Blog Goodies

Some topics are so spammy that likely over 95% of the news in those fields is composed of spam. While uncertain of what to write about some new bloggers may post about press releases as much as interesting news because until you really learn the web and learn your subject well it is a bit hard to distinguish the good from the bad.

If you are new to blogging or are building a blog network based on scale and low costs a few tips worth noting off the start are:

• Most press releases are spam.
• Most information is spam.
• In highly commercial categories almost all information is spam.
• Blogs do well because they are not like press releases. Instead of giving you just the spin and junk marketing messages most good bloggers sort through good and bad information and highlight the best information.
• When in doubt it is almost always better to reference a media site over a press release.
• If what you are doing can be done by an algorithm then there is little point in doing it manually. Learn how to program and set your program loose.

Even if your blog is entirely commercially oriented it is still possible to provide interesting information if you hunt long enough. Good bloggers save their readers time or help them find new perspectives, deals, and relevant topical information.

Is Blogging a fireable offense? Yes. If bloggers could better monetize their marketshare then perhaps it would not matter.

FineFools network hits a rough patch. Cool to see how open they are with content, but at the same time I am not sure how much business sense that policy makes longterm. Also the openness of the network - the lack of structure in picking topics around which great value may be created - may be one of its greatest problems. If people want to blog to be read networks offer that. If people want to blog to make serious bankroll most blog networks do not offer that.

Photo company under heat changes their name. Totally stupid move. A company threw away their search profile and started from scratch after coming under heat. Bloggers quickly cross referenced the new and old companies. Now that makes them look even shadier. If you play your cards right with bloggers hate stories can be flipped into good link popularity and smart viral marketing. Running away from the problem works not so good.

Technorati adds trending graphs and other features.

Some people create blogs that guarantee fresh content every day. In spite of writing many blogs I find it hard to have something useful, interesting, or original to say everyday. I think I perform far better when I do things sporadically.

I know when I have fire or passion or interest, but I end up getting bored or burned out if I do the same thing every day. That means for me being a daily poster is probably a bad fit…although recently I bought a community site and sort put myself in the position where I think I will have to post daily.

Some fields will require that people fight to be first with the story to compete, but as more automated decentralized social communities form around different topics (say Digg: movies) many of the first with the news type blogs will die a slow marginalized death unless they do one or more of the following

• reinforce their market position using some type of social software
• create custom programs to help them find news quickly and hunt for it early in the morning
• create relationships with key industry sources
• are in fields so small that they have virtually no competition
• have a killer brand built up
• stick to what they know better than most others
• envoke emotional responses that make people want to come back
• offer free time saving software
• work in small groups where they cover each others holes
• start to offer more in depth information

ThreadWatch is a great community site, but increasingly I have seen the tech news bits being done better by Digg because they are more decentralized and automated. I think the answer for ThreadWatch to doing well is to focus more on the search stuff than the tech news information.

So I have in the past done this a few times, but have not done it recently, but I have talked to many others who have done it. Have you ever leveraged your archives?

By this I mean:

• Have you ever backdated a post you wanted to make but for some reason did not make it when you should have?
• Have you ever fixed old post errors? Did you cite the error corrections you made or just make them? Is it required to record / mention what you changed?
• Have you ever create a test page in the archives to see how search engines would react to a new page on that topic? For example I have known some well known bloggers who put mesothelioma pages in their archives to test link bombing.
• Some people show time sensitive ads. Is it ok to post affiliate links in blog posts? Need they be disclosed? Is it wrong to change old links in high ranking posts that could make you decent money if they were affiliate links instead of direct links?
• Have you ever went back into an old post and edited out links to sites that became spammy or added links to sites you were working with?

Some people push blogger ethics, etc…but sometimes the content and ideas that sell are not the same ideas that regular readers would be interested in citing or reading. For example, if I had a few thousand SEO 101 pages on my SEO blog they would probably convert exceptionally well, but nobody would want to read about the same stuff over and over again. What would be the best way to introduce that content without offending regular readers who already knew a lot?

Should all new blog content come in through the home page? If so, why?

Wink searches through the archives of tagged sites, including Del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, and Yahoo! MyWeb.

Under the general tagged results they provide results from Google, and show if they have been tagged as well. I think that Wink should also show links to where the individual sites were tagged and allow users to include or exclude certain tag sites.

This is yet another layer on top of feedback channels for those writing stories that are interesting to the blog and Web 2.0 crowd. It won’t scale across general search though because it is just too easy to spam.

This is pretty cool.

I think there are some things with the mashup ideas that still could be better though.

Duncan Riley announced he was restructured out of his real world job, and thus is now blogging full time.

He also mentioned that he does not yet make much money from his blog about blogging…which is probably the case for most every blog about blogging and technology, unless they sell a how to blog information product or consulting services from it. He has killer link popularity which could be leveraged for a good mint if he does a good job with it.

As far as profit goes niche channels selected with profit in mind will likely outperform most large oversaturated markets.

Some people are afraid to expose what they are doing, thinking they would only be creating more competition for themselves. If you are already in a competitive field then discussing what you are doing probably will not create much more additional real competition.

Even if talking does create more competition, discussing it typically still adds personal value far faster than competition. By telling a story about what you are doing and establishing value systems on commodities it tells an interesting story that people will want to spread.

Yesterday when Andy Hagans blogged about buying a poker blog it got many direct and indirect links…probably enough that the post instantly increases the value of the poker website by 50%. It is not easy getting links at sites about poker, but if you wrap it in a blog and talk about it on active interesting channels it is.

The links he got were viral editorial links, which are the exact type search engines want to count.

Since few people see the first posts on a new blog it is no big deal if they are a bit crappy, right?

I sorta thought that a bit, but I think that much less after working with a friend to start up a network. I wanted to start up a network of around 30 channels covering various topics. I thought so long as we eventually got to quality the start would not matter much, but some of the posts made me feel a bit like some of the writers were stealing money from my bank account.

Not to say that any of the writers are bad people though. If I were paid a flat rate for my work and was not being paid enough to be fully committed to the project I would slack off and write quick posts recapping any press release I could find on the topic.

When you break it down to that far of a level there is no value add, the equivalent can be automated via software, and you have nothing but a channel of noise and ads.

Starting around 30 channels at once means that you are not learning from the first few channels and applying it to the others right from the go. It is easy to take on too much to where you can get a bit overwhelmed with it all.

It may also be worth doing a large number of example posts on each channel. I told my friend that between he and I we could write the stuff ourselves, make about 15 posts a day across the network, and by the end of two weeks we would have enough of a archive history to be able to start marketing the sites. If you let others write the content and they do a less than stellar job it becomes much harder to market.

Bringing on others to do work is probably going to be important if you want to scale out some sort of a mini web based publishing house, but when quantity gets too far ahead of quality it may be hard to untread some of those steps.

Rarely do you get to read the details of a smaller financial transaction so clearly from both sides.

Andy Hagans posted about why he bought The Poker Blog and how he came to his valuation of it. Ben Bleikamp posted about how he created the site to sell.

Right now I sorta treat websites like I used to treat baseball cards…love collecting them. Only buy if you think you are getting a deal and only sell if you know it is far greater than you paid for it. One of my perhaps bad traits is that I tend to find ways to build value very cheaply and thus I do not work hard enough to exploit the full value or appreciate how much some things are worth. Having others set up guidelines on value makes it easy to help appreciate the value of certain content / websites / ideas.

Have you ever flipped a blog or bought a blog? How did you know what price was the right price?