How Many Topics Should a Blog Cover?

Problogger tips

Suzie has a post up on her blog which asks a question that many bloggers ask - often when they’ve started a personal blog and want to take their blogging to a new level, particularly in their quest to make money blogging.


The question revolves around how many topics their blog should cover and whether they should have a ‘niche focus’.


Susie writes:
“I also hear focus your blog on one topic. That has been my stumbling block. I want this blog to focus on the Law of Attraction in Action, AND I want to write about lots of other things that I am passionate about, including cooking, blogging, making money online, my art, people and causes, to mention a few.”


There’s some good conversation going on around this topic on her post and I’ve added a 6 point comment of my own there which I’ll point you to rather than simply rehashing it all again here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic though and would encourage you to head to Suzie’s blog to continue the conversation there (shutting comments here as I don’t want to hijack the conversation).

The Opportunity Cost of Not Participating in Web Events

Problogger Tips

Just after midnight last night (as it ticked over here to 1 April) I posted that I was launching a new ProBlogger service - PayPerTweet - a service that pays Twitter users to Tweet about products, services and websites.

Of the 100+ commenters to respond to the post so far the majority noticed the date and time - although what unfolded exceeded my expectations for an April Fools prank. In this post I want to tell the back story of the idea (the idea actually is bedded in reality to some extent) and share some of the 'results'.

The Back StoryOn Saturday I received an email from someone asking me to Tweet about them in return for $20. I won't out them here but they wanted a little 'Tweet Love' to help them build their own twitter follower numbers and were willing to put up $20 to get it. I refused the offer and suggested to the person that there were better ways to build your Twitter following.

Last night at about 11pm my time I Tweeted about the experience of being paid to tweet. The responses from followers were varied from shock, to intrigue, to humor, to a few saying that they thought it was a good idea. These responses reminded me of the launch of PayPerPost. I immediately thought of 'PayPerTweet' and looked it up to see if anyone had registered the domain (purely curiosity). Funnily enough the domain was registered in 2007!
I tweeted my findings about the domain.

At this point I began to think about how I could make a spoof PayPerTweet like site and IM'd Chris Garrett with the idea. He quickly reminded me that it was April Fools day in just a few hours (actually it was 30 minutes away for me here in Australia). He suggested I write it up as a post on ProBlogger.

To this point I'd not been planning any April Fools Day posts (I've never really got into it) but began to write a post anyway - just for fun. I only half thought that I'd post it - I'm always nervous about playing jokes on readers (perhaps it goes back to an April Fools joke played on me in my childhood!)

I IM'd my draft post over to Chris - he laughed and said I should post it. On the spur of the moment I did just that and then Tweeted it for good measure.

The ResponseI was nervous about the post. I'd included a few 'hints' in the post about it's true intentions but still was nervous about how it would be taken. I was quite relieved to see the first comments and Twitter replies come in. Most people spotted the dates - although a few did not.

I stayed up for another hour watching the fun spread across Twitter as people Re-Tweeted the 'news'. The story spread and traffic began to arrive at the post.

The response to PayPerTweet was mixed and I'm not sure I've seen it all yet as it got tweeted and blogged about quite widely. Here's some of what I woke up to this morning:
100+ comments on the PPT post - most saw the joke, a few were completely taken in by it, a few were angry, a few thought it was a great idea.18 Serious Enquiries - surprisingly this morning I have 16 emails in my inbox and two direct messages in Twitter from people who wanted to know more information about PayPerTweet. The 'press release' post had a fake email address in it (the date of April 1) which would have bounced for anyone sending email to it - but 16 people emailed via my contact form. These ranged from potential advertisers wanting to know prices to Twitter users wanting to know how to sign up for the service.Blog Posts - I'm not sure how many people have written about the story on their blogs but there are definitely a few (track it on Technorati). My intention with this was not link bait - but it was the result, to some extent. It even made it to Techmeme. The posts have ranged from those writing about April Fools day through to a number who thought it was serious to a few who I'm still not sure if they got the joke. Twitter - Twitter lapped this one up. It was Tweeted and ReTweeted more than I know how to track (you can see some of it on ProBlogger's Quotably and this search result for PayPerTweet on Quotably). I helped it get kick started by direct messaging a few Twitter friends who gave it mentions. These drove a fair bit of traffic and also drove up my follower numbers (up about 160 so far since midnight). I guess this was good 'TweetBait'.Conversation - what I'm most happy about with this whole PPT thing is that it's actually generated some fascinating conversation and perhaps pointed to an issue that the team at Twitter is going to have to deal with in the coming months. The fact that someone is already offering Cash for Tweets shows that people are already attempting to manipulate the tool. The serious enquiries that I had as a result of posting also indicate that there is some kind of market for this type of thing. How long will it be before someone actually develops the business model for this? How will Twitter protect itself? Should it? Will Twitter be monetized and will see ProTweeters emerge? All of these questions and more have been thrown around over the last 12 hours - fascinating to watch.So it's midday here in Australia and that means the jokes are over and sadly (or happily for some) the PayPerTweet can be relegated to the deadpool (at least for me).

---

You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.

The Opportunity Cost of Not Participating in Web Events

Problogger Tips

Just a quick post to followup on the April Fools post update that I did yesterday. While in general I find the day to be a distraction more than anything else (I'm sure many of us spent more time filtering pranks than doing much else yesterday) it is one of those days that has an 'opportunity cost' associated with it.

'Opportunity Cost' is a term I learned in my university Accounting subject and has to do with missed opportunities of not taking a certain action. When you have a choice between doing two things you forgo the benefits of the option you didn't choose (I'm sure my accountant readers will give us a better definition of it).

The Opportunity Cost of not participating in a day like April Fools day on your blog can be significant. I just checked Technorati again this morning and the volume of blogs linking to my prank yesterday bumped up considerably over night. While there were a few link ups yesterday as the prank happened the real benefit (and opportunity cost) revolves around the April Fools Summary Posts that many bloggers write around the blogosphere. These posts that sum up the jokes that people did are done in their hundreds (if not thousands) and the link juice that they provide can't be underestimated when it comes to SEO.

April Fools Day is just one of many web events that a blogger has the choice to participate in (or to ignore) - there are many hundreds of them out there - almost every holiday and most real world events have some sort of opportunity associated with them for bloggers. For a little more on some of this check out Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture it for Your Blog.

Note: a blogger can't participate in every web event - it would take over their blogs. I guess the lesson is to be aware of the opportunities and to choose to participate in those that relate most strongly to your blog.

---

You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.

AdSense officially Launch Sliding/Scrolling Text Ads

Problogger Tips

After what seems like a very long test period AdSense today have announced that they've added scrolling ads to all CPC text ads. They announce it on their blog here. We started seeing them back in December.

These ads have been appearing increasingly on many publishers AdSense units of late and are little arrows at the base of ad units which allow viewers of the ad to hit forward and back to see more ads. Here's how they look.

As publishers you don't get paid when readers click the arrows or scroll through ads but I guess the theory is that they'll be more likely to click an ad if they see one that is more relevant to them.

Here's a little video of them in action:

Click To Play

What do you think of these ads?

Who Cares How Many Subscribers You’ve Got?

Problogger Tips

The following guest post on measuring a blog's success has been submitted by Mark Seall.
A guide to systematically troubleshooting your blog's performance by focusing on the measures that make a difference.

Apparently it's really easy to get zillions of subscribers to your blog - Just follow a few simple steps, work hard and write good stuff. I know this, because I read it every week on various pro-blogging sites which are keen to dispense the wisdom of their own success whilst making you feel inferior for having less than 20,000 RSS subscribers.

Unfortunately for many of us, the promise of multiple thousands of subscribers is unrealistic no matter how hard we try - sometimes because we work in less popular niches, sometimes because we just don't have the available time, and sometimes because we just don't have that magic mix of talent and luck.

Ultimately this leads to frequent disappointment among bloggers. Many of the bloggers I speak with are at a loss as to how to increase traffic, enviously regarding the multi-thousand subscriber club. Blogging is not a hobby or a profession for those without perseverance.

The reason that we obsess over our statistics

The only reason so many of us obsess over our statistics is because page views and subscriber numbers are the most obvious ways to measure our success. But are they really?

A business that only measures itself by its profits is unlikely to be successful in the long term. Profits are obviously important, but profit is only one measurement of success, and crucially, it is an outcome not a determiner. Outcomes are the things that ultimately we are judged by, but they don't tell you anything about the underlying factors which will make future success possible, and which are making current success difficult.

For example, a firm which is making roaring profits today is a poor investment if their products are so bad that few of their customers return tomorrow. A blog might have 10,000 hits today from social media, but that's hardly a success if visitors don't find any reason to return the next day.

So how can we measure ourselves

To truly understand and address what's driving your success it is necessary to understand the web of relationships between the different determiners which lead to the outcomes that you are looking for. The diagram below shows the network of measurable items which make up these relationships, showing how each is interconnected.

Some of these measures can be determined by statistics and some require a little more subjective judgement. What's important to grasp initially are the actual outcomes in which you are interested. Measures marked in red represent these outcomes. If you blog for money, then obviously ad-revenue is the most important outcome for you. But if you blog only for pleasure then perhaps your level of reader engagement (which can be determined largely by comments) is more important to you? If your blog is part of a longer term plan, then perhaps generating kudos within the blogging community is your best measure of success?

Next, consider (or don't consider) the things which you can't influence directly - such as page views. There is nothing you can do to directly influence these, so to a large extent you shouldn't waste time worrying about them. However, don't ignore them completely. These determiners can provide you with useful information as to why your blog is not performing as expected. For example, if you have few new visitors each month (often the case after the first few months) then perhaps you are getting poor search engine placement, or you are lacking in inbound links? If a quick check on Google shows that you are lacking in links, then perhaps it is time to re-focus on community interaction again? It is important to troubleshoot poor results in a systematic way to avoid firing random shots in the dark.

Finally, put all of your energy into the green items - the things that you can influence. Time and energy are always at a premium among bloggers, and it is usually unrealistic to expect that anybody can focus on everything. However, properly understanding all of the current performance measurements of your blog, and how they interact, will allow you to choose where to focus for the best results. It's worth noting that things which have multiple connections have a greater influence on downstream results - hence the constant emphasis on quality content.

Final thoughts

In reality, most bloggers (myself included) will continue to obsess over page views and find it difficult to walk past the computer without stopping to check on stats. However, putting a bit more focus on the wider measures of success can often delay the onset of the 'blogging blues' and give you the motivation to create that great content that we all love reading.

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5

Posted by: Aaron Brazell

WordPress is about to release version 2.5 into the wild (It just hit Release Candidate yesterday so the release date, though officially not known, is coming soon). If you've been using WordPress.com or have peeked at the demo site you will know the biggest change coming to WordPress with this release.

You might ask, "Where did WordPress 2.4 go?" The answer to this is that it was skipped. Yes, that's right, the 120-day release cycle was scrapped this time and you essentially have two releases in one. Again, the changes are vast and countless. This is a huge release.
So let's get into the nitty gritty shall we?

New Admin User Interface

By far the most comprehensive change in this release was the complete rethinking of how WordPressers do their administrative tasks. Happy Cog Studios was enlisted to do usability research and testing - with the emphasis being on usability research. Several of the items in this rundown are going to be broken into their own list item as they deserve their own description and, again, this upgrade is huge.

You'll notice that the WordPress admin is now bathed in a lighter blue, lighter grey and orange color scheme. I like the nice hues, but others are bound not to. If you're a developer or know your way around creating WordPress plugins, you can supply your own admin CSS with the wp_admin_css and wp_admin_css_uri filters, and WordPress is already supplying per-user options of "Classic" - the old dark blue feel - and the "Fresh" style which is installed by default.
function my_admin_css( $cssfilename ) { // Use name of the CSS file inside the wp-admin folder WITHOUT the file extension return 'my-new-wp-admin'; } apply_filters('wp_admin_css', 'my_admin_css');
I'd just stick with the default though. It's not too shabby.

Menu Layout

One of the first things you'll notice is the change in the administrative navigation. It struck me as very Movable Typeish. I don't know if the idea came from them or simply that Happy Cog had such thorough user research that it made sense. Either way… it makes sense.
Primarily, users interact with the WordPress admin in one of four areas - writing posts, managing posts, managing comments, and managing design elements. You'll notice that these items make up the primary navigation on the left side of the screen. (Sidebar: You'll also notice that the Presentation menu has been renamed Design - which was a usability decision. It makes sense.) Matt wrote more about this.

The rest of the formerly Primary navigation items - Plugins, Options (now Settings) and Users have been moved to a secondary navigation on the right side of the screen.

Sub-navigation is something that's a little weird. As both the Primary and the new secondary navigation used to be part of the same menu bar, the "submenus" all made sense to appear below the primary navigation. This is still the "right" place, I believe for the new Primary navigation points but seems awkward for the Secondary navigation items that are relegated to a different portion of the screen. I know this is something that is currently being thought about, I just don't know what the final results will be.

Also, as a bit of additional commentary, I think plugin authors need to go back and revisit their choice of where they have put their plugin subpages. Do they really make sense to be in the Options page (now Settings)? Do they really belong in the Manage page? In my opinion, plugin settings pages should be listed as a sub-page of the Plugins menu.

Widget Handling

Another MASSIVE shift in philosophy has been in the Widgets page. Before, you could drag and drop widgets into position. You can still reposition widgets by dragging within a sidebar, however, WordPress is relying less on Javascript "bling" for this release. Each widget is listed in a column on the left, you click the Add link and it jumps into the sidebar. Instead of having all sidebars displayed at one time, the user selects the sidebar from a dropdown to expose a different sidebar.

To me, this adds work to the overall experience, and so fundamentally I don't like it, but it feels more reliable.

Dashboard Overhaul

The second thing you will probably notice immediately on login to the WordPress admin (the color scheme being the first) is the new dashboard interface. Now it is completely modularized, and though there is no "tight" way of adding your own, plugin authors can create their own dashboard widgets. The architecture is primitive at this point, but will improve offering a much easier way for plugin authors to do their thing without feeling like they are "hacking".

A summary of your entire WordPress install is summarized in a widget titled "Right Now" informing you of the number of posts, comments, draft posts, tags and categories. Other useful widgets like incoming posts, etc are available and can be customized with your own RSS feeds.

Visual Editor Improvements

The Visual editor, a long time bane of many users existence, has been upgraded with support for TinyMCE 3. It even includes Full Screen mode for those of you that don't like to be distracted when writing. I cannot speak to the ability of this upgrade, as I don't use WordPress' visual editor, but I'm told it is a vast improvement over the older version. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release as well.

Flash Uploader

For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear. There is now a new "Add Media" link in the header of the post window that handles all this now. For those of you who want to debate the philosophical decision to include closed source Flash into open source, and GPL'ed WordPress, knock yourself out.

Plugin Auto-upgrade

An ambitious new feature that is being included in WordPress is a new autoupgrader. By default, it will try to upgrade plugins that are already in the WordPress plugin repository by writing the new files out to the existing plugins. however, this is an inherent security risk as it would require your plugin files be writable by the world. So the fallback is to upgrade plugins via FTP/FTP over SSL. Though your FTP username and password are stored in your database, it's important to remember that FTP is inherently insecure. FTP/SSL is much more secure but is still not the best. Thanks to hooks in the filesystem functionality, I'll be releasing a plugin that I've been working on for Secure FTP (FTP over SSH). It's not ready yet, but hopefully will be soon and I'll let you know when it is.

Custom Sizes for Thumbnails

Since the image uploader was added back in, something like WordPress 2.0, many, many people have complained about the inability to modify thumbnail sizes. I believe the old default was something like 100×100. In WordPress 2.5, thumb-nailing became a whole lot more useful. You can not only set your thumbnail dimensions globally, you can also have a "medium" sized thumbnail, a la Flickr and an option to crop an oversize image instead of just resizing. I figured some of you would like that.

Tag Management

With the introduction of WordPress tags in WP 2.3, the development group took a measured approach to adding user interface around them. A minimal form field on the post write page allowed for a comma separated list of tags with no additional way of management. Fortunately, in 2.5, a bit more UI was added, though functionally identical. It works like Flickr tags where tags can be added via a list of comma separated tags or via a "type, click, add" mantra. In addition, the UI has a tabbed interface which allows for the selection of tags by checkboxes and by most used tags, useful to say the least.

Password Strength Too

The last major item (and trust me there are tons of smaller items or more obscure items) in the list of things you should know about WordPress 2.5, is the password strength meter. Passwords should be at least three characters or they will be deemed "too short" and should consist of two of three types of characters - letters, numbers or symbols - or will be considered too weak. Password security is a big concern for everyone in IT and blog security itself could be beefed up significantly by users choosing "strong" passwords.

Bonus Item: Timestamp Sanity

Thanks to Mark Jaquith (Disclaimer: Mark is one of my employees at b5media, but is also a core developer of WordPress), the timestamp functionality of WordPress has recieved a complete overhaul. By default, a new post has no timestamp module. Instead, it's a publish immediately, or you can click a link if you really do want to modify the timestamp. When editing a post with a timestamp, there is also no "Modify Timestamp" checkbox that caused so much confusion for so many years. If you modify the existing timestamp, it's assumed that you actually want to change the timestamp! In other words, WP is no longer insulting the intelligence of users (not that it was an intentional insult before, but the big brother protection from the blogger's own self was a bit tedious).

So if you feel like testing, you can grab a copy of the lastest trunk code at http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk. The usual disclaimers are in play when using a non-stable released version: No support offered, your mileage may vary, use at your own risk, don't feed the tigers. But if you want to contribute to the development process, testing AND reporting bugs is a good way. A lot of testing is going on right now before a release, so have at it. :-) Enjoy.

Update: Ozh describes how to create your own wp-admin stylesheet.

Top 10 Blogging Tips for Successful Blogging

Top 10 Blogging Tips for Successful Blogging
-By: M.S. Chavan

To become a successful blogger, you must know and apply some basic things. Following tips is a guideline for beginners.

1. The most important thing in successful blogging is the number of posts on the blog. You must write at least 4 times per week on your blog. This will give you more visitors.

2. In each post, the size of content is very important. Do not post articles with just 2-3 lines. Each of your article must contain at least 15 lines.

3. Stay away from copy paste work. No one will visit your blog to read what is already available on other websites and blogs. Moreover, copying other writers' articles is unethical and illegal.

4. You should submit your blog to all major search engines and blog directories. This is the main source for people to know about your blog.

5. Make your blog interactive by putting polls, comment box etc. on it. Many Visitors like to leave comments and take part in the polls.

6. Put links to all your posts in the blog at sidebar. The visitors like to see what are the other posts there.

7. Put an internal search engine on your blog.

8. Be specific and write in easy language. People like read to read articles having these qualities.

9. You should learn about HTML, RSS, PHP and other things which are very useful in success of a blogger.

10. Always keep yourself up to date. This will give you new opportunities.