Blogging Tips

Content Strategy and Words for Business on the Web • • Feature Post Sales vs. Marketing

Is Your Sidebar a Salad Bar?

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Patience has never been one of my virtues, but today’s slow loading Web pages - especially blog home pages - would test the patience of Job.

As blogging has grown in popularity, so has it grown in complexity. Side bars have become salad bars. Badges, banners, buttons, and widgets, widgets everywhere. Recommendations, links, awards, events, comment displays, stat counters, ads, ads, and more ads. Page loading has slowed to a crawl.

Singing the Slow Page Loading Blues

Now, I’m not trying to monetize my blog particularly, so it’s easy for me to be a sidebar minimalist. However, I wonder how many readers abandon ambitiously monetized blogs due to impatience with loading time. Almost as troubling, slow loading provides a disincentive for leaving comments. Numerous times I’ve wanted to comment on an intriguing post but chose not to, simply because I didn’t want to wait 30 or 40 seconds for the authentication and page reload.

The Worst of Both Worlds

A truly lethal combination is slow loading pages and a partial RSS feed. Many readers don’t care for partial feeds to begin with. If readers know clicking through from the feed to the blog will entail a long wait, the instinctive reaction is “I’ll go the next feed and come back to this later.” And of course, later never comes.

Paths to Faster Loading

1. Programming. I’m no technical expert, but WordPress has caching system plugins to speed up page loading. Check it out.

2. Strategic. Here are some self-reflection questions worth asking. Why am I filling my blog with pay per click ads when I’m not yet near a critical mass of readers? Am I adding widgets because I think they will help me, or because they’re cool? Am I quick to add sidebar elements, but slow to evaluate their usefulness? Do I have a monetization plan, or am I throwing stuff on my blog and crossing my fingers?

3. Design. Here is an example of the kind of design choices we must ponder. I made a choice to put my blogroll on a separate page. It definitely has some downside - not as easy for readers to find links I consider valuable, and it doesn’t generate as much link juice for my favorite blogs as a sidebar blogroll would. On the other hand, on a separate page I can list as many links as I want without fear of creating a 15 foot long sidebar. I can (and plan to) add descriptions to my blogroll to entice readers to check out my favorite blogs. Was that the right decision? I don’t know, but if you think about your design options, you’re bound to end up with a more readable blog than if you pile up sidebar elements with no particular thought whatsoever.

Food for Thought

Remember John Belushi in Animal House, indiscriminately piling up mountains of food on his tray as he plowed through the cafeteria line? That’s no way to run a sidebar.

Profile in Courage

It can be done! Joanna Young recently did some soul searching after listening to reader feedback and cleaned up her sidebars. Bravo! Even though she scrapped my Word Nerd badge, I totally welcomed the change. Now I can enjoy her lively conversations without the wait. I’m sure it was tough for Joanna to let go of some of that sidebar stuff (after all, most of it does have value one way or another), but she did it. I don’t know what impact the change had on her traffic, but I’m guessing it hasn’t gone down.

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Taking the BlogRush Plunge

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Friday I took the BlogRush plunge. Blogrush is the new blog syndication network that promises “a flood of targeted readers to your blog.” Very good! I hope to be drowning in readers very soon.

BlogRush is aptly named, because bloggers have been rushing to sign up. The earlier you get in, the more you can take advantage of the pyramiding effect of its referral system.

For the most part, the Blogrush links appearing on my widget are relevant and of good quality. The BlogRush concept is good, and I get the strong impression that BlogRush will do everything possible to prevent abuse of their system.

Get connected! For more information, visit BlogRush by clicking here.

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Blogging Tips by Lorelle–Read It and Reap

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

Lorelle VanFossen has written a remarkable book, Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging, that is well worth the price for beginning and experienced bloggers alike.

In fewer than 100 pages, Lorelle covers every critical area of blogging–strategy, structure and design, content, writing tips, community building, SEO, blog management, and legal issues. She covers not only the what and how, but the why. I like that. And, her explanations of fairly technical issues are laced with a gentle humor that makes Blogging Tips highly readable. Fun and informative is a winning combination.

If you are a beginning blogger, her advice is invaluable. It will help you avoid start-up miscues, many of which are tough to correct later on. As a more experienced blogger, I found her perspective useful in deciding how best to allocate my blogging time. Also, she describes several blogging resources and tools I wasn’t familiar with, but should have been.

If you’re looking for a manual on blogging, look no further. Lorelle’s put all the right stuff in one place. Thank you!

Word Sell … Scrambled Toast

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Does a Business Blog Take Too Much Time?

Friday, February 2nd, 2007

One comment I hear on a regular basis from people considering a business blog is that it will take too much time. While I wouldn’t dispute the notion that a blog takes time, the question is, how much is too much?

Outside tech industries, blogs are unfamiliar marketing territory. When a business owner or CMO says a blog will take too much time, I think he/she is expressing one or two underlying concerns–

1. ROI for a blog is doubtful and/or unquantifiable; and/or,
2. Writing every day is mentally draining, unpleasant work.

When it comes to measuring ROI, blogs are not much different from other forms of advertising, marketing and public relations. Calculating ROI for a print ad, a newsletter, a sales brochure, or even a pay-per-click campaign is an inexact science at best. Yet, companies continue to engage in these activities, often on a large scale. Companies may have a person or an entire department dedicated to creating and implementing advertising, marketing and PR programs. Why? Because companies see value in communicating with customers, strengthening relationships with customers and adding value to the customer experience even when the effects cannot be precisely measured.

So I think business blogs present a problem not because of the time commitment they represent, but because they are unfamiliar. As companies learn more about how effectively blogs can build customer relationships and fill a variety of essential customer support functions, they realize that blogging should be an integral part of any balanced marketing program. And, there are plenty of metrics a business can–and should–monitor on its blog to gauge its performance. For example–

1. Number of subscriptions;
2. Quantity (and quality) of customer comments;
3. Page views;
4. Inbound links;
5. Search engine rankings on target keyword phrases;
6. Technorati and/or Alexa rankings; and,
7. Advertising revenue from affiliate programs, etc.

Tracking these items over time provides a reasonably accurate picture of readership and value. Certainly, business blogs provide a clearer picture of readership and reader reaction than print ads or sales collateral.

The arduous task of writing? Let’s take that up after the Super Bowl!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Word Sell … Scrambled Toast

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Bloglines and RSS Feeds

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

In the business community, one common complaint is that there are simply too many Web sites and blogs to keep track of. True enough. Even though we have a wealth of valuable industry information at our fingertips, clicking on 20 to 30 sites and sifting through them for new content could take hours that business people simply do not have.

However, by using RSS feeds and a newsreader like Bloglines, those news-gathering hours can be reduced to minutes.

RSS feeds allow the reader to subscribe to blogs (and regular Web site pages that offer feeds) they want to follow. Whenever new material is posted, the subscriber receives it without ever having to visit the blog.

New material can be delivered to an e-mail address or to a newsreader. The advantage of a newsreader is that all subscriptions are consolidated in one place for easy–and fast–viewing.

There seems to be little middle ground with RSS and newsreaders. Business people either don’t understand it, or they have accumulated more subscriptions than they can handle. ( Amit Agarwal offers a few handy tips for those suffering from RSS overload.)

I’m not sure why mainstream adaption of RSS is proceeding so slowly–any thoughts? Depending on how a blog’s feed is set up, ordering a new subscription can be somewhat confusing for the reader. But the convenience seems more than worth the effort.

PS. While going through my subscriptions just now, I coincidentally found this post on RSS from Business and Blogging that expands on a couple of my points and offers other very helpful information. Talk about news delivered fast and easy!

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How Important Is a Unique Blog Domain?

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Conventional wisdom holds that a blog ought to have its own original domain. Among the reasons cited is branding. Why dilute your brand by promoting “blogspot” or “typepad” in the blog’s URL?

But how important is a blog’s domain, or its entire URL for that matter?

I’m beginning to wonder. I pay less and less attention to URL’s all the time. Blogrolls display the blog title or author. Hypertext links usually include blog title, author, and/or a description of the linked blog or post.

For me, blog URL’s are like phone numbers and speed dial. A phone number that’s important–a brand I want to remember, if you will–goes straight to speed dial. If you were to ask me the cell phone number of my wife or daughters, I couldn’t tell you. But I can get ahold of them in a flash.

Many contend that a unique domain gives the blog a sense of legitimacy or professionalism. That may be true to some degree, but in the long run, it’s the blog’s content that determines its quality. If I were to rank blogs according to their value to me as a reader, the domain name would not enter into the equation at all.

Now, having your blog title match words in the blog URL is a good thing. (I’ve messed up badly there.) More on that some other time!

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