ProBlogger - Latest Posts |
| Podcast Winners [COMPETITION RESULTS] Posted: 21 Jun 2008 05:14 AM CDT Last week we ran a competition here on ProBlogger where our kind sponsors First Blog Media offered to give three lucky ProBlogger readers a year’s worth of free podcasting recorded professionally. To win readers needed to answer why they would like to have a podcast on their blog. Brian from First Blog Media has selected the three following winners based upon their answers (he tells me that it was a very difficult task):
I’ll email winners shortly to give you details of how to get your prize. Didn’t Win? |
| The Power of Getting Personal on Your Niche Blog Posted: 20 Jun 2008 10:43 PM CDT This time last weekend I was sitting in a delivery suite in a Melbourne hospital waiting for the arrival of my second son Henri. It would be another 12 hours til he was actually born but after he’d come along and we’d had a little recovery time I managed to get online and post that I’d become a father again. This morning I had a couple of spare hours to get online again and check my blogs (I’m taking next week off too by the way) and also sent out a quick newsletter to my DPS subscribers. Again - in that newsletter I mentioned that we’d had another baby. I tend not to get too personal on my blogs - I like to keep to the topic at hand for the vast majority of posts - however both on the ProBlogger post and today with my newsletter I was amazed by the response from readers. The ProBlogger post has over 300 comments (and I’ve had 100 or so emails) and just a couple of hours after sending out my newsletter I’ve had over 100 emails from DPS readers. The same thing happened last time when we had a baby and I posted about it. What I’ve noticed about the comments and emails is that many are from people I’ve never heard of before but who say that they have been regular readers for years. Also in many cases the emails go beyond just saying ‘congratulations’ and tell me something about themselves, their families and their interaction with the blog. It struck me as I waded through these emails this morning just how powerful ‘getting personal’ can be on a blog. I’m not advocating doing it every day and revealing everything about your personal live - but there’s something quite special that happens when you do. I guess it humanizes you as a blogger a little, shows a different side of you, makes you more relatable to your readers and gives them another potential connecting point with you. Read more about Adding a Personal Touch To Your Blog (series). |
| Posted: 20 Jun 2008 05:31 PM CDT I’m a little behind in this one - I’ve had one other little thing on my mind distracting me - but wanted to give a shout out to a group of b5media bloggers who are currently doing a 24 hour blogathon - the Great Blog Off. Bloggers in our Entertainment, Business and Lifestyles Channels are blogging every hour for 24 hours to support charitable causes. Having done a couple of blog-a-thons myself I know how much work is involved - so do drop by some of the blogs in those channels and give their bloggers some support and donations. |
| Are You Putting Cash in the Trash? Posted: 20 Jun 2008 03:21 PM CDT Today Fred Black tells a story of approaching bloggers to review a product and suggests how they could make more money with a little effort. Hi, my name is Fred and I’m a ….I’m a… Blo… ahem… I’m a blogger. At times, I interact with other bloggers and, for whatever reason, don’t reveal my “blogger” side. Occasionally this interaction brings to light something they do that they shouldn’t, or something they don’t do that they should, or something that they could do better. Often times, fixing this oversight could help them maximize potential profits. What follows is such an observation. I recently helped my wife create and produce a children’s creative movement DVD called “Pretend with Miss Kim” that we released in October 2007. One of the methods we’ve used to promote this DVD is to spend time emailing “mommy” blogs about it. We’ve gotten a few bloggers to mention the DVD and review it. I thought it was time to do another round of emailing bloggers to try and get a few more reviews; this is when I noticed a peculiar behavior. Most of these “mommy” and “parent” type blogs sell ads to generate revenue. Most seem to use 3rd party services to manage and sell the ads. No, that’s not unusual part, I’ll bet a good portion of the bloggers reading this post sell ads on their blogs, and use 3rd party services to mange the ads. The strange part is that almost all the blogs with advertising on their site missed a great chance to convert me to a paying advertiser. I spent a couple of hours finding and emailing a nice introductory email to around 20 or so blogs. This took a few hours because I took the time to read a few posts on each blog to ensure sure it was a good fit. Needless to say, I’ve not had any response from the majority of the blogs. A few bloggers wrote me back and said that they would be interested in reviewing the product. Great! I’ll get them a copy in the mail! One wrote me back and said that she didn’t do product reviews any longer, but that she’d trade me a few copies in exchange for running an ad on her blog for a week or so… great idea - I’ll talk her up on that! But, only one blogger, just one, took the opportunity to respond and say that they were buried in this type of request and were not taking anymore reviews at this time, however, he felt that I would get good results placing an ad on their site. He was also smart enough to include his current daily visitor numbers, and to point out that his readers are the exact people I’m looking for! I’ll probably place an ad on his blog! Had he not responded I probably would have never even considered placing an ad on his blog! I guess all the other bloggers, who didn’t respond, just don’t need anymore money! Maybe they think that just because I saw that they have advertising on their site I’ll click their link to place an ad. No probably not, I was asking for a free mention, a review. However, I want results; I want exposure for my product. It’s good news to me that a blog is so busy and popular they don’t have time to review all the products that they get requests to review. So write back and tell me so. Invite me to advertise on your blog. This little prompt, or push if you will, may well convert my request for a free review into a paying advertiser. I assume from the few responses I received back, that most of the blogs I emailed get a lot of requests for product reviews, site reviews, links to other sites, etc. How long does it take to create a standard response, like the lone response I received, simply thanking a person for their interest, giving a few stats, and giving directions for placing an ad on the site? It’s certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to copy and paste because it will most likely result in more advertising revenue. Is that not what most of use want from our blogs? And that is the peculiar part: as a person with a product needing exposure, I took the time to seek out and find blogs that matched my product perfectly, and contact them… yet the majority failed to respond. Plain and simple: missed opportunities for advertising revenue. If you have a blog that features advertising, don’t pass up these missed opportunities. If you do, you’re just throwing money away that could have been in your pocket! As in the photo of the birds, only one blogger was facing a different direction, the right direction! About the Author |
| Letting Comment Spam Take Over Your Blog - How to Let Your Blog Go #5 Posted: 20 Jun 2008 09:07 AM CDT
You dig into their archives searching for information and expertise on their topic only to find their comments section completely riddled with comments that range from annoying self promotion, to links to prescription drug sites, home loan offers, affiliate products, porn, dead links and any other manner of gutter/trash sites. I can totally understand why a blogger might feel tempted to give up on moderating comment spam on one level - however would strongly advise against taking this course of action for two main reasons: 1. Blog Objectives and Brand - everything that appears on your website either adds to or takes away from the objectives you’re attempting to achieve on your blog. It also impacts your blog’s brand and reputation. As bloggers, you and I know what comment spam is and how hard it is to keep it off our blogs - but the average person using the web only sees the comments and links in your comments as part of your site and many of them will associate it with you. At the very least it shows you to be someone who doesn’t care enough to keep your site in good shape - at worst (to the uneducated) it could create a perception that you’re promoting the links others leave on your blog. 2. SEO - Point #1 is my main concern but I suspect there is also another impact of comment spam on your blog. I recently arrived on another blog’s post that had 101 comments on it - 95 of which were comment spam. I did a word count of the page and found that the whole page had 1552 words on it. The post itself have 210 words, the rest (1342) were the comments. What had been a page with a tightly defined focus in the eyes of search engines had become a site that had more words associated with porn, gambling and drugs than the topic at hand. Not only this the comments didn’t have no follow tags on their links and pointed to all manner of dodgy sites and dead links. Google doesn’t like links that don’t lead anywhere and frown even more on links pointing to ‘bad neighborhoods’ - I can only imagine the impact that comment spam had upon this posts search engine ranking. Solution: Today’s ’solution’ comes in two parts. 1. Clean up your comment spam - two years ago it was brought to my attention that one of my old blogs had become infested with comment spam. I’d not noticed it because the email address that I’d used to notify me of new comments on that blog had stopped working for a few months. I was confronted with thousands of spam comments throughout hundreds of posts. The only solution for me was to clean it up. It took me most of a day to do it but I went through every post on that blog and deleted comments manually. it was a job that sucked - but I got them all! 2. Determine a Comment Spam Strategy - the second half of the comment spam solution is to work out what you’re going to do about future comment spam. There are a variety of options open to you including:
What NOT to do about Comment SpamPlease don’t take an ‘ignore it and it will go away’ approach with comment spam. From what I’ve seen ignoring comment spam can actually make the problem worse as I’ve heard from some that there are lists that circulate among spammers that contain blogs that don’t moderate comments and even posts with certain keywords that they should target. Allowing one comment spam to slip through can actually lead to a deluge of them in future. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from ProBlogger Blog Tips To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner |
Inbox too full?  Subscribe to the feed version of ProBlogger Blog Tips in a feed reader. | |
| If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: ProBlogger Blog Tips, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
