Can I talk to you?
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I have a project underway where I want to interview some bloggers. I have an assistant working on setting up the interviews but we’re having a heck of a time.
Most of the folks I want to interview don’t have contact pages on their blogs.
I can’t believe it. I want to interview you - give you publicity and promote the heck out of what you’re doing and you don’t want to talk to me because I can’t get to you.
Oh sure - I can leave a comment on your blog saying “I want to interview you - contact me on my contact page on my blog”. How cool is that? For either one of us? I guess we’ll wind up doing that and then asking you to delete it.
So - if you’re reading this and are an Alltop blogger without a readily available contact page - please contact me on my contact page. It will save us both a bit of a hassle.
Garden Centers Shouldn’t Blog
You run a small retail greenhouse or nursery and you want to know if you should blog.
Blogging has to be seen in the context of marketing and sales. So there are two aspects you have to consider.
1)Your costs.
Take the time you spend writing and uploading a post (conservatively 20 minutes if it’s a decent post but if you aren’t a speed typist and a fast writer - you can easily hit 45 minutes). Understand you have to post regularly to make a blog worthwhile. And the main blogging time is spring when your target market is looking for information. Let’s say an hour/week.
Multiply your wage rate times 52 hours (one hour week). Let’s say that you make $20/hour for the purposes of this. That means your upfront cost is $1040 to produce this blog. But that’s not the way I used to budget my time in the nursery. You want me in November - I come for $20/hour. You want me in May - my time was over $200/hour and I’d still say no. I just didn’t have the time in May to do anything but eat, sleep, and run the nursery. So do figure out your real cost.
2) The Response.
Then take a look at subscription rates. If you get 200 subscribers to a commercial retail garden blog you’re doing well (and that’s assuming you’re a good writer so that folks will read you). Assume that at least half of those are non-local. Now you’re down to 100. Then evaluate response rates by posting a coupon. Typically, response rates approaching 5% are considered downright miraculous on the Net but let’s say you get 10%.
Bottom Line
Congratulations! You’ve just spent at least $1040 to get 10 customers into your garden business and your sales are discounted.
Your cost of acquisition is about $100 per customer and this isn’t likely a good deal when compared to something as simple as direct mail or other advertising options.
Blogging Garden Centers
But I know garden centers that blog! Sure you do - but they aren’t making money at it. They’re doing it for the heck of it - because somebody told them it was “cool” to blog. Or because that individual wants to create a national role within the trade for some other reason.
They surely haven’t thought out the consequences of spending an entire week of the year (one hour a week for 52 weeks=52 hours) on an advertising activity that’s going to create a customer acquisition cost of over $100.
In short, nobody at that garden center has run the numbers.
Does the same thing apply to websites?
No!
You need a website and you need it optimized for local searches. You need to have something up there that that speaks to local folks so when they search for a garden center in “anytown” - you’re going to pop up. Clear directions to your place (include coordinates for gps units) telephone contact points (not email - you don’t have time to answer email in your busy season) - the stuff you need to get these people into your store where you can make money.
You can write a few articles about gardening in your region - dealing with the specific problems of your climate and soils - to establish yourself as an expert resource. Write a new one every month or two to keep the site fresh. But don’t go overboard on it - you’re in the nursery business - not the information-business.
Does this apply to nationally known nurseries?
Short answer - it depends. The same kinds of numbers hold true - same kinds of costs, same kinds of response rates BUT the target audience is different. You’re not writing for consumers, you’re writing for the media. The garden media writes and reads blogs and those are the folks you want to have for your pull marketing efforts.
But you have to do it in a way that answers the classic copywriting question from the reader’s point of view “What’s in it for me?” If your commercial blog is about you - the media won’t read it and there’s quite a few out there that treat their commercial blog as a personal one. If your commercial nursery blog is about your reader - helping them in a some way, then you’re going to have readers in the trade. Tim Wood does a great job of this. He provides useful plant information, new plant info, and ties it all up in a story that just, ever so casually, happens to mention his company every now and then. 
But to return to my main point - there are other, far more cost-effective ways to publicize and make use of resources than blogging. It’s a long way down the list of marketing and sales efforts for local garden centers with no national objectives.
Garden Blogging and the Nofollow tag
Let’s set the stage a bit.
In the world of the Internet, links have been seen as currency. A link from a site with a higher Google PageRank than yours is a good thing. So if your site is ranked as a 2 and you get an inbound link from a 5, life is good. Your ranking and authority with Google goes up and over time, you’ll get more traffic. So incoming links have some value.
But bloggers trade links around all the time. Some bloggers put up blogrolls; most don’t keep them current and lose enthusiasm for maintaining them. Blogrolls have been trade-offs; you give me a link in yours, I’ll give you a link in mine kind of thing. Doesn’t matter if you read a blog - if that blog doesn’t give you a link, then you don’t put them in your blogroll. How many folks do you think read this blog regularly but don’t put it in their blogroll because I don’t have one? 
(Hint - quite a few)
Links in the body of a post are also followed by Google so when you link to another person’s blog as part of your own post or followup (I assume you give attribution when you add another post when you got the idea or are responding to a post) you give a link that Google follows.
You might also think that there’s a link every time you make a comment in somebody’s blog. Well, yes and no. The link is an active link but there’s a code within the blogging software that inserts a “nofollow” tag in the comments section of blogs. It’s automatic with most blogging software. You’ll see them if you open up your blog, go to your browser command line and click on View>Page Source. Scroll down to where you start seeing comments and you’ll see the rel=”nofollow” code.
A nofollow tag tells Google to NOT count this link as a real link. So the link works, but Google doesn’t count it - it doesn’t follow it (nofollow) and you can make all the comments you like and you won’t be increasing your PageRank. You may find folks click on your comment and come to visit your site (a good reason to make comments) but Google won’t give you any credit for the link.
Some bloggers are taking steps to eliminate this nofollow tag and I’ve decided to do the same thing. I don’t maintain a blogroll but I do think that folks who make intelligent comments and help me with my blogging deserve to be seen and rewarded by Google. The last time I checked, this URL had a PageRank of 5 but the rankings change regularly and I don’t keep up with them.
I’ve installed the DoFollow tag for Wordpress. If you make a comment, you’re going to get a live link. All your comments will be followed back to your home site by Google.
This is just one way I have of thanking you for helping with my blog - being part of my garden world.
Policy on Comments
So my official policy on comments now is that if you add something to the conversation, I’ll approve it without a second thought. If you simply say “me too” because you’re looking for a link - then it’s not going to get approved. I also do not link through to non-blogs for commercial purposes so link-spammers need not apply.
Blog Developments and What’s Coming Here
If you see a few bumps in this blog in the next week or so it’s because I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress and have de-installed and am re-installing all the plug-ins and software that makes this amazing bit of software work.
So far it has been seamless (insert sound of Doug reaching for something wooden and saying “touch wood”) and the little bit of software (plug-ins) have even been automatically upgraded. Let’s here it for that little touch of easy installation! But as I’ve been taught in the old school of upgrading, you upgrade and then install each plug-in separately and test-test-test so that you know which one messes things up. So far so good.
The fun thing is that I’ve just finished doing a bit of research into “comments” and the plug-ins that will make this blog even more functional for readers.
What you can look forward to - removing the “nofollow” tag. If you don’t know what this is, stay tuned as I give you all a bit of link-love.
A plug-in that will automatically give the last title of *your* blog so that when you make a comment here and somebody reads your comment, you get an ad in the comment section for folks to go and read your blog. Make a comment here in my blog and I’m going to try to help you drive traffic to your blog. This means of course that I’m going to be ever-vigilant in deleting spammers and folks who are just trying to collect links.
And more!
I think the entire “comment” section of garden blogs has been really ignored and under-used so far. My research says we can do better. So I’m going to try. And I’m sure you’ll let me know how it’s working out for you.
How I Doubled My Adsense Ad Income
Now this is a very simple technique and I have it set up on my sites already but this is the very first time I did it to a real garden advertiser.
If you have an Google Adsense account, you’ll see control tabs Adsense Setup>Allowed Sites and a box that allows you to ban URLs from advertising on your site. Normally, this is used to ban competitors. So if you’re Coke - you don’t want Pepsi targeting your Coke site with their ads so you ban their website.
But many of us use it to ban low-paying websites from targeting our pages and drive the CPM down. One example is to ban e-bay.com ads. This auction site trolls the ad system targting low paying keywords and then driving traffic to their site by using your pages as low paying traffic-generators. So in the box, you’d put www.ebay.com.
You can find the sites to ban for your blog by visiting this site. (Links opens in a new window).
Over the last week, I noticed that one of my sites - normally a decent income generator was slipping badly. I wasn’t concerned for a day or two because these things happen but this weekend, while waiting for the visitors to get up - I wandered over to the site to see who was driving down my income.
I had been targeted by a garden product and they had essentially taken over my site with their ads. And all those ad keywords were very low paying ones. I added their URL to the banned list.
24 hours later, the income from this site has gone back up to normal levels - doubling the Adsense income from the previous week.
Try it yourself. Check out your income levels for the last week or so. Use the website resource above and add those urls to your site. Then wait another week or so (a similar length of time) and then compare CPM’s and CTR’s.
Let us know if it worked for you.
Google and Blog Traffic
I’ve written about Google traffic generation in the past and this past week was a perfect opportunity for me to check out how many pages Google delivers to me and show you exactly the result of posting or not posting on this blog.
The image at the bottom of the post shows my traffic pattern over the past 30 days (it doesn’t show real numbers - just the pattern). You’ll see that a few days ago, I started posting and the traffic started climbing again. The week before that, I didn’t post and except for one day (Thursday - the day my newsletter comes out with a mention of an article for the week) there was insignificant numbers of readers compared to normal traffic days.
What this tells me is that Google doesn’t give me much traffic when people search for specific terms. This blog isn’t search engine optimized nor does it write about the things people search for. So why would Google send me much traffic? And it doesn’t as can be seen by the week I wasn’t posting. My traffic comes from readers and other short term links from other bloggers.
To be sure - Google does visit this blog but most of the posts are likely put right into the supplemental index or forgotten.
I could change that if I started writing specific things as “Google-bait” and do them in a search engine friendly method but I’m not overly interested in doing that. You could do the same thing - and that’s a decision you’ll have to make.
But the point of all this is to simply point out that Google treats blogs differently than websites (my website traffic continued nicely while I was away and not posting new articles).
And while the image below is from a screen capture, and not exactly picture quality, I think you can see the trend line while I was posting and when I stopped.
Full feed or part feed?
So do you put out a part feed or a full feed?
Full feeds let readers read the entire article in their reader. They don’t have to click to your site to get the rest of the article - it’s all in one place for them.
Part feeds are intended to entice you to want to read the first few sentences and then click through to go to the website.
So why do you run part feeds or full feeds?
Interesting stat - readership goes up when you run full feeds. People don’t like having to click through to read articles. So if you’re looking for more readership, full feeds are the way to go.
Some bloggers run part feeds because they want you to click on their link and go to their website where you might click on some advertising and make them money.
But as Rick Klau of Feedburner points out, there’s no difference in response rates between full and part feeds when it comes to visitors clicking through to your site.
Some folks run part feeds because they don’t want their feeds scraped. There are solutions to that as well and here’s a good summary of those. You’ll see the copyright notice on the bottom of each of my posts and I can tell you that this works nicely to identify scraper sites.
My take is that I like running a full feed because I want to make it easier for folks to read my posts. There’s not enough money in blogging to make it a hassle for readers. Make it easy for people to read you.
I had to run a part feed with the magazine format I messed around with but my own feed numbers have jumped over 100 new readers since I switched back to full feeds from the magazine format’s part feed. And still climbing nicely.
Make it easy for people to read you. Did you catch that line above? That’s one of the most important things a blogger or writer can do in today’s Internet publishing world. Otherwise, CLICK
Got an opinion on this one?
Turned Down a Magazine Article Offer
I was offered an opportunity to write a small article for a somewhat prestigious garden magazine the other day.
And here’s the rub. I turned it down.
Why?
Because the editor in charge of negotiating couldn’t guarantee my url would be part of my byline. And the money was a pittance for the work - but according to the editor if I wrote well on this short article, I could get longer articles. Great! Longer articles at the same word rate and I can lose even more money for more hours of my time.
In other words, if I wanted to write for this magazine, I had to pretend I didn’t have a website or blog. The only reason I’d do the work for the small amount of money was the chance to get that url in front of a new audience.
Heck. I’m bigger than they are in terms of readership, I can drive traffic to them rather than them drive traffic to me. After all, the editor found me by searching the Net for the topic she wanted covered.
But magazines don’t get it.
They’re still stuck in a writer-editor-reader model and the information curve is moving away from that. In fact, I think it’s moving away faster and faster now with younger people coming online in our gardening world.
Two thoughts. I’d hate to be a salesman for the advertising department right about now. The data just hit the street that the top 100 advertisers in the US just moved a billion dollars in advertising to the Net and away from traditional advertising. Think about it - you can toss a bunch of money at a magazine or newspaper and not be able to measure your response or you can toss the same amount of money at the Net and get instant results and evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising. You get real feedback and your advertising changes accordingly. No-brainer from a purchaser’s point of view. The big boys are moving - the rest are not far behind.
Second thought. Magazines would be far better off in the long run making strategic alliances with Internet websites and/or finding people who “get” the Net to run their online business. And have their own website compete with their magazine.
But you know the problem with that? The web doesn’t make the same amount of money as the offline operations because it runs on results. Advertisers pay for results, not for prestige and exposure.
A recent release about the online income from the New York Times pointed out two fascinating things. The first was that 90% of the readership views now came from the Net. The vast majority of people reading the Times got it on the Net (worldwide) The only problem with that was it only generated 10% of the revenues. The print version - read by 10% generated 90% of the revenues.
Pareto’s principle is in full effect here; and this is why magazines are having trouble. They can’t move successfully because they can’t transfer their advertising revenues. And the Net is eating their lunch when it comes to those revenues.
Magazines and newspapers are indeed in a tough spot. I’m looking forward to seeing how they all work it out.
MBAB: Your Personal Brand
One of the things I’ve always been fascinated with (for some strange reason) is the entire notion of “branding” a business. Maybe it’s because I grew up during the cowboy movie phase and we ran around shooting and dying in great numbers across countless imaginary plains that never extended beyond the front and back yards.
I’m intrigued with the notion that bloggers (and nurseries, garden centers etc) are their own brand and I think we have a perfect example of that in action over the past week.
I think that branding is one of the most misunderstood concepts on the Net. We all brand ourselves by our writing every day. Your online presence and history creates the image people have of you and that’s your brand. It can be a positive thing or a negative thing but it exists for all of us.
For a commercial nursery, it isn’t solely about tagging and POS posters - it includes that leaky hose lying between the retail benches and the old paint. It’s the late delivery truck and driver who’s not had his “nice” pill. It’s the one flat that doesn’t arrive that’s needed by the store’s most important customer. It’s the entire package that creates the brand in the minds of the customer.
For bloggers, we have our words over time that tell readers who we are and what we stand for. We too, no matter how many readers we have, create our own brands. Susan over at Gardenrant has just outed herself as using language that ranks highly on a cuss-o-meter. “I take full credit responsibility for that, by the way” a “potty mouthed” garden blogger So she’s created her own brand and identified it to the trade and other bloggers. This isn’t up to any of us to decide if it’s good or bad - it’s Susan’s brand and it’s up to her to decide if that’s how she wants editors, readers and other bloggers to see her.
Here’s the implication of branding for any blogger or nursery business.
A good brand buys you a grace period - a mistake or three. A bad brand gets you deleted.
In the publishing business, we’re only as good as our latest book, latest publication, latest issue, latest article or post. And a series of good ones will get you readers and a growing body of folks who will read you and perhaps even reward you for writing (like with cheques) If you have a good brand, a good reputation for providing good articles or good information, the odd stinker won’t hurt you with your audience. But if your brand isn’t stellar, then the tolerance level is lower and the delete button is closer. That “about me generation” isn’t as tolerant of mistakes as older readers.
For bloggers, the issue is one of readership. For retail nurseries, the issue is one of customer retention as more and more customers join the “about me mindset”.
It’s about all your words, your entire operation - and it’s all under your control.
As an end note, I understand that personal brands can be changed over time but it’s like steering an iceberg. Slow going and you can get pretty cold while it’s happening.
MBAB: It’s all about me
It’s all about me.
Well, not me exactly but you too. Let me digress a moment.
In the good old days, there was a writer, an editor and a reader. The reader pretty much took whatever the writer and editor cooked up and delivered. That content was sandwiched between advertisements and we were pretty much captive readers if we wanted that information.
With television, we started with a few channels and were still pretty much captive audiences. The ads were delivered right alongside the content and we were still captive to the content-ad delivery.
Then somebody invented the boon to all guys - the remote controller. Now we could channel surf during commercials and never have to watch one again. Except that of course all the commercials are pretty much on at the same time. Still captive.
Then we had the 500 channel universe explode on us and combining that with the remote, cable tv specialty channels and a bit of creative taping or tivo, and we never had to watch an entire commercial again. Commercials changed - become more like stories and entertainment in hopes of capturing our attention. But the days of captive audiences had ended.
Now the Internet is the main source of information. And for all intents and purposes, this is an infinite amount of information, entertainment and social networking freely available to all. There is ultimate choice. And the ultimate remote controller is now the mouse.
So how does this tie in to being all about me?
It only takes the average visitor 3 seconds (or less) to decide if your website or blog is “about them”.
If your website is about you, then they leave. If it is about them - then they might stay a bit longer and evaluate your content.
Fact of life #1 on the Net. You no longer control the information channel - your visitor - your customer controls that channel by giving you or removing their attention from your website or product.
If your website is about them - meets their needs - then they’ll reward you with their attention. If it’s about you - and they don’t care about you - then they click away.
And oh yeah, the younger the audience, the worse this phenomena is. If you think older consumers are quick on the mouse - you ain’t seen nothing yet.
When I have that mouse in my hand - it’s all about me.
So what’s that do to your blog or commercial website?
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