I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

These are some of the reasons why:-

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that emails being sent from your own domain can be a significant liability
  

  It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
  I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect – the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues) – I just noticed on my Andy Beard Disqus profile that Scott Rafer responded to something important 2 months ago, and I didn’t see it.

Negative Side of Disqus

• The SEO of the site needs some major work – it is almost insulting that the link to Twitter on my Disqus profile is followed, yet the link to my blog isn’t. The anchor text from a conversation on Disqus back to a blog isn’t exactly ideal. This is how Google sees my Discus Profile
• Google is very bad at indexing content on Disqus – this is partially due to the Disqus SEO problems – certainly a conversation I took part in 4 days ago isn’t indexed.
• I have heard reports that managing spam can be an issue, though I haven’t tested it, I rarely see spam on highly popular blogs
• It isn’t suitable for private content – you would have to use alternative commenting on private posts if you are running your blog as a membership site. That is something that can be worked around.
• It is hard, maybe impossible to market to people after they have left a comment. With standard WordPress comments, after someone has left an email, you could present a page offering site membership, a one time offer, or an affiliate product – even suggest related content of interest.
• If you have lots of niche blogs, you will hardly want to include all of them on a single Disqus profile if you want to stay under the radar of your competitors. How would a blog network cope? Retain ownership? I can’t see B5 Network with a profile of 300+ blogs in Disqus and managing who can moderate comments.

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.

I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

Who knows, we might even get Twitter to remove nofollows too… eventually

Disclosure:- I am recommending Disqus even though part of my startup plans would have involved an SEO, product launch and membership friendly system with refined marketing funnel. If I ever get it off the ground, there are ways to migrate back from Disqus.

I must admit I am not a huge fan of linking to articles from Associated Press, simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the original source when these stories “go over the wire”.

A great example of the reasons why is when I reported about the appropriated story last year from the Museum of Hoaxes – that was Agence France-Presse to blame, a different organization.

Readers might also remember my run-in with The Guardian where I was a major source for an article, but didn’t receive a link. The author and editor of The Guardian explained their viewpoint in the comments, but it still wrankles a little.

That being said, there is a huge amount of PROFIT being made online in the form of online membership sites which is a paid content business model.

Highly successful examples include:-

• Strategic Profits – $10m+ business
• Stompernet – $25m+ business
• Success Chef (prelaunch)
• Double Your Dating – $20m+ business

I could the continue the list with the likes of Armand Morin, Mike Filsaime, Jeff Walker, Yanik Silver, John Reese, Ray Edwards, Jim Edwards, Frank Kern, Jason Postash and many many more. Among bloggers Brain Clark with Teaching Sells and Yaro Starak with Blog Mastermind immediately come to mind.

Then of course there are the mega information marketers such as Agora Publishing with multiple content channels such as Early to Rise

I should include affiliate links to all of them, but that isn’t the point – most of these guys are pulling in million dollar earnings on a yearly basis, and whilst they have diversified into physical products, exclusive coaching and seminars.

Agora might even be pulling in $1m a day by now, I don’t have recent figures.

Agora might be making more money than Facebook

Paid content certainly isn’t a dying business model

This was especially significant for me at the time, because I was struggling with a problem which I couldn’t solve.

A few days later 5ubliminal posted, “If I Told You… I’d Have To Kill You” – a simlar idea, again specific to SEO techniques but with a few hints to how you can work out what others are up to… without them telling you.

My End Of year Problem

Lots of sites were publishing their year end stats, showing which were their most popular posts for the year, traffic numbers etc, and many of them were missing one, and in many cases many important statistics that can be used to determine the success of a particular post.

I didn’t post a yearly roundup – it would have been a lie

I know which are my most successful posts based upon various metrics, and the metrics I use are in many cases different to the metrics other people use, and I can use them for competitive intelligence

I wasn’t prepared to write a post highlighting my most popular posts for the year, or the ones I wanted to highlight, if I couldn’t be 100% honest about my methods.

Scribd

The changes Scribd made after the revealing Stompernet videos were really the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you release information without a great deal of restraint on how that information should be used, it can cause problems, and sometimes various tactics and methods stop working, or are prevented from working.

Release The Information In Private?

This is one option I have considered – it would be easy to set up a membership site, or use a report such as this just for list building, or even give it to a number of membership sites I am a member of as a bonus, but that introduces secondary problems.

I am not a programmer

I have worked with programming teams for years, but I can only tinker with code these days. If I released the information to just a few hundred, or possibly a few thousand, there would be 2 very specific problems.

• Only about 10% of the people receiving the information would be able to do anything useful with it – this stuff is a little bit technical, and even once I have all my data together it takes time playing around in excel to really benefit from it, and realise the significance.
• My limited use of these methods flies under the radar – if you have a few 100, or 1000 people mining the same data, it would throw up a huge red flag, quite needlessly, as many would be looking for data on exactly the same websites.

If I make the information available, the ideal solution would be

• A 20 page report
• A viable proxy based extraction and storage system for compiling data
• Various tools, possibly in Excel, to make manipulating the data relatively easy for less technical folk

Oh, Andy Is Going To Sell An Ebook?

Ebooks work for newbie stuff and basic training, or techniques that get hyped but are not necessarily for your average users (even if they are effective)

This isn’t something I want to hype about, and it certainly isn’t basic training

The financial model just wouldn’t cover the development costs

I could also include it in a membership site of my own, but it isn’t something that would stand on its own, I need a lot more time to get together complimentary materials.

With the new year people are planning their course of action for 2008, and this would prove a benefit for their content planning strategy.

Content For Your Membership Site or Agency

Do you remember the days before the junk peddlers of private label rights and bundled master resale rights products when content really had value?

These days the people who create exceptional content only provide it via higher end membership sites, and most, but not all of the ebooks are beginners guides – they can still be good value, but that isn’t the kind of content I want to create.

Over the last year writing this blog I have received a number of proposals of various kinds from membership site owners looking for specialist content, which is why I am considering a slight return to the old ways of providing content to a limited number of partners for a fee that is just a “drop in the ocean” compared to the fees members pay for access to great content, and certainly much better value than retaining me on a permanent basis.

Price – contact me by email for details – I expect to spend up to $5000 on development of the scripts and tools, though depending on the way they are designed, I might also have to provide hosting. I would much prefer to have a comfortable budget for development than to be scraping the barrel.
On top of that I will also be offering support if you provide me access to your member area – there is certainly some 2-way benefit

Initially I am not going to set a specific limit on numbers, but ideally I would like to have the report and tools made available to between 10 and 20 membership sites or agencies

I am including search marketing agencies, because they often have lots of people working with clients with whom they want to share tools and reports. Hopefully a few of the more popular SEO membership sites will pick this up anyway, so small agencies can benefit from their existing memberships, but for larger corporations it would probably be best to purchase your own license.

For further details and possibly a few examples those who have my email can just email me, or you can just use my contact form

I am going to be selective about where this information and tools will be made available

To finish, just one example:-

Which one post was my most successful in 2007? This isn’t 100% accurate because like with all statistical measures there can be extenuating circumstances that mess with the data, and using this method there are frequent occurances within the top10, in much the same way a front page Digg can make a blog seem more popular than it really is.

The Tale of Little Linkalot and Some Blogging Thoughts where I actually linked through to another one of Donna’s posts, “The Tale of Little Linkalot”

If you can work out why I regard that (based on this method) as my most successful post, a “cornerstone” or in some ways “tipping point”, bully for you, but don’t go spreading it around too much ;)
Even if you can work it out, you are going to appreciate a 20 page report on how to use this method to share with your members or clients, and the tools to go with it.

I could have just written a short blog post with my top 50 stories of 2007, provided details for compiling the data, and a very rough excel spreadsheet and a few charts, but it would not be very usable for the majority of non-programming geeks, and the method would be burned or limited within a few hours or days.

Why burn a great method just for a few links?

This won’t interest many of my US readers unless I happen to be one of your customers, though something similar could happen to your Paypal subscriptions wherever you are located.

Here is a timeline…

Barclays Bank (UK) Buy Woolwich Building Society

This actually happened I believe over a year ago. They were both being run as separate entities thus nothing drastic to worry about.

May 2007 High Street Consolidation & Bank Account Notice

I am not sure how much of this has happened, I haven’t actually been back in the UK for almost a year but I assume that there is some consolidation of the retail outlets.

There was a notification of bank accounts being transferred over sometime towards the end of July, but no specific details regarding direct debits that I am aware of.

July 10th Through July 21st Bank Account Merger

Letters start being sent regarding the merger of bank accounts.

I get all business correspondence scanned and sent through to me near enough the day it arrives in the post box. The first letter, dated 10th July arrives in my email 21st July

This allows me to set up my internet banking on the new account

July 31st 2007 All Paypal Subscriptions Cancelled

I had multiple bank accounts and credit cards attached to my Paypal account, but because the bank account that was still listed as being the primary account was closed, Paypal decided to cancel all my subscriptions.

I also received the following email from Paypal

The mandate from your bank account, ending in 6313, was returned by your bank on 31 Jul. 2007 for the reason below:

The bank account is closed.

Sincerely,
PayPal

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Hellish Procedures

Am I to blame? I am not sure, but from the evidence I have collected, the blame squarely rests on Woolwich / Barclays or Paypal.

It seems logical to me that the ideal way for this situation to be handled would be an authorization request of some kind to transfer bank mandates to the new account by Barclays or they should do it without any needed authorization.

Alternatively Paypal could have notified me that they were changing my primary account over to a different account, because they had received notification on my primary account being cancelled.

I am not sure even if I had thought of changing over my primary bank account in Paypal, whether the secondary funding source for each subscription would have been transferred over as well.

Bank Mandates Were Meant To Be Transferred

Referring to the changes documents

To save time we’ve transferred over all your current bill payment mandates.

Further down the page it states…

We have moved all of your Direct Debits across to your new account and notified the companies concerned but because these are new Direct Debits they will not have any of the additional information, such as the last payment amount and last payment date. Once the Direct Debit has been claimed from your new account the details can be viewed in ‘Change Payments’ – accessed from the ‘All Payment Options’ link in the left-hand menu of your homepage.

As far as I am concerned, Barclays and Paypal are to blame for this mistake, but it is certainly going to cost me a great deal of time, and potentially cost businesses a lot of lost subscriptions.

Going Forward

I will most likely spend the remainder of today on the telephone trying to get through to Paypal, and contacting each of the sites I had subscriptions with explaining that I didn’t request a cancellation.
Fortunately I have a lot less subscriptions currently than I had in the past, but this situation is still going to take time to clear up.

How Much Can This Cost Your Business In Both $$$ and Time?

Major bank mergers don’t happen every day, but how many of your subscribers are paying using Paypal, and how many of them would go to the trouble of renewing subscriptions that are cancelled en mass.

Paypal Disaster

Judging by the difficulty I am having reaching Paypal on the phone, this might be a major snafu. Woolwich / Barclays have millions of customers, and they have all just had their Paypal subscriptions cancelled.

Membership Sites on Autopilot?

There is lots of talk about the profitability of membership sites running on autopilot. How would your membership site business handle 20% of your subscribers with subscription cancellations overnight?