A story about User X:

1. User X subscribes to TechSite on Bloglines
2. Google Reader v2 is released, tech people say how awesome it is
3. User X imports feeds into Google Reader
4. Bloglines and Google Reader both report User X as a subscriber to TechSite
5. TechSite boasts large increase in readership

Repeat above * 500+ users for popular tech blogs. End result: an anatomy of inflated RSS stats.

I suggest FeedBurner allow you to insert a 1×1 pixel on every post. Track IP, get ‘unique readers’ and ‘pageviews’ for a post. This method has its own set of flaws, but it should be some interesting numbers.

If there is one weakness I have, it is my ability to ramble. I ramble on like no one I have ever met - ideas and thoughts and what not just spew out, often times incoherently.

I’m sure regular readers know what I’m talking about

So amidst the recent surge in ‘copywriting’ posts, its been odd that very few have actually tackled on the meat of the issue. Almost every single one talks about using bullet points, how to ‘engage’ the reader, how to use the word ‘you‘, and what not. Over and over we hear about engagement, conversation, persuasion, and other multi-syllable words that will take you to riches.

And yet none explicitly deal with the fundamental issue: too many damn words.

Blogging can be a very narcissistic exercise. And while in regular correspondence people love to ‘hear themselves speak’, online (and in blogs) people love to throw out lengthy posts that could be summarized in roughly 1/10th the time.

I’m not picking on personal blogs. Those are exempt. Me too - this blog is more about my ramblings than any effort in creating money. But ‘professional’ blogs - those are ripe with excessive words. Dean (link above) was right in characterizing these words as ‘lazy.’ The education ’system’ (I use that word lightly) has, over the years, shoved long essays down our throats. Write 15 pages on why Dr. Faustus was an idiot. Give me a 20 page essay on catharsis found in King Lear. Spend 10 pages explaining to me how hubris and MacBeth did not mingle well. It was rather odd - we were never told to focus on our argument, or on a number of points to argue … oh dear no, the damn exercise of writing was simply to get to X number of pages.

If you need X words instead of Y words (where X < Y) to get your point across - then bloody do it.

UPDATE: About 15 minutes later, I decided to test myself. Re-write what I just wrote. Prove my point. The results:

I ramble. Its what I do. My thoughts and ideas just spew out unfiltered.

I’m sure regular readers know what I’m talking about

Recently there has been a surge in conversation about ‘copywriting’. Heavy on fat and light on substance, they all recommend the same things: use bullet points, engage the reader, make it about ‘you’ (the reader), and so forth. Buzzwords like engagement, conversation, and persuasion fly around like a magic-bullet to riches.

None deal with the fundamental problem: too many damn words.

Blogging can be very narcissistic. Classic narcissm involved people who loved to ‘hear themselves speak’. The blog world replaces that with ‘love to write excessive text.’ 90% bloat comes free.

Personal blogs are exempt. Mine included - this blog is for rambling, not to make money. But professional blogs - they consist of excessive word usage. Dean (linked above) was correct in calling them ‘lazy words’. The education ’system’ has conditioned us on writing pages, not content. From why Dr. Faustus was an idiot to catharsis experienced by King Lear to Macbeth’s hubris, our only requirement was the nubmer of pages we wrote. Forget the actual argument or points being argued - it was all about the page count. And that has translated to blogging.

If you need X words instead of Y words (where X < Y), only lazy people go with Y.

The above ended up with 229 words. The original was 326 words. 97 less words, or ~30% less than the original.

Comments?

I hate affiliate programs. Not the actual concept, or what happens when you make a sale. Oh no - I hate the actual programs. Many of them are setup in a rather sneaky way that do nothing but try to extract money from your traffic without giving up a dime. And then you have the problem of cookie stealing, and companies building up their brand without paying you a dime - argh!

I make more money from affiliate programs than advertising or sales. But - every single one of the affiliate programs we use (we use 5) all provide XML systems. We are able to complete a transaction without a user ever knowing that we are just a frontend. The most important part here is the provider is never able to exert their brand influence on the end user. Next time User X wants to buy a product, he (or she) will come back to our site and re-purchase. Huzzah!

Actual example: iBegin Toronto. Revenues from ads: $x. Revenue from hotel reservations: $x * 4.

And our partners treat us well. We get solid traffic. We don’t trick our users or annoy them. And we have generated millions in revenue (literally) for them. Its a relationship where both parties try hard to make the most of it.

Speaking of which - none of the companies I work with actually advertise an XML system. We contacted their affiliate manager, talked about the high quality traffic that flows through us, and reached a deal. Simple and easy

[this post catches me up for the weekend so I am again averaging exactly one post per day]

I remember a time when Blog Networks were the it thing. Everyone and their mother was setting up blog networks. People actually cared when a name was changed from ‘Pajama Media’ to ‘Open Source Media’ (though I do agree OSM doesn’t sound very good).

Blogs were the path to easy riches.

About time reality set in.

Perusing around, I came across this sale: Parents Behaving Badly for sale. On its own not very notable, but what was interesting was that they were under the b5Media umbrella. For those that don’t remember, the network recently announced 2 million in funding.

This sale sets off some questions. What exactly does it mean to be ‘owned within the network’ - does b5 own it, or does Person X own it? If b5 owns it - how did it sell? If Person X - why is it under b5’s brand? I assume that b5media actually does own it, and Person X was just running it (and now wants out). But then - is Person X actually selling her ‘webmaster’ position? Can she even do that? Is there some sort of easy answer I just don’t get?

Through all those questions, the real point was that people are finally realizing that blogs are not easy money. Blog networks are not easy money. It takes a lot of time, dedication, and great staff to get to a successful position.

If it wasn’t for Splashpress buying out sites like Blog Herald and Performancing, things would be getting boring

I read the Technosailor no-sale-happened post with a bit of interest. We had taken a quick look, but had decided to pass (more on that later).

We’ve been involved with selling blog resources (but never blogs) and also been involved in acquiring blogs ourselves. And while Jacob does all the heavylifting in finding great bloggers and so forth, there is one condition I have always placed on any purchase involving a blog:

If the blogger does not come with it, we don’t want it

Jacob picked up Blogging Pro and ForeverGeek before we merged. And the lesson he got there was that half the value is in the blogger. What I like about blogs is that it is filled with personality - when I read it, I am subjected (to use that word) to a certain style of english. There are thousands of blogs regurgitating the same information over and over. I like my regurgitated news with a certain flair

So back to Technosailor - things he did wrong:

1. Care that people said he was asking too much. Almost all sites I have sold I have had people complain that the starting bid was too high (nevermind the actual BIN). Every single one has hit the BIN. People always whine and complain … don’t forget, they don’t care about you. They just want the best deal possible.
2. Use of the word potential. Any time I look at a sale and I see ‘lots of potential‘ I immediately hit BACK. Every website has potential. To me it says - “I haven’t done much with this site, but if you work your ass off, you may be richly rewarded. If not well - you didn’t unlock its potential”
3. He was Aaron Brazell. Lets be honest - he is basically the IT/server guy at b5 media. His audience is interested in how Digg is nothing compared to Grey’s Anatomy. The new buyer couldn’t emulate that. If it does have so much potential, why doesn’t b5 push it more?

Aaron’s writings are interesting. His blog is pretty good. But a buyer would have such an uphill battle that unless the blog was highly niche-based (ala Blog Herald), acquiring it at a high multiple just doesn’t make sense.

So the sordid tale has come to an end.

With everything so peachy and giving loving hugs to everyone, I thought it would be interesting to back and dissect what happened.

The name BloggyNetwork was actually my idea, before Jacob and I worked together. I have this odd interest in the word ‘bloggy’, and thought it would be a nice name for a network. And thus the name was taken.

A few months later, as Blog Flux was doing well, and BloggyNetwork as establishing its identity, we decided to merge our efforts and legalize the entire structure. So papers were drawn up, lawyers were cursed, and virtual handshakes were performed.

In hindsight we did not do enough. It was our own fallacy to not go after the hyphenated domain and to go after a trademark on it. But hey - when you are bootstrapping an operation, you go for what (you think) is more important. In our case that was our writers and not the legalese. This of course was a real blunder for me considering I have experience in TM and even patents, so oops on my part

Fast forward a while, and Blog Herald gets acquired. The person running it was none other than Abe (aka yuga). I had actually met this chap when I was in the Philippines establishing our localized presence there (yep I get around. At the same time, this is an actual local establishment, not an offshore development place). And lo and behold, he took one of our writers, J Angelo Racoma.

To say I wasn’t happy was the least. Use our brand name (others professed confusion over the name) and take one of our writers - bugger!

And so began the correspondence. I am very happy with how Jacob conducted himself. As an aside, one of the best ways to see how someone works is when they are dealt with (public) criticism. This ‘dealing’ is especially important in blogs, when people will pull out magical rumors out of their magical arses.

Anyhoo - in private email it did not seem like things were gonna work out. There were a few terse statements, and it seemed like things were not going to work out. I was talking to my friend Kailash about it when he noticed one of their sites copied his creation, Pingoat. They had a gaming blog at Kotaku.net, when a very popular one already existed on Kotaku.com. I think the boiling point (and incidentally tipping point) came when David posted his thoughts.

I think what happened was that a fresh start was needed (by the Bloggy-Network guys). It turned out they had bought a script for pinging which simply ripped off the Pingoat design. The Kotaku thing was … well … just not the smartest idea. And they realized that with a prime site like Blog Herald, they needed a fresh start.

And really that is what made things okay from my perspective. They could have entrenched themselves, we would have dug up our own trenches, and a nice little bruhaha would have erupted. Not the sissy fight over between Scoble and Engadget (so sissy-like it doesn’t even deserve a link), but an actual legal headache. But really - who wanted that? Only lawyers win that way. In the brave new world of the internet, everyone knows that the deepest pocket wins (actual merits unfortunately become secondary). Not to say we had the deeper pockets - just that it would have sucked!

But they knew they had foobarred, and needed a fresh start. We understood they had invested some money in the TM application, and we reimbursed it. So the network formerly Bloggy-Network became Splashpress Media, we said we are super-friends, and I will hopefully see Jangelo when I trek off off to the East this May and hopefully visit the Philippines.

People make mistakes. It takes a lot of guts to admit flat out what you did was something wrong, and just as much guts to say ’sokay, forget about it’.

I’ve never really talked to Matt from WP. The only time we ever corresponded was through email. I had just finished the acquisition of Eatonweb Portal and relaunched the site as Blog Flux Directory. Seeing a major hole in a lack of a centralized-blog-service site, I emailed everyone asking for ideas on what to add. A friend of mine, Kailash Nadh, had just released a pinger of his own at Pingoat. So when Matt replied with ‘pinging service’ - I thought, why not? I could use/point to Ping-o-matic, but that defeated the point - another source for bloggers to use, not the same one. The response was not pretty. Lots of random accusations - you know, the usual

Anyhoo - what we got out of that entire incident was that Matt had a good point - open proxy. Kailash in the meantime had developed his own anti-splog system, and we used his. With the recent explosion in spam, even checking them turned out to be a headache, but that story is for another day

Incidentally, Kailash had to sell the site. He was unable to pay for it, and had to turn it over to someone with deeper pockets.

And today I came across this: Pingomatic.com vs Pingoat - reach and rank.

I’m sure Pingomatic does a lot more pings due to XML-RPC, and while Alexa is far from a reliable source, it is astounding (to me) that Pingoat is neck-to-neck with Pingomatic.

I don’t have any point or morale other than to point out how much Pingoat was originally criticized (before we were even around), and now it is a reliable second (or even first) choice for many.

The amount of information whirring around is manic. Furthermore, information is agnostic in value - it can be useful, not useful, it can be true, it can be false, and it can be a combination of all four.

I try to keep my RSS feed list as small as possible. The total number of feeds I am subscribed to right now is 70. Most of them are work-related, and a few are just plain interesting/thought-provoking (eg indexed and PostSecret).

My rule of being subscribed to a feed is simple. Five (formerly six) possible reasons:

1. You provide useful information. If you post four times in a row and none of the posts interest me - axed. I don’t have time for you.
2. My competition. It is smart business to know what they are upto.
3. My (our) own blogs. It is important to see what your readers are seeing.
4. My employee’s blogs. I encourage my employees to keep personal blogs, and it is good to know what is on their mind.
5. Others. These include the before-mentioned indexed and PostSecret.
6. Comments. Or I did. Not anymore - read on. I am still subscribed to this blog’s comment feed.

Even more important than keeping track of blogs is keeping track of comments. When you post a comment, knowing what follows is very important. Blogs that do not allow comments suck (only one I subscribe to that doesn’t allow comments is Seth’s Blog). Comments are where the real meat of information is, and skipping over that can be foolhardy (and maybe why people have 1000+ feeds subscribed to). To keep track of comments, I use Commentful (top secret notice: we have acquired the site and will be integrated it with Blog Flux soon). Any time I find a blog/forum post I want to track (even if I don’t cinnent), I add it to Commentful. After that it notifies me with a nice little green light in my FF statusbar. No need to visit each page or leave them open in a tab (which is what I used to) or subscribe to the entire comments feed. I instantly know what is going on and when.

The last thing is - email. I actually keep 5 primary emails (through Thunderbird). All the rest of the sites then forward to my one ‘collector’ email or are answered by an employee. Thunderbird Notify keeps my email a click-away in the taskbar, and I have it set to check every 60 minutes. Anything less than 60 minutes becomes distracting. This way I also answer all my emails as I get them.

Any other ways readers here deal with all the information out there?

I had thought that the blog train was starting to slow. The money-men were (are) starting to get in, and (thankfully) the importance of pageviews is waning while the importance of revenue is on the up.

Or so I thought.

Recently we began some house cleaning of Bloggy Network. We have built up a collection of some nice blog resources and it was time to let go. The best one of the bunch was Blog Catalog. A common sight alongside the menu bar of many blogs, it has over 1 million backlinks (as reported by Yahoo). Yet even with all those backlinks, its revenue was still meager - roughly $1700 a month.

So after some discussions between Jacob and I, we set a BIN of $40,000. At almost 24 months revenue, it sounded like a good deal for us. So Jacob went out and posted it on SitePoint. We were going to see how it went, and then start contacting private buyers to get somewhere near the BIN price.

The site sold in under 24 hours.

Within the first five hours we had two offers of ‘if you lower BIN to $30k I will buy it immediately.’ Within 12 hours of the BIN reached, Jacob told me that seven other people had contacted him if the deal fell through, and two even offered us more to break the deal (some people have no ethics).

Our other two sites also flew away. The first one was Eatonweb, which hit the BIN in roughly 72 hours. The sale price was 100x revenue. Eatonweb was the first blog directory, so we were a bit sad to see it go.

The other one was 2RSS. This one went BIN in roughly 3 hours, also at 100x monthly revenue.

So what happened? A few things to learn:

1. Blogs are as hot as ever. The speed at which the BINs were reached speak volumes for that. Incidentally the person who lamented not getting BlogCatalog also lamented not getting BlogRankings when it was for sale.
2. People can see quality. BlogCatalog was a top-notch quality site, and Eatonweb and 2RSS were two well established sites that need a bit of an overhaul. There is a lot of junk, and when you post something of high quality, it will get snapped up. I’ve sold about half a dozen sites, and all of them went for minimum 20 months revenue.
3. Set your BIN high! I do want to say that we have no regrets about the amount we did raise. But going back to my previous point - quality commands a premium. A good solid premium. When will the next PR7 blog directory with 1 million backlinks come again?
4. No place for emotions if you want to succeed. I sort of wanted to keep Eatonweb (after all, it was the first blog directory), but it simply didn’t make sense. When other people’s livelyhood depends on your decisions, getting emotional is not good.

This was a good move for us. Blog Flux is our main focus anyway, and it made sense to give these three sites new owners to take them to new levels.

[UPDATE: Doh! I keep clicking on ‘Save’ instead of ‘Publish’ in WP. Well - it is live now]