Super-Bloggers

The New York Times takes a stab at instructions for how to become a blogging star.

Oh, for it to be as easy as following a few bullet points…

Blogging For Money – The Illegal Way

Well, I’m not aware of any laws against it… but it still violates many blogging platforms’ Terms Of Service. It seems that Google can benefit from the proliferation of these, and so I want to reach back in time and revive a ‘classic’ news article on the subject.

Google Losing Fight Against Splogs?

Last July The Guardian wrote an article about “splogging.” It discusses the fight against splogs -spam blogs that abuse the AdSense program for $$$- and Google’s (apparent) lack of interest. Unfortunately, it seems one of the bloggers that fights splogs has gone radio silent, since the last update on his site was in August of ‘07; I hope he simply didn’t give up the fight

What Won’t Google Do?; Lazysphere Blogging

“The Search Party”

Recently the New Yorker published an article about Google’s foray into, well, just about everything.
Kidding.
Anyways, here’s a great quote:

As Google expands beyond search [...] the risk is that the company will come to believe that its engineers can master any business, solve any problem, and that Google will lose its focus.    

So, I don’t run a multi-billion dollar corporation, but even to me it seems Google is spreading their talent too thin; it’d serve them well to stick to their corporate mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That’s quite a task… so why distract yourself with other things? Is Google running the risk of Starbuck’s, that of diluting the brand? Okay, that may be an apple to oranges comparison, but I think I’ll hold my ground on that argument. I.e., Google should stick to organizing content, not producing content.

Are You A Lazy Blogger?

Steve Rubel once again makes a good point: bloggers can be lazy, meaning bloggers are joining the “Lazysphere” instead of producing thoughtful, quality content. Interesting, because a while back Rubel stated that he’d rather post less on Micro Persuasion in favor of being “into the whole micro-blogging revolution”.

Now, my two cents: it’s hard to constantly produce good content. For some of the longer posts you read here, I can spend one to two hours simply doing research… yes, that time does not even include writing. My process is to go through all of my RSS feeds, hit up some of my favorite blogs and see if I can spot a theme; then I dig a little deeper through search engines in an attempt to find more articles. I read them all. I grab the url’s of the pertinent ones and then try to form a post that includes my analysis and opinion. That takes a lot of time. And what do I get for it??? About 3 pageviews a month.

So what’s my issue? Maybe I’m a horrible writer; maybe I don’t have original, quality, thought-provoking content; maybe I don’t post enough; maybe I might not engage in the blogging community enough to draw others to my blog; or maybe people are simply not interested in my ongoing thought process of how to monetize Web 2.0 sans advertising. Whatever the reason (I’m guilty of a lot of the things I just listed), it’s hard to keep it up when you can tell for certain that no one gives a $h!t about what you have to say…

Blogging For Money; FCC Auctions

Blogging For Money

Another story from the Journal did a great run-down of some new ways bloggers can take their labor of love (i.e., making enough money each month to cover hosting fees) to an actual cha-ching enterprise (i.e., being able to cover monthly hosting fees and some extra lattes for all those late-night marathon writing sessions). Unfortunately, the article is centered around how to do the best advertising program for your blog… which, once again, leaves us with no better ideas about monetizing Web 2.0 than slapping ads on whitespace.

FCC Airwaves Auction

I found an article on Bloomberg that was very useful in clarifying what the FCC auction will look like when it starts in two weeks. Also, the Wall Street Journal reported that Frontline Wireless has met it’s “demise” even before the auction started. Interesting, because the company was able to get a 25% small-business discount credit, but nevertheless ended up not being able to make the minimum bid.

Blogging Can Kill You?

My best wishes go out to Om Malik after suffering a heart attack around the end of the year. As the New York Times article about the incident suggests, however, stress about constantly posting wasn’t the deciding factor in the heart attack… most likely it was all the “smokes, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods” that friends took out of his apartment.

Interesting. Do bloggers who have been set up by venture capitalists and who are trying to make a profit by selling advertising space have the same stress levels as regular reporters/journalists?

Note to self, contact the APA or Columbia School of Business for a great study idea….

Blogging For Search Engine Optimization

The other my boss and I were examining organic search results for some keywords we were adding to a few AdWords campaigns. Picture me in his office and both of us going, “What is that?” “Wait, what the hell is this?” and “Where did that come from?” The top hits of our results were inundated with blogs (quick caveat: the particular product you advertise for may not give you an overwhelming deluge of blogs on the first page of Google search results, so I’m sorry if this post won’t apply to you), and both of us were fairly surprised. But as I sat down in a chair to take it all in, the hindsight (always 20/20) hit me and it became more obvious: the blogging platform is, in many ways, perfect for search engine optimization.

An Insanely Short Checklist for SEO

Here’s my quick rundown of stuff that matters when working towards SEO… in other words, a) this is from my own personal research, b) it’s also from a few things I’ve picked up from SEO companies I work with (no trade secrets revealed here, though), c) it’s the super-short version, and d) I am in no way an expert.

How popular/relevant are you with others?

1. How many inbound links point to your site?
2. Are the inbound links on-topic? From my understanding, if you are advertising a special line of lip moisturizer it may not help to have a link from a gun store.
3. Of those inbound links, which are hi or low quality (i.e., are they from the New York Times, a .edu or a .gov site? Or, are they from nefarious link farms and no-name blogs?)

Do you take special care of your own links?

1. What text do you use in your anchor tags (do links to your line of moisturizing lip gloss appear as “Click here for our product line” or the much better “Soothing Lip Balms” [please cut me some slack for my lametard examples]).
2. Do you make good use of the title attribute?
3. What do your links point to? Is it a url such as www.soothinglipbalms.com/xda=?a18749823196/asdj&%!189.php? Or is it www.soothinglipbalms.com/ultracolor/magenta? (I think this has two parts: url’s that are poorly chosen, and/or the use of dynamic url’s… from what I gather, avoid both)

Do you play tag well?

1. Although meta tags do not play much part in SEO anymore, it’s still necessary to have a kick@$$ meta tag because that’s what typically shows up on the search results page.
2. Are you title tags on-topic? Not only is this what shows up as the brief description on the search results page, evidently the little spiders that crawl the web give a fair amount of attention to these. That said, your title tag should include hyper-relevant keywords and descriptions.

How’s your writing?

1. Is your site code tight as a battleship, or is it being held together by toothpicks and bubblegum? (thanks Ross for that analogy)
2. How is the writing for your content? Did you have little Timmy from across the street write some copy to save a little dinero, or is your writing smooth, coherent and always on-topic?

And most importantly, does your website demonstrate why you are unique? There’s a ton of lip glosses out there, what makes yours so special? Does your site reflect that?

Pulling It Together: Blogging Could Be SEO’s Dream Come True

Now that you’ve read this quick tutorial, does it make sense as to why blogging may be an incredible means to achieve the first organic results on a search? It seems the nuts-and-bolts of blogging itself are ideal for achieving high rankings within search results. Blogs can have an enormous amount of content. Some bloggers are incredibly talented and consistently post well-written entries. Some are really on top of their game and either break special stories or write about old news but with unique angles. The blogging community links to each other obsessively. Links from trusted blogs may weigh more heavily. The list goes on…

Still doesn’t make sense? Okay, here’s a final example: when I started writing a draft for this entry, I wanted to title it “Dude, You Blogs Have It So Easy.” I didn’t; instead I opted for “Blogging For Search Engine Optimization.” Why? Because I learned that the permalink to this post will be something like wordpress.com/blogging-for-search-engine-optimization/, and that is what you’re see on Google. And I want it to be easy for you to find me. To read my blog.

Because it gets lonely in cyberspace.

Quick Lists 7.21.07

Two lists I recently found that may prove quite useful:

• The Five Biggest Website Mistakes – If you’re redesigning or in the process of launching a new website, these five points make a good overall checklist.
• Seven Deadly Sins of Writing for Social Media – Whether you have a blog or use other social media in your strategy, it would be useful to consider these seven points. In the comments section I also discussed the possibility of another rule: “Brace Yourself”. It’s a difficult road to walk when participating in something that is ultimately out of your control.

Blogger Demographics

Since the goal of this blog is to envision what advertising and marketing will/can look like in the realm of social media, I thought it would be in my best interest to post an entry of information I’ve compiled about blogging (so as to reference it in the future).

The map above is a visual representation of the blogosphere and is explained in this Discovery online article. It was created by Matthew Hurst, who maintains the blog Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media.

So who are these people? Advertising Age posted the article Who Blogs?, which includes a handy pdf of some demographics at the end. For an in-depth view of bloggers, you can read another pdf report by the Pew Internet Project. In addition, BusinessWeek compiled a list of the most popular bloggers at the moment (I think it’s important to note that four of the eleven are technology centered, i.e., we are a bunch of nerds who are a real minority when compared to the rest of America; but that’s okay with me). Aside from those who are winning the digital popularity contest, most people write about the “mundane,” according to another BusinessWeek article, and, accordingly, are not read by very many people. Finally, one interesting trend that is taking root as far as advertising is the increasing popularity of widgets, which creates many opportunities for advertisers to put their stamp on someone’s (online) social activities. I feel this is a great step toward making a presence in the digital sphere, and should be developed further (for instance, after checking out widgets for MySpace, I tried out a few different sites and found some to be severely limited and disappointing… but that’s for another post).