Internet Babel

Google have announced the pending (although as yet undated) lauch of their ‘Wave’ product/platform.

What is Wave?

Well – to quote from Google:

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

It is going to be in developer preview for a while, so expect some changes to occur, but looks like it’s going to be big and open-source with a full developer API and toolkits to develop your own apps based on the Wave protocol.

I don’t suppose Big G will be buying Twitter now.

Full details at the Official Google Blog

Here’s a nice little idea for maybe getting a different audience to come to your Blog or Website.

Plenty of News and Newspaper Websites have areas where you can comment on news, but there are a few that actually let you have your own Blog as well.

For example, the Telegraph and the Independent (both are respected and big readership UK Newspapers) have Blog areas where you can sign up and create your own Blog area.

Of course, you can’t carry adverts on there, but you can put your URL in your Profile.

More importantly, you can Post (and comment on other readers’ Blogs) about a massively wide range of subjects – and that means that you can incorporate links back to your desired Website/Post as part of that content.

Off the top of my head I can see a number of good things about this:

• It’s another avenue for you to post content and to drive people to your site
• It exposes you to a new and diverse readership – a large proportion of whom are interested in current affairs, technology, politics, finance etc but perhaps wouldn’t normally fall in your ‘target’ audience
• You get some neat backlinks, most likely from a site with some good authority
• With the telegraph, you get a neat little ‘my.telegraph.co.uk/yourname’ URL for your Blog The independent service is offered via LiveJournal 
• It is of course free
• You can post about your selected subject matter, outside of the strict confines of your own Blog, and direct any links back to specific landing pages/posts
• As Newspapers have a fairly loyal readership, I would guess that by signing up for Blogs at a number of Newspaper sites, you would not be getting too much overlap in your audience 

I haven’t really seen anyone talk about this much before, although the Blogs themselves are very popular with the Newspaper online readership. I seriously think these Blogs have some potential to open your material up to a new audience and to drive some trafic your way. 

The Telegraph Blog area can be found here:
http://www.my.telegraph.co.uk/

The Independent Blog area is here:
http://www.livejournal.com/integration/independent/learnmore.bml

There are almost certainly others out there, but these are the two I wanted to highlight for the purposes of this post. I think it’s worth a try.

Thanks
Dave

Time for a new approach for Internet Babel.

Look across the ‘mid-range’ MMO/IM Bloggers (and even the ‘top’ Bloggers, as I’ve mentioned before) and you see a lot of the same stuff – the latest affiliate schemes, our ’success’ stories, competitions, so-called ‘black-hat’ rubbish and paid reviews.

IB has been as guilty of that in the past as anyone,and now is as good a time as any to give it a revamp – the Blog currently has a ‘tired’ theme that needs a re-skin, and it’s missing a couple of plugins that I consider important.

The Blog itself (like most in this niche) lacks the interactivity and value-added things that a really useful site needs – and no, comments (even threaded ones) on their own aren’t enough.

I have a full-time freelance occupation developing sites and systems for people – Blogging is a sideline and my goal is to make enough from my own sites that I don’t have to work too hard for other people. I suspect many of you are in a similar situation (or at least aim to be).

So, I’m experimenting with a number of approaches to developing my current domain and site portfolio:

• via domain/site flipping
• by taking advantage of quick-hits on hot niche areas
• by developing a wide range of content-rich sites that I can SEO into a money-earning position
• by creating new scripts and software that people will want to use (or buy)

Nothing too ground-breaking there, but by reading about my little successes AND failures in these endeavours people reading this Blog might just pick up some practical tips and save some time in achieving their own goals.

To that end Internet Babel will expand to address what I hope people really want - namely:

• straight to the point tips and news about SEO, content, development and flipping
• a Forum, to introduce much more of a community aspect, and to be able to cover other topics in more detail (coding questions and tips, template/plugin discussions etc) without cluttering up the Blog 
• Classifieds/Directory areas to make it a genuine ‘resource’ site
• updates on ‘real’ projects and experiments that might give some pointers
• useful downloads

The blog will of course remain but I want to make Internet Babel more than that. If you don’t want to come along for the ride, that’s fine – but I hope you hang on in there and see what we can make of it together.

First off – a decent theme to replace this tired old thing – what’s the best one out there at the moment? (preferably free, cos I’m a miserable git – but I do like the look of the ‘Ultimate’ Theme)

It’s a commonly accepted ‘rule’ that many Blogs fail within 3 months of starting up. There may be a number of reasons or factors behind each individual case, but I think a common trait of a lot of failed and failing bloggers is pandering to their readers.

A lot of bloggers write what they think people want to hear as opposed to writing what they actually think themselves.

If you take a look at some of the most successful bloggers, there’s one thing that stands out: They all have a ‘loud’ opinion…most do, at least. We are not just reporters of news or reflectors of the current trends – if you want that you might as well just populate your Blog with RSS feeds and never write at all.

Without the injection of your own personal opinion, you’re just another guy aimlessly tapping keys to the tune of a miscellaneous audience. You have to set yourself apart by writing content that defines itself through your personality, your experience and your beliefs.

By doing this you gain a readership that is like-minded, loyal and attentive (or at least you generate some debate with those that hold other opinions, which is just as good) – as opposed to just writing to an interweb of faceless blobs.

If you just write about what’s happening with no real thought or personal insight then you’ll become nothing more than an alternative news outlet, we really don’t need anymore of those. I have a million news feeds I can choose from – I (and others out there) want personal insight, experience, opinions and originality. I don’t want to be spoon fed but I do want to be inspired to try new things.

It’s tempting to pander now and then as it will gain you some immediate readership, but as you prostitute yourself more and more, the readership will diversify and broaden. We’ve all seen Blogs that were initially focussed on a clear topic drift off into trivia and chit-chat. This will leave you with a completely random readership that will most likely be unreliable, just scouring the Web randomly, rather than specifically coming to read your content.

With Internet Babel I have specific goals in mind, and those revolve around giving people the tools and ideas to make them think for themselves.

I care about trying to give people useful information and seeing them do something with it, and that’s why I want to extend Internet Babel to become more of an interactive community, via a Forum, WIKI or some other means.

You may have other goals for your Blog/Site but the main point is to know what you want to say, and stick to that goal – and don’t get distracted from it in a rush to get cheap visitor stats or diversify your audience.

Cheers

Well, Blogging about MMO, won’t MMO.

Why Not?

Most of us working Blogs in this MMO/Internet Marketing niche try to provide advice (basically to each other) – we talk about affiliates, on-site advertising, reviews and whatever, and the majority of what we talk about is aimed at the guys working in the same kind of field.

There’s a lot of needless obsessing about subscriber numbers (and artificial and temporary ways to boost them), Alexa rank, PR etc, and a lot of chatter about methods for making money online.

While it’s true that these Blogs can provide a lot of inspiration, and a small number of people make decent money from them – the truth is that the kind of traffic we get is not good for converting. Most Blog/Webmaster type visitors are too savvy to click on ads, and the kind of traffic you get from social networking is transient and not focussed (as a rule).

What works?

The recent massive sale of Bankaholic (widely reported elsewhere) is a perfect example of a brilliant piece of business and should serve as the real lesson for those of you who want to really Make Money Online.

Bankaholic is a Blog/Site with unspectaclar traffic and Alexa ranking. However, it is squarely and directly aimed at a very high-paying target market, ranks highly for major credit/banking keywords (due to it’s content and SEO) and this (plus its layout/structure) will bring a visitor population that is highly focussed on the subject matter and MUCH more likely to click/convert.

The timing of the sale (given the current Credit Crunch) is a bit unfortunate, but the appeal of the site to the Buyer is unquestionable.

What Next?

So – the lesson to be learnt (as always) is that finding and focussing on a target niche, building good content and running effective SEO/backlink building is the way to Make Money Online. So stop talking about it, go out and try it for yourself. 

I will be running a 1-year experiment starting soon, developing between 10-20 sites based on selected niche markets and I’ll be reporting on progress here. But don’t wait for me, or anyone else, to do it:

• find a niche (preferably one with good pay-per-click, pay-per-action)
• find a domain
• build some content
• build a site
• SEO it
• build some backlinks
• plant some occasional link-bait
• repeat until Rich

Don’t talk about MMO – go and do it.

Cheers

Dave

or “How I Learned to Love Lists”

Now, I’m just guessing here but, if you’re anything like me, then you find “Time Management” easier to say than to do. I have a lot of Web development work to do, plus writing, domaining and managing this and another couple of Blogs and, while I have the best intentions of keeping on top of everything it just doesn’t always work out that way.

What sometimes happens as a result of this is that I get to a point where I’ve just got way too much to do and don’t know where to start – I get caught up in a kind of action-paralysis where I flit around from task to task without really accomplishing very much.

For me, the only way to stay out of such a state is to use lists – but use them effectivley.

A list in itself is of limited value – because you can just keep adding items to the bottom – and seeing a three page list on my table doesn’t make me feel any better or make me do things smarter. So – here are a few home-grown tips that just might help you manage your own time: 

1. Decide on your method/medium: Being old-fashioned at heart, I use pen and paper a lot for my list building. The main reason being that I just find that the act of physically writing the stuff down helps to focus my thinking. You may prefer to use a whiteboard, a text editor or even a mind-mapping type tool.
2. It’s not just a list: Writing down (or typing in) your lists will help you start to organise yourself, but don’t think of it as a ’single-level’. I create ’sub-lists’, i.e. lists of smaller tasks that belong under a single heading. You list your ‘major’ items at the top-level, and for each major item you can then create a smaller, more detailed list of individual tasks within that. This helps keep the list size down and allows you to focus on that specific area when you’re creating your ’sub-list’.
3. Let it Grow: I mentioned ’mind-map’ tools in the first point. Whether or not you actually use one of these, the same approach is very useful in list/task management. So, in practise, I might find that an item on my list spawns other related categories/lists. I just let the list grow outwards as well as length-wise – and then re-organise it later into a more readabe ’shape’. Yes, I may spend time building and refining my lists but this brings a much greater return in efficiency. Don’t be afraid to let your lists grow organically this way.
4. Know when to stop: Don’t let the list have a life of its own. The list is there to help you work smarter, not to distract you from actually working. You might decide to spend some time each morning on a list, or to take a 30 minute break during the day to revisit it and check progress, but DON’T let it rule your day.
5. Prioiritise: Some items are more important than others. It might be a Client review you’ve promised to do, it could be a contest you need to enter. Doesn’t matter what it is – if it’s important then mark it as such on your list (highlighter, assign it a big red ‘1′ or whatever, but do something to make it stand out from its less vital friends on the list).
6. Do Something You Don’t Want To Do: There will always be things you want to put off, it’s natural . The trouble is that the longer these things hang around, the more fearsome they become – they sit there in the back of your mind, nagging away at you. You know that you’ve got to do it, and you know that you don’t want to but it won’t just go away, believe me. So – make yourself do something from you internal ’stuff I really don’t want to do’ list. Pick one task that you’ve been putting off, and just get it done. You’ll almost certainly be pleasantly surprised at the sheer relief of getting it finished and out of the way.
7. Do Something You Do Want To Do: Go on, give yourself a treat. Put something on the list that isn’t neccessarily the most important thing, but that you want to do. Give yourself a little something to look forward to.
8. Update Your List: ‘The List’ is a living document. Update it when you’ve done something – put a big black ’strike’ through it (you might want to delete items from your list as you do them – I prefer not to but that’s just my choice). Enjoy the warm glow when you look back at that previously daunting list and see that it’s been reduced to a record of all the things you’ve achieved.

So there you go, just a little grab-bag of tips and tricks that might help you in managing your time a little better. They have all worked for me over the years, and god knows I’m not a naturally organised person. Feel free to comment with any little techniques or tips of your own.

Cheers
Dave

As you guys know, I’ve talked before about NamePros and DigitalPoint in relation to picking up Domain names.

Well – browsing NamePros yesterday I came across a ‘for sale’ thread that I thought one of you might be interested in.

This guy is selling a domain AND Wordpress Blog. What that means is that if you purchase the Domain name (which still has nearly 12-months left on it) you’ll get the site contents & database as well (you’d then have to find your own Web Hosting and upload the files, DB etc of course).

The domain name itself has good potential (AvailableDaily.com) – the seller has it set up as a ’special offers’ type Blog but it could just as easily be used as a ‘dropped domain’ service for example. There are a number of posts on there already and it’s got a decent clean theme – with plenty of scope for building on it. It’s only a few weeks old but has a few hundred visits already.

It’s the kind of package that could make a nice base for someone wanting to try out Blogging for the first time or for someone with experience to expand into a new area.

The seller mentioned a BIN (Buy It Now) price of $100 but is open to offers, so you could get a decent deal here. The NamePros thread is given below but please note the following:

• you have to be a NamePros member to view the thread
• it’s your responsibiity to negotiate any sale, perform any checks on domain ownership, arrange payment and site transfer etc.
• i have no connection with the seller (other than asking their permission to post about it here) – I’m posting about it because it might be a good ‘pick up’ for someone.   

http://www.namepros.com/turnkey-websites-for-sale/514727-blog-for-sale.html

Cheers
Dave

Like me, you’ve probably sometimes wondered just what it is that makes Shoemoney, ProBlogger, John Chow etc. so different from the rest of us. So I decided to take a closer look at their recent posts and content, compare it with some of the mid/low level type MMO Bloggers around and see just what their trick is.

What it isn’t

Well, for a start off I’ll tell you a few things that DON’T make them stand out from the crowd:

Content and Originality?

No – looking through Shoe, ProBlogger and John Chow Blogs recently I can’t see much that I couldn’t find on Net Fool, TUK or a lot of other Blogs – and to be honest Jim and Jason do it better in many cases. Looking on the ‘Big’ Player Blogs I see the same recurring subject matters of ‘content’, ‘getting subscribers’, ‘distractions’ etc. 

They also have a high proportion of posts where these ‘top Bloggers’ talk about each other and tell you all about the conferences and expo’s they’re going to be guesting at…yep, really useful.

Like everyone else much of the remaining Blog content is made up of paid reviews, affiliate promotion and general internet/SEO chat (apart from the annoying but probably lucrative restaurant reviews of course).

Grammar?

Nope – the standard of grammar is poor – their stuff doesn’t read particularly well. I’ve seen a lot worse for sure but this isn’t premium quality copy by any stretch.

Posting Frequency?

Partly – Shoe, ProBlogger and John Chow are all averaging 1-2 posts per day recently, which is about as much as you’d want, otherwise you’re just padding your Blog out.

So – what is it?

OK – so they have a flashy skin (nice new look John), good prizes and a lot of good ads, but there are a few main reasons they are where they are:

They’re Big, of course

One thing that makes them big is the fact that they are big – it’s a self-fulfilling thing, because nothing succeeds like success. People want the kudos of being associated with them and therefore want to link to them. Like Doug said in his interview, these sites have thousands of backlinks and eager subscribers because of who they are, not just what they provide. Advertisers and others see a success story and link to it or advertise on it for no other reason than that.

That means that there was a ‘tipping point’ somewhere where these ‘elite bloggers’ graduated to a higher level – either through pure ‘money power’ i.e. a straight purchase of links/traffic, use of contacts in the business, link-bait, luck or (more likely) a combination of all of the above.

The point is that once you’re at this level its easy to stay there – you just keep churning out the same old stuff and keep patting your mates on the back – and as long as you don’t really screw up there’s not a lot that will drag you back down. Hey, if he charges $500 for a review post , he MUST be good eh? 

Value Add & Stickability

What you’ll also find on these Blogs, and this is what keeps a lot of people coming back, are the value-added features, such as Job Boards ($50 a month to post a job anyone?), Forums, Chat, Blog networks plus the E-Book purchases and regular comps of course.

These guys know that posts alone aren’t going to keep a visitor on the Blog, particularly when the same stuff is on a hundred other Blogs – so they diversify and put features on the site that are going to make people WANT to come back. In that way, they’re more like a ‘portal’ than a pure Blog.

Visitor Retention

They sign them up and keep them coming back. Big FeedBurner numbers speak a thousand words, and they’re sexy advertiser-bait as well.

Interaction

Active and lively commenting keeps things fresh. Just looking over recent posts, ProBlogger’s averaging 20-30 comments per post, Chow 40-50 and ShoeMoney is way up around the 80 mark and more. Threaded commenting is great as well.  

What to do?

OK – here’s a few things we can try that might help us get promoted into the Premier League – in addition to the core requirements of creating quality content and doing good SEO:

• Diversify & Value Add – This is an area where all of us can learn. Put a Marketplace, Jobs Board, Forum on your site – find some kind of service that’s going to make real visitors want to come back on a regular basis.  
• Build Subscribers – Regular incentives for subscribing, regular incentives for staying subscribed. Offer individual sign ups for different services, and make those lists contribute to the overall subscriber numbers. Create Newsletters. 
• Interactivity – Keep your comments areas active. Deeplink to recent and not so recent posts to kick-start some up to date feedback. Hell, open up a chat or shoutbox area, or show how many people are currently online.
• Help each other out – the top guys have their clique. We should also be doing the same. Keep visiting the mid and low level Blogs you like and spread the love. If you see something you like. comment or post about it.
• Posting Frequency – You have to keep adding content, but find a level that suits you. Don’t just churn out rubbish because you think you have to. When you get an idea, turn it into a draft post, and aim to have a few drafts that you can return to and get ready for publishing when you have a little time.
• Give practical advice – if you have a good result, tell people about it but more importantly, tell them how you did it. Don’t spoon-feed them though – it doesn’t have to be a step-by-step guide, just give them enough information to let them work it out for themselves. 
• Go off-topic occasionally – most normal people have interests outside of Making Money Online, and they have opinions. Every so often, throw in a little off-topic post that might grab some interest from outside your normal target market.
• Act Clever – analyse your individual posts and see where visitors go in your Blog. Work out what works and work it even more.
• Act Big – increase your advertising and posting fees, cos if you undercharge people think you’re desperate, but if you charge premium rates, you must be worth it, right?
• Stick with it – have a plan, don’t get disheartened and don’t give up after three months. Work on building a brand and people will start coming to your Blog to see what you’ve got to say about a subject*

Basically, the upper echelon is very hard to break into, unless you’ve got a lot of money to throw around or some good contacts to take advantage of. For the rest of us, we can look for incremental gains in traffic organically through good content and good management. And you can look for that killer piece of link-bait or Value-Added service (interaction, real-time updates, a service) that’s going to tip the scales and get a heap of quality traffic heading your way.   

Any other tips and tricks for mixing it with the Big Boys?

Thanks
Dave 

* Plus, of course, “don’t forget important bullet points off your list” and “be prepared to edit/update your post if someone points it out”  (see first 2 comments) – thanks Coffesh0p

As you can see from my sidebar, we’ve just gone over 11,000 spam comments blocked by Aksimet (as at 20th August 2008).

I’m not sure how long Nick was running Akismet etc before I took over Internet Babel, but I’ve just read about somebody hitting the million-spams milestone on their blog. I personally block quite a few comments that are human-spam as well, but I was wondering about your experiences with blog comment spam as well. I have a couple of Blogs on the go and I notice a definite variation in the type of spam comments that are aimed at one Blog or another.

IB (at a very rough estimate) gets about 35% Viagra and related, 35% student loans, 20% looking like they lead to nasty downloads and about 10% just utter rubbish (not including the human spam that I discard by hand).

Is that the same kind of spam breakdown that you guys get? How many comments does Akismet block for you each day? According to Aksimet’s own stats, approximately 88% of all comments are spam…

Do you use other tools/plugins to check for spam? If you implemented Captcha did you find a drop in legitimate comment numbers?

I’m thinking of knocking up some PHP code myself to check for human spam, so I can block ‘at source’ things such as those useless ‘nice post’ short comments and have bad word blacklists and that kind of thing. Just wondered what your experiences are….

Blogs are great. We all know this, that is why we do it. We love them because we can express ourselves easily, search engines love them because they are updated frequently, readers love them because they provide more than just news or stories, they provide opinion. Blogs started off quite simply as online journals but have evolved into so much more.

There are such a huge variety of types of blog but originally they could generally be split into personal blogs or business blogs. Personal blogs are as mentioned already, a type of online journal, or outlet for someone. A business blog will communicate the current goings on in a business. It is a way of making businesses seem more human. What happens though now people are creating blogs as a way of making money.

Lifestyle businesses are nothing new. This type of business is set up as a way to make money from doing what you love. The appeal is obvious. The drawbacks are typically that the opportunity for making money is somewhat limited. The kind of lifestyle is a big factor in this. Some people have a hobby such as music or painting. Here they can either sell their music or paintings, or teach others how to play or paint. Pretty simple.

If your passion is travel, it is more complex. It is going to be tough to find someone to pay you to simply travel. This is where blogging can help. It just so happens that a great number of people love travel making yours a very desirable lifestyle. Already you will have people interested. Assuming you have the ability to write well enough, you could create a popular blog. Regular updates of exotic places, filled with detailed accounts of the places you visit together with interesting stories and photos could prove very popular. This alone will not create you any money.

Making your passion pay is no simple task. You need many key things to fall into place. Continuing with the travel example we used already, so far we have a blog, with interesting content and photos. I am not even going to mention the likes of Adsense, as this is not likely to cover any type of travel expenses anytime fast. It may be worth testing it out though. Travel is a competitive niche so there are likely to be many advertisers. A better way of capitalizing on this fact is to contact advertisers directly, and sell your own ad space. This way keeping all the profits. Whilst on the road though, you are unlikely to have much time to keep on top of this. Ideally you want a solution that you can implement easily and receive a constant stream of income from for a long time to come.

Affiliate marketing is quite simply selling another persons products. How does this relate to your blog? Well it is quite simple really. If you have been in Thailand, and you are telling your readers about what an amazing place it is, listing all the things you did, what you recommend and what to avoid, the chances are, a bunch of your readers will really want to visit Thailand. You have sold them on a trip to Thailand. If you have done this much, it is only fair that you get a commission for it. Luckily enough there are affiliate programs which will pay you a commission for any sales you make by directing your interested readers to the travel company running the program. If done right, with a big enough readership, this can work out to be immensely profitable, allowing you to continue your lifestyle.

Most of us have hobbies, and have considered running businesses that involve these passions of ours. Unfortunately not all hobbies are easy to monetize. A little creativity can go a long way though. If there are no products you can easily sell, how about creating your own. Instructional guides in either video or ebook format can do very well. If there are no obvious products, even in small niches, there is often a market. If anyone is looking for a niche product, online is the first place they will look. Being the first to do something can be very profitable in the long run so do not be afraid if you can not see anything similar. It might not work, but then most successful people have more failures than successes under their belt.

The internet is probably going to be the best opportunity you have to help you make a living from what you love. Give it a shot.