Here are my top 10 stars of last week. For those who are new to reading this blog, this is a post I normally do on a weekly basis that I haven’t done in a while so I thought I would bring it back this week. Each week as I go through my rss reader I start several articles for future reading. I try to make this list a quick recap of the previous week’s posts from various sources around the Internet. Not always blog posts, but most of the time they are articles written by other bloggers.
I have approximately 700 feeds that I go through each week, and as always, there were some excellent articles written last week. Below you will find a few that stood out to me.
Top 10 Stars of the week of Mar 24 to Mar 31
New Owner Lays It Out There
via Blogging Experiment by Max Davis on 3/28/08
Hey there, this is Max Davis. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Ben has sold his amazing website and many of you are interested to see what is going to happen next.
Linking To Differing Opinion
via Andy Beard – Niche Marketing by Andy Beard on 2/18/08
There is nothing wrong with having strong, even biased opinion about a product or service, as long as you provide a basis for that
Designers and Communication Skills: Why and How to Improve
via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 3/26/08
Earlier this week I posted a group interview with several established and successful designers. One of the questions that was asked to each participant was “What do you feel are the most important skills
The Right Advertising Revenue for Your Blog
via Blogging Tips by kelbycarr on 3/25/08
If you have a blog, odds are good you’d like to bring in a few bucks. There are actually several options for doing this, but not all will work
A Step By Step Guide To Writing About Stuff You Know Very Little About
via Freelance Folder by Ram Karthik on 3/27/08
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing only on a handful of topics, but what if a client asks you to write on a topic you know nothing (or very little) about? Can you afford to turn down work?
10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5
via Technosailor by Aaron Brazell on 3/18/08
WordPress is about to release version 2.5 into the wild (It just hit Release Candidate yesterday so the release date, though officially
Ten Killer Interviewing Tips
via Freelance Folder by Keith Johnson on 3/30/08
As a Technical Writer, I have had to interview hundreds of computer professionals to better understand the technology that I would be documenting. Programmers, Quality Assurance, Implementation,
Goodbye 800×600?
via Blogging Tips by John Leschinski on 3/29/08
As I was redesigning my own site I debated what resolution to use. More and more sites are optimized for screens at 1024×768, and the WC3 reports 80% of users have monitors that big or bigger. Even my…
Should I Change My Website Into a Blog?
via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 3/29/08
“Hi Darren, I’ve got a website at www._____.com which I’ve had for a few years and not really done much with. I’ve heard that blogs are a good way of building traffic and making money, should I change it to a blog?â€
10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5
via Technosailor by Aaron Brazell on 3/18/08
WordPress is about to release version 2.5 into the wild (It just hit Release Candidate yesterday so the release date, though officially not known, is coming soon). If you’ve been using WordPress.com or have peeked at the demo site you will know the biggest change coming to WordPress with this release.
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Here is a question for you. What do you do if you are in the thrift shop and you see a ridiculous deal on this? Well, if you are me, you grab it fast!
Opportunity almost never knocks when you are ready to receive it. It is more like a neighbor, who, having something very exciting to show you, shows up when you are in your robe and slippers. Usually, to seize the opportunity when it comes you have to act very fast. Scott and I have both wanted to learn how to play the guitar for a very long time. We were not actively searching for a guitar, but this one found us. We promptly left the shop with it, went down to the guitar shop and had it re-strung and tuned.
Viola, a beautiful, sweet sounding guitar ready for playing. My first lesson is scheduled for Tuesday, 2:30pm. Wish me luck…
Update: well it seems that Scott is going to take on the leaning of the lessons, I will enjoy listening to him play. There are only so many things we can do in our life and listening to him play will be a good one for me.
Update: well Scott lasted about 4 months and did quite well, but his photography was far more developed than he could ever be as a musician so he is sticking with photography.
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Are you generally a user of the system or are you an active participator in the process? Using a pingback can have several benefits for you as the one who uses the link, but it also benefits the person or company you are linking to when Google comes around to index all the relevant pages.
What is a Pingback, Trackback, or Permalink?
For most of us that are not total code junkies I thought it might be good to a have a little background information first. All three of these terms are similar in nature and do similar tasks, with slight variations.
Pingback
What exactly is a pingback? A pingback is method of linking back to an article or post you read on another blog, from within the article you are writing. I will have more on this below. An example of this would be linking to article related to this article that someone else wrote, like this: Linking To Differing Opinion, by Andy Beard. The link I just posted is considered to Andy as a pingback to his original article.
From this blog, to Andy’s, which then comes back to this blog.
Trackback
A trackback is very similar but generally is used as a url location to link back to an article you have written, some times from an article you are writing back to another article of your own. An example of this might be a link to a previous article on my own blog. This is one I wrote last year on how to improve customer service, and the trackback would be here: Steps to Improve Customer Service by Answering Email
From this blog, to another article within this blog, which then links to this article.
Permalink
A permalink is the actual permanant url location of the article in question. For example, the permalink for the same article I wrote last year as mentioned above would have this permanent url http://www.scottfillmer.com/2007/11/02/improve-customer-service-sales/ , usually a very long address that no one wants to post in full, but it works well using an anchor tag.
All of these terms can be used in conjunction with each other as one of three forms of linkbacks. All of which should be used in effectively marketing your blog or website, but be careful how you use them, they are also the tools of spammers when used incorrectly.
What Does a Pingback Actually Do?
A “ping” comes from when you would reach out to another IP address by sending a small bit of information, and in return, you would receive a small bit of information, then you would know that you actually reached the IP address in question. So, when you write an article or blog post and mention another article, and link to it, it will send out a small bit of information saying you did so, and give you a small bit in return.
It is generally quite acceptable to other bloggers or website owners to post back to an article that they have written. It is not generally acceptable to copy what they have written and just repost it on your site, even if you do give the author credit. Some of the reason for this is that they don’t get any benefit from you repeating their information, where a pingback to their site does.
Why Don’t I Just Mention the Other Article Instead?
When you post a link back to an article it will also benefit you (more than just scraping or copying their content) because many times it will automatically post a link in the comments section of their article for the article you wrote. This will bring a certain number of visitors back to your site as well.
Good for you, good for them, and it is usually quite appreciated by the other site. Scrapping content, whether done with good intentions or not, is not appreciated and serves of little benefit to either party.
Is It Better To Give or Receive a Pingback?
Well, in this case, it is probably better to receive the pingback (depending on the content of the site of course) than to give it, BUT, you probably have to give them to receive them. There are other things going on in the background with Google when you use a pingback, and most of the time, it will render the site receiving the pingback more relevant overall because the information was worthy of someone else writing about it.
This can have an opposite effect that may come into play when the site using the pingback is of questionable content, but like a political candidate, it is hard to control who recommends or endorses you and such is the case with pingbacks.
Conclusion
Overall the rule of thumb would be to pinback, not scrapeback. No one likes seeing their content scraped and used on another site and it gives no benefit to the site that created the original content, so use a pingback when you can.
Keep in mind that pingbacks are the tool of some spammers so use it for legitimate purposes when you want to quote another article that corresponds to your own and you will find that the other site will most likely appreciate the mention and link.
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Some images just jump out at me when I see them in nature, this one I loved because of its deep color. This will be posted as my first image of the day on this blog. I love contrasting colors in nature and two of the best (in my opinion) is when you can find red and green together. Luckily in nature, you can usually find green, so if you do find red, green is not far behind. This flower was taken at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Birmingham Alabama.
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Just to notate this date, all blog entries prior to this were moved over from a blog Deborah and I kept under a different title, but for the same purpose as this blog. They are not daily posts, but still what we were doing in LA at the time.
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I have been working with church websites since I first became a believer around 1995 and offered to do website work for a large church in Birmingham.
Of course, this was long before churches decided that having a web presence was just as important for them as it was for the local civic center, and the websites that I worked on and helped start back then were nothing compared to what can be offered by a local church today.
A website for a church is important, and its importance shouldn’t be ignored by the congregation or the administration. The baby-boomers may be reaching retirement age, but they use computers now too, and if you want to attract a younger generation of worshipers and potential believers to your church, a website is a must (in my opinion).
An Internet Home is Important for Churches Too
If you have a church, you better have a website too. Even the smallest churches with no budget should be able to find a presence online to take care of all the various tasks that a website can do for a church. Recently I came across an article from Vandelay Design, called 50 of the Best Church Website Designs that shows just how far church website designs have come, and how important they now are in the tech and digital world we live in.
At bare minimum, it can remind visitors what your specific doctrine is, what time the services are, and what you should expect from the worship service and members. When we thought about visiting a new local church in town, the first thing we did was check out their website, read up on everything they had to say on their church, what they believe, who they are and of course when they worship. We visited 3 weeks later based on what we read.
More Than Just Worship Times
A website for a church can be more than just worship times and directions on how to get there. Many churches now offer real time audio and archived sermon messages, blogs on specific topics within the church, and even live simulcasting of their services. All of this is great, but, having a presence is more than just showing the world how pretty everything is.
Coming up, I will explore the details of how the church and the Internet can exist together and reach out to those members and non-members in meaningful ways. It is important to touch the lives of people for Christ in ways that help and sustain, not just put up a sign of when to show up.
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This question comes up quite a bit, but when you are talking about individuals businesses or blogs, not a corporation, the simple answer is, probably not as much as you think. Certainly not as much as you have put into it.
One of my favorite things to watch is Buy it Now prices on eBay and personal items people put up for sale, like their car or motorcycle. I have this GREAT thing, I paid $5,000 for it, used it for 5 years, it is in perfect, brand new condition and here it is for sale for $5,500, great deal. What we deem as precious and important to us, really only has a value of what someone else is willing to pay, and in my experience, it is not as much as we would want it to be.
There are “collectibles” and things like that of course, but I find those don’t even hold up to current prices unless it is really the hottest of hot in the latest trend or gimmick. We even had a genuine Rolex watch, with an appraisal that had a replacement value of $7,500 and it looks like its current ebay selling price is around $1,200. It comes down to this. Do you actually want to sell the item or business in question, or do you want to sell it for what you want to sell it for?
I am going to examine this question in a series of posts since it can be quite a long subject. In this post I will look at a few variables in determining value to your business, asset, blog, online property, or other digital assets and what it might be worth if you want to sell it. Should you look at selling on Sitepoint as opposed to eBay or Amazon and what other alternatives are there for you to sell your Internet assets. Other points that might come up as future topics are pricing domain names and their value (you can also see Register a Domain Name for eBay Affiliate Traffic, 10 Ways to Set Goals for Your Online Business, or GoDaddy Cash Parking Makes Little Money for some of my other related topics on this subject.
Value is Determined by Someone Else
As I mentioned above, the value of something is not really determined by you at all. How much something is worth depends on how much someone else is willing to pay for it. If you think something is worth $5,000 and someone else is willing to pay $10,000, then it is worth $10k, and of course the opposite is also true.
A good example of this is the current fire sale of blogs. At first, the money making seo blogs were said to be worth bundles. Then as a few were sold off, the value of each was shown, to be what someone else was willing to pay for it. There were, and are, several metrics that bloggers decided each blog was worth and gave it value, but most went by a price per subscriber of about $15.
All of this came to mind when I read, A Difficult Decision – BloggingExperiment.com For Sale, a nice blog which I have read for some time. All of sudden the for sale sign went out. It was up for auction, but has since been sold for an undisclosed amount, but the seller / owner (Ben) was looking for “5 figures”, which is about in line with the price per subscriber listed above. That would make the sale about $13,500 (that is according to the calculation above, I have no knowledge of what it actually sold for).
If we just stay with the guesstimate above as an example, Ben was doing a year long experiment, which he was 265 days into, when he decided to sell his blog. Since he sold it, I would assume he got a price he was willing to accept. If it was my guess above, that comes to about $51/day, or about $6/hour if you go on an 8 hour day, or approximately $18,000/year. But, it is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and sometimes that is better than what we know it is worth.
Don’t self impose an over valuation of your asset. If you do, whatever you are trying to sell will sit there for a long time, perhaps months or years before you find a buyer you will agree with. If you decide you want to sell it, sell it, for what someone else is willing to buy it for, in a reasonable period of time. Ben obviously made the decision to sell his blog, and did so, in about 5 days.
Value Depends on What You Put Into It
As with most things in life, you get what you put into it. One thing that I think is a misnomer among others looking at Internet entrepreneurs is how much work is involved. Sticking with the blog theme from Blogging Experiment, I know it is a hands on, daily grind, meticulous operation to keep that blog at its current traffic level and subscriber list. If he just let it go for a week, or a month, and let it run itself, it would run right into the ground from its prime.
Blog in particular are not self sustaining businesses that you can setup and let run. They take a lot of time and effort, effort that most are not willing to put into a blog, which is what makes sites like Pro Blogger so good, they put a ton of hours into the site each day. Not all of us have the staff and resources to do what they do, but it certainly adds value to their site. What a quick tip to add value to your blog or website. Add content. Not scrapped content or stuff just pulled in from other sites, but real, well written, new, fresh content. That will add readers, advertisers, and value to your site.
Value Depends on How You Present It
One final way to put value into your online asset, presentation. You may have the worlds best thing, but if it looks bad, smells bad, and isn’t generally presented well, it won’t have the value you think it should, or probably does. This may be a clean design or new look, but most likely you have already have this in place.
I can relate this to an eBay listing (or ad if you prefer). You can have the exact same product as someone else on eBay, sell it for the same price, same shipping, and delivery time, but yours will not sell if the presentation it not better than the competition. This may just be nicely worded descriptions of what you are trying to sell or site metrics, visitors, stats, all the things people really want to know about the item for sale.
Give a lot of information. I think people generally read about 10% of what is presented to them, so make the important points stand out. Highlight your strengths, but don’t hide your weaknesses, and give a lot of information about the item for sale. The more questions you get about the item for sale, the worse you did in explaining the sale to potential buyers, especially if you get 10 people asking the same exact question.
What are your best tips to showing the value of an item?
