Content is king. Yawn . . . right? You know this tired phrase is the gospel of blogging, but did you ever wonder why content is really king? You spend your time developing and massaging your posts to create the next bit of killer content. It’s the post that hits the front page of Digg, gets Stumbled to death or even Slashdotted. That’s why content is king, right? Wrong.

Content is King Because of the Long Tail of Blogging.

In 2004, Chris Anderson coined the term “The Long Tail” in a Wired Magazine article, which he followed up with a “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” (Chris Anderson)“>book and a blog on the subject. If you’re not familiar with the phrase or its meaning, here’s a very brief summary from Chris himself:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

(Picture by Hay Kranen / PD - via Wikipedia)

Example - Amazon.com

One of the best examples is Amazon.com, which provides consumers with access to the latest and greatest hit products, books and more. Sales of the bestseller books, however, pale in comparison to sales of the many obscure books in Amazon’s catalog. Hence, the long tail of the book market is where the majority of sales are coming from - and it’s growing.

Hot Content vs. Archived Content

Apply these same principles to your blog. That killer super-dugg post is great . . . for a day or two. Granted, the super-dugg post is sometimes great for added readers, linkbacks and helping your blog grow. It’s the long tail, however, that keeps your blog alive and thriving. While that traffic spike is great, if you adhere to publishing solid content as ProBlogger encourages, then your old, quality content overshadows even that super-dugg masterpiece.

Eyes on Photography Bay Stats

For instance, have a gander at this recent Photography Bay post on a new patent from camera manufacturer Canon, which covers some crazy new iris scanner for a photographer’s eye. This post turned out to be extremely popular for a few days, producing 5,839 pageviews on Wednesday, Feb. 13 - thanks to being Slashdotted and coverage by several tech sites.

The total page views that day were 14,721. The lesson here is that even though the killer post for that day was miles above any other traffic, the rest of the content on Photography Bay bettered the killer post.

Some of these posts are several months old. If you look further down the list of traffic-generating posts (470 different pages this particular day), you would see that some posts are closer to a year in age. That’s pretty cool to me because Photography Bay is only about 15 months old now. Now, think about 2, 3, or 5 years down the road . . . the long tail gets much longer and becomes a lot more significant.

The long tail matters because of Google, linkbacks, readers and other requisite traffic-generating resources. If it weren’t for that catalog of niche posts that we build everyday we blog, posts like the Canon iris patent post might never take off.

Caveat

Please note, however, that this theory may be more true for some blog niches than others. Tech blogs often need that fresh content coming in to keep reader interest, since new gadgets and technology are more interesting than older gadgets (e.g., Googling for HDMI cables versus S-VHS cables). On the other hand, a niche blog on the healthcare industry will still grab Google traffic for the search “medicare anti-kickback laws” regardless of the age of the post. The topic has been around for a couple of decades and isn’t going anywhere in the near future.

The Right Analogy for the Long Tail

Contrary to what Read Write Web may say, the long tail is where the money’s at. Rather than analyzing a given blog’s posts and income, Read Write Web applied the long tail analysis to the blogosphere as a whole. While the data conforms to the long tail, the analogy and, thus, the conclusion, are flawed. Applying the principals of the long tail in the same manner as the Amazon example above, the long tail analysis properly demonstrates that a blog requires a significant amount of niche content to fit the model. With the content in hand, the long tail will wag the blog.

Conclusion

Google regularly accounts for more than 50% of Photography Bay’s traffic, which is why I must strive to continue to make that long tail longer. Today’s killer post is part of next month’s long tail traffic - and I want a longer tail! Regular, quality posts ensure that there will be a long tail tomorrow and that, my friends, is why content is king.

What are your thoughts on the long tail of blogging? Have you seen the long tail wagging your blog? How can we leverage these principals to make our positions in our niches even stronger?

Eric is the author of Photography Bay, which covers digital photography news, techniques and gear reviews. You can subscribe to Photography Bay’s feed here.

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Security

Do you know those people who use a zip code, a phone number, a pet name, and any weird but common thing as their password? Well, they are probably the one's who should take this part very seriously. Your blog might be a hobby, it might be your bread and butter, and it might even be more than that, but if you let a hacker destroy everything, it just makes you seem like a fool.

Browser Compatibility

I use Firefox. Firefox is amazing. Firefox just works. Firefox is, well, Firefox, of course. However, not everyone uses Firefox. Some people use Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Camino, WebKit, Linx, and other available browsers. It wouldn't be wise to alienate a certain group of people just they use an alternative browser. Unfortunately, people still do this. Don't be one of them—always check for browser compatibility.

Use Protection

Because some people have no lives or work for people who have no lives, we have to deal with spam on a daily basis. So, of course, those same people with no lives would find ways to exploit the blogosphere as well. Thankfully, Akismet and Defensio are here to help. Install either of these plugins and live (somewhat) spam-free.

Create Backups

Trust me, you want to avoid a horror story like I told when I first joined Performancing. It is truly a devastating experience to lose extremely valuable data. To me, my blog is valuable. I learned the hard way, but I now make daily automated backups and weekly manual backups. You'll never appreciate this as much until you lose it all, and trust me, you should hope you never have to use them.

Cover Your Assets

Creating a terms of service agreement is important; there are significant legal implications without one. This is one of those "don't leave home without it" type things. Our judicial system is anything but logical, but if you have a terms of use and privacy policy, you are doing a good job of protecting yourself from your readers.

Get Personal

People like to know that their opinion is being heard. That, in essence, is what blogging is all about. However, those who read your content should have the ability to voice their opinion as well. Many of these people don't have the time to create a dedicated blog post just for your efforts. So, make it your objective to allow people to leave feedback. Post links to your email, instant messaging handle, Twitter account, and more. Readers appreciate this sort of thing.

Obviously Now

Some of us have the advantage of having a great domain name. Performancing is a great domain name, but, unfortunately, it is doubtful that everyone knows what Performancing is about when first hearing about it. To be brutally honest, it sounds more like a company selling steroids. Well, I can assure you there is no human growth hormone here. However, the moment you visit this site, you can easily see that this blog is about helping bloggers to succeed. Make it this obvious on your blog as well.

Use FeedBurner

FeedBurner is quite interesting, and it does have all those cool statistics and whatnot, but the real reason to use FeedBurner is because it allows you to take your feeds with you no matter where you are blogging from. For example, I had my old blog on WordPress.com, but now I moved my blog to a dedicated domain and server at OnlyJames.com. It didn't really hurt to make the switch because I was using FeedBurner for my old blog. So, when I made the switch, the transition was seamless.

Make A Logo

Why do logos exist? I'll tell you why—logos exist to help identify people, products, brands, and companies. The more simple a logo is, the better. While I plan on discussing logo design in a future article, I will say that a logo should be simple and unique. It should stand up to the time.

Manage Your Archives

Archives—oh what the world would be like without them. Just as libraries and museums like to keep and maintain great archives, you should put just as much effort with your blog. The archives should serve as an easy way to find content written in the past. I'd recommend creating a listing of each month that displays the title of each post written. This is a simple solution, but if you have a lot of content, it requires much more attention.

Make an About Page

You have a blog, and while people can get to know you through simply reading your content, it is also nice to have an about page. This page should inform your readers about you, your blog, and ways the user can contact you. If you want a great example, check out my about page on my personal blog. I present details about me and my blog in a creative and interesting way.

Make an "Advertise Here" Page

If you intend on making money, you need to have the proper information on how potential advertisers can do that. However, there is also a lot more information that could be displayed. It is a very complex thing to do, and your job is to market you and your blog well. After all, you want to sell you advertising inventory—the advertising page is the one place to make a lasting impression.

Get Analytical

Having plenty of visitors is great, but knowing what they are doing and where they came from is very useful. PMetrics is a great solution. There are also other alternatives like Google Analytics. Regardless of what you use, it is important to use something. This information is also useful to potential advertisers.

Respond to Comments

Comments are a good thing. It shows that there is depth to your articles. It shows that people have been thinking throughout the reading of your article. And, finally, it shows that your readership has an interest in your content. If someone leaves a comment, you should respond. I post on several blogs, but I make a sincere effort to respond to every single comment individually. I also take a look through the archives to see if there are any new comments as well. Responding to comments (and leaving comments on his or her blog) also encourages subscriptions as well.

Promote Existing Content

What good is taking all the time and effort to create an awesome post if you are going to let it get lost with time? While news content probably isn't worthy of resurrection, case studies, opinions, in-depth research, link-bait, and other types of articles could be great use to your readership months or even years down the road.

Optimize Feed Placement

RSS feeds are an integral part of growing a blog. In many cases, it is similar to how newspapers work. People subscribe to their content and have it delivered on a regular basis. The only difference with RSS is that the subscription is digital and, in most cases, free. Make a good habit of designing your feeds with care. Display them properly so they receive the most exposure possible.

Easy on the Eyes

As internet technology improves, so do the designs of websites. People want to create out-of-this-world mind-blowing designs, and sometimes these people forget that people, in the end, still want to be able to read the content. The number of websites I visit because of a great design can be counted on one hand. Most of these site owners spent months working on these designs as well. So, in any case, make sure your content is easy on the eyes.

Social Tools

Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious are great sites to incorporate into your site's design. All of these sites offer buttons, graphics, and APIs to do just that. Considering that some websites generate most of their traffic through social sites, it is not something to skip out on. Even a simple text link which utilizes each site's API located at the end of each post could make a huge difference in page visits.

Be Unique

Being unique within the blogosphere is vital to success. You need to be someone special, someone, well, unique. There are many ways to accomplish this, and a simple way to start is by being yourself. Try to develop your own style for writing content. Format the content in a unique way. Do something that someone else has yet to do. People will remember you for it.

Write Original Content

No longer can you make way by reposting unoriginal content. These days, you must make a sincere effort to get an article noticed. It is crucial for the development of your blog—this is especially true while your blog is in its early growing periods.

Establish Consistency

Writing content on a regular schedule can be a great way to encourage readership to come back. People don't want to visit your blog every Monday one week and every Thursday the following week. Those who opt to actually visit your blog, as opposed to subscribing, might become frustrated. Case in point, develop a posting schedule and stick with it.

Visual Stimulation

People, in many cases, like to have some visual stimulus. Images and videos are the easiest way to accomplish this. However, simply adding an image to a post without reason is not worth the time and effort. You don't want to have images which distract the reader, but instead you want images that compliment the content. The content should always be the focus.

Got More?

I know there are things that I missed, but thankfully, Performancing readers have great ideas bouncing around in their heads. If you have something that every blogger should do or know any insight you'd like to add to the conversation, please add it in the comments section.

The Googlesystem blog has an awesome write up covering the onslaught of new features found within the experimental version of Blogger. One of the new features which will surely benefit user's as well as commenter's is the new inline commenting system. I browse to a variety of different blogs every day, leaving comments as I go. But when I end up on a Blogger powered blog, I don't even bother to comment because the comment system is so out of whack. Now, with an inline commenting system, I don't have to open a new tab or window to leave a comment and I can actually see the content as I'm writing the comment.

Other new features include:

• Importing and Exporting of your posts/content
• A brand new post editor
• Star rating system for posts
• Integration with Google Webmaster Central

All of these features can be found within the experimental version and if things go well, will end up in the standard production version soon.

Are you looking forward to these changes? Does anyone still use Blogger?

There’s a fine line between:

1. diversifying your blogging interests so as to have a number of income streams to help ride out the downtimes that most blogs suffer from

and

2. having so many blogs on the go that they begin to suffer as a result of you not being able to dedicate your focus to them.

The Argument for Diversification

I’ve written on numerous occasions about how it is smart to diversify when it comes to blogging for money (for example here in my 18 Lessons I’ve Learned about Blogging post). Diversification makes sense on a number of levels including:

• Multiple Blogs (wise because most blogs go through highs and lows in terms of traffic, earnings, search engine ranking etc)
• Income Streams (not putting all your eggs in the AdSense basket)
• Non Blogging activities/income streams (looking outside of blogging to find other ways of supplementing your blogging income)

Diversifying your interests is a smart move - ask any financial advisor and you’ll find the advice will almost always be to hedge your bets and invest in multiple areas so that when one market goes down you don’t lose everything.

The Problem with Diversification

While I do believe that it’s smart to diversify - there are some risks with the strategy. The main problem is that you run the risk of spreading yourself too thinly across your blogs.

I learned this the hard way in my first couple of years of blogging for money. I saw what I could achieve with having a single blog and decided to multiply my efforts by blogging on up to 20 blogs at once. The result was poor quality content, stress and strain and eventually blogger burn out.

The more I gave myself to do the less time I was able to dedicate to any one activity - including the producing of engaging, useful, interesting and unique content. The flow on effect of this is that my earnings in this period didn’t raise anywhere near as much as I’d hoped.

What I ended up doing was to hire a blogger to take on one of the projects that I was running, to kill off the majority of the rest of my blogs and to focus upon two blogs (ProBlogger and DPS). In doing so I saw immediate results. The blogs I was able to focus all of my blogging energy upon literally exploded as a result of the improvement in content, the extra time I was able to dedicate to interacting with readers and my extra energy levels which renewed my passion for the topics I was writing about.

Are You Spreading Yourself Too Thinly?

There are a number of areas that I see bloggers (including myself) spreading themselves too thinly including:

• Multiple Blogs - I find two blogs is enough for me - at b5media we have a few bloggers who handle more than that, but there comes a point where their blogs suffer if they add more.
• Social Media - it seems that every day a new social networking site starts. If you were to accept every invitation and engage fully on every one of them you could easily spend your whole life on these sites.
• Reader Interaction - you can never do enough interacting with readers right? Well actually you can. There comes a point where even the very worthwhile task of interacting with your readers can distract you from your core task - the producing of good content.
• Multiple Income Streams - there comes a point where if you add too many different ad networks, affiliate programs and other income streams to your blog where you can be spending too much time administering them. Optimizing ads, tracking results, chasing up payments etc - it all takes time. Sometimes focussing on just a handful of income streams makes more sense than experimenting with too many at once.

Now before I go any further let me stress that the above activities are all good - but they CAN be responsible for you spreading yourself too thinly. I do think it’s wise to have more than one blog, engage with social media, interact with readers and experiment with new income streams…. but not at the expense of your core blogging activities - particularly the writing of content.

Tips for Overstretched Bloggers

If you are like I have been at different times in my blogging ‘career’ I have a few questions to ask and tips for you:

What is Important to You? - I think it’s crucial to constantly be asking yourself this question. Identify your goals in blogging. What are you trying to achieve? Once you’ve asked this take a look at how you spend your time and identify which things that you’re doing take you closer to your goals and which are not.

Where is the Energy? - Identify where the energy is within your different activities. What is working and what isn’t? What is producing fruit and what is greedily sucking your time and energy without any benefits? I’m a big believer looking for points of ‘energy’ in my life and putting more focus upon them. For example when I realized how I’d spread myself too thinly with 20+ blogs I picked the two or three that worked and killed the rest.

Set Yourself Deadlines - When I start new projects I generally have a deadline in mind when I would want to see results by. If i don’t see at least some signs of life in the project at this point I either kill off the project or work out how to approach it differently so that I’ll see the results I need.

Streamline your Processes - what things do you have to do that you’re inefficient at? I always knew how much time email was sucking out of my day but did nothing about it for years. The extra pressure that my inefficiency in this area of my business cost me was stupid and meant I was stretching myself further than I needed. Reinventing my email processing system gave me extra time.

What other processes suck your time? Perhaps it’s email, perhaps its reading RSS feeds, perhaps its social media, perhaps it is an activity like moderating comments? How can you streamline these important but time consuming processes?

Outsource - There has been a big focus upon outsourcing lately (Tim’s The 4-Hour Workweek might have had something to do with it). I don’t outsource much of my blogging activities but do see the sense in it. I currently have help with comment moderation and have taken on a few writers at DPS which has helped me tremendously. Do keep in mind however that outsourcing means managing others which can take even more time away from you in the short term while you get people set up.

Be Ruthless - My last tip is to echoe the thoughts that I shared in my post on how to be a Ruthless blogger. While it can be hard to let go of blogs that don’t work or to cut out activities that suck our time the fact is that for many bloggers it is these things that stand between success and mediocrity.

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All right we got a good back log of questions now, so most Fridays should have a new Questions & Answers post being published.

The last time we run the Q&As I was selecting the questions, so some people ended up with their questions answered. Sorry about that. Now I will take a different approach. I will answer to ALL the questions. Even if I don’t know the answer I will just mention that.

Today we have the first 10 questions answered. If yours is not here just hold till next Friday or the following. You can also ask new questions by leaving a comment on this post.

1. Runner Girl asks:

I’m starting my first blog and I want it to be a lesson in viral marketing. My plan is to turn my alter-ego “Runner Girl” into an online sensation by creating a blog and a video podcast to document the life of this mysterious girl who runs around downtown chicago during rush hour. I would also wear a branded runner’s racing bib every morning during my usual run. The idea is an online based kind of “Naked Cowboy.” But I’m not sure what do for my blog. I’m trying to think of why readers will want to come and read my blog. They’ll watch the videos because they’re funny but should I just write a normal blog with a Runner Girl twist or should it be different altogether?

I think you could write the blog from Runner Girl perspective. Create the character, and use it to fire the popularity of the blog. Writing from a character’s point of view and not from your personal one will enable you to be more audacious with the content. You could for instance explore controversial topics without risking your own name or credibility.

One blog that I recommend for you to take a look before writing yours is Violent Acres. Sure the woman there uses a much more crude style, but her blog is immensely popular, and it can give you an idea of what people are looking for.

2. How to Cope with Pain asks:

How do I put in descriptions of pictures used on my blog, so visually-handicapped readers can know what the picture is of?

Just include an alt tag on all your images. Basically inside the image code, which starts with <img src=” you should insert a alt=”alt text”. Notice that the alt text should be something that will describe the picture, and not merely its name.

You should also try to use the title=”title text” attribute because some browsers will not always read the alt tag properly.

3. Simone asks:

I’d like to ask you opinion on my blog and on the stats.
I’ve a tech oriented blog since 1 year and half, and it is steadily growing in views and RSS subscribers.
Now it’s around 700 RSS subs and 500-600 visits (700 hits) per day.
One thing I noticed is that when I had less visitors the page per visit and time on site where higher (around 2ppv) while now that the figures are higher the PPV is down to 1.2 and going down.
Also the visits coming from Google are more than 80% of the visitors.
I’d like to know if this is a normal behavior of visitors of tech/dev oriented blogs or if there is something wrong with my blog and there is something I could do to go back having higher PagePerVisit.

You mentioned several factors on the question, so let me try to break them up. If you are trying to grow your blog, for the popularity sake, focus on unique visitors or visitors. That is the crude number that tells you how many people actually visited your blog on a given day or month.

The page views per visitor ratio is something more advanced, and I think you can ignore it until is your blog is bigger. There are many methods that you can use to improve this ration, basically making your blog or site more sticky. You could create a series of posts and interlink them; you could create long resource sections broken down into several sections, and so on. Play around with those ideas, but don’t get obsessed with page views right now (unless you have some good CPM networks aboard).

Finally, you mention that 80% of your traffic comes from Google. While this is not a bad thing at all, because search traffic is always more profitable if you use CPC ads like Google AdSense, it is definitely not the percentage I would expect. From my experience tech related sites should get from 30% to 60% of their traffic from search engines.

This means that either you blog is very well optimized for search engines, or that you are not doing a good job at other promotional channels like getting links from other sites, social media and similar.

4. Jerry Thomas asks:

1. I’m looking for some kind of social media plug-in - something very simple that I could put in a sidebar with a title that would read something like “Follow Me Online!” and would have links to my profiles pages on MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and maybe the icon for each. It’s such a simple idea that it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody hasn’t already built one, but so far I haven’t been able to find one. I suppose I could just repurpose a blogroll to that effect, but with my level of skill, it would look a bit clumsy.

As far as adding those links to the sidebar goes, I think the easiest way is to do it manually. It will give you more control after all regarding the links that you want to include, and their styling.

One very cool plugin for people that want to develop their social network, however, is called SocializeMe. Basically it enables you to display a custom message every time a visitor comes to your site via a social network, inviting them to friend you. For example, if someone comes to your blog via StumbleUpon, this plugin will show a tailored message that would invite this person to see your Stumble profile and to add you as a friend.

2. Is there some simple way to search for themes? Trolling the Internet for possibilities is a mind-numbing process, and even after weeks of searching, I haven’t found anything close to what I want. You’d think somebody would have some kind of comprehensive aggregation for these (and I’ve seen what WordPress.org offers, but I have found sorting through things there as rough as anywhere). Or maybe it’s one of those things that isn’t supposed to be easy and I just need to keep hunting.

There are several places where you can go, but the process will take time unfortunately. Smashing magazine has some nice collection of themes. Themes.wordpress.net is the official themes directory, but it has not been updated for almost one year now. Finally, we also have some cool themes on DBT .

5. Keith asks:

1. How do you find sponsors for your blog? Do you go searching for them, do they find you or do you use a third party “supplier”?

These days I don’t find them anymore, I just put a “Advertise Here” banner when I have a free spot, and usually within 1 week the spot is sold.

On the beginning I needed to search for sponsors though. I wrote a pretty extensive article about it, check: How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide.

2. You are starting a new blog, which Wordpress plugins do you find a necessity?

My essential plugins are: Contact Form, Akismet, SRG Clean Archives, MetaMagic and Feedburner FeedSmith and RSS Footer. I will write a more extensive post on this topic soon though.

6. Joshua Clanton asks:

What plugins are you most likely to install on a new blog? Akismet, and subscribe to comments, but what else?

See previous answer.

7. Yaser Sulaiman asks:

Which is THE king: quality content, great personality, strong opinions, or something else?

Quality content is king.

Strong opinions can definitely help a blog, but it won’t substitute quality content.

Promotion is queen.

8. Datter asks:

Where do you see blogging (in general) in say 10 years time?

I think in 10 years 90% of the Internet users will have an online presence, in one way or another.

Blogging will just be one of the formats that people can use to set that online presence. It will basically be a type of website, with some specific features.

9. ReddH asks:

Do you have any suggestions or advice about how to encourage readers to subscribe to your blog via RSS?

The first thing is to publish top quality content. It must be so good that readers will say “Shit, I better subscribe to this feed else I will lose something.” The “something” that they will lose can be how-to guides, funny stuff, interesting opinions and so on. It does not matter what you offer, as long as it is valuable to the readers.

That being said that are obviously tricks and strategies that you use to offer a further incentive for people to subscribe to your RSS feed. You could offer them a free eBook. You could create a contest.

Ah, and don’t forget to make sure that your RSS icon is visible on your site, and that after each post you have a message reminding visitors to subscribe if they liked what they just read.

10. Rajaie AlKorani asks:

Where do you get the images in your posts? Like the one in this post, for example.

I always buy my images on iStockphoto. It costs $1 a pop, so in a month I usually spend $15-$20 there. I think this is quite a good deal for not having to worry about copyright infringement.

Blogging Questions & Answers 6

Basically it allows any person or company willing to spend $100,000 and with enough infrastructure to become a registrar, to create any domain extension it likes. That is right, ANY DOMAIN EXTENSION will now be possible.

Some examples I am sure people are already rallying to get include .sex, .porn, .orgy, .girls, .casino, .poker and so on. You get the idea.

Honestly I think this will be a huge mess, and the only motivator for ICANN to approve it was probably the money that they will be able to make thanks to the porno domain name industry and from companies wanting to secure their own extension.

Over at TechCult we started an initiative to fund TechCult.Shuttlecock .

.sex, .dbt, .crap: Coming to a Domain Near Your Soon

This article will highlight various events which have taken place online and off where the blogosphere has played a major role in the outcome. Although a single blogger such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com can wield a significant amount of influence, no one thus far has been able to stand up to the enormous amount of influence the blogosphere can have as a single entity.

1. Dunkin Donuts Pulls Ad - After Dunkin donuts aired a television commercial featuring Rachel Ray wearing a black and white fringed scarf, bloggers took offense as the scarf was commonly known to be worn by Muslim extremists. After thousands of bloggers made their thoughts known and hundreds of comments posted on the Dunkin Donuts website condemning the ad, it was pulled off the air.
2. Sony Labeled Epic Fail - On Oct. 31, 2005 Mark Russinovich broke the story on his blog, describing how Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. Afterwards, the story spread like wildfire to what seemed like every tech blog on the net. The outcry from the blogosphere was so great, Sony stopped producing the copy-protection scheme and then recalled all of the cds which contained the copy protection. Lawsuits were then filed against the company. Sony's reputation will never be able to clean itself of this stain.
3. The A.P. thinks they can charge for quotations - After word got out about how the A.P. sent a letter to The Drudge Retort website claiming that they were excerpting too much of their articles, the blogosphere blew up and gave the A.P. a lesson on Fair Use. With heavy hitting blogs going against the A.P. along with many other bloggers following suit, the A.P. eventually settled the claim and drew back it's proposal to penalize those who quote their content in a meaningful way.
4. Snakes On A Plane - Before this movie was even released, it gained a huge following with fan sites emerging all over the web. After Josh Friedman's blog entry the movie was then discussed on a number of other internet portals which then lead to bloggers creating songs, apparel, post art, pages of fan fiction, parody films, and mock movie trailers. In fact, the response from the blogosphere prompted New Line Cinema to go back and add five days of reshooting.
5. Dan Rather urged into retirement - After Dan Rather reported on a phony memo on CBS purported to show that President George W. Bush received preferential treatment and failed to fulfill his National Guard duty 30 years prior, the blogosphere erupted into a CSI like investigation. Blogs like Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Power Line raised questions about the documents' authenticity. This caused other conservative blogs to also investigate the matter. In the end, the blogosphere played a major role in showing how CBS had been duped and how Dan Rather had reported on a phony story. This lead to Dan Rather being urged into retirement by CBS

These five events are proof that the blogosphere as a single entity can play a significant role.  The web is filled with noise, but when a large number of people tune into the same frequency, the noise becomes overwhelming to the point where an action needs to be taken. This action is usually in favor of the blogosphere.

In writing this post, a few questions crossed my mind. Can the blogosphere in general be considered a democracy? Is it a play on Majority rules Minority rights? Do you think it's a good or bad thing that the blogosphere can influence anything, whether it be a critical decision, a law or an action made by a company?

I'm also interested in any other events which the blogosphere may have played a role in, minus things within a political nature.

Special thanks to those who helped me come up with this list via Twitter.
geoffmanning
arickmann
OnkelSchark

Why are writers banned and persecuted in undemocratic countries? Because the written word is stronger than the entire governments and the ruthless forces they wield upon their masses. Effective writing can awaken civilizations and trigger unprecedented upheavals. If you’re not using writing as a potent tool for the success of your blog you are missing a big opportunity.

Although people do many things with their blogs like posting pictures and videos, they mostly write on their blogs. Writing is the primary mode of articulation when it comes to blogging; everything happens through writing if you publish written content on your blog. Since the promotion of your blog is as important as the regular updates here too the strength of you writing ability plays a crucial part — we will come to that later on.

By being a “better writer” I don’t mean that you have to give Stephen King, Salman Rushdie and Garcia a run for their money. It also doesn’t mean having good presentation but no substance. Relevance is a factor that is quintessential to the success of your blog but how you present the relevant topic also matters a lot.

You simply need to know how to convey your message compellingly and convincingly. This involves a certain comfort level with the words and the language you use. The comfort level helps you write fast especially when you have to write multiple blog posts or when you have to interact on various forums and comment sections. If you spend hours writing/editing/proofreading just one blog post it is going to be a very laborious task and soon you will run out of steam unless the passion is indefatigable.

Writing is a skill that can be acquired without even having formal training — most best-seller authors never received formal training in writing. I myself have a math background but earn my living writing for others (hope to do it solely for myself in the near future).

How you can learn to write well would be a topic for another blog post, but here I’m briefly discussing the benefits of this quality.

Writing well gives you a unique personality as a blogger

According to Technorati there are million of blogs on the Internet. Among them there are thousands, maybe, that are read by people and not just by the bots. Sometimes you can find scores of blogs dealing with the same subject. For instance, you can find a horde of blogs telling you how to become a better blogger. How do you differentiate one blog from another if they are all trying to make you a better blogger? Consistency is one thing, of course, but the other thing is the writing style. No pyrotechnic words, no surrealistic references; just simple and useful thoughts collated effectively.

Darren, for example, directly talks to his readers and addresses their day-to-day, blogging-related problems, while sticking to the most dominant theme of his blog: how to earn money off your blog. I have noticed that he writes quite well; I don’t know if he has gradually developed the skill or it was inherently there in him. Another blogger whose writing style I admire is Leo of Zen Habits. Talking of Leo, just consider how much writing he does; I am sure he doesn’t have to struggle with the appropriate words and expressions while churning out, maybe, more than 50 blog posts every month for his own blog and for other blogs.

The ability to write well saves you lots of time and consequently makes you more productive as a blogger

This is made amply clear with Leo’s example. He is comfortable writing so he can write so much. Let me reiterate here again that when I talk about writing well I don’t mean an ability to create great literary works; writing well involves talking in the language of your readers so that they find your writing engaging, easy to read and extremely useful. When you know how to write well you don’t have to waste your time trying to write, you can simply focus on the central message and the right words and expressions manifest on their own.

Writing well keeps your readers coming to your blog again and again

Haven’t you often subscribed to a blogger’s RSS feeds simply because you love the way he or she writes? When you write well, when you write in a manner that your readers can relate to, they want to read you whenever they get a chance. When you’re known for writing well your blog posts attract more traffic because your readers don’t want to miss your latest update.

This reminds me, when I used to design websites I generated lots of traffic for my web designing website by writing web designing and web programming tutorials for other website. There was one thing that distinguished my tutorials from other tutorials covering the same topics: an underlying sense of humor. Even the most intricate programming issues I explained in a funny, entertaining manner. I started getting professional writing assignments due to this very quality of my writing. It just came to my mind recently that somewhere while writing content professionally I lost that touch. That used to be my “voice”. I haven’t succeeded yet, but I’m trying to get it back while writing blog posts.

Writing well helps you promote your blog

In the end it all boils down to how well and how fast you can write when it comes to leaving comments on other blogs, writing guest blog posts, generating linkbait content for your blog and interacting on online forums. All these efforts require lots of time and this is the main reason why many bloggers fail to utilize the techniques to promote their blogs. The ability to write well minimizes the time you need to generate content for external sources. When people find your writing engaging they immediately click your link to see what more you have written on your own blog.

Well, inadvertently this has turned out to be a longer post than I had initially planned (sticking to plans is something I really have to work on). If Darren lets me (or if he takes a vacation again), one day I would like to write a post here discussing how you can become a better writer without having to put in a gargantuan effort.

Amrit Hallan blogs at Content Blog. He writes about blogging, content trends and online copywriting.

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Most of the times I am interested in taking a look, and I also know many people that buy and sell websites for a living, so I am thinking about exploring the business side of this market. Many sellers and buyers prefer to keep the transaction private instead of going with a public auction on Sitepoint or similar, because it makes the overall process smoother.

So if you are trying to sell your blog privately, drop me an email and we can arrange something. Similarly, if you are interested in buying blogs privately, let me know and I will keep you in the loop of the opportunities available. You can reach me on daniel AT dailyblogtips.com.

Want to Sell Your Blog? Want to Buy Blogs? Drop Me an Email

Here’s the thing - for a blog to become successful you can’t just work on one aspect of it - there are many tasks to work on as it grows. These include writing content, engaging readers, watching what’s going on in your niche, building networks with other blogs and sites in your niche, working on the design of your blog, moderating comments, promoting your blog/marketing, finding, managing and optimizing income streams, search engine optimization, tracking your blog’s metrics…. and more.

It’s a bit of an overwhelming list isn’t it!?

The problem comes when a blogger becomes obsessed with any one aspect of the list - at the expense of other aspects.

Each of the things I’ve mentioned above are legitimate things to work about on your blog (some more important than others at different stages of a blog’s life) however a blog grows best when you’re working on them all and not just when you do one of them.

Five Types of Obsessed Bloggers

Let me share five common scenarios that I see:

1. The Design Maniac - perhaps one of the most common examples of this is the blogger who becomes so obsessed about how their blog looks that they do little else but tweak it visually by playing with their CSS, touching up logos, trying different layouts, testing new menus and navigation….

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of this - but if it’s all you do when are you going to write content, do some networking and moderate comments?

2. The SEO(bsessed) - I went through a phase where I became obsessed by Search Engine Optimization. Symptoms of this disorder include writing for Search Engines instead of human beings (you know, posts with the same keywords 400 times, all bolded and in heading tags), spending more time tweaking your templates more than you spend time writing content, making every post you write link to your ‘make money online’ page which is filled with affiliate links, checking your page rank every morning before you moderate your comments and sending out hundreds of emails to other bloggers you’ve never heard of before asking them to link to your post….

OK - again, SEO isn’t evil, Search Engines can actually be a rich source of traffic for your blog - however SEO is also enhanced by quality content, well coded sites and the best sites rank well in SE’s because they get linked to for their quality.

3. The Social Media Sell Out - this is something most bloggers go through at one stage or another too. They hear about the masses of traffic that a site like Digg or StumbleUpon can send and they write post after post specifically with the hope of getting on the front page of social bookmarking sites.

You know the posts I’m talking about - 419 Stupid Britney Spears Quotes, 10 Ways to Skin a Cat…. Really!, Ron Paul (insert anything here)….

These types of posts can draw a lot of traffic to your blog, the problem is that it can be a rather empty experience if you’ve not worked on your blog’s design and worked out how to keep the readers. It can also frustrate your regular readers who are wanting posts of substance. Lastly the traffic can be quite destructive (both to your servers and the comment areas on your posts - particularly if you draw 10,000 angry little Digg users into your blog). Sure - write some posts and experiment with social media, but don’t get obsessed.

4. The Money Hungry Blogger - There’s nothing wrong with monetizing your blog but if someone arrives at your blog and there is NOTHING but ads above the fold of your blog you might want to have a think about the first impression you’re creating.

If every post you write contains an affiliate link or is a paid review, welcomes another sponsor, calls for new sponsors or launches your latest ebook - then you also might want to consider the reputation that you’re creating for yourself as a blogger.

5. The Stat-a-holic - if you wake up in the morning and before you have a coffee, head to the bathroom, kiss your wife or pick up your screaming baby from his cot…. you’ve just got to check your blog’s stats - YOU’VE GOT A PROBLEM!

Once again, most bloggers go through a stage when they start out when they seem to check their blog’s stats more times a day than pretty much doing anything else - but for some bloggers they never grow out of it. They spend hour after hour not only checking visitor numbers but have a daily process of checking where every reader arrived from, how many pages they viewed, what links they clicked, how long they took on each page and where they headed to after leaving.

Knowing how people use your blog is good - but…. if you spend more time checking stats then anything else you’ll notice one big stat - no one comes back because you’re not putting enough time into writing content!

The List Could Go On

I could go on describing bloggers who obsess over promoting their blog, networking, building reader community, writing on only one aspect of your niche, exploring new blog tools etc - but you get the picture.

This stuff is all good - but you’ve got to keep some balance!

Tips for Single Minded Bloggers

Do a Time Audit - Take some time out today and think about how you use your time when it comes to blogging. Where is the majority of your time going? List all the tasks in the order that you put time in and ask yourself - am I in danger of obsessing over any one of them? What am I ignoring that I should be doing more of?

Once you know where (if) you’re out of balance it’s time to do something about it.

Give Yourself a Schedule - One thing that I did in the early days of blogging was to set myself a schedule. At the time I was working two jobs and studying part time so only had a couple of hours a day so my schedule included a little time in the mornings for checking emails, an hour before leaving for work to write a post or two and then in the evenings I devoted my time to networking, email and moderating comments. Once a week I also put an hour aside for some SEO and once a month I’d put aside time for design.

Create a Points System - Another system that some bloggers use is to create a ‘points system‘ where they give themselves different ‘points’ for achieving certain goals on their blog.

Get Feedback from Others - I’d also recommend asking someone else for their feedback on this. Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted on one aspect of your blog without realizing it. Ask another blogger or a trusted reader or two for honest feedback on how they think you’re going. You might be surprised with what they come back with.

Have Your Say

What is your obsession (or has been) as a blogger? Are you in danger of getting out of balance? What do you do to keep yourself more balanced?

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