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Friday, February 4, 2011

Niche Travel Blogging Demystified

This guest post is by Matthew Kepnes of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site.

If you look at all the travel blogs out there, you’ll notice many common themes. People tend to write a blog that falls into an overarching category like cruises, backpacking, solo travel, or digital nomad travel. They don’t refine their offerings any further. What readers are left with is thousands of blogs about the same thing, and a crowded field where no one really dominates. There are no leaders, no experts, and the bloggers’ voices get lost in the crowd.

For some bloggers, that’s fine. They simply blog because they like blogging. They want to interact with others and have no intention of ever making their blog into a business. If they make three hundred dollars selling an ad, they’re probably ecstatic; if they never make any money, they’re probably not fussed.

Yet there are a lot of bloggers out there who do want to make money. Some of them want to make a living, and most would just love for their blog to pay for their travels. In a sea of sameness, though, it’s hard to get the traction you need to become an expert, distinguish yourself, and gain traffic. And as we all know, it’s only then that you can make money from your blog.

A few weeks ago, a travel blogger I read said that we travel bloggers should look to companies like Lonely Planet and be like them. “Copy the big companies,” he said.

I think this is the worst mistake you can make. You can’t be Lonely Planet, Boots n All, Orbitz, or the like. These companies have decades of experience and money that you don’t have, as well as huge budgets that allow them to stay ahead of the game.

Moreover, there’s no way you’ll be able to get ahead of their brands. Google didn’t wake up saying they want to be Microsoft. They said, “we want to be a new tech company.” That’s what you should aim for. You should aim to be something new. Don’t follow. Lead.

To be a leader, you need to be niche. That word is thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?

In simple terms, being niche means that you focus on a narrow topic. For the purpose of this article, I am going to talk a lot about backpacking as a niche. If you look at most travel blogs, you’ll notice that they all focus on backpacking or long-term travel. It seems to be a trend. How do you make yourself different when everyone is writing about the same thing?

Recently, I gave some advice to another travel blogger. He had just come back from a long-term trip to Central and South America, and he wanted to make his website bigger and earn some money from it, so what did he do? He followed the conventional line of thinking and turned his site into a general backpacking blog, and in the process he made his blog just the same as all the other blogs out there. They offered the same tips, advice, and stories that everyone on the Internet does.

I asked him, “How many sites do you see about backpacking in Central and South America?” That made him stop and think. He couldn’t think of any blogs that covered these regions, and he had just spent two years living, learning, and traveling that region of the world.

I told him that he is an expert on that area, and I asked him why he’s trying to cover the whole world. “Cover the area you know about!” I said. “When people ask other travelers where they look for information on a specific region, you want your name to come up first. Be the backpacking site for your area of expertise.”

One of the greatest things the Internet has done is that it has made all niches marketable. With millions of people on the ‘net at any second of the day, even the smallest hobby or niche has an audience. You may think you are the only one with a passion for photos of horses doing stupid things, but with the Internet, you’ll find that you aren’t. You can bring all sorts of people together with your niche site.

The same is true in travel. No niche is too small. There are blogs covering RV travel, consumer issues, cruises, seniors’ cruises, gay cruises, gay seniors’ cruises, backpacking, long term travel, couples travel, and Asia travel—you can always find interested followers within your area of expertise.

Look at the “top travel blogs.” Out of the top 20 blogs, the majority deal with backpacking, independent travel, or families. Everyone is talking about the same thing.

When you looked at the numbers of those sites, did you notice something? There are a few with really high numbers, but the most are simply in the same area. They are talking about the same general topic, and thus they all share the same traffic.

Now take a look at the site Travel Fish. This is a destination-based site. It’s not really a blog, but it focuses on one thing: Southeast Asia. What kind of traffic does it get? It has an Alexa rank of 33,000 and a Compete rank of 144,000, which averages 88,500. That puts the site at #5 on the list of blogs.

By going super-niche, your blog gains a single purpose. Everything you do focuses around one central theme. It helps focus your content, your marketing, and your audience. Don’t be everything to everyone. Be the best at one thing to some people. You want people to reference your name when people ask where they need to go for help. Travelfish’s single-minded nature allows that site to be the expert, and dominate one field. The owner doesn’t compete with anyone. People compete with him.

There are many travel websites out there. If you don’t go niche, you won’t be able to create a name for yourself. If you really want to make a stellar travel blog, monetize it, and be successful, you must pick one small genre of travel or location in the world, and be the expert on that. Otherwise, you’ll never break out of the crowd.

Matthew Kepnes has been traveling around the world for the past four years. He runs the award winning budget travel site, Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian UK, AOL’s Wallet Pop, and Yahoo! Finance. He currently writes for AOL Travel and The Huffington Post For more information, you can visit his Facebook page or sign up for his RSS feed.


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How Cancer Changed My Blog

I was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer. Yes, the dreaded c word. It’s probably not what you are thinking. I don’t look at this health issue as an anchor. I look at this as an opportunity for growth.


I’ve been blogging for over three years. Each year I’ve gone through unique pains.


The pain of no one reading my blog eventually transformed to Forbes.com contacting me and naming my blog one of the top 100 blogs for women. It’s been an amazing blogging journey.


I want to share how a major illness has shifted and improved my blog. It has been a journey that has bruised my ego, but it has also lifted me to new heights.


Blogging is not easy, every blogger will tell you that, especially when also dealing with personal issues. There are so many factors that can derail your progress if you don’t stay focused.


You know that you need to put the important stuff first, but how do you figure out what’s important and what’s not?


You have to see where your present wins are coming from and figure out how to expand on them. I teach people to leverage their superpowers and bloggers are no different. You have your strengths, passions, and the work that puts you in the zone. All of these actions need to be pushed to the front.


Too many people say to focus on your strengths and you’ll be successful. That’s not true. You may be a great writer, but if you write about the wrong subject you are never going to thrive. You must take a holistic approach to your work. If you are crazy about music, but can’t seem to string your notes together then you won’t thrive either. It’s all about creating synergy between your passions, strengths, and focus. All three must be present for your action to be a superpower.


When you do work that gets you excited every day, it’s easier to keep your energy level high and stay productive. You have to have a system. Everybody’s system is different. Leo loves to write in the morning. Darren loves to do work in batches. The most important thing is that they put their passions at the top of the list and so should you.


Blogs are dependent upon people not just following your posts, but also sharing your blog with others. That means you have to find the people who are willing to share your stuff with their friends. This is hard and I struggled with this concept in the first couple of years.


Since my cancer diagnosis, I’ve been more willing to put myself out there to be found by someone like you. I don’t care if I get rejected. The fear is just a little less intense.


Because the fear is less intense, I’m more willing to market my coaching or my brand.


You have to realize that you only have a finite number of days on this earth. If you want your blog to get to the next level you have to find people who will tell their friends about it. You have to connect with people in your niche and find a way to encourage other people’s audience to visit your blog on a regular basis. I know you know this, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. You have to test out a lot of different blogs until you find one that connects with your style.


I could have given up on my blog a long time ago. I have a full-time job, a wife, a kid, and not much time. My cancer would have been a perfect excuse to give up. Believe me, there have been times when I really wanted to do just that.


I didn’t give up because I know that I’m on a mission to help people leverage their superpowers. I want to help people change the world. It’s why I love working with bloggers. They are the type of people that are creative and passionate. They aren’t always sure how to get to point b, but they really do want to get there.


Your frustrations can take over if you let them, and they’ll wreck your happiness and relationships. You constantly have to be working with your emotions and using them to fuel your actions. Don’t not let them hold you back.


You can deal with your frustrations by taking time to process your emotions. I like to do a ten-minute meditation every morning and every night. It helps me set up my day and process my feelings each night. This mental exfoliating process is what keeps me balanced.


You may not like meditation, but you need to take time to process your emotions every single day. When you create this habit, you’ll improve your productivity and creativity. I promise.


As a blogger you have access to your work wherever you go. You can write a blog in any country, check your Facebook and Twitter account in any coffee shop, and build more connections at every comment on your friends’ blogs.


I’ve seen too many bloggers burn out because they go non-stop for too long and don’t enjoy the process. Blogging is a skill that takes time to develop, especially in this overcrowded age.


You have to take time to relax.


After discovering I had cancer and having it removed, I took a short time off from blogging. After a few days I quickly got back to it, but realized that I can’t go seven days a week any longer. I should never have been going seven days a week. I needed more time to relax and enjoy my family and life.


I’ve been blogging, networking and planning six days a week and I feel so much better. Sundays are no longer for blogging; whatever I don’t get done Monday through Saturday can wait until the following Monday. The best part about this new routine is that I get just as much done. I’m a little more focused, and I make sure that I get everything done by Saturday night.


You have to find time to relax that brain of yours. There is nothing wrong with posting seven times a week, but if you are constantly checking your stats, email, and whatever else you do all the time then you are missing out on life. You have to be willing to relax and let your mind recharge.


I’m not writing this post to gain your pity. I’m here to tell you that we have a short amount of time on this earth no matter how you look at it.


Bloggers are one of the luckiest groups of people on the internet. They have the superpower of communication. You can write, podcast, or video cast coherently. That’s a beautiful talent that you must optimize. You are changing people’s lives for the better. It’s up to you to find a way to take your setbacks and make you smarter, stronger and more widely read.


Have you ever been sick or had a family member become sick and had to adjust your blogging work load? What did you do and how did it change your blog?


Karl Staib is a career coach who helps people leverage their superpowers! If you enjoyed this article, you may want to check him out on or join his free 10 Part eCourse to a Happier and More Successful You.


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Headline Writing 101: Taught by TechCrunch

When you write a headline for an online news story, follow three rules:

  1. Length isn't (as much of) a constraint. In print, you have to make your headline fit a certain number of column inches. Online, you can add a word or two. Or three. Or even four. Don't keep a headline short and uninformative.
  2. Make the headline descriptive. It should stand completely on its own. It's a micro-summary of the story. If written on a blank sheet of paper, it should tell the reader exactly what they're going to learn in the rest of the story. Your headline will show up everywhere: In links, in search, etc.. Make sure it works in all those places.
  3. Remember the search engines. Make sure your headline includes the words that folks will use to find the story. You don't need to be an SEO pro to figure out that folks are more interested in 'bank bailout' than 'Paulson stock purchases' (keep reading for the full story on that example).

How to: NOT Write an Internet-Ready News Headline

Someone at my office sent me this beauty today, courtesy of Associated Press:

paulson-headline.jpg

While I wholeheartedly agree that stocks should indeed make money, I know that's not what Paulson actually said. His message: Taxpayers should make money on stock the government buys from banks.

This is a perfect example of print-centric headline writing taken online. In a print publication, saying "Paulson says stock purchases should make money" might make sense - the stories around it, the copy right under the headline, etc. will all help the reader instantly figure out what the headline really means.

Online, though, the headline must stand on its own. If I write the headline on a whiteboard with no other information, the reader should immediately know what the story is about.

Otherwise, the mystery headline shows up in search results, where it makes even less sense. If I read the search listing below, I still don't know what's really going on:

paulson-2.png

And, it forces the visitor to start reading the story. Otherwise they can't figure out if they want to read it or not. Which is a bit silly. People don't like to read text online. They never have. So you need to make it easy for them to make that read/don't read decision quickly and easily, with the headline.

Finally, it's an SEO catastrophe. Associated Press probably wants this headline found if someone searches for 'bank stock bailout' not 'Paulson stock purchases'. But the current headline works for the latter, not the former. And it shows - the story is top ranking for 'Paulson stock purchases' but nowhere to be seen for 'bank stock bailout'. Ugh.

Doing it Write (heh - get it?)

Following the 3 rules, I'd re-write the Paulson headline like this:

Paulson: Bank stock bailout may benefit taxpayers

Or something similar. It's got the keyphrase, tells you what Sec. Paulson was really saying, and it's not even that much longer.

How would you rewrite the headline?

Rolling Averages, by a Math Moron

My mom's a PHD physicist. My dad, a PHD engineer. By the time I was 13 they'd both given up on any dreams of me being a math genius and instead hoped I'd finally count to 20 without removing my shoes.

So, when I click 'publish' for this post, I'm going to flinch a little, waiting for someone who's actually math-competent to call me out as the fraud that I am. But I'm writing this anyway, because some folks responded to last week's 11 Things Post by saying stuff like "OK, wise ass, explain some of this stuff."

What's a Rolling Average?

A simple rolling average (also called a moving average, if you wanted to know) is the unweighted mean of the last n values.

My first reaction when I read a definition like that was, "Buh?". Maybe it made sense to you, but to me it's total mathinese.

Here's my definition of a simple rolling average: An average of the last n values in a data set, applied row-by-row, so that you get a series of averages.

Buh?

OK, try this example. The column on the right is the rolling average:

rolling-average-image.gif

See how that works? I'm just taking the average of the last 7 rows, all the way down the column. That's a simple rolling average.

And trust me, I stop at 'simple'. If you want to learn more complex rolling averages, read the Wikipedia page.

Why Use a Rolling Average?

A rolling average can help you find trends that would otherwise be hard to detect. Using the data from above, you get a graph that looks like this:

normal-data-graph.gif

That's not terribly helpful as a trend detector. It looks like my website got a case of the hiccups.

Use a rolling average, though, and you start to see a pattern emerge, with peaks happening more and more often:

rolling-average-graph.gif

That's why rolling averages are so useful: Apply them at the right time and you can get an idea of emerging trends, even if those trends are happening because of sudden jumps in your data.

I'll stop there. Math-competent folk, feel free to leave endless comments about how I just mangled your favorite concept...

19 ways to be a good marketing copywriter

Not everyone can be a great marketing copywriter. But anyone can be a good one. Here are the things I've done to work towards 'good' over the years:
  1. Forget what grammar school taught you. Your 3rd-grade teacher - the terrifying one with 4 layers of lipstick and big hair - was well-intended but never wrote for real people. All she did was teach you to fear spelling and grammatical errors, and how to suck all the fun out of your own language. She taught you nothing about communication.
  2. Forget high school and college writing. These teachers taught you to fear word count. If they asked for 500 words, you'd better use 500, and God help you if you could communicate effectively in 450. Yeah, that's a recipe for great writing.
  3. Learn to love active voice. "Passive" voice sounds like this: I was taught awful writing habits by listening to too much Rush Limbaugh. "Active" voice: Rush Limbaugh taught me awful writing habits. There are times when passive voice makes sense. Usually, though, stick to what works: The [noun] [verbed].
  4. Read the classics. No, not James Joyce. Are you insane? I mean Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, and maybe some Ken Follett. All of them talk to broad audiences, paint compelling pictures (c'mon, you liked Christine and you know it) and translate. 'Translate' means "take stuff we don't normally think about and help us care about it". Hmmm. Sounds like marketing.
  5. Write without punctuation. Sometimes its fun to just slap some letters down on a page Dont worry about punctuation since no one else will read it anyway You can always add the punctuation later
  6. Dictate. Instead of writing down your next blog post, record it. Then play it back and write it down. For most people, speaking doesn't carry the stigma that writing does, so they edit less (that's not always a good thing).
  7. Beware of big words. I once met a prospective employee who used 'ameliorate' about 3x per sentence. Problem was, he thought 'ameliorate' meant 'crash' or 'those funny double doors on some people's patios". I never figured out which. I love learning new words, and using them. Just make sure you do it in that order.
  8. Use vernacular when appropriate. Did you know that, outside the northeastern USA, no one uses the term 'pocket book' to refer to a purse? I didn't, until I wrote what I thought was a fantastic sales letter for a purse, but used pocket book as the term. For a client in Seattle. They thought I'd been hit on the head. Avoid vernacular unless it's native to your audience.
  9. Write about your business every single day. Pick one product, or your whole company, and write about it. For 5 minutes. 15 minutes if you can. Don't give me crap about how you don't have time. If you don't have time to improve the way you communicate with potential customers, you should quit.
  10. Don't write sales copy. If you sit down to write sales copy, you'll end up sounding like either Mr. Rogers or William Shatner. Neither is great for sales.
  11. Show your copy to people but don't tell them who wrote it. If you hand a friend your latest creation and say "I wrote this," they'll probably go easy on you. Instead, tell them someone at the office wrote it and you need some help.
  12. Test stuff. Write two versions of a best-selling product's description. See which one performs better.
  13. Write descriptive headlines. Any headline you write should make sense on a blank sheet of paper. I've ranted about this before.
  14. Ignore stupid criticism. Deep in your soul, you know that someone who says "I didn't understand this part" as they lick a light socket is probably not the best source of feedback. Pick your editors carefully. Learn to know good advice from bad. It's not easy, I know, but you have to do it. Otherwise you'll be paralyzed. (let the flames commence)
  15. Never write by committee. One person writes. Another person edits. If a piece of writing passes among more than 3-4 people it ends up as intelligible as a George Bush speech. Or a John Kerry speech. I try to be even-handed.
  16. Never exploit. One of the worst pieces of marketing copywriting I ever saw was for a September 11, 2002 ad. It talked about how the company in question would send you a gift certificate to make you feel better. Really? A gift certificate? Utterly tasteless. Don't exploit people's feelings around tragic or infuriating events. Leave that to crappy politicians.
  17. Avoid cliches. If you write "In the blink of an eye, the world can change" or "In a world where..." I'll puke on your shoes.
  18. Write to the customer. Say "you", not "customers". Imagine you're pointing right at the reader when you write.
  19. Watch shows like Phineas and Ferb. First, this is the most awesome show on TV. Second, it's written to appeal equally to 8-year-olds (like my daughter) and 41-year-olds who have the maturity of 8-year-olds (me). The writing is brilliant. Just watch it. Learn to write for that same, absurdly broad audience. Hell, write an episode or two. Curse you, Perry the Platypus!

There are lots more things you can do, but it boils down to reading, listening and practicing. Tell me I'm an idiot, ignore everything I write. But if you read, listen and practice you'll probably still end up pretty damned good.

11 internet marketing skills you must always be learning

In spite of reading my blog, you want to go into internet marketing. Welcome to the asylum, my friend.

Time to start learning. This is a list necessary skills for an internet marketer. Warning: I do not necessarily know all these as well as I want to. I'm still learning:

  • Writing. I've beaten this one to death. If you can't write, don't even put the word 'marketer' in your title. DON'T. I hear you starting - "mar..." BZZZZT. Stop right there.
  • Statistics. You don't need to be an expert statistician. But understanding a rolling average, statistical significance and confidence interval is required.
  • SEO. Yep. Search engine optimization. This of course leads to a whole new list of stuff. That's for another blog post.
  • PPC. Pay per click marketing. See SEO, above.
  • Information Retrieval. I separate this from SEO and PPC because it's central to a lot of stuff you may end up doing to dig through/mine/organize data when you do everything from social media monitoring to reading your client's last 3 years of sales brochures.
  • HTML and CSS. Please. For the love of all that's good in the universe. You can't help people market on the internet if you can't even fathom how it's all built.
  • Design. You don't have to be a professional designer. At least I hope not - I can't design to save my life. But you should understand some basic principles: The Golden Ratio, typography, use of color, how to do a layout using a grid. Don't be a native, but at least speak the language.
  • Social media. Shudder. It pains me to use this stupid phrase. Still, you need to understand how people connect online. It's a (sarcasm here) teeny little aspect of online marketing (end sarcasm). Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and a bunch of others.
  • Math. Quick: What's .1 X $10,000? If you answered $100, then I've interviewed you before. Fail.
  • Business sense. I can't easily categorize this. But you need to understand what makes a business 'tick'. Little stuff, like earning more money than you spend, can really make a difference.
  • Diplomacy. Yeaaahhhhhhhhh I'm still working on this one. Learn to advocate, strongly, for controversial points that you know for certain are critical to your client. Without alienating every single person in the room. 'Diplomacy' is the ability to tell people they're totally wrong, and make them smile at the same time.

SEO Articles : How Much Blog Spam? A Study of a Ping Dataset

How much blog spam is produced in 5 minutes in a quiet Sunday evening? What is the ratio of spam blogs in the most popular blog services? To answer this question I present you the results of an experiment analyzing ping data and manually reviewing blogs.

The relative ease of creating and maintaining blogs makes them ideal tools for spamming search engines. Spam blogs or splogs serve two basic purposes: making money from advertising and affiliate programs, and participating in link farms. But making money from AdSense and providing nepotistic links are not what it takes to call a blog splog. Otherwise we would have to classify all blogs showing ads or promoting a business as spam; and there are thousands popular, quality blogs that would fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a splog, however, is that it has no use for its visitors. Should Google ban a splog from AdSense and prevent its links from passing on authority “ such a splog would have no more value or purpose of existence. So my definition of a splog would be a blog with the only purpose of showing contextual or affiliate ads, or boosting link popularity of certain target site

How active are these splogs? This question calls for a little experiment; similar to one described by P. Kolari, A. Java and T. Finn in their paper Characterizing the Splogosphere. They did their experiment in early 2006, and I am going to repeat it at a smaller scale now, in the early 2007.

Every time a blog is updated it sends a ping to one of many ping servers in order to invite search engine crawlers to index the new post. I am going to use ping data provided by one of the most popular ping servers Weblogs.com. Due to the limited scale of the experiment I will be using the smaller dataset covering the last 5 minutes of pings. It's pretty big though: 8117 pings. I've written a simple Java application to parse the XML file and extract URLs and names of the blogs in the dataset. Also some of the blogs were classified by blog platform: Blogspot (Blogger), MySpace, Spaces.Live.com etc. I have discovered a number of popular blog services, that I haven't come across yet, such as a popular Taiwanese site Wretch.cc, or Italian Libero.it and Splinder.com. I was surprised to see how few pings came from some other popular blog services; Livejournal for instance had only 6 pings! Obviously LJ doesn't rely much on Weblogs.com, but LJ has little to do with my experiment, as it is known to have very small percentage of splogs.

So below is a break down of blogs by platform, according to a ping dataset retrieved on a Sunday evening, Feb. 11. Do not mix blogs under Wordpress.com category with blogs using WP as a blog engine. Only those blogs hosted by Wordpress.com are included into this category.

Fig. 1 Popular Blog Services in the Sunday Weblogs Dataset

The huge Rest category consists of standalone blogs and blogs hosted by minor blog services.
A few words on the blogs in the dataset: a lot of blogs were not in English, I think as much as 70% of them. For instance, all Wretch.cc blogs and many Spaces.Live.com ones are in Chinese, there are also a lot of blogs in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and German.

Once dataset was downloaded and processed I started manually reviewing the blogs and discovering spam. Of course I couldn't visit all the 8117 blogs, so I randomly selected 20 blogs from each category.

How did I classify spam blogs? While blogs with automatically generated content or dictionary dumps are easily classified as spam, those with plagiarized content or in foreign languages required a bit more of effort. Nepotistic links with keyword stuffed anchors were a good indicator of spam. Copyscape.com helped much discovering plagiarized posts. And finally, affiliate and contextual ads were the final complement in the spam classification problem. It has to be noted that very few blogs in languages other than English were classified as spam. I can be sure about my judgment of German and Russian blogs, since I know these languages, but when dealing with others I relied only on excessive advertising and nepotistic links as spam indicators. I skipped Wretch.cc and Explog.jp samples as I was totally unable to judge Chinese and Japanese blogs. In total of 177 reviewed blogs 36 were classified as spam.

Below you can see two charts, one indicating a ratio of spam within a sample, and another showing how much each blog platform contributes to the total amount of spam.

Fig 2. Percentage of Spam Blogs in 20-blogs Samples

Fig 3. Contribution of Each Category to the Total Blog Spam

With the notable exception of Blogspot, the majority of blogs hosted by popular blog services are spam free. Of course one can question their quality, as many of them are of little value to others. But let's not forget that most of those blogs are private diaries or personal playgrounds never intended to have big audiences; and as long as they have value to the author and his/her close circle of friends we can't call them spam.

Thus, according to my reviews blogs hosted by beon.ru, Libero.it, Spaces.Live.com, Livejournal.com, splinder.com, and typepad.com showed no instances of blog spam in 20 blogs samples. Among 20 MySpace blogs I have discovered 1 splog, and Wordpress.com sample contained 2. The popular Google's service Blogspot has confirmed its unofficial name of Splogspot with 50% spam ratio. The Rest category comprised by standalone blogs and blogs attached to commercial sites showed even bigger proportion of blog spam: 23 blogs of 27 reviewed were classified as spam. The relatively low number of splogs hosted by public services can be explained by anti-spam actions taken by the administration of such services. The standalone splogs, however, are not subject to such moderation, which allows them to thrive producing tons of junk content for SE crawlers and overloading ping servers with spam pings.

As you might have noticed I used the same style of charts introduced by the famous blog ModernLifeIsRubbish.co.uk, which has an excellent tutorial on how to create pretty pie charts in Adobe Illustrator. Highly recommended!