In our blogging 101 series, I’ve spoken regularly about the need to continually review what you’re writing to best find things that work. Einstein said that the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and the same holds true for blogs: yes, it takes time to establish a blog, but likewise there’s no point going on forever if it’s not working.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a man I can say many things about (despite rumors, most of them positive), but there’s one trait I’ve always admired in Michael, and that’s his constant drive to work out what works, and change on an ongoing basis. Stats for TechCrunch are notoriously hard to come by (they’re blocked in Quantcast for example), but Alexa shows that from around May last year, TechCrunch’s traffic and rank started to slide. There was an improvement in November, but only to levels below pre-May. Stagnant probably isn’t the right word, because TechCrunch on a bad day does more page views than most sites out there, but certainly there was no growth.

Come late March, the chart started heading north. As of today, TechCrunch has risen from around 6,000 in Alexa to just outside the top 1000. Obama was elected in January, but in April change came to TechCrunch. So what changed?

Repositioning to PoptweetCrunch

PoptweetCrunch is a name used by some observers privately to describe the change at TechCrunch starting in late March, but fully taking hold in April. Sensing a trend in the market, Arrington smartly called that posts about Twitter, sometimes mixed in with celebrities was a great way to build traffic. He hired the very capable MG Siegler, who had gotten a name for himself as a consumer oriented tech writer at VentureBeat, and gave him the primary task of writing about Twitter. Siegler does do other posts (his critics may not agree), but he’s the chief Twitter correspondent for lack of a better term. With Siegler on board, TechCrunch has thrived.

The results from the new mix of content don’t just show itself on Alexa, but on other services as well. Posts about Twitter are heavily retweeted over non-Twitter posts from TechCrunch, and this helps drive traffic. On the small but popular with a few meme tracker Techmeme, TechCrunch has risen from under 6% of all mentions, to nearly 9% today, and will likely go past 10% in the near future. Some have suggested that the close personal relationship between Techmeme’s owner and MG Seigler helps in this regard, but I believe that to be unfair: any idea that Techmeme is fair and impartial to begin with has long been dismissed, and I don’t believe that MG Seigler would get more favors than other sites and writers that are favored by the site, over those not in the club. Further: the drop in VentureBeat’s Techmeme ranking is somewhat mirrored in the rise of TechCrunch with MG on board.

All in all the repositioning of the site has been a huge success in terms of traffic and in bringing in new readers, and you can’t dispute that.

Mistakes

The success though of the move to PoptweetCrunch hasn’t been seamless, and there’s some good lessons in this for all sites.

The change hasn’t been universally embraced by long term readers. Any change any site makes is always going to have dissent, no matter how much you try. The marginal cost of losing old readers at TechCrunch has been the gain of more new readers, so from a business perspective it makes perfect sense.

Here’s what I would have done though to somewhat appease older readers: I would have offered a clean feed. Maybe not lots of feeds (and in retrospect, that was an mistake we made here at The Inquisitr), but a separate feed called “startup news.” That way you could offer a feed to long term readers who only wanted to read about startup news, and who didn’t want to read about Kanye West and Twitter.

Commenting policy is an issue: TechCrunch has gone from one extreme to the other in comment censorship, and that does alienate some people. When I started my 12 month stint there, comments were never deleted, a policy I believe today to be the wrong one. But likewise, dissent on posts is regularly deleted on TechCrunch now, not just the extreme stuff, but more moderate views. I should note that they still do leave some dissent up there, and in that regard the implementation is very hit and miss. Michael Arrington once told me to ignore the commenters, but today TechCrunch doesn’t ignore them enough. TechCrunch should make a clear (or clearer) commenting policy that is a little more open to dissent, but within reason.

Conclusion

If one of the biggest tech blogs in the land feels the need to shift focus to drive traffic, it should be a sign to other blogs that shifting isn’t a sign of defeat, but an opportunity waiting to happen. Try new things, give up on old things if they aren’t working, and ultimately work out what works best for your site.

(image: lalawag)

What TechCrunch teaches us about repositioning a blog is a post from: The Inquisitr

We didn’t run inline text ads when we started The Inquisitr, but with our ad revenue starting to drop off late last year as the recession kicked in, we gave it a shot.

Kontera is the company we’re using. You’ll notice their links with a double underline within a post, with a pop-up box when you mouse-over them. These style of ads play nicely within Google’s rules, and can also be used alongside Adsense units.

So far, I couldn’t be more happy with the service. While they haven’t countered our drop-off in display advertising, they have gone some way to supplementing our primary ads, and in this market it all helps.

Kontera ads though work better on some sites compared to others.

Making Kontera work for you

The key to making Kontera work on your site is to give it enough text to work with. Kontera runs words in a post and looks for matches, so if you do primarily shorter posts, it won’t have as much to work with.

Posts three paragraphs or more work best with Kontera, as it often finds more, and often better matches. The type of content (and the content that gets traffic) is also an important factor. Like other advertising solutions, Kontera does pay better on tech and more serious content, and pays less on say celebrity content. Types of content in between reflect the general market. This isn’t to say you can’t make money with celeb content from Kontera, but you will make significantly more if you’re running more serious content.

Compliment, not supplement

The key here is to not treat Kontera as a solution alone. Kontera works alongside your existing ads, so it’s an easy way of complimenting your existing blog income. In many cases, you might not be utilizing this form of ad already, so you don’t lose by giving it a shot, at least that’s the way I first approached it.

Do they click?

One thing that has surprised me is how popular some days can be in terms of CTR on Kontera ads. On a good day, our CTR can often be 10x higher than the next highest unit on site. Even on a slow day, the CTR rate is still strong. These ads don’t deceive; it’s clear what they are visually, but by being inline users seem more receptive to them; less ad blindness helps.

Conclusion

Inline text ads aren’t for everyone, and even I’ve been critical in the past about the format. But as the recession goes on, we’re in a game of survival now and this is a legitimate way of making some more money for your site. Put it this way: I’d rather do these ads then something that might upset Google, or make the reading experience unfriendly (like putting up ads in the middle of text…not yet anyway ).

You can sign up for Kontera here. Worse case: they don’t work for you, you can take them down. They also offer a plugin for WordPress that makes it nice and easy to set up.

Using Kontera to increase your blog revenue is a post from: The Inquisitr

In our Blogging 101 series we covered a range of areas you’d need to look at while setting up a blog, but there’s one small thing that can help with looks and branding: a logo.

A logo for your blog is a key part of your branding. A logo helps the name of your blog stand out and become more memorable to those who visit it.

In an ideal world, we’d all have the money to go out and get a designer to do a logo for us, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Further, while a logo should be on your list of things for your blog, it shouldn’t be necessarily a top priority either.

The good news is that it isn’t hard to design a logo yourself. Here’s some things to consider in designing a logo for your blog. For the purposes of this post, we’re referring to logotype (that is, text) and logo (graphical element) as one in the same, although strictly speaking they’re aren’t.

Tools
You will need a graphics editing package to create your logo. Windows Paint doesn’t count. At the high end, Photoshop is industry standard, but an expensive call for most people. If you’re determined on using Photoshop but can’t afford it, you can often pick up older versions on eBay for around $100. Photoshop CS will still do a fine job vs Photoship CS4 for example, even if it doesn’t have all the latest bells and whistles.

On the cheaper end, The Gimp, the open source graphics editing package is free, and has improved with age. There’s also other options such as Corel Drawn and Paintshop Pro that offer cheaper packages that will allow you to create your logo.

Once you’ve got the tool, creating a basic logo is about as hard as typing text into a blog or word processor. Create a blank canvass, type the name, change the font and color.

Font: serif vs san-serif

A Sans-serif font is a font like Arial, it doesn’t have the “serif” end strokes that you see in serif fonts like Times New Roman or Garramond.

The web has broken some of the rules when it comes to font use. Traditionally, serif fonts have been used in print due to readability; experts claim that serif fonts are easier to read. And yet sans-serif fonts (particularly Arial) are widely used online for text. For you logo, readability rules for cotent don’t apply as much, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Generally speaking, I’ve always found the split this way: Serif fonts look for traditional, and have an authoritative feel about them. San-serif fonts look more modern, and are more commonly seen in tech/ web 2.0 blogs for example.

You can also go with a decorative font like an Old English newspaper style font (like on the NY Times) but you need to be careful with these styles as they can often be difficult to read depending on spacing, placement etc…

Graphical element

One consideration is the introduction of a graphical element to your logo. That might be a picture or designed graphic that is used with your logo text. The two can also be merged, so that a graphic might be part of your text. Here’s some examples:

No graphical element

We don’t have a graphical image with our logo

Graphical element (designed)

Darren Rowse’s Problogger has a designed logo to the left of the text.

Graphical element (stock)

b5media’s Media Scribbler has some stock images in the background adding to the theme of the blog.

The harder of the three is the designed element. Unless you pay some one to design it for you, are skilled, or can create something very simple that works, they are best avoided.

Getting it right

The Inquisitr has had 4 different logos since we launched in May 2008. No, I’m not indecisive, but I use the example because even on the first attempt, you can always improve. Ideally you get to the stage where you lock in a logo for the long term, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment.

Here’s our previous logos and why we changed (note, logos not to scale)

Our first logo was very much a reflection on the template we started with, which featured strong Serif headlines. I believed it was assertive and strong as a branding statement (note in use, it was 550px wide).

The second logo reflected a desire to add a 728×90 banner ad to the top of the page. The logo had to shrink, so it did. There were actually two versions. The first had “tech, pop and penguins” as the slogan, the second version “the better mix.” Feedback was that people didn’t understand what tech, pop and penguins meant (it was an inside joke), so it failed as a branding statement. The Better Mix referred to our mix of content, which by this stage was starting to go wider.

The third logo abandoned the aggressive serif font for a lighter, more traditional font. As we moved into more non-tech content (we’ve never dropped tech, but it dominates less today) I was looking for something that appealed more broadly, particularly to a female demographic. Around this time we also did a major overhaul of the template.

The fourth harks back to the original logo, but switched to a sans-serif font. Our template revisions had dropped the serif headlines, and the rest of the site was in a sans-serif font, so I felt that it fitted better with the overall layout. It’s also cleaner, more modern, and dropped the slogan.

Slogans

One possible way to add to your logo is with the inclusion of a positioning statement/ slogan. As noted above, we ran additional text about what we were about on several versions of our logo. This can be particularly useful when starting a blog, and where your sites name doesn’t define what you are writing about.

Case study: Blippitt

I’ve been corresponding with Chris Monty, the owner of Blippitt for a while now, some great content there if you haven’t checked it out. Chris recently changed the name of his blog from Monty’s Mega Marketing to Blippitt for branding purposes and simplicity.

There are other changes to the site, but one thing has stayed the same: a plain text logo. I thought I’d try to come up with some basic logos for the site based on the advice in this post.

Space
Starting point is the space to work with. By my rough calculations, a 360×60 logo will fit in the current configuration.

Note I’ve played with basic colors here. Blippitt is primarily black and red (not unlike The Inquisitr). It’s always safer to not introduce new colors in a logo (unless primary), and introducing additional colors is the biggest mistake many people make.

None of these logos are necessarily ready for use, but it took me less than 5 minutes to come up with the list. I quite like the second last, although maybe not in red.

The point though is a simple one: you can start with a basic blog name and come up with a basic logo even if you’re not that comfortable around graphic editing tools.

Conclusion

A specialist graphic designer will tell you that there’s much more again to coming up with a logo for your site, and I wouldn’t disagree. But for the rest of us, getting a basic, solid logo up doesn’t have to be that hard if you follow some simple rules.

Your logo is an important part of your branding, and it never hurts to take that first step away from plain text.

Creating a logo for your blog [blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Running a blog can be highly rewarding, but not every blog is successful.

You’ll read lots of great advice across the blogosphere (some of it here) about how to make your blog successful, but rarely do you read the bad news: that sometimes you’re best walking away, and starting again.

While walking away may be considered failure, a failed blog is actually a great learning experience. Jeremy Schoemaker, one of the smartest guys I’ve had the privilege of meeting wrote the other day that he’s failed more than he has achieved, and even with all the smarts in the world, he’s still failing today:

I am always amazed at how scared people are to fail. I fail all the time…. or at least what other people would consider to be failures. I would rather call them experiences.

Learning from your failures and trying until you find success is an amazing experience.

That doesn’t make failing easy. No one who has ever committed themselves to a blog ever finds it easy walking away. I can’t change your mindset, but I can provide advice on when you might quit your blog and what you can do to save it.

The number one mistake new bloggers make

Before we start talking doom and gloom, there’s one very important rule when it comes to blogging success that new or newer bloggers without fail nearly always make: the time equation.

It takes time to establish a blog. I’ve always put the figure at 6-9 months before you know whether it’s going to really work or not, based on the time it takes you to build links, traffic, a strong presence in Google, longtail content and more. Others, such as Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo and founder of the Weblogs Inc blog network puts the figure at 2 years.

What ever the figure, getting 2 or 3 months in then walking away because you’re not making money is in most cases a mistake, because you usually can’t tell that early whether you’re blog will be truly successful. There are some pointers we’ll get to further into this post, but I’ll put it this way: it would have been easy to walk away from this site after 3 months, our figures, despite having a writing team were low and didn’t even come close to paying the bills. Month 4-6 we started to grow, and by month 7 we were really starting to deliver stats that paid the bills.

Criteria

This advice applies to blogs that are being published to make money. If you’re writing a personal blog, traffic and revenue may mean nothing to you (it doesn’t with my personal blog) you would only really want to quit if you no longer enjoyed it, or it no longer served what ever purpose you had for it (might be promoting your business, sharing with friends etc…).

When to quit

Short term

Having said that it takes time to establish a blog, there’s no reason to flog a dead horse either. I know when I’ve written about growing The Inquisitr in the past, some expressed surprise that I considered 100,000 page views a month low, and some shared publicly and privately figures far lower again for their blogs.

A blog that does 1000 page views a month in its 2nd or 3rd month isn’t going to make it.

You should see some growth the longer you blog, although from month to month that may vary, for example The Inquisitr went backwards in its second month before starting to grow again.

Look for things like links in and Google search traffic. Even if your numbers are low, a potential growth marker is search traffic; the more you post, the more search traffic you might see. Links should be assessed on a similar basis; if you’re regularly getting links in, more people might find your content.

You need to establish early on how much traffic you need to reach maybe not for your goal, but a level that makes the site sustainable, be that relative to the time you put in going forward.

There’s no hard and fast rule on numbers. A site doing 10,000 page views a month in a high paying niche may be quite sustainable, but a site doing 100,000 page views in a low paying niche might not be.

Ultimately though, if you aren’t getting traffic, it’s time to quit, but if you are seeing some growth, see if you can hold out a bit longer. 6-9 months is the key.

Long term

If your blog is 12 months old and it’s not delivering, chances are that it won’t take off. There are exceptions: Jeremy Schoemaker run his personal blog for years before it became popular for example. My first blog, The Blog Herald, took nearly 2 years before I made more than $100 in a month from it and it really took off.

At this stage you have to make a judgment call: do you love what you’re doing and is money not that important? Some people can blog for years and hardly make a dime because the end goal isn’t money, but sharing. But if you’re in the business of making some money, can the skills you’ve learned be better used on another site, or a new site altogether?

Like the short term assessment, I can’t put a hard traffic figure on what’s good or bad here. You’ll know though, be it through revenue (lack there of), traffic or even engagement.

How to save your blog

If your blog isn’t going well, it’s a sure sign that you’re not breaking through to your target audience, or your content isn’t working in its niche.

That’s doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve done something wrong, but it is does mean that your competitors are doing more things right.

Refresh

One way to reboot a blog is to give it a new look. We did a major overhaul of The Inquisitr in October, and it kick started a long period of growth for us.

Looks aren’t everything, but there’s more to this than aesthetics. A refresh should incorporate best practice SEO and layout techniques to drive new traffic, get those who visit to spend more time on the site, and to get people clicking on ads so that even if the traffic doesn’t shoot through the roof, your ad revenue starts to grow. There’s a lot of bad practice around with ads, and given you’re trying to make money, it’s one area that can make a difference.

One word of caution though: lots of people think they’re experts here, but few fully understand things like ways to improve SEO and even click through on ads. The best looking sites aren’t always the best delivering sites. A number of people heavily criticized our makeover, usually graphic designers, but they had no idea of what we were trying to achieve, and if I’d followed many of the criticisms we wouldn’t be where we are today, period.

You don’t have to spend money either to do this. There’s a wealth of knowledge freely available online, and the more you know, the better placed you’ll be. Even if you can’t do a big overhaul, sometimes even small tweaks can help a blog.

New ways of doing content

There’s always a fine line between quality and quantity, but if your blog isn’t working, it might be time to tweak the ratio. Study what your competitors are doing, then don’t copy it, but take the best bits and do your take on it. That might mean shorter, but more frequent posts (by short, posts should always be a minimum of 3 paragraphs in my opinion, with some exceptions), or that might mean doing lists or new styles of feature posts. List posts are very popular on some sites, although they’re highly time consuming in my experience. What have you got to lose? Try some new styles of content, see if some work; if you find some that do, keep on doing them!

Go wider

There is a great market for specific niche blogs (b5media comes to mind), but they’re notoriously difficult to scale unless you’re a true expert in the field, and put a lot of effort into them.

Presuming you haven’t picked a name for you blog that locks you into a small niche, try going wider. Actually, scrub that, even if you have picked a name that locks you in, you can still go wide. Sites like TechCrunch and SiliconAlleyInsider do the occasional celebrity post now.

Going wider though doesn’t have to completely pollute your focus. Wide can be related, for example when TechCrunch started writing about Paris Hilton dating a MySpace founder, the link was the MySpace angle. You don’t have to go celebs, but it can be linked in.

The name of the game is scale. If going even a little bit wider helps with traffic, it subsidizes the core product; ultimately, do you want to have a pure, failed blog, or a well read blog that writes great content in a core area, and also writes about related content as well?

Conclusion

Admitting failure is never easy, and it’s harder when often you’ve put your heart and soul into creating your own blog. But ultimately, blogs fail. They say 90% of all small businesses fail within 10 years, blogs are no different. Learn from what went wrong, be prepared to make changes if you’re going to stick at it, and if you’re giving up on a blog, don’t give up blogging altogether. Remember that there are thousands of people every week starting blogs for the first time who are going to make the same mistakes, sometimes worse than you have. If anything, your experiences now give you an advantage in the future. Those who succeed share the same quality: they’ve all failed at various points along the way.

When to quit your blog, and things you can do to try and save it is a post from: The Inquisitr

We’re hitting serious turbulence in the economy, and over a number of posts we’ve talked about the advantages and disadvantages the market brings. Yesterday things took a turn for the worst when Sequoia Capital, the Valley’s number one VC firm, said that it’s now officially time to panic.

So lets take the worst case scenario: your blog or smaller startup isn’t working. It’s not profitable, or it isn’t bringing in enough money to make it work. Or alternatively, you own a number of sites, and you need some cash: selling isn’t always a dead end, and sometimes you need to focus on some sites over others.

Where to sell

I’m old school, so I’m going to recommend Sitepoint for anything over $1000, Digital Point for sites under that mark, with the proviso that you can sell both on each. There are other sites that do sales now, and some of them may work for you, but do your homework first. Don’t use eBay if you can help it; it may have been used by some high profile sites, but the problem on eBay is standing out from the sea of rubbish that pollutes listings there. If you’re confident in building lots of publicity, then eBay might work, but for everyone else, stay away.

Having said all of that, your ideal sale is one that is never public. Public sales always cause a crisis in users: be it for a service or site. The degrees can vary, but ultimately your site is always best sold without your existing user base knowing about the sale.

The other thing to consider in your mix is the value of your domain name. It might not be a glamorous exit, but if you have a great domain name, you may get better returns by selling the name on one of the dedicated domain sites, and better still at open auction. You’ll always find some money, even small, from content and IP, but dedicated domain auctions may offer better returns.

What to sell for

In late 2006/ early 2007 I spent 6 months doing nothing much more than buying and selling sites, and I lived and breathed the low end of the market. I haven’t had as much hands on experience since then, but I’m still a regular visitor to most key sites, and I still track sales when and where I can. This advice is given on what I see today, and my experience in the market, for both blogs and small scale startups/ web services.

If you’re looking for large scale economics (or bigger startups), read this post from Fred Wilson. It’s great advice, and the theory holds true. But at the end of the scale, buyers and sellers look at sites a little differently.

The first key is multiples. Buyers at the lower end don’t think in EBIDT, they think in monthly revenue. As a general rule, you should be able to find a buyer in the range of 9-13x monthly revenue. Two provisos: buyers will look at operating costs, and if there’s a high operating cost (blogs fall into this some times), you should cut it back to a multiple on profit. Second: buyers won’t pay that in high risk verticals, and while there are several, the one that most comes to mind is proxy sites, that can easily be banned and lose traffic. When I was dealing in proxies, a good proxy might get 3-4x monthly revenue, but quite often less.

You can though get more. Multiples of 50 or even 100x aren’t unheard of. The key is the idea, and how you sell it. What I would suggest though is that 9-13x is your base rate. We don’t know how bad the low end startup and blog market will be affected by the downturn. It could see less buyers in the market, but likewise it could see more as those traditionally buying higher up look for bargains at the lower end of the market.

There are any number of factors in determining a high multiple sale. It could be anything from Technorati rank, through to Google indexing. Different buyers will see different things. The key when selling at high multiples is to identify clearly what your strengths are: saying you have a world of potential alone doesn’t cut it, you need to prove why.

Intellectual Property

Although you’ll usually find buyers based on existing revenue multiples, IP is a different matter. You may be an existing smaller scale startup who has built something interesting, or alone you may have built something no one else is offering. There are buyers of IP, and startups do manage to find new homes, even towards the $1 million mark in fire sales (Revver comes to mind). One example: bamzuku.com just sold on Sitepoint for $25,000, without any revenue history. The exit premise wasn’t great, but it offered something interesting in terms of IP: a full clone of a very popular video service in Japan.

The key is the pitch. You may have worked for years on your startup, but what is the real replacement cost today, are there competitors, and what is the real potential. Lets face it: particularly for a service post launch, if you couldn’t make it work, how are you going to convince someone else that they could? Buyers are looking for bargains on replacement costs, and often they are looking for services that might complement what they are currently doing.

Conclusion

There’s always an exit, and there is always buyers. The problem is accepting that your site or startup isn’t working, and that sometimes (not always) you’re going to take a loss on the sale. Do you homework, research the market, explore private sales first if you have to sell, and then go public. Sometimes it’s better to get something back for your investment then nothing at all.

Selling your blog or small startup [blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr

But I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t disagree with something, and as much as 1000 words of agreeing might make Steven happy in this post, it doesn’t add value here.

Here’s what Steven had to say on passion and the business case:

It doesn’t matter where you turn in the blogosphere the one consistent thing you will hear from people trying to tell you how to be a successful blogger is that you must write about the things you are passionate about.

Bulls&*t.

Remember this is a business decision you are making here. You are in the business of making a good living writing about something. As with any business the key is being able to find a market that isn’t being covered; or isn’t being covered very well, and getting in there before anyone else does. Blogging for an income is no different. I’m not suggesting that you can’t; or shouldn’t, be passionate about the area you end up writing about. After all you may come across that under served segment because of your passion but don’t think that passion isn’t something that can’t grow because of what you end up writing about. Making money can sometimes prove to be a great fertilizer to help grow your passion.

It’s not completely wrong, and my issue is one of semantics, but it’s the order that I take umbrage with. It does ALWAYS come down to a business decision, but passion needs to lead before the business case, and as Steven points out, both can co-exist.

If you’re starting a new blog and you’re working out what to write about, you start with the topics you like or have knowledge of, topics you may have a passion for. You then do the market analysis and formulate the business case. If you can’t find a strong business case around your shortlist, or you simply don’t have a shortlist and your only idea (your passion) fails the test, then you might go looking for opportunities.

Passionate bloggers rock

There’s several advantages bloggers have over journalists, but one of the big ones is knowledge of the topic they are writing about. A journalist is trained as a journalist (most of the time), and has little or no real world experience of the areas they are writing about; journalists learn as they go. Bloggers come from outside of writing (mostly), and may enter the space with real world experience. Likewise most bloggers lack a skill that journalists have: the ability to easily learn new areas outside of their own experiences. The exceptions there are people who have worked in marketing and politics, because both demand the ability to deliver text based on the topic or focus at hand.

To suggest that an average blogger, with no background in writing for a living, simply abandons passion for a strict business case fails: it presumes that the blogger is fully capable of delivering outside their knowledge field, and in a way that delivers a strong product. Can you imagine a blogger with a degree in economics writing about the latest in hairstyles, or an expert in cooking writing about third world technology challenges. It’s not impossible that some will discover hidden skills and may well deliver, but the odds on them doing so are small.

Passionate bloggers rock. Passionate bloggers have a real world connection to the subject. Passionate bloggers will nearly always beat a blogger writing on a topic they have no previous experience in, or passion for.

The path to money

The ability to adopt to suit a strong business model is learned. Experienced bloggers, those with training in journalism, or related fields, have an advantage up front, but other bloggers can get to the point where they can capably move outside their comfort zones to focus on a business case first. But I wouldn’t recommend most did the first time they wrote a blog. It’s a path to money; despite some of the marketing pitches you see online, blogging is not a get rich quick opportunity. My recommendation to anyone starting out new: write what you’re passionate about first, it’s a bonus if you can deliver a strong business case, and get out there and start learning by practice. If your blog doesn’t work, start a new one, the barrier to entry is as cheap as free. Refine your skills, become comfortable with the format, and then, and only then if you’re convinced that you want to do this for living, then start looking at opportunities outside your passion zone.

Passion and the business case [blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr

In the first post of the Blogging 101 series, I mentioned that buying a domain name for your blog is as easy as visiting a domain registrar and typing in the name you want, yet the hard part is finding a name that isn’t taken. It’s never been easier or cheaper to by your own domain name, but finding the right name can be a challenge.

Why a domain name?

Having a domain name for your blog offers two advantages: control and branding. It may be easy to set up a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com, but you end up with a yourname.wordpress.com URL that you neither own nor can take with you if you decide to leave the service. Owning your own domain name gives you that control, allowing you to shift hosts or services with the knowledge that your URL will never change. For branding, it’s an issue of recall: what’s easier to remember: yourname.com or yourname.wordpress.com? If you’re looking to make money from a blog, which URL would you take more seriously?

Simple, Short and Sweet

The first consideration in finding a domain name that is right for you should be simplicity and length. If you’re setting up a personal blog as a branding exercise for yourself, you may simply use yourrealname.com, and there is always a place for that, where applicable. But for the blog that doesn’t include your actual name, you need to consider the following:

Simple

theisareallylongnamethatshardtospell.com might sound funny upfront, but it fails the simplicity test. Any domain name you pick should be simple to type and recall. As a general rule, avoid names that are difficult to spell, unless you absolutely need the spelling as an angle for the site itself. You want people to be able to type in your name.

Short

You’re not going to pick up a 4 letter .com domain name, at least without bidding at auction, but you should still try to keep your domain name as short as possible. Ideally, 10 letters or less, although sometimes you’ll need to go longer. This ties into spelling to some extent, as it’s a recall issue; you want users to have to type the least amount of letters to hit your site, so they don’t get it wrong, or don’t accidentally mistype your url.

If you’re not convinced, take a look at the Top 100 blogs on Technorati. 7 out of the 10 blogs on the first page have 10 letters or less in their URL. 1 has 11 letters, 1 has 14 (huffingtonpost.com… a play on a name, and easy to recall) and the other is the official Google blog on a blogspot sub domain.

Sweet

Most importantly, your domain name needs to sound good. It needs to roll off the tongue easily, sound interesting, and be easy to recall. A very simple test is to say the name out loud; is it hard to pronounce? does it fit the tone of what you are or will be writing about? Does it simply sound nice?

Going back to the Techonrati Top 100, Engadget and Gizmodo are both nice sounding names that fit the tone. The Huffington Post as a name fits perfectly with the news offered on the site, and BoingBoing nicer again.

Now for the hard part

Keeping those rules in mind, you then have to find a domain name that works for your site and is actually available. I personally use DomainTools.com for research, and Namecheap for registration but there are a number of tools and registrars you can use. It helps to start with a list of possible names, because 99% of the time, you’re not going to get your first choice. The reality today is that with domain registration being cheaper than ever, that most obvious names will be taken, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find a name for yourself, it just means that you’ll need some patience and time to get there.

With your list of possible names, look at variations on the general theme. It may be adding a word to your first choice, varying the spelling, or rearranging the order of words.

.com over everything else

If you’re writing for an international audience, you should always own the .com domain name for your site, and even if you’re not, you should aim to own it anyway. Country specific domain names have their place, particularly with ecommerce and commercial sites, but for blogs, most people think .com. The same rule applies for .net, .org, .biz and other exotic extensions: if you absolutely have no other choice, maybe you’d blog on one, but ideally you want the .com, because enough people will automatically place the .com after your domain name, even if you’ve never used it.

Likewise, if you can it also helps to own some of the variations as well to prevent domain squatting. Look not only to availability of the .com name, but of the .net and .org as well, and buy them at the same time. Some suggest buying other variations as well, but not everyone can afford to own 25 versions of their own domain, so aim for the .net and .org as a minimum. Also look at variations on the name, for example theyourname.com if you’ve got a blog name that includes The in the title, but not the source URL.

Exceptions to the rule

If you’ve gotten this far in the post and noted that The Inquisitr breaks one of these rules, you wouldn’t be the first person to have pointed that out. Inquisitr.com breaks the spelling rule, and to top it off, it users an r ending instead or er or or, a trend I’d previously said publicly I wasn’t fond of.

Here’s roughly my process in deciding on the name

• I wanted a “newspapery” sounding name, so I started with joint words (for example my first blog was blogherald.com) and straight out names
• I tried a number of word variations, but couldn’t find anything I either liked, or was available
• I found a list of historical newspaper names, a picked out the ones I liked the sound of but weren’t in regular use today, at least not commonly anyway
• I punched name after name into DomainTools, looking at .com availability as well as variations
• Inquisitor was on the list, and I liked the name, but it wasn’t even remotely available
• From my short list, I looked at plays on names, and spelling variations, Inquisitr.com made the cut
• Left with a few names, I tested the names on my wife, who felt that Inquisitr had a ring to it. I agreed
• I ran the name through Photoshop, looking at the name from a visual and branding perspective. The use of the red Q stood out fairly quickly…and in various visual configurations, the name worked well
• I registered the name, and one significant variation on it.

If the correct spelling of the name was available, I wouldn’t have thought twice about grabbing it, but ultimately it came down to a great name vs availability, and although spelling was an issue, it just felt right. It also met the other criteria: short and sweet, and although we may not be the biggest blog today, very few people forget the name, even if some of them struggle to spell it It also had eight letters, and 8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture, so it had an extra bonus in it for me.

There are always going to be exceptions to the rules above, and not following these rules isn’t going to kill your blog, but every one of them are factors that can help you on the path to success.

Conclusion

Buying a domain name doesn’t have to be a scary experience. For less than $10, you can afford to play around, and sometimes you will make mistakes. But if you’re looking to make money from your blog, and you want it to be successful, you need to minimize mistakes upfront, and maximize your opportunities through a great name. Using the above rules as guidance will help you find a name that is right for you.

A rose by any other name: naming your blog [Blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr

You you’ve worked out what you want to blog about, and you’ve set up a blog. But what do you write about? Being knowledgeable about a subject might deliver you some great starting posts, but there is only so many times you can write about the same thing over and over again. Ultimately, you’re going to need to put in place a system for sourcing posts ideas and content, and you’ll need to know how to get your delivery of that content right.

Read hard, read well

There’s a good argument around bloggers living in an echo chamber, and I’m not about to debunk that premise, nor argue against the problems that can cause, at least in this post. Blogging though is a reflection of life; if we have an interest or passion, we’re likely to interact with people who share out interests. In blogging, that might mean reading people who think the same way you do, or blog on the same topics, even when they are your competitors, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. You should be aware what your competitors are writing about, and you should be aware what others are blogging about in your space, even if you don’t always follow that lead, because there is value in doing so. There’s value in seeing how others do it, there’s value in keeping up to date, and there’s value in sourcing content ideas when others write about topics that interest you, that you believe you may wish to cover on your blog because they are of interest to you and/ or your readers. Even in the age of social aggregation and customized delivery, nothing will ultimately substitute reading other blogs regularly.

Love your Feedreader

Reading multiple blogs and heritage media sites doesn’t need to be a burden. Long gone at the days of having to hit every website for your fresh daily read. Feedreaders are a godsend to the time challenged and reading lovers alike, by delivering all the benefits of reading many sites from the one private point. My particular preference is Google Reader, but others are available, including Bloglines and Regator.

Adding blogs and websites to a feedreader is as simple as clicking the RSS icon in your browser or on the site. Follow the instructions and add to suit. Within the reader itself, you can prioritize your reading experience throw folders. For example, I break down my feeds from a Web 2.0 folder at the top, a b and c list folder, all the way down to a general folder (with another dozen in between with various labels), this way I can prioritize the topics and/ or blogs I want to read first or later. This way, I read hundreds of sites every day, and it works well, where as I’d never have a chance of doing the same if I was hitting every site individually.

Look wide, give sites a try

Subscription as a word may imply payment to some, but with feeds, syndication is a free service and you can always unsubscribe if you don’t like the content. Particularly when you’re starting out, don’t be shy in adding feeds to your list, because there’s no other way of building a base reading list. You can always revise it, but regularly you will also find that those feeds stay as well because they offer something you may not have seen when you first visited the site. Just don’t be shy in trying.

Beware the ides of social groupthink

It’s easy to follow the lead of others and write about what ever the big stories are each day. There are numerous sites you can use in every vertical space, and it’s simpler to simply follow. If your goal is to simply document the big news of the day, and you’re not to worried about creating a break out blog, go for it. But if your blogging goal is to become a leader in your space, you have to lead. You have to break stories, and you have to lead conversations, because there are thousands out there who aren’t and are looking for that very leadership.

Some social sites are bigger traps than others. The new wave of social sharing sites such as FriendFeed, Strands and SocialMedium aren’t too bad, although I know with FriendFeed that I’m more likely to see “popular” stories as more and more people join the service. While it worked great for me earlier on as a source and information tool, it is slowly becoming more of a traditional social group think site that still offers great value to me personally (both as a networking and fun sharing tool), but it doesn’t so much as a tool I can use in my blogging to find new or fresh ideas.

The worst sites are the established players, with Digg at the top of the list. Not only is the news on Digg unquestionably old by the time it hits the front page, it’s a terrible source for ideas. You can use Digg as a tool to assess the sort of content that might work on your blog, but you should never use it in your idea mix. Reddit, although I get more personal enjoyment out of it, shouldn’t be in your mix either. Both sites can be used as a way to measure your success in finding fresh ideas and getting it right, but only AFTER the event.

Sometimes the best ideas are the stories that come to you

If you’re starting blogging for the first time, and presuming you weren’t previously a journalist in the same vertical, you’re going to have to go digging for news. And yet, despite the noise and a pile of junk, the best news for established bloggers often finds them. My inbox is regularly full of PR pitches, and although I don’t write about all of them (and I don’t think I could if I wanted to anyway), some of the stuff I break comes via email from a source.

As a new blogger the challenge is building those sources. Sometimes they will naturally find you, and more so than in the past PR professionals scope wider now when pitching story ideas to bloggers, and yet without an established presence nor a lot of traffic, you’re not always going to be on the radar. What I recommend is simple: if you see a company you like, but want to know more, contact them. Send an email, or pick up the phone. Sometimes they won’t respond, and there are companies out there who still don’t take blogging seriously. But the smart ones, the ones you’ll want to work with, will. You’ll start to establish a list of contacts within the company, be it PR folk or actual employees. Some might not place you on their lists, but others will. You should always add something like “don’t forget to drop me a line if you have any news stories you want some coverage on” or something similar when concluding any correspondence on a story so you’re asking to be put on any distribution lists they have. Startups in particular want exposure, and they’re usually more than happy to give stories to bloggers who have shown an interest in them in the past.

Context

There are times where you’ll want to write about a story others are writing about. It may be a personal interest, it may fit in the mix of your blog, or you may be seeking to cover every story in the vertical. But how do you cover it, how do you get it right? Here’s the three ways I’d divide using an existing story on your site

The key point remix

There’s a story you want to cover but you’ve got nothing much to add to it. The end goal is relaying the story to your readers. Find a source, then remix what they are saying in a form that suits your blog and relays the key points to your readers. Where required, find someone else talking about it and quote them with a link if and when it adds value. This isn’t the ideal post, but sometimes you need to use it.

Differing opinions

There’s a story in an area of interest and you don’t agree with the conclusion made by the original writer. So say you don’t agree, and argue your case. Where possible, try to separate the argument from the writer, something the best of us can struggle with at times. And most of all, argue your case well, and back it up. Don’t be afraid to quote others, and reference your points.

Market context

If the story has a place within a broader context of an area you’ve been writing, explain how it fits in while covering the story itself. Link to previous stuff, draw some conclusions, and even make a value call for or against on the story.

Know what works

From reading blogs through to following social sharing and voting sites, you’re going to paint a mental picture for yourself about what works and what doesn’t by seeing what works for others. Sometimes when you cover a story others have written about, you’ll get no traffic, or you’ll see a big spike. Original ideas may take you days to write, and minutes to see that people aren’t interested in it.

Here’s the bad news: after 7 years of blogging, I can’t give you a definite answer as to what works and doesn’t. However, given enough data and understanding of any blog and vertical, I could certainly identify things that are more likely to work than others. You can do the same as well. The best way of getting to that point is to experiment. You won’t know if it works if you don’t try it, and just because it doesn’t work for others doesn’t mean that it won’t work for you.

Like with blog goal setting, working out what is more likely to work is simply a case of setting a way in which to measure success. For a blog post, it might be comments, traffic or links in to the site. It might be feed subscribers after a post, or even likes and comments on FriendFeed. There are lots of ways you can measure if something works, and you can use a mix of these things, or other ideas to work this out.

Getting it right

You’ll never always get it right, but if you’re aiming big, you’ll need to get it right more times than you get it wrong. Getting to this point takes time, and this site in itself if walking proof of that. The important points to remember is that you need to be patient, you need to experiment, and you need to try new things and not be shy in changing things when they aren’t going right. There’s no rewards for blogs full of good intentions and bad ideas.

Conclusion

We’ve gone deep on ways you can improve your blogging experience in this post, and it may sound a little daunting, and yet most of this advice is really quite logical if you think about it. We learn to read and write by reading others, we improve our knowledge of the world by reading others. We get a hot story to tell our friends after being told by others. As humans we regularly argue a point, and sometimes we get things wrong, in business and in our personal lives. Blogging is really in many ways an extension of life, with the same challenges and hurdles, and yet with the same opportunities. Learn from others, experiment, have some fun, retain your focus, and there is hope.

Finding ideas, getting it right [Blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr

So you know you want to start a blog, and you’re know how easy it is to set one up of your own. It’s a start, but just blogging isn’t enough. I believe that I could argue a case 100% of the time for why every business or person should be blogging, but I now tell people outside the space that they should never blog just for the sake of blogging; ultimately you should only start a blog when you have clear goals on what you want to achieve. Having a goal and knowing where you want your blog to go applies equally to personal blogs and corporate/ business blogs, and without that goal, there’s a very strong chance that your blog will fail within 6 months. Then there’s the consideration of what to blog about. Anyone can write, but what topic(s) should you target so you can achieve your goals.

Goal setting

What do you hope to achieve in setting up a blog? Are you starting a blog for fun, a lark where you can rant and rave, or shares pics with friends? or are you hoping that your blog can achieve something, traffic, fame, money, publicity or any combination there in? No matter what the reason, you should always know up front what you want to achieve from having a blog. Goals can be anything you want them to be; it might be creating a presence on the web that is completely you. It might be using the blog as a support tool for something else. It might be establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Typically many will set statistical goals, such as Technorati rank or traffic. Related to this is income; you might wish to make $500 a month from your blog within 6 months to supplement your income, or you might want your blog to become a full time job. No matter what the goal, you absolutely must have one to have any chance of your new blog going the distance.

Finding your niche

One of the hardest challenges facing people looking to start blogs today is knowing what to blog about when everything has been done before. At the base level we have personal blogs where we share our thoughts on anything we care to write about (my personal blog is a good case in point). There’s a role there for personal blogs, and they can assist in building your online presence, and sharing with friends, but most personal blogs don’t go far unless they target a particular niche (my personal blog is again a case in point).

Business bloging is a little easier, because the topic will always be related to the business. But even in this space, focus and niche come into the mix.

The first step is to short list what you think you might be interested in blogging about. The obvious first entry on that list is going to be what ever field you know the most about. If you’re a PR professional that would be PR, if you’re a call center worker who collects fine china, it could be a blog about collecting china. If you’re knowledgeable about the topic, and are passionate about it, your chances of running a successful blog improve.

But sometimes the world doesn’t need yet another blog about startups, or gadgets, or celebrities. Competition can be fierce, and opportunities to enter the space slim. If your goal is to have a lot of traffic, and make good money, then sometimes you have to think outside the areas you’re naturally drawn to.

Spotting opportunities

Some internet marketers love spruiking lists of “high paying verticals” which they say you should target if you want top returns. It’s all very good in theory, but let me warn you now: there are thousands of mesothelioma blogs out there, and very few pay. Chances are every entry on that list has been bled to death by thousands and thousands of bloggers. The idea of a list isn’t a bad one, but you need to create one of your own.

Start with a list of things you think might work, they might be items you have a passing interest in, you think you will be able to write about, and areas where you’d like to learn more (sometimes writing a blog is a great way to learn about a topic). Then hit Technorati, Google Blog Search, BlogCatalog, Blogs.com and any other blog search/ directory services you can find and type in those words, visit the sites your find and make a list of the results. From that list, and from your observations, note which topics are being well served, which aren’t, and note any ways you think you can do better. With a good list and a little time, sure enough you will eventually identify opportunities, and you may find a topic to blog on. This may sound like a slow and long process, but I can’t preach the point enough: always do your research, even if you’re already sure about what you want to blog about. If you don’t know what’s out there, you don’t know who you will be competing against, or who might be able to help you along the way.

Small niches can be really nice

When I founded b5media with Darren Rowse and Jeremy Wright in 2005, we knew we didn’t have the capital to create a few huge blogs that could compete against the blogs coming out from Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. We decided then that if we couldn’t own a space, we’d own the sub-spaces instead. For example, we couldn’t do a huge celebrity news blog, but we could create the biggest Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears blogs because the competition in each space was less than at the top. I don’t know whether b5media follows that path today, but while I was with the company, it grew to over 260 blogs and something like 6-7 million page views (possibly more) and went on to take $2 million in its first round of funding.

I’m not suggesting that you should go out and set up hundreds of blogs, and b5media had over 200 bloggers when I left and one of the biggest expenses was the accounting required to pay all the bloggers. But it does prove a point: you can specialize in a particular niche that isn’t at the top of the food chain and succeed. Rather than writing a web 2.0 blog, you could run a blog about Facebook, instead of a gadget blog, you could specialize in GPS units, or the Apple TV. The key is to find a small niche that works well for you, and offers competitive opportunities.

Conclusion

In some ways, we’ve gone from the simple (setting up your blog) to the difficult (niche and goals) and yet although it may sound a little hard, it really isn’t that difficult. We make decisions every day based on goals, and we regularly focus on niches based on personal likes. Should I take that new job because we can use the money to buy a car is a goal based decision, deciding whether to buy chocolate or free range chicken this week is picking a niche (although obviously sometimes you can have both). Goal setting and finding a niche is really just common sense, but sometimes people get caught up on the wonders of blogging without taking time to fall back to everyday decision making skills. Use this as your rough guide; it won’t deliver you millions, but following these steps will improve your chances of success.

Finding your niche, knowing your goals [Blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr

But it’s hard! I don’t know how to use FTP! CHMOD?!?! php is confusing! what’s CSS?

These are all typical arguments I’ve heard from people in the past when arguing against setting up their own blog under their own URL on a server. We know that setting up a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com is easy, but it doesn’t match a blog under your own name, where you control every aspect.

Naturally it helps that you’re not afraid to try, and sometimes fail along the way, but anyone can do it.

URLs are easy to buy, easy to point

Buying a domain name for your blog is as easy as visiting a domain registrar and typing in the name you want. The hard part is finding a name that isn’t taken, but using sites like Domaintools.com can help there. Once registered, the only remotely scary bit is pointing your URL to your server. Many registrars will offer easy to follow instructions, but all you have to do is find the right option, and usually enter two things, something like ns1.yourhost.com and ns2.yourhost.com, and both will be provided by your host. Not the least bit scary. If you can type, you can do this!

If you’ve decided to buy hosting from your domain registrar (I’d never recommend that you do, but some do), you don’t usually have to point the domain either.

Blog setup is often a click or two away

In the old days, setting up your own blog meant ftping the code base for your blogging platform of choice to your server, playing with permission settings, editing config files, then if you were really lucky and got every step right, you’d have your own blog. The good news is that on most hosts today, you don’t have to do any of that. WordPress is regularly offered as an install option in Plesk, cPanel and similar offerings, and installing WordPress usually involves a few clicks, and maybe typing in a password you’d like, and an email address for the account. Very, very simple.

If you’re concerned that your host might not offer this feature, check before signing up. Long gone are the days where hosts would kick you off for running a blog, today easy installation of blogs is a selling point.

Themes, FTP! Help!

At this point, everything as been really easy. You have your own domain, you have WordPress set up, and you’re able to post. But not many people will want to stick with the default WordPress theme. This is where FTP steps in, and it’s not as scary as you think.

Can you browse files using Explorer in Windows or Finder on a Mac? Can you move a file from one folder to another? If you can, you already have every skill required to upload a theme to your blog.

I recommend Filezilla for FTP, it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and it comes with a killer price tag of $0, but there are others you can use. If you’re really keen, you can even use Windows itself, with Explorer supporting ftp addresses and logins.

The only things you’ll need: ftp details (usually ftp.mysite.com) username and password. With WordPress, you open the themes directory in wp-content (sometimes your WP install will be buried in httpdocs or user or similar folder). You download the theme, then you drag and drop the theme folder into the themes directory, and let it upload. If you’d rather not drag and drop, navigate to the folder using Filezilla, then click on upload once you’ve got the themes directory open on the right of screen. And that’s it. Might take a few minutes, but there’s nothing hard or scary there. Think of FTP and the folders/ files on your server in the same way you’d look at the same on your computer, and you’ll be fine.

Plugins

Like themes, plugins do need to be installed, in this case to the plugins folder in wp-content. There is usually instructions with the plugin, and there will be two possibilities: upload a file or upload the folder. Do as it says and they will be installed. To activate, go to plugins in the WordPress control panel, and click activate on your plugin of choice.

WordPress today makes it a lot easier to add these plugins to your site, without having to touch any code. If the theme you have installed supports widgets (and many do) all you have to do is go to the widgets tab under design in WordPress, then simply add your plugins where you want them.

There are going to be times where the widget and/ or template doesn’t support widgets. If you just can’t cope with code, I’d recommend sticking to ones that do.

Conclusion

See, it’s not really that hard. There’s no massive learning curve required to run your own blog on your own URL where you have full control. We’ll tackle the coding side in a future post because it helps to know a little, but there is no reason today why you can’t set up your own blog. If you’re reading this, and can turn on a computer and open a file, you can do this.

(img credit)

Setting up your own blog is easier than you think [Blogging 101] is a post from: The Inquisitr