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| Which Social Media Sites Would You Use if You Could Only use 3? Posted: 06 Jun 2008 03:25 PM CDT Here’s a question for the weekend that was submitted to me from Twitter friend philbaumann who asks: if you were permitted only 3 social sites to work with, which ones would you pick? So it’s over to you for your comments. Which would you choose (be it social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit, or social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace or Social Messaging/Micro Blogging sites like Twitter or Plurk) - and WHY do you choose the ones you choose? |
| How Much Free Content Should I Put in My Blog? Posted: 06 Jun 2008 09:07 AM CDT In this article Daniel Scocco answers to a question by Jana:
Considering that Jana talks about revenues, in this article we will cover only paid books that are created (mainly) with the purpose of generating money for the author. In other words, we will not cover the cases where someone writes a free eBook to promote his website, to build an email list, to offer a bonus to RSS subscribers and so on. The first question that one needs to answer is the following: is my blog established as an authority in its niche, or am I established as an expert in this niche? Notice that the two parts of this question do not walk together necessarily. One can have an authority blog or website without being a well known expert. Consider Sitepoint.com for example, they are one of the most respected resources for webmasters on the Internet, and yet the site is not associated with any particular person (but rather with a group of authors). The opposite can happen as well. Muhammad Saleem is a social media guru, and yet his personal blog is not very well known. This is because his strategy involves mostly guest appearances on high profile blogs, as well as on the direct interaction with the communities of the various social bookmarking sites on the web. Now going back to our initial question, if you answer is no, you probably should keep putting free and quality content out there. Do not think about this free content as money left on the table, but rather as an investment. Whenever you create free and high quality content, and publish it on your blog (or on other blogs and websites), you are both building your credibility and making prospects enter your sales funnel. That is, they are getting in contact with your material and ideas, and over the time they will become more inclined to take that relationship to another level (by purchasing your eBook, for instance). If, on the other hand, you think that your blog or your person already have enough credibility to get an eBook on the market, then you have three main possibilities as far as the origin of the content is concerned. 1. Blog into bookThe first possibility is to use completely the content that is already published on the blog. As Jana correctly pointed out in her question, there are many people out there willing to spend money into freely available information that comes edited and formatted. This editing and formating, and the fact that the information will be contained in a single, easily searcheable document, will probably save people time. And time, is money (sorry for the cliché). The advantage of this method is obvious: the content is already written, so the author will just need to gather, edit and format it. The downside is that you won’t be able to charge a lot (else people would just go to the trouble of finding the information themselves). Leo Babauta had a good success with this strategy. He turned his most popular articles into an eBook titled “Handbook for Life,” and started selling it for $6.95. 2. Almost uniqueThe second possibility is to use some of the free content on your blog, and then to build on top of that to create a more complete and appealing eBook. This is the strategy that I used on my eBook. It was a natural process, and it all started with a single post. The post was titled “The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names,” and it attracted a large amount of comments, links and traffic. The buzz that it generated was a signal that people were interested on the topic. After a small research on the web I discovered that there was no eBook focusing completely on "how to find domain names," therefore I decided to write it. That initial post became the first chapter of the eBook. The rest was unique. 3. Completely uniqueFinally, you can also write an eBook from scratch. It might even cover points that you wrote about in the past, but you would need to rewrite them under the framework of an actual book and not of a blog post. The obvious downside of this strategy is that it will take much more time than the other two. The advantage is that all your current readers and prospects are potential buyers. Even the ones that have been reading your blog for a long time will have a reason to the eBook. It comes with fresh content, after all. ConclusionThere are no rules defining how much content you should give for free, and how much content you should charge for. The first corner-stone is to establish your blog or yourself as an authority in its niche, and from there, depending on your availability of time, you should decide what kind of eBook you want to publish, if at all. Another interesting question is the following: are ongoing training programs the new eBooks? But this is for another article! Daniel Scocco is the author of Daily Blog Tips. You can stay updated with his blog tips by subscribing to his RSS Feed. |
| Top 10 Plurk Users Statistics - What’s the Karma Algorithm Posted: 06 Jun 2008 08:00 AM CDT As a quick followup to my last post on my experimentation with Plurk I thought I’d do a quick analysis of the top 10 Plurk Users (as currently rated on the Interesting page). They are rated there on a basis of their ‘Karma’. There’s no explicit definition of the way that they calculate Karma except: “Your karma score is directly influenced by you and your friends Plurk activity. The more active you are, the more points you’ll get. Using various features of Plurk such as instant messaging or uploading a profile image will also help. Invite your real friends to boost your karma!” So lets look at some of the average statistics of the top Plurkers and see what seems to count towards a high Karma:
I was a little surprised by a couple of the numbers. The description of Karma seems to indicate that inviting friends would count for a fair bit - but the average of the top 10 is 10. The most any of them had invited successfully was 20. Having said that - the 9th ranked Plurker was well under average with # of plurks, responses, profile views, fans and length of time but had the most friend invites so perhaps they do count for something. |
| Add a ProBlogger Tab to Your FriendFeed Posted: 06 Jun 2008 07:24 AM CDT If you are a FriendFeed user AND you like ProBlogger - you might want to check out a greasemonkey script for Firefox users that Duncan created that puts a ProBlogger tab to the top right hand corner of your FriendFeed page. It means you can view ProBlogger from within FriendFeed - like this (click to enlarge): He’s also made some others for other blogs and also Gmail and Google Reader (among others) which means you can use FriendFeed as a start page for lots of sites. Grab the ProBlogger Script here. |
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