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Archive for April, 2007

Don’t let the Haters bring you Down

April 18, 2007 | Comments (6) | Filed under: Blogging

A friend of mine recently started her own blog (no link cause she doesn’t want people to know I’m talking about her) that has started to pick up a bit of steam in terms of visitors. She recently had one of her articles reach the front page of Reddit and as a result has seen her traffic quadruple over the last few weeks. However, in addition to her new influx of traffic comes the inevitable influx of haters.

For anyone who has a blog that even gets remotely popular, you know exactly the situation my friend is in. Sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can bring you a ton of traffic, but a good portion of it is just angry people looking to flame whoever and whatever they can. This can come as a big shock to someone just starting out, like my friend, who wasn’t really a big web presence prior to starting her own site. If you’re not a regular visitor of other blogs or community sites like those mentioned above, you might not be prepared for the onslaught of insults that popularity might bring. In the beginning, it is tough not to take it personal.

As I mentioned in a previous post, inflammatory comments are one of the most underestimated ways of generating interest in your new site. They can increase commenting, help you stand out, and also cause a little controversy which always feeds further discussion. However, there is a difference between inflammatory comments and straight up insults. Unfortunately, the anonymous nature of the web makes it simple for people to drop an insult and quickly vanish without a trace.

Understandably, when my friend first started getting comments like “This site is garbage and the writer knows nothing” and “Don’t quit your day job, this trash won’t get you anywhere” she was a little upset and wondered whether running her site was even worth it. What I tried to tell her though is that even if you wrote the Lord of the Rings as your blog post, someone would eventually stop by and call it crap.

The key to success is to not let these haters bring you down, and actually look at the bright side. Two posts at Bookmark Bliss recently made the front page of Digg, 10 Lessons 300 Can Teach You About Online Business and 10 Tools to Help You Select a Web 2.0 Color Palette. If you look at both of these posts here and over at Digg, they are marvels of insults. Probably 2 out of every 3 comments are insulting and inflammatory in some way. Did this bother me?

Not in the slightest.

Why? Because 95% of the people who trashed on my article also took the time to Digg the post up. Most of the people commenting are simply posting because they feel they have to. For the most part, it is never anything personal. Once you realize that and the fact that these insults are actually benefiting you with more traffic, you’ll see a smile start to form on your face.

If you look deeply, it’s really is a case of the most vocal minority being the haters. From a post that received more than 1000 diggs, maybe 40 people posted negatively. While 40 is a fair chunk of the 60 comments received, in the scheme of things it is clear more people enjoyed it then hated it.

Bottom line. Haters will hate no matter what you do. The best you can do is post what you think your readers will enjoy, and don’t let the haters bring you down. When you get over taking it personally, you’ll really start to find that the Haters really have zero impact on anything that happens to your site. It is at that point you’ll start to figure out ways to use them to your advantage and that will be the day you start your quest to take over the world!

What are some of the best examples you guys have seen for people just hating on a post for no reason at all? I find people who visit your site directly generally offer good responses, but some of the people who come through other sites can be really venomous. No press is bad press they say, and I guess in the blogosphere things are no different.

Google PageRank: Where will you be when the Dust Settles?

April 17, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: Ranking

Well, it’s that time again, the magical moment where Google presses the big green go button and sends its engine off to recalculate the PageRank of every site on the World Wide Web. In case you don’t already know, every 3-4 months, on a regular but not exact schedule, Google updates the PageRank numbers that are visible on the Google Toolbar. The last update was in January and many signs seem to point to a PageRank update going on right now.

PageRank is Google’s way of ranking webpages on a scale of 0-10. The higher up you rank, the more credibility Google gives to your content. The PageRank formula is fairly complicated, and always changing. No one outside of Google knows exactly what goes into its calculation but the basics behind it are pretty straight forward. The one sentence summary is, the more sites out there that link to you without you linking back to them, the more important Google thinks that you are. That’s why things like removing the NoFollow attribute to your links can really help out your most frequent contributors.

Having a high PageRank can have some definite benefits for a site. For starters, many publishers and advertisers look to the PageRank as a way of determining status for a site. In fact, some advertising companies won’t even consider you until your PageRank has surpassed a certain threshold. Some sites make their entire living from their PageRank. Directory indexes and software repositories can make a fortune selling spots within their archives after reaching a PageRank of 5 or higher. Who wouldn’t pay a small fee to instantly get a backlink from a high ranked site?

In terms of Google itself, not too much is known in regards to how much stock is placed on the rank itself when determining your placement in search results. Many people seem to think that the higher your PageRank, the more relevant Google thinks you are for specific keywords and thus the higher your rank for said keywords. I am sure this is true to some extent, but I don’t imagine it is as straight forward as that. One thing is for sure, the more backlinks you have, the better off you will be. Backlinks are never bad.

There are some tools you can use to help you try and predict your PageRank as well as see how the current PageRank update is going in regards to your site. While an update is in progress, like it is right now, it is not uncommon for a sites PageRank to fluctuate all the time, so if your rank suddenly plummets to zero, don’t be too worried.

When Google finishes it’s latest update, where will you be? Bookmark Bliss currently has a PageRank of 2, but that is mostly a hold over from when this site used to be just a portal for my business. Since the last update, we’ve really changed the site a lot, and I’m hopeful our PageRank will increase this time around. I’m predicting a PageRank of 4, but that might be a bit optimistic.

So, where do you think you’re site will end up when the dust settles on this update? 2? 5? 10? I guess we’ll all find out soon enough

Improve your Online Business: Play to your Strengths

April 16, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Online Business

One of the questions I get all of the time is: Should I start a web community site, e-commerce site, or a blog to try and make money online? I find this to be a very difficult question to answer. For starters, it is not really something with a boilerplate answer you can simply toss back and be done with it. I find the best choice really has to do with each person’s individual strengths.

Take myself for example. I would classify my background and experience as 90% software development/programming, 10% web design and graphics, and 0% professional writing. To me, my strengths are entirely on the development side of a new site. My ideal projects are ones where the majority of the focus is on designing and automating tasks. With that in mind, I always tend to gravitate toward e-commerce ventures or community portals first before looking into a blog.

Some people, though, have much different strengths. If your background is in web design and graphics, you’re more likely to be successful working on something related. If you’re a great writer and you have tons of unique knowledge just itching to be told, then a blog might be right up your alley. There really is no wrong choice, but choosing an avenue you’ll be successful in may take some testing before getting it right.

Just because you’re strengths lie in one area of online business does not mean you shouldn’t experiment with others. Take Bookmark Bliss for example. Based on my background, I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a blog. My writing is not the best and my worldly knowledge is very limited. What I did though is play to my strengths in development even in this arena. Bookmark Bliss’s main topics are those that I have experience and a solid background in. I’ve done a lot of optimization on the site itself and spent a ton of my time figuring out ways to improve traffic and also use social networking to my advantage. These are things I find enjoyable and a blog has turned out be a great way to use my strengths to my advantage.

If you play to your strengths in online business, you will end up on top at the end of the day. Don’t try to force things, but never be afraid to try something out that’s new. After all, some of your strengths you might not even know about yet….

I Follow the Following Followup to the IFollow Movement

April 15, 2007 | Comments (10) | Filed under: Traffic

I know this past week I kind of beat everyone over the head with a sledgehammer concerning my 2 posts about removing the nofollow attribute on my site and the IFollow movement, but I really do feel it’s a great idea and the more awareness to it we bring the better off everyone will be. If you missed it, there is a great start of a discussion in my first post on the subject of whether or not advertising the fact that you removed nofollow, will encourage spammers to hit you even harder.

Randa of Randa Clay Design recently tagged Bookmark Bliss to participate in the I Follow D-List. I promise this will be my last post on the issue, at least until I recap the the changes it has made, but I thought this was a great way to continue to grow awareness and spread the link-love at the same time.

Here are the rules of the D-List:

***Begin to copy here***
1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra link back.

2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.

3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.

4. Add at least 1 new blog that you KNOW us using the DO FOLLOW plugin to the list in the “My Adds” section. (Add no more than 5!) Let the people you’ve added know, so that they can keep the list going!

5. Leave relevant comments on the blogs listed and get a link back to your site thanks to Do Follow!

My Adds:

Mitchell at HarpzOn.com
Kirk at Just Thinkin’
Philip at IHelpYouBlog
Bret at TechTraction.com
Shane at AskShane.org

Original List:

GeekySpeaky
Simple Kind Of Life
3DayMom
BuyMeBlog
The Hockey Dad
Midlife Musings
Utterly Geek
Whatever I Feel Like
My Dandelion Patch
Surviving NJ
BizMark Tech
Two Dog Zoo
TDZ Travel
Body, Mind & Solar
MidLifeMusings
HomeBizBlogger
Confessions of a Housewife
Andy Beard
Randa Clay Design
Solo Technology
Improve your Online Business

Google buys DoubleClick for 3.1 Billion

April 14, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: Advertising

After tons of speculation that Microsoft or Yahoo was going to pick up rival ad network DoubleClick, it seems Google was the only company willing to do what was needed to get the deal done. Today, Google announced that it has purchased DoubleClick for 3.1 Billion dollars, almost double what they paid just last year for YouTube. This is a huge acquisition for Google who’s been trying to get a foothold into display ads and expand outside of its already dominant contextual ads business. DoubleClick was arguably the leader in this arena. The biggest benefit to Google with this purchase is the substantial portfolio of existing customers that come along with the deal. DoubleClick has cultivated many relationships with huge online businesses and Google will immediately jump right into the game as a result. It probably doesn’t hurt that they took the company away from Microsoft and Yahoo in the process as well

What will this mean for all of us trying to make money online? Well, for starters the introduction of this new avenue for advertising may open a whole new suite of options for web publishers. For months Google has been testing new options for directly competing with services like CommissionJunction or AdBrite to offer advertising on a pay-per-action model rather than a pay-per-click one. DoubleClick might just give them a massive shot in the arm of businesses to get these new tools off and running.

In addition, they also improve their status substantially in the eyes of big companies who previously thought that contextual ads were low quality. DoubleClick gives Google the tools it needs to really support these huge businesses and really put a stranglehold on the online advertising front from all directions. Will that translate to more adverstising revenue coming to small publishers? I guess we’ll have to wait for Google to detail its big plans.

Interesting news though. What do you guys think of this deal? I can’t imagine Google did this for the tools that DoubleClick has, it must have been for the clients and to stop Microsoft. What’s 3.1 Billion to stop a competitor? Apparently nothing for Google!

Bookmark Bliss: 75 Free Font Resources

April 13, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Web Design

Another week has come and gone, and you know what that means, it’s time for another entry in our Bookmark Bliss series. In case you’ve missed out, so far we’ve covered a wide range of topics with our bookmarks. From our developer cheat sheet compilation to our list of 50 sources for web design inspiration we’ve dug deep into the bookmark vault and so far have no signs of stopping.

When you’re designing a new web template, logo, or software application, a good font can really make or break a great concept. You can never have enough fonts at your disposal and the more choices you have, the better opportunity there is to find the perfect one for your specific situation. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve pictured an idea in my head only to be unable to make it a reality without the right font to do it.

So, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I am constantly bookmarking every new free font service I come across. You never know when you might need to find a new one. This list has helped me hundreds of times already, and I’m hoping it will do the same for you. So, allow me to present 75 websites for downloading free fonts:

I hope you can get as much use out of this list as I have. Please let me know of any other resources I might have missed and as always, let me know if you find any inactive links.

Have you found this list useful? If so, show your support by subscribing to our news feed. We’ve posted several other entries in our Bookmark Bliss series that you might find interesting as well…

View your Google Analytics and FeedBurner Stats with Wordpress Reports

April 12, 2007 | Comments (4) | Filed under: Traffic

A few weeks back, we compiled a list of the Top 15 Wordpress Plugins running here at Bookmark Bliss and our subsequent changes. In the comments of the original posting, Bookmark Bliss reader Walt, from lordkingsquirrel, suggested that we checkout a plugin called Wordpress Reports.

And check it out we did…

Wordpress Reports is actually a pretty cool idea. It Takes a snapshot look at the last 7 days of traffic on both your site and your news feeds, and compiles it into a series of graphs accessible from the administration panel for Wordpress. Wordpress Reports saves you the trouble of having to individually login to both FeedBurner and Google Analytics to get a quick idea of how your traffic is doing. This is good news for anyone like me who obsessively checks statistics.

Of course, this plugin is no where near as comprehensive as either service is individually. Once you install the plugin, you can customize which information it retrieves from each to build a report that matches your individual preferences. Regardless of your choices, you are given only a “bird’s eye view” of your traffic. For example, Wordpress Reports only show the top 5 sources of incoming traffic instead of a full list.

Basically, if you’re a statistics junky like me, and are already running both the Google Analytics and FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugins, you can give yourself an additional convenient means of quickly glancing at your traffic with Wordpress Reports. Is it a necessary addon? Absolutely not, but you might find some utility in it as a time saving statistics report.

The best way to make improvements to your site is to analyze when, where, why, and how people visit you and what they do when they get there. If any of you have some additional suggestions for statistical plugin packages, I would love to hear about which ones you’ve used.

Join the iFollow "Movement"

April 12, 2007 | Comments (8) | Filed under: SEO

It’s been almost a week already since Bookmark Bliss officially jumped onto the iFollow bandwagon and I’m pleased to say that things seem to be business as usual around here. Our daily spam seems to continue at its regular pace (thank you Akismet for keeping us spam free) and I’ve removed only 2 comments so far that I felt were mostly just baiting for a linkback.

Yesterday, Randa Clay, the owner of RandaClay.com, stopped by with some information on her own iFollow Movement, that already has more than 20 different sites taking the plunge. She has even gone as far as generating a bunch of excellent graphics that anyone can add to their sidebar to show their support.

I think this is a great idea and you can already see the graphic in place on our own sidebar. I encourage everyone who hasn’t joined the movement to make the change to your own site. Removing the NoFollow attribute on links encourages more commenting and rewards visitors of your site for their contributions. It only takes a minute to remove it from your site so why not?

If you have some time and want to show your support for the iFollow movement, first remove NoFollow attributes from your own site and proudly show your own graphic. Also, spend your time visiting sites that also support the movement to show them how much you appreciate the fact that they put their community first when it comes to their sites.

You’ll benefit from doing so and they’ll benefit from you as well. It’s win/win!

Increasing Subscribers: Part 2

April 11, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: Traffic

Last month, I felt that the area Bookmark Bliss could use the most work in was subscribers. We had about 100 at the end of the month and my goal was to increase that number to at least double before the end of this month (April 2007). My first improvement was to add an easy subscription method to the bottom of each post. Already, this has resulted in a decent increase in subscribers.

For this installment, I want to work on the visibility and usability of the subscription sidebar widget. Previously, we simply put up the standard orange button, with no description at all as to what it did. I showed this to a few people I know and surprisingly, many of them didn’t even realize that the orange button meant RSS Feed. As a result, the first thing I did was replace that entire section with something a little more intuitive.

At first, I tried out the subscribe me plugin for wordpress. I wanted to give it a shot for two reasons. First, it was more graphically attractive, in my opinion. I thought it would generate more eye focus from new visitors, and ultimately generate more clicks. Secondly, on the advice of Bookmark Bliss reader Sunny, I wanted to try out a 1-click link to several common feed reading applications. You might have seen this in action over the last couple of days.

Ultimately, I decided I didn’t really like the Subscribe Me plugin. It was powerful and did the job, but for some reason I just didn’t like the way it looked with the rest of the site. What I decided to do instead was take it back another step and go even simpler. Instead of fancy graphics and multiple links, I thought I would write a couple of friendly sentence with links to the appropriate feeds. You can see this version in action right now, at the top of the green sidebar. I think I really like this version. It’s much cleaner then the first version and I think much more friendly then the Subscribe Me version. I also think it is eye catching enough to draw some attention from new users. I will give this one a try and see how it works out from a subscriber perspective.

If any of you know of some good examples of eye catching subscription notices on other sites, I would love to see some links. Sadly, most people just post their big orange button, and nothing more. If you know of a site that grabbed your attention immediately, I would love to check it out. I will summarize the effects of these changes in the coming weeks so you guys can get a feel on what is working and what’s not. At the end of the month, I’ll once again analyze our subscription numbers and hopefully we meet and exceed our previous months goals. At least that’s the hope anyway

Would you read your own blog?

April 10, 2007 | Comments (1) | Filed under: Blogging

I came across an interesting article over at Search Engine Journal today entitled, Would You read Your Own Blog. Since many of the readers here at Bookmark Bliss are new bloggers, I thought it was a worthwhile article to dive into a little deeper.

I think the author, Ahmed Bilal, makes some great points that any new blogger should analyze in his/her own work. It’s very easy for a new site to copy content from others and offer next to nothing in terms of originality. You could easily fill up hundreds of posts in this way, without breaking a sweat. It all comes down to this though, would you read a site like that if you happened across it while browsing the web?

The author of the article says 90% of blogs out there run sites the authors wouldn’t even read themselves. Maybe this post right here (not too original after all ) just proves his point. While I agree with the author, I do think he takes a very narrow view of the blogosphere and doesn’t look at the issue from all angles.

Ultimately, you do need to consider your motivation behind wanting to blog. If you’re driven to crack the Technorati top 100 and become a force to reckon with on the World Wide Web, then you need to focus on whatever it takes to make a blog you would read, your parents would read, and your friends and family would read. I think this type of site is specifically what Mr. Bilal is thinking about when he wrote the article. There are, however, literally dozens of other motives behind starting a blog that I think this applies to much less.

What if your motivation behind your blog is making money online regardlesss of your reader base? I think I can safely say that you can do this very well simply by copying other people’s work and using social sites like Digg, Reddit, MySpace, etc to promote the hell out of everything you do.

I think the guideline of writing a blog even you would read is a great concept and every single person writing a blog today should take the advice to heart. I do, however, think that an unoriginal blog with content you wouldn’t read yourself, is not by any means the sign of an unsuccessful business opportunity. I can think of at least a dozen sites right now that make a fortune every single day and have thousands and thousands of subscribers, without writing content that provides a fresh opinion or a cutting edge observation.

At the end of the day, you have to go with your strengths. If your past experience or your writing ability are not enough to write a blog you would read, don’t let that stop you from getting your own piece of the Internet pie. Everyone else is doing it and I’ll tell you right now, not very many of them would pass Mr. Bilal’s test…