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I’m in two minds whether this story should go on my personal blog or here on ProBlogger. The lessons are about life but in the second half this post I tie them to blogging. Apologies for the quality of the images in this post – they’re pictures of pictures – my scanner died today! Unfortunately I don’t have any excuses for the clothes I’m wearing in some of the shots!

On the spur of the moment on a cool September morning in 1993 a mate and I bundled some camping gear into the back of my 1986 Toyota Camry and left for a four week road to the red center of Australia.

It was a trip that changed my life in many ways and it all started with a hair cut.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here…. lets back things up a little….

To that point in my life (I was almost 21) I’d worked hard at fitting in.

I carefully watched what those around me in my social groups were doing and I always followed their lead.

I had the same hair cut as my friends, I wore the same types of clothes as them, I was interested in the same types of activities as them, I went where they went and acted the way they did.

As a result I was very…. normal…. a very average guy.

Actually – I’m probably being a little generous to myself…. in fact I was probably below average on many levels because despite my best efforts to imitate those around me I wasn’t really that good at it.

I’d only ever had one girl friend, I was failing my university degree, I couldn’t land a job, I wasn’t ever the life of the party and didn’t have many friends and I was pretty depressed about life.

I remember looking at myself in the mirror late one night and realising that it was really not going anywhere – and it was going there fast. Looking back I guess I had a mid life crisis of sorts (I’m hoping that doesn’t mean I only last til 42 years of age).

A mid-life crisis can lead to some pretty crazy things but in my case it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

On the spur of the moment a mate and I decided we were going to change things up and we were going to do it with a Road Trip! Neither of us had ever done anything like it before (we’d been playing it safe and doing what every else did after all) but we decided it might be a good way to get away and have some fun.

We quickly planned our trip and packed my 1986 Toyota Camry with enough camping gear for a party of 7.

The night before we left we decided to mark the occasion by shaving our heads. We didn’t shave them to the skin – but it was short, shorter than anything I’ve had before.

This head shaving ended up being a very symbolic moment for me – I didn’t know it at the time but it was a turning point.

At that time we didn’t know anyone in our friendship group with shaved heads but we figured that we were going to be gone for 4-5 weeks so it didn’t really matter – no one would see us and by the time we got home we’d have at least some hair!

I remember looking at myself in the mirror that night before our trip and hardly recognising myself. I also remember being quite glad that nobody that I knew would see me until at least some of my hair grew back!

Side Note: We also decided that night that until we got home we wouldn’t shave. This turned out to be less life changing and only helped me to realise that while I’m capable of growing hair on my chin and above my upper lip that I’m incapable of growing sideburns! This has little relevance to this story but I thought I’d share it for my fellow brothers who have an ability to grow sideburns – you’re not alone!

To cut a long (5 week) story short my mate and I took the trip of our lives.

We drove from Melbourne to Alice Springs (in the center of Australia). It took us a couple of weeks to get there – Australia is big.

Getting into the outback was the best thing I’d ever done to that point – I guess you could say that I found myself and had a spiritual awakening of sorts (another story for another time).

While the trip itself was an awakening where I came to many realisations about my life and what I’d bee trying (and failing) to achieve by imitating others – what happened on my return home opened my eyes to another important lesson.

I still remember nervously walking into a party the night after we returned home from our trip.

My hair had grown back a little from the ‘great shaving’ but it was still ’skin head (ish) short ‘and I’d trimmed my attempt at a beard to be a Goatee (don’t mock me, it was the 90s).

Walking into the party that night was the first time in my life (and probably the last) that I turned heads.

A ‘whooop’ went up from the guys around the BBQ and a ‘oooooh’ went up from the girls.

At first I thought the whooops were mocking and the ‘ooooohs’ were in sympathy – but I quickly realized that they were not. People were looking at me in a way that I’d never looked at before.

Actually I suspect that many people in the room were actually noticing me for the first time ever. It was the first time I did anything unique, noticeable or different and people responded so positively.

Life didn’t magically change and become perfect that night but it did change. Things changed in many ways but two of note were:

• A few days later a girl called me – the first time that had EVER happened.
• Two months later I was offered my dream job out of the blue (I didn’t even have to apply).

I don’t think all this happened just because I shaved my head (I think the change in my attitude and approach to life in the outback had more to do with it) but I do know for a fact that people started to treat me differently when I started to be myself, stopped pretending to be someone else and allowed myself to be a little unique.

And How Is This Related to Blogging?

OK – crazy story and not really related to blogging – but as I looked back on some photos of this trip today it struck me what a life changing time that was and how some of the lessons that I learned on and after that trip have been mirrored in the way that I’ve built my blogs over the last 7 years.

When I first started blogging I had no idea what I was doing. I’m still amazed that I managed to navigate the setup process on my first Blogspot blog – it was the most technologically advanced thing I’d ever done!

As I began to blog I based almost everything I did upon what I saw others doing. I didn’t copy their content – but I watched what was working for them and did emulate it. The type of posts that they wrote, the type of topics that they covered, the style of design that they used, the tools that they were using….. much of what I did in that first 6 months of blogging was imitation of others.

In some ways that was a good thing – I certainly learned a lot about blogging by watching other bloggers and trying out what they were doing in my own context. However there came a point where imitating others started to hold me back.

6 or so months into my first blog I realised that perhaps it was time to stop imitating other bloggers and to start finding myself as a blogger. In part this happened naturally as I found my groove – but there were a couple of moments when I realised that I was not being true to myself by blogging in the style of other people.

Again – I don’t think I was doing anything unethical by copying someone else’s content or ideas without credit – but I just wasn’t being myself on my blogs.

What I discovered about blogging is that the more real I was and the more true to myself I became as a blogger the more others seemed to connect with what I was doing. Blogging also became a lot more personally satisfying when I was blogging as me and not trying to be something that I was not.

The other thing that I ‘discovered’ through those early days was that the more I was myself the more unique my blog became. There’s nobody else like me in this world (just like there is nobody else like you) and the more I began to just be me the more unique my blog became. Uniqueness is of course a pretty important thing in blogging – there are millions of blogs out there, being unique sets you apart from the crowd.

Take Home Lessons

I’d like to finish this post with a slightly modified excerpt from an email that I wrote to a blogger named Lucas Mayeur recently (shared with permission). Lucas asked me asking for a little advice about getting his blog going as he found himself a little paralyzed by all the blogging advice he was reading. I hope that my response to him is relevant to readers here:

I think it really comes down to just trusting that you’ve probably absorbed a lot and now you just have to do it and trust that what you’ve learned will come out in your blogging.

You will make mistakes along the road and forget to do stuff – but you’ll learn from those mistakes and they’ll shape you as you move forward.

Back yourself, your experience, your wisdom, your style – do use what you’ve learned from blogging advice sites but don’t let having to get it all right slow you down. In fact if you do just emulate everything you read you’ll not create anything that is truly you.

Take the principles you’ve learned and let it marinate with who you are and then do something with it.

And a few thoughts from those much wiser than I (which is quite ironic given the topic of this post):

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” – e.e. cummings

“The hardest battle you’re ever going to fight is the battle to be just you.” – Leo Buscaglia

“If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” – Billie Holiday

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Lessons about Blogging from a 90’s Road Trip

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Lessons about Blogging from a 90’s Road Trip

A Guest Post by Warren Davies from GenerallyThinking.com.

It’s pretty clear that if we want to be pro bloggers, we can’t rely purely on producing fantastic content. We have to optimise our pages for search engines, build backlinks from relevant sources, as well as putting our heart and soul into our content to make it as valuable as possible for the reader.

But what if the reader gets what they want from the post and then leaves? Well, that’s nice of us to solve their problem, but it’s not going to help us earn the money and freedom we want!

We need to entice first time visitors further into our blogs, expose them to its different areas and articles, make them feel like a kid in a candy store when they see all the information inside!

One way we can do this is through a landing page analysis – to see which pages people are landing on, checking the metrics for these pages, and then optimising them so that they are better placed to convert first time visitors into regular readers. Here’s a 4 step plan.

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content -> Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. These are the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through. Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at another page on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (or not) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’re missing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. This is vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential to converting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

• Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is it significantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so, it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the question they had when they clicked through.
• Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve this article: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, and don’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, a simple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can be useful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post, to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.
• Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Are people mostly finding the article through Google images? This might account for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise the article. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe you want to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it more appealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design is unattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on the page. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other content on your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in and category list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax your reader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may want to use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page. Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, and you can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Step 4 – Check Results

One week should be a good enough time frame to compare the before and after effects. Going back to Google Analytics, bring up the Content Detail page for the entrance article you’ve been playing with. Set the date for the week leading up to the day you edited the page (but not including that day). Copy and paste the stats into a text editor or Excel; the main ones you’re interested in are Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit %. Then set the date for the seven days after you optimsed the article. Again, copy and paste the results, and compare.

How did you do? If you were successful, you may have seen an increase in the Time on Page – although maybe not – but certainly a decrease in the Bounce Rate and Exit %. This would indicate that more readers are looking further into your site – congratulations!

What if there was no difference? Then go back to step 2. Conduct further research on how you might improve the page. Ensure you have links to other content on your blog, and that the wording of your article makes these links seem like essential further reading.

What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate?

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all figure to aim for. It depends on many factors. A bounce could mean the visitor literally only wanted one piece of information, and left because they got it. The ambiguity of the keyword you’re targeting will be important. If you’re getting a high bounce rate from an 8-word keyphrase, it’s probably a worse situation than the same bounce rate for a 2-word keyphrase. Your domain name could play a role too – ‘Problogger’ is pretty clear, but would an article on, say, ‘marketingtips’ be specific to blogging, or to offline marketing? Maybe you’d have to read it to find out.

Having said that, bounce rates over 80% generally mean there’s work to be done.

Landing Page Analysis – A Case Study

I performed a landing page analysis analysis on GenerallyThinking.com, my psychology blog. My top landing page by far was my post on personal strengths and weaknesses. This article proved hugely successful with search engines, and accounts for 25% of the overall traffic of the site! However, the bounce rate and time on page were dismal, as you can see below:

• Time on Page – 00:01:35
• Bounce Rate – 86.67%
• Exit % – 82.98%

I ran a WP-Poll asking what people were looking for at the bottom of the page, and got no results. I put it to the top of the page, and got a few replies, but still not many. Clearly, people weren’t reading to the bottom – there was a need unfulfilled. The data I collected from the poll indicated that people wanted more information on strengths than I was offering – the article was too focused on weaknesses.

So, I ripped out the section on how to manage and work around your weaknesses completely, and posted it as a new article. Then I re-wrote the post as a portal, giving a basic overview of personal strengths and weaknesses, including how and why they could be identified – but not giving too much away. I preferred to point to other articles on my site that cover these topics in depth.

I uploaded the new page, waited, and then tested the results as described above. Here they are:

• Time on Page – 00:02:31
• Bounce Rate – 66.67%
• Exit % – 66.20%

Fantastic! Time on Page increased by a minute, bounce rate reduced by 20% and Exit % reduced by nearly the same amount. A little more tweaking and playing with images might improve things further.

(By the way, if Darren will forgive the flagrant self-promotion that article’s worth a read actually – what successful entrepreneur would say personal development is not an important part of their craft?)

How much could you improve your site by performing an entrance analysis? Remember – don’t make assumptions; test and measure everything!

Warren Davies is a positive psychology student at the University of East London, who runs a psychology blog at GenerallyThinking.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Perform a Landing Page Analysis on your Blog

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Perform a Landing Page Analysis on your Blog

By Mary Jaksch from GoodlifeZen.

Do you dream of creating a post or Ebook that goes viral? If you do, you might run into a problem. People flock to your site. You’re ecstatic about the spike in your visitor numbers. And then your site crashes.

The problem is that your site can buckle or crash under the strain of using too much bandwidth. So in order to safeguard your site, it’s important to use as little bandwidth as possible. But how can you do that if you want to use images, audio, or even video on your site? Luckily, there is a nifty solution. And it’s dirt cheap!

The solution is Amazon S3.

What is Amazon S3? I’m not a geek, so I’ll give a simple explanation:

Imagine for a moment that you’ve got a storage problem in your home. One way to deal with this, is to rent space in a storage facility. This is exactly what Amazon S3 is: it’s an online storage facility.

You know Amazon.com, right? That’s the big online store that sells books and other stuff. I’m sure you can imagine that they have a huge server capacity because they’ve got so much stuff on their site. Amazon S3 is a system that rents out some of their spare capacity. For cents, not dollars.

Advantages

• Amazon S3 is super cheap.
  There are no setup fees or minimum costs. You only pay for what you use, even if it’s just a couple of cents a month. We are literally talking cents, not dollars here!

• It works.
  All your images look just like usual and you can control the size and placement just as before.

• It’s easy to use - eventually.
  With the help of Wordpress plugin Amazon S3, you can upload images through Amazon S3 automatically. If you’re not on Wordpress, or if you’re uploading videos or audio, you can upload manually.

Disadvantages

• The setup is complex and glitch-rich.
  Setting up on Amazon S3, the Firefox S3 Organizer, and the WP Amazon S3 takes time and can be frustrating.

• Amazon S3 only works with Firefox.
  In order to upload manually, you need to use the (free) Firefox extension S3Fox Organizer

• There are plenty of pitfalls.
  Uploading manually with Firefox S3 Organizer is fraught with possible errors. (People have been known to punch their computer in frustration!)

Set up Amazon S3 in three (reasonably easy) steps

Step #1: Set up your account on Amazon S3
Go to the home of Amazon S3 and set up your account. This video will help you. Just follow the steps.

Step #2: Install and set up the Firefox extension Amazon S3
Go to s3fox.net to install the Firefox Extension. Once you have installed it, you can access it by clicking on ‘Tools’ on the Firefox navigation bar. Once you’ve installed the extension, set up at least one ‘bucket’. (This is what storage folders are called.)

Take a look at the video I suggested above. In the second half it tells you how to upload files, using the Firefox S3 Organizer. Make sure you take note of how to set ACL permissions.These permissions say whether only you can read the file you’ve uploaded, or whether it will be available to the general public.

The way to change the ACL permissions is to highlight a file you’ve uploaded, then click on the pencil icon in the bar above it. Make sure the file has three green ticks, i.e., set it to ‘read’ for everyone.

Step #3: Set up Wordpress plugin Amazon S3
There is a nifty WordPress plugin called Amazon S3. Download the plugin and unzip the file. To install it, use an FTP client (that’s software to get stuff onto your site), and upload the unzipped file into your Plugin folder. Then go to your WordPress Dashboard and click on Plugins.

Activate the plugin. It will ask you for the “AWS Access ID” and your Secret Key. If you’re not sure what they are, have another look at the video above. It’s explained how to find them. Once you’ve inserted your ID and Secret Key, the plugin is ready to roll.

Pitfalls nobody tells you about.

• Pitfall #1 You haven’t set up a ‘bucket’
  If you have more than one website, chose one bucket per website. (A bucket is like a storage room for files). You could also have a bucket each for images, audio files, PDF’s and so on. Setting up a bucket is an essential part of the process if you want to use the WP Amazon S3 plugin. The plugin won’t work without at least one bucket!

• Pitfall #2 You cant find the correct upload URL
  In order to put the stuff on your website, you need to know what the correct address is. Unfortunately, the S3 Organizer fails to point out this small but crucial detail! Here is an example from my GoodlifeZEN website: http://goodlifezen.s3.amazonaws.com/welcome-GLZ-5.flv -it’s the actual address of my ‘welcome’ video.
  The ‘bucket’ or S3 folder I’ve set up is called goodlifezen, and the file name is welcome-GLZ-5.flv. When formatting the file address, use your bucket name, then s3.amazonaws.com/ followed by the file name.

• Pitfall #3 You just can’t get the darn thing to work.
  You’ve done everything right, but when you click on the link, you get error message or the plugin refuses to work. Frustrating! Take a deeeep breath and don’t throw your toys out of the cot just yet. Consult the following troubleshooting section first.

Troubleshooting

• Problem: You’ve installed the S3 Plugin and it comes up with an error message - even though you’ve put in your ID and Secret Key correctly.
  Solution: Did you cut and past the keys? If so, try to type in the ID and key number.
• Problem: You’ve managed to install everything correctly but when you try to access the file on the Net, you get the message ‘Access Denied’.
  Solution: Check the ‘read’ permissions and make sure you have three green ticks.
  (See above to read about ACL permissions).
• Problem: You’ve set permissions correctly, but still get the ‘Access Denied’ message.
  Solution: Check whether the file you’re trying to upload is located in a folder. If so, change the address to include the folder. Here’s an example: Let’s pretend that the file I mentioned above was uploaded within a folder called video. The correct address for the file would then be: http://goodlifezen.s3.amazonaws.com/video/welcome-GLZ-5.flv. As you can see, the folder name is now included in the pathway to the file.
• Problem: You try to access the uploaded file but get an error message, saying: ‘File not found’. This can mean that the the link address isn’t configured correctly.
  Solution: Check and correct the link address. The quickest way to check is to put the address in your browser window.
• Problem: You’ve configured everything correctly, and you still get ‘Access denied’ message and are just about to throw your computer out of the window.
  Solution: Go back to the Firefox S3 Organizer and check that the filename you chose is in lower case. If not, rename the file and upload it again.
• Problem: Your S3 plugin isn’t working. Solution: check whether your site running on PHP 5. (This is the scripting language your site is using). Ask your hosting company what PHP your site is running on and how to change it. It’s usually just a one-click change. This plugin will only run on PHP 5.
• Problem: Your S3 plugin still isn’t working.
  Solution: Make sure you’ve created a bucket in your Firefox S3 Organizer. The plugin won’t work without creating a bucket first.
• Problem: You’ve tried it all but it still doesn’t work.
  Solution: Shoot your computer, forget about Amazon S3, or leave a rude comment.

You’ve set up Amazon S3. Now what?

If you are not a Wordpress user:
You can manually upload any file through the Firefox S3 Organizer. Then link to the uploaded file using the address formatted as explained above.

Wordpress users:
Once you’ve installed the plugin, everything is automatic - at least where images are concerned. Upload your images as usual and the plugin will automatically upload the image to your Amazon S3 bucket and create a link to it. It’s easy! You can also upload PDF or other text files with ease.

Audio and video
Putting up audios is relatively easy. I use a WP plugin called Audio Player for the podcasts. I manually upload the audio files through the Firefox S3 Organizer and then link to them on site, using the correct plugin configuration.

Putting videos on your site is more complex. I use a JV FLV Player and upload with Amazon S3.

Conclusion

Setting up Amazon S3 is complex but not difficult. Allow about 20 minutes to get everything set up. Once you’ve got it set up, you will love it! You won’t have any more problems with bandwidth and you can store your files there for mere cents.

I’d like to acknowledge Dave Kaminski of the Video University Blog. Without his ever-patient support I would never have overcome all the obstacles to using Amazon S3.

You can read more by Mary Jaksch on her blog GoodlifeZen or on Write to Done where she is the Editor. Join Mary on Twitter.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Want a Crash-Proof Site? A Paint-by-Numbers Guide to Using (and Surviving) Amazon S3

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Want a Crash-Proof Site? A Paint-by-Numbers Guide to Using (and Surviving) Amazon S3

The sun is shining, freezers everywhere are being stocked with ice cream, and it’s Friday. For the cherry on top of this summer fundae, put on that smile (smiles will not be graded) and enjoy your Friday Recap for this week in search! [I have Oatmeal Cookie Crunch waiting for me in the freezer at home. --Susan]

Google made a splash, announcing that a Google Chrome Operating System would be on netbooks available to consumers next year. There were, however, a number of features of the OS that Google didn’t include in their announcement. Thankfully, our friends at Woot did some digging to bring us 11 undocumented features of Google Chrome OS.

We paid our respects to Michael Jackson this week, bringing people around the world online to watch the event. Mashable reported that CNN’s live stream got at least 9.7 million views, much less than the 27 million drawn during President Obama’s inauguration. However, there was more viewer engagement, as the Facebook Connect status feed that ran alongside got up to 6,000 updates per minute.

Funny thing about Facebook; it looks like drunken youths aren’t the only ones that don’t understand that people will actually see what you post. The wife of the new head of MI6, the UK’s secret intelligence service, posted potentially compromising details on the social networking site. His codename, where they live and work, and family photos are among the intimate particulars posted on her account with almost no privacy protection. Learn to use those filters, people.

Rebecca Kelley made her premiere on the 10e20 blog this week after being brought on as social media director. Peeps are glad to see Rebecca back on the SEO blogging circuit. My fave pick for debut week: L.A.’s failed attempt to fundraise online. After spending $1.4 million on security during MJ’s memorial service, the city figured it’d accept donations to recoup some of the cost. Great idea, until the server crashed due to high-volume traffic. If anyone from L.A.’s information technology agency is reading this, look into some of the server considerations in this piece. (Notice: there will be no more MJ mentions through the rest of the post, so no need to go — pinky swear!)

Marketing intelligence agency comScore ranked countries by their population’s level of social networking engagement. Topping the list is Russia, with users spending the most time and viewing the most pages on their social networks. Elsewhere in the world, nasty cyber attacks were targeted at government sites in the U.S. and South Korea beginning last weekend. Just another public service announcement: secure your stuff.

That advice goes for your reputation, too. United Airlines has succumbed to the too-little, too-late fate of companies struggling with the viral Web and its effect on online rep management. The Internet’s given ordinary consumers a platform that lets them vent their frustrations. Pair that frustration with a really catchy tune, some viral fairy dust, and a spot on Consumerist — sorry United, you hardly stood a chance. [Maybe they should have done something in the year between the incident and the songwriting. --Susan]

It’s time to sign off with some Boing Boing bits, but a quick heads up first! Tomorrow is 7/11 and the 7-Eleven convenience store chain is celebrating by giving away mini Slurpees. Mmm, tastes like summer!

[Tomorrow is also my mom's birthday! Happy Birthday, Mom! I'm broke so this is your entire present. (Worst. Daughter. Ever.) --Susan]

Things I learned from Boing Boing this week:

• No wonder Russia is leading the way in social media engagement. They’re playing for souls.
• Stanford University revealed that human mouths are really sharks’ mouths backwards.
• I don’t know how fashion conscious the readership is, but I do know that girls and sci-fi are generally safe subjects, so voila! Sci-fi inspired women’s fashion that totally rocks.
• They weren’t kidding when they titled this post creepy vintage print ads. I hope we’ve learned a thing or two about adverting since then!

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Friday Recap - Oatmeal Cookie Crunch Edition