Consistent Image Sizing

Consistent image sizing is critical, many times posts that have 25+ images laid out and sized consistently can go viral, just because the fact there are so many consistently sized images, no matter what the content of the images are.

Tutorial Posts With Clear Imagery and Explanation

Tutorial posts are another great way to convey information on a blog. Rather then explain how to do something with just text, breaking up the flow of the document with concrete call to actions and examples via imagery can help a lot.  Many times I find tutorials that are completely inaccurate or represent false or dated information, but because the post is laid out so well, it gets shared around.

The OMG Photo

The OMG photo as I have coined is that awesome hero shot you find on some blogposts. I see this time and time again, where a unbelievably funny or creative hero shot causes a blogpost to go viral, no matter what the actual article said.

Lengthy Infographic Content

One of my favorite ways to convey information is through an infographic. Although time consuming to create, they tend to go viral.

Consistent Giant List Round Ups

This really is where quality gets washed away sometimes. Want to create a hit on your blog? Simply round up 146 sources that discuss a niche topic, write up brief descriptions about each and lay it out in a consistent, readable manner. I see several specific sites that make a killing doing this all the time, and guess what, typically the sites listed are not that great and sometimes are lucky to be on topic.

If you notice one of the biggest factors people will overlook in executing content distribution is consistency. Messy, outdated, false, regurgitated content gets shared all the time. Consistent, easy to read layouts is king, content is queen.

The snapshots I sourced in this article are examples of consistency + great content which will yield the greatest chance for success.

1. You will realize that Dave Snyder is actually not a human and is a bear.

2. You own 456,000,000$ worth of domain names. You don’t need to try in life anymore – it is effectively game over. Therefore attending the conference and learning a ton is not priority.

3.  You have to listen to me speak about things that don’t get regurgitated in the blogosphere.

4.  You get nervous when getting ridiculously unique, great answers about your current internet marketing initiatives, from A list experts that would never give you the light of day at a large impersonal conference.

5.  You are allergic to fun.

6. Because you think the bacon explosion on your computer screen will taste better by licking the screen than in person eating it from the creator himself, TheMadHat.

7. You enjoy spending 2,455$ to attend large conferences, and frankly having to spend 500$ to see
Chris Winfield – Kenny Hyder – Greg Finn – Brent Csutoras – Reg Saddler – Todd Mailcoat – Neal Rodriguez  – Li Evans – Jeff Quipp – Brian Chappell  – Carolyn Shelby – Wil Reynolds – Rhea Drysdale – Steve Plunkett – Rae Hoffman – Michael Streko – Aaron Chronister – Frank Watson  – Brandy Eddings – David Szetela – Chris Hart – Pamela Lund and  Tony Adam irritates you.

With that said I definitely do not want to see the following people at the event. Whatever you do guys – do not show up!

Martin Bowling
Scott Hendison
Joanna Lord
Taylor Pratt
Ben Cook aka Skittzo
Pat Sexton
Dave Rohrer
Scott Clark
Kid Disco
Dan Zarella
Kate Morris
Lisa Barone
Eric Lander
Rick Galan
Wiep
Nick Andron
Dan Perry
DJ Litten

If this post thoroughly confused you then read this.

• xml
• rss
• html
• google gadget
• netvibes module
• image loop
• google maps
• icalendar
• json
• csv
• email
• xsl
• yaml

Below you will see a demo video I made in which I grab images off of a page, and only images, and turned it into HTML that I can then embed wherever I want. Have you used Dapper for any projects?

Interesting that I am not alone in trying to balance so much. Like I eluded in the other post – the key to all this is balancing your life, staying focused and diversifying your time.

One great way to pad yourself in todays economy is to diversify your streams of income. A few things off the top of my head that folks are doing right now to do just that…

• Content Creation
• SEO implementation
• Affiliate Marketing / Personal one off side projects
• 9-5 agency/in house jobs
• Consulting
• Coding

Everett over at Sphinn brings up a good point. I think I should have clarified that the domains are side projects – don’t count the multitude of domains you look after at the 9-5 SEO agency job.

I thought this would be an interesting survey to find out how well diversified most folks really are.

The difficult element in all of this is to find the right work/life balance. Focus is paramount and it is easy to get washed away in distractions.

Lets get this started off with a situation where a man stumbles in front of a car and the car pummles over his leg, but the man manages to walk away!

Your buddies are out horsing around on the ice and accidently fall in.

An endzone dance is a typical occurence in the NFL. Could you imagine a guy doing a move only to faceplant into the ground.

Lets imagine your neighboor is up on he roof blowing leaves off, trips and take a head first dive towards the ground from two stories up. Miraculously he lands on the hood of his care, bracing the impact, and gets up and walks away.

The day has come, you have prepared your whole life for this. You get the local NBA team to place a message up on the scoreboard asking your loved one to marry you – only to be rejected on national TV.

Cats are amazing creatures. In fact so amazing one managed to rescue himself from the balzing house fire that tore through the neighboorhood.

It appears the last time they tested this was back in 05′

Here is a screencast:

If you have no idea what I am talking about check out the video below:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Blog Writers Ubiquity:

One idea I have so far is an auto inner linking command to alleviate that nasty chore of finding the right page to link to on your site. Imagine if you are typing a blog post in your wysiwyg editor and you need to interlink a phrase. You simply highlight it, and open up Ubiquity via ctrl-space. You type in inner-link and boom. That phrase is linked to the most relevant page on your site. How might this work? Honestly, not sure how the api’s work right now, but if you could get Ubiquity to query site:www.domain.com “highlighted phrase” in Google and return the #1 result as the page to link to then this might just be a time saver.

Link Builders Ubiquity:

This one is a no brainier, but being able to type in link-count, and it takes you to the yahoo site explorer page, defining the number of links for that page. Also, being able to quickly see the total number of links for the domain would be nice.

Social Bookmarkers Ubiquity:

It would be extremely handy if there was a command line prompt for say, bookmark, and it opened up 3 new tabs. They could be something like Digg, Stumble-Upon and Reddit. Each site would have the URL of the page you came from already preloaded, as well as embedded description content if you highlighted text on the old page.

Competitive Analysis Ubiquity:

Lets say you want to do some quick competitive analysis on a specific domain. The newly launched Quarkbase.com is a great place to ping. Open up Ubiquity and query site-stats and off you go to -> http://www.quarkbase.com/show/”site-name”

Jerk-Off Commenter Ubiquity:

Perhaps you find some jack face leaving an abusive low blow comment, and want to find out potentially if they have commented other places across the web. Open up Ubiquity and type in comment-finder “name” and it queries http://www.backtype.com/people?q=lex.

Rob, Aaron, Shady let me know when this is done.

Thanks,

Brian

Google Knol recently launched. If you have not started writing articles for it, well then, hurry the heck up before you get passed by all the other folks who understand the need to get an early start. My latest post was on Increasing Conversions, I started off with 68+ tips and tricks to do so and I fully welcome others to add there thoughts to the article.Now you might have noticed, after writing an article, you could not find it or others. It appeared the “search feature” was not working. The only way to see your article through searching was by being logged in.In fact, a gentlemen for the LA times thought nobody was even writing articles, which obviously was not the case. Turns out it takes “time” for Knols to be searchable, according to a Google representative.Now that we know Google knows how to search, the remaining question is how well are the articles going to rank? I have a strong feeling these pages are going to rank well. In fact they have already starting do just that.

Now I know these are somewhat “long tail terms” but this is a brand new subdomain. It has not been live but for about a week. Give Knol some time to build up backlinks and age and you can start to understand the ramifications of all of this.

Read More on this topic:

Google Knol Review

It is worth noting Google wasn’t even included on the list, funny stuff. Here is the excerpt if you cannot read the image:

“Publicizing your page in the major search services helps Web surfers find your site. You should try and get your page listed in as many search services as possible.

The following table describes how to add your site to several of the popular Web Search services. To list your Web Site in the search service, go to the URL and click the link indicated in the last column of the table.”

• Altavista
• Excite
• InfoSeek
• Lycos
• MSN Web Search
• Yahoo!
• WhoWhere?

“You can save yourself some time by submitting your Web site to a submission service called Submit It at www.submit-it.com (which is owned by Microsoft now for something completely unrelated). This service can submit your Web site to more than 400 search engines for a modest fee of 59$.”