Life as I find it

I came across this bizarre (yeah, that’s my favourite word) situation with poor Vlad, who like many of us here is a blogger writing about his interests and writing paid posts as opportunities arise. Now, this situation seems to have a lot of angles to it, but from what I basically understand….

This Vlad accepts to write a review about ePerks. From all that I have heard, this was a positive review (I can’t find it). However, comments on his post were very strongly negative. These had some intervention attempts by an anonymous commenter and the whole thing heated up.

Well… he addressed that exploding comments situation inviting an exploration into ePerks in a follow up post. The company itself did what ….. they shouldn’t have, if they valued their reputation. They threatened him. Now, for a company that buys reviews from bloggers to build thier reputation, to threaten a blogger for writing - and from what I hear, Vlad did not criticize the company until then - is like having an axe… don’t know where to put it… look…. there’s my foot…..

This is basically what happened. This was followed by an explosion of bloggers speaking up in support of Vlad (like I am doing right now). It really is no longer the issue what the services of ePerks are anymore. The issue now is their image. For a company paying to get reviewed, it sure has more unpaid reviews now, and none of them that they would want to pay for. I doubt if any of them include a link either. Some examples would be:

• iHype & ePerks - How To Kill A Startup by Andy Beard really looks into this situation from many angles. I found this post really helpful in understanding the situation.
• Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Aaron Walls speaks briefly about the right to free speech and the risk involved in mass acquiring of links without building relationships.
• Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is… by Greg Swann along with some other posts, all equally “defending” the right to free speech.
• There are many others who have got angry about this whole thing.

My perspectives on this:

• ePerks: This was an incredibly stupid thing to do, which I guess I don’t need to tell you by now. If you pay for a review, you get a review. The end. If you don’t like the comments, go camp out on the comments form, address the commenters (which you did). However, threatening a blogger for something he did not do….. You don’t have a leg to stand on. Opinions are opinions. The smart thing would have been to acknowledge the comments, apologize if anyone had suffered inconvenience, and invite them into a dialogue to resolve the issue, or make your stand clear. This could have got you a few free nice posts, for graceful handling. Now, it is just about digging yourself deeper and deeper, and the damage is really beyond control. How many bloggers can you sue? Do they even live within your reach to do that? Really, I see no happy solution for you beyond a massive apology, an attitude shift and big payments to bloggers for damage control.
• Vlad: I see you doing what you were supposed to be doing initially, but I wonder if you really understood the imact of your second post. While it certainly invited investigation and feedback, I felt that it enouraged making extreme stands, which is good to get lots of comments, but really, how important are comments - at what price?). Though I don’t see how it would have changed anything considering the nature of comments that followed.
• Common man: I understand your frustration at being scammed and applaud your sharing of your experience so that it may serve to warn possible victims, or provide feedback to ePerks, if they do attempt a change of attitude.
• The blogging community: I expereince this rush of support for Vlad as one of the strengths of this platform, and the community. I don’t know Vlad at all, but being in his situation (having written about a scam earlier) I know that it is a risk that we get unnecessarily caught up in legal hassles. While we know that there is something inside us that wants us to stand for the truth, it is equally difficult to face legal feed regardless of who will win eventually. I don’t know most of you personally, but this act of solidarity makes me feel that there is support anyway if we stand for our beliefs.
• For me: The truth needs to be told. If I can do it in a way that facilitates resolution, superb. If not, confrontation it is!

If you haven’t yet joined Twitter, what are you waiting for? This is one place that combines my interests, people and blogging…. and brevity. It is an experience in freedom to not worry about what to write about.. what to say…. having enough content?

Its simple. What are you doing? An absolutely fabulous way to find out what people are doing too! What’s more, there are widgets that make it so easy…… like your chat box, only that it tells you what people are doing, and allows you to tell them what you are doing. You have widgets for firefox, oper, for your desktop….. just see all their widgets to see what I mean.

So, what are you doing?

follow me on twitter.

Ok, so much for me being aware of what is happening in the world. After almost an entire day of surfing John Chow’s site, I finally tried the front page…… and realized that he has a contest going about a bag of goodies that Market Leverage is sponsoring. The bag contains a Flip camera for sure - I really wanted one for adding some video content here…… Then, it contains a USB drive that doubles as a pen…. ipod (the husband won’t let me get close to it even if I win it…..) and a card for 200$ (notice how I am vague on the details?)

The contest post is not exactly invisible, and this is a prime example of how yours truly can lost all perspective when she starts reading

Actually, what’s so special about this is that the bag of goodies contains stuff I want….. like everybody else, and as John himself puts it, it has about the same chance as being struck by lightning…. which is a good chance for me, considering my name means lightning….. actually it is a better chance for the husband……

So now, I’m writing a post about it. Of course my intentions are entirely dishonorable. I probably wouldn’t have written about this at all, if writing about it hadn’t meant that I get entered for the draw that could win me the bag. The bag I want. So the post, I will…

This just goes to show you yet again how well the advice he gives us works. So, what remains is following it. I wonder how many suckers like me are linking to him out of sheer love - for that bag Yeah me too.

As I keep learning and growing from my blogging experiences, I find a certain clarity in me about which were the things I did hat helped me get better viewers. I say better viewership, rather than traffic or comments, because it is people reading your blog that counts, not the comments or traffic.

For the last year, my readership was rather low. My pagerank, Alexa, and whatnots are still low, but expect to see a shift next month, because from the last month onward, there has been a shift in my blogging behaviour. This shift has already started reflecting in my revenue from my blog, and the search traffic that I get. It is a simple matter for it to continue into recorded statistics, and I am not too bothered about that, because, after all, it is the working that matters more than the numbers.

Changes I have already seen. From the last month to this, my traffic has gone higher by 67%, page views by 89%, time spent on the site by 45%, number of pages per visit by 53%. My revenue from this site has doubled (its still pathetically low, but doubled). For one month (actually its mote like 15 days) is good enough

So what is the difference in my behaviour, and how can you get it to work for you?

1. Figuring out what needs to be done: This is important. Take a good, hard, honest look. What is unsatisfying about your blog? What makes YOU avoid it? Plan changes for making it to something you would celebrate. And don’t worry if the list is overwhelmingly long. A blog has no deadline - it should have a schedule, though.
2. Frequency of posting: If you look at my blog archives, you will notice months going by without a post, or a spurt of posts for a day or two followed by silence…… if you look at the postings this month, they are consistent. Strangely, the more I write, the more I want to write. After a gap, it became difficult for me to figure out subjects and write with any clarity.
3. Titles: If you look at earlier titles and the titles now, the titles now create interest, describe the post more accurately…. this helps readers click through to the post and read.
4. Categories: Actually, you can’t see this change to compare. Earlier, my categories were in a state of complete disorder. I had 1 post in “funnies”, “funny” and “humor”. It was the same post. My process was to make a post, asign categories, and create any more descriptive categories that came to mind on the spot. While this made me have a lot of categories, it didn’t help the visitors coming in to read to make a choice. I deleted the lot (almost) and created a comprehensive list. I am now in the process of going through the posts to make them fall into the categories I have. Thus the whole lot of uncategorized posts. It will take a while to get the whole of the thing sorted, but now that I have a direction, I find myself motivated toward the blog, rather than avoiding it.
5. Tags: The same with tags. I got rid of the haphazard tags I had, and am now in the process of planning them out to make more sense. What’s working for me for this is assigning all the tags that I can think of for a post, and then, once all the posts are done, going through the list, to ensure that newly added tags applicable to old posts get added. Then finally, I “weed out” the list of tags to remove the ones that have single or very few posts on them, and are not really descriptive. Thus, done (in progress).
6. Reading: I can’t stress this enough. Once I became aware that I needed to become a better blogger, it was apparent that I was clueless. I applied myself to reading different blogs by more experienced bloggers, blogs with useful tips…… Some of these are problogger.com copyblogger.com JohnChow.com …… no mentioning individual posts, this would become a spam post. Really, there is a wealth of writing out there. All it takes is the will to find out what can be done, and then DOING IT. There are really MANY sites out there and really insightful bloggers. All it takes is curiosity
7. Attention to titles: Luckily (or unluckily) my blog hardly had any deeplinks, so the permalinks changing hardly mattered. Where possible, I kept the permalink same, but edited the title of the post to become more interesting. I edited content I found myself yawning through, and replaced the yawning bits with things I would have prefered to see there. Again, this is work in progress…. will probably take me a long time to do.
8. Commitment: I found that there are some things I like to do, and others that I don’t. I compromise. I alternate between things I like to do, and things I don’t, and keep going. I have promised that I will devote at least a couple of hours everyday till my blog comes out of the ditch I drove it into, and then re-look at the time factor. The key thing is to keep being productive. Think of it like a part-time job.
9. Reading and commenting: Reading is not the only thing that helps. Commenting on the blogs you read helps develop an understanding of the subject matter, simply because you take a small moment to think of what you understood from the post. Not to mention the link to your own blog with the comment helps as well. Over time, I do hope to develop relationships with the writers I admire. That’s the fun of blogging - you can make friends with authors you enjoy, unlike a book……
10. Social bookmarking: Until my search hits happened, I decided to submit content that is good to social networking sites, and linked to it directly while commenting. I guess this can be done with forum signatures, newsletters, or whatever.
11. I’m planning to get a newsletter out with the announcement of the new and improved version of the site, with a promise to not neglect it again and ask for help from my readers in terms of promoting it and feedback. Not done it yet - getting my guts together, I guess.
12. Content: All the while, while this is happening, I have promised myself that I will make at least one post a day. Shouldn’t be too tough at the moment, with so much that I am doing to write about. I’m sitting right there, working on the site, and I love writing. So, it is actually a welcome break from re-organizing that I am enjoying now, while sharing my learnings for those who are interested.
13. Promoting the RSS feed.

Hmmm… so much for now. I love writing so much (or is it another avoidance of spring cleaning?). I’m hoping to make another post with a kind of credit roll for all the individual posts that helped me through this transition.