I used to accept advertising on this site, and it was kind of nice. I’d make a few bucks each month for a banner or a few links sprinkled in the sidebar, and nobody complained.

The common arguments potential advertisers give are “it’s really not that noticeable” or “why not make some money for your writing?”. The truth is, when it comes to working really hard towards something, every little bit matters.

When I redesigned this site a year ago, I spent months poring over many different iterations, and built the theme from the ground up. (Well, almost ground up. I used the Thesis theme framework. And yes, if you click that link it *could* make me a referral commission. And yes, I understand the irony.)

Once I had the theme in place, I changed much of it by testing and optimizing the layout for subscribers. If I have one goal for new visitors on this site, it’s that I want them to subscribe in some form. I spent a lot of time changing and testing different ways to organize the information and structure. (I saw an increase in newsletter signups of about 600% after doing this. No joke.) I took it seriously, and it’s been paying off.

So when someone asks me if I want to just “give up a little screen real estate” for their company, there is a lot more involved on my end than slapping up a banner in the header and calling it a day.

Most importantly, it detracts from you. 99.8% of the readers of this site won’t click on a banner or ad, so why would I put something up that annoys you, for a few bucks?

The issue is never about money. I mean, I’d love to be paid pantloads of money to do this. I could even make a little if I accepted ads. (I do have a family, after all.) But it would be a compromise.

Compromises mostly benefit people on the outside and usually never those that receive. I’ve been watching the House and Senate try and compromise on the debt ceiling over the past few months, and the compromise between politicians is seriously damaging. It pulls attention away from the core issue–not being owned by China–and instead focuses on individuals and politicians who all want something. (I’m almost positive that whoever coined the analogy “it’s like too many cooks in the kitchen” must have been watching a government operate.)

Fortunately for me, I don’t have to compromise on this site if I don’t want to. I’m the only cook here, which means that you’re stuck with what’s served :)

So that’s how advertising works on this site: it doesn’t. At least for now.

Photo by Roadsidepictures

This is a continuation of my last post on creating magnificent content. If you’ll remember, we talked about how the Internet is going through a rough patch, with content farms are springing up and creating one-off bits of Internet scrap that rank highly for dinky keywords. It’s a game of quantity versus quality.

This is called the relying on the “Long Tail“, or getting all those shoddy pages to rank highly for non-competitive keywords.

The Long Tail

For those of you who don’t know what this mythical Long Tail is, it’s a term coined by Chris Anderson of Wired. Anderson’s book The Long Tail was meant to show that businesses like Amazon were making tons of money selling tiny amounts of tons of products. Smart people have already pointed out that the long tail might be a good strategy for massive websites, but not so much for bloggers and content producers like you and I.

Quality wins every time.

The Long Tail is GOOD

I’ve made the Long Tail approach look like an awful strategy for writers and content producers, but in truth it’s a great way to get some extra search traffic. We just need to view it differently.

There’s a lot of traffic to be gotten with the Long Tail. Ranking highly for hundreds or even thousands of non-competitive keywords could be a major traffic bump for your site. We shouldn’t just throw the baby out wit the bath water.

A Primer on SEO (the Good Kind)

When you’re creating awesome things, people will want to link to you. Twitter, Digg, Delicious, niche social news sites, blogs, Google Reader, comments… people will link because they want to share what you’ve created. You’ve clearly taken the time to craft something worth sharing, and the Web is a great platform for it.

For those of you needing a quick primer on SEO, here is how the bulk of rankings are determined in search engines:

1. inbound links to the exact page and domain in general
2. on-page factors (title tags, headings, keywords in urls, content)
3. age, strength and reputation of the domain

(There are tons of other ranking factors, but these are the most important.)

So when you create amazing content that resonates with people, you’ll get a) inbound links and b) your domain becomes stronger. This paves the path for your site winning at the Long Tail.

Stay with me. This is going to change how you view your writing, SEO and marketing forever.

Make the Long Tail Come to You

As we said earlier, pages rank highly in Google because they have lots of inbound links pointing towards great content. The crazy thing is, you might rank for keywords you’ve never imagined within your flagship content. With all of those real, high-quality inbound links coming to your site, it means that you might rank highly for phrases that are simply a part of your article body.

Crazy, huh?

How the Long Tail Works for LifeDev

Need proof as to whether this really works or not? Look no further than this site. I rank for some of the most bizarre keywords. Lots of ‘em. And it wasn’t on purpose either. But my referrer logs tell me that people are coming to my site from all sorts of different searches.

In the past 30 days, Google Analytics tells me that 4,255 people have come to my site from 1,899 different keywords. That’s 2.24 searches per keyword on average.

This site is benefiting like crazy from the Long Tail. In just a month, over 4,000 unique people have found LifeDev. Those people do things like share articles, leave comments or even subscribe to the site.

Has this changed anything in terms of the types of content that I’ll create here? Not a bit. You see, I don’t really care about the Long Tail.

Why I don’t Care About the Long Tail

So far we’ve covered that long tail keywords can be easy to rank highly for, if you’re willing to create content specifically for them.

But it’s a shortsighted game. What if Google suddenly decides it doesn’t like those content farms that generate pages specifically for the Long Tail? They’re hosed. Nobody is going to naturally link to a dinky spam page. What’s the point?

The problem with betting the farm on Long Tail search is that you’re placing all of your eggs in one basket. If Google decides it doesn’t like you one day, *poof!* the traffic is gone. And you’ve got no other leg to stand on.

But the even bigger problem for you and I is that it sucks to create content for machines. There’s no community. There’s no feedback, or even human aspect.

There’s no love, man.

Do you want to write for people? Or do you want to write for machines? I’d rather write for smart people who think like me. Oh, and if you don’t think you can make money creating stellar content, you’re crazy.

So, to conclude:

Don’t worry about the Long Tail.

If you’re creating stellar, unbelievably creative content, the Long Tail will find you. And then some. So fahget about it!

Photo by jenny-bee

1. The World’s Shortest (and Probably Most Controversial) Guide to SEO
2. What the Frontpage of Reddit Does To A New Blog In 24 Hours
3. Creating Powerful Content (and Why the World Needs It)

List blogging is nothing new. In fact, it’s origins come from magazines. Go peruse the local magazine rack and you’ll find tons of helpful articles like “10 Ways to Lose 20 Pounds” all over the shelves.

People have argued that things like bullet points, breaking up text into tiny paragraphs, obligatory number in the title, and tons of other factors.

I have made (and still do to some extent) a good portion of my income writing list posts for various websites and the truth is this: lists work for grabbing attention. Always have, and always will.

The thing to remember is that lists aren’t evil; they’re only a format.

And there are other really effective ways to build traffic and community, without conforming to an unwritten standard.

Chris Guillebeau has a quietly built a massive following. People link to his articles like fiends and buy his guides like hotcakes. And I can’t think of the last time the guy wrote a list post. Seth Godin posts tiny to medium-length marketing nuggets as they come to him. Naomi curses like a sailor with tourettes, and Colleen does whatever she wants.

What these smart people have figured out is that they don’t have to write linkbait or lists to grow a community. They just have to be themselves.

There is no wool-over-the-eyes, fakey Big Smiles or blustery posturing. It’s all real, like you were sitting down and talking to them face to face.

And that’s how they draw people in. They’re not necessarily telling a story, they are the story. And they’re not trying to attract the masses either. They’re trying to attract the smallest portion of the masses that thinks exactly like they do, which means that their readers “get” them.

There is no golden rule or standard when it comes to building a community. You are the convention. You are what you create.

And that’s why people are following you.

###

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. Am I the only one feeling this trend? How has it affected how you create? Oh, and thanks for following and commenting. The discussions have been fantastic lately.

Photo by ???? Th?t

1. Project And Action Verbs List To Speed Up GTD
2. GTD Refresher: The Next Action List Isn’t A Project Management System
3. The Two Most Under-Used GTD Tools: The Someday/Maybe List and the Trashcan

Bob Dylan: “LifeDev, it is a faaaiiiling.”

A few months ago, I made an unsettling discovery. (And by “unsettling” I mean nearly needing a fresh pair of trousers.) My previous site design on LifeDev was incompatible with Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Big deal, right? I mean, I had assumed that most anyone who knew anything about the Internet was using Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Sure, there were probably a few people who visited LifeDev that used IE, but the rest were like me, right?

Wrong.

I started digging in to the data, and I realized that for the four years the previous theme was on this site, I had turned away 210,678 unique visitors.

It was at this point that I started dry heaving. Over 210,000 people visited my site, never to return again.

Most web visitors are fickle, staying only a few seconds on a page before bouncing to the next one. You can bet that hardly any of those 210,000+ visitors stayed longer than a nanosecond before flitting off to the next site.

But the much deeper issue is that I wasn’t tuned in to where my people were coming from. I wasn’t smart enough to think about who my visitors were.

You gotta know who your people are, and how they find you

This is what spurned me to create the new theme that you’re seeing today. And yes… you better believe it’s compatible with IE 7. (IE 6 usage has dwindled considerably since 2007, so I tell the handful of remaining IE 6 users to upgrade or switch to Firefox. I guarantee most of the Web is lookin’ wonky for nearly all sites in IE 6.)

It works like this: the people that come to your site are supporting you. When they click on a link to your site, it’s like they’re giving you a ridiculously quick test drive. They arrive at your site, they scan the page, noticing how the colors line up and how everything feels. They’ll know instantly if something doesn’t work.

Don’t make it hard for them! Don’t show them the door before they even get a chance to read what you’re all about. (I curl up in the fetal position and start sucking my thumb every time I think about what how many of those 210,000+ people might have subscribed to the site.)

Sigh.

So how do you learn from my mistake and kick massive amounts of visitors to the curb?

1. Check Your Site

Obviously, you should make sure that your site’s theme is compatible with almost all browsers. (Nearly all stat programs like Google Analytics should tell you what browsers your audience uses.) You can see how your site looks on a bajillion different browsers and operating systems with the handy (and free) Browsershots.

2. Know Your Visitors

Knowing your audience is absolutely pivotal. Things like

• Age
• Location
• Visiting frequencies
• Bounce rates

Etc., etc., etc. Without this data, you’re just shooting blindly in the dark. You don’t know what your visitors need until you know who they are.

Another way to help visitors is to know where they come from. When we can figure out how people come to our sites, we have a pretty good idea of what the visitor will want to do. For example, visitors who come from Google and other search engines are much more likely to click on ads than other visitors. Visitors from social sites like Twitter are the exact opposite, and most likely won’t click on ads.

You can learn all sorts of stuff and improve your site just by the knowledge of where your visitors come from. The goal of my latest venture centers just around that: to help others improve site interaction (sales, newsletter subscriptions, commenting, etc.) with the knowledge of where a visitor has been.

Knowing your audience is a very powerful thing. It allows you to resonate with the biggest chunk of your people, just by knowing who makes up most of the visits to your site.

3. Don’t Assume People Will Tell You When Something’s Wrong

What’s most unsettling about all the people that came to my broken site is only one of of them told me something was broken. That’s a whopping 0.00000476% of the visitors. The saying “no news is good news” does NOT apply to a website.

Odds are nobody is going to complain when something is wrong, they’re just going to leave. People are busy, and taking the time to a) find your contact information and b) send you a message is mostly out of the question. This means that you’ll need to….

4. Ask the Right Questions

You’re going to have to ask your readers if there’s anything you can improve. Your regular readers might not even tell you if something is wrong, in an attempt to not hurt your feelings. You’ve got to really probe and ask if anything could be improved.

This could be done with a simple survey, or just a quick post to ask your readers if there’s anything that you could improve on. Site design, types of articles, delivery methods, etc. This information is gold if used correctly.

(I haven’t done this recently for LifeDev as I didn’t want the new design to dominate the discussion. But I’ll be sending out a quick survey very soon.)

Conclusion

So there you go. Learn all you can about your visitors, and ask them if anything is wrong. It sounds simple, but the results can be amazing. Just don’t blindly believe that everything is great because you haven’t heard any complaints.

Photo by kellan

1. Twitter: Business Gain or Productivity Drain?
2. What, No Ads?

Susan NYC

How much time do you spend on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites? It’s estimated that Robert Scoble spent over 2,555 hours on Friendfeed and Twitter in 2008, which is way more than a normal full-time job (2,000 hours).

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Robert has essentially worked a full-time job with overtime for these two companies, pro bono. And don’t kid yourself into thinking that he’s the only one either.

But here’s the kicker: people like Mr. Scoble spend a lot unhealthy amounts of time building up profiles on sites they don’t even own.

Those of us who have spent enough time around the web realize that sites and services come and go, and to trust that one will be around forever is absolutely bonkers. Friendfeed, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter… who knows what these sites will be in the next 10 years.

Sure, one could argue that Robert’s involvement on these 3rd party sites ultimately improves his personal brand. But if Friendfeed goes under, so does all those hours Robert spent on the site. Poof. Heck, Friendfeed was purchased by Facebook in August. Who knows what the future of Friendfeed?

The best way to safeguard yourself into losing everything you’ve worked so hard to create is to become your own platform, and not rely solely on a third-party to publish your content online.

Creating Your Platform

If you’re going to be a “creator” on the web, you can’t put your faith in a single platform like Facebook or Twitter. You’ve got to create your own.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and it’s an incredible tool to connect and gain an audience. When you put all your content’s eggs in one basket, you’re putting yourself at a huge risk. While I don’t think sites like Twitter or Facebook are going to go away any time soon (knock on wood), we don’t know how this Web thing will turn out. You may find in 20 years that all those hours you spent creating content on Tumblr or Twitter might just be lost for good.

But more importantly, when you’re trying to brand yourself, it doesn’t help when people only see you as a Twitter user first. You want YOUR brand first then the platform, not the other way around.

Be Everywhere, But Don’t Live Everywhere

Photo by Evil Erin

I can already hear the next question asked: “So how do you develop a following and gain attention without leveraging popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook?”

You’re right: you have to utilize them. You just can’t rely on them. It’s a fine line to walk.

Sure, you still need to be on other platforms. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, and a few other places. But I don’t live there. Those places only help my personal brand. They’re only tiny pieces of my digital identity. Sure, it would stink if one of those places shut down one day, but I’d still have my own personal platform.

But where I spend most of my time is working on things that are 100% my own. If Twitter is ever bought by Nazis, I’ll still have LifeDev. Or Web Jackalope.

Note: I have no idea if Nazis are interested in a Twitter purchase, but from what I hear everyone is giving Twitter offers these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nazis haven’t put in a bid too. But I think we can all agree that if Twitter was run by Nazis, we would all spend a LOT less time there. And we’d really regret all the previous time we spent sending tweets.

It’s Not Just Me

Look at the really successful content producers on the web who have Twitter and Facebook accounts. Sure, they tweet often and keep their followers engaged. But you can bet your biscuits they spend twice as much time creating content for their blogs and own sites.

Here are a couple easy tips to creating a personal brand that’s invincible to the ever-changing winds of the Internet landscape.

Make it about YOU. If you’re going to use 3rd party services like Twitter, try and make the focal point of the pages you by adding a unique design that mirrors your brand in some way. I tried to do this as much as possible with both my personal Twitter profile and Web Jackalope’s Twitter profile with designs that were similar to the original sites.

Keep the balance. Be conscious of how much time you’re spending on third-party sites as opposed to creating your own content. Try making a 1:1 rule, where for every 20 minutes you spend on Twitter/Facebook, etc., you’re spending 20 minutes writing content on your own site.

Point back to you. Virtually all social media and social news sites allow you to create profiles where you can point to your site. Make sure all the 3rd-party services point to your own domain.

Own, Don’t Rent

Photo by turkeychik

When it comes to online presence, you want to be an owner, not a renter of your brand. Just like in the housing industry, there are plenty of reasons that renting is appealing. If you’re an online renter, you don’t have to worry about servers, design, or many other things. But at the end of the day, you still don’t own anything.

All the resources that you put into building profiles at social networking sites and gaining followers show for nothing if the platform crashes.

Be your own platform, and reap the benefits.

1. Facebook Could Be A Killer Productivity App For Web Workers
2. How to use Twitter as a productivity tool
3. We Create Because It’s Fun

Google Docs is one of the coolest web applications ever (in my humble opinion). I am convinced that it is a godsend for anyone; blogger, writer, student or housewife. It solves a lot of problems that traditional word processors have, and adds some compelling features that any writer would love.

Less Clutter- Don’t worry about saving text files on your computer. Shoot, you don’t even need a word processor installed on your computer. I didn’t have one for a long time, and did fine without. They take up tons of space and memory, not to mention that they take more time to load than it takes my computer to restart. Seriously.

Easy to Organize- You don’t need to save your document in a physical location on your hard drive. Just assign it to a folder in G Docs and tuck it away. If you lose a document on your computer, you have to run a computer-wide search that a) takes forever and b) doesn’t always work.

Auto-Save- How many times has Word (or any other word processor, for that matter) unexpectedly froze? Or your computer crashed, and you lost all the files? This doesn’t happen with Google Docs. They’re automatically saved at timed intervals, so backups are frequent and never lost. In the event that (God forbid) Google’s servers crashed, they still have backups on other servers.

Aside from G Docs’ thoughtful built-in features, there’s still a lot of functionality under the hood that we haven’t tapped. In order to pull the most use from the online document editor from Google, you might explore these next features a little more.

Collaboration- The ability to share and edit documents in real time. I can’t tell you how many blog articles I’ve either written or helped edit with Google Docs. No more waiting sending the document by email and wiating on the other party to read/edit before sending it back. We’re talking real-time here. Saves hours (even days!) of waiting between revisions.

Revisions- Revisions are possibly one of the greatest tools for editing, especially when you’ve shared a document with another writer. Click on the Revisions tab and see who edited what and when. You can compare between versions, and check the differences. It’s also quite handy for the absent-minded writer who can’t remember why he changed something. Just go back to the revisions and refresh your memory.

Comments- You can insert comments as visual guides for you or anyone else looking at the document. Whenever I write an article I find it quite tedious to stop the flow and pull up another window and find the link for something. Totally counterproductive. Instead I insert a note that says “link here” and I know to come back and add it in the editing stage of writing.

Bookmarks- A very underused and misunderstood feature, the bookmark is quite useful for longer documents. If you want to link to another part of the document, just insert a bookmark, and then later on in the document you can link to that bookmark. It’s like an internal link. Very nifty, and especially handy if you’re needing a table of contents page.

Publish (blog or on Google)- If you want Google Docs to truly become your blogging command center, you should try publishing articles straight to your blog from Google Docs. All you need to do is head over to the “Publish” tab and set up your blog. If you want to add the post to a certain category on your blog, just label the article in G Docs with that same category. Poof! Your document has been published to your blog as well.

There are probably many other great ways to utilize Google Docs that I haven’t even touched on. Do you have any? Leave ‘em in the comments below!

Photo by bogdan.glushak

1. Gmail Integrates With Google Docs
2. What Google Can Teach Us About Self-Image
3. Google Reader Updates

Well… I don’t know about you, but this Christmas was incredible. Mirth and merriment were in full supply, and my families were in no shortage of the giving spirit either. I hope everyone had as wonderful time with friends and family as I did. But rest assured, it wasn’t all fun and games. I was hard at work on a very secret project that, I’m happy to announce, has just launched.

I give you the Facebook App Creator for Bloggers!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and a half, you’ve probably heard of Facebook. It’s experienced rapid growth in the past few months, especially when they opened their doors for outside developers to build applications on top of the service.

These application creators quickly learned that leveraging the Facebook platform was a quick way to get a lot of people using their applications quickly, due to the viral nature of Facebook. They’ve created an excellent atmosphere for sharing, due to the fact that there is trust with who you’re sharing with. You personally know all of your contacts, so when they recommend something to you, you’re much likelier to check it out.

Well now any blogger can quickly and easily create an application that will republish your blog’s articles to your readers’ Facebook profile, giving them a way to easily track and share your blog’s articles among their friends (with that high level of trust). Plus, their friends see the application and install it, and the friends of those friends see the application and install it… well you get the idea. The potential is huge. Oh, and did I mention that you don’t have to know a lick of programming?

So if you’re interested, be sure to check it out.

Also, I’ll be giving away 10 lifetime “Pro Blogger” accounts to the first 10 commenters expressing interest below. If you’ve got any questions, suggestions or thoughts feel free to email blogfuse [at] gmail dot com. I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

1. Facebook Could Be A Killer Productivity App For Web Workers
2. Isolator- Concentration Application For Mac OS X
3. Facebook: The New Online Office

Good buddy Leo Babauta of ZenHabits has a great post fusing GTD and blogging, specifically for us bloggers who suffer from not using our time productively. Between reading, writing, commenting, responding to emails, advertising, and many other tasks, it can get a little hairy for someone without a trusty system. Fortunately GTD plays perfectly into a blogger’s workflow, as Leo goes on to illustrate.

While the post is full of tasty examples for bloggers,  I especially loved this part of the post:

One of the problems with the way people implement GTD is that they spend too much time fiddling with the system and their tools. You’re a busy person — you don’t have time to do all that. Pick a tool, and stick with it. Now spend your time actually writing your posts, and responding to comments, and making your blog better.

How many serial GTD’ers suffer from this problem, even aside from blogging?  When we realize that it’s not all about the system and actually start doing things, we’ve figured out the true meaning of GTD.

1. The Facebook Application Creator… for Bloggers
2. The Browser Inbox- Organization by Tabs
3. When Productivity Tools Make You Less… Productive

A lot of times people try to find the latest and greatest tool to fully organize their lives. I can tell you up front… it’s not gonna happen. What makes the self-help/productivity arena so interesting is there there isn’t one tool to “rule them all”. Some have come close, but tools aren’t meant to organize everything in our lives. That’s not their strength.

Because as of yet there hasn’t been the mythical app that controls every detail in our busy lives, we should focus more on becoming more productive with our existing tools. So in that spirit, I’ve decided to share a little trick that works pretty effectively with your online tasks. I’ve used this system mostly for blogging, but the uses are practically limitless. I call it the Browser Inbox.

The basic premise is this: use your browser’s tabs to track your things to do. If you have a modern browser like Firefox, you can have multiple tabs open within the browser. Each tab can be thought of as a task (or Next Action for the GTD Junkies), and once you’re done with the task, close the tab. It’s extremely simple, but it’s surprisingly effective.

Here’s an example.

Blogging

I’ll crack open my trusty Google Reader and start browsing feeds. If I see a story that’s compelling and a possible post topic, I’ll hit V and open the original page in a new tab. By the time I’m done reading, I may have 6 or 7 tabs open. I systematically go through and read each story, deciding whether each one is blog-worthy. If it is, I write the post. If not, I close the tab. Easy, right?

I love this approach because

• The tabs are physical reminders that I can’t ignore
• I’m not bringing any other tools or extra processes into the mix
• I have everything I need in one spot

Granted, this system has some obvious limitations (like all tools). The browser inbox only works if I know I’m going to be writing in the immediate future. Also, if Firefox crashes and the system can’t restore your session, or your browser is accidentally closed, you’re screwed.

But, at the same time, the simplicity forces you to quickly get through the “inbox” of your browser’s tabs quickly. The physical closing of each tab is pretty satisfying too, so that’s a subtle motivator as well.

So there you have it. The Browser Inbox: Gently forcing people to finish their online tasks quickly. A nice tagline, don’t you think? ;)

I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions on this system. Can anyone think of other uses for the BI?

[Update: You guys had some great suggestions! Be sure to check out the comment thread for incorporating the BI with offline tasks as well.]

1. Save Space and Minimize Tabs In Firefox
2. Productivity Software News: Stikkit updates, Firefox tabs hack and The Procrastinator’s Clock
3. Tips For Keeping Your Gmail Inbox Empty

Whoops, I forgot to post this yesterday.  I’ve been writing some blog tips for Problogger these past few weeks, and yesterday I had another article published.

How to Blog with “Voice” and Increase Community and Readership

I don’t know how many of you already read Problogger (probably loads), but if you don’t, check it out. Darren gives some invaluable tips for any blogger.

Granted, my blogging advice may not be that sound, but Darren’s is top notch ;)

1. The Best Blogging Advice Ever. Period.
2. Blogging The Leadership Summit
3. Mark Twain Would Love Blogging