Successful Blogs

ORDINARY DAYS

This is the first of my blog reviews, requested from BLOGGST

I like the title - “Ordinary Days”. It’s a shame that ordinarydays.blogspot… and ordinary-days.blogspot… are both already taken.

The header. As you wrote in your post on Bloggst, it’s tricky trying to get it right. On a standard IE6 browser, at 1024 X 768, it’s extending to below half way down the visible screen area. For me, this is too much. A header is a good thing, helping to bring people into your blog, but content is king, and the content starts too low down.

And the header is so messy! You have the check background, the white background to the photo, the light yellow background to the text, and a different background (custard colour?) to the subtitle. I would recommend trying to use just one background. The check is distracting.

The ancillary text (dates, latest posts, etc) is a sort of light blue, which doesn’t stand out enough on the green background. The main content text is a dark grey (?) on the green, and it doesn’t stand out enough either. The font is TNR, I think, which is not a good screen-reading font. Tahoma or Verdana are amongst the best. While you’re at it, I’d increase the font size a tad too. The paragraphs look like big blocks of grey text, and doesn’t entice the browser in to read it.

Where you have bulleted lists, I’d separate the sections by a small space (an extra hard return would do it). Try to keep your paragraph size down.You only have a very few seconds to make your reader actually read what you’ve written, and that first glance needs to reassure him/her that it’s going to be an easy read, and not be a trial.

The Adsense block is too far down the page, and may well be glossed over by your visitors. I’d leave the “Addthis” button where it is, but move all that other stuff down the page, and move the Adsense block up. If you’re not bothered about earning money from it, why have it on at all? If you’re going to have it on, change the clicky link colour - dark green on light greeen doesn’t go at all. You visitor needs to be clear about what the links are. They’re not going to struggle to read the text if it’s in the wrong colours.

Finally, the Blogrolling thing is not very nice - you have too many links in it, and the scroll bars look messy. I’d use the standard blogroll that comes with Blogger.

Sorry if it seems like I’ve been over-critical. I have a bit of a ‘thing’ about blog design.

Your writing style is fine, and I personally like the chatty style. It’s great to be able to record your family’s history like this, isn’t it?

Recently, Movable Type (corporate blogging platform of choice for ’sensible people’) announced that it would be moving it to Open Source.

So, why move a successful commercial platform to Open Source? As they say:

Why now?
We felt the perfect time was with the introduction of Movable Type 4, which is the culmination of more person years of development than any other release of Movable Type as well as the future of the Movable Type platform.

So, that’s all right then. I thought it might be because the truly Open Source blog platform Wordpress was and is so phenomenally successful, SixApart were losing business. Desperate tactics? Apparently not.

I love the psychology of the internet, especially marketing of products.

Almost daily, it seems, we’re being treated to the outpourings of probably the best marketing team in the business - that of Apple. Their latest high-profile launch, that of the iPhone, is creating a huge buzz.

Check this article

So why is this? Is it a fantastic, ground-breaking device? Well, the answer has to be no. It’s a phone, it has PDA facilities, it has a camera, it can play tunes - pretty much like most of the mobile phones and PDAs around these days. What sets it apart is that little i. It seems almost anything that features a lower case i followed by an upper case letter - iBook, iTunes, iPod, and now iPhone - is instantly the must-have gadget of the year. Even if you didn’t know you wanted it, the fact that everyone else seems to want it is enough to have you reaching for your credit card.

So, it’s not about the technical abilities, clever though it may be. It has some cute features, but they’ve all been seen before in some form or another. It has the lovely Apple style, with it’s shiny case and curvy corners - see it :: here ::

What Apple have done is create a uber-brand - something Graham Jones has alluded to in an article about Starbucks.

What they wanted was to make people addicted to Starbucks, not necessarily to coffee. The idea was that Starbucks would become the third most important place for people in their daily lives, behind home and the office. In order to do that, Starbucks had to offer something other than coffee.

Instrumental in this process was the choice of tables; they are always round, never square. Round tables help people socialise more easily. Plus they invented words to create their own “culture” - such as “frappucino”. What this did was make people feel part of a special community.

Read more :: here ::

How does it apply to blogs? Well, as Graham says,

That’s precisely what good web sites do - they allow people to socialise and connect with each other, or feel part of a special community. If your sales web site doesn’t achieve either of these things, then you are “just another” shop amongst the millions of others.

We, like many of our UK friends, have unlimited broadband. I’ve been out of reach of this connection for the past few days, and I’ve used the time wisely to read up on developments in internet and online marketing technology. I’ve read newspapers, printed-out articles, and books. And, do you know, it’s actually quite an exciting time we live in.

The book I’ve been reading mostly is Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, which not only describes the phenomenon, but also how the major online marketers are defining it and using it to increase their revenue whilst decreasing their costs. There is a move (as if you didn’t know this) away from huge warehouses stocking things to huge servers stocking digital representations of things, which take up a fraction of the physical space of the original thing, and which can replicate the things from one copy, at will, whenever a customer orders one.

One of the examples oft-quoted in the book is Amazon. Their purchase of BookSurge in mid-2005 supplemented their already growing print-on-demand capability. Now, when you receive your book from Amazon, you’re not aware whether it is an original print copy or a print-on-demand copy (although some will say you can still tell if you look hard enough).

The work is being repeated by DVD sellers, moving away from storing boxes of ‘who knows if they will sell’ DVDs, to one copy sitting on a hard disk somewhere, ready to be burned at a days’ notice.

This same has been in existence for some time in music sales. For too long, the industry fought the desire from you and me, the customer, to be able to download the tracks we wanted when we wanted them. Peer-to-peer sharing grew out of this desire, when the capability presented itself, and it is only relatively recently that music downloads have become legitimate. Perhaps the most successful to date is iTunes, who have hundreds of thousands of tracks available to download. Imagine a record store with that much inventory!

The rise in popularity and legitimisation of downloads has left the poor old UK ISP (Internet Service Provider) behind. You can still sign up for a 1Gb (1 gigabyte, or 1,000 megabyte) per month limited download service. The providers helpfully offer the equivalent in emails or music tracks downloaded, and their generosity seems unbounded. “I never receive that many emails in a month, nor do I do any music downloads, so this is the one for me.”

Now just hold on a minute. Have you never received an email with a link from a friend: “I found this great video clip on YouTube – you must see it”. Click. Ten megabytes later, you reply to your friend: “Brilliant. Have you got any more like that?”

Next day, the reply comes: “Here’s a few links to some more, but you can search for what you like. Google videos have some too.” Click. Click. Click. Your son wants to downloads some additions for his games console. Click. Your daughter wants to download some free tracks that her friend’s recommended. Click. Click. Click.

An online community I frequent have a forum. Nothing special about it, just a load of online acquaintances swapping stories and advice. But every time I reload one of the pages, it downloads around 250k of images – of borders, graphic links, advertising panels, header blocks, and forum images. 4 pages is a megabyte. Catching up with 1 days’ posts, with a few replies of my own, can require around 30 page loads, which is 7.5MB. A month of this daily usage results in downloads of a quarter of a gigabyte per month. This is one person, one forum.

If you and your family take advantage of some of the other multimedia resources, you could be looking at downloads of over 3-4GB per month.

I’m on an unlimited connection, so that’s good, eh?

No.

Each unlimited broadband connection comes with a RUP (Reasonable Use Policy). In it, it reserves the right to take you off your premium connection and place you on a ‘high usage’ connection, should you be shown to be excessively downloading. Sometimes they will quote figures, sometimes not. This ‘high usage’ connection increases the contention ratio (basically, the number of users sharing your connection to the internet), and puts you with other ‘high usage’ users. The end result is that your download speed decreases, and the response time (the time between you requesting a webpage, and it actually being delivered to your computer) increases, and your satisfaction with the internet plummets.

So, I’ve been reading exciting things about news aggregation (piping text, image, graphics and video) into a newspage, and offering hyperlinks to other, relevant resources. I’ve been reading about video-on-demand, selecting the video you want to see today. I’ve been reading about an exciting world, where computer, TV and hi-fi equipment become integrated into one multimedia unit, and everything is available via your internet connection.

As long as your ISP allows you, that is.

As a blogger, it’s sometimes interesting to look a little beyond the blogosphere. After all, we need to interact with real people, who have other, real-world influences on them. Understanding how other marketers approach the problem of marketing to real people can give real insight.

I subscribe to the Monday Morning Memo. It is written by a guru of selling and marketing, Roy H. Williams. Here are some of his “10 ways Retail is Changing”, and how they relate to blogging.

3. A large in-store selection can be counterproductive – successful stores only stock those items which represent the best value for money. They may offer just one vacuum cleaner, but it’s the one that everyone is buying.
Ensure your blog is focussed. Visitors don’t want to hunt for an essential post on blog design through a sea of TV program reviews and celebrity gossip. And returning visitors want to know what to expect when they come back to you.

6. Hype doesn’t sell anymore – people are no longer naiïve.
Web users are not happy to stare at flashing adverts, popups, and interminable testimonials from “Mrs. J. F. of Halifax.” Bright colours, bright backgrounds, and bright colours on bright backgrounds have all passed their sell-by date.

7. Attention spans are shrinking – too much to do, too little time.
You need to get your message across, and fast. Bullet points, well thought out titles, easy-to-read text – hit them with your message quickly, and hit them hard.

8. Clarity is more important than creativity – the most effective ads are short and clear.
The idea of a blog is to convey information, not to impress with quality of design. Your viewer needs to understand your message.

10. Speed is essential – customers don’t complain when you waste their time. They just don’t come back.
That says it all for me.

Another article I read in “What no one tells you about Blogging and Podcasting” concerns the use of blogs to aid marketing.

David Meerman Scott, author of “Cashing in with Content”, and owner of WebInkNow, discovered how a blog can aid your business first hand. He wrote a short e-book entitled “The New Rules of PR”, and made it available for download from his website. He received moderate traffic – 4 or 5 bloggers linked to him, and had around 2,000 downloads. On the 4th day, popular blogger Seth Godin linked to him, and David received an additional 8,000 downloads of the e-book. Two days later, another popular blogger, Steve Rubel, linked to him with slightly negative comments.

David recalls:

“Suddenly, there was a controversy, and a fat, loud conversation going on.”

In the next month, David had 50,000 downloads of his e-book, and six months after the e-book’s release, 75,000 people had downloaded it. He booked 10 paid speaking engagements, got new consulting clients, and saw an increase in the sales of his earlier printed books.

So, what do we learn from this? Blogging can create a business, or improve your existing business. Blogging is cheap (or free), and anyone can do it. So, everyone can start a blog which will enrich their lives and create additional income, right?

Wrong.

Blogging is easy to start, blog software is easy to use, and the use of pre-existing templates can create an impressive, attractive website, that people will flock to and read and make you money and … and … and

Those of us in blogging seriously know that is not quite true. Making a commercial success from a weblog is actually hard work. It’s all about marketing, and being a salesman. A blog is a product, much like any other, and unlike the “leading a horse to water …” saying, the hard part is finding the horse, and encouraging him to your water. The horse will drink when it gets there, but how much it drinks, and whether it comes back another time when you have fresh water, is all down to the quality of the water.

Okay, enough of the metaphors. I think you get the idea. It’s all about marketing.

One of my favourite programs on TV is “Dragon’s Den”. If you’ve not seen it before, there is a panel of 5 very successful businessmen / business woman, all millionaires in their own right, who see a procession of business ideas paraded in front of them, and the idea is that the new entrepreneur tries to entice the panel to invest in his / her project. It’s entertaining, it’s enlightening, it’s interesting, and sometimes it’s just a little bit cruel.

There are truly some ingenious ideas on that program, and some fascinating opportunities. The key issue, time after time, is how the idea is being, and will be, marketed. The best despairing look from the panel is reserved for the hapless individuals whose sole idea for marketing is the creation of a website. Heads fall into hands, glances get exchanged, sighs are exhaled. Because the experts know that, although some form of web presence is essential for any modern business, it is not enough to simply create a website (or a weblog, for that matter), and expect the world to beat a path to your door. No matter how attractive and efficient that website is.

The key to a successful business is marketing, and if you don’t understand that first principle, then your blog won’t be financially viable.

I, like you too, probably, have several blogs I read regularly. These tend to be blogs on blogging, in all its aspects. Of course, Darren Rouse at Problogger, Brian Clark at Copyblogger, and Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips are up there for me, and I’m sure you have your favourites too.

You can add to this the few blogging forums that are around. Lars-Christian Simonson at Bloggst is my favourite, since I was there nearly at the start. I sometimes also visit Webmaster World, where they have forums on all aspects of blogging, design, monetization, et al. Bloggertalk sometimes has some useful stuff.

So, to summarise, there’s loads and loads of advice out there, on everything from blog design, blog promotion, blog monetization, blog this, blog that, blog the other. So, what’s the point?

I mean, what’s the point in me starting yet another blog about blogging. What have I got to say that’s new, exciting, life-enhancing? More to the point, have I got anything that anyone wants to read? Much more to the point, how the hell am I going to earn money at this thing? Come on now, bloggers, how many of you click on Adsense ads that have the word “blog” in their title? I’m afraid I very rarely do.

So why should I write this blog, A Blog about Blogging, when there’s hundreds, nay, thousands, already out there, already producing great articles, bringing in revenue for their owners / authors?

Actually, it’s quite simple. I write it because I want to write it. I write it, because I think I have something different to say. It’s only been a very few weeks since I started this lark, and it’s going OK. I have some readers, I have some comments, I have a few cents in my account. Everybody says “stick at it, building a reader base takes time; it will happen eventually.”

Will it?

Can yet another blog on blogging cut it in the cut-throat world of providing resources and advice to other bloggers? Should I just regurgitate great stuff from other bloggers … “A. Blogger has some great advice over on …. clicky link“. It might get me some link love. It might get me some comments. But I just don’t think I can do it.

So, here I am, writing my Blog about Blogging, and you know what? You’re reading it. And that’s good enough for me.

At the moment, much of my weekend is spent out of touch of the internet. I find this both frustrating and enlightening, because I have chance to read print books, instead of poring over websites and forums, looking for new ideas for content.

For instance, I’m currently reading “What no one tells you about Blogging and Podcasting”, edited by Ted Demopoulos, and there are some nuggets of information in that book I’d like to share.

Ron McDaniel, CEO of Buzzoodle, says:

“Unless you are a big celebrity, a blog does not get you buzz right out of the gate. It can take months of blogging several times a week before you get an audience big enough to matter.”

He goes on to say:

“My dirty little secret is that I have only been blogging since 2005, and I was a tech person when I started. Now I am an internationally-recognised word-of-mouth and buzz marketing expert. All thanks to the blog.”

Once more, we have evidence that a weblog can not only help to support marketing, and business in general, it can create a business for a successful blogger. Of course, not every blog which is created can create thousands of dollars for the owner, and for every successful blog, there must be hundreds that don’t become successful. Sometimes, the blogger is happy writing and publishing their own work, and creating any revenue is a secondary issue. Indeed, there are bloggers around (e.g. Diamondgeezer) who make strenuous efforts not to make any money from their blogging.

To be a financially successful blogger, you need some ability to write. Non-fiction writing techniques can be learned, but the blogger must enjoy creating words from nothing; making interesting, worthy content is not an easy thing to do. You must read, read, read.

A few years ago, when I was trying to break into the fiction world, I read a lot of advice on how to write fiction. My genre was crime fiction of many types, and I have written something in excess of a quarter of a million words over a 3-year period, and much of the advice I read was to read as much as possible, to learn how the professionals do it, and to adapt your own techniques to emulate their success.

So it is with writing non-fiction. There is an optimum size for a non-fiction article, which will vary with the medium it is being presented in. There are techniques in presentation, and in writing style, which will help the reader absorb what you are trying to say, and make the process more enjoyable. This, in turn, will ensure that reader will come back to read more of what you write.

I’ve been surfing around for information. I’ve read Darren Rowse’s Adsense tips, and also downloaded the free report from Adsense Secrets. They both offer good sensible advice on how to get the best out of Adsense. I have also read the 15 simple Adsense tips.

Yesterday, I had some fun!

First of all, I checked by server stats (something I don’t do often enough - I think bloggers should invent a 30 hour day or something ), and I found that 21 of my top 25 search keywords, and 8 of the top 10 search keyphrases, were all motorhome-related. The Motorhome blog is one of the Multi-user blogs I have installed on the main Successful Blogs domain.

Seeing that one particular model of motorhome (bought recently by JayKay from Jamiroquoi) was on top of the list, I searched Google for that phrase. I was top! Top of Google! Me! I even beat the manufacturer’s website And yes, I did take a screenshot

I then did a little work on the motorhome blog, posting something new, changing the ads from a small box to a skyscraper format, and pushed it right up under the banner (more of the ads ‘above the fold’). Within an hour, I got my first paying click from that site.

I know, I know, small beer, no great shakes, one measly click. But considering I’d done nothing with it, other than creating it and posting some award results, I was really pleased. In fact, I was cock-a-hoop.

Onwards and upwards.

Over at Problogger, Darren Rowse has a group writing project / competition, with a prize and everything! All entrants will have links featured on his weblog, and have a chance of winning the top prize.

I’m all for prevarication. In fact, I’m a bit of an expert in it, although this post temporarily disproves that fact. So here they are, the top 5 reasons for not posting to your blog:

1. Not enough time
This is a strange one, because we’re both time rich and time poor in our civilised western society. We’re working longer and harder than ever before in our 9-to-5, especially here in the UK (although certain po-faced ex-ministers don’t seem to think so), but we also seem to be enjoying more ‘free’ time than ever – witness the increased number of purchases of overseas homes, and the increased takeup of leisure activities. So how much do you want to make a success of your blog? The web is littered with the detritus of ex-blogs whose owners didn’t have enough time to update it regularly.

2. Can’t think of anything to write about
Poppycock. These days, we are inundated with feeds, both structured and unstructured, which regularly assault our eyes and eardrums. Podcasts, rolling news, traditional print publications, radio – there are more sources of interesting or contentious issues than you can shake a stick at. And if you’re really, really desperate for a blog topic – try writing about what you had for dinner.

3. No one wants to read it
Well, I will. Probably. As long as you get your marketing right, which means commenting on other blogs, participating in online forums and bulletin boards, registering with social networking sites, people will read your blog. People read mine, and it’s pretty rubbish, so I’m sure they’ll read yours.

4. I’m waiting until I get the post just right
Ever heard of the 80% rule? No? What about The Pareto Principle? Well, they’re much the same thing, and when it relates to blogs, you should spend your time perfecting your work until it is approximately 80% finished, and then publish it. 80% of your time is spent producing 20% of your output, and you can’t afford to waste any more time on it. You’ve got to enjoy those leisure activities.

5. I’m going to change my blog structure / design / template / ethos in a few days, so it’s not worth it.
Oh my Lord. What rubbish. What planet do you live on? Your blog posts will remain, no matter what wrapper they’re published in. Concentrate on writing first, and titivating (which means adjusting, modifying, improving, changing, or otherwise messing about with) your blog after. Try unplugging from the internet for a couple of hours, then see how much you write. And anyway, when you’ve completed the redesign or whatever, you can blog about it!