Ben Tremblay

I recently integrated a forum into one of my WordPress blog and it really is a great thing to add if you have a “hot topic” people are talking about a lot. I will talk about a forum platform that integrates very well with wordpress for a good reason: it was developed by WordPress developers!

Tell me!

I’m actually surprised no one really talked about it because it deserve the spotlight. The web application I’m talking about is called bbPress. bbPress can be installed without a WordPress blog, but for that we already have some good forum platforms like vBulleting and phpBB. The real cool thing about bbPress is that it integrates with your WordPress blog’s database. You can share the same users and login so you don’t really have to manage two different things, it’s really an extension of your blog. It supports what made WordPress a success: Templates, easy administration interface and plugins.

Full of features?

bbPress doesn’t have the look of traditional forums running phpBB or vBulletin, it looks a little bit lighter but it doesn’t mean less features. Users can have their own avatar or Gravatar, you can have users with different levels of security, they can also add signatures, smiles and all that good stuff you would expect from a forum. If it doesn’t have the feature you want, there’s probably a plugin doing it. It’s really like wordpress. When you look at wordpress without any plugins it’s a good platform, but nothing that impressive. It’s really when you start customizing your template and adding plugins that you understand its power. If you want to have a look at what a forum might look like, you can have a look here:

http://bbpress.org/about/examples/

In the examples you will find the wordpress.org support forums and also the technorati.com support forums. These are two pretty big and important forums so even if bbPress looks light at first sight, it’s packed with features and can scale to a very large forum very easily.

Here’s the official features list from bbPress.org:

• Fast and light

  We keep our code lean so that you get the best experience possible.

• Simple interface

  One of our biggest goals is to keep things simple and make things intuitive. Our dream is that you forget you’re even using the software.

• Customizable templates

  Not everybody likes the same pair of pants, so we allow you to dress up your forums however you like.

• Highly extensible

  bbPress can’t toast your bagels, but a plugin for it sure could!

• Spam protection

  A bundled Akismet plugin offers you an amazing weapon against spam.

• RSS Feeds

  You want feeds? We get ‘em; they’re everywhere.

• Easy integration with your blog

  WordPress and bbPress are siblings, and they get along together a lot better than you and your brother did when you were kids!

So there you go, you can now integrate a nice forum into your wordpress blog without too much pain!

It’s hard to find a balance between posting 5 articles a day to fill your blog with content and post an extremely good article once in a while. Both ways will kill your blog/website, so it’s extremely important to keep that balance and give your posts the proper time to live!

The mad blogger

The mad blogger post 5-10 articles a day and while the website looks to be filled with content, that content is usually “filler posts” (Not so unique posts just to fill some space). Why is it bad to do that? Well, I’m not saying it’s totally bad because I guess it might work for some websites. Again, it’s a case of “it depends what your website is about”: if you have a news website, of course you should post 5,10,15 articles a day, it’s your job! But let’s say you own a ‘regular’ blog about a particular subject you have some good knowledge of and that your goal is to spread that knowledge and make some money while you’re doing it. If you write five articles a day about your subject, not only you will run out of ideas eventually, but you are not going to market any article. It’s good to spend 5 hours a day writing tons and tons of articles, but what’s the point if no one’s reading them? You have to spend some of that time marketing these articles. By publishing too much content and not having much traffic, you are killing your ideas.

What’s great about writing a blog is to know people read you and also comment on your blog because they like what you do. When you end up on a blog you don’t know, I’m sure you check the average number of comments on the blog just to estimate the website’s popularity. Popularity is extremely important to a lot of users, they like to be part of something, a community. Posting 5 to 10 articles per day on a website not getting a huge amount of traffic will split your comments into these 5-10 posts, making maybe 10 articles with one comment on each. While you have some readers commenting, it’s not that impressive for a new user.

The lazy blogger

The lazy blogger is the complete opposite. I won’t go into details as I’m sure you get the idea. The main thing to understand is that being lazy and not updating the content is not a better idea. While you may end up with a lot more comments on each of your posts, new users will see you don’t update your website too often and this is usually a turn off. We like fresh content don’t we?

The balance is hard to get

I try to stay on a one post a day routine to keep fresh content coming in but also to maximize the number of comments I get per article. I know sometimes it tends toward a 1 post every two days routine, but that’s simply because I don’t want to write crap: if I don’t have time or ideas to write, I simply don’t write and so far it’s never been a major problem in my blogging experience. I try to write quality, not quantity and I’ve talked about it in a previous post: Don’t write just to write something. I also try to let people know about my new blog posts and I give my them the time to live. This way, the articles get some exposure, you haven’t spent your precious time writing for nothing and you maximize your comments possibility.

I guess the way to go is to write the amount you are able to write every day without feeling like you don’t know what to write about. You also have to keep some time to market your new articles, otherwise you are writing for nothing! If you are filled with ideas and could write 20 articles, spare some ideas and you get yourself almost a month worth of ideas on a one post a day routine.

Bottom line is that the balance is extremely hard to get. The best way is to go with what feels natural for you.

Here’s a problem I know some people would like to have to handle, because having too many comments on a post also usually means your blog is popular. It’s nice to have a popular blog with popular articles and people commenting a lot, but trust me it can become a huge problem.

I recently had to face that situation:

It’s a huge load of comments to handle and while it’s fun to know people like what you write, it’s a pain for first time visitors. First time visitors comming from Google have to wait for the page to load and it’s a pain. Not only the visitors have to wait, but with a 1Mb page it hurts the bandwith a lot!

How to handle it?

The solution is the WordPress paged comments plugin. This little plugin allows you to have paged comments on your blog instead of having a single page with hundreds of comments. You can decide how many comments you want per page, how to order the comments, etc. There’s even a CSS sheet included with the plugin that you can modify to fit your template. I decided to display only 25 comments per page and the article went from 1Mb to 80kb. Quite an interesting improvement for the bandwidth and also for the poor users!

So there you go, now you can handle the popularity of your blog. I hope you will face that problem!

I will share a little trick with you guys today to increase your technorati authority simply by commenting on blogs. It’s simple and works like magic. I’m not bothering too much about Technorati for this blog so I haven’t put that technique to use with SEO Horror, but I did it with other blogs.

1. Technorati introduction

First of all, to understand how to increase your Technorati authority, you have to understand how the Technorati authority is calculated, right?

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

All right, so it’s all about getting backlinks again. Damn backlinks. The good news is that it’s easier to get real backlinks with Technorati than with Google. The reason is that technorati don’t care about a link being ‘no follow’ or ‘do follow’: a link is a link! The problem though is that Technorati only takes in consideration backlinks coming from blogs registered with Technorati, but most blogs are so it’s usually not a problem.

2. Comment

Commenting is the easiest way to get backlinks from Technorati, but not by commenting the usual way. A regular comment on a blog won’t give you a backlink from Technorati because when the owner of the blog actually “ping” Technorati to say “Hey, here’s my new post”, there are no comments on the article. So it doesn’t matter if you comment because Technorati won’t go back and check for new links. The question is, how can you get an increase in authority by commenting?

That is fairly simple and it’s called “Top commentator” or “Recent commentator” plugins. You will find these plugins on a lot of blogs and they simply are plugins showing the top commentators for the blog and also the 5-10 most recent comments. I use them on my blog and you can see the “Top commentators” in the footer. How to exploit these plugins? Well, by becoming a top commentator on a blog, you will appear on every single page of the blog. What does that mean? It means that everytime Technorati will visit a blog you are a top commentator on, it will see your link on the blog and that makes a +1 blog reaction for you!

3. Real life examples

Here are some real life examples:

We see that what was picked up by Technorati is the top commentators part of the blog and I was actually a top commentator at the time!

Now, we see that what Technorati picked up was the Recent Comments part of the blog and luckily, my comment was a recent comment at the time!

These two examples actually gave me an increase in authority just by commenting, which is something I do anyway!

Being a top commentator is dead easy

I know you are thinking you don’t have 15 hours a day to become a top commentator on all these blogs! The thing you have to know is that the top commentator plugin usually resets every month. That means everything starts fresh on the first of every month and you can be a top commentator with a single comment! On the first of each month, visit a couple of new blogs and comment as you would normally do. On the next blog post, if you are still a top commentator it means a +1 authority for you!

That’s it, it’s as simple as that. You guys might have other strategies to increase your Technorati authority and feel free to share that with us!

Aright folks, let’s put aside the serious stuff and let’s have fun a little bit. You know, I like to teach you stuff or tell you what not to do and I might actually post a little something about that later today, but I have a funny thing today for you guys.

Part of blogging is to accept you’ll receive tons and tons of spam. Sometimes, spammers are actually good at writing general enough statements so you believe these are actually related to your post and approve the comment. I call them the Nostradamus of spam: write general enough statements so that even 500 years later, people can relate them to actual events. That’s what being a Nostradamus of spam is, even in 500 years, a blogger could question himself if he should or should not approve the comment! Now, Saturday I got spammed by the opposite of the Nostradamus of spam! Let’s have a look at the comment I received:

Saturday In searching for sites related to AdSense but more specifically to %KEYWORD, I found your site which has great content.

Man, this thing is funny! The dumb dude forgot to change the spam template and replace %KEYWORD% with his own keywords. That’s what I certainly call a failure.

When spamming like that, you know you’ll probably get 98% rejection, but this case is a case of 100% rejection rate. I just wanted to share that with you guys. You too might have some funny spam stories, so feel free to share them!

I want to make a brief post about how Alexa ranking is inaccurate and might not be that good at getting a decent traffic estimate. I’m pretty sure everyone here is familiar with Alexa, but if you are new to SEO/Internet Marketing, you might wonder what I’m talking about so here’s a short description from Alexa’s website:

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

So you see, Alexa analyze the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and that’s their main source for traffic analysis.

Why isn’t accurate?

I run a couple of websites and I obviously like to compare how they are doing against each other. They aren’t in the same niche, but i still like to have a look at the ranking in Alexa vs the traffic I get. The past few weeks confirmed what I thought: Alexa is not accurate. For example, let’s take one of my older website which actually receive 50x more visitors than SEO Horror. Yes, you read correctly, 50 times more visitors daily than SEO Horror, so it’s interesting to have look at the rankings!

here’s how seohorror.com looks in Alexa:

Wow that’s not bad for a website about a month old. We have to look at the 1 week average because the 3 months average isn’t really any good for me now as seohorror.com has only been live for a month or so. I’ve had a couple of days in the top 100 and now it looks like I’m mostly between 100,000 and 150,000 on a constant basis. I’m OK with that.

Now, let’s see how my other website with 50 times more traffic than SEO Horror compare:

What’s that? I’m ranked 556,812 this week! I mean, 50 times more traffic and I’m poorly ranked. You see how inaccurate it is!

Why does it look so inaccurate?

The reason it looks so inaccurate between my two websites is because they aren’t in the same niche. The visitors at SEO Horror are SEO/Web marketers and there are good chances you guys use the Alexa toolbar. If 50% of my readers use the Alexa Toolbar, it will certainly boost my rankings because a normal percentage could be something like 0.5% of the readers. Now, on my other blog, which is definitely not aimed at techies, nobody uses the Alexa toolbar and nobody has a single clue what this toolbar is all about. So even if I receive 50 times more traffic, because nobody use the toolbar, I get a poor ranking.

Is it any good then?

It’s good to compare with websites within your niche. For example, if I compare my blog with another SEO blog, then it makes a little more sense when I look at the numbers. If I take a look at a cooking recipe website, then it doesn’t make any sense to compare. Alexa is mainly used as a traffic estimate and to put a price on how much you’ll sell advertisement on your website. If your Alexa ranking is good, you can usually sell advertisement a little more, especially if you’re in the top 100. So, the bottom line is that it’s so much easier to get a good ranking in Alexa with a tech/SEO/internet marketing blog!

So, you can continue to use Alexa to check your website progression, but it’s definitely not everything as you just saw. 50 times more traffic does not mean 50 times better ranking….In fact it can be the complete opposite as you just saw!

You’ve got your website nicely setup, a custom theme, lots of content, a nice income coming in everyday without you doing much but still…NO BACKUP! What’s that? I’ve seen that too often and I have to go through the importance of a full backup for your websites! The subject has been covered before, it will be covered in the future but I steel feel like writing about it. It’s my blog after all, you know: if I feel it’s good, I write about it.

Why no backup?

You know you have to, but still you don’t do it! I could go and tell you: “I learned it the hard way, you know. My website got hacked, then I lost everything, blah blah blah”, but you know all that don’t you? It seems like there’s no argument to convince people to backup their website, only a bad experience can convince them. I’ve warned many persons and told them they should do a full backup of their websites just in case something goes wrong but it’s really a low priority until something bad happens. Then at least I can say “I told you”, but it doesn’t help much. Designing a new theme, writing a post or coding a new little tool for your website is always more attracting than making a backup and that’s why most people don’t backup. There’s always something better to do!

It takes 5 mins, once a week

I backup all my stuff once a week, but I must admit I haven’t done it for the past three weeks because I’ve been so busy. What? Too busy? It only takes five minutes, and I wrote a new article everyday in the past three weeks as well as commenting on other blogs and doing some link building. OK, time wasn’t an issue, there was just so many better things to do! You see how we always come to that.

Anyway, the point is that I usually backup once a week and it takes a little 5 minutes. Five minutes per week isn’t that much compared to the time you’ll lose if something goes wrong. I like a new backup every week and I feel it’s the perfect timing. A week of work is the maximum amount of information I feel comfortable loosing without feeling the need to kill myself. How much information is your life worth?

What to backup?

A full backup for me is a backup of the files on my server with a dump of the database as well as an export of my posts via WordPress. If you’re not running a blog, you simply need to backup the files on your server and your database. There are a lot of ways to do that kind of backup. If you use CPanel with your host, CPanel offers a backup function so you can backup the combination of your database and files (I know I have the old CPanel version, I have to ask for an upgrade…):

And then:

Then, the process will start and you’ll receive a notification via email when the backup is complete. It shouldn’t take too long if you have a relatively small account. Then, when the backup is complete, a single .zip file will be generated with all the information on you host!

Have a blog? At least export your posts!

Let’s say you’re too lazy to backup your stuff and you have a WordPress blog, please export your posts into XML! WordPress has a nice little feature that let you export all your posts and comments into a single XML file that can then be imported back into WordPress. How great is that? It doesn’t backup your theme or anything like that, but a blog is all about content, isn’t it?

Now backup

We spend so many time on our websites, so having a backup is a must! You don’t want to loose everything and start all over again, so take that five minutes now and backup that little gem of yours!

This is the kind of day I had to look at my iPod to figure out what to write (See Always carry notes with you to understand the reference to the iPod!). That’s perfectly fine and that’s why I make note of my ideas, because I forget them. So, here’s a little something I wanted to talk about for some time: short posts. As bloggers, we always feel guilty to write short posts, but short posts are actually OK!

Don’t feel guilty

Don’t feel guilty everytime you write a short post. Why would we always have to write a 2,000 words article? I don’t know, I guess we feel that short = lack of content. While this can be the case, if what you have to say fits in a couple of lines, then don’t feel bad for that. Look at the well know ShoeMoney blog for instance, the guy posted a single line article last week:

A single line! He just wanted to link to an interesting article, does he have to go through a thousand words article just for that? I must admit it could have been at least 3 or 5 lines, but the outcome is the same. Going straight to the point is good and you don’t have to create content where there’s no possibility to do so.

Don’t make it an habit

Again, it’s like everything in life: don’t abuse the concept. It’s OK to write some short posts once in a while if you can easily fit all your ideas in it, but make sure it’s not lacking of content.

I’m going to make it short

I’m not going to make a long article about short article writing. That’s really what I wanted to point out: writing short posts is ok as long as you don’t make it an habit and as you’ve seen, even the big guys do it!

We all have genius ideas that come and go and if you’re like me, you forget half of them. My best ideas come when I’m walking, at the gym or in the car and never when I really try to find one. What’s good is that I don’t have to spend hours thinking, it just comes to me when I don’t expect it, but what’s bad is that a couple of hours later, I don’t remember anything. I learned it the hard way, but now I always carry with me a little something to take notes.

Just take notes

I usually have my ipod touch with me all the time, so that’s what I use to take notes. Because it also act as a PDA and not only an iPod, I’m sure I always have it on me. I even have it with me at the gym because I listen to music so I really carry it everywhere. I usually avoid to have it with me in the pool, but that’s another story. When I think about something I think is a genius idea, I simply make note of it and when I look at the same idea a week later, it might not be a genius idea anymore, but at least I can re-evaluate the idea. On the opposite, when I look at it a week later and feel like it’s the best thing in the world, I’m glad I wrote it down.

Create an ideas backlog

You know these days when you simply don’t know what to write about? Well, it won’t happen anymore if you write down every idea you have. When I don’t know what to write about, I simply read my notes and pick a little something I feel would be good to talk about. This way, I don’t waste two hours just wondering what I should write about and I can take that extra two hours to do some useful stuff for my websites.

Ideas filtering

Have you ever written posts just because you felt you had to write? Have you written posts you weren’t proud of? Well, with an ideas backlog, it also act as an ideas filter. You might write down a hundred of ideas, but only pick five of them in the end because the other 95 weren’t that good after all. This way, you make sure you always write quality content and don’t write impulsive posts. By impulsive posts I’m talking about articles you think are awesome, but when you read them a week later, they aren’t that great anymore.

Bottom line, wether it’s your cell phone, iPod, laptop or a simple piece of paper, always carry a little something with you to write down your ideas.

I feel good right now. For seo horror, which I launched this month, I had a simple goal for the first few months: “Not give a damn about Google”. I know you’ll say it’s pretty dumb for a blog called SEO Horror, not to care about SEO, but In fact I think it’s a pretty good SEO strategy.

Let’s be honest here, I still care a little bit about Google, but only for long term benefits. When launching this blog, I did the traditional SEO tricks: link directories submissions, join social networks, on-page optimization, etc, etc. This means that not caring about Google does not mean not doing SEO. When I say I don’t care about Google, it simply means I don’t give a damn about my rankings so far.

The social strategy

My strategy with this blog is being a lot more active socially than I used to be with other websites and so far it pays off. This initial strategy was to get traffic from alternative sources and with that, the Google traffic will come. You know, it’s extremely hard to make your way into the Internet Marketing business because there are just so many websites out there and so many SEO being done. It’s hard to get good ranking for popular keywords and for that reason, I didn’t want to spend all my free time just to get decent rankings. The way I see it is: if my blog is good enough and that I’m an active blogger, traffic will come from alternative sources like other blogs and social networks. I must admit I’m getting decent traffic from these sources and I’m extremely satisfied.

The John Chow example

I used not to like John Chow and now I must admit his marketing strategy is one of the best out there. John Chow got penalized some time ago by Google for a too aggressive SEO campaign and for that reason, he’s not even ranked for his own search terms “John Chow”. If you type “John Chow” on Google you won’t get johnchow.com in the results for that reason. Then, how do you explain this guy is one of the best known blogger and has some really good traffic? The answer is quite simple: he has Internet Marketing strategies outside of Google. Yes he does use controversy a lot and viral stuff as well but he’s damn good at that.

We can’t all be John Chow

I can’t use a marketing strategy similar to John Chow’s strategy for the simple reason I’m not John Chow. I’m not good at generating controversy like he his and it’s not part of my personality anyway. I know what I’m good at and I use it in my own social strategy. What are your social skills? I know for my part I make friends easily, get a long with mostly everyone, I’m a good marketer and I’m also good at selling stuff in an honest manner. That being said, I know I can’t fake personality traits so I use what I’m good at. Write your social skills on paper and think about how you can use those skills in a social strategy to generate traffic.

Feels good

Not caring about Google feels good because you concentrate on what’s really important: building a network around you. Nobody can act alone in the web Business, you need a network around you. Google won’t give you that network, so you have to build it on your own. Then, the Google rankings will surely come anyway. I used to care too much about Google rankings and forget about what’s really important. Yes, this was giving me good ranking and traffic, but it was not as fun and didn’t have much friends in my niche.

You’re the master of your strategy

In the end, you do what you want. It would be stupid to ignore Google so YOU HAVE to do some SEO, but I don’t think it’s worth investing 100% of your time in that. You don’t want to be 100% dependent on search engines: alternative sources of traffic are equally important and you’ll get that traffic with a good social strategy. It’s your call as to what percentage of your time you invest in link building, seo, etc VS the time you invest in making friends and establishing your brand. The bottom line is that you have to do both correctly, but don’t ignore the power of a good social strategy.