Written on August 17th, 2007 at 12:08 am by city of Stanton David Shawver

Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign For Your Blog

Social Media, 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, Blog Promotion 40 comments

Today’s task in the 31 Day Project is aimed at driving new visitors to your blog by running a mini advertising campaign for your blog using StumbleUpon.

Note - This task will take a small budget (unless you get creative and find another website willing to give you some free advertising - which isn’t just a bad idea, perhaps you could do an ad swap with another blogger) but it need not be much. One of the methods below could drive at least 100 new visitors to your blog with just $5.

One of the things that I do from time to time is set myself a small budget for advertising my blog. I do it as a little bit of a challenge - to see what ad systems work best and more importantly to see what I can learn about branding and promotion. The bonus is that it also drives some new visitors to your blog.

Where can you advertise?

If you’re just starting out with advertising your blog I’d suggest experimenting with different types of advertising to see what works best for your blog - but today I want to suggest an easy and relatively cheap way to get started.

StumbleuponStumbleUpon - StumbleUpon is a growing social bookmarking service that is used by many people around the globe. It is a service that many bloggers target to drive organic traffic to their blog - but one that also offers a means to advertise a website upon it. StumbleUponAds allows you to submit a page on your blog to be shown to StumbleUpon users as they go Stumbling. The cost is 5 cents per impression so for as little as $5 you can have 100 SU users see your page.

The beauty of StumbleUpon is that it is relatively cheap, you don’t actually need to create an ad (just a page to send people to), that you can target your page to be shown to different categories as well as specific demographics (age, location and gender) and that you have the chance of your page being Stumbled up the rankings in SU naturally.

SU lets you set daily budgets and limits to how many impressions you want on any given campaign. The payment is via PayPal or Credit Card.

If you pick the right page to submit in this way and throw a few dollars at the campaign it is not uncommon for organic stumbling to happen and to end up with many more impressions than you paid for. The key is to pick a page that SU users will like and vote for (more on this below).

The StumbleUponAds interface gives you a report on how many people saw your site, how many voted your page up and how many voted it down. This enables you to test different pages that you want to advertise and to adapt those pages to see what different versions of it work best.

Stumbleupon-Advertising

How to Make StumbleUpon Advertising Work Best

The key to making a StumbleUpon advertising campaign work for your blog is to do two main things:

1. Make Your Content Appealing to SU users to get Organic Stumbles - While 5 cents per impression isn’t that expensive (it’s a lot cheaper than some other forms of advertising) it’s more expensive than natural traffic from SU. Your goal should be to start the campaign off with paid visitors and then let the natural voting up of content take over. To do this you need to create content that is appealing to SU users. A couple of days ago I published a guest post here at enternetusers that talked about some of the principles that draw StumbleUpon users into a site. This would be a useful starting point for designing the page that you want to advertise.

2. Make Your Page Sticky - The other way to get extra value from a StumbleUpon advertising campaign is to get the visitors who come to your blog to come back again and become loyal readers. This is one of the biggest challenges that you’ll face with advertising using any means - but particularly on a service like StumbleUpon where users have their cursor hovering over the Stumble Button ready to surf on to the next site. Of course the best way to hook someone onto your blog is to create compelling content that they can’t live without - but also consider other ways of making them loyal readers by prominently offering subscription methods, driving people deeper into a blog. Most of what I cover in my latest video post on Stickifiying Your Blog applies here.

3. Test and Tweak - The key with StumbleUpon is not to throw big money at a campaign straight away. Get your landing page/post ready and then set a small budget (a few dollars) to see what results you get. Once this is spent - do some analysis of how many people voted the post up and down. If there were more downs than ups you might want to change something about the post (title, add a picture/video, change your opening paragraph etc). Then run another small campaign to see what impact the changes have. Do this until you have a page that is consistently getting voted up and then turn up your budget a little. Keep in mind that you might only need to get a relatively small number of up votes before SU will start sending you organic traffic so be ready to pause your campaign once this starts to happen or you could waste your money.

What NOT to do

While you might think that the front page of your blog is the best page to send traffic from an Advertising campaign to - I would highly recommend that you don’t. Instead - use a single post as the landing page for your campaign. Pick a post that relates closely to the category and demographic of StumbleUpon users that you are targeting and pick a post that you could see becoming viral (whether as a result of it being entertaining, useful, controversial etc).

Give it a Go

So set yourself a budget and give StumbleUpon advertising a go. It’s actually quite fun and if you keep your budget to a reasonable level it’s not that expensive to do. You’ll drive a little traffic and hopefully learn something about the way people interact with your content through the process.

Other places to Advertise Your Blog

There are many places that will sell you advertising space for your blog. Other blogs and sites in your niche can be a good place to start but so can ad networks. Two that I’ve had some success with are BlogAds and Google AdWords. Both are worth experimenting with - but both take the same sort of ‘tweak and test’ approach as outlined above.

- (aff)

Have you tried advertising your blog? Let use know what you’ve learned about it in comments below.

Written on August 16th, 2007 at 08:08 pm by city of Stanton David Shawver

Amazon’s aStore Gets a Feature Upgrade

Affiliate Programs 7 comments

AstoreAmazon have emailed publishers in their Associates Program to let them know that their aStore shop tool has had an upgrade of features.

These upgrades include the following:

  • Access to every Amazon.com category and subcategory for automatically populating your product categories – If Amazon.com has created a group for it, such as Biographies of Frank Sinatra, you can create a category page to automatically pull in those products and organize these categories however you like.
  • Unlimited category/subcategory nesting – Create as many levels of product categories and subcategories as you like, and populate the products in each category by Amazon best-sellers, hand-picking them, or importing a Listmania list.
  • Build your own category navigation – Advanced users can take integration with their existing websites a step farther by hiding the aStore category navigation and building their own directly within the core site navigation.
  • CSS control – Advanced users can also now directly edit the stylesheets for their stores, and share those with others.
  • aStore Widgets – Advertise your store to your site visitors using these new banner links, and increase your aStore traffic.

With these upgrades aStore becomes more customizable and able to be integrated into an existing site.

Written on August 16th, 2007 at 07:08 pm by city of Stanton David Shawver

Secret AdSense Online Advisory Council Revealed

Adsense 26 comments

It seems that AdSense is forming (or has formed) a secret new group made up of some of it’s most successful publishers.

An email was sent to an unknown number of publishers in the last 24 hours inviting them to join it with the following email which was forwarded to me by a enternetusers reader two enternetusers readers who both wish to remain anonymous. I’m unsure if this group is new or an existing one as it’s not something I’d heard of until today:

Your Invitation to the AdSense Online Advisory Council

Hello xxxxxxxxxx,

Congratulations on your success with the AdSense program. Given your extensive experience with AdSense, I’m happy to invite you to join AdSense’s Online Advisory Council, a select group of publishers who offer input on new AdSense products and features. Our development team relies on the Online Advisory Council to help us refine our new services and features. As a member of the Council, you will have the opportunity to:

- Contribute to a community of other respected publishers in the council

- Test new features and products before they are released to the general public

- Provide direct feedback to the AdSense team on how we can better serve our publishers

We hope that you’re excited about the opportunity to help shape the AdSense product offering for Google’s extensive publisher network. Upon receiving confirmation of your acceptance, you will receive an e-mail with further instructions on using the AdSense Online Advisory Council forum. If you’d like to participate please reply to this email with the following text:

“I agree. I understand that information provided to me as part of the Online Advisory Council is Google Confidential Information under the applicable Google AdSense terms and conditions.”

Please note that by sending such a reply you are guaranteeing Google that you have legal authority to accept these terms.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Has anyone else seen or heard of this group before?

Written on August 16th, 2007 at 09:08 am by city of Stanton David Shawver

Why does my Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate?

Featured Posts, RSS 48 comments

Feedburner-Subscription-Conters-2

  • Why does my Feedburner subscriber count fluctuate so much?
  • Are people unsubscribing and subscribing as much as my Feedburner counter says?
  • I notice your Feedburner counter goes up and down each day - why?
  • My RSS Subscriber Counter Goes Down Every Weekend - Why?

Over the last week I’ve been asked these and similar questions about Feedburner subscriber numbers a total of 7 times. Each time I’ve muddled through an answer to the questioner, thinking I knew the answer but not being sure.

So this morning when I woke to the question twice more in my inbox I thought I’d go straight to the font of all knowledge at Feedburner - Rick Klau (Feedburner’s Vice President of Publisher Services) and ask him for an official explanation of fluctuating Feedburner subscription numbers.

Here’s how Rick answered the question:

When we report a subscriber number, that represents the total number of individuals who had the feed requested on their behalf on that day.

Most of these subscribers fall into one of two groups:

  1. those using a stand-alone feed reader
  2. those using a web-based feed reader

In the case of stand-alone feed readers, that user has an application running on their computer which fetches the feed repeatedly throughout the day. We look at characteristics of those requests, and differentiate between repeated requests from the same person (as indicated by regular polling intervals, consistent IP addresses, and common user agents) and different requests (where one or more of the previous data points vary).

In the case of web-based feed readers (My Yahoo, Google Reader, Bloglines, Pageflakes, etc.), those services retrieve the feed repeatedly throughout the day, but do so on behalf of multiple people. Almost all of these services report to us how many of their users are subscribed to the feed. At the end of the day, we tally up how many stand-alone feed readers are subscribed, and add them to the web-based users. The end result is the total subscriber number we report. (I’m leaving a few details out; see below for a more complete answer.)

The fluctuations are almost always due to people using stand-alone computers who don’t turn their computer on, or don’t load their feed reader on a given day. If their feed reader doesn’t ask for the feed that day, we don’t see them, and consequently don’t include them as a subscriber. (note from Darren - this is why on weekends numbers tend to go down as a result of less people checking their feed reader).

Other explanations are when a site gets Dugg - large spikes in traffic, at least when some of the visitors are using older versions of browsers, may result in us being unable to differentiate between browser accesses of the feed and the browser’s feed reader accessing the feed. A more detailed explanation of this phenomenon is here - look for my answer to the question asking about spikes from getting Dugg.

Finally, for a more comprehensive look at the various components of a subscriber report, we did a case study last year on TechCrunch. It should provide even more context for the hows and whys of subscriber calculations (and fluctuations). It also makes some important comments on “Reach”. Unlike the subscriber number, which may be representative of people who indicated an interest in your content but who do not actually read it, Reach reports on just the items that were viewed in aggregators or the clicks that drove traffic back to the publisher’s site. As a result, it represents a much more accurate picture of the engagement a feed’s audience enjoys, while the subscriber number represents the total audience who’s expressed an interest in the content.

Written on August 16th, 2007 at 12:08 am by city of Stanton David Shawver

Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog

31 Days to Building a Better Blog, Blogging Tools and Services 41 comments

Building-A-Better-Blog-2Have you ever wondered what readers of your blog do when they arrive at it? What do they look at? What links do they click on? What internal navigation do they use? What ads do they click? What positions on your blog do people gravitate towards?

Today your task in the 31 Day Project is to do some analysis of what people do when they’re on your blog by creating a heatmap.

This is a little similar to one of our earlier tasks (doing a first time reader audit) but this one is on a larger scale and using a clever tool that I find incredibly useful by the name of CrazyEgg.

Some of you will be familiar with CrazyEgg already as I’ve mentioned it numerous times previously at enternetusers but I’ve never really given it a full review.

The basics of this tool are that it tracks where readers of your blog click when surfing on your blog. It creates a heatmap of the results.

All it takes is to embed a little javascript on the page that you want to track and CrazyEgg will do the rest. Here’s an example of a heatmap of a page from Digital Photography School that I ran a CrazyEgg test on recently (click for an enlargement):

Crazyegg-1

This is just the section of the page above the fold (CrazyEgg tracks the full page) but it shows you quite clearly a number of hotspots on the page (particularly the top left hand navigation section and the picture).

The other useful tool that CrazyEgg offers is one that they call ‘Confetti’ (pictured below). This pinpoints the exact position on the page that people click and analyses them by a variety of ways. In the following screen shot the different colors signify different sources of traffic.

The red dots are where Digg users clicked, the yellow dots are tracking visitors from Google etc. Confetti also lets you track people according to their operating system, the keyword that they arrive on a page using, browser, window size and even how long they stay on the court before they click.

Crazyegg-2

So why would you want this type of information?

Knowing where your readers click when arriving on your blog is GOLD! I can’t emphasize to you enough how much you’ll learn about your blog and reader by doing this type of analysis.

Here are just some of the ways you can use this information:

  • Ad Positioning - CrazyEgg tracks clicks on ads like AdSense. You can track where on the ad they click, test ads in different positions and of different designs (run one test for a few days, then make a change and run another one).
  • Design Testing - Once we finish a few more tweaks of the enternetusers design I’ll be running CrazyEgg tests on the front page and single posts of this site and comparing the results to the previous design of enternetusers. In doing so I can compare how different design elements, navigation etc are working to fine tune them.
  • Content Development - I’ve learned a lot about writing and how to structure posts using CrazyEgg. Particularly interesting is how readers click different links in your posts. It’s also fascinating to see where people click on your blog where there are non live links (you can track these too)
  • Reader Analysis - Being able to track how readers from different sources use your blog differently is very useful. For example what if you could find out what type of links or ads Digg users click as opposed to Google traffic? You could use this information to serve up different type of design to different users etc.

Really the list goes on and the more you use CrazyEgg on different parts of your blog will reveal all kinds of useful information.

Give it a go. CrazyEgg does have a free option (that allows you to track 6000 impressions per month on up to 4 pages). I personally use a paid plan which allows more impressions and pages but even the free plan will teach you a lot.

Once you’ve given it a go let us know in comments below what you learn. I’d be fascinated to know what you find and how you use the information.

Please note - that the link to CrazyEgg in this post isn’t an affiliate program but has a enternetusers code embedded in it because CrazyEgg is doing a special offer for enternetusers readers to give them extra impressions for the ‘free trial version’ (6000 impressions instead of the normal 4000).

Written on August 15th, 2007 at 02:08 pm by city of Stanton David Shawver

MovableType 4.0 Launched - Interview with Anil Dash

Blogging Tools and Services 23 comments

 Mt4 I Mt4-LogoAs this post goes live MovableType 4.0 is being launched by it’s creators - SixApart. This new release has been a long time coming for those of us with MT blogs (I have a couple that I can’t wait to get upgraded) and so I thought it might be fun to ask Anil Dash from Six Apart a few questions on the launch and what the new MT version is all about. I hope you enjoy this interview with Anil.

You seem really excited about the launch of MT 4.0 - what 3 things are exciting you the most?

1. I think number one, this is a great moment for the whole MT community. Movable Type was first beta tested by a few people (I got to be one of the lucky few!) six years ago, and if you look at the remarkable evolution since then, it’s a testament to how creative and inspiring the community of users are. So the excitement and participation of tens of thousands of people in the MT4 beta, and the hundreds of thousands more around the world who’ve looked at the demos or downloads of the work in progress are truly inspirational. Things like the new MT site and the new plugins site are a testament to that passion.

2. From a purely technical standpoint, the rearchitecture is amazing. There’s the really obvious surface-level changes like the smart dynamic charts showing activity on your blog, or the all-new user interface and navigation. But at a fundamental level, there’s been a redesign that lets you do things like set up pages to publish in a queue, so you get the reliability and performance of static pages without having to wait for them to publish. And at an even lower level, the completely new underpinnings for the system’s infrastructure let you take advantage of the same open source infrastructure that we use to run our other blogging platforms like LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad. Those infrastructure pieces also help run most of Web 2.0, so it’s a great way of bringing the technology full-circle, especially with the upcoming release of MT’s open source version.

3. Finally, I think there’s just a delight in using a lot of the new features. Things that formerly required plugins or workarounds are just built right in. You can manage all your blogs in one place easier than ever. Tags and Pages and all that stuff aren’t plugins, they’re integrated. And I don’t know how I got by without the asset management system, which tracks all my files and automatically lets me make podcasts with them, or put them in a Recent Photos widget on my sidebar. Once you get used to having it all integrated, you can never go back.

What will MT users upgrading to 4.0 notice the most about the new version?

Right off the top, the new user interface puts things like statistics on your comment and posting activity front and center. So you’ve got the ability to judge your blog’s success immediately, and then you can filter those views or get an XML feed of what’s going on with your block with just a click. Of course, things like editing and revising entries are a lot easier, too, with an all-new rich text editor and asset management and niceties like automatic saving of drafts and automatic conversion of curly quotes from MS Word.

Screenshot of the new Dashboard below:

Movabletype

What are your top 10 features of the new version?

My personal Top 10? Man, that’s hard. I think my list looks something like this:

  1. The new documentation. I think it’s the best docs anyone’s ever done for any social media app, and the Business Blogging Guide alone is over 75 printed pages worth of information that’s all about the “why”, not just the “how” of blogging.
  2. There’s *lesson almost every screen. The new UI means that there’s no clutter with stuff being on the screen to confuse me, and at the same time there’s handy links on the side of almost every page leading me to my next task.
  3. Admin feeds. Every single listing screen in MT4 can be viewed as an XML feed, which i can get to on Google Reader or on my mobile phone. So I know every time someone comments or creates a draft entry, and I can act on them to publish or delete or whatever without having to learn every screen in the application. It just feels like a ton of power to have in your hand, especially when I see my friends with iPhones managing their blogs on a phone with a few taps.
  4. Built-in file and asset management. Like I said, I don’t know how I got by before this — it’s a piece of cake to reuse files. We use this already on the movabletype.org site, where I can reuse a picture one of the other authors has uploaded, just by clicking on the link.
  5. OpenID. I know it’s geeky, but the idea of using your own web address as your identity is *important*. Instead of giving away an email address that can be spammed, or relying on an identity from a site I don’t control, my own web address represents me. So good, it seems obvious in retrospect.
  6. Complete Backup and Restore. Maybe I’m the paranoid type, but a single file that backs up every single entry, page, template, setting, and file on my blog seems like the best thing in the world. And it’s handy for deploying test blogs, since I can just restore them on another MT4 install to make them live.
  7. The new plugins and plugin directory. *Manour community is amazing. It’s not just the fancy new directory for plugins, but the fact that there are so many cool new MT4-specific plugins out there, and that’s on top of almost all the most popular plugins from MT3 being built right in to MT4.
  8. Replying to comments right in the administration screen. It’s just a time-saver. The kind of thoughtful little touch that makes managing a blog fun instead of a chore.
  9. Cross-blog aggregation. We use a ton of blogs inside our company (obviously), and it’s a piece of cake to include posts from one, some, or all of the blogs on a single page. I can even clone a single blog as many times as I want, making it really easy to make a new blog for each project.
  10. The new template tools. Okay, I’m a geek for this one, but MT4 highlights my template tags when I add them in to my templates, and even tells me if I have a typo when I add tags to my templates. That’s just cool.

MT seems a lot more community oriented these days? Is this an intentional change in your thinking and approach?

I don’t think it’s a change, I think it’s making visible how we’ve always worked. If you look at the history of MT from the beginning, our community has defined what we do, and has given us the best ideas, the strongest praise, and the harshest critiques. We just hadn’t really done a good job of giving a face to that, and so we made sure to do justice to all teh work and passion that the community’s had for almost 6 years now.

How easy is upgrading to 4.0? What issues do those upgrading need to be aware of?

It’s pretty straightforward. This is by far the easiest install process MT has ever had, and we have special pages for people who want to upgrade. In fact, we had our first upgrade-a-thons last week, where everyone joined in at the same time online and on the phone to work to help each other upgrade, and that us help document exactly what it takes to make the leap. You can see those results here.

How about moving from other platforms to MT?

Yep, we’ve got importers for popular platforms, especially since almost every common tool supports the import/export format that MT invented. Honestly, our goal isn’t to get people to waste time messing with tools if what they have is working for them. But if people think MT can be more reliable and let them do things they couldn’t do before, we welcome them into the community. The most important thing is that people know, when they’re telling their boss the company needs to start using blogs, or when their friends ask “what tool should i use?”, they know MT4 is a great choice.

Do you have any questions or comments for Anil? If so - feel free to leave them in comments below as he says he’ll be watching and willing to interact. Thanks to Anil for his time!

Written on August 15th, 2007 at 12:08 am by city of Stanton David Shawver

Stickify Your Blog

Video Posts, 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, Blog Promotion 57 comments

Today’s task in the 31 Day Project is to ’stickify your blog’.

This week’s video post is based upon a tip I mentioned in a recent podcast interview with Yaro and revolves around a technique that I’ve recently used to help convert one off and first time visitors to my blog into RSS subscribers.

It revolves around identifying key points where traffic is entering your blog and then optimizing those points for stickiness either by providing means for subscribing via RSS or email or by driving people deeper into your blog.

Posts mentioned in this video include:

This video goes for 3 minutes and 15 seconds.

PS: this was recorded last week when I had a cold - sorry about my nasally voice :-)

Written on August 14th, 2007 at 04:08 am by city of Stanton David Shawver

How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog

Social Media, Featured Posts, Blog Promotion 114 comments

StumbleuponThis is a guest post on How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog is by Skellie who writes tips and tutorials on creating better content at her blog, Skelliewag.org.

The potential for StumbleUpon to send traffic is often under-estimated, particularly by new bloggers. Unlike digg and del.icio.us, an item doesn’t need to become popular before you see immediate results. One or two votes can bring a hundred or more readers — more than a new blog might see in a day.

StumbleUpon users are, however, notoriously fickle. The service describes itself as allowing you to ‘channel-surf the internet’ and I think it’s a very appropriate description. Users flick through websites like you might flick through channels, often making a decision on whether to stay or leave your site before it has even had time to finish loading.

In this post, I want to suggest some quick tips you can use to draw StumbleUpon users into your site before they stumble away.

Channel-surfing the internet

We’ve all flicked through TV channels back and forth, waiting for something to hold our attention. The decision to stay on a channel or surf elsewhere is usually made in a second or two, and the principle is the same for StumbleUpon users.

With so many other potentially great sites available to them at the click of a mouse, you need to make it immediately clear why your site is worth their time. Here are some tips to help you do just that.

1. Make your blog’s core mission-statement unmissable

A core mission-statement as I define it is a one or two sentence description encapsulating what your blog has to offer. A good core mission-statement describes the kind of content you provide and broadly what your blog is about. It should communicate a lot of information in only a few words.

If a stumbler can see straight away your blog is about something they’re interested in then they’re likely to stick around.

2. Insert powerful visual cues

When channel-surfing the decision to stick with a channel or move on is often largely determined by visual cues. Even with the sound off you can tell a drama from a news program, a travel show from a cartoon, because visual elements provide clues as to what kind of show you’re watching.

The same principle applies to blogs. If your blog’s header contains an image of a pile of cash, we can reasonably assume the blog is about money (or making it). That’s a lot of information communicated instantly by a single image.

3. Push your content above the fold

StumbleUpon users often judge a site by what is offered in the above the fold area — the area of your site which appears on screen before any scrolling occurs.

I think this blog is an example of how to do that well. Not only do headlines and the first few paragraphs of a post appear above the fold, but other content of interest is showcased in the header area. StumbleUpon users immediately see a site packed with value.

You can use the top part of your blog’s sidebar, its header area and the post area to showcase your content. In doing so, you’ll straight away show StumbleUpon visitors why they should stick around.

4. Be unique, be pretty

While it’s difficult to judge the quality of a blog’s content in just a few seconds, people are much more hasty with aesthetic judgments. A gorgeous or interesting blog design encourages a stumbler to stick around and see whether the content is great too.

Of course, a great design is a lot of work (or quite a bit of money). The next-best thing is a unique logo or header image, an interesting color scheme, and so on. There are a number of small changes you can make to create a blog that looks unique and sets you apart from the crowd.

What we’ve done

The emphasis in all the above tips is on instantly showing visitors who’ve stumbled across your blog what it has to offer. This should help you make the most of StumbleUpon traffic and turn more stumblers into readers.

Written on August 14th, 2007 at 12:08 am by city of Stanton David Shawver

Analyze Your Blog’s Competition

31 Days to Building a Better Blog, Miscellaneous Blog Tips 34 comments

Building-A-Better-Blog-2Today’s task in the 31 Days Blogging Project is to so some analysis of other blogs in your niche - your ‘competition’.

Note: I use the word ‘competition’ hesitantly because the thing about blogging is that those blogging on the same topics as you are potentially your biggest allies. Connect and work with your competition and everyone improves.

This is actually an exercise that I recently recommended to a friend in the process of setting up a blog as part of his process in refining a topic. Having thought about it since I’m becoming more convinced that it’s actually a good exercise for established bloggers to do from time to time also.

1. Make a list of 10 blogs in your Niche
2. Get the RSS feed of each of these blogs and commit yourself to reading them each week
3. Do some analysis by asking some of the following questions:

  • What do they do well?
  • What are the boundaries of the topics that they focus upon?
  • What don’t they write about?
  • How often do they post?
  • How long are their posts?
  • What level are they pitching their blog at? (beginners, intermediate, advanced)
  • What questions are their readers asking in comments?
  • What style or voice do they write in?
  • What type of posts seem to get the most attention (comments, trackbacks, incoming links)?
  • What is their design like? What do they do well and what do they do poorly?
  • What are other blogs writing about them (use technorati to check this)?
  • If they have an open or unlocked stats package what can you learn from their stats? What pages are popular? Where does their incoming traffic come from?

Why do you need to ask these questions?

Good question - I’m glad you asked!

My reasoning for doing this type of analysis is not to copy other blogs in your niche (although you might find some things that you want to emulate) - but it is quite the opposite.

In asking these types of questions you will often find gaps in the niche that others are not writing about that your blog might be able to fill. You’ll also have a good feel for what is working and not working for others, might have some possible ideas for connecting with other bloggers in your niche, could come up with some potential post topics etc

Let us know what you find in doing this analysis in comments below.

Written on August 13th, 2007 at 12:08 pm by city of Stanton David Shawver

Beginners Guide to RSS

RSS 27 comments

Martin Neumann has put together a great new resource for people wanting a good introduction to RSS by the title of RSS - Beginners Guide.

It’s one of the better resources on the topic that I’ve seen and I’m adding it to my own What is RSS page along with How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way, Getting Started with RSS and the below Common Craft Video.

How do you explain RSS?


VideoJug: RSS In Plain English

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