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!

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.

I found an “experiment” to increase Technorati authority. For bloggers, it is all important to have good authority on technorati for some reason. Whom am I fooling? That reason IS traffic.

However, something like this to increase that authority is a little too much. Who really is sitting idle there waiting to link random blogs together (AND update such random nonsense everyday!)? I guess plenty enough people. This is part of why most really good writers are less visible. They have no time to pander to bizarre measures nor the inclination.

What this “experiment” is, is no experiment, it is a link farm in a blog. There is a post with a list of links to other blogs, who have a similar list on theirs. As people join the project, they comment, and get added to the list, which is supposed to register as lots and lots of links with technorati, thus raising their authority. What in the world makes them think that their “gains” from technorati are not going to go reverse with search engines?

Uh…. that doesn’t mean I’m too good for such stuff. Actually, I AM good, but not because I don’t have the time, its simply because I don’t find it worthwhile to play these games. Not even for traffic (which is something most bloggers seem to sell their soul for). What experiment does it take to know that link lists are read by sites that count links? Worse, what does it take to know that this is basically worthless the minute some algorithm figures it out, and then its penalty bait.

How much traffic is enough traffic? And what is the point where we say… okay, I’m not going to post links that I have no respect for, because I have traffic, and now I would like some self-respect? Uh… never, I guess, unless we begin.

I feel a little disillusioned when I see such processes gain such popularity. Has anyone realized that Technorati getting hold of this link list is the one thing they don’t want, if they wish to retain their gains?

Sigh!

I don’t earn much from this blog, but hey, I’m having a blast writing, and I DO earn enough to not be spending for it. There is steady growth in traffic without spending a rupee for it. People come back, if you make an effort to write well.

I guess it would be too much to hope for that people use the daily devotion time to updating such lists to actually creating content that would gain them links that readers would enjoy, search engines would respect, and technorati would credit?

I have been a professional outbound person for over 12 years now and it is one of the most satisfying professions I could be in. I have worked hard and often on high altitude treks, with horses on riding trails, cooking, guiding, translating, climbing, organising and in general wishing that a day could have 48 hours. I have been frustrated, tired, happy and every other emotion there is, but I have yet to feel like leaving the outdoors as and find work elsewhere.

Back after a 7 year life in Manali, the city Mumbai feels calustrophobic. From an adventuring nomad who took clients along on journeys, I have become a “service provider” in the eyes of my clientele. Such changes are not good for the free spirited wanderer in me, but then one has to acclimatize to life in a prison to find happiness there.

I own a company Wide Aware and it’s doing well too, but I often feel that selling adventure is like filling a breeze into a balloon. I merely try and introduce ‘clients’ to what I enjoy, and what I see as important and count myself lucky that they often agree.

This may have been because the outdoors, to me is a way of life, it is simply the ‘flow’ - that is how it is. I can leave the outdoors like my shadow can leave me. There may be no light, but there is always a shadow. Perhaps, if I thought differently, I could have done something else, been another person, writing on a blog about racing cars or computers or something else.
It is not my choice for now.

At the moment, I am content to be a nomadic, a nut-case blogger speaking of distant melodies that echo from old memories. Expanding my world view to fit the city and online world. To overcome the sense of loss and explore what I have found.

Now, I have a new world to wander in. The world of blogging. I am new at this, but to my inclusive nature, this sounds just perfect.