different angles, and nobody knows what the right one is yet.

5. There aren’t as many innovative startups as I thought, at least not there.
After hearing that there were over 250 companies that applied to be part of the Launchpad 13 where startups got to launch themselves with a 5-minute presentation, and after seeing who the panel of judges were, I thought we were in for an exciting set of companies. I was underwhelmed, and a bit bored by the presentations. One-quarter of them seemed useless, one-quarter of them didn’t seem very innovative, one-quarter were actually interesting and promising, and I’d read/used about one-quarter of them long ago (how is that a launch?).

6. It feels like a bubble.
It was a really nice venue, very crowded, the parties were pretty lavish, and it seemed like a lot of people were walking around hoping to get bought by the big few in the industry. Just had a bubble vibe.

7. You can hack a conference.
Recently-launched Mashery hacked the conference by booking a conference room for a party right in the middle of the action. It was cheaper than sponsoring the event, and may have gotten them more attention.

8. Basic problems still need fixing.
About 40% of talks and sessions seemed to have problems with the wireless connection, computers screwing up or crashing, or power not working. And the conference wireless connections were hit and miss all week. It’s ironic we’re all trying to build these new revolutionary web applications, when we still suffer from such basic infrastructure problems.

9. Talking to random people you don’t know is still socially awkward.
I’ve been to many business conferences, I feel confident about myself and my employer, and I feel I’m a social person. Yet, there’s still something very socially awkward having conversations with people at these events. They’re either trying to sell me something, I’m trying to sell them something, or you’re both generally not interested but still are in a situation where a conversation needs to exist. Sure, every once in a while a common ground is formed and a real conversation ensues, but it’s still pretty strange.

10. Eric Schmidt talks through an API.
Read the link for more details, but it was fascinating listening to Schmidt talk intelligently, dance around tough questions, and jab his competitors without explicitly doing so. Very well done.

Posted in: Advertising, Blogging, Conferences, Google, Web 2.0

Update From Entrepreneurs at Web 2.0 Summit

November 9, 2006 11:54 am / Leave a Comment /

This session at the Web 2.0 Summit was a visit with four entrepreneurs who launched in the last year and had involvement in the last Web 2.0 Summit.

Zimbra – Satish Dharmaraj
Launched the Zimbra Collobration Suite last year, and they started selling the suite in March. They just passed 4 million accounts.

Today they are launching the Zimbra offline AJAX client. It works just like Zimbra online, and basically sent messages just stay in the Outbox. When you get back online, you just hit the synchronization button and it syncs up and sells your email.

They are also starting to sell a white label solution. Satish gave a funny demo where they skinned and made Zimbra into an exact replica of the Gmail interface.

Zimbra raised $15 million and hasn’t really touched it. They are trying to disruptive stuff and thought it’d be necessary, but they’re doing pretty well.

Zimbra knew a bunch of developers, so it hasn’t been a big challenge.

Their biggest mistake was asking for an all or nothing on their product suite.

Veoh Networks – Dmitry Shapiro
It’s a peer to peer network, but uses the Netflix queue idea combined with an Internet Tivo. They’ve started dealing with long form high resolution video, and think it changes the way TV work.

They got a Series B round of $12 million, and are doing over 3 million unique visitors. Initially they raised $2 million in a Series A, and they haven’t used much of the Series B yet. They feel they need a warchest because this is a big opportunity and aren’t planning on a quick exit. Their business is very capital expensive.

Finding good developers has been a challenge for them.

One problem they’ve seen is knowing where to stop with features and opportunities. They get presented with many opportunities to extend their video platform and white label things, and they need to keep in control.

Wink – Michael Tanne
A social search engine that launched late last year. They feel that the web is getting more social (no kidding!), and they take user input and help turn those into relevant search results. They put an early beta out earlier in the year, and a month ago they did a major upgrade to the product to take into account all the feedback they got. They also added “collections”, which allows people to put links together that belong in the same community. He gave a nice demo of a Ramones collection.

You can also do an Advanced People Search across social networks, which is pretty cool, and also probably makes for a great stalker tool. You can search social networks for specific interests, filter by gender, filter by age, and filter by dating status.

He thinks people should start with an angel investment for a consumer web application, and see where it goes from there. They took $6 million and have only used $1 million of that.

He thought their biggest mistake was probably releasing their product too early before it was ready.

Weblogs Inc./Netscape – Jason Calacanis
It’s been a big year, they sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, and have now integrated that into AOL. He’s still running Weblogs Inc, but when he got to AOL they were wanting to do something different with Netscape.com since it had been stangnant for a few years. Jason liked what was going on with Digg, del.icio.us, and other sites like that and rolled with the Digg model with an added editorial layer and did meta-journalism.

He thinks they had a rocky start, but things are going well now. He thinks they are less susceptible to gaming, and have vastly different demographics. Digg is 94% male, and Netscape is split pretty evenly between male and female, and they have a more balanced audience. So while tech stories dominate Digg, Netscape sees a mix of general news, politics, and family stories.

To start Weblogs Inc. Jason and Brian Alvey put in their own money, and Mark Cuban then invested low six figures which they didn’t touch.

Finding developers has not been a challenge for them because Jason feels that you just need to have something they believe in, and to find them working at jobs. He said good developers have jobs, so you just need to recruit them away.

He’s felt his biggest mistake is probably six or seven blog posts he’d like to take back. He was used to a transparency and fast acting style, and many in AOL were uncomfortable with that. But they’ve found a good balance and he and other new companies in AOL like Userplane our working with the old guard to push AOL forward.

He also mentioned one problem was parallel entrepreneurs who take on too many projects or get too wide on their main project. Mark Cuban always told him “remember what got us here”, which was a reminder to focus on their profitable blogs and don’t move out into all the other opportunties that were popping up.

Posted in: Blogging, Conferences, Web 2.0

What Digg and Netscape Can Do For You In Organic Search Results

November 3, 2006 11:52 am / 9 Comments /

diggsearch.jpg
Publishers and bloggers who have had the experience of having their content “Dugg”, “Scaped”, or featured prominently on any other social news or bookmarking sites have seen the short traffic spikes that tend to occur from this experience. Many have commented that beyond those huge traffic spikes there isn’t much long term value from having your content featured, and why submit to them at all if your content isn’t going to make the front page when the traffic spike occurs?

A recent experience with organic search results and some research has caused me to believe that the long term value proposition is changing and will get even better. It also sheds some light on which social sites may grow in traffic, and which of the three major search engines indexes them the best.

The Initial Query
My parents have an ecommerce site primarily selling an ergonomic stool called the Swopper Chair. I provide some technical consulting for them and I needed to look up some PHP shopping carts. So I did a Google search for “best php shopping cart”.

I started reading through the results, and noticed the result from Digg half way down. Knowing what Digg is, I figured it’d be a good recommendation and probably have some comments and additional links that might help me out. I read through the comments and ended up clicking through to both the Dugg URL and some of the URLs in the comments.

This made me wonder if there is potential for organic search results for social news and bookmarking sites to drive long tail traffic to your site, maybe even if your article never got many votes and never made the front page of the site.

The Tests
It was time to start picking some search queries and see what kind of results appear from social sites and what about those sites makes that happen. I’ll link to the query along with what social sites have results and where the original article ends up in the results.

Test 1: john battelle keynote

This was a search term from the post I made from John Battelle’s keynote at the Blog Business Summit last week that did not get many votes on the social sites, and got a few links to my post from the blogosphere.

Google:

  • 5th – Netscape
  • 7th – Digg
  • 11th – ConversionRater (my post)

The result of that is if I hadn’t submitted my article to Netscape and Digg I’d have no chance of getting any visitors who didn’t pass the first results page. Of course, the visitor has to click through Netscape/Digg to get to my actual article, but the chances of that are decent based on how those sites are structured.

Yahoo Search:

  • 3rd – ConversionRater

No results from the social sites. Either Yahoo doesn’t index them well, or index them quick enough.

MSN Live Search:

  • 10th – ConversionRater
  • 13th – Netscape

Interesting that Digg was not here at all when Netscape was listed.

Summary: Google provided the best and the most beneficial results for using social news to get higher rankings for an article than I could get on my own without submitting it.

Test 2: yahoo invests

This term is from the title of a more popular article than our first test. This one is from SmartMoney.com to the tune of 137 Diggs that was on the Business and Finance front section on Digg, and I also made a blog post with the same phrase in the title.

Google:

  • 3rd – Digg
  • 5th – Searchmob (A Digg like site from John Battelle about the search industry)
  • 6th – SmartMoney.com Article (Actual article that was Dugg)
  • 7th – ConversionRater blog post

Solid results, and the presence of social sites and linking between them and my blog post allowed this one story to take 7 of the top 10 search results, even though Yahoo has invested in many, many things over the years. This provides a lesson that sites like Digg hold a huge page rank and authority now that it ranks higher than most media outlet sites that have reported on Yahoo investing in various things.

Yahoo Search:

  • 17th – ConversionRater blog post
  • 21st – SearchMob
  • 23rd – DuggMirror (site that mirrors popular articles on Digg)

So where the heck is Digg? They haven’t been on either test so far. Does Yahoo not index Digg? Now that Searchmob has shown up on two engines, maybe it’s an important site to add to the submission mix even though it’s not as well known as others. This is the only story I’ve ever submitted there, so that looks promising. Yahoo also had much more varying results instead of just the Right Media investment story, so perhaps Google’s top results are more time-sensitive.

MSN Live Search:

  • 2nd – ConversionRater blog post
  • 11th – SmartMoney.com article that was Dugg heavily
  • 17th – Digg
  • 19th – SearchMob

Live Search likes my blog the best which is great, but also interesting to see SearchMob popping up again in the top 20.

Summary: Google’s results make Digg and Searchmob look especially important to get higher rankings. It doesn’t look like social sites matter to Yahoo, and MSN results are mixed.

Test 3: toyota logo

A few weeks ago my friend Mike Rundle had a little run in with Toyota based on a company working for them taking the 9rules leaf logo and barely changing it for a site they were running. I figured this search query might be a bit harder to rank high on, so it’d be interesting to see if the social networks helped out.

Google:

  • 6th – BusinessLogs.com original post
  • 10th – Digg
  • 11th – Netscape
  • 20th – Reddit

Not bad, but the social sites might not help all that much as the original post would probably get clicked on more. It is interesting to see our first sighting of Reddit.

Yahoo Search: No results

Ugh, Yahoo hates social sites and blogs!

MSN Live Search:

  • 4th – Digg
  • 8th – BusinessLogs Original Post

The Digg listing is a big help here at potentially getting more search traffic.

Summary of Tests
Even though it was a pretty quick test, and the search terms I tested aren’t that competitive, it’s clear that submitting your site to the social news services can help drive more traffic to your site through organic search.

I think we can also see that Google seems to embrace fresh content and the social news sites more than Yahoo and MSN, and Yahoo definitely isn’t a big fan. This is probably not a big deal as most publishers are primarily concerned with Google traffic anyway.

What does this tell us about the social sites?
Digg and Netscape were definitely the most commonly found sites, and I ran some more additional quick tests and found that Netscape seems to also show up ahead of Digg in many cases. I had an extremely hard time finding Reddit or del.icio.us in any results. Why is this? Let’s take a look at why each of these sites may or may not rank highly:

Digg:

  • Lots of link popularity and authority. 8/10 Google Page Rank (if that means anything).
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • Article title in an h3 tag.
  • Uses title in search-friendly URL.
  • Community comments make the page have more text and makes the Digg listing page like an article itself. It can provide more keywords and variety.
  • They provide incentive to blog about their stories (and thus get more link popularity) by listing the Digg users who blogged about the story with a link back to their blog.
  • There are sites like Duggmirror and blogs that basically just republish Digg listings and content so it drives more links.

Netscape:

  • Even more link popularity than Digg, but this is a benefit of Netscape.com’s long time place on the web. 9/10 in Google page rank. This could account for why Netscape sometimes comes up ahead of Digg for the same stories.
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • Article title in an h3 tag.
  • Uses title in search-friendly URL.
  • Community comments make the page have more text, but usually not as many comments as Digg.
  • Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
  • Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.

Reddit:

  • Decent link popularity at 7/10 Page Rank, but not as good as Digg and Netscape.
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • No header tag around article title (ouch).
  • Does not use the article title in the URL.
  • Community comments make the page have more text.
  • Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
  • Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.

del.icio.us:

  • Link popularity is good and similar to Digg at 8/10 Page Rank.
  • Does not use title of the article as the title of the page.
  • Uses h4 tag for article headline.
  • Does not use the title of the article in the URL.
  • Instead of it really being comments and a discussion, users leave notes about the bookmark. They are usually very similar notes.
  • No incentive to blog the stories.
  • I’ve actually heard before that del.icio.us blocks search engines from indexing it with their robots.txt file. I haven’t researched if that’s true, but judging from how they have their bookmark pages set up it does not appear that they are trying to get good organic search results. I did find their tag pages listed in some search results however.

Searchmob:

  • Low link popularity, currently showing a 0/10 in Page Rank. The root domain of battellemedia.com does have an 8/10 though, so that probably carries over.
  • Uses title of article in the page title well.
  • Article title in an h4 tag.
  • Uses title in search-friendly URL.
  • There is the potential for comments, but since it gets less traffic there aren’t many comments.
  • It does take trackbacks which can encourage blogging the stories. Didn’t look too common though.

Social Site Summary
Based on looking at how they have set things up, Digg and Netscape are positioned the best to continue to grow from organic search results. This will be a key to break out of the tech audience and into the mainstream web userbase. If users find Digg through Google results they may be inclined to stick around. Also, as publishers learn about the value they can get from having their articles submitted to these sites, Digg and Netscape will get more submissions while other sites won’t.

It seems to me like Reddit and del.icio.us are missing the boat here and not doing some very easy things they could do in order to get their pages show up more in organic search. Do they not want traffic?

Posted in: Blogging, Google, Microsoft, Publishing, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Yahoo

John Battelle Keynote at Blog Business Summit

October 27, 2006 1:48 pm / Leave a Comment /

battellegif.jpg FM Publishing and Searchblog’s John Battelle was the keynote today at Blog Business Summit.

Battelle led off with a bang by saying he missed yesterday at the event but read the blog coverage, and so everyone should “turn off their fucking cellphones”. A funny reference as many phones seemed to go off during speakers throughout the day.

He went into a background of himself through Wired, Hotwired (where he was then offered the Editor in chief job at Yahoo which he turned down thinking portals were stupid), and then moved on to starting the Industry Standard. TheStandard.com spent $16 million to get to the point of 500,000 visitors a month, which they were very proud of. Hotwired was also where the first banner ad was supposedly born as they chose to take the idea of the constant ad on Prodigy at the bottom of the screen and turn it into a banner ad.

The Industry Standard was going great until the boom in 2000 hit, and he was out of a job as the company that owned his company put him out of a job.

It was back to Berkeley to start teaching journalism, and he started Searchblog in 2003 because he wanted to publish as a professor and he was fascinated by search, and he started working on the book The Search.

Battelle also got interested in the newer companies that were forming that were different and started the Web 2.0 Conference with Tim O’Reilly. Shortly thereafter, BoingBoing called him with a problem that their $500 hosting bill was too much and they needed to do advertising. Battelle asked how many visitors they had, and the reply was 500,000. He noticed that obviously a huge shift had occurred when it took TheStandard.com $16 million to achieve that, and it now was costing BoingBoing $500.

He thinks the shift that occurred was basically that the back office got digitized, then the front office got digitized, and the shift was that the users/customers were now digitized. Search had now become the new interface or navigational device to our computers.

Next on the list was a discussion of Web 2.0 principles:

  • The web is a platform
  • The architecture of participation
  • Lightweight business models
  • Innovation in assembly
  • The long tail

And then Web 2.0 search principles:

  • The driver of Web 2.0 businesses
  • Our culture’s point of inquiry, the spade with which we turn the web’s soil, artifact of a new culture.
  • A new reality for all forms of traditional businesses

Battelle then spoke to how amazing seach is for it’s ability to keep our search history forever, and the implications of it. Who owns our search history? Who owns our search data? Can we give our search history for our grandkid?

The next point was that search rules for marketers is because it has the cheapest average customer acquisition cost of any advertising medium. As users we declare our intent into a little box, and then search forms the world around us for what we want to see. Traditional advertising means trying to find the audience where they are consuming content, and try and gain their attention from it.

Search also drives people to social media sites, because that’s where conversations are occurring and new content is being created and aggregated. In traditional media attention is controlled by distributors, and now it’s controlled by consumers. There are new centers of attention, and content is king with landing place as queen. “All businesses must join the Point-to Economy (links = votes = attention)”.

The promise of the web is the ability to know what your customer wants, or to invite them to tell you. This requires a new set of skills, new tools, new thinking about media buying, and venturing away from the comfortable.

Next up was the idea that marketing has evolved into the architecture of participation. So this led into showing a case study of their first participation advertising done at Federated Media. They ran a campaign for Lenovo that invited users to vote. Lenovo was a bit uncomfortable, but they got over 200,000 votes in the campaign.

Another example was that Microsoft ran a campaign on WiFiNet News, and the initial creatives for the campaign were kind of irrelevant. Glenn Fleishman at WiFiNet News suggested that they change the creatives to talk about the Office wireless features. Microsoft’s agency worked with Glenn to write the copy for the creatives and it got a 60% improvement on click-through rate. A step in the rate direction for having the publishers participate with the advertising.

He followed up with a couple of more examples, and then went into FM’s business model of FM bundling quality sites together, selling them individually and as groups, and promoting conversations between the advertisers and publishers. They feel their key business value is their relationship with their publishers, and the value they create through their work. They focus on quality and engagement.

An interesting talk overall on the history of Battelle’s career and what they are trying to accomplish at FM.

Posted in: Advertising, Blogging, Conferences, Publishing, Web 2.0

Fifteen Ways to a Killer Blog With the Scobles

October 27, 2006 10:17 am / 16 Comments /

Robert Scoble and Maryam ScobleIt’s day three at the Blog Business Summit and time for Fifteen Ways to a Killer Blog with Robert Scoble and Maryam Scoble.

I’ll recap the Fifteen Ways here with some comments mixed in:

1. Blog because you want to
Robert pushed Maryam to blog for quite a while and she resisted because she felt she wasn’t a geek. She didn’t start blogging until she really wanted to, and now Robert complains about what she blogs about. She compared it to a parent who can’t wait for their baby to start talking, and then when they’re a kid chatting away they want them to be quiet.

Robert said if he didn’t want to be writing about what he does, he wouldn’t be able to stay up until 2 am writing posts and interacting with his audience. “If I was doing it for $20 a post without an interest in my subject I couldn’t do it.”

2. Read other blogs
Find the blogs you like and read them for inspiration. Those blogs also will be the ones you’re most likely to build link relationships with.

Maryam: “Another reason I started blogging is because I’d go to conferences or meet people and they’d tell me they’d want to read my blog, and I enjoyed reading theirs so it made sense to start my own.”

Robert suggested becoming an authority in the subjects and blogs you like to read about. He’d read blogs about Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and then link to all those blogs.

3. Pick a niche you can own (be different)
Robert said “It’s a Google world”. He noticed that while he was in Montana meeting with a lot of non-geek people that people used the computers by just using the search field to interact with the computer. Matt Cutts told him that one of Google’s most popular search terms is “Yahoo”. And the same situation is true that one of Yahoo’s top search terms is “Google”.

What this means to Robert is that mainstream users are finding sites through search, and by focusing on a niche you can gain traction in search engines to get traffic. He used the example of a user who has broken pipes in Seattle coming to Google and typing in “seattle plumbing”. If you can blog often about plumbing in Seattle you’d very likely be the top search results.

An audience member pointed out to Robert that his blog is in a very difficult niche being that it’s about technology where there are many early adopter models. But Robert responded giving TechCrunch as an example that is a newer blog that focused on a part of that niche (startups, Web 2.0 companies) and basically has rocketed to the top of the tech blog world as a whole.

Maryam gave an example of a woman she met at BlogHer that was writing a blog about the London Underground. Maryam considered that a pretty boring topic at the time, but when the London Underground bombing happened this blogger rose in popularity and became an authority. Maryam continues to read her blog as it’s actually very interesting talking about “London Underground fashion victims”, interesting stories, and things along those lines.

4. Link to other blogs
Robert led this off talking about Apple having some problems, and Robert using linking to get their attention by linking to them and them seeing it in their referrer logs.

Maryam pointed out that bloggers are generally egotistical, so they look at their referrer list and see who’s writing about them. If you want to get a blogger’s attention and potentially get a link, write about them and they’ll notice it.

Dave Taylor of AskDaveTaylor.com asked if he could pin Robert down. He mentioned how Jason Calacanis talked about that people can become an A-list blogger if they want and have some talent, and how if you’re not on it you suck. Dave asked Robert if there is an A-list, and Robert said there was, and that it’s okay because anyone can get on it if they have interesting things to say. It led to a mini-discussion where people debated if someone can get on the A-list being a one-hit wonder. Finally another audience member pointed out that the A-list doesn’t matter if your blog is near the top of your topic. Robert agreed and pointed out that a plumber doesn’t want to be on the technology A-list blogosophere, he wants to be #1 in the plumbing blogosphere.

5. Admit mistakes
Maryam led off with saying one of the reasons she didn’t want to start blogging was because of the negative comments or abuse Robert received on his blog if he made a mistake. Like in real life, admitting that you made a mistake is the best way out of it.

Robert appreciates it when bloggers admit mistakes, apologize, and change their behavior.

6. Write good headlines
Robert said he sees things changing a bit in our behavior in reading blogs. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of wine blog feeds, he is now subscribing to a Technorati feed for wine and reading the headlines for posts that are interesting regardless of what blog it’s on.

The headline should be interesting to catch people’s eyes so they want to read it, and if they include keywords that their users might be searching for it can obviously help your posts show up in search results.

7. Use other media
Robert said one aspect of TechCrunch that helped Arrington succeed was using logos and images in each post. Robert posts mainly text, and he wished he spent more time. Robert said he thinks bloggers who use audio, video, and pictures can help improve their blogs and rise in prominence. It can be an advantage over competitive blogs.

An audience member pointed out a study that people read 30% slower online than offline, and if you add pictures it actually allows people to read faster and keep them engaged. Halley Suitt pointed out Busblog.com and their great use of pictures of sexy women in the blog, even though the pictures don’t have anything to do with the post.

8. Have a voice
Robert tries to write just how he’d talk. He imagines that he’s just talking to his wife or a geek friend.

9. Get outside the blogosphere
Go to parties, conferences, events, and get out and talk to people. Make relationships with other bloggers, meet them face to face, and you’ll be much more likely to get links and readers. Robert said this was how the first A-list was really formed, by a group of bloggers who all became friends and linked to each other after meeting at parties and conferences.

Robert said that this is where PR people go wrong, they just try to email him pitches for products. But he met Stuart Butterfield of Flickr in the hallway at a conference when Flickr was just starting and he wrote about Flickr after meeting Stuart and checking it out.

10. Market yourself
Don’t be afraid to promote yourself and your blog. Maryam told a funny story of when her blog was mentioned as one of MSN’s top blogs and was featured on the MSN home page. She went to Robert and told him she had 40,000 visits that day, and Robert deadpanned and said “That’s because I linked to you.”

Robert mentioned how he often looks at business cards after conferences and meetings and noticed many bloggers don’t even include their URLs on their business cards. He was the first Microsoft employee to put his blog URL on his business cards. He said that alone caused conversations within employees there and got his blog more readers. It’s small little touches like that which can make a difference over time. An audience member pointed out that many companies have their main website URL on all their materials, but never their blog. Many companies get a lot of referrers back and forth between their blog and website, so why not promote both?

An audience member mentioned that advertising wasn’t mentioned as one of the tips, and Robert pointed out that for most bloggers advertising through Adwords or other means may not be profitable for bloggers. Personally I think this depends on how the blogger is monetizing their blog. If they are using the blog to sell products or services, it can make sense. If they’re relying on advertising or not menetizing at all, then spending money on advertising is probably a losing proposition.

11. Write well
Use spellchecking and proof your post before actually publishing it. Make sure your thoughts make sense. An audience member said writing well is hard for some people, so at their company they suggest that if people struggle with writing that they do a linkblog, photoblog, or videoblog to still get some thoughts out and publish. Robert also pointed out a crazy idea that people could try and get educational help on becoming a better writer by taking a class, reading books about writing, and working at improving.

12. Expose yourself
Don’t just write a safe blog. Blogs that read like press releases aren’t engaging or interesting. Spice it up by showing some personality and maybe a little bit of your personal life. Robert said if a few posts out of 100 are about your interests, it lets your readers get to know you without boring them as well. Move the needle towards the “interesting” over the “safe”.

13. Help other people blog
Robert pointed out that Dave Winer has helped a lot of people learn to blog, and that’s come back to him by getting more links and relationships with bloggers.

14. Engage with commenters
Participating in conversations on other blogs grows your reputation and can get people clicking on your link to come back to your blog to read more of what you have to say. Additionally, I’d add that you should engage with people commenting on your own blog as well.

15. Keep your integrity
Dave Winer told Robert to keep his integrity when he started blogging, and he didn’t know what he really meant at the time. Now he realizes it’s really about disclosure and treating people well. If you take free products to review them, disclose it. If your blog has a commercial focus or motive, disclose it and be honest about it. There are lots of examples of things like the Wal-Mart/Edelman incident when pretending you’re something else is dangerous.

Robert said he has his phone number on his blog so that people can call him for opportunities or to ask questions. He said he probably gets 4 calls a day, and the majority of the time it’s a good reason. He’s gotten on TV in the BBC because his phone number was there and the PR firm’s phone number wasn’t easy to find. Extreme Home Makeover also got a hold of him on a Saturday while he was playing mini-golf saying they were doing a house in his area and they needed to get computers by Monday but couldn’t get a hold of anyone, and to see if Robert can make it happen. He made it happen and got some good PR for the company out of it.

Posted in: Blogging, Conferences, Publishing