Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

Just letting you all know that up until the 12th of December or so, new posts will be more or less sporadic here at Lars-Christian.com. The reason? Exams of course. I have 3 final exams in this period, and because of this I am taking some time off from blogging.

Wish me luck! And of course, good luck to those of you who are in the same position as myself, preparing for your own tests.

When I first took an interest in internet and marketing as a whole, people kept referring me to the blog of this guy who had posted a strange image of himself (look to the left), saying that it was a must read, because he offered great advice on the niche. That guy was of course Seth Godin.

If you are not familiar with it, I suggest that you subscribe right now, because this guy certainly knows what he is talking about. He is also the master of sticking to the point, and providing value, even with posts no longer than a single paragraph or two. Read the blog, and you will understand what I mean.

Yesterday Seth posted another short post, where he answered a question from one of his readers who asked why he doen’t monetize his blog. This was his response (full post):

Not only can’t I imagine charging for my blog, I’m practically in debt to the people who read it. I ought to pay them, not the other way around.

Certainly a noble response from a humbled person, and while it is true that his blog would most likely be non-existant had it not been for his readers, certainly there must be some incentive for Seth to keep his blog alive? After all the blog is ranked as the 16th most popular blog of them all over at Technorati.

And yes, Seth most certainly has plenty of incentives to keep posting and promoting his blog, but seeing how he doesn’t monetize it directly, it is safe to say that he is more concerned about the Indirect Benefits of Blogging, which is also sometimes referred to as the Non-Monetary Benefits of Blogging.

You see, Seth Godin is actually the author of several successful books, a renowned speaker, and on top of that founder of a online service called Squidoo. By continuously updating his blog and demonstrating his knowledge with his posts, he is reaching out to new people, and proving the worth of his other products. I know I for one learned about him for the first time through his blog, and as a result of it I have also ordered a couple of his books.

I am also willing to bet my bread and butter for the next year on the fact that I am by no means unique in this, and that Seth has sold hundreds if not thousands of copies of his books as an direct result of his blogging ventures. Are you still convinced Seth blogs because of the goodness in his heart?

Please don’t misunderstand what I am trying to point out here. There is nothing wrong with this approach, and blogging because of the indirect benefits is something that many bloggers out there should consider, especially those who brand themselves with their own names. In the long run, it can probably mean much more beneficial results than what you can harvest from a few AdSense and WidgetBucks ads on your blog.

Another great example of this is Nate Whitehill, who has even pointed out this himself at several occasions over at his own blog. Nate started blogging, and used his blog as a tool for branding himself, and when the time was right, he launched his latest project Unique Blog Designs. Needless to say it became an instant success, partly due to the work Nate had already done to promote himself and his brand through his personal blog.

There are many bloggers out there who spend too much time obsessiong over PPC clicks and the easy dollars they can generate, who could benefit from considering the potential indirect benefits their blogging ventures can give them. To help you get started, I will give you a quick guide to how you can maximize and control the indirect benefits of own blog:

• Who are you? A big part of blogging is showing people who you are. If you make a conscious decision about who you are, and how you present yourself through your blog, people are more likely to gain a perception of you that matches how you see yourself.
• What do you know? If you to be famous, or at least somewhat known for something, you need to identify what you know, and demonstrate that you know more than most people about a certain field. Just like Seth does with his blog and the field of marketing.
• What do you want? Do you have anything you want to achieve by blogging? If you know what you want, it will certainly increase your chances of getting it. Are you blogging because you want to sell your books like Seth, or are you an aspiring web designer like Nate who wants to sell his work? Find out what you want, and show everybody why you should get it.

Those are the three most important things to think about if you want to directly influence the indirect benefits of your blogging efforts. It isn’t hard, it doesn’t take a whole lot of starting capital, all you really need is dedication and persistence, and your blog can get you the things you crave the most!

While I am by no means the first to voice my concerns over Technorati’s recent demise, I think it is yet again time for someone to point out how they have completely wasted the once so promising position they found themselves in.

Although their services have been everything but fully functional for the past few months, I have continued to go back, hoping that they would soon be restored to their former glory. But now I am officially giving them up, and declaring them dead to me at least. What was once a useful tool for bloggers in order to track the growth and popularity of their blogs, has now been reduced to waste.

Disagree? I present you with a small list of evidence. Granted these are things that could easily be rectified by the Technorati team, but the lack of interest they have shown in the past couple of months for actually doing so, leads me to believe that they have even given up themselves.

• Blog posts are not being indexed properly. While indexing many millions of blogs and what they write about is no small task, a service that gets its bread and butter from doing it, should be able to pride themselves by doing it in a reliable fashion.
• As an extension to this, their whole service is completely unreliable, in particular the search function and the favorites function. The latest posts from my favorites frequently disappear, only to reappear but then not up to date at all.
• Result? WordPress have dropped Technorati when displaying the most recent reactions to your posts, and now uses Google’s Blogsearch (the large keep growing).
• Authority is not being updated at all across the board. Just have a look at this thread in the Technorati Support Forums, which was started a month ago, currently has 32 replies and still no response from the staff.
• Although it has been criticized for being to easy to game, this of course makes the Authority function completely useless, as it no longer reflects any accuracy of a blog’s popularity at all.
• With Authority not being updated, and reactions to your own blog posts not being indexed properly, it is as the headline states, completely useless as a tool for bloggers and keeping track of what happens around their own blog.
• The search function is worthless because posts are not being indexed properly.
• Technorati is now crap, and I will never use it again.

Well that last statement is a tad angry-fanboy-ish, especially seeing how I am avid supporter of Technorati and the services they provide for bloggers. It was an excellent tool for keeping track of the blogosphere, and in particularly staying up to date on the community around your own blog.

I also loved the fact that a simple start-up like Technorati is, was able to get a firm stronghold over this position, compared to the alternative, which is as we are seeing right now, that a giant corporation like Google is taking over another important part of the web. Unfortunately, because of all the problems at Technorati and no end of them in sight, I am now forced to turn to Google with my blog searches as well.

And just to top it off, I give you a screenshot of what the reactions page to this very blog looks like as of now:

Now that is a lot of reaction from many unidentified blogs with no authority at all. Excellent, if the staff over at Technorati keep this up, it will not be long before we have to go the the Internet Archive to be reminded what Technorati used to be!

Seeing how I have boosted the frequency of posts here at my personal blog, I thought it would be nice to restart the recommended reading column again. So every Sunday from now on, I will be doing a nice little roundup of articles from my feedreader from the past week that I recommend everyone should take the time to read.

On average I will include around five articles, but if I feel that there are more that deserve your attention, I will naturally include more. If you have written a blog post you are particularly proud of, you can contact me, and I will take a look at it and see if I feel it deserves a recommendation.

Are they Milestones, Scores or Hurdles? - Chris Garret brings up an excellent point with this blog post which bloggers everywhere should think about.

. . . bloggers might be the most self-critical people I have ever met. In some cases monitoring our own progress can be a great thing, I expect we have all worked with people who we wish would have cared more about their own performance! But when we routinely beat ourselves up, something has to change . . .

Webmaster, stop being so AntiSocial!! - Another post which gives us something to think about, this one by Shana at the new group blog on social marketing called Collective Thoughts.

. . . Having a beautiful website that is constantly being optimized and fresh content added often is still extremely important, but it is not enough anymore. Personal Interaction with readers and other Webmasters and Bloggers in your Business Niche is a must . . .

Differentiate Or Die: Marketing’s Magic Bullet - Excellent post over at Freelance Switch by Jonathan Fields.

. . . Question is how? How do you demonstrate a level of differentiation that is so strong it immediately sets you apart from the field? Hmmm. For some people, it’s an easy challenge, but for 99% of us, it’s brutally hard . . .

Political Backlash on Reddit - David Chen at Pronet Advertising brings up one of the disadvantages of social community driven news sources.

. . . Since sites like Digg and Reddit exploded in popularity, it was only a matter of time before people tried to take advantage of them for their own purposes . . .

How To Implement Tags In Your WordPress Themes - Lastly a bit of blatant self promotion, this is a post I wrote over at Everybody Go To.

. . . many bloggers found themselves unable to take advantage of this new feature because the themes they were currently using at their blogs didn’t support tagging . . .

Hopefully you will enjoy these articles if you haven’t already read all of them. And of course, if you have any recommendations of your own, feel free to post a comment and share them with the rest of us!

Yesterday sparks light up the web when the guys over at Izea, PayPerPost’s parent company, announced that they would be introducing a new metric to gauge the importance and popularity of any given website called RealRank.

This is obviously a response to Google’s PageRank punishment of those who have been found selling paid post, which incidentally Izea’s core services revolve around. While it is easy to understand the reasoning behind introducing this type of feature in an attempt to step away from relying on Google’s PageRank system, this is not the way to go, and I will be more than happy to explain to you why that is the case.

First, let’s take a look at what this ranking system will be based on. The following is quoted directly from Izea’s announcement of the system:

70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day

It is, just as they state themselves, a relatively simple formula. Now before we jump to any conclusions, it is imperative that we consider the reasoning behind introducing this system. As it is meant to be a direct competitor to Google PageRank, and considering that the core services of Izea, as mentioned before, revolves around advertising, some obvious conclusions can be drawn.

They have previously used PageRank as a factor when pricing advertisements from any site participating in PayPerPost, and such it is reasonable to believe that Izea RealRank will aim to replace it. The first and most obvious flaw that surfaces is that it does not say anything about the value of an ad at a certain site. The reason PageRank became a powerful metric in the first place, is because it says something about how much authority Google attributes a given site, and therefore indirectly how much authority a link from that certain site will to the site at the other end of that link.

Naturally the RealRank will not give any indication of what benefits you can expect from advertising at a certain website or blog in terms of search engine rankings. Right about now you are probably ready to shout out that this new metric will still give us a good overview of the popularity of a website or blog, and that is certainly a fair point.

Unfortunately however, it is in this case moot. First and foremost because it will simply be too easy to manipulate the numbers. Anyone with $10 to spend per day can simply pay someone to do some social media manipulation which will artificially increase the number of unique visitors per day well into the thousands. Not to mention the possibilites of the numerous amount of traffic exchange programs out there, which will do the same for no cost at all.

The worst part of it all? Nobody can be accused of cheating the system here, because a rank that relies severely on unique visitors is subjected to these fundamental flaws, and that is why RealRank should not and hopefully will not be used by advertisers when shopping for adspace. If the future proves otherwise however, I can assure you that traffic and link exchange programs will get a swift and grand ressurection. Ultimately this would lead to a lot of people making much more money from their websites than they should be, and advertisers throwing their money into black holes of no return.

What is the solution then, you might ask? Well, judging from a post by Andy Beard regarding Izea’s new advertising platform Social Spark, they might actually be heading in the right direction already. Andy explains that this new platform will display current statistics such as CTR (Click Through Rates) for the site or blog to those considering investing in ads at that given site.

This is obviously what buying advertisements should be based on, because when someone wants to buy an ad, they do not do it out of generosity and because they feel a blogger deserves to afford an extra Happy Meal that day. No, they do it because they want to spend money to make more money, and click through rates and conversion rates are what gives a good indication of whether or not this is a likely outcome or not when they buy an ad.

Believe it or not, advertising at a blog with 500 dedicated readers per day can be ten times worth the money compared to advertising at a blog with 5,000 daily readers who do not notice the ads at all. And that is why we need a system that reflects the conversions, rather than another one which is really just based on artifically inflated fluff.