January 2008

Seth Godin wrote a post the other day called Needle in a Haystack Marketing. It’s a good post: the idea is that if you solve specific problems for small groups of people, and you do it often enough, you’ll have a repository of really useful information.

I remember reading The Long Tail when it came out and trying, the entire time, to figure out how exactly blogging fit into the equation. I refused to think that there was no long tail here.

There is one. The long tail of blogging happens with your archives. If you answer one question thoroughly and well, it will turn up in Google when people search for it. You’re getting the ten or fifteen people per day who need the answer on your site. And that’s true for every post like this that you do.

You do it enough, and you’re going to get a steady stream of exposure from search. Forever. Pretty good return for a one-time investment.

For a while now I’ve been used to clicking the little “more” tab at the top of my google homepage to select blogsearch. It has been at the top of the list - first thing you go for.

Looks like people aren’t searching blogs as much as they used to. Now the top hit is Video:

In fact, now the list goes:

• Video
• Groups
• Books
• Scholar
• Finance
• Blogs

Eh? I refuse to believe that people use Google Scholar (what is that anyway?) more than they use Blogsearch. Although to be fair - it’s probably easier to click a link right next to the bottom divider than something in the middle.

Still, Google’s making a conscious choice to throw blogging farther down the list. I never understood why it was hidden in the “more” menu in the first place. Over the past year I think Google has been consistently the best blog search tool for me.

I wonder what people are using. Or if they’re not, why aren’t they searching blogs?

The additions blog has a post up from yesterday comparing the user-interfaces of Twitter and MySpace when you land on their home pages. It’s hard to come at this comparison without some sort of bias, and I’ll admit, I think Myspace is a visual quagmire, especially in comparison to Twitter. The insomniac comes to the opposite conclusion.

Basically, the idea is that users come to your site with a set of conventions in mind. Ironically, I wrote a post a while ago on Web Community Forum arguing that MySpace’s “conventions” were essentially non-existent, and that’s why it’s such a pain in the tookus to use.

Regardless of who’s right about which site is easier to use (I am), the point remains: when you design your blog or web service, keep in mind what your primary functionality is, and make those actions as simple as possible for the user. I could invoke the famous Amazon “one-click” story to prove this point. Amazon helps you buy things. One click.

If you’re not careful about how you set up your interface, you’ll risk turning off potential users (or readers, or clients, or customers) the way The Insomniac is turned off by Twitter.

Also, unless you actually log out of Twitter, your home page looks like this:

Notice the people search circled in Red? The whole process outlined in the additions blog post becomes three steps: search, click, click follow.

It’s appropriate for Twitter to require you to log in because the value in twitter is really in being logged in, and being part of the conversation stream. But that’s just my two cents.

In the Wall Street Journal article New Services Help Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue, reporter Kelly K. Spors says “If you’re not making money off your blog, 2008 might be the year.”

Spors profiles several bloggers and the services available to generate revenue. Here are some revenue specifics to inspire you:

Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com, a site with articles on rainforest conservation and other environmental issues, makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month from AdSense, using various types of ads. Mr. Butler says his blog currently gets about 1.3 million unique visitors per month.

He’s planning to eventually experiment with Google’s video player ads and create his own video content for the site. “The rainforest has always been my passion, but I never expected to make a living off of it,” says Mr. Butler, who quit his job as a product manager in 2003 when he realized he could make a living off his site.

Darren Rowse, the Melbourne, Australia-based writer of ProBlogger.net, a popular blog that teaches other bloggers how to make money, earned roughly $250,000 in 2007 off ads on three blogs he writes. Mr. Rowse says he makes the most off traditional display advertising, where advertisers pay a fee to appear, but he also has used affiliate ads and Google AdSense.

The great thing about Problogger.net is that the site is all about how to achieve the kind of success Darren has. Lots of great tips and techniques straight from the horse’s mouth.

One of our favorite online communities is the group of gadget heads that gather at CES every year to blog and geek out. We love them so much that we throw them a party every year. Here’s some video footage of this year’s event:

Full coverage of the event can be found here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

We’re very excited to announce that our friends at Virgin America airlines will be handing out 80 free round trip tickets anywhere they fly. For you online community geeks, this might be interesting because of Virgin America’s nifty seat-to-seat communications tool.

So if you’re at CES and you’ll be around tomorrow night, drop my colleague Jason a line at jason [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, include the URL of your blog and let him know that you’d like to join us.

Since early October, we’ve aimed our sentiment tracking system at the many bloggers who have been comparing the Apple iPhone to the LG Verizon Voyager. While our Sentimine system can accurately sense the tone applied to almost any product or service, we focused our first public portal on consumer electronics as it provides a nice linkage to our upcoming CES blogger party.

As of this writing, the sentiment meter shows the two products in a dead heat. That was not the case at first. Below is a chart depicting how the sentiment tracked over time.

The blogosphere was largely pro Voyager until mid November, when the trend moved in the direction of the iPhone. It appears that the anticipation of the product led to positive speculation while the actual shipping of the phone (on Nov 21) led to side-by-side, hands-on comparisons. This led to some negativity.

This chart depicts the cataloging of 260 original relevant blog posts. Duplicate and splog-generated posts are filtered out from the final sentiment rating.

Many of the bloggers whose posts are cataloged will be attending our second “It Won’t Stay in Vegas” blogger party next week at CES. If you’re a blogger who covers the gadget space, we’d love to see you there. Just email Jason AT parnassusgroup DOT com for an invite. Vendors, exhibitors, and PR people should contact Kim AT parnassusgroup DOT com for sponsorship information.

Launching a new product or service? We can build a private, real-time blog/press sentiment portal for you too. Contact Kim AT parnassusgroup DOT com.