Yesterday I wrote a post where I had issues with major slowness on GoDaddy hosted sites. I’ve been a loyal, vigilant, zealous customer of theirs since they were a “baby” company (over 10 years), and have referred hundreds (if not thousands) of people to them without getting any reward or payment. I’ve just been THAT much in love with them. But recently there were a lot of slowness issues, for both myself and my clients, to the point where even one client switched hosting companies.

Anyway, later on that afternoon I was out of the office for the rest of the day, and I returned this morning to find over a dozen emails from GoDaddy stating that they moved all my sites to a new server to address issues I’d had. WHAT!? I hadn’t said anything to them other than when I had the support guy on the phone that one time. I had only posted this one post on my little ol’ blog, and suddenly I got upgraded? It was like MAGIC!

Okay, not so much magic as it was my post being discovered by a GoDaddy employee who then forwarded it to likely several people, where it wound up in the hands of the VP of Technology, Mike Chadwick. Mike then shot off an email to me asking me if I’d be open to discussing things with him via telephone, and then he apparently put out a call to action to get my problems fixed.

Well I just got off the phone with Mike, and I have to say I’m doubly impressed right now. Not only did they do the migrations for all my sites, but they also checked their database to find my client’s sites and are doing the same for each and every one of them. I’m flabbergasted! They paid that much attention to my concerns, and took the steps necessary to remedy them. Without my having to call up and rant and rave, without my being put on hold for 45 minutes while someone tried to figure out the issue and then tell me it was “on my end”, without my having to write letters and post obnoxious rants time and again. THEY took the initiative to fix the problem for me.

Mike and I had a great discussion, and he told me that they’re working on some new technologies and plans to try to connect with WordPress to work together on making sure that they’re both providing the best service and support to end users. He also confirmed that a dedicated server is likely not the solution for me (or my clients) given that they do require strong knowledge of servers and I just don’t have that knowledge myself. I can hire someone, sure, or I can pay the fees for the service plan (which I totally do NOT have a problem with them charging - it takes people to do the work, and GoDaddy has to pay them) but after Mike analyzed everything, he agreed that it wouldn’t necessarily be a good use of funds right now. He also stated that if I ever did decide to go that route, that all fees already paid on hosting could be credited back/transferred to the cost of the dedicated hosting. AWESOME! The reason why it’s not necessary is because dedicated servers are more for sites experiencing high traffic or using high levels of bandwidth, that also have people with the knowledge to maintain servers. He even mentioned that it’s often necessary for large sites with heavy traffic sometimes need several servers to push out their content. Makes total sense, of course, and it makes sense that neither myself or my clients at this time would need such power or expense.

So to tidy this up a bit:

• GoDaddy not only pays attention, but sincerely cares about their customers. I’m sure that the next time I have a problem, I’m going to get in touch with Mike before posting something about it. To get your concern to “elevated” status is not a difficult thing when you call their support team, and keep track of everyone you talk to. I know that Mike was glad to know the details of my conversation, so that he can take the proper steps to educate that employee on what would’ve been the right move.
• Blogging is QUITE the effective tool. Within hours of my post, something had been done. And no, it’s not that I had to do that before anything would’ve gotten done - it’s just the fact that within hours someone from GoDaddy got wind of it, and the VP of Technology contacted me directly to fix the issues. Given that out of all the blog posts I’ll ever write in my life, few will be major complaints like that, it makes me take notice of the things I say and the power behind them.
• I’m going to continue to use and recommend GoDaddy, plain and simple. Do I still think that Danica Patrick is kind of a male-oriented, slick ad scheme? Sure. But the unfortunate fact is that the demographic for GoDaddy users is largely males, aged 18-55. “It’s a man’s world,” might not be all that appealing to hear as a woman, but sometimes you gotta just roll with it. My being a woman didn’t get me any less attention or service than had I been a man, and that’s what it all boils down to in my opinion. Customer service. Support. And GoDaddy’s got it.

Before anyone jumps into the comments and starts thinking anything odd or making accusations, I hereby attest under penalty of perjury that the statements I’ve made are pure and unintentional. I’m not saying this because of any other reason than I’m supremely pleased with what’s happened. I don’t feel as though I were threatened or anything like that (as I’m sure you may have read on some of the GoDaddy bashing sites out there) - I simply feel that I was treated with concern and respect as a customer, and I can’t say enough how good that makes me feel. It’s pretty damn good.

I think this is setting a precedent that should’ve been set a long time ago, personally. In this case, it’s really about the loss of the life of a teenager, which is probably the most extreme end result in cyber-bullying. However, we’ve seen bloggers shut down their sites, move to another state, or completely go offline because of other adults. And until now, no one’s been held responsible for this kind of behavior.

The problem in this case? The mother was never charged in regards to the death (neither were her daughter or her daughter’s friend who has now felt the need to take on the responsibility for this to the point of attempting suicide herself), but MySpace has filed charges against her for violating the sites Terms of Service.

I get it all the time on one of my personal blogs. People who feel like they can use the so-called anonymity of the internet to say things to me they don’t have the guts to say to my face. The truth of the matter is that if I wanted to, I could take the IP addresses they left behind and find out who they are. Fortunately for me, I haven’t been harassed to the point where I’m in fear for my life, but I’ve traced IP addresses back to junior high and high schools, which really gets me. Why are these kids so hell-bent on being hurtful to strangers, much less to people they once considered friends? And in this case, WHY would an adult, a mother, perpetuate this kind of behavior?

Parents are supposed to be responsible for their kids’ actions. Not be acting like children themselves, and surely not harassing children. It’s kind of frightening if you ask me. I hope this woman gets some kind of jail time to be honest. She should be put away for as many years as Megan lived.

What do you think?

I’m speaking from experience here, folks. I own several blogs that had been tremendously neglected for some time, but I didn’t really want to let them go just yet. I decided to hunker down and create an editorial calendar for each blog to schedule my posts out ahead of time, so that when I had the time/energy/desire to sit down and get some posting out of the way, I had a concrete plan so I could post up to months in advance if I wanted to!

Now, depending on your niche topic, this might be more difficult for some of you than others, but never fear, for there is always a way!

If your blog is a “newsy” type blog - where you spend the first part of your day, 5-7 days a week, scanning RSS feeds for barely-reported news, and then quickly write up a post to get on the list of the first few to “break” the story, then what you need to do is break your editorial calendar down into subtopics for certain days.

Let’s say you have a tech news blog, and you cover anything and everything technology related. Set up a schedule so that certain days cover certain aspects of technology and development.

Monday - New Products
Wednesday - Product Reviews
Friday - Company Profiles

Notice, there are 2-4 days missing in that calendar (depending on if you want to be a 5 post a week blogger or a 7 post a week blogger). This is where you can fill in with your feverishly researched breaking news stories. Since regularly updated content is essential to the success of every blog, wouldn’t it be better to have guaranteed posts for a few days, and then fill in with the “Oh my God I have to blog this!” type stuff on a less frequent basis? Yessir, I think so. Instead of having to do that RSS feed research/fever posting 5-7 days a week, you can now bring it down to 2-4 days a week, without having to worry about missing days of content!

Now, here’s another take on this, so let’s stick with the tech blog and try another type of editorial calendar:

Monday - iPod/Apple
Tuesday - PCs/Microsoft
Wednesday - gadgets/gear
Thursday - company profile
Friday - other product reviews/link post to “news”

In this editorial calendar, you’re set up with pretty much 5 days worth of posts that you can write in advance. Let’s face it, as a small-time blogger (no offense, that’s what we all are when we start and up until we “make it big”), it’s highly unlikely YOU are going to be in the first 5 or 10 to post something newsy. So why not save Fridays for a weekly link roundup of the top blogs that HAVE earned that status, which will not only provide you with several less stress-induced posts to write each week, but will also give your readers links out to people you feel are an authority. It’ll also likely get you attention from those authority bloggers, which can never be a bad thing!

The real benefit to a calendar like this, is let’s say that you’re sitting there really finding some good stuff to write about iPods. Rather than write one post now and wait until next week, then scour your bookmarks or do the research all over again, you can post date that second and third post for the following two Mondays! So now in one fell swoop, you’ve gotten three posts out of the way, and you don’t have to research iPods again for weeks!

I found one of the best ways to manage an editorial calendar when posting is to have an actual calendar in front of me, with lists on each day for what posts go on which blogs. Then when I write my posts, I can cross out the calendar entry after it’s been postdated, so I know I’ve already taken care of that day on that particular blog. Plus, the crossing out of things has always made me feel like I’ve really accomplished something, and it motivates me to do more so I can cross more off!

Now, all that said, there are other ways editorial calendars can help spur activity on your blog:

• Visitors know what to expect, and when. So they know you’ll have something of interest to them on a certain day, and they can be sure to read and comment.
• Readers are allowed the chance to be more loyal, because they get used to knowing that you’re going to have X amount of posts per week, rather than sporadic posting. Research shows that inconsistent posting can lose RSS subscribers. (Among other things…)
• In the event that you choose to have multiple authors or you want to hire ghost writers, you can delegate the schedule so that you know certain things will be covered on a regular basis by others. This allows YOU more time to market your blog and be more social (commenting and linking and all is also quite time consuming, though essential!)

What are your thoughts on editorial calendars? Are you using one, and if so, what’s your schedule?

The thing about sneeze pages is that they can really target a specific group of readers on your site. I’m going to talk about the pages I’m planning on creating here on the Anubis Marketing blog, but you can create them for any kind, on any topic.

One of the first things you might want to do is get yourself set up with an analytics program so that you can see what’s already bringing readers to your site. I use 103bees, because it not only tracks search queries, but it shows you exact questions (”How do I…?”) so that you can better target future posts, or see where your blog is getting the most attention. One of the most popular posts on this site is one I wrote ages ago when someone forwarded me information on a plagiarism checker website.

Now what this tells me is that there are people who are concerned about one of two things. Either they’re worried that people are plagiarizing their stuff, or they want to repost something and see if and where it’s already posted (common with sites that use article repositories to get content - something I’m not too fond of, but that’s another story).

Since I don’t condone the use of article repositories, I’m going to go with encouraging users to check their own content to see if anyone else is ripping it. Now, I have to think about what kind of bloggers would be concerned with that. It’s likely NOT big corporations, because many of those either don’t care, or aren’t aware of it as a potential issue. It’s probably going to be smaller businesses where there is only one or two proprietors, and they’re writing their hearts out to help customers (past and future) and to display their authority on the subject at hand.

So what else would those kinds of bloggers be interested in?

Maybe they’d want to know about ways to protect their copyright.

In that case, I’ll write a post about tools online that can help you protect your copyright, and maybe another post about the confusing laws when it comes to the internet. Ignorance is not innocence, and I’m telling you that people WILL rip your content when you have a blog. Wouldn’t you want to know what you can do about it?

So there are already 2-3 posts for my sneeze page. Notice, I don’t have a title for it yet, because I want to make sure I’m on the right train with things first.

Now I’ll keep running with this process, coming up with ideas on what might be of major interest to these small business bloggers. How about a post on ways to get more readers? Or one about what your job as a blogger means, as opposed to your “regular job” in your small business? I can keep going on this, but I don’t want THIS to turn into a sneeze page! I’ll be creating some of these soon, so you’ll find more examples there. *wink*

So you’ve got a good bunch of ideas for a themed sneeze page. Now you’ve got to come up with a title that’s going to attract that targeted audience. You don’t want to be overly creative here, because people looking for information are looking for it NOW. Get creative with post titles, but point people to your sneeze page with direct language.

“Important Tips for Small Business Bloggers”
“Are You a Small Business Blogger?”
“Small Business Blog Resources”

All of these titles will work, and you need to maintain the natural tone of language in your blog, so you can avoid looking like what you’ve compiled is out of place.

Now, there are many different kinds of sneeze pages, but this is one type. The point with this kind is to build it up and THEN come up with a title. Sometimes when you’re writing a post, it’s the opposite, but in this case, you need to collect the info, possibly write MORE on the topic, and then create the compiled list of resources. If you’re writing something like Darren’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, you’ll want to announce the project and then proceed with the posts, updating the sneeze page as you go.

Anyway, WordPress has a new version, with some really great new features. My friend Aaron Brazell always writes up some great stuff when this happens, and this time’s no different: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5. He covers all the changes and visual improvements in the new version, as well as the new features like 1-click plugin updating and improved widgets.

The new admin interface (dashboard):

Pretty nifty, huh?

All in all, this version’s been on the board for about 6 months, and is considered a major release. There are lots of changes and “upgrades” and is something we can’t wait to implement on our client sites. However, that being said, we never do the upgrades until we’ve had a chance to play with it ourselves, so it’s going to take a little time to get all the upgrades completed. If you’re one of our clients, you’ll receive an advance notice email with a scheduled date and time of your site’s upgrade.