Answer: Whatever is the most original at the time.

Since the earliest days of blogging, the most popular sites have always been the most original.  I do not necessarily mean the most original writing, pictures, videos, or designs.  Although, that certainly helps.

The most popular blogs have always been the ones with the most focused, original subject matters.

Until the early 2000′s, there were no such thing as a “politics blog” or “tech blog.”  That meant that early political blogs like DailyKos and FireDogLake were extremely popular.  Why?  There wasn’t anyone doing it at the time.  As crazy as it sounds, a politics blog was something that would have been considered niche for a pseudo news site.

Once political blogs started to surge in popularity, they became a dime a dozen.  In order to compete, sites like DailyKos had to continue to improve the quality of their content since they were now competing for a share of each user’s attention.

Today, all the major subject areas are saturated with sites all writing about and saying the same things.  The more niche, focused, and original your subject is, the better the chance of standing out.

It is almost impossible to launch a general interest, cooking, mommy, gossip, political, news, or sports blog and actually expect to get huge traffic.

You’ve got to take your subject layers deeper in search of originality.

If you want to start a general sports site, don’t.  Instead, pick team.  Pick a sports town.  Pick a player.

The more niche you are, the easier to make a name for yourself.  The tent will be much less crowded while you get up and running.  This will help you actually get the initial traction you need to build an audience.

Speaking of audience, don’t be afraid that being too niche will limit your audience.  First, you would be surprised how many people are searching specifically for content related to that niche.  Secondly, users appreciate a site with clear focus.  They like it so much that they come back often.

Overall, it doesn’t matter what subject matter you are passionate about, just pick one.  Then, dig deep. Take ownership of your own little corner in that subject.

Be original.  Do it well.  The traffic will follow.

When I was taking my journalism classes in college, I haaaated AP Style.  For the record, I do not pretend to be a good writer at all.  In fact, I’m barely passable.

I wrote some pretty damn good stories in college but lost many grade points because of AP Style errors.  AP Style became the focus of my hatred for print media.  I enjoy reading print stories, but knew it would never be my profession.

Now that blogs, Twitter, and Facebook lead American news dissemination, how much does strict AP conformity really matter?

Not at all

There is an argument to be made that journalists should be taught both.  I can’t really disagree. However, that’s nearly impossible for many of us.

Most people have the capacity to learn one, maybe two writing styles, and actually be good at them.  Your first is the everyday email style of writing.  That’s really what I would consider most of my blogging; halfway decent streams of thought.

Second would be your more formal article style writing.  Straight forward and clear, but not worrying much about AP Style.

Then there is this third category of New York Times style.  The apex AP Style.  

Writing for SEO is an art just like AP Style

Assuming that the brain typically has the capacity to handle only a couple of writing styles, (casual and formal) where’s the room for AP and SEO?

If you are not the type to focus on things like SEO, let me just tell you that article writing for SEO is an art form that is just as hard to master as AP Style.  It takes a lot of time and effort to even become remotely successful at SEO.

SEO is far more important to learn today than AP.  SEO is what will help get you that first job, and earn you that first promotion because of all your ninja SEO skills.

If I had to cut classes due to a lack of patience and frustration, I would cut the AP Style course.  AP can be learned later in life.  There’s no learning curve or shelf life to worry about.  The AP Style hardly ever makes significant changes to their overall spec.

SEO strategies and best practices change multiple times a week.  Journalists must learn SEO today to stay on top of their game.

Choosing the better of the two evils

If you are registering for classes and only have room for one course, choose the SEO class with the geeks.  It will pay off sooner than the AP Style class full of media elitists.  And remember, you can always learn AP later.

Lastly, and most importantly, don’t forget to hire me when you see my resume cross your desk.

This year, I was asked to speak about the importance of web analytics platforms.  One of my sessions featured my Top 10 web analytics platforms that I believe everyone should know.

The Top 10 Web Analytics Platforms are in no particular order.  Also, it is important to note that I do not think that you should use all of them.  Instead, you should pick your favorites, and go with it.  But make sure you know a little about all of them.

#1 – Google Analytics

google.com/analytics

Shockingly obvious, yes.  However, the analytics beginner may not fully appreciate the power of this platform since it is ubiquitous to the industry.  This fall, we saw GA release realtime analytics (finally!).  Realtime analysis makes the platform more appealing to “newsroom” style publishers.

#2 – GetClicky

getclicky.com

Still my favorite all around analytics platform.  I’ve used it for years, and it has never let me down.  GetClicky has offered realtime analytics since virtually day one.  The platform has continued to evolve including rich extensions such as an app for iPhone and iPad.  For “newsroom” applications, they have released a big screen mode that basically takes over the full screen of your machine with realtime site traffic.  Also has a robust solution for advertising and marketing tracking with no-fuss reporting.  

#3 – Chartbeat

chartbeat.com

The undisputed leader in realtime traffic analytics.  Since its debut, Chartbeat showed the power of understanding how your content was being consumed at the very moment it is consumed.  With the release of Newsbeat (for newsrooms), Chartbeat positions itself squarely as the homepage of digital news directors everywhere.  No other platform will help you to make data driven changes to your group of lead stories like Chartbeat can.  A must for news, gossip, and “immediacy” focused content publishers.

#4 – Klout

klout.com

Today’s digital ninjas need to go beyond the data provided by their owned and operated domains.  Understanding you and your brands social influence is critical for successful digital professionals.  Klout will help you understand, track, and grow your digital influence in any number of categories.  Anyone with a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Four Square account has a Klout Score.  At the time of this posting, mine is a healthy 48 (of 100). One of the most impressive social media products launched to date.

#5 – Quantcast

quantcast.com

In keeping with the natural evolution of digital data geeks everywhere, you want to know how your site ranks compared to its peers.  Quantcast acts as one of the Internet’s premier “freemium” ratings and ranking services.  All sites with statistically significant traffic find their way into the Quantcast database.  Proactive webmasters can place a free Quantcast script on their site to allow direct measurement.  In addition to tracking and publicly reporting your site’s overall reach, Quantcast breaks your traffic down demographically and geographically.  Publishers can quickly and easily see what mix of gender, race, incomes, and education levels visit their sites.  And so can potential advertisers.

#6 – Compete

Compete.com

At its core, Compete is similar to Quantcast in its tracking and audience aggregation methodology.  However, it focuses more on being a resource for advertisers to looking to target specific audiences with their ads.  Compete offers a suite of advertising planning tools to its customers that help evaluate overall campaign efficiency.  The focus is no surprise since it is owned by Kantar Media, the data geek nerve center for worldwide advertising conglomerate WPP.  Both Quantcast and Compete are important reference points for publishers because these are the tools that your advertisers (aka the ones keeping the lights on) use to evaluate your site.

#7 – Sitemeter

Sitemeter.com

Ahhh Sitemeter.  Ohh how those of us that have been in the industry since the dawn of blogging love you.  You were there for us when there was nothing else [free] available.  Sitemeter is one of the older free analytics services.  It offers a standard but thorough analytics dashboard that provides everything the startup publisher would ever need.  They also aggregate and rank publishers that use the service.  Your Sitemeter ranking used to be something that bloggers bragged about.  Those were the days…

#8 – Sprout Social

sproutsocial.com

As mentioned earlier, social media now finds its home in the wheelhouse of every serious publisher.  When publishing content, you must now understand how to market it in the social graph, and analyze what comes back.  In addition to providing a truly comprehensive suite of social publishing tools, Sprout Social also analyzes every aspect of every tweet and status update.  Keep track of every new follower, every retweet, and Facebook share with Sprout.  You’ll quickly be able to track what content you publish gets shared the most.  Before long, you’ll be a viral publishing machine.

#9 – SEO Moz

SEOMoz.org

Arguably the best one-stop-shop for every SEO tool you could ever need.  In addition to understanding visitor site traffic and social media, great publishers understand how the Google overlords view their content.  Publishing great content is the most important thing you will ever do in this game.  Sadly, that does not always bring the eyeballs.  SEO Moz will give you actionable advice on how to structure your site overall as well as analyze the Google-mojo of every content post.

#10 – comScore

comscore.com

It is with mixed emotions that we place comScore on this list.  For most publishers, comScore will never factor into their day-to-day activities directly.  However, it will be the bane of your career every time your advertising sales managers come down to your office to discuss this month’s comScore ranking.  comScore is the default advertising rating service that the vast majority of online marketers utilize.  With billions of dollars being spent advertising online, the industry needs a common set of benchmark evaluations.  comScore will rank your site’s traffic, reach, page views, and demographic makeup in order to provide a rating”.  Your site’s comScore profile will often mean the difference between gaining or losing advertisers.  Again, it will not factor into the day-to-day activities of publishing your content.  However, a positive comScore story can mean serious revenue wins.

That’s not all…

There are dozens of other great services that did not make this list.  By no means would I consider this list to mean anything other a grouping of services I have grown to respect, and in some cases, cannot live without.

If you feel I’ve made an egregious mistake by leaving a certain platform off of this list, please post it in the comments below.  Let’s start a discussion!

Eventually, they stop going because they are actually interested in the conference.  Instead they go for two things: validation and socializing.  That’s it.

We could skip the conference and business part and just get to the giant “prom” of geeky bloggers.

In the early days when people start getting into web publishing, they attend conferences to truly learn things and network with others.  Typically, I would go to learn more about a specific subject like layout, organic traffic, and advertising.

After a while though, you really have learned all you’ll ever learn at these conferences and trade shows (doesn’t take long!). But for whatever reason, you just keep going every year.

The shows become this weird annual reunion of otherwise strangers.  No one has any intention of actually working the show floor.  Maybe just to visit an old rep or seek out that hot new vendor.  If you’re smart, you know which vendors are having private parties or have drink tickets, and you become friends with them.  For free drinks, most will swim through the soup of trade show nerds.

None of the veterans have any plans of attending the conference sessions to see speakers other than those led by their blogger buddies.

The rest is just a giant get together.  People compare notes, bitch about Google/SEO, compare how big theirs is [traffic that is], etc.

For a lot of guys, these events are their only social outlets for the year.  It is only among these people that they feel important.

If you’ve read this far, I’m sorry.  I didn’t really have a point other than to make note of my observation.  Really, I’ve just noticed the quality of the events and quality of attendees really drop of in the last couple of years.  I believe this is why.

Photo credit.

Source: Facebook.com

You officially have 29 days to prep your business’ Facebook page for the conversion to Timeline.  That’s right, Facebook has officially announced that current Pages will be converted to “Timeline” mode on March 30th.  No, the change is not optional.

Timeline has been controversial.  Ironically, there is a Facebook Page called “Facebook Timeline Sucks.”  Little do they know how goofy that will look in 4 weeks.

If you have a Facebook page for your blog, you have until the end of the month to preview, prepare, end edit your page for Timeline deployment.  If you are ready to go, you can even push it live ahead of time.  However, after March 30th, it will automatically switch to Timeline mode forever.

Love it or hate it, Timeline does offer Page owners some handy new features.

You will now be able to take advantage of the large “Cover Photo” across the top of the page that you see in personal profiles using Timeline today.

Messaging is finally coming to Pages.  In the current (old) version of Pages, users were unable to send the brand a private message like you can to real people.  Now, users will be able to communicate directly and privately with the Page/Brand.

In the new version, you will also be able to “Pin” things to the top of your page such as maps, events, calendars, etc. giving your page admin some more control over the organization of content.  Pinned posts will also appear a bit larger than the regular status update.

There will also be an enhancement made to the admin dashboard that shows additional usage statistics such as likes, unanswered comments, and other performance indicators all from one page.

Log into your Pages today and see how your brand Page will look in preview mode.  Then get to work!

In this post I am going to lay out a blueprint for you that you can follow step-by-step and then in later posts I will give you more details on how to actually set up each of these methods to maximize their impact on your traffic stats.

1. Do the preparation steps in the previous blog post.
2. Write five articles related to your niche – this is not as hard as it seems – you can simply rewrite your blog posts to create unique articles.
3. Use Camtasia Free software and PowerPoint presentation slides to create videos out of your article content – don’t mind being in front of the camera?  Then use that, but you want to create five videos based on your five articles and you will need five PowerPoint presentation slide shows for traffic generation as well.
4. Create an audio file of all five of your articles.  If your article content is quite short just make one audio file including the information in all five articles.

Okay so at this point you will have five articles, five videos, five PowerPoint presentation slide shows, and at least one audio file.  All of these files will contain backlinks to your site and if you can include a call to action (without sounding spammy) in the content as well all the better.  Now you have to get these out on the net.

The Articles

Your articles are going to provide a hub for the rest of your traffic efforts.  Firstly you want to submit them to Ezinearticles.com.  Unless you are a premium member this is going to take a few days for the articles to be approved.  You are also going to submit your articles to the following sites:

• Goarticles.com
• SubmitYourArticles.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• Freenichetopics.com

But wait until your articles have been approved on Ezinearticles.com first – EZA does not like duplicate content.  Don’t forget to ping your article links (the actual link of the page your article is on) as well as Stumble it, Twitter it and put the link up on Facebook.

Next you want to find some graphics to go with your article content and then head over to Squidoo.com and set up five lenses using your article content and the pictures you have collected.  Each article will make an individual lens.  If you have not made a Squidoo Lens before then check out the help tutorials they have on their site which are very good or courses by people like Tiffany Dow or the PotPieGirl.  Again once you have your lenses finished then ping them and use your social media links to put the word out about them.

Well that should be enough to keep you going for the moment.  In the next post I will explain more things you can do with your articles and also where to post the other content that I had you create.

Setting the Groundwork

Getting prepared for traffic to your site is something that you should be thinking off from the moment you install WordPress on your new domain.  Before you start generating traffic you want to make sure that you have installed all of the plug-ins outlined in our previous post here [Link to 5 Essential Plug-ins You Blog Must have].  To keep Google happy your site will need to have a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions Page and a Contact page at the very least.  You should also make sure that you have a minimum of three blog posts on your blog, with more scheduled or planned before you put this traffic plan into place.  Ideally you should aim for one new blog post for your blog daily for about a month, and then at least three times a week thereafter so that your blog always has good fresh content coming in.

Setting Up Backlinks

If you are not familiar with SEO then it is unlikely that you have come across the term “Backlinks” before but these are a vital part of your blogging success.  In a nutshell backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your blog, or a specific blog post.  The more backlinks your blog has the more valuable it is considered by Google and other search engines.  So you need to set up a system to start generating backlinks as quickly as you can.

Warning: There are a lot of companies online that claim they can get you hundreds or even thousands of backlinks for the price of a cup of coffee – Do not use these methods.  They are considered spam and can get your blog banned from Google permanently if you use these “Black Hat” methods.

Your pinging will already be creating backlinks for you but you can go a lot further with this.   Just some of the methods you can use include

• Putting articles on article directory sites like Ezinearticles and GoArticles
• Putting up videos on YouTube and other video sites (TubeMogul is good for this)
• Creating audio files and placing them on sites like iTunes
• Blog commenting on other blogs in your niche
• Forum posting on relevant forums in your niche
• Posting an ebook of your content on free ebook sites like Free-ebooks.net
• Setting up related pages on Squidoo.com and HubPages
• RSS feeds
• Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon

Now before you go thinking that this could be a lot of work, remember that you can outsource a lot of these tasks and as we will show you in the next blog post – a lot of these ideas come from recycling and repackaging content you have already created.  See you on the next post.

Read Part Two

1. WP-FBConnect: This plugin adds the Facebook functionality to WordPress Blogs through Facebook Connect APIs. To use this plugin you have to link your Facebook account to your WordPress and then sign into it again. This will allow you to publish comments through the Facebook newsfeed and avatars displayed in the comments field using WordPress.
2. Add to Facebook: This plugin provides a link at the bottom of your blog posts for users to click on. Once they click on this link they can add the post they are currently on to the mini-feed on their Facebook home page. All they will need to do is sign into their Facebook account.
3. Facebook Dashboard Widget: You have to be interactive on Facebook, and this application provides you with all the updates from friends. This widget allows users to work with both Facebook and WordPress to keep you updated about friends even if Facebook is blocked.
4. Facebook Comments: This is a very useful plugin which imports all the comments made about your post which were shared on Facebook. These comments will be posted directly into your WordPress blogs so that you don’t miss any of the comments.
5. Facebook Photos Plugin: Everyone likes images on posts; it makes them interesting, attractive and sometimes help people understand things better. This plugin helps you by making it easy to add photos to your blog posts. You simply have to link your plugins to your Facebook account using the WordPress blog. Once this is done, whenever you edit old or new posts in WordPress, a new icon in “Add Media Section” will appear. You will be able to see the uploaded photos in your Facebook account by clicking on the new icon visible on your screen. You will be able to insert your images as small sized, medium sized and large sized images. You can also align the images if you want.
6. Gigya: This is a very important plugin and all its features are configurable using the WordPress Administration Panel. Once you use this plugin you can enjoy secure signup and login to your website. Additionally you will be able to update your status on different social media sites and invite your friends to the different social media sites to join your blog.

Beyond doubt, WordPress is the best blogging platform anyone can use with Facebook.

To utilize this function in your WP blog you need to go to “Settings” in your admin panel and click on “Writing” in the drop down menu that comes up.

This will bring you up a page like the one above.  You need to scroll down this page until you find…

You won’t have anything in this block when you install your new blog – you have to find a ping list to copy and paste into it.  To help you here are ten you can include by simply copying the links below and pasting them into that box:

Make sure that when you paste them into this box that there is only one link per line – you don’t have to put commas after them.

Now just click save and then every time you update or create a page or blog post all of the sites listed in your ping list will be notified.   Subscribers to those sites, who are interested in your particular area of expertise will be notified automatically about your new content and before long you will have plenty of new people coming along to your site, to see what you have to say.

For example if you are writing a review on a product or service then your point of view is important.  If you are writing a site on relationship problems and how to solve them, then your own personal experience might be relevant and helpful.  If you write about politics you can be opinionated but if you are updating your workplace blog then third person anecdotes and factual information might be more appropriate.

Personally I share as much of myself as is necessary to get my point across.  If I am writing about “make money tips’ then some of the things I have done and tried would be good examples to use in a post. 

When I write book reviews I give my opinion and the reasons for it.  There are times, like in the relationship niche for example, where I have used life experience to illustrate certain points but personally I don’t think that topics like what I had for breakfast, what I watched on TV last night, or what my mates and I got up to at the beach last summer is really important – because none of my blog topics are based on television programs, food or hijinks.

There are times when the personal approach is a good one.  Rori Raye, on her relationship sites gives a lot of personal stories about how she changed the state of her marriage by following the advice that she sells – heaven’s her business is based on it.  Tiffany Dow who is a well-known Internet Marketer shoots little videos of her dog, Honey, and puts them on her blog along with the more useful information – her readers love it.  John Chow is another successful blogger who actually does video trips he goes on with his family, places he goes to lunch and things like that – his readers love that he shares these aspects of his life along with really useful information about how others can succeed online.

So what is the point of this blog post?  Well that is simple.  To give you the same answer that I would give anybody else – it depends on the topic of your blog.  Another couple of tips I would suggest given that large corporations and employers now do searches on the internet for references to their employees (or applicants) is don’t post anything online you would not want to share in a job interview – because you will never know when that embarrassing photo someone took of you last summer will show up on your Facebook page.