Archives for February 2011

Introducing Free Weekly Blog Topics at For Bloggers By Bloggers

For many bloggers, coming up with blog topics can be hard. Keeping your blog fresh and interesting for readers old and new can see you hitting the blog topics wall, and often that leads to you just not blogging at all.

Which is why at For Bloggers by Bloggers, we’re launching a new weekly series every Saturday where we’ll provide you with 10 free blog topics to get your mind rejuvenated.

As well as offering you some blog topics ideas, we’ll also give a short paragraph on each topic to help you get off the starting blocks. Hopefully this will give you some more ideas, if the initial titles of the post topics themselves don’t.

We’ll break the blog topics into five categories, and mix and match this as the weeks go by to try and make sure we’re not missing too many niche blogs.

To give you an idea of what you’ll find, here are some of the blog topics from this week’s selection:

Business Blog Topics

The Trick to Making a Business Blog Personal. Many business blogs are exactly that ? all business. But they don?t need to be ? what tips can you share with other business bloggers to make their blog more personable? What should they write about? How have you mixed up your business blog?s voice?

Video Blog Topics

How to Syndicate Your Videos. Everyone knows about YouTube and maybe Viddler or Vimeo. But what other tools can video bloggers use to syndicate their posts? Is TubeMogul a good option? Help other bloggers decide what they should be using.

Real Estate Blog Topics

Five Little Known First-Time Buyer Mistakes. What mistakes do people new to the property market make? Can you give them some of the mistakes that realtors see but buyers very rarely do? Tips like these will build trust in your blog and business.

That should give you just a small idea what we’ll be covering each week. As I mentioned, though, we’ll be mixing up the topics every week. You’ll also find you can mix one blog topic up across different niches.

Check it out, and if you like what you see, feel free to subscribe to For Bloggers By Bloggers so you get each free blog topics post as soon as it’s published.

Cheers!

image: iStock

Why We Bloggers Are Ignorant

This is a guest post by Ari Herzog.

I confess guilt.

When I recently shared how to write a blog post, I specified the noun, “post.”

That was wrong of me. I should have echoed Phil Gerbyshak and specified the noun, “article,” as in, how to write a blog article.

Are we ignoramuses for interchanging the verbs used for publishing blog articles with the nouns used for the articles themselves?

I don’t think this is about semantics.

The blog, according to Wikipedia, is an ongoing diary or commentary and each entry is popularly called a “blog post.”

Why is each entry, this entry, any entry called a blog post?

Use the word as a verb and it makes sense, as in Danny posted his thoughts about elephants, but use the verb as a noun and you need a new verb. You can’t have it both ways. I suggest the term is overused and should be stricken from our lexicons. Interchange “posted” with “published” if you insist, but substitute “post” with “article” for the thing being distributed.

More to the point, if a blog is indeed a serial publication and qualifies for an International Standard Serial Number, then why not use the same terminology as other publications? Does the New York Times or Le Monde say they just posted something, or they wrote a news post? Of course not. Why should bloggers be different?

Let’s treat a blog as a part of media. Who agrees?

Thanks to Venson Kuchipudi for photographing the elephant.

Ari Herzog is a policy and communications specialist south of the border. He works dually as a new media consultant for public organizations and as an elected councilman. To learn more about him, check out his blog at ariherzog.com or follow him on Twitter at @ariherzog.

Don’t Confuse Free With Free Exposure

There’s an interesting debate online at the minute about the AOL purchase of The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars.

The debate isn’t so much about the price – of the amount, $300 million is expected to be straight cash – but more around the contributors to The Huffington Post over the years, and the belief that they are owed some of that money.

The train of thought behind this is that, without the contributors, The Huffington Post wouldn’t have had anywhere near the content that led it to becoming one of the most popular sites on the web, with more than 26 million unique visitors per month.

So now there’s a backlash against The Huffington Post, and blog posts and social networks are filling up with ways to get back at Arianna Huffington for “selling bloggers and citizen journalists out.”

To me, though, this backlash is missing a simple point – the content wasn’t the property of the contributors once they signed their publishing “deal” with The Huffington Post.

Paid Content or Free Exposure

A caveat – I don’t know the contributor Terms and Conditions for The Huffington Post, but if it’s like any other main publication (or smaller one, for that matter), then there will be two options:

You become an official contractor for the publication, and draw either a salary or pay-per-published-post option.
You contribute for free, in return for the exposure and back-links to your own site or blog.

While being paid might seem the more attractive option straight up, very often the opposite is true. That’s a one-off (unless you sign a royalty and re-publish agreement).

With the exposure and authority that can come from being a contributor to something like The Huffington Post, that can set off a long-tail effect that is both constant and residual.

It’s the exchange mechanism at work – I accept I won’t be paid in hard cash, but I’m giving that up for the potential of grabbing a section of 26 million visitors to my own site, as well as being put in the spotlight for media interviews and quotes as a respected expert on a certain topic.

Pain Points or Sour Grapes?

I’ve made decisions like this in the past and will (possibly) do so again. My blog is syndicated to different networks, which has helped raise awareness of what I write about over here. I syndicate less now – or more judiciously – because the trade-off in syndication is often losing traffic to the syndicating source.

But you make that decision.

Jeff Esposito, who’s a PR Manager, makes a good point. “It’s just sour grapes of putting things on rented space since she owned the blog. It’s kind of like tumblr going down or people basing their whole community strategy on Facebook. What happens when the owner sells the site or just deletes it? You are shit out of luck either way and these folks are pissed because they only got paid in Skittles and viewers.”

Kami Watson Huyse, a 16-year PR veteran and co-founder of Zoetica, also sees it as misunderstanding of rights and property. “When you write for a portal like Mashable or HuffPo (or just on your friend’s blog) you agree to do it for the visibility and even the links back to your own site, which are a currency all their own. Many people write articles and scatter them all through the Internet on much less influential sites just for the SEO. In other words, you already accepted your ‘pay’ so move on.”

I have to agree with both Kami and Jeff, and the others that aren’t sold on the view that The Huffington Post should share the sale price with its contributors. That’s not to say I’m a fan of The Huffington Post – I think I’ve read it twice – but unless an agreement was put in place about profit share, the pay is the exposure.

Lessons Learned

Does it suck that Arianna Huffington will get millions of dollars while the people that helped build the site up to that sale price get nothing? A little, but that’s business – very rarely do 100% fair things happen when there are so many factions at play.

The Huffington Post and its contributors aren’t the first to be in this position, and they won’t be the last. Unless people take responsibility for their content and contributions.

Make your work Creative Commons. This means you choose how it’s used, shared and attributed. It gives you power to claim if the license is broken. This blog is Creative Commons, as shown in the sidebar.

Define your contract. If you want paid, make it a paid one. If it’s free for exposure, see if there’s a way you can share in profits for extremely popular content.

Ask for republishing rights. You give up a window of exclusivity, but after that period is over, you can republish on your own site and be truly recognized for it.

The web is awash with content and people wondering how to get noticed amongst the noise. Often the solution is to write for a hugely popular outlet and look to build awareness of yourself that way. But that means giving up a lot of your own identity in the process.

As the current argument over The Huffington Post sale shows, it’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly, because everything has a price.

Whether you get a share or not is the question.

image: psd

Internet Fame and the True Impact of Influence

You may be aware that there is a big debate going on in the social media blogosphere about ?influence? (and you can see links to several blog posts at the end of this one for examples of these discussions).

How we need to leverage influencers in our communities in order to get the word out about our causes, brands or services, etc. And that makes total sense from a generating-word-of-mouth point of view.

But hold on.

If you?re trying to do this, what if you don?t actually know who your industry influencers are? Perhaps because you?re not really immersed in your own open community, or because your community is too large or public-facing to be able to list your champions in an organic way, you?re just not seeing it?

So you begin to use some of the tools out there that purport to measure influence, and you start to think, ?This isn?t as easy as it sounds.?

Maybe you?re starting to think that influence is not about how many followers someone has on Twitter. ?Maybe you?re starting to think that ?influencer scores? are totally meaningless for your goals and objectives.

So what is influence, really?

Can it be measured (and if so, how)? How can you find the influencers in your industry? Do apps?like Klout or Twitalyzer really work to automate this? Or?is this all bunk?

A group of us are going to be talking about Internet Fame and the True Impact of Influence in a new BlogTalkRadio show on Wednesday February 9 at 10pm ET.

This new show is the brainchild of some really smart social media practitioners and consultants from various industries, and the purpose of the show is to debunk some of the social media bubble/hype around various issues. The tone will be irreverent, but the conversation and concerns around the topic are very real.

I hope you?ll be able to join us (expect the accompanying chat to be lively and extremely snarky!), or listen to the podcast afterwards (bookmark this page and come back to listen!).

I?ll be hosting this inaugural episode (uh-oh!) and Tamsen McMahon, Lisa Thorell, Allyson Kapin, Rich Becker and Olivier Blanchard will be chatting live with me on the night. But, as it?s BlogTalkRadio, anyone can call in and ask the panel questions. Lots of other people with thoughts on the topic will be listening in and participating by chat.

In preparation for the radio show, here are some of the blog posts the group may be referencing.

4 Things You Need to Know About Influence ? Tamsen McMahon, on Brass Tack Thinking
It?s About Impact NOT Influence ? Allyson Kapin on Frogloop
The Influence of Trust ? Danny Brown
Artifacts of Influence: grassroots movements, familiar strangers and the power of the social media daisy chain. ? Olivier Blanchard
Flipping The Scale: Influencers Are The Most Influenced ? Rich Becker on Copywrite, Ink.
Klout & Critics: Time to Close the Door or Kick it Wide Open? ? Lisa Thorell on Digital, Ink.
Strength of Community Supersedes Influence ? Geoff Livingston
Why I?m 10X As Influential As Ashton Kutcher On Twitter* ? Chris Yeh, Adventures in Capitalism
The Holy Grail of Online Influence vs Our Current Measurement Limitations ? Beast of Traal
How do you evaluate influence? ? Jeremy Porter, on Journalistics

So put the kids to bed, grab your tipple of choice, and join us on Wednesday evening!

This post is derived from Maddie Grant and SocialFish.