ê¿êspi20.com — watching and writing

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You know, some things are just plain ugly to look at. They are the acne of the universe; maybe caused by oily thoughts or dirty minds.

What am I talking about now?

I’m talking about unorganized, rambling, no subject blog posts.

It’s like the blog owner just got lost writing their post. Forgot what they wanted to say, had a brain fart, whatever. It’s a waste of everyone’s time — a waste of the blogger’s time writing it and certainly a waste of the readers’ time trying to figure out what in the heck they were trying to say!

Puleeeze — if you ever find one of those on this site, just send me a slap through the mail. Or an ammonia capsule or cup of VERY strong coffee — something to wake me up!

Oh I’m fully aware that not everything blogged about is remotely interesting to everyone; I’m really not talking about INTERESTING posts. But it should be interesting to SOMEONE even if it’s only your sainted mother who is interested in everything about your miserable, wannabe life. (Hi Ma! Love ya!)

No, I’m talking about posts where even the words strung together don’t make any sense at all and go on and on and ON. Maybe they’re a really bad translation to English from another language; I don’t know. They just make my eyes cross and my brain freeze.

What you write about doesn’t even have to be something everyone will agree on — and would probably get you more attention if it wasn’t something everyone could agree on. No, those posts get your juices flowing and your synapses snapping! Some of my most popular posts (I have popular posts???) have been on subjects that are rather divisive by nature.  Note to self: write another one of those real soon.

I was reading the EntreCard blog this morning and Graham’s last post in particular where he’s telling us about his latest venture to prove to the world (well at least to EntreCarders) that he can take a start up blog and by his boy-genius-ness alone make it something….I’ll have to go back and re-read it to make sure I know just what, but something spectacular and prove that Entrecard isn’t just a drop-and-go phenomenon.

I think I know already, but OK - show me how……I’m all eyes.

Oh DARN! You have to write something that’s emotionally compelling. Crap….left out again! Will somebody please stumble this anyway???

Thanks!

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Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Effective advertising takes thought and planning. Just putting together an ad on Google or Yahoo! based on a set of keywords isn’t quite enough.

What’s the goal of your ad? If you’re selling a product, you are trying to generate sales, but if you’re selling a service of some kind such as web page development, you are trying to generate a contact. That ultimate end will dictate how you should shape your campaign.

When your customer clicks your ad where is it going to take him? Is your landing page going to be the main page of your site or a specific target page for a product or service you’re highlighting.  Having a focused page for that ad to take the customer to may end up generating more interest in your overall site than just clicking through to the home page would.

Do you have a “hook”? Something like a discount or special shipping rate often gets buyers’ attention and can make or break a sale. Having an end date that’s in the very near future gives your ad a sense of urgency and helps encourage the buyer to close the sale.

Special features help bring in sales. For example a television set with an added feature like closed captioning where that model doesn’t normally come with it can make the customer feel like they are getting added value for their money. Using words like “exclusive” and “unique” help give the customer a sense of getting something special.

The page your buyer lands on should contain words that he found in your ad. It not only reinforces to your buyer that he’s in the right place, but helps your Quality Score on Google and Quality Index on Yahoo!.

Be sure to monitor your ad to see how it’s performing. If your ad isn’t generating the number of clicks you think it should, then you may need to adjust it. Maybe your keywords are too general. Tightening up on them, making them more specific may help get more clicks. “Electric Car” is going to get more clicks than “car”. Sometimes colors can make an ad pull in customers. There are quite a few studies out there showing that blue generates more interest than other colors do.

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Just like your finances, successful blogging requires budgeting and planning.

Updating content isn’t enough.

Say what?? Yes, you read that correctly. Just updating content isn’t quite enough.

Hopefully, before you began your blog, you decided on what you were going to be writing about and had some idea of how much time it would take to do it correctly, but just in case you are like me and the target of your blog has sort of evolved over time, I’m going to try to help you get on track with your blog.

Now, this blog started out as a mish-mash of subjects and to be perfectly honest it still is and will probably continue to be throughout it’s lifetime. However, more and more of my posts are centering about blogging effectively. The success part is coming slowly but surely. How does one measure the success or failure of a blog?

Many people measure their success by outside measurements such as Alexa scores and page rank. Those are certainly valid TOOLS to begin to get a feel for how successful your blog is. Others measure their success by how much money they pull in in a month’s time. That is certainly another tool to measure success.

To me, however, the most true measurement of success is how fulfilled you feel with your blog. If having viewers (both PR and Alexa rank viewers and links as measures of a blog’s worth), or having a paycheck (fat or otherwise) from your blog at the end of the month is what defines “fulfilled” for you, then you are good to go.

I want more.

I want interaction with my readers. Static numbers on a page aren’t good enough. I want my readers to TALK TO ME. Tell me what concerns you. Tell me if I’ve entertained, educated or helped you in some way. To attain this, I have to budget my time and plan my posts.

I want to post often enough to keep you coming back for more. That means I try to plan my posts so that they have information you want (such as the post about Microsoft’s BrowseRank), a lesson that’s valuable (such as my experience with the new EntreCard Toolbar) or at least makes you laugh or cry (the post about my toning up). I also try to release them to you in some kind of fashion that doesn’t overwhelm you. I think you’ve found out that I can and do write a LOT. So, I’ve tried lately to limit the number of new posts to no more than 2 a day. I’m not doing so well on the photo blog — I went nearly a week with no new photos, then put up 4 or 5 yesterday :(. At least those are JUST photos, so it’s not like you’re trying to comprehend one of my 2,000 word essays.  But this blog is rapidly approaching it’s 600th post and it’s only been “live” since March of ‘06.

Taking my habits into consideration, that means that in order to write good, informative or entertaining posts, I have to budget out the time to research the topic, find suitable graphics (you wouldn’t enjoy them as much without some kind of picture now would you?) and sometimes that even means I have to create the graphic myself which takes time as well. If I’m running a contest, I have to budget out the money to purchase the prizes or find sponsors for them.

And, in the grander scheme, I also have to budget for domain name renewal and hosting as well. Without those two things, there would be no eyespi20.com at all! And I’ve been there and done that!

I could let all this overwhelm me and that would result in “writers‘ block”. in order to combat that, I also budget in time for me. That’s time when I’m not thinking about writing a post, time I’m not dropping cards and time I’m just doing something I enjoy doing. It might be reading, drawing or getting my nails done, but it’s something that takes me out of “blog mode”. Without those breaks, I would become stale and my goal of being fulfilled by my blog would be even farther away. I understand how some people “lose thier blogs”. Life interferes, they didn’t chose a subject they could stay interested in and focused on or they wouldn’t let the blog evolve.

How do you combat “stale blog”? What measurements do you use to define if your blog is a success? Do I post too much or too often? Should I be more narrow in my subjects?

You are my readers. SPEAK UP!

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No, I ‘m not making that up.

Dogpile (the search engine) and Pet Finders (the humongous pet adoption listing service) are teaming up to bring you tight search results when you’re ready to add that new furred, scaled or feathered family member.

“This partnership is a great extension of the Dogpile brand,” said Bruce Allenbaugh, Chief Marketing Officer of InfoSpace. “By working closely with Petfinder to introduce Dogpile’s search experience and our pet-affinity to their pet-loving audience we’ll encourage cross-traffic between the Dogpile and Petfinder sites.”

They plan to bring widgets and toolbars to facilitate that search. I may put a widget on my websites as I do support rescue in several other ways as well.

While my search engine of choice is Google, I have used Dogpile on occasion. It’s been awhile though.

What about you? Have you ever used Dogpile to search for anything (not necessarily a new pet) or will you now that they are teaming up with Pet Finders?

Have you ever found a pet using the Internet?

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