Here are five thoughts that have turned convictions during my personal and professional experience in the the last fifteen years.

Lie No .1: “No degree=no chance”

Fake: knowledge and culture are two very different things.

I learned much more aware of people and different cultures than browsing dusty textbooks. If the study is your way to increase awareness so good, otherwise it would be better to consider other ways.

Unfortunately, the conventional education has taken on the task to ratify, neutralize and flat all our personalities to hold the matrix safe.

Lie n.2: “What is good for your company is good for you”

Fake: Your role  within a company is justified by the gain involved for them

Lacking this assumption they would put few seconds to to fire you, no matter how many time you stole to your family because of job.

Lie No 3: “Customers are always right”

Fake:  work ennobles men just when it let him to grow and evolve.

With how many clients you can establish this kind of relationship? If a customer is’nt right try to make him understand. If he do’nt understand (or do’nt want to understand) thanks him and move on.

Lie No 4: “Career means climbing a hierarchical system”

False: higher you’ll get more you’ll dislike the boss over your head

The job organization within companies is based on competition between human resources, but the main aim of  competition is to prevent communication and collaboration between workers, that could turn the control by management really difficult.

Consider also that  once you’ll get the top floor you’ll gain also the worstest boss: the bank that loan the company.

Lie No 5: “Hold on…. your chance will arrive”

Fake: You, only you can determine whenever your time will comes.

Managers who say this pretend only to put you on hold forever. A lot of people die waiting for something to happen.

So, what’s your opinion about it?

Photo credit: James Steidl

• “Hallo?”
• “I’m Larry. I didn’t succeed in updating it.”

Those were the words he never wanted to hear.

• “Pardon, can you repeat please? I think I didn’t understand……”
• “You understood properly, Sergey. There’s no new post. It wasn’t updated.”
• “Are you sure about that? Did you run all controls?”
• “Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. I know you are puzzled, but that’s the sad truth: he didn’t update the blog”

It was a long time that something so mysterious didn’t happen in Mountain View, and now it was important to take a decision at once:

• “What will we do then?”
• “You well know the procedure in these cases.”
• “Yes, but….maybe he was just too busy or he had an accident….”
• “It’s useless now to search for some excuses: the blog hasn’t been updated and we have to follow the procedure.”
• “OK Larry. Give advice to the Game Over department. Cut all pages, wipe them out from SERP. Close his AdSense account, kidnap his wife, steal his car and………..”

At this moment usually you suddenly wake up, in a cold sweat, while your mind takes its time to get in touch with the reality, and then you understand you were just dreaming, luckily….it was only a bad dream…….

Photo Credit: cybernesco

Come on, who is not victim of this fear? A fear that, with years, has taken place of the past and common nightmare of the missing high school license exam for an alarm-clock that didn’t go off. That’s a true nightmare for any blogger: what happens if I am not regular in updating my blog?

A part from any sort of blogger or information overload mania, what will really happen in case we stop up-dating our site? Which are the risks we run?

Here my personal experience when I stopped updating it for 2 months.

In the last two years, the italian version of Ikaro has been updated on average every week with 3 new articles, up to 23 June, 2007. From that day on up to 3 September 2007 I nearly abandoned it.

Let’s try now, examining all access statistics, if bloggers fears can be real or not.

2006 and 2007 access comparison

From Google Analytics I get all accesses trend referring to the period 23 June 06 – 03 September 2007: it is compared to the same period of time in 2007. We should notice that in 2006, my blog was updated quite regularly, while, in 2007 in was abandoned.

I must specify that it is much better to consider just its trend and not its absolute values, as one year of difference means more articles, more contacts, more links. In other words: more traffic. As much as about the trend, it is easy to find a sort of similarity up to the end of August, and after that period there is in 2007 a sudden and astonishing jump: that is to say after 2 months the blog was abandoned!

But this jump could be the result of off site elements, for example a sudden popularity of an article thanks to a keyword related to a subject ran on tv or on a newspaper. In other words, we still have few data to state that my site didn’t really suffer from 2 not updated months. Therefore, let’s extract the traffic and let’s do the same graphic for:

• Direct access
• Engine access

Direct access traffic comparison

Engine access traffic comparison

It seems to be quite clear that this raise was determined by traffic coming from all search engines, the one that we supposed to be the most suffering from such a long time blog inactivity.

Engine traffic analysis

Why do engines had such a raise in visits after 2 months inactivity? If we are so stubborn to refuse that updating frequently our blog is not that much important, not even a risk of being penalized from engines, we should think as well that the cause of such a raise is maybe an important keyword, which appeared in 2007, but was absent in 2006. But it isn’t so. Top keys are always the same ones, but in 2007 they were much more incisive in all serp. Here you have:

1. coolstreaming   +95%
2. voipstunt           +196%
3. pplive                   +33%
4. tv internet          +905%
5. software free    +100%

Conclusions

My conclusion is a simple one: all blogger mania of updating constantly one’s own web site with thousands of information, sometimes not interesting, is really useless. You can live your life quietly even if you don’t update your site so frequently as you think you should (a part in those cases in which such a frequency is an editorial choice, of course).

I realize that many SEO and marketers will disagree my statements but, on my turn, I disagree such a maniac and empiric way (supported by too many numbers, operations and formulas), stealing web marketing of its nature. Sometimes it is much better to stop calculating, forecasting or thinking to be some sort of scientists, in order to make a stop, relax and observe silently all situations in their developing.

A user of Problogger community contacted me asking;

I was reading your advice to Cadpro re: the Google Keyword Tool and CPC. I followed your directions and found that the keywords most relevant to my blog have a CPC of $4-8 or so. How does this help me earn money? I am so confused. Isn’t the CPC something an advertiser would pay? I am just trying to monetize my blog a bit by using AdSense effectively. Maybe it’s too late for me to be thinking about this and learning something new.

Can you help me out, please, or let me know where to go for help?

Here an insightful approach to this problem; before trying to increase cpc or cpm of your AdSense account is better to know how and why Google decides to pay more for a click to a specific publisher instead another one.

AdWords and AdSense CPC relationship

Adwords Google Keyword Tool let you find the most expensive keys for advertisers related to specific topics. The cost of each single click is split between AdSense and the publisher of the site where the users has clicked.

So, the higher the value that the advertiser pays the higher will be the gain of the publisher.

Why I earn just few cents for a click on a very expansive ad?

The goal of AdSense is business for its advertisers. The user’s behaviour on the advertiser’s website after clicking on an ad is very, very important.

If the user, after clickin, make an action on the website of the advertiser (a subscription, a contact request or a purchase)  AdSense will reward your website with ads more profitable, because it drives business to its customers.

This means that blog assure to the advertiser a return on his investment. This is the key to understand all the trick: ROI

But why the cost per click remains low in all of my blogs?

This mechanism that divide the good adsense publishers from the bad ones is called smart pricing, and it affects the whole AdSense account, not the website.

If you have several websites under a single AdSense account the one with low conversion rate can affect drammatically the others.

So, keep AdSense just on blog with a good cpc rate.

How to improve conversions to escape from the smar pricing trap

Just look at your website with the eyes of someone else: the ads on the post must be a complementary information for your users, not just advertising. This is possible only if Adsense contextualize properly the ads thanks to an insightful and relevant content.

Users with the higher probability to drive conversions are the ones who land into your blog looking for information trought the search engines. He’s searching for a product, for a service. He’s clicking around to satisfy a specific need.

So, the problem is not anymore how to force my users to ckick an ad, but how to convince Google to put my page in front of millions of eyes searching for something…

Adsense earning will be just a conseguence.

Photo Credit
Coins: Willi Heidelbach
Money chain: cre8tiv88
Few cents: strelok
Money targets: Mostafa Fawzy

With  ScreenToaster everything becomes more simple and available for everyone:

• Connect to the ScreenToaster home page
• Click on the Start Recording button
• Press ALT+S to start recording the screen output
  
• Then, press ALT+S again to stop recording

After visualizing the video draft you can add comments in audio using the microphone or subtitles, and save the screencast in the users’ area by clicking on Publish it. The embedding code to insert the video on your blog will be available. It’s almost immediate.

This way you avoid installing softwares on your PC, generating huge typical screencast session files, editing them and uploading them online.

Quality is what surprises most. In this kind of filming, quality is really essential for the users to visualize important details such as the cursor, the text, the interface elements like the buttons, menu, etc. ScreenToaster, besides making it more simple, guarantees remarkable quality.

Here’s a screencast developed at the time this article was being written, check it out:

This is a project by Iteria SARL, a French start-up capable of this huge step after getting financing from an angel investor in September/08. It had financed the prototype itself before that.

ScreenToaster, a great service!

If you want to begin in a simple way not necessarily creating original content, here’s how to create the basis of a successful blog.

Keep in mind that: selection and aggregation of relevant content might be valuable as the original content creation.

Image Credit: luchschen

Start a blog on WordPress

The blog’s platform is important because it allows connection automatization on blogs you link on your posts and vice-versa (trackback).

The dilemma always lies between choosing WordPress or Movable Type, but if the choice for a platform consists on generating the higher traffic in less time, so you must start a blog on WordPress for a simple reason: it’s the one more frequently used and it offers a high level of customizing due to the several plugins and templates for every demand.

Select a few but relevant sources

Almost every blogger don’t generate self content, they limit to comment / translate / reelaborate the same news coming from the same sources (a.k.a. background noise, 1% rule, etc). It’s important to get them directly from the original sources skipping intermediaries.

Here there are 5 websites that constitute a good source pack on new medias, web 2.0, etc:

• Mashable
  News and articles on web 2.0 and social media
• Lifeshacker
  Great source on useful programs and advice on PC
• ProBlogger
  Specific advice on how to improve the quality of your blog and monetize traffic
• TechCrunch
  The best site to get in touch with start-ups news and new media backstage and rumors. News frequently travel as rumors by TechCrunch much before they get to public acknowledgement…
• KillerStartups
  It’s a social media specific for web applications and start-ups. Every new web-based service come by and users love blogs that post on new services on the web

If you post on other topics, you should obviously find relevant sources of your interest.

Metabolize the process of acquiring fresh news

To check and to evaluate new posts from several sources should constitute a very simple process since it may cause a great stress due to the information overload.

It should be as simple as opening the browser. And that’s exactly what you should do:

• create a homepage on iGoogle
  If you have a Google account of any kind, you can customize your homepage adding lots of content, including the RSS feed sources previously mentioned.

• use your iGoogle page as the initial page on your browser
  Evey time you open your browser you’ll instantaneously get the most recent news from the web
  

Select and publish the most interesting posts

Choose one piece of news a day from your sources and publish it to your blog.

1. Summarize the original article translating it from English
2. Add your notes and opinions
3. Always mention and link the source without hesitation
4. Always insert a related image to it

Another good idea is to insert links to other articles to get a better idea on the topic (in your blog or to an external link). That procedure generates incoming links due to automatic trackbacks and it offers a useful service to your readers.

Share only your best posts on social media

There are lots of social media that allow content sharing and getting traffic. Don’t go over the top and use one strategy that allows better results with less effort. Use SocialPoster to spread your post across social networks and OnlyWire to share your pages into the most popular social bookmarking websites.

Hint: do not post all your content indiscriminately. Share only the most interesting posts even the ones not written by you. This little strategy will help you gain reliability and get the attention of other users.

Resist to teasing

There comes a time when someone will tease you by saying all you can do is copy and paste articles and that your blog is a clone of this or that website: don’t bother!

To filter, to select with criteria and to suggest again the news published every day has become a procedure almost as important as generating original content.

If there was no one to do so, think of the amount of original news that would get lost in a global ocean of information without reaching the ones they were written to.

Some of the most popular and followed blogs do exactly as mentioned above. No doubt they do it in a structured and organized way, but what they do essentially is to gather, to select and to indicate news.

Watch, evaluate and evolve!

You’ll gradually learn how to understand what your readers search for and get to know their inclinations in a better way.

You’ll learn how to direct your researches, to select other sources, to focus, to create original news and to generate new kinds of content (audio, video, etc.).

You’ll also feel the need for tuning the instruments and to begin using more complete and efficient RSS add-ons. You’ll find more specific social media and learn how to use the ones you already work with in a better way.

We wish you good work. And remember: the ingredients for a recipe are only a part of the dish: it’s up to the cook to turn them into something good with dedication and passion.

Searching for good templates is hard once you come across the huge amount of layouts available, therefore the choice on selecting and sharing the best websites that offer templates for all demands: professional, amateur, free and paid ones.

Freshy 2 Theme

A free but high-leveled template, developed by Julien De Luca. The Customize plugin allows a degree of customization almost limit free with the control panel. Here are its main features:

• WP 2.6 compatible (in opposition to the previous version)
• 17 languages automatically configured through the visitor’s user agent
• Lots of sub themes
• Gravatar compatible
• Fixed and fluid width
• XHTML compatible
• Open source

and much more.

Recommended due to the high level of customization which allows it to be unique when compared to other blogs that have adopted it.

DiploD

Davide Del Monte is the author behind the old layout for Geekissimo and he develops templates for WordPress and Joomla for free under Creative Commons license.

Check it out:

• Nerino 2.0
  A nice and professional template for WP. Widget ready, Adsense ready, gravatar compatible and highly customizable.

• Geekissimo
  The foundation of this old template, very popular in Italy, available for download.

• Web TV
  If you have an online TV website or a web TV, check this great ready to use template.

TemplatePanic

Layout files of all kinds. If you’re patient enough to dig through all the pages, you might find great templates, both minimalist and extravagant and joyful. iPhone Blog Theme is a recommended choice. Here are its main features:

• XHTML and CSS compatible
• Widget ready
• Automatic management of related articles

Great for blogs geek on gadgets.

Web 2.0 Themes

Six templates for WordPress, five of them free and one paid. A strict Web 2.0 style. Check the top 3:

• Magazine theme (US$100)
• Sodelicious 2 (free and great)
• Socute (free)

Check and download the others here.

Recommended for blogs Web 2.0 style.

Woo Themes

If you’re looking for a WordPress theme for a blog focused on content and articles, this is the right place.

That’s where the new Ikaro Brasil layout was chosen from. There are approximately 15 templates, all paid, the mono user license costs US$70. The quality of the templates is excellent, ideal for quality upgrade for blogs with relevant content.

Some cool stuff for templates customization:

• Banners management 125×125 integrated
• Video file and integration due to Tubepress
• Management of files in evidence
• Feedburner and feed subscription integration via automated e-mail
• Google Analytics integrated management

These are the two favorite WooThemes templates: The Gazzette Edition, Fresh News Theme.

Recommended for highlighting relevant content.

Top WP Themes

130 free templates for WordPress, among the usual ones you can find some in great
quality. Ideal for blogs with no clear graphic definition: lots of templates from the most basic minimalism to super colored 2.0 extreme.

Great navigation system: it allows template filter based on the features you want, such as number of columns, widget management, fixed or fluid width, etc… (the illustration template is Zinmag Redux).

Recommended for bloggers not defined between milimalist or psychoedelic.

Revolution WordPress Theme

Professional paid templates, ideal for magazines, online newspapers or simply good content blogs. Ten themes for 2.6 WordPress compatible. License for only one website is around US$80.

Have fun and remember: WordPress 2.6 X version may occasionate some image aligning problems in some templates developed for previous versions. Here’s how to work it out.

Photo Credit: solarseven

I opened a proper thread into the Problogger forum and  others bloggers provided quickly relevant and useful information, as usual.

Skinny said:

I don’t use a plugin- just got a MailChimp account (or use whatever email marketing provider you want) to set up my database and then have the html opt-in form linked on my site- they enter information there and it dumps to my email marketing account with MailChimp.

MailChimp seems a good mailing list manager, and it’s free up to 500 subscriptios as Sid said;

With MailChimp you can have up to 500 subs for free. I am using MailChimp, you can sign up for the free motivational quotes ebook in my sig if you want to check out how the sign up works for a free bonus with a subscription. I customized it a *lot* so that all the thankyou pages etc are on my site – I think it is pretty spiffy =)

It integrates with WordPress, Twitter and others platform . The WP plugin adds  a subscription form in the sidebar and store the information directly into the MailChimp db.

Chickblogger instead was using Aweber, another well known email marketing software but he’s giving up because he find it a little bit expansive;

… I too await some answers. I had Aweber for a while and ratched up some 500 subscribers but had to cancel as the price went up from $19 a month to $29 a month, and I honestly didn’t know what I was doing…

Rhys has a different approach:

The problem is with a dedicated mailing list “Plugin” is that you’d probably get thrown off your server for spamming, so you’re far better using something like Aweber/Mailchimp (my choice). I have written a plugin called WP Email Capture which can be used to display a form on your site, which mimics the functionality of all those Aweber boxes out there (Mailchimp’s sign up form in my opinion isn’t particularly good), which you can then export to other programs

I will say this, if you import into Aweber & some other programs, you have to reconfirm again, however I’ve never had a problem with Mailchimp, and it has a high success rate of delivery.

It’s a nice solution because it let you manage directly email collection, but on the other hand it requires to transfer the  list from the WP db to the mailing list software each time that you need to mail your users.

Syed, the author of WPBeginner, propose to connect WordPress directly to feedburnew with some tricks;

Because of high demand, I got this tutorial written…

You can use WordPress and Feedburner with a few plugins to make your WordPress work as a Newsletter Manager type service that Aweber has.

You guys might want to check it out  – Create a Free Email Newsletter Service using WordPress

Another relevat resource is  A Trek Through WordPress Mailing List Plugins – Email Mailing List Manager by Solomon Rothman, who describe 8  mailing list plugin for wordpress.

I still don’t know what solution suite my needs but i’ll continue to dig around a bit…

Thanks to alll of you for sharing

It’s not exactly a tutorial but rather a kind of brainstorming  that i had with… myself.  Have fun!

1. No subject is never out of date
   maybe it is for you, but how many potential readers do not know what you know?
2. Be friendly, give attention
   because people who waste his time reading your stuff is friendly with you
3. Think, talk, write simple
   the most read articles are the simplest
4. Do not waste energy with those who copy content
   your posts will be republished anyway
5. Don’t moderate comments
   it’s better to apply corrections after publication
6. Structure good titles
   you must squeeze  the post in a nutshell. It is not easy but try it
7. Link always to relevant post of others blog
   it is important to gain relevance from Google
8. Link regularly even your older posts
   it’s useful for internal content optimization
9. Don’t write for friends and people you already know
   try to catch the attention of unknow users
10. Do not waste too much many time promoting your posto into social news websites
    every time that you do it you  work for them, not for you
11. Trolls are the gatekeepers of the toll-road leading to success
    their presence means that the direction is right
12. Don’t blog for money
    money is  like women: more you look for them more they run far away…
13. Make networking
14. Share strategies and tricks with other trustable blogger
    this kind of  information are always the most precious
15. Blog rankings don’t reflect authority but referentiality
    don’t care about it
16. Referentiality does not reflect relevance, but networking
17. Keep in mind that the bloggers are touchy, egotistical and a little bastards creatures
    better to be pleasantly surprised that sadly disappointed
18. Don’t misunderstand relevant content with original content
    a post can be relevant even though it  covers well known news / events
19. You are a blogger, not a journalist
    do you wear  a jacket with sweater and dusty shoes? You must not tell the truth: just give your point of view
20. A girl  spreading  charming and sexy personality online will not necessary have fun with everybody at the next barcamp
    if you will attend  for this please… give up
21. If you have an infatuation for a guy because he looks really great in his avatar, take a breath an think “Photoshop … Photoshop … Photoshop …”
    just to avoid bad surprises
22. Invest some money for a good hosting or dedicated server
    if you don’t trust in yourself why others should?
23. There’s no difference between Web 2.0 and the real world
    except for one thing: everything move quicker and faster. Even failures
24. When you are not insipirate for writing …. keep your keyboard far
    your stress tis he worst enemy of your blog
25. Answer to every comments
    do not be a (blog)star
26. Show yourself as you really are
    not as you would like to appear
27. Don’t be afraid to cite and link your sources
    this will increase your popularity
28. Don’t get crazy with  SEO
    optimization is like yeast, and content such as pizza dough. If the dough sucks the  yeast will never let it grow…
29. Almost 99,9% of people who says  “I have been banned from Adsense without reason” is  lying – if it’s your case you belogn to the 0.01%
30. The post archive is the bigger value of a blog
    it’s hard to monetize until you build a good archive
31. Try to catch the strategies of others bloggers
    the magic formula has been teraed in many little pieces, and each piece was put in the pocket of each blogger
32. Every succesful blog require an hard, hard work
    when you will be tempted to say that somebody became famous writing crap, take a deep breath and write to him: “congratulations, you did an excellent job”
33. Do not be afraid of being caught
    this fear could inhibit yourself changing your way to write.  If it happens explain how and why it happened. You’ll gain popularity and reputation
34. Take a break from blogging every few
    we need to look at situations from afar to turn cold and identify the right way
35. Update your old posts
    it brings the bigger part of the traffic, so you should consider it as the main entry of a building: every few it must be renewed
36. Select and aggregate only relevant feeds into a single stream
    and put it into the default page of your browser
37. Learn another language, or at least try
    just to see what’s happening out of our home

Why 37? It sounds great!

Photo Credit: Julia Pivovarova

The Javascript code that embed the widget into your web pages is just made of fews characters, although it is not the widget itself but it just specify where and how to download it. You don’t know how much Kb the browser needs to download in order to display your last twit, or the most recent MyblogLog readers. In this way, the load time of your pages can increase without control.

Here’s a list that shows how much your web pages are charged by the most common widgets around:

1. MyBlogLog: +64 Kb
2. AdSense Ads: +22 Kb
3. Google Analytics: +22 Kb
4. Disqus: +17 Kb
5. Criteo Autoroll: +17 Kb
6. Woopra tracker : +6Kb
7. Quintura cloud generator: +380 Kb
8. Technorati Rank: +27 Kb
9. LLOOGG Tracker: +2 Kb
10. coComment: +8 Kb
11. DIGG button: +17 Kb

As noticed before, once you have installed three or four widgets into your blog platform your web pages have become more heavy without a warning, and the load time of your pages increase. Here’s the pager size of some italian blogs:

• Ikaro: 177 Kb
• Daniele Salamina : 79 Kb
• MasterNewMedia: 120 Kb
• Psiche e Soma: 52 Kb
• Sw4an: 204 Kb
• Downloadblog: 95 Kb
• Geekissimo: 136 Kb
  
• Catepol: 337 Kb

As you can see, widgets are useful but they charge the browsers with additional data  that can make the site really unaccessible for slow internet connections, and create some serious problems with search engines ranking.

The best you can do is to choose only widgets that can bring some benefit to your blog and compress your web pages by using the mod_deflate or the php. That kind of caution can reduce the size down up to 70% and increase page loading speed.

A great tool to analyze the size of each element in a page (including widgets and adds-on) is the Web Developer Tools for Firefox. Once you have visualized the webpage, open Tools>Web>Developer>Information>View document size.

[Photo Credit: SasPartout]

Permalink means permanent connection to a content. This simple concept hides one of the strength points of any blog: information longevity, that is to say the period of time a information keep on being relevant and updated.

Everlasting blogs, a longevous blog

How much time net surfers will search for informations related to the argument of your post? The answer gives you an idea of your post longevity. Bloggers are ever and ever eager to post news in preview in order to catch any possible visitor. But they will have a very limited contents longevity, as they will run researches only for a short period of time.

As much a blog information longevity level is high, so much the effort to keep its level so is low.

Examples

Let’s consider some Ikaro posts.

Here you have an example of scarce longevity posts:

• Venice, internet free TV by Skype and KaZa (italian)
• It was written when Skype creators diffused news about P2P TV. It has such a short longevity because:
  1. In the meanwhile its name changed (now it is Joost)
  2. It doesn’t give any additional information about the product (it hasn’t come out yet)

In few words, this post won’t be interesting in a short while.

Reviews about programs, products and online services are always good contacts sources as names will always be research object and other blogs references. In my opinion some really everlasting contents should be a blog base. Current and up-to-date subjects, are always object of interest and research.

So, subject widening or press agencies?

As usual, the best solution should be middle way. Think about our blog as if it was a castle, as we need a solid structure – that is to say a good quantity of everlasting information – where we can put capitals, windows, lapis lazuli. In other words whatever decoration we like, easy and simple.

Photo Credit
Time: McKenna P