Author Archive
On Your Blog – Go Niche, or Naff Off
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Image courtesy of Visualpanic
You’ve heard the stories about people making thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars a month from blogging. There’s some truth to those stories. People really do it. Some people really do make that much. But the vast majority of bloggers earn little or nothing for their efforts. One reason for the difference is the value the successful folks deliver.
Creating blogs is very easy and inexpensive. With just a little bit of training, most anyone can do it. It’s so easy to create blog that statistics indicate there are something like 100 million of them. But only a tiny fraction make any money. Perhaps the biggest reason is that most blogs, regardless of the effort their creators put into them, give the visitor nothing unique that would cause them to come back again. Read More→
Your Blog Can Still Drown – Content and Value Aren’t Enough
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Image courtesy of Sean McGrathUnless you’re completely new to the blogging scene, you’ve probably heard two things. One thing you’ll have heard is that content is king. The other is that you must offer your visitors real value if you want them to come back. These things are necessary to make money, but they’re not enough in themselves. A less talked about secret of earning big blog income is that great content and providing value will only get you so far. That may seem to contradict what you’ve heard, but it doesn’t. Please let me explain. Read More→
What you most Certainly Do NOT Know about your fellow Bloggers
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If you’ve dipped so much as a toe into today’s marketing world, you’ve heard about blogs. Actually, if you’ve been on the internet at all lately, you’ve probably seen that blogs are a pretty commonplace occurrence. You probably are not aware of how truly easy it is to advertise on the blogs of bloggers.”
What is this thing called a “blog?” What is it for? When did people across the unverse first hear about it? How can you make it work for you in today’s competitive marketplace, especially when you have very little money to spend on your marketing?
The term “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, editor of RobotWisdom.com, one of the oldest blogs out there. The shortened term “blog” came about in 1999, offered up by one Peter Merholz, editor and author of Peterme.com, a very well-established blog about his life, the web in general, and about everything else under the sun. By July 2006, statistics show that there were 12 million bloggers in the US alone (we’d venture to say there are many times that amount now), and that more than 39% of the US population reads blogs. Again, chances are that now, with the unemployment rate rising and Internet costs getting less expensive, that number is much higher. From the perspective of someone who wants to advertise on blogs, this is a good sign. Statistics also show that by February of 2009 there were 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide. Read More→
Regular as Blog Work
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I have a guilty secret. I’m not proud of it, I hardly even remember when I started doing it, but now I’m hooked.
Sure, I could give up if I wanted to – I just don’t want to. What is it? Failblog.org
It’s a silly website dedicated to videos and photos depicting epic fails of all sorts. Before I check the news headlines, before I check my emails, hell, before I even check on my kids I have to have my daily fix of fail. Read More→
Blog like there’s nobody reading
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You know how the saying goes, dance like there’s no one watching, sing like there’s no one listening. I think the same is true for blogging.
A close friend of mine stared blogging many years ago. She was a pioneer, sharing her innermost thoughts with the world. Oh she got all the feedback about, “why share your diary with strangers?”, “what will your colleagues think?”, “Aren’t you scared of stalkers?” but she took sensible privacy precautions and opened her heart.
In the early days her blogs were a touch guarded and I could tell that she was holding stuff back in case a parent or family member was reading, but as time progressed and her style became more confident she would share more and more intimate details with her readers.
The results were self-evident, as she shared more, her audience became involved. A crisis at home, a fragile relationship with a friend or even a personal health “life-changer” moved from being an abstract concept to something affecting a “virtual friend”.
What had changed was the style, a style that started talking from the heart. Read More→
The In-Growing Toenail Blog
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Image courtesy of Scragz
Day 132: Travelling on Public Transport
Pain Level at Rest: 3/10
Pain Level if Provoked: 10/10
Visual Unattractiveness: 2/10
My toenail is affecting my relationships with complete strangers. It used to be my personal secret, an embarrassing disability that is the subject of humor in ‘Carry-On’ movies but recently its shifted up a gear.
I could pull on a pair of shoes and for all intents and purposes I was a regular member of the public, no outward signs of distress or difference until the subway trip.
It started off well enough with a relatively empty train, plenty of seats and the relaxing hiss of second hand i-Pod music allowing me to play “name that tune” from clues consisting purely of notes exceeding 20,000Hz and the occasional mumbled lip movement. However as the car filled up I was compelled to give up my seat and as each stop fills the train, commuting becomes more like a Japanese game show where they explore the limits of elevator capacity.
Then it happened, an unintentional placement of a hand made leather Italian instrument of torture was guided on to my toe with the force of a 170lbs focussed by stiletto and a gum chewing secretary. Read More→
From Citizen Journalist to Blogployment
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The website Technorati, has produced an annual ‘State of the Blogosphere ’ report since 2004 following the growths and trends across the blogging community. The recently released 2009 report confirms that while “more bloggers than ever are making money from blogs” the actual methods by which they do it appear to be as varied as the topics that they blog about.
According to Lijit, between 2008 and 2009 there has been a 68% increase in the number blogs with ad tags installed. This indicates that monetizing blogs is high on the priority list of most publishers. However advertising is only part of the story.
Across the groups who make money from blogging, being a speaker at an industry event or contributing to print media is likely to contribute more to the bottom line than the monthly cheque from Google.
So if highly paid jobs in the “traditional” print media are become scarcer and few bloggers are getting rich on advertising revenues – where’s the money? Read More→
Now You See It Now You Don’t – Backing Up Your Blog
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You’ve set up your blog. Everything is going fine, you’ve got some traffic, people are recommending your blog to friends. That picture of a cat juggling potatoes worked really well. Readers seem to respond to it. They must love cats. You’ve been uploading content for a month now and you have a respectable amount of content on your site. You sit back and relax, because life is just so good. After making yourself a delicious sandwich you log on to your computer and check your blog.
BOOOOMMM. Your blog is gone. You refresh the page and still nothing. You start to panic. You suddenly realize that a month’s work has transformed into an error page. All that time you spent looking for funny pictures of cats has been wasted. Your blog, like magic, has gone. Read More→
How To Make Money From Telling People About Your Crappy Day
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Wouldn’t it be nice? You sit down from a crappy day at work and type up your troubles into your blog where millions of readers await the latest update on your uneventful, tragic existence. Every wild and crazy story about your annoyance at noisy traffic and your frustration at the government for taxing people will be applauded by hungry readers around the world. Imagine the response. Okay, so maybe you can overlook my sarcasm, but the point is this- there are millions of confessional blogs written as a kind of therapy that make no money at all. So this begs the question- why should your personal blog make any money?
The key to money on the internet is traffic. If no one reads your blog then you have to be pretty inventive to make any cash. Actually I’ll be frank- NO TRAFFIC MEANS NO MONEY. How do you get traffic to your blog? Well, I won’t lie, sex blogs tend to due pretty well. Take Tucker Max and The Pussy Ranch. These have a cult following and have generated cash and fame for both authors. But it is important to look past the sex and see that these blogs tell great stories. Taking your readers on an emotional journey is the value you offer. Personal blogs must tell a great story. Read More→
How Niche is Your Blog?
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Images courtesy of Samlavi and Tark Siala
Niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market.
Neither blogging nor niche marketing is a new concept. However, only in recent years has the concept of a niche blog come into being. Usually, niche blogs will contain advertisements of some sort (pay-per-click or products or both). In some cases, the purpose of the niche blog is to incite the reader into visiting another website which may then attempt to sell the reader a product or service. Read More→
