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By khalid on March 13, 2008 3:04 pm
Posted in (Blogging)

19 Dos & Don’ts before you start

  1. Do host your blog on your own domain
  2. Don’t spend hundreds of dollars hosting your blog when you are first starting out.
  3. Do make sure your blog can handle traffic from social media sites
  4. Don’t go for too cheap/free hosting plans. You do not have to spend a fortune since you can get a decent host for less than $20 a month.
  5. Do brainstorm 30-40 topics for your blog before you start
  6. Do have 10 posts written and posted before you launch the blog
  7. Don’t create filler posts to have 10 posts for launch
  8. Do invest money to get a professional blog template
  9. Don’t think that you have to spend a fortune creating a professional looking blog. A professionally designed template can cost as little as $400
  10. Do comment on other blogs in your field before starting out
  11. Don’t spam other blogs just to get your name out there
  12. Do define success metric for your blog before you start blogging
  13. Don’t set unreasonable success goals that are too difficult or too easy to achieve
  14. Do understand why you are blogging
  15. Don’t think that blogging will solve your business problems
  16. Do understand the time commitment it takes to blog
  17. Don’t think that blogging will take less than couple of hours a week
  18. Do use an SEO friendly platform. By the way: Word press is the best for blogging!
  19. Don’t use a CMS for a blog. We used Joomla for our blog, and it was too much headache
  20. 31 Dos & Don’ts After you start

  21. Do commit to a regular posting schedule
  22. Don’t kill yourself if you are not able to keep up with your schedule
  23. Do understand that traffic and comments will take time to come
  24. Don’t get too frustrated if takes months before you see any comments on your blog
  25. Do spend a reasonable amount of time every day reading other blogs
  26. Don’t spend hours every day reading other blogs
  27. Do select the categories for your blog carefully
  28. Don’t have more than 10 categories for your blog
  29. Do optimize your blog for SEO or hire someone to help you do that
  30. Don’t think that anyone who claims to be an SEO expert is actually one
  31. Do get a feedburner account for your RSS management
  32. Don’t get hung up on RSS membership fluctuation
  33. Do Install Google analytics to track your daily visitors
  34. Don’t get stuck on daily fluctuation in traffic or unusual traffic hikes
  35. Do Analyze keywords people are searching on to get to your blog
  36. Don’t stuff your posts with keywords to get search engine traffic
  37. Do invest the time to add pictures to most of your blog posts. Use a site such as istockphoto.com to purchase images for your blog
  38. Don’t steal images from other websites!
  39. Do optimize images before you use them
  40. Don’t spend too much money on image optimization software. XT has a free version and you can pay $ to purchase the software
  41. Do keep your blog conversational
  42. Do create a series of blogs about topics you are an expert in
  43. Don’t pretend to be an expert on everything
  44. Do create a meaningful about us page
  45. Don’t make your about us page too corporate
  46. Do get to know other bloggers personally
  47. Don’t calculate every blogging relationship in dollars and cents
  48. Do create a robot.txt file
  49. Don’t copy a robot.txt file from anywhere without really understanding it
  50. Do allow users to subscribe to your blog via RSS or via email
  51. Do use a full RSS feed
  52. 27 Dos & Don’ts Topics:

  53. Focus your blog on specific niche
  54. Don’t think that 100% of your posts have to be on one topic
  55. Do keep a running list of topics that you can write about
  56. Do share case studies and client success stories on your blog
  57. Don’t share client success stories without their written consent
  58. Do be authentic
  59. Don’t do something you are not comfortable with
  60. Do be honest
  61. Don’t share too much information
  62. Do share your knowledge with your readers
  63. Don’t think you cannot sell your services through a blog
  64. Do write a post each day
  65. Don’t post a blog each day. Writing a blog and posting it are two different things. 3 strong posts a week can do wonders
  66. Do use Hittail to get suggestions for long tail keywords
  67. Don’t follow Hittail suggestions blindly.
  68. Do interview leaders in your industry
  69. Don’t assume that just because you are just starting out, industry leaders will turn your interview requests down.
  70. Write “how to” articles
  71. Write a “secret to” post
  72. Write a tutorial post
  73. Do create a 101 post
  74. Do write a post about the top 10 blogs in your niche
  75. Don’t use random judgment to determine the top 10 blogs in your niche instead relying on Google PR, technorati rank and Alexa
  76. Do write a post that reviews books in your niche
  77. Don’t write a review about a book you never read.
  78. Keep most of your posts to less than 700 words
  79. Do write pillar posts that explain topics in great details
  80. 21 Dos & Don’ts of marketing and promoting your blog

  81. Do plan on investing time and money to market your blog
  82. Don’t think that marketing your blog means posting regularly!
  83. Do use your blog as a way to increase your brand online
  84. Don’t rely on your blog as the only way to increase your brand online
  85. Do allocate sometime in your weekly schedule for blogging activities
  86. Don’t stretch yourself thin to keep up with blogging activities
  87. Do spend at least 50% of your blogging time off your blog (commenting, emailing, reading other blogs)
  88. Don’t conduct networking blogging opportunities without a plan: planned comments and emails can help promote your blog if done correctly
  89. Do use your blog to market your business tactfully
  90. Don’t make your blog a sales brochure for your business
  91. Do create content for social media sites
  92. Don’t make all your content targeted for social media
  93. Do use social media sites such as Digg, Stumble upon, Reddit to promote your blog
  94. Don’t submit your content to these sites. Find a friend who can submit the content for you
  95. Establish relations with other bloggers in your niche
  96. Don’t spam other bloggers in your niche
  97. Do invite guest bloggers to post on your blog
  98. Don’t let your guest bloggers write without any guidelines
  99. Do write guest blogs
  100. Don’t write a guest blog in a topic that does not relate to your niche at all
  101. Do use contests to promote your blog
  102. 4 Dos & Don’ts of bloggers:

  103. Do Ask people in your company to blog
  104. Don’t force people to blog if they don’t like to do so
  105. Do review the posts of your colleagues before posting them
  106. Don’t fix more than grammar or spelling mistakes in a colleague’s post
  107. 10 Dos & Don’ts comments:

  108. Do create and enforce a comment policy for your blog
  109. Don’t hide your comment policy. We are guilty of this one
  110. Do encourage comments on your blog
  111. Don’t allow abuse to the comment on your blog
  112. Do respond to comments on your blog
  113. Don’t think that you have to respond to every comment
  114. Do reword your commentators by linking to them
  115. Don’t link to commentators on your blog for the sake of linking. Remember, only link to good content
  116. Do visit commentators blog and leave a comment
  117. Do email commentators to thank them and start a relationship with them
  118. 11 Dos & Don’ts of links coming in and going out:

  119. Do check your technorati ranking every day
  120. Don’t think that technorati is the authority site on blogging!
  121. Do monitor incoming links to your site
  122. Do visit blogs that link to your site and leave a meaningful comment
  123. Do create link worthy content and links will come in
  124. Do email other bloggers telling them about good content posted on your site
  125. Do not spam other bloggers with every topic you post
  126. Don’t get frustrated if it takes a while for links to start coming in
  127. Do select your links in your posts carefully. You are telling your readers that you vouche for the quality of each link
  128. Do link to other blogs in each post: we usually try to link to at least 3 other blogs in each of our posts
  129. Don’t link for the sake of linking
  130. 6 Dos of formatting and design

  131. Do keep a blog log and journal any changes (design, plugins, etc) in the blog
  132. Do use your picture next to each blog post
  133. Do include a clear RSS button on the left/right nav
  134. Do use a tag line next to the name of the blog to inform new users the topic/niche of your blog
  135. Do display your most popular posts
  136. Do display your pillar content in your left or right navigation
  137. 16 Don’ts of business blogging

  138. Don’t require visitors to login to view your blog
  139. Don’t require visitors to login to leave a comment
  140. Don’t quit too fast
  141. Don’t vent frustrations concerning clients/co-workers/bosses in your blog
  142. Don’t dig deep into your personal life, try to keep the blog’s focus business related
  143. Don’t post anything you don’t want Google to pick up
  144. Don’t use adsense on your blog
  145. Don’t quit blogging if you cannot keep up with your schedule.
  146. Don’t over post. 3 posts per week are plenty.
  147. Don’t start another meta blog: There are too many blogs about blogging
  148. Don’t start another SEO blog
  149. Don’t offer blog coaching services if you just started blogging or if your blog hardly has any comments on it!
  150. Don’t think you will make a lot of money directly from blogging
  151. Don’t think that content is enough to get people interested
  152. Don’t badmouth your competition
  153. Don’t allow others to high jack your blog
  154. 7 Random Dos of business blogging

  155. Do think about hiring a virtual assistant to help you with auxiliary tasks for your blogs
  156. Do consider hiring a ghost blogger!
  157. Do read and subscribe to Chris Garrett on New Media daily
  158. Do read and subscribe to Copy Blogger daily
  159. Do read and subscribe to the invesp blog daily
  160. Do be patient
  161. Do have fun
By khalid on January 3, 2008 10:06 pm
Posted in (Blogging)

Happy new year everyone!

Posting on the Invesp blog has been light over the last couple of weeks since most of our team members were either out on vacation or trying to close last minute projects. We will be going back to our regular posting schedule starting next week.

Until then, here are few posts worth reading from some of the popular blogs:

Posted in (Blogging)

TyppingOne of the most controversial topics discussed during Blog World Expo was the issue of ghost blogging. To be honest I was surprised. We have been providing ghost blogging services since the first day Invesp started. We completed over 500 blogs couple of weeks back. And while most of our clients prefer not to divulge the fact that they use a ghost blogger, they have been extremely successful. Getting on the first page of digg or redditt is something we see every week. But that is beside the point.

The topic of ghost blogging came up in at least two of the sessions I attended during the conference. Many of the speakers had “very” negative feelings towards it.  Jennifer Cisney who blogs regularly for Kodak thought that ghost blogging goes against the spirit of blogs and blogging. John Earnhardt’s who blog regularly at Cisco’s high tech policy blog did not have any kind words for it either. It is my understanding that Cisco maintains an editorial process to review and approve company blogs. John mentioned that besides the person authoring the blog, Cisco usually assigns someone from their PR group to own the blog. If we want to very pure about the blogging, then a blog should be posted without an editorial review.

Wouldn’t you agree?

So, what are pros and cons for ghost blogging?

Cons:

  • Not an honest way of blogging: Someone is taking credit for a blog which he did not author
  • It is easy to detect: you can easily tell which blogs are written by ghost blogger and which ones are not.
  • Ghost bloggers are not able to convey the ideas of the person they are blogging for
  • Ghost blogging is against the spirit of blogging and it might be unethical: Blogs are an honest way to communicate with the world, ghost blogging is deceptive.

Pros:

  • Ensures that the company is able to maintain a regular blogging schedule
  • A Good blogger is able to communicate the corporate message accurately and clearly
  • Ghost writing has been used for tens of years. Ghost blogging is an evolution of that process.

Needless to say that I think ghost blogging makes sense to many companies. Many CEOs do not have the time to blog. Even more important, not everyone has the skill to write a successful blog, nor the ability to communicate his/her ideas clearly.

But there is a trick to ghost blogging. The truth is that for every successful ghost blogger there are ten who are not good. In blogs where we have been successful, we work very closely with the company to create the list of topics and to come up with an outline for each topic. Since the ghost blog will be published under the name of the CEO, it is imperative that he/she approves each blog prior to publishing. With some of our clients, the CEO spends the time writing the different thoughts covered in each post. The ghost blogger then takes that outline and adds meat to it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, there were several occasions where we tried to discontinue the ghost blogging service. That was more of a business issue and how we want to position our services more than a question of the ethics around the issue. Also, every post you read on our blog is written by the author himself.

So, what do you think? Does ghost blogging go against the spirit of blogging? Are you completely for it or against it?

By khalid on November 18, 2007 10:59 pm
Posted in (Blogging)

We use “do-follow” on our blog as a way to encourage comments and rewords those from our community who take the time to leave us a comment and add to the discussion. Tay, from super blogging tips did the same. However, he seems to have changed his mind and decided to remove doFollow

It is not enough to create good content; you need to learn to improve the findability of your best content

The no-nonsense guide to clearer, sharper, and better writing is a must read for every blogger

We are fairly active on few forums as well as keeping busy with this blog. If you do not have the time to focus on both, then here are 5 reasons why forum are better than blog

There are lots of possibilities to get your name out if you are starting to blog. The biggest secret is to remember that blogging is no one-way street

Positioning yourself as a thought leader is a sure way to survive as a small business. Christine gives 10 ways to position yourself as an expert

How to design your posts to guarantee they get read
: Not only is the title great, but the content is a must read as well.

I am not a big fan of blogging for the sake of blogging for business. Chris discusses how to use a business blog effectively.

By khalid on November 15, 2007 11:39 am
Posted in (Blogging)

Update: We just released our free report, Breaking the Digg Code: A step by step instruction to get on the first page of Digg in 4 weeks or less. Download your free copy now.

I have seen many blogs that focused on the Digg top 100 users. Although that approach is somewhat interesting, I think focusing the top articles can give a better insight to what works, and what doesn’t on Digg. Being a math geek and a fan of Digg, I spent time analyzing the top 100 articles of all time on Digg. What is the average number of words for a Digg top 100 article? Should you choose a different title when you are submitting an article to Digg or just stick with the one on the blog? What is the average number of words in the title of a Digg article? Do I have too much free time on my hand?

Before I start answering these questions and few others, here is the approach I followed. I looked at the Digg top 200 submissions of all time. If the submission was an actual article as opposed to picture or a video I included it in the list.

Well, let’s take each of these questions and see what the data tells us.

Should you choose a new title for an article when submitting it to Digg or should you stick with the original title of the article?

Of the top 100 articles, the submitter chose a different title 75 times. Only in 25% of the top articles did the submitter decide to stick with the original title of the article. Some common sense here; many people do not know how to write good titles that hook the reader. So, if you want to get on the first page of Digg not only do you have to find good content, you have to do some more leg work and choose a better title.

Okay, if I choose to come up with a new title when I am submitting to Digg, should my title be longer than the original title?

70% of the time the title on digg has more words in it compared to the original title. Only in 30% of the submissions, the digger decided to shorten the title when submitting an article to Digg.

So, when submitting to digg, choose a more descriptive title

What is the average number of words in the title of a top 100 article?

Average number of words in the title of a top 100 article is 8 words.

The smallest title of the top 100 had 3 words in it

  • 1 Miiiiiillion Users
  • Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

The longest title amongst the top 100 articles goes to:

  • So, as of yesterday, If you protest the war, the Prez can take your stuff (15 words)
  • PLEASE Digg this story up. This boy needs help, get his story out PLEASE (14 words)
  • Courtney Love does the math, or Why you needn’t shed any tears for the RIAA (14 words)

What categories do better on Digg?

Here is the category breakdown of the top 100 articles

% Category on Digg
36% Technology
29% World and Business
18% Offbeat News
9% Science
7% Entertainment
1% Gaming

Technology rules on Digg, then business.

What style of articles does better on Digg?

% Type of article
38% News
15% Announcement
16% Story
11% Other
6% Story about Digg
5% General blog
4% Secret
3% Top list article
2% How to

Although top lists, how to, and secrets articles generally do well on digg, they are not of the kind that will make it really big. You might be able to hit 400 to 700 diggs with them, however the chances of hitting 2,000 diggs is very limited.

What is the average number of words in top 100 article?

Average number of words per article

  • The average number of words in a top 100 article is 674.89 words
  • The median number words in a top 100 article is 444.5words.
  • The smallest article had 27 words in it.
  • The largest article of the top 100 had 6881 words in it.

67% of the top 100 articles are less than the average number of words. You articles will do better on Digg if you keep them to less than 700 words.

What is the average number of words in the description on Digg?

Average number of words in description

  • The average number of words in the Digg description of top 100 article is 41.28 words
  • The median number of words in the Digg description of top 100 article is 47.5 words
  • The smallest Digg description of top 100 article had 2 words in it.
  • The largest number of words in the Digg description of top 100 article had 68 words in it.

So, even a description of 2 words can make it! But you probably want to do a little better than that.

What is the average number of comments a top article receives on Digg?

Number of comments on an article

Number of comments is a good indicator of how well the blog engages the community.

  • The average number of comments on the Digg for top 100 article is 520.99 comments
  • The least number of comments on the Digg for top 100 article was 56 comments
  • The most number of comments on the Digg for top 100 article was 1649 comments

What is the average number of comments a top article receives on the site publishing the article itself?

  • The average number of comments on the publishing site for top 100 article is 73.45 comments
  • The least number of comments on the Digg for top 100 article was 0 comments
  • The most number of comments on the Digg for top 100 article was 1691 comments

So, the number of comments an article gets on digg is about 8 times more than the number of comments on the publishing site.

What is the Google page rank for sites publishing these articles?

Google page rank for averages for top 100 Digg article

75% of the articles are published on sites with a Google PR 5 or more. The median page rank for top article sites is 6.

By khalid on November 13, 2007 1:10 am
Posted in (Blogging)

The other day, I was examining our robots.txt file and discovered few things that should be corrected in it. As I was doing that, I thought this would be a great blog topic. So, I decided to share couple of things that can be helpful to others.

A “robots.txt” is a simple text file used to instruct search engines which pages should not be indexed on the site. By using the file, you will direct crawlers to the pages and directories to crawl into and which ones to ignore.

Assuming that wordpress is installed in the directory /wordpress on your site, your posts can be crawled and then indexed in several ways:

mysite.com/blog/category/title-of-post.html

mysite.com/ blog /page/1

mysite.com/ blog /trackback/title-of-post.html

mysite.com/ blog /tag/some-tag-on-the-post

This dilutes the power of your site since the same page is indexed several ways. And of course you might suffer from duplicate content penalty from search engines as well.

How to fix this problem?

Here is a sample robots.txt that fixes the above problem.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /blog/wp-

Disallow: /blog/feed/

Disallow: /blog/trackback/

Disallow: /blog/pages/

Disallow: /blog/tags/

Disallow: /blog/images/

The last directory is the images directory which you may or may not want search engines to crawl into.

If wordpress is installed in the root directory, then your robots.txt will look something like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-

Disallow: /feed/

Disallow: /trackback/

Disallow: /pages/

Disallow: /tag/

Disallow: /images/

what does this mean?

User-agent: * >This means that the robots file should apply to all crawlers.

Disallow: /wp- >This means that you will stop crawlers from indexing any wordpress specific files

/feed/

/trackback/

/pages/

/tags/

These directives instruct crawlers not to double index your pages. The pages will be indexed directly via their own unique urls.

After you create the robots.txt, upload it to the root html directory. And there you have it, a few tips that make a world of difference for you!

Do you have any thoughts on robot.txt or anything else that we can apply to our systems in order to avoid potential problems?

By khalid on October 25, 2007 12:25 am
Posted in (Blogging)

A friend sent me an email earlier today asking me to take a look at a new video blog he just posted on his site. His words were, “I think I finally came up with something remarkable. This will be huge.” I was intrigued, so I jumped on his blog to watch the video. The clip was about 10 minutes long, an amount of time I only give to online videos form Guy Kawasaki. But sure, why not, what are friends for after all? The video starts with my friend talking about a new term he coined and I can tell how excited he is about it. I watched the first 3 minutes. He was just talking about how great the new term is. The next 5 minutes went by and he continued talking about how important the term is because it helps explain the benefits of blogging. And the last two minutes of the blog went on as my friend continued to talk about how important the term is. Confused? Well you’re not the only one! And I am almost sure that my friend shares the same level of confusion.

This got me thinking. The chasm between my friends’ excitement versus the reality of his video blog is scary. He thought he came up with the next big thing and I thought that, well, his idea and his video blog stunk! Leave the issue of me having to tell him that, or maybe him reading this blog to find out what I thought. But how many times do we write pieces that we pour our hearts into, yet they are poorly received? Why is that? Is it because we did not find the right audience? Or is it that most of the time the material presented flat out stinks. Is that too harsh of a word to use? Maybe it is. I can only hope that anyone who takes blogging seriously will publish content they are proud of. But that is not the point. What if you do publish good quality content but your visitors do not think much of it?

On the opposite end of the spectrum you present pieces that have not received much attention and investment from you, yet they gain popularity. When Chris Denny wrote a post about a website having charisma, I thought the piece was very average and would not get much attention. Let’s just say the public proved me very wrong! The piece was one of our most popular blogs we published on the site. We were very close to hitting the first page of digg with it. So in that case, my opinion of the piece is what really stunk, or did it? I sometimes read a blog for an A-blogger and find very little value in it. As a matter of fact I just started cleaning my RSS reader yesterday since some of the blog did not give me any value.

How do you know if your blog stinks?

This is the next question that came to my mind. What if people are NOT thinking too highly of your blog but no one really cares enough to actually say that. So here is my suggestion: it is time to come up with a way to measure how much a blog stinks! I will leave that to my next blog but before get into that, I wanted to hear from you what they think. How do you measure the “smell” and success of a blog? What makes a blog “stink?”

By Chris Garrett on October 24, 2007 4:56 am
Posted in (Blogging)

When you are communicating it is often helpful to think of your audience as being a single target. We speak of laser-focus, and drilling down your niche to find a target.

In fact with a tiny amount of research you will usually find it is not actually the case. Our audiences are made up of distinct but overlapping groups. Each group will have subtly or wildly differing interests. This is quite normal and it is our behavior and content that attracts them.

If your blog is marketed well you will primarily attract people interested in a certain theme. For example Invesp will find people who are interested in business and marketing. Those topics though are still quite wide, it will include people interested in SEO and also people interested in conversion copywriting. Those topics overlap but also have their own specific audiences too.

In addition we need to attract people other than our prospects or ideal reader. We want links from other bloggers, in some cases we need advertisers, and then there are our peers for networking.

So I said it is useful to think of our audience as one and now I am saying it is more complicated. How does this help?

Well first of all it is worth keeping in mind when creating your Flagship Content. You have to first decide if you are targeting a sub-group or if your whole audience will find it valuable. Then you need to answer the following questions:

  • What is this content for?
  • Who does it need to attract?
  • What is the outcome you would like to see?
  • Who is most likely to perform the action we want?

Each sub audience will have their own specific interests, needs and approach to finding your content.

While there will always be a primary reader or prospect that we want to attract we need to be aware of the other members of our audience that we could be overlooking.

By khalid on October 18, 2007 9:35 am
Posted in (Blogging)

It has been over a month since we concluded our blog contest. Many had emailed asking me how well the contest went and if I would recommend doing something similar with other blogs. I wanted to wait a little while before I posted an assessment of what worked and what did not work during the contest to carefully consider the results.

Goals

Prior to June the blog was not a main focus of ours. Posting was sporadic at best.  Although the blog had daily traffic of around 100 visitors, I do not think we had any RSS subscribers. As part of our push to engage with the online community a bit more, we decided to make couple of changes to better utilize our blog as a means for communication. First, we decided to post at least three times a week. Second, switch our blog to a more search engine/ visitor friendly platform.

I have always believed that RSS membership is a cornerstone of a good blog. It gives a great sense of a community around the blog. So the goal of the contest was to increase the number of RSS subscribers between 50 on the low end to 300 on the high end.

RSS membership

Our rss membership level jumped up by 130 during the month we ran the contest. Many had warned that the membership level will drop down after the contest.  It is natural to assume that people will subscribe until the end of the contest, and then unsubscribe. That was the main reason I held off on writing this post to get a better idea of how well the contest worked. I am glad to share that our membership did not drop down since the contest finished over a month ago. As a matter of fact the number of RSS subscribers is steadily increasing.

Links

Although generating links to the blog was not one of the primary goals of running the contest, the blog received close to 40 links as a result.

Daily visitors

I am not sure if I can relate this directly to the contest or if it is a result of the regular posting schedule that we decided to stick with. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, our daily blog traffic was around 50 visitors per day. As of writing this post, our average traffic is between 300-500 visitors per day.

Comments

This is the other indicator of how well a blog is working. I have always said that a blog without comments is a very lonely place. Prior to the contest, there were too many days were blogs did not receive any comments. Since we ran the contest, we had a total of 60 posts with 354 comments on them. The community engagement has been tremendous and very rewarding.

Conversations

This is probably one of the best results of the contest. Our team members including myself became much more involved with the online community. Whether it is via forums, blogs or social networking sites, we have established very valuable relationships. There is no way to put a value on these relations.

Lessons Learned

  •  Setting up a contest with a large prize is not enough to market it. I can here people say duh! The response to the contest was not strong during the first week. Marketing and promoting the contest for a new blog takes a lot of effort.
  • If you want to run a contest, consider setting goals that must be met before prize is given away. I was very pleased with the increase in the RSS membership we received. But I have seen other blog where the RSS level needs to hit a certain level prior to the giving the reword.
  • Consider adding other rewards to the contest besides the monetary value. I liked what Ben did by getting Chris Garrett to write for blogging experiment contest winner. How about paying for a review me post for the contest winner from a big name blogger?

Would we run the contest again?

This is the question that truly determines the success of the contest. And the simple answer is, (drum roll please) YES we will.

By khalid on October 4, 2007 12:01 am
Posted in (Blogging)

As I was going through my daily hunt for blogs that deal with online conversion, I ran across a blog that had a good collection of posts on optimizing websites for conversion. What a great find. I started reading some of the blogs and they sounded very familiar. Why? Because a good chunk of the content came from the invesp blog. The posts appeared on that site about a week after some of our blogs were posted. Hmmm, fishy…

It was not a straight copy job. There was some rewording done. How sure am I? Well, I can understand that another blogger might have the same titles as our blog once or twice but five or six times, come on! And that is just the start. It actually does not annoy me that our content would inspire someone to blog. I think that is the whole point of blogging. What annoys me is that in 5 blogs about conversion that were inspired by our own blogs with titles taken from us, however not a single link back to invesp!

Oh well, I guess that happens when you publish content online. There is always someone out there who might just steal from it.

Of course there is the other set of bloggers, the ones who just do a straight up copy job from our blog.

What do you think? Should I even be upset over this? What is the best way to deal with this?