In my case, to some degree, “Why should I blog?” is a rhetorical question. As someone who pretty much lives and breathes WordPress development & design these days, I shouldn’t even be uttering this question aloud.

“It’s good promotion.” “It’s good for SEO.” “It allows potential clients to become more comfortable with you.” All of these things are true. But.

I admit it, I’ve been stuck. I’ve been self-editing before I speak, to the point of not speaking (both here and on twitter). I’ve been having conversations in my head about where to take this blog, “finding my voice”, beating myself up about how sadly neglected my websites are in content, design, structure, the whole shebang. (What does shebang mean anyway?)

This blog was started in 2003, before blogging was cool, before there were 10 million sites telling you to “define your niche” and “create a publishing schedule” and “have a commenting strategy”. Before most people knew what a blog even was. I started it because I could, and because it was a way to learn (Movable Type at the time), and because I was inspired by the blog of a brilliant programmer I worked with. At that point I could talk about whatever randomness inspired me in whatever way I felt because pretty much nobody read blogs. Essentially blogging was just for me.

Fast forward some years and I’m fumbling my way through a new life of being a full-time freelance designer, and becoming more self conscious about what I publish in the blogosphere. Not that I was ever raunchy or overly personal, despite the porn-worthy words of my first post, but I began to feel like I have to present myself as An Expert. That I have to be writing for My Audience (which one?).  That I should be writing more and more for my clients. Trouble is, that’s not what this site is about.

In the beginning of my freelance adventures I threw together a quick portfolio site. It does the job, barely, but enough that I’ve hobbled along for far too long. I don’t much like it so I rarely update it and cringe when I hear new clients say they’ve been reading my site. Of course they have. And to them, it’s probably fine – they contact me, after all. But to me, it’s a sorely dissatisfying representation of what I can do. It runs on WordPress too, but I blog over here. The silliness of this does not escape me.

And here is where I often find myself when I write: wondering how I can get to the end of the post with a nice ribbon tied up around it. *sigh*

Before I wrap up I will say that there’s some clarity at the end of the tunnel. I’ll be relaunching with a new webdesign portfolio soon. Then I will be able to blog with my different hats in different places and feel so much more comfortable in them. Maybe I’ll wear a silly hat here more often. Maybe I’ll get over my self-editing a bit more. We’ll see.

Wondering why YOU should blog, and how not to make an ass of yourself in the process?

…she says, putting her Expert Hat on.

You’re not alone. Here are some links I recommend on the subject.

• Blogging Therapy series by Havi Brooks (see bottom of the post for links to topics like mean comments, what if nobody reads my blog, etc.)
• Why you blogging? and Why you hiding? by Karen J Lloyd
• Sonia Simone’s Remarkable Communication – perhaps Slow Blogging or The Sweeney Todd Guide to Blogging.
• Skellie. Especially this recent a-niche-isn’t-required post… there’s hope for me yet.

If you have any thoughts or related links to share on this, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Fire away!

• She likes to mix her kick-ass marketing advice with a lotta swearing and mentions of sex/nudity/alcohol.
• This leads to much humour for her readers and high rankings on her website for bizarre search terms. I suspect this has taught her a thing or two about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Which brings me to…

A quick review of SEO School

I got my hands on a review copy of this ebook so that I could hopefully recommend it to my clients. Pretty every web designer in the universe has been asked “How do I show up number one in Google?”. Upon hearing this, every web designer in the universe cringes. To even begin to answer that question you’d have to be more specific, like “How do I show up number one in Google for ‘cheese biscuits’?”. The short answer is:

• Nobody should promise that you’ll rank number one in Google for anything except for, maybe, your website’s name. (See SmashLabSucks.com – there’s always the possibility of somebody bigger with more SEO juice affecting the results.)
• SEO is complicated.

Thankfully Naomi’s SEO School contains a long answer in her non-complicated, sailor-worthy language. At $19 on sale, it’s the best deal of the bunch. (Use the coupon code “wood”, without the quotes.)

While I don’t specialize in SEO I’ve been building web sites long enough that I have a good handle on this subject. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to learn a few new-to-me things in this ebook. In the many online tools she highlighted there are some I hadn’t heard of such as one by Microsoft which gauges commercial intent of a website or a search term. It shows for example that etsy.com has a .87 probability of commercial intent whereas unicef.com has a .98 probability of non-commercial intent. Or that “sexy boots” has a .97 probability of commercial intent. (That one’s up for debate, I think.) Another tool to check the age of a website, and so on.

What could be improved?

• Naomi’s already told me the graphics are soon to be re-done, so if you value style as much as substance you might want to buy later when the new version comes out. The current version is fine though.
• A beginner’s glossary of SEO (and/or an index) would be useful. She covers some really ninja-worthy stuff but in a few spots jumps past some basics on the way. For example she first mentions backlinks without explaining the term. Later there’s really awesome detail about what kind of backlinks you want, but at first mention this is probably confusing for a newbie. (Backlinks are the links coming into your site. Like that “web designer” link above? That is a keyword-rich link to my own portfolio I threw in so I could explain it just a bit.)*
• The section for bloggers has some advice I might handle differently or expand on. For instance there are plugins for WordPress that help with some of the issues and tasks mentioned. But I suppose that’s why there’s WordPress SEO Secrets for the really keen bloggers out there.

Conclusion

This part’s short & sweet because I’ve blabbed on enough and my honey is watching the Long Way Round and I’m kinda distracted.  So here you go:

• If you’re an SEO newbie, SEO School is a fabulous place to start. You’ll get an excellent grounding in the basics in a short time and walk away knowing some of the top tips to improving your rankings. Note, she doesn’t get into *how* to do some of the more technical site tweaks. She reckons either you built your site and know how, or you’ll ask your web guy/gal to do it for you.
• You should check out Naomi’s other goodies before you go to bed Thursday night. I’ve  got her Online Business School and you won’t be disappointed if you need an introduction in this area. There’s also a brand new e-book on how to launch your e-book. You’ll need to get the discount codes from her sale page.
• Ewan McGregor is one amazing dude.

*Tip: if you get stuck understanding a term, try using Google as a dictionary. Enter define: followed by your term and you’ll get a summary of definitions for the term. E.g., “define: backlinks” without the quotes.

“Impressive” by OrangeJack

Each of these ads is fine on its own, but two ads for the same product from the same company with different prices adds up to one confused customer.

While context is one of the things that makes advertising online an interesting opportunity, it’s also one of the challenges.

Which isn’t to say there’s no context issue in other advertising media; we’ve all seen pictures of billboards gone horribly wrong when paired together or put in an ill-chosen location. But in web advertising it gets trickier.

The above example could probably be solved easily enough with a good adserver+administration, some logic and coordination. Unfortunately, that means the right hand needs to know what the left is doing, and having worked at Telus I can tell you that’s easier said than done in a large corporation!

The limitations of machine logic become apparent when ads are targeted by keyword . At myTELUS we occasionally had complaints of inappropriate advertising: advertising for flight specials next to stories of crashed planes and the like. Yes, the story had related keywords, but humans are a more sensitive to the meaning of those words in context than the adserver was.

And then there’s the trickiness of putting AdSense or other contextual text ads on your business site. Some people are tempted to do that, figuring they might make an easy buck off of work they’re doing anyway. But the thing is, it’s difficult if not impossible to ensure you’re not advertising competitors whom you might not even be aware of. Or, you could be advertising something you wouldn’t support. I met someone recently who has a website on tortoises (of all things!). Although she could monetize her hobby she’s wary of contextual ads which might link to shady pet supplies etc. I wonder if Goodsense green advertising might be a good option for her site.

If you have ads on your blog or website, what do you use? Have you any words of experience to share?

1. Multicolr photo search – choose a few colours, and it’ll show y a grid of photos containing those colours. Just discovered this via DFCKR. Beautiful!
2. Flickrvision – a map of the world constantly displaying recently posted photos from around the world, by David Troy. Troy’s Twittervision is also a very cool way to see the flotsam, jetsam and zeitgeist of the world.
3. PictoBrowser – Builds a little Flash gallery using your Flickr photos, generating HTML that you can paste into your website.
4. FlickrFolio – it’s not yet launched, but this looks like it will be a nice minimalist way for an artist to build a portfolio out of their Flickr photo sets.
5. Photosets for inspiration: from business cards to a neon graveyard. There is a fantastic array of interesting photo sets and groups on Flickr.

Bonus WordPress Plugins for you WP lovers:

1. FlickrRSS – I’ve used this to pull in photos on a few sites, like Joanne Probyn‘s home page, and it works quite well.
2. PictoBrowser plugin – haven’t tried it myself. Have you?
3. Photo Dropper – for easily finding creative commons-licensed photos to include in your posts.
4. I know there’s a ton more which I haven’t tried, so here’s Specky Boy’s 10 Amazing WordPress plugins for Flickr. Looks like his site is ful of other great round-ups too. Oh, the Internet, it just never ends!

Once you enable the features in Labs, they may appear in your Settings tab, just to keep things interesting.

I also enabled the “Take a Break” feature that turns your email and chat off for 15 minutes and reminds you to go take a walk or something. I didn’t like this one so much. It disables the whole gmail screen, so you can’t access things you might want if you’re still working but just trying to avoid incoming messages. I’d like that feature since my mail is both taskmaster and a reference library of sorts. Not to worry though, close the tab, reopen, and you’re in business.

While I’m at it, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Better Gmail Firefox extension which I also find handy. If you have any Gmail tips, feel free to share in the comments.

Today I found the shift also happened in Firefox 3. Doh!

Fortunately a discussion of rounding errors in Firefox got me to wondering about the size of the background image. Well, it was an odd number of pixels wide. Increasing the width of the image by one pixel fixed the bug in both FF3 and Safari. Bye-bye hack! Dunno why I didn’t think to check that before.

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

These guidelines are good no matter the forum you’re writing for. I think they are particularly useful for bloggers and others writing for an online audience where attention is short, eyes are tired, and there’s just too much crap to sift through. Your readers will appreciate you for saying something short with feeling.

E-Junkie shopping carts offer a digital content delivery service, so if you’re selling MP3s or PDFs using PayPal buttons, and having to jump through silly hoops to get the product to your customer after you’ve got the dough, their digital storage & delivery might be the answer.

I discovered E-Junkie via Naomi Dunford’s 45 Home Business Resources: Things and People That Help You Make Money In Your Underwear. She has some great stuff in there, and I’d like to add a few others:

• For cheap starter business cards, Moo Mini-cards are a great creative option. They’re half the size of a regular card on a nice thick cardstock. (Wimpy paper for your business card says “hey, we’re wimpy!”.) You can make a pack with many different photos of your own. (So if you’re a realtor with a cheesy headshot, you’re in luck! These are made for YOU!) But I digress… I have some of my puppies and a macro shot that I took of a bee, and they’re a real conversation starter. Moo also makes stickers, postcards, etc., and people have all kinds of creative uses for them as you’ll see at Flickr.
• For email marketing Naomi recommended AWeber, which I haven’t used. I have used two others though. I recently sent an invite for Marleen Vermeulen‘s upcoming show via CampaignMonitor and it’s generated some very promising leads for her. (Woo hoo!) And, I set up a MailBuild newsletter template for Charlene at CSJ Active Wellness who is enjoying the easy tool for sending professional-looking e-mail broadcasts.
• Google Checkout is worth a look as an alternative to PayPal, and has some special deals for AdWords advertisers too.

Speaking of Adwords, that is exactly how I found the TorsoPants Naomi mentioned. Freakin’ hilarious.

Do you have anything to add?

Alas, I was annoyed by banner ads full of flashing, spinning things I wasn’t interested in.

“Hmm, I thought, maybe this is why I spend more time reading blogs & small independent sites than I do the big sites. They don’t have these kinds of ads.”

Yet, the content was interesting. I pressed on. For a few more (brief) pages of the series, no less. In each page, a new flashing spinning thing annoyed me.

Then, the icing on the cake arrived: an interstitial ad interrupted the page I was reading. That’s right, the page I was interested in was overtaken by something I had LESS than zero interest in. I clicked the “skip this ad link” out of habit while the annoyance boiled up.

I stopped reading the series, to write this rant.

Hey, annoying web publishers*!

I know you need to make a buck on your content now and then. Maybe if you paid your audience more respect you’d HAVE A LARGER AUDIENCE to contribute those pageviews and click-throughs you’re looking for.

This audience is now gone, and keeping her link love to herself.

*Annoying in this case being all those who allow really crap advertising to degrade their content. It’s so TELEVISION, and you know what’s happening to TV… it’s dying. People love their Tivos because they can skip this crap. Take a hint, OK?