PureBlogging

About a week ago I opened my mailbox to discover a booklet of coupons from Ralph’s, the grocery chain that operates here in Southern California. About 24 pages long, the booklet was filled with coupons for “green” products like organic nuts and soy milk (and — ahem — bottled water). It was printed on hard-to-recycle magazine-quality paper. I’d say that, even if I used all of the coupons in it (I cut out about half), about two-thirds of it would be tossed in the trash.

The booklet’s title was “Going Green: What We’re Doing to Help Protect the World We Share.”

I looked closely. I didn’t see any sign that it was made with recycled paper. I did find two separate phone numbers to call, one of which was ostensibly for “suggestions” on “new opportunities to conserve resources.”

I called both numbers — and a third I found later — and each time, asked the operator whether she thought it was kind of silly for Ralph’s to advertise its environmental stewardship by sending out thousands (tens of thousands? A million?) of direct-mail booklets that will probably be thrown in the trash. I asked each time if that didn’t seem a little counterintuitive.

Each time I got the same response: Thank you for your suggestions, sir, I’ll forward them on to the relevant department. Have a nice day.

(Ok, that’s not entirely true. One operator agreed with me, and even chuckled about the vast silliness of the situation. But, she told me, there was nothing she could do — I had called the Ralph’s Club hotline, where I could only ask questions about my membership in the store’s loyalty program. She gave me the third number, which I called to receive the response above.)

Since I’ve got something of a stick up my rear end about customer relations, I also sent an email. A day or so later, I got the same generic response: Thanks for your comments. We’ll send them to someone who cares. You just sit tight.

It struck me as an all-too-common mindset in marketing: You don’t have to provide quality. You just have to make people think you are.

The feeling of futility this whole episode gave me came back this week when I read the post-game reports on the April 16 Democratic debate that took place in my hometown of Philadelphia. PureBlogging is about as far from a political blog as you can get, so I’m not going to get into the gory details (full disclosure: I’m an Obama guy). But the first hour of that debate was, from a purely customer-relations standpoint, a flaming ordnance-filled train derailing over a fault line filled with radioactive plague-infected zombies.

Again, I don’t want to get into politics too deeply. But most of the political issues people seem to care about (the people I know, anyway) tend to deal with health care, or the environment, or whether we’re about to suffer a complete economic breakdown that will leave us all fighting tribal wars over the last remaining canned goods. So of course the fine minds at ABC News decided to focus on American flag lapel pins.

It’s the same mindset that made Ralph’s send out the “green” mailers: It doesn’t have to be real journalism. You just have to furrow your brow enough that people think you’re serious.

What I’m getting at is this: I’ve said before that being surrounded by incompetence tends to make you look better (and I think a nice corollary to this assertion is Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans argument). We’re all surrounded by examples of companies, media outlets, government agencies and other places that don’t really engage us on any kind of meaningful level.

This is your big chance.

Do you engage your readers?

Do you solicit emails from them on how to do better?

Do you respond to them in comments?

Most importantly: How do you engage them? Are you too busy to have a real back-and-forth with them?

Why do you have your blog?

Is it to give people a bit of real, tangible quality in a sea of mediocrity and meaningless, dumbed-down pap?

Is it to make a few bucks?

Are you the kind of blogger who respects your readers’ intelligence and sense of curiosity? Are you willing to really put in the hours it takes to provide a real service to your readers? Are you writing nonstop top-ten lists, or providing thoughtful commentary?

Are you truly attempting to engage your audience?

How many blogs do you have? 1? 10? Dozens? If you have more than one blog, you may find that your attention is spread thin. Perhaps it’s time to pare down your blogging diet and give up one of your blogs. But how do you know when it’s time to say goodbye and end the relationship with a particular blog? I’ve had about a dozen blogs, only some of which are still active. Here are some of the reasons that I gave up on my old blogs.

1. Interface Problems

Some of my blogs were on blog community sites based on Drupal and other blogging software. I remember that with one particular site, I lasted only four weeks before giving up my blog there. It was just too hard to post there. I would post, and the site would crash or have problems, leaving me postless. After a while I decided that I didn’t need the site enough to keep posting there and I cancelled my account. I was running four other blogs at the time, so it wasn’t a big loss.

2. No Admin Presence

If you are having problems on one of those sites, having someone to help sort the problems out is essential. On at least two of the sites, it was really difficult to get problems sorted out, or even to get a response from the site admin. After a while, I turned my efforts to sites where the admin was involved or where I controlled what happened to my blog.

3. Admin Too Involved

Of course, there are also problems when the admin forgets that the site also belongs to the community. I have blogged on sites where the admin took the site down without warning for a couple of weeks. On another site, the admin decided to change the link structure without putting redirects in place. That meant that I had basically wasted my time promoting my posts on that site. Although my content is still there, I have pretty much stopped posting on that site.

4. No Financial Return

If you are blogging because you want to earn an income, then blogs that don’t make money may be a waste of your time. Of course, you need to give blogs time to develop an audience before you give up on them. However, if no one is interested, then perhaps it’s time to turn your attention elsewhere. A couple of my blogs outgrew their usefulness for that reason, because I was experimenting with them to see what worked.

5. No Mojo

If you can’t be bothered to write about a particular topic, then there’s no point in maintaining a blog about it. You may have been enthusiastic at the start, but if that enthusiasm wanes, then it may be time to call it a day. That doesn’t mean that the blog has to die. Instead you can get some guest bloggers in to handle most of the content, or turn it over to someone who is enthusiastic about the subject matter.

6. No Time

I blog for four sites regularly, and a few more occasionally, and I have three active blogs of my own. That means that blogging time is at a premium, and some of my blogs on other sites don’t get much of my time. If this is happening to you, then maybe it’s time to pare down your blogging life. My decision was to concentrate on my freelance mentoring blog, my professional site and my guest blogging activities, getting to the others when I can. I think that will give me a balanced blogging life.

So those are six reasons to give up on your blog. Next week, I’ll look at some reasons why you should keep your blog going.

One of the biggest trends in technology today is increased seamlessness between all of the different tech tools that you use. VoIP technology is a main player in creating wireless seamlessness because it connects phone calls through your computer to let people reach you at home or on your cell phone via one number. And now, with click-to-call widgets, you don’t actually have to publish that number so people can now place a call to you without having access to your personal phone number. Not too many bloggers are taking advantage of this tool but it’s something that you might want to think about adding to your blog.

How the click-to-call widget works

You sign up with a VoIP service that offers click-to-call widgets. Make sure you choose a low-cost or free service because you don’t want this to cost you more than it needs to. You then download the click-to-call widget for your blog. It will add a button to your site that says something like “click here to call me”. A reader can click on that button and the computer will dial your personal phone number (without sharing it with the reader). Your phone will ring and you can choose whether or not to take the call. (You can also forward calls to different numbers and send them straight to voice mail when you don’t want to be bothered.)

How click-to-call benefits bloggers

There are some very obvious reasons that bloggers have been hesitant to add these buttons to their blogs. Most of us are busy working all day and don’t actually want to have strangers calling us at any time of day or night. But there are some major benefits to bloggers who opt to use this technology.

The main thing is that you’re going to rapidly increase your loyalty from your readers when you encourage them to call you with their thoughts, questions and concerns. You show that you’re interested in what your readers have to say. You also indicate that you trust them enough to provide this service. That makes you a lot more accessible and accessibility can gain you friends online. Those friends will promote your blog to others.

And you might find that you really do make friends with some of these people. The blogging life can be pretty lonely and people actually benefit a lot from making friends with other bloggers. This can lead to personal rewards as well as to financial benefits caused by the social networking aspect of the job.

Additionally, this is an innovative tool for blogging. It’s relatively new and it’s not something that bloggers are taking advantage of. If you’re among the first bloggers to use this tool, you’re going to get attention in the blogosphere as a result. Attention leads to traffic which leads to revenue.

And finally, you make it really easy for blog owners to get in touch to offer you additional work with their blogs. Many blog owners work on the Internet but prefer to resolve the details of the business with their bloggers over the phone. Make it easy for them and you’re one step ahead of your competition.

Keeping the problems to a minimum

In order to maximize the benefits of this technology, you’ll want to minimize its drawbacks. The main problem is that annoying people may call you at odd hours and interrupt either your sleep or your work. The key to preventing this problem is to establish some really clear rules for calling you and place those on your blog.

For example, you may decide that you’re only taking calls during certain hours. Whether that’s Monday-Friday from 9-5 or just on Tuesday nights from 6-8, figure out a schedule that works for you. Be available to take calls then and people won’t be likely to bug you at other times.

You also need to come up with some clear rules for yourself as to what you will and won’t tolerate from these calls. You may be happy to debate with people who disagree with something that you said on your blog or you may prefer to keep conversations non-confrontational. Set those boundaries for yourself so that this can be a positive experience.

Branching out to other areas of VoIP calling

If you discover that you like the benefits of opening your blog up to callers, you might want to branch out into other opportunities made possible by this technology. For example, you may wish to hold conference calls with your readers on a weekly or monthly basis. You could discuss a specific topic and put the audio file of the transaction on your blog for others to read. The possibilities are wide open since VoIP lets you easily merge your data, voice and image information in one location online.

Where to go for click-to-call widgets

There are a whole lot of different VoIP providers out there and many of them offer the click-to-call widget. (Incidentally, there are also Skype-specific widgets and widgets that are designed to go on your social networking profiles rather than on your blog.) TringMe and Jajah are two big names but shop around to find a service that suits your needs.

As a blogger, I’ve found a lot of inspiration for things I have written by reading the comments in the blogs that I read.  I have learned a lot of new information from the commenters who keep up with the latest developments, and I have quickly learned who to listen to, and who typically gives bad advice.  I’ve also noticed that there is a lot of repetition of opinion, which a spread of misinformation and leaps in logic that can lead readers that are less informed to make poor decisions when setting up their blog..

The world of blogging, internet marketing, and search engine optimization is constantly changing.  The things that gave your pages a huge boost in the search engine results yesterday aren’t nearly as important today.  Likewise, the things that weren’t considered important in the past are now being preached about by SEO gurus.

The unfortunate thing is that some of these techniques that are deemed to be less important are being abandoned.  One cause of this is the Google effect.  Because Google is such a powerful force in search engines, a great deal of the SEO advice that is given is designed to get your pages to rank on Google.  Because some SEO techniques aren’t as important to Google, they are cast aside.  It’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

META Tags

One of the techniques that is being ignored by a lot of sites lately is the use of meta tags in the design of their site. 

Meta tags are lines of HTML that are in the <head> section of your web page.  In WordPress you can edit it by editing it in the Header section of your theme.  There were a multitude of lines that could be used but the tags that were considered most important were Meta Description, which contains a brief description of the page, and Meta Keywords, which is a list of keywords and phrases that you feel are relevant to your page.  Because search engines list individual pages, not sites, each page in your site could have very different meta tags to describe that individual page.

These tags were once considered a critical part of getting listed well in search engines, but have really fallen out of vogue.  The reason; many search engines ignore meta tags.

One reason that some of the search engines abandoned meta tag information was that it is too easy to manipulate.  It’s possible to write keyword and description tags that weren’t really relevant to the content of your site.  It was a great way to draw people to your site that weren’t really searching for your information.  As search engines struggled for ways too deliver more relevant results, meta tags were abandoned.

Reason to use this:  Some search engines still use meta tags in determining search engine positions.  While some of the search engines ignore meta tags when they spider your pages, not all of them do. There are a few that look at that information and include it in their algorithm.  To my knowledge, there are no search engines that will penalize your page for having meta tags.

Another reason to include meta tags is that some search engines and directories draw from the meta description tag for the summary that is included in your listing.  When someone searches for your keyword, they will see what you have written in your meta tag under your page name on the results page.  This gives you a lot of control in what message searchers will see.

Direct Link-Backs

When I wrote about Page Rank last week, I said that links to your site were a huge part of what Google looks at in determining your Page Rank.  It is known that one-way links are more powerful than two-way links.  What I mean by that is, if you link to my page without me giving you a link back, it is given more relevance by Google than a link to my page when I give a link back to your page. 

Because of this, I have seen comments advising site owners to abandon direct link backs, and you are seeing more and more three-way linking, where Page A links to Page B which links to Page A. 

Reason to use this: While one-way way links may carry more clout, reciprocal links still work, and ignoring them will make it much more difficult to attract traffic to your pages.

 Direct link backs still count toward your Page Rank.  It may not carry the same weight as one-way links, but they still contribute. 

Also, as more people develop schemes to try and get around Google, they run the risk of doing something that Google will decide isn’t right.  I’m not the only one who reads SEO and internet marketing forums.  Google has their people reading as well, and if I know that these schemes exist, you can bet Google does, too, and they have someone working on a tweak to the algorithm to penalize them.

Best Practices 

Best practices are called “best practices” for a reason.  They work in the long run, and they work for multiple search engines.

It is an ever-changing sea of what Search Engines do or do not pay attention to.  Things that do not seem to affect your search engine position today may return to vogue tomorrow. 

My advice is to base your decisions on good intent.  If you are using a technique with the intent of fooling or getting over on the search engines, stop.  If your intent is to provide relevant information, products, and services to your readers, then do it.

And remember: it is possible to rank well on several search engines.  Google may be the biggest dog, but it isn’t the only dog.

A big part of blogging is figuring out what to blog about, and blogging about what’s hot in your niche could increase your traffic and win you some Diggs and Stumbles. Would you like more readers? Then keep reading as I reveal four ways to discover popular content for your blog.

1. Browse Message Boards, Forums and Groups Related to Your Blog

Search Google for message boards, forums and groups related to your blog. Read through the posts to find out what people are asking about the most, and then blog about it.

2. Research Keywords

Using your favorite keyword tool, enter the name or title of the subject you want to blog about. Next, study the results to see which phrases are the most popular; the popular phrases are the ones you’ll want to choose for your upcoming blog posts. For example, let’s say your blog’s a parenting blog. Using your favorite keyword tool type in the word parenting. If you’re using the keyword tool from Wordtracker it will return the top 100 keyword phrases, and one of those phrases is parenting advice. Now, if you click on parenting advice, the keyword tool from Wordtracker will reveal more keyword phrases. You now want to select a popular phrase from one of those phrases, and step parenting advice could be the one you select. That’s it, you now have a topic to blog about, and step parenting advice appears to be popular enough to write about.

3. Explore Current Trends

If something is hot at the present time, a blog post on that trend will be popular and could increase your readership as well as your RSS subscribers.

4. Surf Over to Amazon and/or Barnes and Noble and Scan Through the Bestselling Books

Select a topic and book related to your blog. Not only are these popular titles, but they can also give you a variety of ideas to blog about.

Those are just a few of the many ways you can discover popular content for your blog. Go ahead, give it a try. Grab your pen and paper and start researching for popular content using the methods mentioned above. Good luck and happy blogging!

Originality and creativity are sorely lacking in most blogs. You can try all the blogging tips and tricks you want, but nothing is going to help you with two problems:

• The whole concept of your blog is one of the same old cookie cutter niches everyone else is doing
• Your content is nearly the same as anyone else’s content in your niche

Once you’ve seen enough pathetic internet marketing wanna-be blogs, anything original is like a refreshing splash of cold water to the face!

I have spent the past several months collecting blogs for this article. I was on a mission to find blogs that were startlingly original in concept, content, and design. I didn’t always get all three at once, but I found some fantastic blogs that are superb examples. Observe, study, and learn from them. The bar has been raised pretty high since blogging first started. Rethink your entire approach and concept of blogging. It might be time for a little creative destruction for your blog. Maybe it’s seriously time to kill your blog and start over.

I offer the following three blogs as inspiration…

PingMag MAKE

PingMag MAKE is an offshoot of PingMag, a Japanese culture magazine. The design of this blog is fresh, techno, and clean. There is a Google Maps mashup embedded that shows the locations in Japan of the people whom the articles are about. Each article is about a small company or single person in pursuit of a highly skilled an artistic craft. In some cases, the craft has a technological bent, but often the “technology” is indistinguishable from the “art” of what they’re doing.

This really is an amazing blog. The concept is profoundly original in a world of same-old me-too blogs. Its niche could hardly seem more ultra-specialized, and yet it appeals to anyone who appreciates craft or Japanese culture… and that’s a fairly big audience.

The Worst SEO Blog Ever!

The Worst SEO Blog Ever! is in fact one of the funniest blogs I’ve read in a long time. I have no idea who its author is, but I can tell he or she does know SEO. Now, how many SEO blogs are there out there? Too many of ‘em to ever have the slightest hope of ranking for the term SEO. Not ever. No seriously, not EVER. And maybe this one doesn’t either, but that’s not the point.

The use of the Kubrick theme cracks me up. That’s what a “bad” blog would do, right? What really stands out about this blog, and what really makes it break the mold, is the combination of intentionally bad design with exceptionally witty and sarcastic writing. Basically, it’s freakin’ hilarious. Strangely enough, while your side is splitting from laughter, you may learn a thing or two about SEO in a back-handed fashion. This is an example of how a unique angle on the content and design of a blog produces something remarkable and original.

Knuckle Tattoos

Knuckle Tattoos mostly written by Nathan Black rates high on the originality meter. The blog is about “Collecting pictures of knuckle tattoos and the stories behind them.” At first glance, this would seem to be far too over-speicalized. How could anyone sustain a blog about just knuckle tattoos?

Here’s the beauty part: It’s not really about the tattoos as much as it about the people who bear them and their stories. There’s enough general interest in tattoos to bring an audience, and everyone loves when people tell their stories in their own words. The whole premise of the blog is pretty cool: Nathan goes around collecting the stories of people with knuckle tattoos and taking their pictures. You can submit your own picture/story.

This is only the beginning of the creative destruction

Next week, I’m going to have another three remarkable blogs that will drive you to destroy your blog in the name of excellence! Be sure to subscribe to PureBlogging so you don’t miss it!