ProBlogger

What Every Blogger Needs To Know About Their Target Audience

John Taylor writes on the topic of keeping your reader in mind as you blog....

It doesn't matter what kind of web site you have you must understand your target audience and know what it is that they want. Please notice that I used the word want and not the word need. There is a world of difference between wants and needs. For example you might need a means of getting from A to B and almost any vehicle would fulfil that need; but what you really want is a top of the range BMW!

I write my blog with just one person in mind. In my minds eye I have come to know that person intimately, I understand his goals, his dreams and his aspirations and I know the things that really interests him. He is my ideal reader, he soaks up every word and he clicks every link I include in each blog post.

Clearly, you can't please all the people all of the time. So, the best strategy is to focus on pleasing the people you can influence. You don't want passive readers, you want people who will take action. Readers who will click a link because you have recommended a new eBook or a new software product. Readers who will click the “Buy Now” button and earn you an affiliate commission.

So, what do you need to know about your target audience?

You will get two types of people coming to your site... People with whom you have built up a relationship and who like to read your blog. People who have come to your site for the very first time. You have two jobs to do. You have to keep the first type of people coming back and you have to grab the second type of people's attention, persuade them to stay long enough to engage their interest and to convert them to loyal readers.

Just think - when you are online what is it that you want to achieve? The majority of people online are looking for
something. It's unlikely that they are just surfing in a random fashion, although some people will do that. When online people are usually looking for specific information or seeking the solution to a problem.

Your job as a blogger is to make that information, and those solutions, available so that they can be found. In other words your content must closely match the wants of your target audience.

Make sure that your blog has a well defined theme and try to stick to making posts that stay on topic. Keep up to data with the news within the theme of your blog and provide your readers with your opinions on relevant and interesting items. Encourage feedback and always respond to questions from your readers.

Use a blog script or service that allows the easy addition of RSS feeds so that your blog site has fresh new content as soon as it is available.

Above all remember that each and every visitor to your site is a real person with feelings and emotions and be prepared to reveal something yourself in your posts. Your readers are much more likely to trust you if you allow them to get to know you.

Resource Box:
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John Taylor - November 2004.
John is a prolific writer and is the author of several books including “Testing & Tracking” (http://www.Test-and-track.com). John's http://www.MarketersBlog.com weblog provides insightful comments on all aspects of online marketing and is well worth a vist! For information on *How To Get Paid To Blog* click here now to visit... http://www.Blog4Cash.com

This article may be reprinted online, within ezines and newsletters on the condition that this resource box remains
intact.

Clicklab Releases White Paper on Click Fraud

'Clicklab, a leader in the emerging field of click fraud detection and prevention, announced the release and general availability of the white paper “How to Defend Your Website Against Click Fraud.”

http://www.clicklab.com/white-paper

The white paper is released shortly after Google has filed first-of-a-kind click fraud lawsuit against AdSense publisher. The lawsuit filed in a California Superior Court, alleges that a Texas-based website publisher generated fake clicks on its AdSense ads and paid a number of individuals to do the same.

Earlier this year, a California programmer was indicted for allegedly attempting to extort $100,000 from Google to prevent him from releasing Google Clique, the software he wrote to generate fake clicks on AdSense ads.'

Read more at Clicklab Releases White Paper on Click Fraud as Google Files First Click Fraud Lawsuit against AdSense Publisher

Blogs Are Business Support Tools, Not Direct Money Makers

Fredrik from CorporateBloggingBlog has an interesting post on making money directly from blogging and writes:

'I'm not sure why so many people are looking for direct revenue streams from blogging. Or, well, I understand why. We all have to pay the mortgages. But I don't think that blogging as such ever will be more than a small niche business.' Read more at : Blogs Are Business Support Tools, Not Direct Money Makers

I have to agree with Fredrik - but also disagree. I think the majority of money to be made from blogging probably comes from other activities on the edge of blogging and not directly from the activity of posting articles. For instances blogging tools, support services (like providing advertisers for bloggers) and blog consulting are obvious examples of how people can make money indirectly from blogging - however I think its been proven that it is possible to not only make a few dollars directly from blogging - but to make a decent income from it. I know of a growing number of full time bloggers who sustain their total income from their blogging (most of whom are not willing to go public about it for fear of being copied). Of course this is a small number of people and is an activity that will become more difficult as more and more bloggers give it a go and compete - but I really believe that the market is big enough to sustain a good deal of bloggers taking this approach.

Pro-blogging >> My two year Journey of Discovery

Yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of the very first blog post that I ever did on my first personal blog.

It has been a very interesting and rewarding two years. I've been reflecting today a little about the journey of blogging so far. There have been a number of movements that have brought me to the place I'm in today as someone who now who earns a living from blogging. Let me reflect a little on the journey so far....

- The first year of blogging (almost solely working on my own personal blog) was mainly about connecting with other bloggers, learning some basic coding (I knew nothing at all when I first started), testing different blogging tools, developing some writing skills, testing what worked and what didn't in terms of topics etc. It was largely about familiarization, experimentation and gathering of skills and knowledge.

- Another side benefit of the first year was that it built my 'livingroom.org.au' page ranking in Google. I did a number of projects in that time which caught the attention of a wide variety of other bloggers and involved them in my blogging. This had the side benefit of thousands of inward links to my blog which built my domain ranking significantly and gave me a great foundation for the launching of new commercial blogs.

- At the end of my first year I discovered Google adsense and added it to my blogs to discover that I could pay for my ISP and hosting costs with it. Nice. I also had a play around with Amazon affiliate-ship and made a few dollars on the side - enough to buy a book or two each quarter.

- Around this time I accidentally started my first commercially viable blog - Digital Photography Blog. I say accidentally because it was a complete fluke. This blog was originally a personal photolog with holiday pictures that I'd taken on a trip to Europe. I also had a review of the camera I used on the trip which included links to a number of other good reviews on the camera.

After a few weeks it became very evident that the pictures were getting no hits but the camera review was ranked quite highly on Google (due to my domain having risen in ranking over the previous year). I also noticed that one or two people bought the camera I'd recommended through my link to Amazon and that my Google Adsense figures seemed a little higher. A light went on in my head as I thought - 'what if instead of having just one page of reviews - I had 100 pages on digital cameras?'

This began my intentional journey of developing a niche news blog on digital imaging. Today that blog has thousands of pages and has become a regular read for hundreds of thousands digital imaging enthusiasts each month. Whilst not the biggest digicam site out there it regularly features in the top 10 returns for hundreds of Google and is slowly growing in readership and reputation.

- A few months into this new blog I started experimenting with a number of other topics and have since rolled out around 13 blogs including the mother of them all (well it was for a month) - the Olympics Blog which I worked on with a friend in the months leading up to the games in August. The traffic graph (below) for this blog is pretty amusing (click to enlarge) with the blog receiving around 1.5million visitors over the month of August. It was hard work with us each working virtually around the clock on it during the games - but it was a worthwhile time which saw us not only financially rewarded but also learning many lessons about commercial blogging.

- Some of the blogs I'm involved with are more commercially more successful than others of course - but all in all they have become my main source of income. As they've increased in earnings I've been freed up to dedicate more time to it - which in turn is rewarding. Next year I will be a full time blogger as my last part time job ends.

- As I look ahead at the next 12 months of blogging I'm excited by the potential that I see for the medium. I'm currently working on some new projects which I'll talk about here over the next few weeks and am thinking through some ways of making blogging something that not only benefits me financially but a medium that can bring about social change. I see that it is a powerful tool that could really give a voice to the marginalized and even be a way of generating income for those less fortunate an unable to work in traditional work places for reasons of health, location, disability etc.

All in all its been an amazing two years in which I can hardly believe the progression. I would never have imagined that blogging would progress from a hobby to a career as it has.

Another Blogger for Hire on EBay

Friday we mentioned that Jeremy Wright was Darren has also started an auction on ebay - but instead of starting at $100 he's decided to kick the bidding off at $500. No bids so far - but I'm sure he'll get there.

The publicity for these two alone will be worth the effort. Here's what they should do - start bidding on each others auctions. Get it up really high - like $10,000 - it would cause a massive stir in the media. Then at the end when they both buy each others services for the same price - they don't have to shell out any money but they surf on the fame of it all.

ecto blog: Amazon

The wonderful people who developed ecto - a tool that has revolutionised the way I blog - has added a feature that I requested in forums a few weeks back to their MacOSX version - the ability to add Amazon affiliate products to your blog all remotely! This means not only can I blog this entry without having to log into MT - but I can now also add links like this one to “Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content” (Biz Stone) or the image based one in this post with just a couple of clicks!

Have I mentioned that I LOVE ecto?

Product Placement hits Blogging

'On Monday, a squad of around 15 independent bloggers will begin inserting mentions of Marqui's hosted communications management services into their blogs for money.

"We hit on the idea of [connecting with] heavily read, influential bloggers who create public discussion groups and get feedback," said Stephen King, Marqui CEO. "But there are no mechanisms for them to make money. So we came up with idea of paying them."'

Read more of this article at Marc's Voice: Marqui product placement ads

Also talking about this story is Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, who writes 'I am on the fence on whether this is smart strategy or not. On the one hand, the company gets to reach influentials in a very cost-effective way. On the other, I feel that it's tainted.'

I tend to agree with Steve and feel like this is something of a risky experiment both for Marqui and the bloggers taking on the job. Does this approach run the risk of disenchanting readers?

This will be an interesting story to follow - if its done carefully and the bloggers chosen are writing on related topics to the product they place in their content then it could prove to be a worthwhile move - however if it becomes an unsubtle and obviously money grabbing exercise that dominates the blogs chosen then I'm not so sure.

Blogger for Hire on EBay

Blogger Jeremy C. Wright is in the news again - this time he's auctioning his services as a blogger to the highest bidder! Yes you heard me right - Jeremy of Ensight is willing to blog for three months for the highest bidder - posting 5 to 10 times per week. The auction is at ebay and the bidding as of tonight is at $112.73.

He posts about it on his blog answering the question - Isn't this all a little stupid? - Maybe. But, like all free market stuff, you never know if there's a demand for something until you try. If there is a demand for this, there may be a demand for more blogger trials at more companies in which case - who knows - maybe I'll end up brokering such deals for other bloggers with other companies.'

This isn't the first time we've mentioned Jeremy on this blog - last time he was selling his blog in another attempt to earn money from his blogging.

So why is he auctioning himself? - 'To be honest, I'm doing this to raise the profile of blogging, plain and simple. Plus, being a writer as well as a consultant in a past life, I know I can help companies figure out if blogging is the right space for them to be looking at.'

Interesting move - not only is he raising blogging's profile but again he's raising his own and hopefully will earn a few dollars on the side. $112.73 would be a bargain but with 7 days and 3 hours still to go in the auction I'm sure the price will rise - if not I know I'll be putting in a bid!

Pay per Click Advertising Trading

A lot of Bloggers are earning good money as a result of being publishers of pay-per-click advertising but those that are making the most out of it are also bringing traffic to their blogs via the same method.

It sounds all wrong when you first think about it - why would anyone spend money on getting readers to their site in order to get them to click an ad to earn money? Wouldn't it cost more to get readers than you'll make from it?

Well it all depends how clever you are really. Let me explain a little...

Imagine this - you spend 5 cents to get a reader to your site but when they get there they click on an ad or buy something from an affiliate you link to and you earn anything from 50 cents to $20 (or more)! Sounds like a good investment to me.

This is what many webmasters and an increasing amount of bloggers spend their days doing. Its a little like share trading - you are looking at the fluctuations of prices on buying ads and timing it just right so that returns are maximized whilst also searching for affiliate programs and high paying contextual advertising terms. The hope is that a high enough percentage of your readers click those high paying ads or buy those lucrative products you sell to not only recoup your investment but also make a little on the side.

Of course you don't even really need a blog or website to make money from pay-per-click ads. Here is another strategy that many are using. You buy ads cheaply and instead of funneling people to your own website you send them to another site which you happen to be an affiliate for! An increasing amount of the ads that you see advertised on Adsense and Overture are actually placed through this method - not by the site you visit when you click them, but by an affiliate hoping that a high enough percentage of clickers make a purchase and earn them a few dollars.

The method is risky and it takes some good well thought out strategy and precision execution but the rewards are potentially great.

I talked to someone using this method earlier in the week and he told me that his sites now earn him $US10 million per year - but that he's spending just over $US5 million in advertising. Food for thought.

Building blog traffic for newbies

The Blog Herald has a good post on Building blog traffic for newbies - pretty basic tips but well worth a read if you're new to blogging and wanting to get some traffic over to that blog you've been working hard on. Here is their last tip:

'The most important feature of all: post regularly and post often. It not only brings readers back regularly but it means the spiders from the search engines will return more frequently indexing your entire site, and you'll start getting hits from the search engines. Some may argue but these aren't that valuable but I would argue that's rubbish. It exposes your site to a new audience for free, and even if only a few return you've still built up your readership for free. Take the Blog Herald for example, we get 5,000 views per month just from clickthrus in from Google and another 2,500 from other search engines (Google is the only real game in town though). Even if only 1% return to the site later, that's 75 new regular readers per month or nearly 1000 per year, and what I also find is that this traffic also responds well to advertising on the site if they've stumbled in for the wrong reason.'

How to Be Your Own Link Partner

This article by Stephan Miller has some interesting concepts for those of us wanting to make our sites more accessible for our readers and search engine bots. Its a nice change from all the articles out there about building your page ranking simply by getting lots of links to your site.

How to Be Your Own Link Partner - Yes, I know it sounds kind of weird, but it's not really. Now I don't mean to build forty websites and link them to each other, although if you have forty sites that are closely related, go ahead and do so. It will definitely help.

What I mean here is to take a look at your site. Where do you want your search engine hits to go? Yes, I know, you want every page to get hits. But where do you really want them to go.

You may build a link exchange directory and start adding link partners, but taking a hard look at the structure of your site may do more good in the long run.

If you're selling something, the page you want to rank high is probably your sales page. Your index page is great. Your contact info page is fine. But you really want a person to buy something. But does your site structure show this?

All pages on your site should point to this page, every one. This sales page should only point back to your index.

Pagerank works on your own site in the same way in works on the internet as a whole. If each page on your site links to each other page, than every page should have the same rank. But who needs their contact page or link partners pages to rank as high as their sales page.

I had a site that I looked at the other day with literally thousands of pages, all dynamically created. The main purpose of the site: to get a sale. But then I looked at the site, closely.

A few of the pages had a pagerank just as high as the index page for many reasons. One was an article that many people had linked to. Another was the description page for software that I had once sold and submitted to many shareware sites. But the problem was that both pages were just sitting there.

So I added a smaller version of my sitemap to both in an attempt to spread around the Pagerank that just sort of stagnated in these pages. All that I can say is that is worked.

Another tip, when you link back to your index, do so with the domain name, for example http://www.your-site.com instead of http://www.your-site.com/index.htm or you could accidentally split your pagerank.

But remember to be your own link partner before you go searching elsewhere.

----------------------------------------------------------
Stephan Miller
http://www.profit-ware.com

Mailing List Services

Does anyone out there know of any plugins for Word Press and Moveable Type that are for collecting and generating a mailing list for your blog? I've been using a paid system for the past year that has been very unreliable. I'm sick of writing up emails to send to those that have signed up for my mailing list only to find that the program which is billed as seamless and easy to use doesn't end up sending anything 50% of the time.

It doesn't have to be a plug in for WP or MT - I'm looking for something that will allow me to collect email addresses (opt in style) and shoot out weekly emails. It needs to be cheap (free is good, but willing to pay) and able to handle lists of over 3000 recipients. Any suggestions would be gladly received.

Essential Pro Blogging Tools

Hypothetical question time - If you were stranded on a desert island (with dsl broadband and a laptop) and the had to make a living (to pay for your boat ride home) from blogging - what would be your top 5 blogging tools/programs/services?

Ok - silly question - but someone was just asking me about my blogging and the tools that I use - I told them that I LOVE...

1. Google Adsense - my wife loves them too - They give me money to research and write about stuff that I'm really interested in and probably would have researched and written about for free!

2. Bloglines - These people find me the stuff that I write about in a 10th of the time it would have taken me to find it otherwise. They also tell me if others are writing about it within minutes of them doing so.

3. Ecto - I still remember the day I first fell in love with this little program. It makes uploading blog entries so quick and easy. What you see is what you get editing - one click publishing - purrrrr.

4. Google News - Once again the nice people at Google come to the problogging party and kindly email me news on any topic that I might choose. Articles from around the world that I'd never have heard of land in my inbox daily.

5. Topix - Once again this service sources news (for free) from around the globe and shoots it into either an email or an RSS feed for my blogging pleasure.

What are your top 5 blogging tools??

Average Blogger makes $20 to $50 per Month

WebPro New has an article on the rise of blogging and estimates that the average blogger is making $20 to $50 each month. I'm not sure how they come to this figure - I know many bloggers, 90% of whom make nothing from their blog. Another 9% might make a few dollars each month (probably less than $20) and then there is a very small percent who make good money from blogging. I guess if you average it out those earning big money would increase the average - but I doubt if you averaged out the millions of bloggers that you'd find $20-$50 is the figure.

Read more at Blogs Being Registered Every 7 8 Seconds

Google Vs. Adsense Fraudsters

Google is sending a message to its publishers about click fraud and is suing one of its clients this week in an effort to recoup loss incurred by false clicking - but is also no doubt hoping to send a warning to those cheating the system that they are serious about this issue.

'Internet search giant Google Inc. filed a lawsuit against one of its AdSense Online clients this week, claiming the company defrauded the search company by clicking on its own ads multiple times.

The case, filed in Santa Clara County Court, also alleges that Houston, Texas-based Auctions Expert International were in breach of their contract with Google for intentionally manipulating the advertising program....

The AdSense agreements, though, expressly bar any company from clicking on its own sites in order to create ad revenue or to pay other people to click on the company’s sites.

“[Auctions Expert] flagrantly abused the AdSense Online service by artificially and/or fraudulently generating ad clicks,” the complaint stated. “These clicks were worthless to advertisers because they generated significant and unjust revenue for the defendants, who were paid by Google as if the clicks were legitimate.”'

Read more at Google Vs. Adsense Fraudsters - addict3d.org

Google Moves to Continual Indexing

'If you've noticed that Google seems to be updating their index more frequently than once a month, you're not alone. Clint Dixon observed this as well. In this article he discusses how this changes the world for website owners, search engine optimizers, and anyone else trying to get on the front pages of popular search engines.

Google.com took a step forward in offering the most relevant information available by beefing up their mission statement. For a long time Google has updated their database of information by indexing the World Wide Web once per month. In light of recent events I have come to the conclusion that Google is now updating their index much more frequently, as evidenced by server statistics from my clients, and from my own server.

With the November 2003 Florida Update, Google dropped many of the offending webmasters who employed black hat SEO techniques off of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This upset a great many webmasters whose sites sat on the front pages of Google.com for years, and who felt smug without preparing for the future.'

Continue reading Google Moves to Continual Indexing

How big is the Blogosphere?

Clickz has a good article on the size of the Blogosphere which continues to grow.

'The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to blog analysis firm Technorati. Over that time, blogs have gone from being a word that sounded insulting to an online trend embraced even by a sexagenarian Massachusetts senator running for president. Given the frenetic pace of that growth, data charting the blog phenomenon have been vigorously consumed, and in some cases contradictory....

According to David Sifry, Technorati's chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003.'

Read more at The Blogosphere By the Numbers

Services to Ping When you Update your Blog

Over the past year I've collected a list of services to ping when you update your blog. Here is a list of those I have so far. There are heaps more out there - you might also like to head over to Jeremy's Services to Ping list also where he's got a list of 41 or so services (many duplicated here).

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping/
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://ping.blo.gs
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Please note - you might not want to ping them all every time as it can take a long time to post anything. The Pingomatic one at the top of the list automates the process and pings many services for you all at once.

Tech Bloggers Wanted - AdverBlogging

Jeremy Wright's employees are looking for tech bloggers willing to blog for a few dollars.

'The company I do the majority of my writing for is looking to open half a dozen topical blogs. The content output expectations are fairly low. These are ‘entry level’ blogging positions. The positions are unpaid, but you get to put your ads on the pages. The site you’re blogging for gets 1M visitors per month, so you should be able to make a reasonable income via AdSense.'

Read more at Ensight Tech Bloggers Wanted - AdverBlogging

Are You Utilizing All the Features of Google Adsense?

An article about Getting the most from Adsense written By Merle

Many website owners know that Google's Adsense program is a great way to show targeted ads on your site and make money at the same time.

Google offers many features that you may not know about. Let's take a look at a few of them.

Colors: With built in color palettes, you can use Google's or create up to 100 of your
own. You can pick up to four palettes that randomly rotate on your site.

Channels: If you use Adsense on multiple sites, it's nice to know which page and domains are generating the most click thrus. Channels offer detailed reporting so you can assign separate channels to each of your domains, track different ad formats to see which sites/ads are pulling better.

You can use up to 50 channels and you can deactivate them at will. If you use descriptive
names in your titles, you can easily recognize what you were tracking when you check your
stats later on. You will have to generate specific code to paste onto your pages.

Ad Formats: Google offers many different ad formats in various sizes, from buttons to banners. To view all of the available sizes, see http://google.com/adsense/adformats You'll want to experiment with different formats to see which ones generate the best click through rates for you.

Image Ads: Don't forget about image ads, which are offered in four major formats:

Leaderboard 728X90
Banner 468X60
Med Rectangle 300X250
Skyscraper 120X600

You can opt to show a combination of image and text ads, but not image ads alone. You can also choose to display image ads only on some pages of your site and not all of them. Again, you'll want to test to see if graphic ads outperform standard text ads.

Public Service Ads: If Google doesn't have targeted ads to display on your site, they'll show PSA's (Public Service Ads). To avoid this you can set up your own "alternate ads" to appear in their place. By showing your own ads you can still generate an income instead of donating the space to charity.

Reports: Google offers many different reports you can download in CSV format in which you can then import into any spreadsheet program for further analysis.

For more information see Google's new updated FAQ page at https://www.google.com/support/adsense

As you can see, Google offers a variety of features for AdSense users to make their service work best for your website. Isn't it time you took a closer look?

-------------------------------------
By Merle
Download Your Free Ebook or register for Merle's E-course and learn how to market and promote your site."50 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website" http://WebSiteTrafficPlan.com'

Google sees benefits in corporate blogging

'Google, which implemented an internal web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, Google said.

Google deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003, and since then Google staffers have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog, said Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google.

"Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they are thinking about and what they are up to," Goldman said.

"It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents."'

Read more at Google sees benefits in corporate blogging:

Writing and Blogging Opportunities - California Chronicle & American Chronicle

Here is an opportunity for bloggers to get their name and writing into the public eye a little more - it doesn't pay anything but the side benefits could make it worthwhile:

'The California Chronicle family of online magazines is offering writing opportunities for authors and bloggers to publish with the California Chronicle, American Chronicle, World Sentinel and 17 additional affiliated online magazines throughout the US and the world.

These are unpaid, yet rewarding opportunities. Authors and bloggers may regularly submit their work on a variety of subjects to gain exposure for themselves as experts in their fields or to refer employers to professionally published examples of their writing to obtain positions as full-time, freelance, or syndicated columnists. Writers can show off the best examples of their writing to employers, families, or friends. In addition, authors can write about almost anything, including hobbies, opinion, sports, travel, politics, or entertainment.'

Read more at Writing and Blogging Opportunities - California Chronicle & American Chronicle

9rules Blog Network

A friend recently suggested I take a look at the 9rules Network of blogs run by Paul Scrivens. Paul, like many bloggers, didn't set out to create a blog network, but rather found himself creating more and more site, out of which a network emerged. He bases his blogging on 9 Rules - (hence the name). These rules got my attention as being simple, to the point, well thought out and a great set of values to base a network upon:

1. Love what you do
2. Never stop learning
3. Form works with function, not against it
4. Simple can be beautiful
5. Work hard, play hard
6. You get what you pay for
7. When others talk, listen
8. Always improve
9. Respect your inspiration

The sites in the 9Rules network are:

• Big Money Tips

• Bet Fest

• CSS Vault
• Forever Geek
• Lame Ass Job
• The Roe
• Version 2
• Whitespace
• Web Drug Database

Some of them seem a little out of action to me at the moment - but you'll get a feel for his work. Paul is a great web designer - I love his clean, simple and well laid out sites. His content is similarly uncluttered and lacks the hype of many of the other blog networks that have launched over the last few years.

The income streams that Paul uses on 9Rules are varied - he is seeking private advertisers, runs Amazon Affiliate Stores (he's posted his Amazon earnings on a monthly basis here - wow, if only I could get mine that high!), has experimented with other affiliate programs and has Adsense ads on some of his pages.

Affiliate News: Pay Per Lead/Click Program Reviews

Affiliate News has put together a very useful resource that reviews 9 Pay Per Lead/Click Programs

If you're looking for ways to add an income stream to your blog using this type of approach this might be a good starting point.

Free Blog Tutorials

Orangejack Blog has a great series of free tutorials for bloggers. They write:

'Interested in blogging? Don't know much about what a blog is, why blog, or how to blog? Need to tweak your blog? Do you feel like you need to take some classes on it all?

Well look no futher. I have put together a series on the ins and outs of blogging. I call it the Orangejack Blogging University. Here's the curriculum in case you're interested in starting.

Blogging 100: Prerequisites
Blogging 101: Blogger.com
Blogging 102: HTML Code
Blogging 201: Posting Photos
Blogging 202: Publishing
Blogging 301: Marketing
Blogging 302: Webstats
Blogging 401: Template Tweaks
Blogging 402: Etiquette

Found via Micro Persuasions

Blog Buyouts

Wired News has an interesting piece on media buy outs. The article finishes up by predicting that in the next year or so that we'll see companies moving in to purchase blogs.

'According to Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, over the next 12 to 24 months you will probably see big media companies scarf up these cult destinations, where a growing number of people are going for opinions, analysis and community. "Look at what happened politically," Whitmore said, when blogs hit the big time during the presidential campaign. "The same thing will happen in business, because people know they don't need to head to branded sites for good information. Bloggers can be trusted to be independent and people will turn to self-published experts for information."

Whitmore, a former editor and chief of PC Week, believes that established media brands will have no choice but to adopt blog strategies -- and acquisitions will be a part of it. He predicts that by this time next year, Nick Denton, founder of Gawker and Wonkette, or Jason Calacanis, who co-founded micropublisher Weblogs, will have sold a couple of their blogs.'

Read more at Wired News: Web Media Buyouts Coming? Kinda

How much would you sell your blog for?

Google Adsense to Provide Additional Payment Options?

I recently wrote an email to the kind people at Google Adsense Customer Service HQ suggesting that they work on an alternative payment system for plebs like me who live outside the USA. I recently wrote about the predicament I face - it takes 14 weeks from the time I earn money through Google to the time I see it hit my bank account. I decided to let Google know (after all I make them money - they should listen to me!) and sent them an email making a suggestion that they provide alternative methods of payment. This is part of the email I received in reply:

'As you know, AdSense participants currently receive payments via check in US Dollars. Unfortunately at this time we do not offer alternative payment methods or currencies. However, we hope to add additional payment options in the coming months. Thank you for your patience as we expand our program.'

This will be an interesting develop for tens of thousands of Adsense users - bring it on!

Ad Placement - Where do Readers Look on a Blog?

WebProNews also has a good article on Ad Placement on websites:

'Advertisement drives the revenue of the Internet industry. Learning about the science associated with successful ad campaigns can only benefit you and your site. With this in mind, a study performed by Eyetrack III attempted to determine which sections of a webpage the human eyes focus. Eyetrack accomplished this by creating mock pages containing text and advertisements. Test subjects then reviewed the documents while Eyetrack monitored where their eyes focused....

"Advertising placed on top and in the left column of the page was viewed most. Ads placed at the bottom of the page were viewed least." On their first mock-up page, 68% saw/focused on ads that were positioned in the top left of the page; conversely, ads appearing at the bottom of the page were only viewed by 14% of the test subjects....

researchers found that ads that blended into surrounding editorial content on a news homepage attracted people's eyes more often than ads that featured contrasting colors or designs.'

Read more at Ad Placement You’re Getting Warmer

RSS Ads A Growing Trend

WebProNews has an interesting article on the rise of RSS Ads and RSS spam:

'Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one of the fastest growing methods of content distribution associated with Internet technologies. Because creating feeds is not too complicated, the ability to present on-page information to subscribers has been embraced by bloggers and business sites alike. Many users also recognize the value of RSS when it comes to improving search engine ranking. Links that appear within subscription feeds are given relevance, which is essential for enhancing SERP position.'

Read more at RSS Ads A Growing Trend

New Google Adsense Features Google AdSense Support

Google's Adsense has just added a newly designed FAQ/Support page to their site with more advice and tips for the program. They've also added a 'invite a friend' option to the program. Unfortunately there is no incentive to make such an invitation for publishers. Already forums dedicated to Adsense are full of comments about this feature - complaining about the lack of commission or reward for recruiting new Adsense users. Many other similar programs pay referrers either a one of payment or an ongoing percentage of earnings from those that they refer. I guess Google don't need new publishers that much.

Relationship Between the PageRank and the Number of Backlinks

How many links to your blog do you need to climb up Google's page ranking? A recent study titled Relationship Between the PageRank and the Number of Backlinks - Articles about link building and PageRank examines that question and draws some interesting conclusions:

'- With a few exceptions, whatever the PR is, more backlinks than the month before are required every month to get a given PR.

- As expected, one needs far more backlinks in order to get a high PR than a low one. Even if there may be exceptions, because the study deals with a good number of data, it gives experimental support to the theoretical hypotheses or ideas never proved before but only discussed in forums.

- During this summer (2004), Google changed the behaviour of the link: command which now includes low PR pages. Only PR4 or higher PR pages used to be listed by this command. Conversely since this summer you can also list the low PR pages backlinks, which you can see in the table.'

Get more details of this study at Relationship Between the PageRank and the Number of Backlinks

8 Tips for Maximizing Contextual Advertising Revenues

WebProNews has a good article on Tips for Maximizing Contextual Advertising Revenues - the first of these 8 tips is:

'1. Determine overall fit with your site.

The first rule of thumb of contextual advertising is that it is not for everyone. Some sites do extremely well with it, earning 5-figures or more a month, while others earn mere pennies a month. Others running Google Adsense, for example, enjoy being in the "UPS Club" (Google sends by UPS the checks to publishers who earned $10,000 or more whereas the rest gets their check through regular mail). Many say that they find it hard to even reach the monthly check cut-off amount of $100.

The beauty about contextual advertising is that it is not about traffic, as there are some sites getting only 5,000 ad impressions that earn more than those getting 50,000 impressions monthly. It is about the types of visitors you have. So what types of site do well with contextual advertising?

Sites where users are in a buying mood

Sites where users are looking for information on specific products or services that interest them - product, business opportunity, looking to buy tickets, etc.

Sites where users are researching ways to spend money

Sites with a high percentage of fresh unique visitors (regular visitors tend to ignore ads)

Sites where users show an interest to ads, and not just the site's offerings

If contextual advertising is not working for you as you expect, be sure to check out other forms to monetize your web real estate such as affiliate programs and CPM-based advertising.'

Read the other 7 tips at Tips for Maximizing Contextual Advertising Revenues

How To Plan Your Week Making Money At Home

How To Plan Your Week Making Money At Home is an interesting article with some practical tips on how to have a money making week at home on the internet...

'Is it really possible to earn a 6 figure income on the internet? The answer to that is yes, but not everyone will do it! WHY?

The biggest lie told everyday on the internet is you can make money at home doing nothing.

"Join my program and I will build your downline for you. I do all of the work. This is so easy anyone can do it in their underwear. Buy my book and you will be successful."And on and on.... We have all fallen for this at one time or another.

My book shelf is full of books I have bought online and never finsished reading. Who has ime to read all of this stuff and still actually work at making money?'

Internet Ad Spending Hits New Heights

ClickZ reports - 'Internet ad spend topped $2.4 billion last quarter, according to the quarterly "Internet Ad Revenue Report" conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) on behalf of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

The third quarter estimates mark the eighth consecutive quarterly increase for the industry and the fourth record-setting quarter. Q3 2004 represents a 35.3 percent increase over the $1.79 billion of the year-ago quarter, and a 2.4 percent increase over the $2.37 billion of the previous quarter.

"Historically, the second and fourth quarters are the strongest in advertising," said Greg Stuart, the IAB's president and CEO. "That the industry bested Q2 revenues is testament to the confidence and success marketers have found in the medium. As the experts predict, the holiday season should be a merry one for the industry."

Revenue for the first nine months of 2004 totaled slightly over $7.0 billion, compared with the $7.3 billion in revenue reported for all 2003. Based on these numbers, 2004 could be a record year, beating the previous $8.0 billion revenue record reported in 2000, according to Pete Petrusky, director of advisory services at PwC.

The third-quarter figures are an estimate, based on aggregated data from the top 15 online ad sellers. These results were extrapolated to calculate the total estimated industry revenue figure. Actual Q3 results will be appear in PwC's full report, expected in Spring 2005.'

Read more at Report: Internet Ad Spending Hits New Heights

Pay Per Click (PPC) Blog

Cube Management's Pay Per Click (PPC) Blog will be an interesting one to follow if you are thinking about promoting your blog in this way. As the name suggests its following all Pay Per Click news from around the web.

'Pay-Per-Click is a powerful tool that companies can use to increase sales. Cube’s PPC blog offer helpful insights the multifaceted world of pay-per-click campaigns, focusing on relevant stories and issues that appeal to both PPC novices as well as expert Pay-Per-Click campaigners. Cube’s PPC blog aims to be the top pay per click resource on the internet.'

Found via PR Leap

A day in the life of a ProBlogger

A number of people have asked me recently what a typical day of blogging looks like for me - I thought I'd share the basics. Of course what an actual day looks like differs from day to day depending on other commitments (I have other interests/work outside of blogging), the day of the week (weekends I try to get a life) and my mood (I'm an impulsive type).

7.00am - My wife's ('V') alarm goes off. I attempt to ignore it. She hits 'snooze'.

7.15am - The alarm goes off again - I shove V out of the bed in the direction of the shower and promptly fall back asleep.

7.45am - V returns to the bedroom and the hair dryer starts and sleep becomes impossible - and so my day begins.

8.30am - Having showered, eaten and seen V off to work I sit down at my powerbook with a fresh cup of coffee and begin my morning blogging routine.

8.35am - Check blog stats - I use Safari (and sometimes Firefox) as a browser - both enable me to simultaneously open up the statistics page of each one of my blogs in tabbed windows. I run a free SiteMeter stat counter on each of my pages and find the information it gives sufficient for a quick check of overall visitor levels - hot pages and referrals. It take a few minutes on each blog to look for any spikes in traffic and to work out where traffic is or isn't coming from.

8.50am - Check income streams. I then log into my Adsense and Affiliate reports to see what earnings over night were like.

9.00am - Check RSS feeds - I use Bloglines to track 200 or so blogs and search feeds on particular keywords. Most mornings I will log on and find that there are anything from 400 to 2000 results since I last checked that I need to wade through. This can take up to a couple of hours to do because as I check them I enter relevant posts into my blogs using Ecto.

Ecto is a simple blogging tool that lets you post to your blog/s without actually logging into the back end of your blog. It allows the posting of pictures and has a wonderful feature that allows you to highlight text on a webpage and import it into a draft entry on your blog. As most of my blogs are 'news hubs' and generally are quotes from and links to other sources with a few of my own comments this features is very useful. I can post something to my blog within minutes.

10.00am - check and respond to emails. I get ALOT of emails. Every comment left on my blogs ends up in my inbox where I monitor their appropriateness. At least a few get deleted every morning due to them being spam comments or using foul language (I try to keep things 'family friendly' as I get a lot of kids through my blogs doing project research). I also get a lot of requests for links, advice etc and attempt to respond to as many as possible.

10.30am - Check Google News subscriptions. I subscribe to a number of news services such as Google News. Every morning between around 8.30am and 10am emails start arriving in my inbox with the results of these searches. As I sort through them I upload any relevant links directly onto my blogs.

11.00am - Coffee time. Most mornings at this point I take a walk up to my local Cafe for a coffee or two. I generally take either a business book (often on Marketing, Branding, Small Business), a magazine (on gadgets, the internet etc) or a newspaper with me. I always have a notebook handy because this is the time of day I often get my best ideas. I intentionally make space for myself for this 'dreaming' time because it is very easy just to get caught up in the micro level of updating a blog/s and not spend any time looking at the bigger picture. I use this time to set goals, plan new projects, think about ways of improving what i do.

12.00pm - Connect with other bloggers/forums. I chat regularly to a small number of other bloggers who have similar interests and projects. Most days I would touch base with them to bounce ideas around, support one another, work on common projects and catch up on what they are doing. Similarly I participate in a number of forums including Site Point, WebMasterWorld and Digital Point. I find these interactions very helpful and have learnt so much from others doing similar things with their blogs and websites.

12.30pm - Lunch - usually eaten whilst checking stats again. I find its really helpful to keep your finger on the pulse of your blogs by regularly checking your stats. This way you are ready to make changes if you notice sudden changes in visiter levels.

1.00pm - Most afternoons the pattern generally repeats itself somewhat with me heading back to my RSS feeder and checking for relevant articles/posts to update to my blogs. On an average day I'd be updating between 30-70 posts to my blogs every day of the week (including most weekends).

3.00pm - Siesta. I tend to take a nap in the afternoons if I can afford the time. Largely because I stay up late (see below).

4.00pm - it is about this time that my RSS feed really comes alive. I'm based in Australia and so this is the time of the day when the USA wakes up and I notice a spike in traffic levels but also in other bloggers and newspapers posting stories. I work hard at this time of day updating my blogs and in quiet patches coming up with original content (like this very post).

6.00pm - frantically race around the house cleaning up and making it appear that I've done some housework before V gets home.

6.15pm - check Adsense figures. This is the time of day that Adsense closes its books on an old day and releases channels figures for the previous day. Its a good time to do a little reviewing of the trends of the past week and see where traffic and income is coming from. Which blogs are performing - which are not? Where do I need to focus my attention in the next few days? What is hot and should I ride the wave of?

6.30pm - V arrives home form work - I welcome her at the door and catch up on the day that was. This is usually followed by dinner/TV/being a good husband.

8.00pm - Usually whilst watching some TV show I'll grab the powerbook (wireless) and sit in the lounge room to do a little more updating from the RSS feed. I also tend to use the evenings to review the day's postings. I go through each entry for the day and ask the question - 'who could I let know about this post?' I'll email other bloggers that I know would be interested in the things I've written (I also do this during the day as I think of it) and submit a few of my better posts to some of the bigger blogs and websites out there that I have relationships with in the hope that they might link up and send a deluge of traffic my way. I also use the evenings to think about Search Engine Optimization - often in the heat of the moment during the day time I don't give as much attention to this as I should and the time in the evenings is a good time to reformat posts so as to get better ranked on Google.

10pm - V is generally off to bed by now and so the evenings see me continuing to post a few stories as they come in. I also chat in the evenings to a few of my colleagues who are in different time zones - again its about building networks, sharing ideas and resources.

12.00am - 1.00am - After one last skim through the relevant stats and RSS feed for any urgent stories that are breaking I hit the sack and promptly fall asleep after a long day of blogging only to be awoken at 7am with that dreaded alarm.

Once again I'll stress that each day is very different from that proceeding and following it. I do other work most days and get out and about also but most days have the above elements in them at least in part.

Malcolm Gladwell on Human Nature

IT Conversations have a good recording of Malcolm Gladwell talking about 'Human Nature' which is well worth the read. It doesn't directly apply to bloggers but Malcolm's stuff has always been influential in the way I approach my blogging.

'Malcolm explores why we can't trust people's opinions -- because we don't have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke's market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller's Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.'

These Traffic Numbers Are Real

'Mention "audit" to David Barlin, vice president of marketing for I/Pro, a company that verifies audience data for about 500 small and medium-sized websites, and he practically gushes.

"They're exciting," he said, not at all defensively. "Really."

That's because he and the company he works for see a potential gold mine in independently auditing the traffic for all the sites that are not Google, Yahoo or MSNBC -- the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of commercial websites dedicated to niche subjects like business-to-business, chemical engineering, software development and online publishing. Since fans of these types of sites rarely make it to the mass portals, advertisers have been clamoring for ways to reach them.

Of course, Yahoo is fine if you want to peddle mass consumer items like, say, camera phones, vacation getaways and the latest Hollywood offering. But if you want to sell a new type of chip, manufacture routers or market a B-to-B website, you need to go straight to the people most likely to buy your product. To figure out whether a certain site will give a sufficient return on advertising, however, requires accurate traffic forecasts, something that has been lacking.'

Read more at Wired News: These Traffic Numbers Are Real

Minkmedia Launches UK Blog Network

Minkmedia is the latest network of Blogs to launch. This one is based in the UK and describes itself as:

'Mink Media is a nanonpublisher. We publishe a series of weblogs (five so far) aimed at a British audience.

A weblog is a topical website, new stuff appears at the top, and it updates frequently (more than once a day). People are excited about weblogs (or blogs)--we basically think they are fun to read.'

Mink Media is run by Azeem Azhar and Shehnaz Suterwalla

They are offering a few opportunities for advertisers to partner with them - either as a premium sponsor (privately arranging banner ads etc), via Blog Ads or text ads via Adbrite. They are also running Google ads and Amazon affiliateships which is a good idea until they build up a high enough readership to run more premium sponsorships.

They currently have two main blogs running - these being:

- Wanda Lust - a blog about Travel
- Honourabloe Fiend - a blog about politics in Britain

They are open to being approached by bloggers wanting to join their network and I've no doubt we'll see them add new blogs to their two current ones shortly.

Betting on Tools that Power Blogs

BusinessWeek has an interesting article that talks about another option for making money from blogs - through the infrastructure that makes blogs possible. They write -

'While Web log entreprenuers search for a viable business model, venture capitalists are backing companies that make it all possible

Ask David Sifry when his little San Francisco startup called Technorati will turn a profit, and he laughs contagiously. No, Technorati, which tracks Web logs, or blogs, and will soon offer blog searches, is a long way from turning a profit. But it has big-league venture-capital backers like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, and they're willing to wait as blog entrepreneurs cast around for a good business model.

It may take a while. Truth is, the fledgling blogging industry's business model is closer to a question mark than a dollar sign. Sifry would be the first to admit that he's part of an industry in flux. "This reminds me of the Web in 1994," Sifry says. "It's an ecosystem that's evolving and just being built."

PICKS AND SHOVELS. Plenty of people are part of the building process. Sifry estimates that about 12,000 new blogs pop online worldwide each day. On about 10 million blogs today, writers are posting about 400,000 new items per day. That's more than 16,000 per hour. The interest is out there. The question is: How can money be made?'

The Holistic Approach to Search Engine Marketing

Top Hosts have a very interesting article on Holistic Search Engine Marketing which is well worth the read. They suggest a multilayered approach that includes:

- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Website Conversion

'The fact that these components are most effective when used in concert does not mean that each should not be tracked individually- of course they should. But do not be surprised when your returns on two or more of these disciplines used together are greater than the combined returns from the individual components used separately. And this presents a dilemma- a highly successful holistic SEM approach can make extracting exact ROI figures for each individual component difficult, since “the whole” has become “greater than the sum of its parts”. But as many savvy companies are discovering, this is a nice problem to have.'

Read more at The Holistic Approach to Search Engine Marketing

Internet Advertising Comes of Age

'Volatility may no longer be the watchword of online advertising, according to DoubleClick's third quarter serving trend report.

"What's most surprising is it's no longer surprising," said Kathryn Koegel, DoubleClick's director of research and industrial development, who chaired the survey. "With such a new medium, we have often grown accustomed to big changes quarter to quarter. Now we're seeing signs that things are stabilizing. Online marketing is now reaching a kind of maturity."

As a case in point, Koegel referred to rich media holding steady at 43 percent of total ads served for the third quarter, a level it has consistently held for most of 2004.

Click rates, too, remained stable for rich media and non-rich media alike. Rich media ads have stabilized at 1.17 percent, a full five times the rate for non-rich media ads. Overall, the average click rate was 0.62 percent for the third quarter, an uptick of 11 percent from the second quarter.'

Read more at After Years of Turbulence, Internet Advertising Comes of Age?

More detailed Adsense Statistics

Adsense Tracker is one of the most useful tools that any Adsense user could invest in. As the name suggests Adsense Tracker gives you statistics that Adsense does not even come close to giving you in their statistics/reporting package.

Track Click Throughs from Each Page - For example - have you ever wondered which pages on your blog are providing the click-throughs? Adsense only lets you track 50 channels - most of of us track categories but Adsense Tracker lets you track every page on your blog!

Now in my mind that is information that I'd pay for. Think about it. You've got 1000 pages on your blog. The clicks could be coming evenly from them all - or they could be coming predominantly from one or two pages. Wouldn't it be useful to know which pages they were so that you could:
1. write more posts on those topics (or even start a new blog dedicated to them)
2. promote those pages more

Tracks Ad Format Results - it tracks which colors, ad sizes and formats are working best. Again - most of us have hunches about this - but imagine if one ad format was bringing in all of your income while others did nothing? It could be very useful information.

Real Time Reports - Don't wait 48 hours for your channel stats to kick in. Know instantly if a page is suddenly 'hot' and move quickly to capitalize.

Tracks which ads are being clicked - Adsense Tracker lets you know which ads and which keywords are producing click throughs. Again this is invaluable information that allows you to customize and configure your page to further increase your Adsense earnings.

These are just some of the many features of Adsense Tracker. The program is simple to install and in my opinion well worth the money you'll spend on it (currently $99.95) - I see it as an investment that could pay itself off in days. I guess its not for a blogger only making a few cents a day - but a tool like this could increase your earnings 10%-20% and its worth doing the sums!

AdSense Per Click Payout Based On Natural Rankings

Interesting post over at Digital Point on Read more AdSense Per Click Payout Based On Natural Rankings. The basic question - does Google rankings for keywords have an impact on the rate at which ads on those keywords pay out at? The thread starts with this:

'I've noticed something interesting with pretty much every site I run AdSense on. The better it ranks for it's main keywords (which is what AdSense would be based on) in a natural search in Google, the higher the AdWords cost (and AdSense per click payout).

One site ranked around #25 in the SERPs for it's keywords. AdSense paid roughly $0.10 per click. As it slowly moved up in natural rankings, so did the AdSense per click payout, until now it's top 5 and it gets $1.50 per click on average (nothing else has changed).

Conversely, I have a site that did rank top 5 for something, and it was getting about $1.20 for AdSense. The rankings have dropped, and the AdSense per click payout mirrored that drop (now it's averages $0.02 per click).'

TypePad Blogs to get Contextual Advertising

Kanoodle and Six Apart (makers of Typepad and Moveable Type blogging systems) are partnering together to offer Typepad bloggers the opportunity to run contextual ads to their site - and thereby add a revenue stream to their blogs. This is similar to what Blogger blogs can do with Adsense - however it seems that this new system will be a little more seamless and integrated into the Typepad blogs. It will be interesting to see how many TypePad bloggers utilise the system due to go live in the first quarter of next year. For more information see the following press relase.

Press Release
Kanoodle and Six Apart to Offer First Integrated Weblog Publishing and Monetization Service; Six Apart to Offer Kanoodle's Content-Targeted Sponsored Links to Webloggers

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 9, 2004--Kanoodle, a leading provider of sponsored listings for search results and content pages and Six Apart, the maker of award-winning Movable Type and TypePad weblog software, today announced that the companies will offer TypePad subscribers the ability to easily add Kanoodle's content-targeted sponsored links to their sites. This marks the first time that webloggers will have seamless access to revenue-generating sponsored links as part of their publishing toolset. The companies expect the product to be live by the first quarter of next year.

"Six Apart is the clear leader in the creation of publishing tools and platforms that empower independent publishers. Offering industry-leading advertising tools via Kanoodle's sponsored links is the logical next step," said Lance Podell, president of Kanoodle. "We are excited to bring first class relevancy and monetization to this large group of content creators."

"TypePad's subscribers are creating some of the Web's most innovative content and we are committed to providing them with additional services in partnership with industry leaders," said Andrew L. Anker, executive vice president of Six Apart. "Kanoodle demonstrates the level of relevancy and monetization that Six Apart and our customers demand."

About Kanoodle

Kanoodle provides advertisers an unparalleled opportunity to leverage text-based, cost-per-click sponsored links to reach their customers on the Web's search engines and content destinations. Kanoodle's products -- KeywordTarget(TM) for search-targeted sponsored links, ContextTarget(TM) for context-targeted sponsored links and BehaviorTarget(TM) for behavioral-targeted sponsored links -- are distributed on networks of high quality search and content providers, including CBS MarketWatch.com, MSNBC.com, USAToday.com, CNET's Search.com, the InfoSpace search properties and Kanoodle.com. Kanoodle was founded in 1999 and has offices in Amherst, NY and New York City.

About Six Apart

Six Apart Ltd., based in San Mateo, CA, is the recognized leader in weblogging software and services. Its Movable Type publishing platform and TypePad personal weblogging service power the world's premiere weblogs for business, politics, media, and everyday life. Founded by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott in 2002, Six Apart's sole focus is to create the tools that enable millions of individuals, organizations and corporations to participate in the Web's full potential by publishing their ideas on the Internet with simple, yet powerful software and services.

Ways to promote your Blog

Boston.com has a good article on ways to promote your weblog called Don't let your blog get lost in the fog.

They write - 'But even good blogs can go unread, without a little extra effort to attract visitors.

What's needed are some eyeball magnets -- blogging tools that will bring new traffic to your site. And there are plenty to choose from.

Syndication, for one. That's the popular practice of adding a tag to your blog that will automatically let readers know when you've added material.

On many popular blogs, you'll see a link marked RSS, XML, or Atom. Plug that link into a syndication software program, and you'll get an update every time the website is updated. Most avid blog readers use syndication programs to keep tabs on their favorite sites. Adding syndication to your own blog can deliver a quick boost in readership.

The leading blog-hosting companies, like Google Inc.'s Blogger, provide syndication; it's just a matter of switching it on and adding a bit of extra code to your blog. If you're serious about expanding your audience, it's the first move to make.'

Google traffic vs Slashdot traffic - Which would you prefer?

Have you ever been Slashdotted?

It sounds painful doesn't it - but its actually quite fun. Being Slashdotted basically means that you're linked to by the mega-blog - Slashdot. The cool thing about the experience is that if you chance upon being mentioned on Slashdot that you are about to have a deluge of traffic.

This morning I awoke to find that one of my new blogs had been mentioned in a post - just 6 hours after it was linked to the blog had had over 25,000 unique visitors. Pretty cool stuff - I mean traffic is the key to making a fortune online isn't it?

Does 1000 times the traffic = 1000 times the income??

Wrong - Buzzz - Please Try Again....

You see each time I've been linked to by Slashdot (and other mega-blogs) I've noticed a pattern. My traffic goes up massively (in this case many thousands of times over) but my income (from pay per click ads) goes up only slightly - if at all. How can that be so?

Well you see I have a theory that some traffic is more valuable than other traffic when it comes to pay per click advertising.

Slashdot is a megablog in more senses than it has a massive readership - it is also fairly general in topics covered. Mostly it posts on techy topics, but within that scope anything goes - it posts on Science, Gadgets, Robotics, Computers - everything. As a result its readership has a pretty general interest in a wide variety of topics also. So when they follow a link to your blog they are doing so out of general interest and not searching for particular information. They are not surfing with intent and are less likely to click on an ad.

On the other hand there are web surfers out there who are surfing with intent. They want to buy a product or find a service. They know what they are looking for and they go straight to the source where they will find it - Google.

Google traffic in my opinion is more valuable than traffic from a megablog like Slashdot. (Don't get me wrong - I like the slashdot traffic too - for one the link can't hurt my page rank - for two (is that an expression?) a certain percentage of them will click an ad (a lower % but a % non the less) - and for three its nice to look at your traffic counter and see 6500 people surfed your blog in one hour.) Anyway - I digress - the Google traffic is more valuable in my mind because it brings targeted traffic to your blog.

Example Joe is on Google searching for information on 'Gizmo A' - he's in research mode for a purchase he's about to make. He types 'Gizmo A' into Google and is presented with 4,973,235 results. Because of all your hard work in Optimizing your site for search engines, your blog is the first result listed - the title is 'Gizmo A'. He clicks the link and surfs on in. He reads your quality content but as he does so he also notices a contextual ad on your site which is conveniently for 'Gizmo A's'. The chances of Joe clicking that ad are a whole lot better than a slashdot reader who has come to your site out of general interest.

I know a lot of bloggers who spend most of their time trying to get links from blogs or websites higher up the food chain - their hope is that one of their emails or submissions to the big sites will make them rich - as a result they don't pay much attention to the simple things like optimizing their site for Search Engines. Whilst I understand the temptation of their approach I believe that a more balanced strategy would actually be more beneficial in the long term.

Build quality traffic to give yourself a stable base income and when the opportunity comes for the big link ups ride the wave of traffic that it brings.

Making Money from Blogs - BloggerCon III

I wish I were able to get to BloggerCon III - the Making Money session sounds particularly interesting as reported on PaidContent.org. Here are a few of the quotes that they quote that I find of most interest:

-- "One sure way to make money -- provide infrastructure to people like me."
-- to make money from Google, "try to be as small and niche-like as possible."
-- Dave Winer wants to know why we're talking about nickels and dimes instead of the real money that can be made by creating business because of your blog, with people you meet through the blog, with ideas that bubble up through the blog? He says he flips hundreds of thousands of dollars through his blog.
-- An author says he can make twice as much referring his book through Amazon then from the royalty.
-- "If you want to make money from blogging maybe it's not your personal blog that's going to do it."

Read more at PaidContent.org's coverage of BloggerCon III

update - a few of other bloggers are also covering this session at:
- RConversation
- Roland Tanglao's Weblog
- John Furrier

Ad Networks for your Blog

I was just reading a thread over at SitePoint Forums on where someone ask which is the Best Ad Network?

Someone answered with this list which I found really helpful. I've filled in the links of some of those mentioned.

Tier 1: Tribal Fusion, Fast Click, Burst, 24/7 Real Media
Tier 2: Casale, RealTechNetwork, Max Online, RightMedia, Rydium
Tier 3: BUDS, JoeTec, RealCastMedia, GorillaNation, ValueClick
Tier 4: FocusIN, EzzPublishers, BannerSpace, ClickXchange, Adtegrity, BraveNet, Undertone Network
Tier 5: ValueAd, CompactBanner, Adinfinity (same company), ClixGalore

They write in explaining the list - 'based on rates, difficulty of becoming accepted, and quality of advertisements. Tiers 1 - 3 are, overall, good ad networks. Anything below three either means their ad quality, ease of entrance into their network, or questionable business in the past is in question.'

What ad providers have you tried? What additions or changes would you add to the above list?

Lessons Learned: AdSense

'Brainy Betty' over at the Adsense forum at Webmaster World has started a good thread on Lessons Learned with Adsense. She writes:

'A year and a half later with AdSense and still going strong - here are my lessons learned: (What are yours?)

1. Graphic design: Provide clean pages and lots of them with a simple, 1 color (non-tiled, generally) background

2. Meta Tags: Use them! Make sure you don't have 90 bijillion keywords. The fewer and more targeted the better. Put the title tag up on top first.

3. Content: Provide useful, necessary content. Get feedback from your visitors to find out what they are looking for; what they want, and create pages accordingly. The more descriptive text on each individual page, the better.

4. Ad Settings: Change them about once a month or so. Make large banners smaller; use verticals in some places, definitely change colors so people notice - especially repeat visitors who have 'turned off' the ads in their heads if they see them in the same place with the same colors and formats all the time...'

Read more from Betty and others at Lessons Learned: AdSense

Unique Titles for Each Page of your Blog

Good post over at Search Engine Roundtable on the importance Unique Titles for Each Page of your Site (Blog). I can't agree with the post more - I have all my blogs set up this way (ie the title of my post becomes the title of my page) and noticed a huge difference in search engine referrals a few days after I made the change.

Some blogging systems are set up this way by default, but most require you to specify it and manually set it up this way. Also important is having your key words in the URL of your page. I incorporate the title (and therefore the keywords of my post) in my URLs and again noticed an increase in traffic after making this change a year or so back. Here's an excerpt from the post mentioned above.

'Each page should have a unique title - one that will attract clicks.

A title consisting of keywords separated by commas may not be the most appealing to surfers - it's the title that appears as the clickable link in the SERPs. So make it about 8-9 words or less, including the main keyword phrase for the page and also a word or two that's a variation or additional modifier, to target a little wider variety of phrases.'

Read more at Unique Titles for Each Web Page

Why Weblogs work so good at site promotion

Sohosad has a good post on Why Weblogs work so good at site promotion. Complete with cool little pictures!

BlogAds: Is There Life after Nov. 2?

'The outfit, which sells ads on Web logs, has enjoyed this year's burst of interest in political sites, but it needs a post-election plan....

'Copeland's company sells ads to run on more than 500 blogs, including political specialists like InstaPundit and DailyKos. After Sept. 20, he says, business went through the roof. "Watching big corporate media suffer at the hands of 100 individual bloggers, I have to admit I was happy," Copeland says. "There was a big traffic spike and a nice gush of ads." By some estimates, DailyKos was pulling in $20,000 per month advertising at its peak. Copeland gets a 20% cut.

But can the blog business survive without a Presidential election and gaffes by mainstream media firing up the Internet masses? Skeptics wonder, particularly since some blog sites damaged their credibility when they jumped the gun and erroneously predicted Senator John Kerry would win the election.'

Read more at BlogAds: Is There Life after Nov. 2?

Choosing an Effective Domain Name for your Blog

Choosing an Effective Domain Name for your Blog
by Leva Duell

Choosing an effective domain name is important to increase visibility, attract buyers, and inspire trust.

What is a domain name?
Your domain name or web address is a unique name, identifying a specific web site such as www.yourname.com.

For visitors to see your web pages on the Internet when typing in your web address, your domain name and web pages must reside on a server or host computer. Small businesses usually pay a hosting company to take care of that.

Why do you need a domain name?
Having your own domain name is a must for a business web site. Here's why.

- Your domain name allows customers to find you on the Internet.
- Having an address that represents your business conveys a professional image and stability.
- A domain name helps you market and advertise your unique company name.
- A domain name increases credibility. Without a domain name, you will have a longer address that starts with the provider's name, e.g., www.yourprovider.com/yourname. This looks unprofessional and is difficult to type.
- You can use your unique domain name in your email address, e.g., info@yourname.com or sales@yourname.com. You can keep the same domain name and email address when changing hosting companies.

Follow these tips when selecting a domain name
- Choose a descriptive domain name that conveys professionalism and is easy to remember and type.
- Consider a domain name that represents your business name, product names, or type of business.

More tips about domain names
- A domain name can include up to 63 characters, not including the .com, .net, .org or other extensions.
- Domain names are NOT case sensitive, so you can spell your domain in uppercase, lower case, or a combination of both, e.g., http://www.yourname.com or http://www.YourName.com.
- Domains cannot contain spaces.
- You can use numbers, letters, and hyphens (dashes) in your domain name.
- Domains must begin and end with a letter or number.
- Special characters such as ? ! @ # $ % ^ & * and ( ) are not permitted in web addresses. Neither are underscores or commas.
- Avoid confusing characters like 0 (zero), l (one), 2, s, and z to minimize the risk of typos. The number zero (0) can be
confused with the letter O, and the number "1" with the letter
"l."
- Include relevant keywords in your domain name to boostearch-engine ranking, e.g., secretarialservices.com, secretarialbusiness.com.

Domain name variations
You can register your domain name with .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us, .edu, or other extensions. Always register the .com name since most people are familiar with it. In addition, consider registering your domain name with .net to prevent competitors or speculators from registering a similar name. You can also register variations of your domain name like making it plural, adding hyphens, or underscores, e.g., www.yourname.com, www.your-name.com, or www.your_name.com.

Checking availability
You can check the availability of a domain name at http://www.internic.com/whois.html.

Registering a Domain Name
You can register your domain name yourself through domain name registration services, known as registrars. Internic provides a list of ICANN-accredited registrars (the organization governing domain names) at http://www.internic.com/regist.html. When submitting a registration or transfer, the registrar will ask for the name of two domain name servers that contain your IP address. Your hosting company will give you that information. Once your domain name has been registered or transferred, it takes approximately 72 hours to become active.

Parking a domain name
If you want to reserve a domain name but don't have a hosting company yet, you may have to pay a fee to a hosting company or registration service to hold or park your name. Some registrars charge $40 and others offer parking for free.

Fees for domain name registration
Each registrar sets its own price for registering domain names. The fees to register a domain name for one year range from $8 to $35 a year. It's a small price to pay to gain your prospects' trust. You can register a domain name for one or more years. Some registrars offer free or discounted registration services in connection with other offers, such as web hosting. Make sure they are reliable. Receiving a $10 discount is not worth the delays and hassles you may encounter. Ask your professional web designer for a referral.

To keep your domain name, you need to renew the registration and pay a renewal fee each year. If you let it expire, someone else can take your name.

Protect your business and product names by registering them as a domain name before someone else does.

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-------------------------------------------------
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The Adsense Shuffle - Is it time for a Direct Debit Payment System?

With the arrival of September's Adsense cheque today (its now November 4) I find myself doing what I like to call the 'Adsense Shuffle'.

As a non US citizen cashing my cheque is becoming an increasingly difficult prospect. You see not only do I have to arrange for my cheque to be cashed, exchanged into Aussie dollars (which involves the filling in a number of forms) - cheques over $xxxx require further authentication which means the cheque has to be physically sent back to the US before they are cleared. Despite the planes that fly back to the US every day this extra process takes a further 6 weeks!

So the money that I earned on the first day of September is not likely to hit my bank account until the 18th December (if I'm lucky)!

Of course I'm getting used to it now - money still comes to me every month - but its amazing that a company with as many innovations and cutting edge technologies as Google can't arrange for the people who are paying a lot of their bills to get their share of the profits a little quicker than 108 days after they earned them.

Of course I shouldn't complain too much - my real gripe is with Amazon which only sends cheques quarterly. The money I earned from them on the first day of July won't hit my bank account until 18th December also!

8 Year Old ProBlogger blogs for a Horse

8 year old Delaney is a ProBlogger. Her new blog - Horseshues.com is an attempt to buy her a horse (and teach her a few lessons in web design, business and creativity along the way).

The concept is simple - she takes old horseshoes and she decorates them and sells them from her blog for $15US. Its quite the little cottage industry.

The site uses PayPal to collect the income and has photos of each horseshoe for sale.

One of Delaney's parents left a comment on Paul Allen's Internet Entrepreneur blog saying that she has made enough in her first week of operations to pay them back their initial set up seeding investment in her project and that she is well on the way to buying her horse.

What a wonderful idea - not only will Delaney get a horse one day from her blog - but along the way she's learning some really useful lessons and developing some wonderful skills.

The question is - if an 8 year old can do it - what is stopping the rest of us?

Red Herring Blog: Paying bloggers: Participating in the conversation

There is a couple of interesting articles the last few days on the topic of blogging for dollars starting over at Red Herring Blog who is writing about Paying bloggers: Participating in the conversation. He's got some helpful things to say on the topic and suggests a way forward:

'Pay bloggers for feeds of their sites that are aggregated to topical blogs hosted by a sponsor. For example, if a snack food maker wants to have a blog, fill it with postings provided by food enthusiasts. Any number of companies are in the position to fulfill this role in the market. By hosting the comment sections for the aggregated blogs, these companies would provide sponsors the ability to participate in the conversation without necessarily intruding on the source blogs’ discussions.'

Then also at Raving Lunacy where the topic is Blogvertising is probably a zero sum game who seems to like the idea of blogging for money but can't see it working. He writes:

'One of the latest ideas floating around the blogsphere is getting paid for blogging. This idea was kicked of by a post by Marc Canter whose proposition is that there is this enormous pool of money out there that bloggers can get a slice of by promoting products. This is a silly idea and doomed to failure.'

Do hits matter?

'The problem with blogs that are only intended to attract traffic is that they can't survive in the long-run. Traffic statistics keep bloggers going for a while, but the numbers eventually stabilise: there can only be a 100,000 most popular 100,000 websites. The world just doesn't have enough internet users to support millions of traffic-seeking blogs.'

I just read an interesting article in The Age newspaper about blogging and the reliance upon hits to make it a profitable enterprise. Its a bit of a no brainer really - although I'd disagree that its ALL about hit levels. They write:

'The few bloggers who try to transform hits into returns invariably focus on ad revenue. Unfortunately, ads cannot sustain millions of blogs, and never will. Some simple math makes this painfully clear. If five percent of a blog's visitors contribute 25 cents in ad revenue each, it will take 100,000 visitors a month just to make $1250.'

Ok - thats good analysis - if you're going to make reasonable money blogging about a topic that pays 25 cents per click you do need a lot of hits. However if you are blogging about a topic that pays 50 cents per hit - or even $2-$10 a hit you need a whole heap less traffic.

I have a number of blogs - some are obviously more profitable than others - some rely upon lots of traffic, others do not. Traffic obviously helps them all - increase it at any pay per click level and you'll increase your earnings - but also be smart about your topics and income stream choices and you can also do pretty well with average hit levels.

SEO Strategy - Content or Links?

Blog Business World has a good post looking at two theories of search engine optimization - generating keyword rich content and good linking strategy. Is one more important than the other or do they work together?

'Keyword rich content will get you part way to your destination atop the search engine results. If you are seeking to gain high search engine results for highly competitive keywords, content is perhaps not enough on its own. The King needs help.

Every King needs a Queen.

In this case, the Queen is in the form of links...'

Read more at Blog Business World

Google Does The Update: What's New?

'Google has (once again) updated its search algorithm, panicking webmasters everywhere. What will happen to those high rankings you've worked so hard to achieve? Wayne explains what you need to do to raise your score with search engines (and your site visitors) regardless of any software changes.

Google has finally updated its display of sites’ incoming links. Along with that incoming link update, Google has made public some changes in its vaunted Google PageRank. As always, misconceptions, conflicting theories, and webmaster panic are everywhere. It’s time to look past the mythology, forget the quick fixes, and ignore the latest hair pulling and teeth gnashing.'

Read more at Google Does The Update: What's New?:

Watch Your Weblog - Legal Issues with Blogging

Computerworld has a good article on the legal issues that corporate bloggers face that is a must read for all Problogger. Here's a taster:

'As weblogs have multiplied, a number of legal issues have arisen, and regardless of whether your company sponsors its bloggers, it may be opening itself up to hidden liabilities. Here are some of the dangers of corporate blogging and precautions companies should consider.

Danger: Libel and trade libel. Bloggers who write anything negative or defamatory about a corporation or an individual are opening themselves and their companies up to the possibility of libel suits, says David Carr, an attorney and partner at London-based consulting firm Big Blog Co.

Precaution: Do your homework. If the blogger is going to make negative statements about a company's or individual's business activities, Carr says, "he's really got to do his research and make sure what he's saying can be proven to be true and not just believed to be true...."'

Read more at Watch Your Weblog - Computerworld

Sharp Money - Making Money Online

Sharp Money is a blog about making money online which itself is an attempt at blogging for money.

'With this blog, we will explore opportunities for making money on the web (without resorting to spam, spyware or other predatory practices). Of special interest, of course, will be generating money from blogging. We’ll also look at ebay, affiliate programs and anything else having to do with generating revenue on the web.'

Its still very embreonic by the looks of things but will be an interesting one to follow. They are running Google ads as an income stream (although none are showing at present on the front page - perhaps they need to set up some alternate ads).