Blogging Tips : The DiggBar Changes Things At Digg

Blogging Tips

The DiggBar Changes Things At Digg (Some for the Worse)

First things first, what is the DiggBar? It is basically an iframed toolbar that was released by Digg this week. The toolbar has two purposes: the first one is to serve as a URL shortener service. The second one is to allow users of the toolbar to interact with the Digg stories in a different way.

Now I must admit that the first part of the toolbar works well. It bring an interesting concept for URL shorteners: the fact that you don’t even need to visit Digg to use it. You just need to add digg.com/ in front of the URL of any web page, and the shortened link will be created on the fly. You can try with this page. Just go to the address bar in your browser and type digg.com/ in front of the URL (which will look like this: digg.com/http://www.dailyblogtips.com/…).

OK now that you saw it works, please hit “Back” on your browser and return to my site!

This example brings us to the second part of the toolbar (the one where I am skeptical about). The toolbar now wraps both the pages that used the URL shortening service and the Digg stories inside an iframe. They even changed the way the front page links work. Just head to Digg.com and click on one of the stories on the front page. Until last week, upon clicking there you would go to the website in question. Not anymore. With the entrance of the toolbar, you are now redirected to a shortened URL of the Digg story, and the content is presented inside an iframe.

For Digg, this might be a brilliant move as it will keep all the traffic inside their site. For webmasters and bloggers, it might become quite annoying. Why? Here are some of the reasons:

1. The iframe wrapping technique is quite old on the Web. It started appearing on sites late in the 1990s, and a lot of people got angry with that. Some even called it content theft. Digg after all would be displaying your content inside their website. Some webmasters might be fine with that, but many are definitely not.

2. With the iframe technique, Digg will inevitably take some real estate from the websites that will appear there. Considering that such space is in the header, it also has a lot of value for advertisers. What if they start showing CPM ads there, on top of the content of other websites?

3. Since the front page links are not pointing to the original sites anymore, the SEO factor might be gone. That is, Digg is not sharing the link love with website owners anymore since its front page links are redirects to internal Digg URLs.

For the small blogger those might be small details, but when you consider big sites like The New York Times, the issue gets a new dimension.

It will be interesting to see how the webmaster community will react to this. Of course Digg has the right to shape its service in whatever way it wants, but I am not sure if Digg would be where it is today without the support of bloggers and webmasters from around the world.

Personally I will also stick with bit.ly for URL shortening. The URLs there are shorter, have embed stats, and, above all, they don’t iframe my content….

Blogging Tips : 84% of People Would Prefer More Blog Readers than Twitter Followers

Blogging Tips

Over the last 10 days I’ve been running twin polls on two of my blogs - ProBlogger and TwiTip - asking readers whether they’d prefer more Twitter Followers or Blog Readers.

The overall results were fairly clear - 84% of those who responded people would prefer more Blog Readers.

I expected this result but was curious when starting the poll to see if there’d be a difference in the responses by ProBlogger readers to TwiTip readers (given the topics of the blogs).

Here are the results as they happened on each blog (at the point of writing this the ProBlogger poll has had over 1230 responses and the TwiTip one has had just over 700):

Again - the results are fairly clear on each blog although there is some unsurprising skewing towards Twitter on TwiTip.

The comments section on each of the poll pages (ProBlogger and TwiTip) really illustrates the Pros and Cons of each option quite well and is a fascinating read (at least I enjoyed it). People argued strongly for one or the other (although there were a lot more for ‘Blog Readers’ of course. Let me highlight some of the comments that caught my eye:

Arguments for Blog Readers:

“I chose blog readers. Twitter, for me, is like melted butter and the blog is the lobster. They can compliment each other very nicely, but if I have to choose one I want the one that provides the most meat and satisfies the hunger.” - Howard Hopkins

“People follow too much with the hope of a follow-back and don’t pay attention as much on Twitter. If they are subscribing to your blog, it usually means that at least one point they were engaged with your content enough to take action, they didn’t just go down a list of people and click a button. I’d trade every Twitter follower I have right now for a blog subscriber.” - Andrew

“The viral power of Twitter is amazing, but if it doesn’t convert to more blog readers, it’s just an ego trip.” - Janet Barclay

“Capturing and retaining a small percentage of faithful blog readers is more difficult and time consuming than acquiring and keeping Twitter followers. Blog readers are not easily replaced, whereas lost Twitter follower counts can generally be recouped within a day or so with little or no effort. Therefore, I would much rather have more blog readers than Twitter followers. There’s more of an investment and sense of loyalty.” - Snow Vandermore

“Definitely blog readers! I can’t type huge articles in Twitter, and plus the posts on Twitter scrolls so fast that most people will miss what you have to say.” - Kai Lo

“That’s like asking a newspaper: Would you rather have someone read your headlines or your stories?” - Jamie Littlefield

Arguments for Twitter Followers:

“I do think you have more ‘power’ with a large follow count on Twitter (and make of that statement what you will), but a large subscriber count on a blog monetizes significantly better.” - Sheamus

“With that said, as time goes by, I’m beginning to value Twitter followers just as much as my blog readers. While it’s harder to promote and convert Twitter followers using 140 characters than it is with full blog posts, the relationships that can be created on Twitter are very valuable.” - Jamie Harrop

“Depends on what business you’re in. If you have a media business model, a blog post offers more engagement (which translates into revenue via ads or some other kind of media-based monetization). But if you’re marketing physical goods, Twitter can spark a more immediate call to action (that is, it can drive demand and generate sales through other channels). ” - Jonz

Some Wise Words to End On

I think Monologue Blogger had some good thoughts:

“Both serve a specific purpose and yet both complement one another as well. I think first and foremost, it depend on the nature of your usage of both media and the goals you have in place regarding that media.”

Personally I would prefer Blog Readers to Twitter Followers (as I wrote a few weeks back here) however I don’t believe that there’s a right or wrong answer with this poll. Rather it needs to come back to your goals for using these mediums. It probably also has a fair bit to do with your personality, style, skills and the topics that you’re writing about.

Blogging Tips : Rise Of The Blogging Service Industry

In this guest post, Neil Matthews from WPDude.com writes about the rise of the blogging service industry, and how bloggers can use their existing skills to enter this lucrative industry.

Blogging has moved away from a niche activity to such an extent that it has spawned it’s own service industry. There are numerous activities and companies supporting the blogger.

The market is huge, with hundreds of millions of blogs in existence and thousands more being created each day, there is an insatiable need for blogging skills, something the experienced blogger can use to their financial advantage.

I would like to present you the various sectors of the service industry and how you can use your existing skills to enter the industry.

Theme Development

If you have experience designing and modify the theme of your blog, you already have the skills to become a theme developer.

The routes available to you are to develop a premium theme such as Thesis and sell if from your own site. A second option would be to set yourself up as a service company selling bespoke theme design and development services.

People want individual blogs, not standard themed “Just another WordPress blog” blogs. For many Probloggers a target is to have their own bespoke theme built for them. This requires theme developers.

Plugin Development

Do you have computer development skills? If you do you can string together the code to write a plugin, there is place for you in the blogging service industry.

Plugin developers can make their money in two ways, much like bloggers, directly and indirectly.

The direct method is to write a plugin and charge for it. The majority of plugin in circulation are free, but there are a growing number out there which are for profit. They tend to be larger and more complex. The paid for plugins I have used include a mailing list and a membership site plugin.

The second method is to develop plugins, distribute and support them for free and use them as a showcase for your technical skills. This is excellent social proof that you have the ability to develop blogs and can lead to other development jobs.

Coaching & Consulting

As I mentioned there are millions of blogs, and many of these blogs owners needs support from blogging experts.

Well know bloggers such as Chris Garrett and Michael Martine offer consulting services to their clients on the back of their very successful blogs.

If you have the skills and know-how to coach people or companies on their blogging strategy/problems, then this is a route into the blogging service industry with a low barrier to entry. All you need is some social proof that you know what you are talking about and a website to inform potential clients of your wares. This is the sector I work in.

Copy Writing

Blogs have an insatiable thirst for content, they need to be fed with a continuous stream of words. Why not set yourself up as a blog copywriter.

Check out the PB jobs board for a small section of the work that is available. There are paid freelance writing gigs out there for good writers.

Create a portfolio of writing by developing posts on your own blog, cast the net out and guest post (for free) on other blogs and take this social proof to the market to prove you can write quality content

Books

A quick search for the word blog on Amazon, will return page after page of results on books about blogging. This is another sector of the industry which you could enter.

The skills you have learned developing content for your blog can be put towards a larger writing project. Can you take your blog posts and edit them together into a larger work? If you can develop a few hundred blogs posts, then you have the skills to string them together into a book length piece of work.

I understand that a couple of up and coming bloggers called Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett (no I’ve not heard of them either) did just that. They wrote a book on blogging called ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

The only thing I would say about writing about a dynamic medium like blogging is to make it timeless. The time to press for a book can make your manuscript out of date before it is in the hands of your readers. I have read a number of blogging books only to come away thinking that was yesterdays news and techniques.

Consider writing a book for your niche. Blogging for {INSERT NICHE HERE} books may be viable way to service the blogging industry.

Graphic Designers

If you are handy with Photoshop, there are a huge number of opportunities to service bloggers. We need logo design services, 125×125 banner ads, fancy RSS logos, even the latest tools such as Twitter need graphic designers to create home page backgrounds.

Whilst blogging is predominantly a text based medium, it still required a lot of imagery for the presentation layers of those millions of blogs.

Check out freelancing sites such as elance.com for graphic design gigs.

Other Bigger Services

There are other sides to the blogging service industry which is probably out of reach for most bloggers to enter but well worth a mention anyway and these are the large infrastructure services underpinning blogging. These include:

• Syndication services e.g. Feedburner
• Hosting - Deamhost,Godaddy to name just two
• Advertising - Adsense and Chitika,
• Blogging platforms- Blogger, Wordpress.com

If you have the benefit of a generous Angel Investor and the next big idea for bloggers, there is a large enough audience to enter the infrastructure side of the industry.

Conclusion

There is a brand new service industry out there servicing an abundance of blogs, getting a slice of this industry should be easy for people like us; the early to mid level adopters of blogging. Remember as the medium becomes more and more mainstream, there will be more and more blogs and more and more opportunities.

If you can establish yourself as the blogging expert in your niche, not just a blog writing expert in your niche there is money to be made from a fertile market.