Performancing as a Blog Model
I am sure most of you are already familiar with Performancing, the blog about “Helping Bloggers Succeed” - I have mentioned them many times on this very blog.
I am amogst a huge fan base of the site for many reasons and so I guess it comes to a point that it becomes useful to figure out why so many people like the site and why it has had such a metioric rise to be one of the best blogs on professional blogging within only a few months of its launch.
The initial launch of the site could basically be summed up in one sentence. Produce a lot of excellent content as quickly as possible and let as many people as you can know about it. These guys produced some awesome articles in the first few months and there were a lot of them. They were posting 5 or 6 articles a day at one point and the content was genuinely useful stuff for people interested in promoting their own blogs. They also did a lot of advertising on other sites - especially other sites devoted to blogging or professional blogging or places that people interested in those topics were likely to be hanging out online.
The next part of their rollout was to produce the Performancing for Firefox plugin. This was a top quality piece of software that they obviously put a lot of time and effort into. They also got the new community that they had developed into the project by asking for and acting upon their feedback for the plugin. They did all of this for free and developed one of the best pieces of blogging software around.
The next thing they came up with was Performancing Metrics - the blog statistics tool that over 5000 sites are now using. Again this was free, developed in conjunction with user feedback and also had the additional bonus of forcing people to go to the Performancing site if they wanted to check their statistics. It is also possibly the best stats package available for blogs.
With all of this they have developed a fanatical following that is waiting with baited breath for everything that they do and write. To date they have followed an almost flawless plan of developing a large, popular site.
Now they have mentioned before that they do intend to monetise the blog, but they are being vague on how they will do it. The thing is that they have developed such a loyal following that it is almost guaranteed to be a success. People will buy it based solely on their reputation for producing quality stuff - I know I will certainly be well disposed to giving these guys money, and I don’t even know yet what they will be selling.
So how can you apply this to your own blog or niche?
Well, the “produce lots of good quality content” rule should be pretty obvious. That’s how you get people coming back to your site.
If you can produce something that people can use, you will also develop a following for your site. This bit can be a little trickier, but it doesn’t need to be restricted to something only coders can produce. For example, I have seen many people give away little MS Excel spreadsheet tools that include formulas they have invented. Of course, the spreadsheets are then branded with their websites etc.
Ideally, you could produce something that means people would have to come back to your site to utilise it. That can be tricky, but it’s really up to your imagination. You can’t code it yourself? No problem, just go over to a site like renatacoder.com or elancer.com or sitepoint.com and ask someone else to do it - you will usually be surprised at how cheap you can get coding work done on the internet.
In the end, it all comes down to producing value for your audience. Performancing is a great example of how to do that.
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