Architecting Your Blog to Keep Your Readers Happy
I was recently sent a comment from a reader saying that they were about to subscribe to my blog, and would I install a comment subscription plugin asap.
At first I was a bit taken aback, I’ve never had anyone ask me to extend my blog for them with new plugins or feature. This started me thinking, have I ever dropped a blog because of the way it is configured, and the answer is yes, here are my turn offs, what are yours?
Register to comment
You want feedback through your comments section, but you expect me to register, confirm and then login before I can join your conversation.
No way Jose, you have to remove all barriers to entry to make people comment, this just makes me sad and away I go.
Partial RSS
I don’t care that you are trying to up your impression count for your advertisers, when I ask for an RSS subscription I want the full monty to read at my leisure inside of my feed reader, I don’t expect to be propelled back to your site after the first 500 words.
I have clicked on unsubscribe a couple of times when this tactic eventually wears me down.
Pop-Up email boxes
A new fad has being doing the rounds to have popup, pop-over, pop-under and pop goes the weasel email newsletter signup boxes appear after a couple of seconds on blogs.
If I want to subscribe to your newsletter, give me an incentive, an ebook, a course not an dodgy flying box in front of your content. it makes you look spammy.
No RSS subscribe button above the fold
I’ve found a new blog, the content is excellent and I want to read more, don’t make me hunt around your site for an RSS icon, make it big and bold above the fold.
We are lazy, we know what we expect, join the herd and do as everyone else does please.
Lets Have A Rant!
What are your bette-noirs about blogs? What makes you unsubscribe or stop reading a blog, let’s make a list in the comments (which I am happy to say you can now subscribe to).
Is there anything else I am not doing which which really annoys you, seriously let me know, I have a hoop ready to jump through all you need to do is ask. Readers are a precious resource for a blogger, they are your customers so to speak give them what they want.
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BOOK REVIEW:ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
I was packing for my holidays at the start of this month, and I decided to pick a few books to read around the pool. My eyes landed on ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (aff link).
My wife gave me that “You have got to be fucking joking look” and icily informed me I was on holiday and not working, so I pushed in two other fiction books which appeared to pass approval as suitable poolside reading. To cut to the chase I re-read the book when I got home, and thought a review was in order for the good readers of WP Dude.
Books on Blogging, an Oxymoron Or What?
Here is my issue, I have read a number of books on blogging and, because of the fairly fast nature of blogging and the slow speed to publish a dead-wood book, there tends to be a time lag which leaves the information out of date. The Problogger book was first published in spring 2008 which is a long time in tech circles. Read on to see if this is the case with the Problogger book.
What’s the Book About?
I would describe this book as a beginners guide to blogging for money. How people make money blogging, how to develop a sucessful professional blog via quality content and marketing/networking techniques.
Who Wrote it?
The book was written by two of the leading lights of blogging; Darren Rowse, the force behind problogger.net, twitip.com and http://digital-photography-school.com and Chris Garrett, the author of chrisg.com and ubiquitous speaker on all things tinternet.
Wherever you go in the blogging community their names are whispered with reverence and awe, they could take a dog turd, carve the word blog in it with a stick and the very next day that turd would have 5000 rsss subscribers, they are that good and followed so closely by poeple in the blogging community.
With this in mind when I first found they were writing a book I dashed over to Amazon and pre-ordered my copy. I have read it a number of times and still use it for reference often.
What Do I get for my money
You get a manual on starting and developing a blog which generated an income.
THIS IS NOT A GET RICH QUICK PROGRAM!
This is an insighful practicle guide on how to develop a quality web presence, how to monetise your work, build a network with blog marketing techniques. This is aimed at bloggers who are in it for the long haul. drop the $$$$$ now thoughts, this will not help you.
The chapter by chapter break down goes like this:
Blogging for money - some background on the writers and what this whole blogging for money malarkey is all about.
Niche blogging – developing your blogging niche, market research and c0mpetition analysis.
Setting up your blog – a techie chapter on setting up a blog using free hosted solutions such as Wordpress.org or blogger and a section on self hosted installs such as WordPress.
Blog writing – one of my favourite chapters on copywritting from a blogging perspective, headline writing, the types of posts you can write, the importance of writing from a website and rss reader perspective. Great stuff. Going off track if you are interested in developing your writing check out copyblogger.com an excellent resource for web writers.
Blog income and earning strategies – this is where we get into the nitty gritty of earning some money. This chapter talks about direct versus indirect strategies, affiliate marketing, ads and developing your attractiveness to potential advertisers with your media kit and much more. This is timeless stuff and this is how people are making money bloggin right now.
Personally I use a mix of indirect methods via my WordPress services and affiliate marketing such as this review.
Buy and Selling blogs – Blogs can be flipped just like real estate, I have developed a number of blogs and then sold them on when I became bored or disillusioned with the niche. That was done using techniques described in this chapter.
Blog Networks – The demise of the blog network has been discussed widely recently, but this chapter tells you about the benefits of joining a blog network, the increased traffic and marketing exposure and the downside of shared revenue.
Blog promotion & marketing – I remember feeling deflated when I first read this chapter, my re-read confirmed that feeling. This chapter is 20 or so pages long and it attempts to cover a vast topic, and as a result is only highlights the numerous techniques available to market your blog. My advice, take each in turn and do further research online. Find what works for you and expand your efforts there. I do about three of the marketing processes described in this chapter.
Secrets of Successful blogs – an analysis of some long running and successful blogs, how they did it and where they excel from other similar blogs.
Creating somthing worthwhile – The wrap up chapter and probably the key, make a blog that is worthwhile to your readers is the real secret to a successful and profitable blog.
My favourite quote from the book in the marketing section:
Content might be king, but without posh clothes and an army to back him up, what is a king but an arrogant bloke in a funny shiny hat.
My Feel for the book
When I first read this book I loved it. It was a distilled version of problogger.net which I could refer to easily without the need to search the site. There is so much content on problogger.net I find it really hard to search for a particular post I read x months back.
My suspicions were bourne out, blogging is such as fast developing media that I saw gaps in the book, some of the most popular marketing techniques such as developing your Twitter presence were mere by-lines, but that in no way depreciates the content, the majority of which was still relevant today.
I would still 100% recommend this book to beginning and developing bloggers, thats why I wrote a review packed full of affiliate links. I only put my name and reputation against products I believe in.
To get your copy from Amazon or to read more readers review, click on the link below:
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (aff link)
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CASE STUDY: Adding a Forum to a Wordpress Blog
A client of mine wanted to add a forum to her blog so that her readers could create a community they could interact inside of, but away from the comment section of her site.
She wanted the discussion to be moved away from her comments so she had no moderation overhead and people could discuss to their hearts content without it mixing and being confused with her blog content.
What Are the Options
To my mind there are three options, you can have a completely separate forum from the blog, one which plugs into the same users database and closely integrates into WordPress or lastly you can get a forum plugin which works inside of your blog so administration is in one place.
In this post I want to discuss the pros and cons of the three types of forum solution for integration with WordPress.
The Distinct and Un-Integrated Forum
There are a large number of free open source forum solutions, forgive me (or leave a comment) if I miss your favourite off the list, but here are a few I have used.
Pros
These are well used and supported forum solutions with a wide range of plugins and themes to extend your solution to give you exactly what you want. They will have powerful management functions, monetisation and membership plugins.
Cons
Not integrated (easily) with WordPress so you will need to keep two separate databases on-line and your users will not have a single sign-on solution. In other words you will need to manage two distinct websites, your blog and your forum.
The Closely Integrated Forum
When I talk of a closely integrated forum solution, I am,of course talking about one solution BBPress, the forum developed by the same team which brought us WordPress.
It can work as a stand alone solution or it can use the same user DB and login cookies that WordPress uses. To ungeek this, that means you use one set of user tables and if they login to Wordpress they are logged into BBPress. A very neat solution/
Pros
A single singon tightly integrated forum which makes for simpler user management. Here is a screencast on integrating WordPress and BBPress
Cons
A smaller user base than the other big forum solutions so there is not as many plugins out there, but I suspect this will grow in time as it is embraced by the wider WordPress community. I also suspect that integration will be made much easer in later editions of BBPress.
The Forum Plugin
I don’t know how many times I have said it, but where there is a WordPress problem, there is a plugin, forums are not overlooked by our stout community of plugin developers.
I have used the following forum plugin, let me know of others in the comments section below.
Pros
The forum becomes another function of your blog, and is administered from a user interface you are already very familiar with.
Cons
Limited extension, you only get the functionality of the plugin, no 3rd party plugins or themes I’m afraid.
The Final Solution
In the end, my client went with BBPress, this was because she wanted a distinct forum rather than a page of her blog with a forum inside of it.
So if you are looking to create a more interactive community on your blog over and above the comment section why not check out one of these three options.
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Auditing Your WordPress Database
I am going to give you a glimpse into my soul and tell you about the OCD I have about my WordPress database and why I audit my database on a regular basis. Feel free to join me on my downward spiral. I hear the cuffs on straight jackets no longer chaff
It’s Alive, it’s Alive!!
Your WordPress database is alive and growing all of the time. As you add posts and get new comments, they are added into your database, this is great, but there are also other reasons your database can grown, and these often go unnoticed
As you add plugins, they often create new tables on your database, you may have a forum or affiliate software, this will create new tables on your database, are you aware of them?
Why Audit Your Database?
There are a number of reasons to audit and clean up your database and they are:
performance – a large database needs more resources and can degrade in performance
Backup and recovery needs – are you aware of all the tables on your system, are you backing up all of the data you need? An audit shows new tables which need to be added to your backup schedule.
Hosting issues – your hosting provider may have an upper limit on database size or you may pay a premium for space, reducing the size may solve these problems.
Security – Have you been hacked, are there hundreds of credit card numbers in your database from a Paypal phising attack? An audit of your database can show discrepancies like this.
Backup
Before we start messing around with WordPress database tables, we should always do a backup, what should be do children? (I’m cupping my hand to my ear waiting for your reply).
Default Tables
The default tables for a WordPress install are shown below, don’t touch these or it will end in tears. Please note your prefix may be different.
wp_comments
wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_terms
wp_usermeta
wp_users
Doing Your Audit
I cannot give you the exact specifics of an audit for your site,every blog is unique with different plugins and addons, but here is what I do. I do all of my DB admin using phpmyadmin, check with your host to see what tools are available.
1. Check the default tables make sure nothing is untoward there.
2. Look for unidentified tables or unusual tables. I know it’s a bit woolly, but I have just done a quick check and I can see tables for an invoicing plugin I tested but rejected, they are on the list. I also saw some weird tables with a qu prefix I did not recognise, a look at the data shows it is my affiliate system, I need that but the audit has helped me to know what is valid and what is not. I put these tables names on my list.
3. I check last updated times on tables, if they have not been updated recently, they can go on the list as potentials to get rid of.
During you audit it may be a good time to run an optimize table routine, this tidys your database and indexes to improve performance.
What to Remove
So I have built a list of tables to get rid of and suspect ones, the suspect ones I leave alone till my next audit if they have not been updated they are dropped, the ones I definitely know I don’t need are killed on the spot.
In database parlance you drop a table, look for that button on your database admin tool.
For The Seriously Messed Up
If you are getting into my mania, why not document your database. A list of tables and relationships just like the corprate database administrators do.
I am only stage two barking so I don’t bother, but you may have the urge, there are even tools to do it http://www.leadum.com/products.php?prod_id=2 (no affilaite link, I am not that desperate).
As I Fret Myself into an Early Grave
Go on have a look at your database and see how untify it has become, a quick audit of your tables can improve your database performance.
It’s friday we always have waffles on Fridays, where are my waffles, WHERE ARE MY WAFFLES!
Oh yeah and I audit my plugins too.
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RESULTS: The Great Big Twitter Consulting Experiment
As you may have seen, I was running an experiment on Twitter to see if I could provide technical consultancy via 140 character interchanges here is the original post http://wpdude.com/twitter-wordpress-consultancy-experiment.
I also said I would write up my findings, so here you go.
How Many Takers Were There
I was completely underwhelmed with the results, I only got two takers .
Financial Results
I made a big fat lonely zero in pounds, shillings and pence. Nada, zip, bugger all, sweet FA, nothing.
The HUGE problem
You cannot give consultancy in 140 characters. It is too small to express the problem people have, and again too small an amount of characters to give out information. In both cases I dropped from twitter to email exchange very quickly. I was expecting to give out small how to’s, pointers to other documents or plugins that type of request, but what I got were very big and complex problems or blog design requests.
I got one really meaty problem and that took up a large part of my afternoon, so trying to give support via twitter was pointless, in the end I got my hands dirty and fixed the issue.
What I learned
Although financially it bombed, I have learned quite a lot and I believe there are some great client acquisition techniques to be learned from what I did. Here are some of the things I learned
You cannot sit back and wait for people to come to you. I asked a few twitter chums to RT what I was doing and I tweeted a number of times to introduce the concept. I sat back during the morning and waited for the stream of tweets asking for help, but none came. I changed my technique and went searching for people. This is where my hits came from. I pushed the URL to my experiment in front of people tweeting about their WordPress problems. This brought action.
Timing seems to be quite crucial on Twitter. You need to get your offer in front of people at the right time, my initial push was early morning UK time, this obviously missed the US and Canada, and on the other side the Aussies and Kiwis were off to bed. If I was doing this again, I would use a service like Tweetlater.com and setup and number of timed announcements to push to people in other timezones. I am going to take this further and time my blog posts to publish at a specific time and push tweets about them during core hours. I am not sure when that is yet, need to get out a world clock. Any suggestions when the most people are awake please drop a comment to me.
I was able to push work to other members of my twitter network which was cool. I am not a web designer and one of the requests was for prettyfication. I was able to refer that to someone in my network.
I generated a bit of of buzz. Quite a few people have noticed the tweets and are following me because of it. This is another area I will investigate further. The ideas which come to mind are free webinars push out like this, then gaining paying clients on the back of that.
Twitter is an excellent client acquisition tool. If you know how to tap into search you can place your offering before people just at the point they are having the problem your service or product solves.
You need to develop your twitter network. A lot of the contact came from people re-tweeting my messages.
Will I Do It Again?
No I won’t. I lost a day of billable hours to the experiment, but I learned a boat load of new techniques which I will be using to push people to my blog to gain readers or even clients.
Got any more questions about the experiement please leave a comment.
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The Twitter WordPress Consultancy Experiment
Photo by burningkarma
What’s The Big Idea
I am doing an experiment on Twitter throughout Wednesday 20 May 2009 09:00 – 20:00 GMT to see if there is a way for subject matter experts to provide their professional services via 140 characters and earn a fee for it.
Here is the offer, I will give anyone who tweets me a 140 character consultation/technical support answer on any WordPress technical issue they may have.
In exchange I will ask them for a tip. This is completely at your own discretion. If my answer was no good or you feel it is not worth a tip simply walk away.
This may cause uproar, a lot of people think the interchange of information and ideas should be free on twitter , but why not carry the real world personal services tipping culture online. I remember a time a gave a hotel usher $1 to open a taxi door, surely some expert advice is worth the same gesture? Let’s run the experiment and see what happens.
How to give a Tip
First you need to register with TipJoy. Tip Joy is a cool little startup which allows people to send money via a tweet. You need to create an account and then charge your account up via your credit card.
To make the payment you need to make a tweet in the following fashion
p $X @wpdude for wordpress services
Replace X with the amount you want to tip, the recommended amout is $3, but if you think my tweet is worth more (or less) please feel free to change the amount.
The Write Up
I will also write up a detailed description of the day to let you know the response and how well or poorly the experiment worked including full disclosure of money earned, the amount of work required to do earn this cash and my observations on the day.
Micro Payments Are The Future
I think micro payments are the future of the knowledge industry. Instead of the large hourly consulting fees or deleveoping content for a miniscule adsense click awaywhy not give a micropayment tip. Sometimes you just want quick pointer or nugget of information not a full on consultation. Check out Nick Cernis’ excellent blog post on the subject http://putthingsoff.com/the-end-of-free-content/.
I need Your Help
Please tweet and RT this page by clicking on the button above, I need to generate some buzz for Wednesday.
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Twitter
