WHAT DOES IT DO?
It makes lots of fancy charts. No, really, that’s pretty much it. Still, those charts are exceedingly useful for seeing how your subscriber count has risen over time. It also predicts your subscribers after 3/6/12 months if you keep expanding at your current rate, and it’s fun to look at approximately where you’ll be in the future (apparently, I’ll have 2.5k readers within a year. Remember that the metric for determining blog popularity is whether your RSS count can be expressed in “k.” If you can, then you are automatically a top blogger).

My description doesn’t do it justice, so I’ll let these pictures do the talking:

Even if you’re not a stat junkie, you need to check Feed Analysis out.

Performancing Ads is a new ad network that sets itself apart from all of the others in a lazy yet brilliant way: it exclusively focuses on the sales of 125×125 ad boxes on blogs. Instead of confusing people with such complicated things as 486×60 and CTR and whatnot, all it offers are those cool little square buttons that are the hottest thing on the web since, well, 468×60.

But don’t let my seemingly mocking introduction fool you - the concept really is nice. Most blogs have space for 125×125 ads and lots of people want to sell them, and making a dedicated marketplace for the format is a nice move by Performancing.

SO HOW DOES PERFORMANCING ADS WORK?
After signing up for an account and submitting a blog that you want to display ads on, you install the Performancing Ads plugin and add a piece of code to your blog. The process is fairly straightforward (although installing a plugin takes more work than the far-easier variant of putting javascript/HTML to display the ad) and shouldn’t take too long. You then set a weekly price for each square you add and wait for the money to start flowing in.

Well, kinda. I haven’t had a single booking yet for my test period (only two days, but at four bucks per week it’s a steal compared to my normal pricing) and all of the other sites that I’ve seen using it are filled with the default ads. This would be all fine and dandy if the backup ads actually made me money, though, or if I could at least CHANGE them. Not so. Having useless affiliate ads on my blog is not something I’m partial too, so Performancing needs to get its act together.

Despite this huge shortcoming, Performancing Ads is still worth checking out because it’s the first ad program of it’s kind.

It’s Firef.ly.

Since it’d be easier to simply show you what it is first, click on the slider above to open it up (please hop on over to this page, RSS readers). An overlay will appear on Blog Badly and you’ll be able to type anywhere on it. If there is another reader here that’s using the app, you’ll be able to talk with them. I’ll be here for the next hour or so checking back on it, so you can talk to the famed owner of this prestigious blog

SO WHAT IS FIREFLY, EXACTLY?
One could describe it as a fancy pants chat client (because that’s basically what it is), but lets get into the nitty gritty: it’s a chat application that you install on your site/blog using a simple piece of code that allows for easy reader-to-reader-to-owner interaction. This takes place in a simple overlay that allows you to type messages and view what others using Firef.ly on the site are doing in real-time. This is a killer app because it’s

• simple
• easy-to-implement
• user-friendly

There is, of course, one problem: you need to have quite a few willing users for it to work, and a good amount of traffic. I’m counting on you guys to provide your feedback, whether in the comments section of this post or just by typing it into the app (it saves chat history too - and I can ban you troublemakers [even more cool features]).

Why couldn’t I be a contest blogger?

Does it matter? In short: yes

How often you should post on your blog is often a hotly debated topic. Whether you post weekly (lazy!), every few days (me), daily (me with ideas), or multiple times a day (HOW?!?!?!), though, it’s clear that it does have an effect on traffic.

WHY?
There are three main ways in which blog post frequency affects traffic:

• More posts = more indexed pages = more search engine visitors = more pageviews (this also applies to blogging consistency)
• More posts = more content for readers to absorb = more pageviews.
• More posts = more resources for the reader = more likely they’ll return to the site/link to you = more pageviews/publicity

All of these seem to show this seems to point to one thing: the more you post, the more traffic you’ll generally get. In most cases, this is true - you just have to make sure your content doesn’t suck and your readers aren’t getting overwhelmed if you put out more than one post per day (this is why I don’t read Problogger).

SO, IN CONCLUSION…
Posting on your blog more often generally leads to more traffic. Can you still have a successful blog and post once a week? Yes. Will it be harder than if you posted daily? Generally. Just remember that frequent posts should take a backseat to post quality and marketing - you can be successful with the latter two but expecting visitors just because you crank out a bunch of generic, boring posts every day is folly.

Article marketing is one of the many ways to send traffic and backlinks towards your site. Although it’s more time-consuming than methods like high pagerank dofollow blog commenting, blog carnivals, and forum marketing, it still yields results.

Google, of course, hates duplicate content and thus probably views articles reposted on different sites with contempt. Unless you intend only to submit your article to a single directory (why even go through the effort?), your poor content might suffer!

Google actually doesn’t penalize for duplicate content on different domains in most cases - props goes to Internet Marketing Strategies for pointing that out (note to self: research topics before posting about them. Not that I don’t already do that, of course. Wink wink. Nudge nudge). Google simply dislikes duplicate content on the same site (i.e. the normal and printer versions of an article), so submitting the same article to various directories should be fine. There are other uses for this trick to make money blogging, though, so don’t fret.

GETTING AROUND THE PROBLEM
Ironically, a simple way to get rid of duplicate content and bypass Google’s stringent content policies is with Google itself. Its translation tool, to be exact.

Basically, just plug in your text and translate it a few times. For example, your pattern could go something like English -> Spanish -> French -> Russian -> German -> English. At the end of this chain, you’ll get a whole new article with some nice synonyms and different phrases used. Just make sure to proofread the article, or else “One day, Roberto the Magician decided to pull a rabbit out of his magical hat at a birthday party.” can turn into “One day, Roberto, a magician decided to send a rabbit from his hat magic child to a birthday celebration.”

Every new combination results in a whole new article, and it shouldn’t be too hard to whip up a script that does this automatically due to Google’s lack of a captcha, creating a simple way to spin out hundreds of different and often nonsensical articles.

Which of the above posts would you rather read (assuming you spoke Lorem Ipsum)? If you picked the one on the left, then log off of your computer and go read a book. War & Peace by Tolstoy could be a good choice for you.

SHOCKING POSTING ADVICE
Contrary to popular belief, the length of your post does not determine how good your content is. No, really, I’m not kidding! While it might have made you look smarter in elementary school (and probably bored your teachers into giving you A’s), writing long essays is generally not a good blogging technique unless you’re in the niche of… uh… writing long essays.

ITS A FACT: LONG POSTS MAKE PEOPLE LEAVE
Think about it this way - walking up a mountain or a hill. A small knoll takes less effort to conquer than a mountain. Basically, you can:

• Write concisely in an easily digestible format to attract readers.

OR

• Drag on and on and on and on and on (repeat ad infinitum) to scare most away.

BUT WHAT IF I HAVE A LOT TO SAY?
There are few acceptable times and ways to write a long post. If you’re some affiliate marketing genius who has a brilliant idea that has never been discussed before and for some odd reason you want to saturate your market share your money making technique, THEN you should write a long post (right after giving me the idea first ). Even if you do that, break the post into segments or even just make a series of posts - make it bearable to read. If you are appealing to a certain niche audience that requires lots of information (i.e. historians, lawyers, med students, etc.), then you should write long posts.

JUST KEEP THIS IN MIND WHEN BLOGGING…
Make it readable. Make it fun. Make it entertaining. Make it worthwhile. Make it informative. Make it concise. Make it poignant. Make it sticky. Most of all, make it worthy of your readers time.