Duelling bloggers - entertaining for readers or bad for your blog?

Posted by stuart as , ,

From time to time, we see a couple of bloggers tee off at each other. Generally it’s just over a misunderstanding, or two people who just can’t get along or see eye to eye on a specific subject.

The question is, is this sort of thing good or bad for a blog?

There’s no doubt that a coherent, strongly argued flame-fest can be entertaining for those on the sidelines, especially if both the protagonists know their subject well, are clever, and inject a little humour into the fray, but what about when it turns nasty?

My thinking is that it quickly turns boring for the broader readership, expecially if the argument degenerates into name calling and petty sniping. So where do we, as the owner, draw the line if this sort of thing happens on our blog?

There’s a pretty good chance that if there’s flame-war erupting on a blog, the blogs owner is going to be in the thick of it, so acting in an emotionally un-invested manner is nigh on impossible for the blogger. The question becomes, how does a blogger know when enough’s enough, and what do they do when they’ve made that decision?

Deciding on where to draw the line is the first thing to be done. I would imagine that great caution needs to be taken once the first name has been thrown, and the blogger wants to have his or her finger on the “dump button”, as they say in radio. If the blogger is involved personally, maybe a regular reader with enough pull with the blogger needs to drop him a quick email along the lines of “Mate, it’s getting a bit nasty on here, maybe we need to close the thread, or try to take it in another direction?”

Once the decision has been made to put a stop to things, the blogger has a few choices as to what to do:

• Turn off comments in the thread in question
• Delete the post in question (although I wouldn’t personally do this, as a blog is really a “warts and all” thing, it would be misleading readers in a George Orwell’s 1984 kind of way, re-writing history if you will.
• IP block the blogger in question - this would be a last resort, if the blogger just kept hitting random posts with non-constructive comments.

I’d be interested to hear other’s thoughts on this issue. Have you had experience with this sort of thing? What would you do if this happened on your blog?

Payperpost review - six weeks in

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Note - this is not a paid post - it is a genuine review by someone who uses the service.

Well, despite the controversy, I’ve kept up with my payperpost experiment. I’ve been using the service for around six weeks now, although since the controversy here, I’ve been reticent to use it here, so I’ve kept it for other blogs for the time being.

My initial thoughts on the service are that for a blogger who struggles to monetise their content, this is a good idea. I’m not going to argue the pros and cons associated with payperpost here, as this is a review of the service.

For those still unaware of what payperpost is (where you been, man???), the concept is pretty simple - blogger writes posts linking to an advertisers website, fitting within the advertisers guidelines for the post, and once the post has been live for 30 days, the blogger gets paid. payperpost.com simply act as an intermediary between the blogger and the advertiser.

I thought that I’d run through the whole process, from signup to payment,and give my thoughts on each individual step of the way.

Signup: This is pretty straightforward, simply fill in the form, including your paypal address (they only pay by paypal at this stage), and your blog URL. There’s a lot of talk about needing to give an EIN number or tax ID before you can join. I chose not to do this (I live outside the US), and there hasn’t been a problem getting paid. Payperpost will manually assess your blog to decide whether it fits in with their requirements, this will take a couple of days. One thing that it’s important to note here is the requirements your blog must fulfill to be accepted:

• Your blog must also be at least 90 days old, verifiable by a third party index of the site.
• If over 90 days old, your blog must have at least 20 entries in the past 90 days. If just around 90 days old, your blog must have 20 pre-existing entries.
• No blogs with gaps over 30 days (no entries posted for 30+ days) will be accepted.

I imagine this is to stop a million junk blogger blogs being submitted, to maintain the quality of the blogs using payperpost, so this is a good thing.

Choosing an opportunity: Once your blog has been accepted, you will be given access to the bloggers dashboard. This page presents you with data for your account, such as how much you have been paid, and how much money you have waiting to be approved once your posts reach the thirty day threshold. You will also be given access to the “opportunities” area of the site, where the current paid post assignments are listed. Currently, there are 84 opportunitites available, although this number is increasing all the time.

Upon choosing an opportunity which you would like to take, you are presented with the requirements for that blog post. These include:

• The opportunity description
• The amount being offered by the advertiser for you to write the post
• A URL for a custom (transparent) tracking image which must be included in the post.
• The minimum words required in the post
• The “type” of post - opinion, review etc.
• The “tone” required of the post, these are generally either “positive”, or “neutral”
• The URL’s of any optional images that the advertiser requires you to include with your post.

Once you have read the requirements, and are satisfied that you can meet them, you will click the “take this opportunity” button, where you will be taken to the next page. This page is pretty similar to the last one, with the exception that it includes the HTML of the link that you are required to include in your post. this code must be copied eactly into your post, as the advertiser chooses the keywords for SEO purposes.

Once you reach this page, you would go to your blog, and write the post, ensuring that you meet all the requirements as laid down by the advertiser. Once you have written and saved your post, you will go back to the “take this opportunity” page on the payperpost site, and fill in the form. This is simply a case of filling in the blog post URL, title, choosing which blog you have posted to, and clicking the box which confirms that you have read the terms and condittions.

You will also be given the opportunity at this point to donate your earnings to charity. This is an individual choice, and I’ve never been pressured to do this.

Once this is all done, you will click the “Take opportunity” button, and you’re done. The post will be assessed to ensure that all the criteria have been fulfilled, and the clock will start ticking to count down the thirty days till payment.

You will be able to track the progress of your posts by clicking the “My posts” tab at the top right of the page at any time.

Adding another blog: If you would like to take paid posting opportunities on more than one blog, this is possible. Something to keep in mind, though, is that you may only add a new blog to an existing account once you have had ten paid posts approved in your initial blog. So when signing up, you would do well to consider which blog you want to use for paid posts first. I would think that this needs to be looked at by payperpost.com, and maybe allow approved bloggers to add new blogs, as long as they meet the initial signup criteria.

Payment: So far this has gone without a hitch, money is deposited into my paypal account on the correct day, and the correct amount. Upon payment, you receive an email from payperpost detailing how much was paid, and for which post. The email tells you that they’ve “hooked you up”, and that you should “hook them up” by telling your friends about payperpost. This seems a little desperate to me, and I’d rather not be implored in every payment email to tell my friends, but it’s only a small inconvenience.

One great thing is that payperpost seem to absorb the paypal fees. I was expecting to get my fee, minus 2.4% and 34 cents or whatever the paypal fees are these day, but no, I received the full fee quoted every time. This is a good move by payperpost, as it will definitely build goodwill with their bloggers.

Other things to think about: There seems to be a sub-culture of “posties”, as they’ve named themselves, who are sitting on the payperpost website, refreshing the page, waiting for new opportunities to arrive, then grabbing them. As each opportunity can only be taken a certain number of times, this means that bloggers who “have a life” might be missing out.

The value and criteria required of paid posts seems to be tightening considerably. From the intitial flurry of ten dollar plus opportunities, there now seems to be a move to lower value projects, with more stringent criteria, such as pagerank and alexa rank, to be met before the post is accepted. Payerpost will need to watch this trend carefully, as I don’t think there’ll be many bloggers who will take a $2.50 opportunity for their blog if the requirement is a PR of five and an alexa rank of 50,000. Bloggers, should I say quality bloggers are the lifeblood of this business model, so to keep these bloggers happy, the rewards for effort need to be sufficient.

Closing thoughts: The processes at payperpost seem to work quite well, it’s arguable whether the system provides value to the blogger or the advertiser, but I’ll let others decide that. The main thing that payperpost will need to keep in mind is striking the balance between providing that value for both the blogger and the advertiser.

Another issue that will confront the owners of payperpost is whether the business model will hit a critical mass at some point, when the advertisers have had their day in the sun and stop advertising, and there are thousands upon thousands of bloggers waiting on each opportunity. This will cause bloggers to become disgruntled, and move on.
The final issue I can see happening is the search engines clamping down on this form of link buying, if they decide that the number of backlinks to a site has increased too quickly. Maybe this is a positive of advertiser placing stringent criteria on their opportunities, as they will be taken up more slowly, and the link building will be seen as organic by the search engines.

Pecking order and cliques in the blogosphere

Posted by stuart as ,

There seems to be a clearly defined pecking order in the blogosphere. The higher you are in the pecking order, the more seriously you will be taken.

I’ve given a bit of thought this morning about how I “rate” a blog, or decide whether it’s worth subscribing to. I’ve come up with a list of factors which determine whether a blog hits my feedreader:

• Is the subject of interest to me?
• Is the blogger vaguely literate?
• Are the posts interesting and informative?
• How many comments does the blog get?
• How often does the blogger post?
• What’s the alexa rank of the blog?

So if we use these factors to determine the “quality” of a blog, or the blogger, this raises some questions:
The first question is, how important are our “betters”, and do we need them / can we afford to upset them?

Blogging “A listers” like Darren at problogger.net (who’s work I love), seem to attract hoardes of hangers on, who fawn over every word they say. Whilst this is not necessarily a bad thing (especially for the blogger concerned!), what it does do is give that blogger an inordinate amount of clout in the blogosphere (Yes, I hate that term too, but until someone coins a better one…….)

Now I’m by no means having a go at Darren here, I love what he writes, he just happened to be the first example of an “A list” blogger that came to mind.

This clout can be used, advertantly or inadvertantly, to make life very good, or very bad, for other bloggers. Think of it as a kind of PageRank thing - some love from an A lister can make or break a blogger. A link, review, or even mention from a top level blogger can increase the traffic to blogs of those of us who struggle for traffic ten, twenty, or even a hundredfold. Along with this comes (hopefully) an increase in bookmarks and RSS feed subscriber numbers. Get enough love from top bloggers, you might even build enough credibility to be seen as one yourself.

But what about the downside? What if a top blogger decides to tear you down? The damage to an aspiring blogger could be devastating, both on traffic, and at a personal level. Think of someone new to blogging, working hard to get to the level of these “better” or more popular bloggers, who gets ripped into by one of the big boys. Not only could this have an effect on their blog’s popularity, there’s also the possibility for serious personal repercussions.

The blogosphere is possibly the perfect example of democracy at work, the most popular rise to the top, and maintain a power base that those at the bottom can only dream about. It would appear that in the majority of cases so far, those entrusted with that power have chosen to use it wisely, maybe they’ve made it to the top because they choose to wield power wisely? Let’s hope that this continues.

Meta refreshing other people’s services

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I got up early this morning (2.30am) to watch the doubles in the Davis Cup semi-final between Australia and Argentina. Whilst I was up, I thought I’d go to the FIBA website, and follow the scores in the Women’s World Basketball Championships final between Australia and Russia. (I have a bet on the game)

As is the case with most “live update” services on sports websites, tracking the scores is done through a page which opens up separately, and is a “pared down” page, with little in the way of graphics etc, as these pages use a meta refresh, usually somewhere in the vicinity of 60 seconds, they are trying to keep their bandwidth usage down to manageable levels. This is fair enough, as all I really want is a live update of the scores, anyway.

There’s a couple of things which are quite interesting about the FIBA live score service. Firstly, the page is really pared down - there’s very little in the way of superfluous content, just the scores.

Secondly, although most sports site refresh their scores every 60 or 90 seconds, this one does it every 30 seconds, which is great from a users standpoint, but means they’ll go through a bucket-load more bandwidth.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most interesting, is their use of Google Analytics. Every time that page re-loads, it shoots off and has a bit of a yack with the Analytics website. Now I’ve always thought that stats on pages which re-load automatically are pretty much useless, about the only stat you’re going to get of any value is the number of uniques, as a lot of people will load up the page, then walk off, so page views are irrelevant in this scenario.

How does Google feel about this use of their service? Surely an organisation as big as FIBA can afford their own stats tracking software? Imagine what this might be costing Google - I would think that whilst this final was being played (Australia winning 87-71 with about 3 minutes remaining - w00t!), there’s be at least a couple of hundred thousand people using this service, multiply that by 120 hits and hour on the Analytics service, and you start to get what I mean.

Note to FIBA - AWstats is free with a $4.95 a month hosting account, I’m sure you can afford to sort something out on your own.

Back in front on the punt

Posted by stuart as

A couple of good results overnight have put me back in front on the punt!

After Australia getting up over India in a one day cricket match, and Sydney beating Fremantle in an Australian Football League preliminary final last night, I’ve managed to scrape my total back up to $36.02. This is a return on investment of a little over 9% in just over three weeks.

I’m actually learning a few things doing this that I think can be applied in a business sense, either offline or online. When I first started this little project, I argued a bit (that doesn’t sound like me, does it) with Mark about the value of odds, and return on investment. Mark argued that without the possibility of at least a 200% return, a bet wasn’t worth placing. I argued that a 5% return, with a much lower risk of the gamble going sour, was a much wiser investment.

Now I’ve been a punter for a long time, but never a serious one, just a few bucks on the footy on a weekend sort of gambler. I’d never really tracked my progress, so had no statistical data to back up my theories on the whole process.

What I’ve learned whilst tracking my progress (through an admittedly insgnificant data-pool so far) is that the reality is probably somewhere in between Mark’s and my ideas on the subject.

I’m finding, statistically, that I’m having the most success laying  bets with odds in the range of $1.20 to $1.50. The return on investment is reasonable (I bet $5, if I win, I get something in the vicinity of $6 to $7 back), and the chances of success are reasonable as well. Of course, a lot of this is attributable to dumb luck as well, but if you’re going to rely on luck, you may as well try to stack the odds as much as possible in your favour, right?

So how does this all apply to other business ventures?

It’s teaching me about return versus risk. Specifically, in relation to my Private Label Rights project, it’s very easy to see the dollar signs, and go for broke with a theory like: “If I pay $50 for ten articles, and I sell those articles 100 times for $20, I can make a profit of $1,950, or a 4,000-odd % return on investment”  (Obviously, we’re not going to be particularly successful with this theory)
Sure, you might be able to sell a few article packs at that price, but if you lowered your price to $10, and sold the pack only 20 times, you’d (I would think) have no trouble selling out the packs, keeping your customers happy, and bringing in repeat business.