Written on May 23rd, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 09:05 am by Darren Rowse
Text Link Ads Link Value Calculator
Over the past few months I’ve been testing Text Link Ads (aff) on most of my blogs as a secondary way of adding income streams by selling text links. I’ve found TLA to be a very useful service - particularly because it’s something that once you’ve set up is incredibly easy to maintain. In effect TLA do all the work for you - finding advertisers, working out the cost, collecting the income and then sending it to you at the end of the month.
They are by no means my highest income earner but in April made up around 5% of my income. The other good thing about them is that each month they perform better and better as they gradually fill your inventory of empty ad slots over time. Most advertisers stay on from month to month so it’s very low maintenance and as they find new advertisers the potential for higher earnings grows.
Looking at my own blogs and the b5 blogs that we have them on (almost all of them) they do perform better on some blogs than others (obviously there are more advertisers out there looking for links on some topics than others) but if a blog has a reasonable page rank they seem to earn between $15 and $52 per link per month on most blogs that I can see. Not bad if you are selling up to 10 of them per blog and then if you have multiple blogs.
One of the only gripes I had with them was that the way they determined how much to sell text links for seemed quite mysterious. Some blogs seemed to fetch higher prices than others for no apparent reason.
Today they launched a helpful little Link Worth Calculator that gives some insight into how they value links. It’s a cool little tool that is quite fun to play with. Variables that impact the worth of links include positioning, site (presumably your page rank has some influence), topic of site, how many ads are to be sold and whether the link is site wide or on a single page.
Written on May 23rd, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers - Group Writing Project
This is a slightly long winded announcement post inviting you to participate in a enternetusers.net project. For details of how to participate read on:
Today I set myself the task of writing a list article titled ‘X Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers‘ (the ‘X’ was going to be a number determined by the number of points I wrote).
I thought it’d be a fun article, written in the style of ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ that would outline some characteristics that new bloggers wanting to grow in their ’success’ or ‘effectiveness’ might find useful.
I got off to a great start and listed off 10 habits that I’d write about.
The problem as that as I constructed my list of habits that effective bloggers have that for each habit I came up with I found both examples of bloggers who embodied the habit and also examples of bloggers who obviously blogged successfully without the habit.
I found myself arguing with myself constantly as I wrote and ended up quite frustrated through the process.
I came to the realisation that while I might desire to define or describe an ‘effective’ blogger that there are many ways to being one.
Effectiveness as a blogger can only really be measured on a fairly individual basis as one looks at a bloggers personality, topic of choice, style of blogging, intended audience, goals and circumstances.
I found myself realising that a list of ‘habits of effective bloggers’ would differ from blogger to blogger and I’m sure that there would be some similarities between lists but lots of discrepancies also.
enternetusers Group Writing Project
As I pondered these things I thought it’d be fun for numerous bloggers to write the habits that they think make an effective blogger and to put them side by side.
It’s been a while since we did a common writing project so I’d like to invite you to write a post on your blog on the topic of ‘Habits of Effective Bloggers’.
I will still write my list of habits this week (in fact I’ll write it as a series) but want to invite you to write yours also.
Write it up on your own blog (if it’s not appropriate to do so because it would interrupt the flow of it see below) and then email me via my contact form to let me know where you’ve written it up.
I’ll then link to everyone’s lists/articles during the week ahead so that everyone can surf by and read our collective wisdom. You’ve got until Friday to submit your post.
This is of course a voluntary thing. If you don’t have time, energy or desire to do it - feel free to not submit anything - but if you feel like reflecting upon what makes a successful blog successful or effective then I’d love to hear your thoughts.
My list will not be a generic one size fits all kind of list but rather a list of habits I’ve developed over the last few years and others that I’m working on. Feel free to take this approach also - or to tackle the topic in any other way you’d like to (humor, rant, short post, long post, series of posts, poem, video post, podcast - whatever you’d like).
If you don’t feel it’s appropriate to write such a post on your blog (ie if your blog is about playing chess, hoola hoops, metaphysics or recipes and such an article would break the flow) I’m happy to publish your piece here at enternetusers on a ‘page’ (ie it won’t be on the main blog but a standalone page on this domain which I’ll link to from this blog. You can include a link back to your blog).
To submit your posts this way I’ll need you to include your post, your name and a URL back to your blog and if you can for you to write it up ready to be posted in html (if possible - as this will save me time if there are a lot of these submissions).
Hopefully through this little group project we’ll see some interesting themes emerge between us all but will also see some of the diversity of approaches that we as bloggers are taking in our efforts.
PS: feel free to use the image in this post if you wish to tie your post in with other submissions.
update: See a list of readers submissions so far here.
Written on May 22nd, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 03:05 pm by Darren Rowse
The Benefits of Highlighting Popular Posts on Your Blog
Stephan Spencer writes a useful SEO Tip on highlighting Popular Posts and kindly uses enternetusers’s top menus as an example of one way of doing it.
I have to admit that my reasoning for using the boxes at the top of my blog was twofold.
I first saw the idea on a blog that Rachel had designed for herself and then asked her if she could incorporate it into my design. My reasoning was that it would help with:
1. Blog Stickability - when a new reader comes to a blog the chances are pretty high that they will spend a minute or two with you (at the most) looking at the page that they enter on and then that they will either hit the back button on their browser to return to the place they came from, will leave your blog via a link on your blog or will close their browser. Giving them something else within your blog means they stay with you for another minute or two which increases the long term chances that for some sort of connection or loyalty to you.
If you give your new readers a way to go deep within your blog to multiple pages where they’ll find rich helpful content the chances are that they’ll come back again.
I quite often get emails from readers who have spent an hour or two on their first visit to enternetusers surfing through the archives after discovering some of my best content via these menus. It’s funny to see them progress through posts and leave comments as they go along and is not uncommon to get 10 or more comments within an hour as they progress through the articles linked to from the menus above.
In a sense what you’re doing is giving readers a guided tour of your blog in the hope that along the way they’ll make a decision to make a regular stopping place in their online activities.
2. SEO - as Stephan writes - Search engines also love it when you link deeper within your blog and the benefits of doing so are tangible.
When I analyze my blog statistics each week to see which posts are most popular it is almost always the case that the posts linked to in my top menus are the most visited. This is of course partly because they are linked to prominently and people visit them (as discussed above) but it is also because these posts tend to rank higher than other posts on my blog in Google.
One of the key principles of SEO is that if someone links to a post on your blog that Google sees this as a vote of confidence in that post and will boost it’s ranking (sort of like a popularity contest). As a result most SEO types love to get links to their blogs and posts from other blogs. However it’s not just links from outside your blog that impact SEO. If you link from within your blog to key posts it boosts their ranking also (not as much as an incoming link from outside your blog - but it does seem to count).
In a sense what you’re doing is giving Search Engines a guided tour of your blog and showing them your best bits so that they can promote those for you.
As a result of these two benefits of doing so it’s well worth identifying your key posts on your blog and linking to them from other points within your blog. You can do this from within other relevant posts, form a a sidebar, from a menu or even using plugins (WP has a variety of them that allow you to create a list of popular, relevant or recent posts).
Written on May 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 01:05 pm by Darren Rowse
YPN add Payment Features
Jen reports that YPN have launched direct deposit, tax withholding and faster payment turnaround for publishers in their beta test.
update: More official word on this at YPN’s blog.
Written on May 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 10:05 am by Darren Rowse
PPCalc - PayPal Fee Calculator - Calculate Your PayPal Fees
If you use Paypal and have ever wanted to calculate how much you’ll be paying in fees for different situations then you might be interested in PPCalc a PayPal Fee Calculator.
It also has a ‘reverse fee calculator’ which will tell you how much to ask for if you want to receive a certain amount. Very handy.
found via Lifehacker
Written on May 21st, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
AdSense ‘Change to ads about’ Ads Reappearing
I’ve just started seeing the following ads on enternetusers.net today in my AdSense ads.
They look pretty normal except for the last line or two ‘Change to ads about:’ with alternate ad categories under them.
When you click one of the links under that it reloads the page and you get new ads as follows (I clicked ‘Blog AD’:
Then you type in what you want to search for ads about (for example I typed in ‘digital cameras’) and your page again reloads and appears with ads like this:
This is a feature that I spotted AdSense testing 18 months ago (I wrote about it here and here) but this is the first time I’ve seen them here at enternetusers (not on every page impression - but I’ve seen them a few times today. In the previous appearance of these types of ads there was a lot of buzz in AdSense publisher discussion forums - they make the ads much more interActive (I’m unsure who would use the feature though) but I’ve heard very little about them for at least a year.
This could mean that they have been testing them for 18 months in an ongoing way or it could be that they’ve widened their testing and/or are moving towards releasing them into normal circulation.
What do you think of the ‘Change to ads about’ feature? Would you mind them being shown on your blog? Would you want to block them?
Written on May 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 04:05 pm by Darren Rowse
4% of enternetusers Readers are Six Figure Bloggers
Early results after 24 hours on this week’s poll show that 12% of enternetusers readers are earning over $1000 per month from blogging and 4% are earning over $10,000 (making them six figure bloggers if they average that over a year).
At the other end of the spectrum 25% don’t earn anything.
I wish now I’d put two categories of the ‘earn nothing’ category, one for ‘I tried but earned nothing’ and another for ‘I haven’t tried’. I’d be interested if you are one of the 100 voters in this category to hear which you are in comments of the post announcing the poll.
Of those who have earned something it is the ‘under $10 category’ that is most common followed by the $100 to $499 a month category (15%).
Interestingly this survey I added a $15,000 or more category (last time the top one was a $10,000 or more one) and it has actually been voted in more than other lower levels (3% of total vote so far).
if you haven’t voted yet I’d love to include you in my informal little study.
Written on May 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 01:05 am by Darren Rowse
What to Do When You’ve Said Everything there is to Say
Do you ever feel that you’ve written about everything that needs to be said on the topic of your blog?
If you do - you’re not alone.
Many bloggers hit a dry patch 6 to 12 months into their blog when they feel they’ve already covered almost every aspect of their niche and that they’re content is getting ‘thin’.
Unfortunately a large number of bloggers hitting this dry patch give up on their blog when they feel they’ve ‘covered everything’ and as a result could be missing out on the benefits of their previous months or years of hard work.
My theory is that most bloggers see their archives as a list of items on a ‘to do list’ that they’ve ticked off. Once they’ve ticked them off they’re over and done with - never to be returned to.
I think this is flawed thinking
Rather than thinking this way I see a blog’s archives as a treasure trove of ideas for future posts
Bouncing off previous posts that I’ve written is one of the techniques that I regularly use on my blogs to build momentum and go deeper into the topic that my blogs cover.
The problem with seeing your archives as a list of static topics that you’ve ticked off is twofold:
1. You can always go deeper on a topic - Take ProBlogging for instance - while there are constantly new developments happening in the niche (to provide me with ‘newsy’ content, I’m also always learning how to be a enternetusers better myself. As a result my strategy for ProBlogging is different today from what it was a year or two ago. For this reason some of what you’ll find in my archives is somewhat dated. It does reflect what I previously thought about the topic but there is plenty of room to legitimately address the topics there again as I’ve grown (as has the niche itself).
2. Never assume current readers have read everything you’ve written - Blogs have a natural turnover of readers over time. No matter how good you are as a blogger people will naturally come and go from your regular reader list. While it’s sad to lose a reader (there are many reason they might leave - often outside of your control) this turnover can actually bring life to your blog as new readers find you and bring new perspectives, questions and energy. Keep in mind though that most of your new readers will not have read your early posts. Some might have crawled through your archives but most will not and will often appreciate you addressing an older topic.
As a result of these two factors you should see your archives of old posts not only as a collection of your previous thoughts but as a springboard for new ones.
I regularly scan through old posts for ideas for future ones. I particularly look for posts that I either disagree with (due to a change of perspective) or posts that I think I could go deeper with. Sometimes I link back to my old posts to show the progression of thinking but on many occasions I simply write them as standalone new content.
I often talk about how blogging is conversational in the way it lends itself to interactions between blogger and readers (as well as between bloggers).
Talk to Yourself
In a sense, when you treat your archives as a living part of your blog that can be revisited over time you actually take the conversation into a new realm, talking to yourself.
While ‘talking to yourself’ might sound a little strange (my mum always said it was the first sign of madness) I think it actually is one of the first signs of a maturing blogger who is taking their blog to a new level by refining their thoughts on a topic. It’s through this refining process that real wisdom and expertise surfaces.
Without revisiting your previous thoughts or ideas you run the risk of becoming stagnant and limit your own growth in your chosen field.
Action Plan
Take a surf back through your archives today to see what might inspire your next post.
- What do you see there that is out of date?
- What old posts do you disagree with?
- Where could you go deeper?
- What older posts might your newer readers have never seen?
Written on May 20th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
Poll of the Week - How Much Money do you Make from Blogging?
I was interviewed during the week by an Australian journalist who was fascinated by the idea that people were making money from blogs.
As with most interviews that I do the old ‘how much can bloggers earn?’ question came out fairly early in the piece (it’s an oldie but a goodie).
I quoted a couple of the polls that I did of enternetusers readers last year with regards to their AdSense and Chitika earnings and then realized that it’s been a while since we did a poll on reader earnings. In fact it’s been an even longer time since we did a ‘total earnings’ poll.
So it’s time for another one.
This week’s sidebar Poll asks the question:
How Much Money did you Make from Blogging in April?
I’m talking ALL forms of income from your blog - from direct income earners like Advertising, Selling products and Affiliate programs through to indirect earners like consulting or speaking work that you might have picked up BECAUSE of your blog (more on the distinction between direct and indirect earnings here).
I’m also talking on a personal level - what YOU earnt from all blogs you work on.
Don’t answer straight away - tally it up, give it some thought and then let us know.
If you didn’t earn any money from your blog in April either because you tried and didn’t have any luck or because you don’t try to then there is an option for you also.
If you’d like to comment on your vote or on the poll in general feel free to do so on this post.
Written on May 19th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia397 zone.at 09:05 am by Darren Rowse
Positioning BlogAds for Maximum Impact
I’ve noticed quite a few bloggers using BlogAds.com ads on their blogs recently so thought I’d share a simple tip that should help attract advertisers.
I share this out of my experience both as a BlogAds publisher (I use their ads on a number of my blogs) but also as a BlogAds advertiser (I use them to promote my own blogs and projects).
The tip is this (and it’s not rocket science). If you’re going to use BlogAds put your Ad strip above the fold.
As a BlogAds advertiser I consider a number of factors when choosing which blog to place my ads. They include:
- Is the blog on a relevant topic to the blog I want to drive traffic to?
- Is the ad reasonably priced?
- What level of traffic does this blog get?
These are all important questions to ask but even if they all are positive I’m unlikely to buy an ad unless I am confident that the readers of that blog will see the ads.
I know this sounds like a basic tip but the reality is that as I look at many blogs with BlogAds I see bloggers that have learnt how to optimally place their AdSense or Chitika ads who ignore the basic placement tips on BlogAds. The same principles apply. The more prominent your BlogAds strip is the more attrActive it becomes to advertisers. Generally the higher on your sidebar you can position it the better.
If you can’t fit your BlogAds Ad strip high on your blog (sometimes there just isn’t enough room) there are two courses of action that I’d recommend:
- Don’t use them - This is the reason I don’t have BlogAds ads on enternetusers. I’ve chosen to have a two column blog here and as a result the sidebar space is at a premium and I just can’t fit in a strip of ads. Down the track when I do a redesign I’ll reconsider this but until I can give them the attention they deserve it’s not really worth my time or potential advertisers time.
- Make them a Bargain - If you don’t have room but you just can’t bear to leave them off your blog the best strategy that you can have with BlogAds is to price them at bargain levels in the hope that advertisers will not be able to resist. As an advertiser I’m not sure I’d go for this strategy unless your blog had A LOT of traffic and was VERY cheap. But it is worth a go. I know quite a few blogs have multiple BlogAd strips on their blogs. At the top and in prime position they have ‘premium ads’ (much more expensive) and lower on the blog they have cheaper ones. It seems to work for them - but they do have a lot of traffic.
PS: the ‘BlogAd’ above is an attempt at humor - there is no ‘BlogAds Secrets’ e-resource (yet). I just thought it’d be a fun parody of some of the e-courses out there.
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