Complete lack of original content

Talk about beating a dead horse. These clowns keep writing about the same pathetic garbage day after day after day. And we eat it up like it’s the finest cut of steak in the house. Not only do we read, with baited breath their every boring and droll word we then spend 10 or 15 minutes crafting a comment hoping against hope that they’ll actually spend 3 seconds replying to us or in some other way making reference to what we talked about.

Tell me, how many times can we read a series on Building a better blog or how about one on The importance of getting readers to comment? But these A-Listers keep throwing it out there like candy and we eat it up. Fact is that it’s not candy, it’s feces and they’re a bunch of monkeys throwing it at us and we’re chowing down on their shit. Prime example: Twitter. I like twitter as much as the next guy but how many times do I have read about the latest and greatest “feature” which in reality is just someone copying another idea?

These people actually believe their own press

They read the comments people leave for them that go something like this:

Hey Blogger Dude(tte) just wanted to tell you how great your blog is and how much I learned from you. You’re so awesome and I want to bear your children!!!!

Yes I know in reality it’s much worse than that, but since this is a somewhat family friendly piece of internet real estate I decided not to be overly graphic. Point is they read these comments and they actually start believing they’ve added value to the internet and worse yet to people’s lives in general.

Funny thing is I could have given about 150 more reasons that A-List bloggers suck but I got to depressed thinking about it to go on.

How am I going to benefit from your content?

We have a finite time in our days no matter who we are or what we do. Because of this we expect to benefit for our time and effort of looking at your content. It could be learning something new, being entertained, reexamining our position on and issue, or something else entirely. But the common denominator is that there needs to be something in it for me.

Why should I choose your content over the competition?

If you were to hand 10 people a one page “fact sheet” and then ask them to write a blog post on the contents of the fact sheet you’d get 10 very widely differing articles. Even with that fact there’s going to be one, or two that really stand out. That you just read and understand. A couple of the posts are going to resonate with you. The same is true with blogs. There are a lot of blogs out there that give the same information, but a few stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

Did you make an effort?

Anyone can go out concoct a blog post out of existing information. A dab of this, a pinch of that. Copy and paste, edit some words, move sentences around. But did you really take the time to understand what you are passing along to me? Because if you don’t how can you expect me to get any thing from your post? You don’t need to be the premier expert at what you write about, but you need to be educated.

Today I was watching a video from Westboro Baptist “church” (and in this instance I only grudgingly use the word church) on YouTube. Fred Phelps was up to his usual nonsense and of course there were no shortage of comments decrying them (Westboro Baptist). It dawned on me as I was watching, listening, and reading the comments at how absolutely brilliant Westboro Baptist is. From a marketing standpoint. Until a few years ago who had ever heard of Fred Phelps and Westboro baptists church? Now it is a household name. Synomous with hate, and bigotry of course but household nonetheless. It got me thinking about a few things.

Can negative press be beneficial to a blog?

Some will say that any press is beneficial for a blog, but I disagree. The right press at the right time is beneficial for a blog. And sometimes the “right press” is negative. For some reason our human psyche is captivated by ugly things. That’s why people will slow down to a crawl as they drive past a car crash. Anyone who tells you they slowed down for the safety of the emergency works is lying. We want to see the carnage. Be that twisted steel or twisted bodies.

It’s the same with a blog. When someone highlights a blog in a negative light it draws traffic to that blog. People want to see the disaster for themselves. Kind of like when people view a Westboro Baptist YouTube video. They already know it’s going to be bad, everyone has told them this but they still go to watch it.

Can you capitalize on negative press?

I believe that you can, but it takes some forethought and preparation. There need to be two things in place; a plan of action and the ability to recognize when to implement that plan.

1. Have a plan in place BEFORE the negative press hits
2. Recognize when it does hit and not after the fact

It’s easy to reflect and know when something turned negative but the real skill is to see it when it happens and immediately begin to work it to your advantage. If you try to jump on it a few days after the initial storm has died down you will end up looking like someone who is trying to justify themselves rather than someone who is meeting the challenge head-on.

Should you generate your own negative press?

In some instances yes, in some no. Let me explain. You need to gauge the answer on your own abilities to make a connection with your visitors. First consider your current readers.

• How will they react?
• Will you alienate them?
• Will they see it as a brilliant ploy or will they be offended

Next consider those you will be entrapping with the negative press “ploy”

• Is your target audience going to take the bait?
• If they do respond can you keep them interested?
• Can you depend on them to generate secondary interest with their contacts?

Finally consider your own moral values in regards to generating your own negative press. Because at the end of the day you need to live with yourself and how you’ve handled it.

Now some questions for you:

1. Have you ever dealt with negative press?
2. Did you create it, or was it “natural”?
3. What was the end effect? Good, bad, or no change?

Why ask you?

Because you alone are able to give the best explanation. I could tell everyone why, but I can’t sell them on your site. Only you can do that

Promote your site

Here’s your chance to shamelessly promote your online presence. Just comment below and be sure to follow these simple (I think they’re simple at least) rules:

• Keep your explanation to 45 words or less
• Keep it family friendly
• Don’t promote anything illegal
• No pornographic sites
• Using keywords as the link to your site is fine. Making the entire promotion one giant string of keywords is not fine
• Both the site and the promotion should be in English

What am I asking in return?

The usual. A short (or long) post/twit/whatever with a link back to this article telling people about it. That’s all. Nothing earth shattering. In fact here’s the code you can use:

<a href="http://www.ablogaboutnothing.com/why-visit-site"
target="_blank" title="why we should anyone visit your site">
why we should visit your site</a>

Just copy and paste it like you would anything else.

For the purpose of this article we will refer often to YouTube because that is what most people are familiar with.

Everyone knows how powerful multimedia is on websites. It keeps viewers coming back time after time and it helps to make your site sticky. The website Entheos says that Creating a Sticky Web Site follows this pattern:

1. Fresh content
2. Interactive tools
3. Educational
4. Offers an electronic newsletter
5. Light on text content
6. Intuitive navigation
7. Branded with your identity
8. “Value-add” content for readers
9. Visually appealing

One of the greatest interactive tools is video. People love watching videos online. Whether they are from YouTube or another source doesn’t matter as long as they are there. But what about those of us who for whatever reason don’t have our own videos, or not enough to keep them fresh? The answer to that lies in using the work of others.

Finding appropriate videos

The first step in using videos is to find the ones that fit best with what your site is about. To do this make use of the search feature located at the top of every YouTube page.

For example if your website is about wedding dresses you would type wedding dresses into the search bar and get a variety of videos to choose from. Then it is a matter of going through and watching the videos that you look appealing to you and deciding if your visitors will like them.

Single or multiple videos

Depending on your needs you may want to include just one or two videos from a particular channel. The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste the embedding code that YouTube provides for you. Most other video portals also provide embedding code.

If you don’t see it on some videos it means the publisher of the video has chosen to restrict the ability to embed. If this is the case then you may have luck contacting them directly and asking for permission to use their videos. Most publishers don’t restrict the embed function so the simplest course of action is just to find one who doesn’t and use their videos instead.

What often happens is that you’ll find a particular publisher who you like. If that is the case you can either embed the videos one by one, or you can setup a feed that displays their entire channel. To do so embed the following code into your site:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/username/uploads

Be sure to replace “username” with the approriate username. This will create an RSS feed of all the videos in that publishers channel. This will ONLY create a text feed. If you want to embed the actual videos in the feed use the following:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/username.rss

Again replace “username” with the appropriate channel name, but be sure to leave the .rss extension in place.

There are a couple of sites which do the work for you and allow you to display multiple videos from different sources. One of the most user friendly is Dynamic Vids which can embed videos from YouTube based on keywords. Another one is UBeek which will let you embed an RSS stream created from a playlist. You can also use Widgetbox YouTube TValso does something similar except it creates a media player instead of just a list.

The impact it will have on your site

There are many factors that come into play when looking at how well you benefit from using this method. My own personal experience was that:

• Bounce rate went from 93% to 65%
• The time spent viewing the site went from less than 1min average to between 3 and 5min average
• Comments increased 10 fold for almost all of the articles
• People began linking to the site much more frequently

The key is to present it properly. I go for the added value presentation as opposed to the driving force behind the site. It’s not my video and I don’t want my visitors to think it is. I want them to know that it is provided by others who were gracious enough to make them and allow others to use the content. I’ve not tried so I have no way of knowing this for sure, but I think it would cause a sharp decline in traffic if people thought you were trying to pass the videos off as your own.

Do you need permission?

Technically if the publisher has not restricted the ability to embed the videos they are giving their permission to use them. It never hurts however to send a quick email and let them know what you are doing and your website address. I’ve never had anyone tell me no, or block the videos. In fact I’ve had several people offer to make me videos especially for my site. Why? Because while I’m adding value to my site with their content it also helps them by bringing their content in front of more people.

How about you? Do you use embedded videos to enhance your site? Do you care if others use your videos to enhance theirs?