Jerry D. Russell dot Com

One of the two bggest reasons fellow bloggers give for staying with services like blogger or WordPress.com is that the cost of web hosting is simply too high to justify the move to their own domain. I really hve to stress the point that the downside of having to pay as little as $2.49 a month is more than worth the benefits of hosting your own blog installation.

Sure, staying with a service provider gets you updates and a few other freebies, but it robs you of much of the power of your own hosted site.  If you want truly custom layouts, you’ll be paying for them, and paying big.  You have to dael with slowdowns on the networks caused by high traffic to blogs that have nothing to do with your own, you have to abide by their rules and your options for monetization are limited to just a few of the major players in the industry.

In short, you’re holding yourself back. There may never be a point at which you are comfortable moving your blog from a service-hosted solution to your own, bt I guarantee that within a few months of doing so you’ll wonder exactly why you hadn’t done so sooner.

Jerry Observations Blogging, Hosting, nc, Tools, web hosting

I wish I could tell you that from personal experience, but alas, I’m nowhere near those numbers yet.  Even though I’m not qualified to give you that information, I know of someone who is, his name is John Scalzi.

You may have heard of John.  He’s an incredibly talented and successful Science Fiction Writer and former journalist. He’s also the author of one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, a little thing called whatever.

John is very aware of what to do with 40k + readers, because he’s GOT those numbers, and he’s willing to share his experiences with the rest of us through a video stream of a panel he was on at last years Tools Of Change Conference.  The panel also includes such notables as Ron Hogan (Beatrice.com), Patrick Nielsen Hayden (TOR Books) and Tobias Buckle (Self Employed).

John and the rest of the panel do a wonderful job covering the basics of blogging and the importance of community.  I can’t encourage you strongly enough to take the time to watch this video.  While you’re at it, make sure that Whatever is one of the subscriptions in your RSS reader, you’ll be very glad you put it there.

I’m going to be shameless about this.  John Scalzi is one of my all-time heroes. He comes in second only to Robert Heinlein as an author, but as a blogger he’s at the top of the list.  I want you to watch because this man has something to teach you.  The other members of the panel also run very successful blogs.  They know what they’re talking about, and they’ve got the numbers to back it up.

Take the time. Watch the video. Learn.

Peace, I’m out.

Jerry Blogging Blogging, community, readers, readership, Scalzi

A few weeks ago I wrote about ecto, a blog updating tool for Mac and Windows. At the time I was singing ecto’s praises and while I still enjoy using it, I may have just found a tool I can live without even less, ScribeFire.

ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that can update your blog from your PC desktop in the same way ecto can.  It has all the basic features, such as spell checking, the ability to assign posts to categories, WYSIWYG formatting of posts and the ability to save drafts (or notes, as it calls them) for later editing,  but it has several advantages that I think make it more usable and user friendly than ecto.

First and most importantly, as a FireFox extension ScribeFire is 100% platform independent and runs equally well on my Mac, My Windows Machine and all four of my Linux machines.  This alone would have made ScribeFire worth looking into, but would not have kept me looking at it if it was the only thing it had going for it.

Another plus is that since ScribeFire is a Firefox extension, it’s always ready when you are.  The activation icon sits happily in the status bar waiting for a click from you, at which point Scribefire will happily launch and let you post on whatever topic you like with the page still visible.  If you need to do more research, just click the utton again and ScribeFire falls back to the status bar to wait patiently for you to continue.

Another advantage over ecto is ScribeFire’s ability to edit blog pages as well as posts.  While this might not be necessary all the time, it’s handy if you just want to quickly update a page that you already have posted.

Just like ecto, ScribeFire will allow you to highlight text inside any webpage and launch a new post with that text quoted in the new post.  The advantage of ScribeFire is that the formatting used to do so is customizeable, which leaves you in control of your citations, rather than leaving it completely up to the software.

On the downside, even though ScribeFire will allow you to add tags to your posts, it does not store the tags you already have.  this means no auto tag completion and allows for the possibility of mispelling a tag name.  In my installation, the post preview function is not working properly and ScribeFire has no facility at all for adding custom fields in WordPress. These are small issues to me, but may have more significance to you.

After only messing with ScribeFire for a few hours, I have to say that I’m impressed.  For the moment it’s my new tool of choice for most things, though I’m not quite ready to give up completely on ecto, which is a more mature tool.

Jerry Productivity Blogging, Desktop tools, Productivity, productivity tools, ScribeFire, Tools

If you’ve been reading about writing content for the web for any length of time you have probably seen more than one A-List blogger expound on the value of a good post title. Blogs both big and small, from doshdosh and Andy Beard to blogs you may not have heard of, like Flooded Lizard Kingdom are all talking about the importance of post titles, and with good reason; having a great title on your post is far more likely to get that post read than having a mediocre one.

I’m not just saying this because the big boys have mentioned it, or because it’s a simple way to get your posts read more often. I’ve decided to cover the topic because I just ran a study on it and have proven (to myself at least) that it works beyond the shadow of a doubt. A simple change in tile tags has increased traffic to my food and cooking blog over the past two weeks. The numbers prove it, but they would be meaningless without some background, so let me run through the changes that I made to the blog, then detail the results.

Making some changes:

Like any case study, this one began with a set of base numbers and the realization that there was room for improvement. In looking over my visitor stats for Cooking, by the seat of my Pants!, I noticed a trend in which posts were visited most often. With only a few specific exceptions, posts in the “recipes” category that had the word “recipe” in the title got the most overall traffic. Other posts received far fewer visits in general.

The exceptions to the rule were for posts that I targeted specifically to people that would be looking for the keywords in the title and were quite specific. They can be easily negated from overall site traffic, but have proven over time to bring in a steady stream of visitors. Those post titles were left unchanged and are considered a baseline measure of success in good post titles.

For the rest of the recipes on the site, I went through and added the word “recipe” to the title in a manner that made sense in the context of the existing title. The post slugs were left exactly as they were, no permalinks were modified and the posts themselves were left exactly as they were originally written. No other settings were changed. Then I did something that would make most bloggers shudder or recoil in horror…

I stopped posting on my most read blog without notice.

Doing the unthinkable:

Yes, you read the above statement correctly. I stopped posting. I walked off to handle other projects and no matter how badly I wanted to add something, I wouldn’t let myself do it. For this to be a true test of the effectiveness of title tags, I needed to give it a bit of time without influencing the numbers. I figured two weeks should do it, so that’s how long I left it alone.

I’m not saying that I didn’t lose traffic. I did. According to Google Analytics, my overall traffic was down by 9.46% overall. Not having any new posts meant that readers that normally visit my site via RSS readers, twitter announcements and StumbleUpon simply weren’t visiting, as there was nothing new for them to see. This was an expected side effect of the study. It’s painful, but not something that can’t be recovered from.

The exciting part of the experiment is in daily visitor totals.

Change the titles, watch the visitors come in!

While the difference in visitors wasn’t earth shattering, it was more than noticeable. Over the course of two weeks with no effort on my part, I not only maintained constant numbers, but also managed to increase my baseline traffic. (Traffic generated organically through search engines.) The following snapshot of my Google Analytics dashboard illustrates this increase:

If you look at the beginning of the graph, traffic consistently dips below the 450 unique visitors per-day mark on those days when no post was added to the blog. This level of traffic was consistent from the end of the Holiday season until I modified my title tags. Those modifications were made on march 4th, and as is demonstrated in the graph above, the number of visitors to the site increased almost immediately and steadily held above the 450 visitor mark for all but one day in March. (The rise in visits in the middle of March was due to an increased interest in Irish recipes, also an organic response, but since I wasn’t adding new recipes, it caused only a light increase in visits.)

In the end, the data speaks for itself. With the investment of just a little time and effort in changing title tags, I managed an overall increase in organic traffic. While this increase was not enough to raise my overall visits above what I would have gotten if I had posted every day, it was enough to keep my numbers from faltering significantly over a two week period; something that definitely would have happened had I simply stopped posting without modifying the tags.

It must also be taken into consideration that in the world of food blogs, cooking, by the seat of my Pants! is a relatively new blog, with only two years worth of posts and only a bit over 240 recipes. On a site with more titles to gain results, the numbers would have been far more significant.

Wrapping it up:

I hope this article will inspire you to take another look at your post titles. Take the time to make sure that the title of the post is relevant to what your visitors are searching for. Check your analytics for specific posts and see if the search terms that got people to your post are actually relevant to the post itself. If you haven’t been thinking about the importance of your titles, you may be surprised what got people to your site in the first place.

Jerry Blogging Blogging, Blogging Tips

One of my former employers taught me a valuable lesson in making money on the Internet.  His simple concept has shaped the way I find income for years and it has never proven to be the wrong choice.

His philosophy in creating new ventures was simple:

Don’t innovate, imitate and then improve

Or in other terms never try to reinvent the wheel. The wheel already works. What you need to determine is if you can improve on it in any way.

This isn’t to say that if you have a revolutionary new idea for a product or service that has never been done that you shouldn’t go after it.  The chance of being the next “big thing” is definitely there, but the chances of success in those situations is far less than you might imagine. If you do have the next great idea, work it on the side, for everything else follow these simple tactics.

This article assumes that you’re going to be developing a new web presence, whether it be a blog, website or … Whatever. therefore the terminology used will be about a new web site. Your exact focus isn’t important, but the method is.  In fact, this method would work if you were planning on staring a new restaurant or dry-cleaning shop. It’s about how you approach it, not exactly what it is.

Find a site or service that you really like:

If you aren’t in love with the concept you’re trying to imitate, it will show in the end product. If you aren’t the financial type, don’t try to build a better version of a blog that reviews financial services.  Your readers will quickly abandon you when they discover your heart isn’t in it.

Sign up and work with it for a while:

Become an active member on the site.  Go through all of the features that are offered and become proficient with them. Sign up for newsletters and RSS feeds.  Remember, you like the concept enough to want to emulate it, you’re going to have to know how everything works.  This is not the time to rush!

Define the site’s strengths:

What are the owners of the site doing incredibly well? you’re either going to have to do these things just as proficiently or simply accept that they are better at it.  How can you add value to your visitors in these areas or can you compete at all?  You have to know before you get started.

Define the site’s weaknesses and determine if you have the skills to do it in a better way:

This is the most important pat of the process.  Determine where you and perhaps other users of the site feel that it falls short. if you’re going to be any kind of competition you are going to have to squash these issues before you launch. If you have previously found that the site far exceeds your abilities in one area, this is the place to distinguish yourself from the pack.  Even if you’re on level ground with all of their strengths (and you probably will not be), don’t make the same mistakes that they have made.  Do these things right the first time.

Check the competition and make sure someone hasn’t already done what you were considering:

There is nothing more disappointing than spending a great deal of time and effort on a project only to find that someone has already beaten you to the punch, so before you get in too deep, go check out your target site’s direct competition.  while you’re at it, assess their strengths and weaknesses as well.  In the end you have to offer something different and more useable than each of these services.  You have to stand out.

Plan, Plan, Plan:

You’ve checked the competition, you know that you have the capability to offer something that they can’t, or at least do what they are doing better than they have managed to do.  Now it’s time to lay the groundwork.  Buy your domain name, set up hosting hire designers and developers that you can trust to turn your vision into a reality.  Set up a facebook and twitter account to start a buzz in your chosen niche. All of this has to happen before you launch.  You want people waiting to see what you have to offer, not finding it on their own sometime down the road.  A site launch benefits from a little buzz.

Get at least a small group of testers together to work out any kinks.  You may have made sure that you aren’t recreating your competition’s problems, but you’ll surely have some of your own.  If you’re running a community site, that group of testers will also make the site look a lot less empty when it first launches, and this is a good thing. Nobody wants to be the first to sign up.

Mind your professional manners:

Just because you’re using an existing concept does not give you permission to use any of your competition’s content.  You can’t “borrow” their layout, images or text and you don’t want to.  You aren’t building a clone, you’re building something different and you want to be sure that people can see that the minute the site opens in their browser window. If you are perceived as nothing more than a knock off of some other site you will find it difficult to attract new visitors and even harder to keep loyal readers.

Wrapping it all up:

There are those who scoff at the idea of doing “the same thing everyone else is doing.”  These people will tell you with a smirk that “it’s already been done” and that there really isn’t a point in the effort.  These people are missing a very important point. if someone else is doing it and making money, then there is money to be made. There’s a market for it and if you are willing to work at it, you can get your share of that market.

In the course of my career in the Internet industry I’ve seen many people fail at selling their big ideas.  I’ve seen far fewer people fail by following in someone else’s footsteps.  They may not make millions, but they make a profit and they are free to pursue other projects.

Still think I’m mad?  Consider your local area restaurants. I’ll lay bets that at least 4 of those are burger joints of some description.  Each one of these places does basically the same thing, is producing the same kinds of product and each one has its loyal followers.  If there was no money in it, they wouldn’t be doing it.

the fact of the matter is that each one of those burger joins does what it does just a little bit differently. For each person that thinks that difference is great, there are three who don’t agree.  The other places take up that slack.  All four are getting steady business and their customers are happy.

The same is true of websites that offer basically the same services.  Take Google Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail as examples. Each provides the same service in slightly different ways, but none of these services has a lack of users, or a lack of revenue.  Some people prefer one over the other and that’s all that matters.  Most people choose their favorite service and use it exclusively.  Others use all three, but both types of customers bring in potential income.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.  Get out there and build a better one.  it takes less time, less effort and in the end can make you more money.

Jerry Blogging, Business Sense Blogging, Business, site cdesign, site considerations