I found this new dating site for people who travel a lot for work, Traveling Encounters. I was thinking that it’s kind of a neat idea…for people who want to have a good diner with someone while they are in a different city they don’t know. No different really than other dating sites, except that you have smaller windows of time when you can see the other person.

Though I don’t travel for work, I figured I would sign up for a profile so I could blog about it. Here is a sample of some of the questions I was asked:

Do you use condoms during sex?Do you regularly go to the dentist?

Do you groom your genital area?

Do you like using toys during intimacy?

There were a lot more, the total process took me about 15 minutes. Here is my question. Why call it a “dating site”? Clearly, it’s for travelers looking to hook up briefly on layovers or to meet people outside of their marriage. I’ll bet that most people who use it don’t travel at all, but use the site as an excuse to have a hotel room waiting for them at the end of a blind date.

So, if you’re looking for one-night-stands, the site is offering free membership through 2009. Good luck.

Earlier in the week I published a post titled Skip Digg: Not All Traffic is Created Equal. In that post I mentioned that I’d follow up the post with some arguements FOR using Digg by a top Digg user. Today social media expert Muhammad Saleem tackles that very topic.

You will probably be surprised to read that I agree with a lot of what Josh said in his post earlier in the week. Josh’s points probably resonate with the experience that most of you have had. However, does that mean that Digg ( or other social news sites) is worthless as a marketing platform?

The answer to that depends on what your goals are.

The problem with most people is their approach to social news is shortsighted. Social news sites are a long-term investment not a day trade.

Josh is right, building a following requires time and patience, and why should a social news site be any different? You have to actively participate on the site and network with other users (both of which are incredibly time consuming) before you can truly understand a community and they can appreciate what you have to offer. And even if you do make the investment, there is no guarantee of success on the site, and why should there be?

Social media marketing is not for everyone and won’t work for everyone. Before you take the plunge and invest your time and energy into any site (for marketing purposes), whether it be Digg or one of its competitors, take a moment to understand the site, the demographics of the site’s community, and the community’s preferences (My Little Pony would hardly work on Digg, but on StumbleUpon maybe). Communities are always evolving and what works today may not work tomorrow. Darren is a great example of this.

ProBlogger used to do really well on Digg but for some reason it doesn’t anymore. At the same time, however, Digital Photography School still performs really well. Why? Because Digg users are no longer interested in blogs that blog about blogging or making money from blogging, but have in the past months become infatuated with digital photography.

The web is a crowded place and filled with people fighting hard against information overload (and mostly losing). In this kind of an environment, an environment where people are doing their best to filter out useless information (noise), social news sites function as filters that help separate the wheat from the chaff the definition of both varies community to community).

But even then, every social news site is different. If you don’t like the Digg community, or they don’t like your content, try Reddit, StumbleUpon, Propeller, Mixx, the list goes on. The problem is not with social news or one particular site, the composition of these sites is natural self-selection of likeminded people.

Traditional social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Propeller serve as newspapers. They are designed to have all sorts of content, some. Some of it will be tabloid material (for the stupid people) and some of it will be smart (for the rest of the crowd). These sites (Digg) aren’t necessarily for distraction only, though they certainly do a good job of that.

Ultimately, Josh is absolutely right when he tells the “ProBlogger” audience to not use “Digg”. What I would recommend instead is Sphinn.

However, for the average blogger, especially news, politics, entertainment, science, and offbeat bloggers, Digg and all its sister sites are a great avenues for a lot of exposure, of which some definitely sticks and can lead to great long-term growth. When people target all the wrong communities where their content is not desired, that’s when people get frustrated. It’s just a matter of taking the time to understand the community that best fits your needs and where your content will be best served and spending time on that community.

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More and more blogs seem to be transitioning to multi-author set ups and as they do I’ve been asked increasingly for information on how to manage these types of blogs.

If you have a multi-author WordPress blog then you’ll want to check out a great post at Hongkiat - 35 Tips Tricks To Manage and Handle Multi-Author Blogs.

The post is packed full of useful tools and plugins that will help make the task of managing more than one author on a blog a lot easier - enjoy.

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Two very close friends of mine have made blanket statements stating that SEO is Dead and that, in essence, so is personal brand.

Though I understand the sentiment expressed in both posts, it is still misinformation and very debunk-able. Micah Baldwin, who thinks SEO is dead, also happens to be my boss at Lijit. Geoff Livingston, happens to be my roommate. So I tread lightly in both cases.

Let’s go back to prohibition where, unlike today, companies were not simply told to adjust how they do things or risk a failure - they were told that they could not do their business.

Big beer companies like Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch were faced with traumatic decisions that demanded them to adjust to a changed landscape. Much like the SEO business and Personal Brand in a down economy, people can either fail or adapt.

In the case of Yuengling, they brewed near-beers (beers under the minimum alcohol by volume (ABV) levels that would be considered non-alcoholic beer today) and provided ingredients and instructions for mail-order home brews. When prohibition was repealed by the 24th Amendment, these companies who adapted were positioned best to move in and dominate the landscape.

While personal brand can certainly be a bugaboo and is certainly not something that anyone should assume will be an easy coat-tail ride, personal brand does not guarantee anything.

However, the reputation that someone with personal brand can leverage is extremely important. That ability to negotiate, converse, discuss and work on deals on an individual level is something that can position a person to rebound fairly quickly in a down economy.

As in any market, there are corrections. Maybe the personal branding “market” or the SEO industry as it is today is a little hyperinflated. A correction is certainly in order. However, that correction brings out the best in those areas and those who survive are positioned best at the end.

I will agree with Geoff that having intrinsic value to backup personal brand is extremely important for survival. Talkers are important though, as they are the ideas people. Eliminating talkers is a sure fire way to squelch innovation during a down economy - exactly the wrong thing to do.

Intrinsically, there is still a high premium on personal brand. Likewise, SEO is very important for marketing. In both cases, these things probably need a correction to procure a more pure form of business though. Those who adapt will survive. Those who do not and continue to try to live life as normal… Well, see ya later, alligator.

#7 Use Bigger sizes.  Bigger ads = Bigger dollars.   Who cares if they completely take over your site.  (OK maybe your readers do.)

#6 Ad MORE units.  This one is a no brainier, but the more ads you have on a page, the more ad revenue you will make.  Sure, there is a law of diminishing returns, but that will only affect each ad unit, not the overall revenue.

#5 Click on your own ads.  Yes, this one is against the TOS and will get you banned from AdSense, but in the short term you will generate $$$.  Google publicly frowns on this of course, just like affiliate companies frown on cookie stuffing but really they are laughing all the way to the bank.  ***NOT RECOMMENDED, JUST A JOKE RELAX!  So the real #5 is Change your Colors.  This one is easy to do and will help your $, but most people are just too lazy and use the default colors.  (me too:)

#4 Jam the Ads in key spots.  Sure you should have content at the top of the post, but the bloggers who jam AdSense units right at the top of the post make more money than you do…

#3 Stuff keywords everywhere.  It is the spam blogs that generate the bulk of Google’s long tail revenue, you know the sites, they contain virtually no real information, just a bunch of nonsensical keywords related to what you are really looking for.  Do a search on Google for ‘make money online’ and take a look at some of those results.  Have a look at this site in the top 10… Make Money Online Everything above the fold is an advertising link in some way, and has the words ‘make money’ in almost every sentence on the page.  Also try the ‘Make money at home’ and click on the 2nd result… MMAH.  Can you stuff anymore keywords on that page!!

#2 Be nice to Google.  Bitch slapping them like I do, does NOT help your revenue in any way, trust me…

#1 Write crappier content.  There is a direct inverse relationship to your effective CPM on AdSense and how good your content is.  If users really love what you write, they tend not to click away to something else.  If you write really low quality stuff, the readers who are looking for something useful will click on your AdSense away to something that they were  actually looking for…

AdvertiseSpace.com (Go ahead steal this post, just leave the link bitches)

~Chad

One of the tips that is often given by bloggers is that you should use some sort of service or plugin that shows related posts on your blog. Not only does this give readers something else to look at, it provides another way to make your blog sticky.

This will help to decrease bounce rates and increase average visitor browsing times. However, what if you took the idea of related posts on your own blog and extended it out to those who used a particular service across the web? That is the idea behind Sphere. In this post Jeff Chandler reviews Sphere to see how it works.

Company Info:

Sphere was founded in 2005 by four individuals and is based in San Francisco. Martin Remy; Steve Nieker; Tony Conrad; and Toni Schneider. If the name of that last person sounds familiar to you, it’s because he is also the CEO of Automattic, the folks who bring you WordPress.com. What was originally a search engine for blogs has turned into a site that makes connections across a wide variety of content.

Using Sphere:

There are two ways in which to use Sphere. The first is by submitting your blog to the Sphere network. The second is to use the Sphere widget. Once your blog url is approved and added into the Sphere network, links to your blog posts will be distributed throughout the Sphere userbase. It does take some time before your blog URL is either approved or disapproved but until you receive that notice, you can use the Sphere Related Content Widget.

As with the site submission process, you’ll have to pony up some information to Sphere before you can actually use the widget. Pay special attention to the Blog Content selection box as this will determine the type of related posts that are displayed within the widget. If you are using a self hosted version of WordPress, you’ll be able to use the Sphere Related Content plugin. Once you have that plugin installed and activated, you’ll need to configure it.

 This plugin currently supports the following content display types:

• The CLASSIC plug-in — shows related blog posts and news from a wide variety of sources, not category specific. If in doubt, stick with this one. (You’re done here, nothing to change.)

• The NEWS VIDEO plug-in for news bloggers — shows related video from Sphere Partners, as well as related news articles and blog posts.

• The POLITICS plug-in for Democrats — shows related blog posts from Democratic and other left-leaning blogs, as well as from a variety of news sources.

• The POLITICS plug-in for Republicans — shows related blog posts from Rebublican and other right-leaning blogs, as well as from a variety of news sources..

• The POLITICS plug-in with Balance — shows related blog posts from both sides of the political divide, as well as from a variety of news sources.

At some point in the future, more specific content types will be available to choose from. However, for most people, Classic should be just fine. Once the plugin is configured, you should see a small Sphere icon with the text “Sphere: Related Content” appear below each blog post.

Clicking this link will open up the related content widget which displays five posts from other bloggers talking about the same subject, two related videos, and two to three related articles from across the Sphere network.

My User Experience:

When testing out the service on my own blog, I discovered that for the most part, the bloggers talking about the same topic were generally more related than the related articles section. The related videos were hit and miss. Overall, not a bad experience and I’ve found myself clicking on a few of the related articles myself. Personally, I’d like to see the option of configuring the widget to display a certain number of related posts on the blog page rather than having to click on the widget. In a later revision of this plugin that can be configured to display a specific category of posts will be a welcomed addition.

Conclusion:

Using a related post service such as Sphere has its benefits. For starters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, TechCrunch, All Things D and Real Clear Politics that generate over 1 billion monthly article page-views are already on board. If a link to your blog post appears within the widget or related post area on any of these sites, you are sure to benefit from the follow through traffic. Although from browsing around CNN, I did see a good mixture of related blog post links. However, the tech category appeared to be dominated by the big name blogs/sites such as TechCrunch, CNET, and Zdnet.

In the end, just being part of the service, displaying your widget, and allowing Sphere to use your content to showcase related articles is a simple way to increase exposure as well as traffic levels for your own blog.

Sound Off:

Here is what I’d like to know from you. First, do you use Sphere or a related service? Pardon the pun. Also, have you been able to measure any amount of success from having your articles display on the various widgets within the Sphere network? Last but not least, have you ever had a blog post show up in the widget on a site like TechCrunch or CNN?

This Review of Sphere was written by Jeff Chandler who is currently a writer for Performancing, BloggerTalks and is the host of two podcasts, WordPress Weekly and Perfcast.

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I watched the movie 300 for the millionth time this weekend. I was reminded of when it first came out in 2006 and the talk that surrounded it. There was the talk about the history, the graphics, the fact that it was filmed entirely in a warehouse in Montreal, blah, blah, blah. What people are still talking about today though, are the men in the movie. The men were AMAZING. They had perfectly sculpted abs and chests so hard they didn’t need armour. Even the ugly guys were hot.

What I love most about the men in this movie, is how men in real life hate them. Every time I mention to a man that the Spartan men had great bodies, they are so quick to say “Their abs were painted on” or “It’s all cgi” or “They were airbrushed”. My question for men is: How does it feel? Women have been competing with airbrushed pin-ups since the technology was invented, yet you still believe we should look like that. It’s your turn to spend all your free time working out and eating chicken to please us.

I don’t believe there were that much computer generated abs. If you check out the website for 300 and look at the video journals, there’s not that much difference between the abs during rehearsals and the abs on the abs on the movie. I do believe those bodies are achievable, and men who deny that are just lazy, probably fat, and looking for a way to make themselves feel better.

Recently, I kicked off a development effort behind the scenes here at Technosailor.com that will take a bit of time to see through to completion. This plan involves you as a community of readers as well as some of the best technology currently lying around the web. I’m calling it Operation Dharma for no fancy reason except I can’t wait for LOST to come back. :)

Seriously though, the goal is to pull together some of the best ideas and technologies of the web and combine them with the most thoughtful and ambitious people on the web to extend a community that I already am very proud of.

Details to follow. However, in the interest of the “iterate early and often” approach to software development, I am kicking off the new definitive look for technosailor.com.

As outlined earlier, I want to bring some of the best web technologies together. Of course, I wrote about Chris Pearson’s amazing Thesis Theme. The new design here is based on Thesis but has been heavily and significantly modified and customized.

There are still some display bugs I’m not happy with. Feel free to let me know by leaving a comment.

In the last theme, I began including commenter Gravatars which WordPress supports natively now. If you’d like your picture displayed, go grab a free Gravatar account.

For the future, the plans are broad but I’ll highlight some of the plans:

• Community Blogs
• Article Promotion/Voting
• Partner Blogs (Venture Files is currently somewhere between Technosailor and a Partner Blog - that will further be defined, as well as other relationships established/announced)
• Community Features

With a sad note, this update also involves the well wishing and goodbyes to Carlos Granier-Phelps who has been producing original spanish content over the past year. He is highly focused on building his company, RED66 in Miami.

We also say goodbye to Andrew Feinberg who was writing Tech Policy content. In both of these cases, these verticals do not seem to fit very well in what the Technosailor brand is trying to accomplish. So the decision to focus in the areas that have the largest audiences and traction is obvious, for me at least. I thank Andrew and Carlos for their time here and wish them the best. The archives of the content remain searchable and archived here.

So that’s it. Let me know if you see anything out of place or want to offer feedback (any kind, just if it hurts too much, use a smiley face or something :) )

In this video Gary Vaynerchuk answers how to monetize your blog or video blog with a practical illustration.

Of course you need to have at least some traffic to pull in advertisers - but once you do, if the advertisers are not coming to you yet - go to them.

PS: this actually works. When I started my first camera blog I couldn’t attract big advertisers like Canon and Nikon - so even in the early days when I just had a few hundred readers a day I began to contact local and online small businesses with a photography focus. I was amazed at how many of them were willing to buy advertising. The money wasn’t massive but land a few of them and it adds up.

The beauty of this is that as your traffic grows you’re able to charge more to these advertisers (give them traffic and many of them will stick with you). It also shows other advertisers that you’re attracting advertisers (which can stimulate new advertising).

Read more about Finding Advertisers for your Blog

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1 week ago today I launched a new blog called TwiTip here on ProBlogger. In that launch post I documented some of the setup process that I’d already gone though (hosting, design, content, promotion etc). In a subsequent post I also outlined 10 WordPress plugins that I’d installed.

It has been 7 days since I launched it now and since I’m getting a lot of questions about how it is going and what I’m doing on the blog I thought I’d give a quick update on what I’ve done since and how the blog has performed.

Plugins and Features

While I’d already installed a few plugins over the last week I’ve added a few more including:

• Outbrain - a post rating plugin. You can see it in operation on single posts (at the end of posts). It allows users to rate posts and also suggests other reading that readers might find relevant (from both your own blog and other blogs). I’m still testing it but so far reader feedback has been good. My only concern with it is that there’s no way to control what other sites it recommends (you can switch that feature off) and it has recommended posts from a site that I didn’t think was that relevant to my readers on at least one occasion. Hopefully this will improve in time. Outbrain also gives a ‘popular post’ widget which I’ve added to the sidebar as well as some useful internal reports on what posts on your blog are connecting most with readers (see below).

• RSS Footer - a plugin I’ve been wanting to test for a while. This inserts a link (or any html really) into the footer of each post in your RSS feed that allows you to add a link back to your blog. This is useful when scrapers take your feed and put it on their blog without any attribution. While most bloggers try to stop other bloggers doing this it means that at least if they do do it that there’s a good chance you’ll at least get a link back and some attribution.
• FeedFlares - I’ve added a number of Feeburner ‘Feedflares’ to my RSS feed including a ‘Twit This’ and ‘Stumble it’ feature to help subscribers pass on the content to others.
• Feedburner Counter - I mentioned in my launch post that i would wait til I hit 1000 subscribers before adding the feedburner counter to the blog. This happened a couple of days back (although I only noticed today) so I’ve added the counter to the sidebar. Hitting this milestone was faster than expected and largely due to my amazing Twitter followers spreading the word about TwiTip.

Content

In my launch post I mentioned that I didn’t think I’d be updating TwiTip more than 2-3 times a week. That has turned out to be wrong - I’ve published 12 already.

This is due to two reasons:

1. I got excited - there’s something about a new blog that gets your creative juiced flowing.
2. Reader Submissions - since launching the blog I’ve had 60 or so offers to write posts for TwiTip. I’ve had to say no to 40 or so of them simply because it would take me two months to publish them all if I did one a day. Having said this - some of the submissions I’ve received are great so there’s definitely enough content on hand for a post a day.

One of the things I’ve been working on over the last few days is a editorial calendar of sorts (or at least the beginning of one). One of the temptations when you start getting offers for guest posts is to just accept anything and everything. The problem with this is that you end up with a blog that doesn’t build momentum.

What I’ve been working on in the last day or two is a list of posts that I want to publish. This way I’m setting more of the agenda for where the blog will go rather than just letting guest bloggers do that (as great as they are in the long run I’m the one with the vision for the blog). Once I’ve determined topics I’ve gone in search of people to write them.

I’ve also been thinking through a few regular ‘types’ of posts that I want to feature. For example I want to interview some top Tweeters on how they use Twitter. I also want to try doing to do some user reviews. Having these consistent types of posts will hopefully help readers to know what they’re getting and will help develop a rhythm for the blog.

Polls/Reader Questions

One of the things that has brought real life to the blog are the polls I’ve run so far. I installed WP-Polls early on and I love some of the options it gives to rotate numerous polls in a sidebar (as well as putting them into posts). The polls have been really successful at drawing people into the blog and getting things a bit more interactive.

Similarly I’ve made sure that each post has questions for readers (quite a few of the titles even have questions in them) and even had a post that was purely a chance for readers to have their say (this one on Twitter Tools). It’s important to me to build the most interactive and participatory blog as I can - it seems to be working with some great discussions so far.

Traffic and Promotion

So how’s TwiTip performed so far in terms of traffic?

One of the things that has been quite different for me with this blog is that I’ve spent very little time so far on ‘promotion’. Outside of a few tweets and two posts here at ProBlogger (three now) I’ve not really done anything for promotion.

The reason for this is partly that I’ve been swamped with work and partly because I’m fortunate enough to have a couple of other places of presence to leverage (my Twitter account and ProBlogger). Both of these have crossover with TwiTip topic wise and both are read by others who are willing to pass on news of the new site.

This is of course different to most bloggers starting out but illustrates a principle that is important - ‘leveraging any other online presence you already have‘ to promote your blog (something that gets easier with time of course).

In terms of actual traffic numbers to the blog in its first week Google Analytics reports the following (click to enlarge):

There was obviously a surge on day 1 and 2 when the launch happened and the last day is incomplete (still a few hours to go). Page views per visit should increase a little as more posts get added to the site and ‘new visits’ will obviously fall in time as people subscribe and become regulars.

In terms of where traffic has been coming from - let me give you a screen grab of the top 10 referrals from my WP stats plugin:

As you can see the biggest referrer was Twitter itself, ProBlogger’s launch post has driven some nice traffic, there was a little social bookmarking traffic over the weekend and a growing amount from Google Reader (and other feed readers).

Other Activities

Starting a new blog brings with it a variety of activities. I find that it is a bit of a hectic couple of weeks as you tweak, experiment, remember to do things and see what works. A couple of others things that I’ve done since last time I wrote:

Claimed blog on Technorati - TwiTip was already being indexed on Technorati but I claimed it as my own earlier today and set it up with some tags.

Secured @twitip - one of the things that I had been trying to do since before launching was getting in touch with the owner of the registered but unused @twitip twitter account. It’s hard to get in touch with someone who has registered an account but doesn’t update it. You can’t Direct Message them (as they need to be following you) and there is no real way of finding out who is behind the account (unless you know someone at Twitter). I did try to get in touch with Twitter but had no response but over the weekend I did a public @reply to the account and surprisingly the owner got back to me.

They were willing to do a trade on the user name. I gave them some of my time and they gave me @twitip but also @twittip (double ‘t’) and also a domain www.twittip.com (which I had previously tried to get but was already taken). I’m still not sure what to do with the twitter user names and at this point they just point people to @problogger (my main Twitter account). I’ll probably use @twitip to broadcast updates from the blog.

SEO Tweaks - Thesis (the theme I’m using) is great to use and well set up by default - but there have been a few tweaks that I’ve been doing. These are partly around the All-in-One SEO plugin - particularly around how title tags and meta tags are showing up on posts (although nothing too major).

Interestingly there’s already a trickle of Google traffic coming into the blog. I don’t really expect much of this for some time now (and it’ll go up and down as Google works out how to index the site) - I take a long term view of SEO - no rush here and no need to push it faster than will happen naturally as I add content and as others link to the blog.

Next Steps

The next phase of TwiTip is really to knuckle down and keep developing great content. This includes writing a few of my own posts as well as editing and liaising with those doing guest posts. Outside of this not a lot will probably change with the way that the blog is set up in the short term (although I’m toying with the idea of getting a logo designed).

I will probably add RSS to email and email newsletter options at some point (although not for a bit) and will work towards a custom design - but I’m in no rush for these as I have a few other design projects to get done first on DPS. Really the main task for TwiTip now is about content, community and a little promotional work.

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