Written on December 4th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Darren Rowse
How Many Blogs Do you own?
I’ve just added a new ‘poll of the week’ question to the side bar - how many blogs do you own?
By own guess I really mean how many blogs are you the primary blogger on (ie if you’re blogging for a network I don’t mind if you claim a blog to be yours if you’re doing most of the writing on it).
It will be Interesting to see how many blogs enternetusers readers are involved with. Head over to the sidebar to vote and feel free to expand on your answer in comments below.
The Poll is being run with an AJAX based WP plugin that I’m testing called Democracy.
Update: apologies for not having a ‘0′ option. I thought I’d put one in but either the plugin doesn’t like ‘0′ as an answer or I messed up. Too late now to add it in but feel free to tell us if you don’t have a blog in comments below.
Written on December 4th, 2005 at 05:12 am by Darren Rowse
Blogging Goals
There’s a good insight into Weblogs Inc and how they set goals for their bloggers over at the Jason Calacanis blog today. Jason says they don’t give incentives to hit the goals of 20% growth per month for blogs with less than 1 million pages a month or 10% growth if you have more than 1 million pages per month - but the goal is there.
I like the concept of setting these sorts of goals.
My own goals have become a bit fuzzy in the last few months but in my early days I set a 10% minimum growth in terms of traffic and income per month. I found this was easily achievable so bumped it up to the 20% mark so I think WIN’s goals are achievable.
Sustain growth of 10 - 20% per month over a year or so and you get to a point where the growth becomes quite exponential.
As I say - the last few months I’ve been less focused upon setting goals as life and blogging have become quite busy. I’ve decided that in the new year I’m going to try to take a few days off by myself down at the beach somewhere (summer here) to think through my blogging strategy and to refocus after what has been a pretty amazing 2005.
Do you set yourself goals for your blogging? Feel free to share what they are if you wish or what factors you build into them.
Written on December 4th, 2005 at 01:12 am by Darren Rowse
Google AdSense Referrals Program - One Month In
I’m interested to hear if anyone has had any success with the Google Adsense Referrals program. It’s been just under a month since they launched the new program that allows publishers to refer other publishers to the program.
I’ve seen quite a few bloggers using the buttons that Adsense provides but I’m yet to hear of anyone seeing any income from it yet. This is understandable I guess as it generally takes new publishers longer than a month to hit the $100 earnings mark (the point at which Adsense pays you your $100 commission) but I’d love to know what people are thinking of it after a month.
I’m not sure we’re allowed to talk specifics of our results but I can that I’ve had a handful of sign ups so far but no payments as of yet. CTR was pretty abysmal - but I suspect most of the people who read this site are already publishers with Adsense so that’s to be expected.
Written on December 3rd, 2005 at 02:12 pm by Darren Rowse
Verbalize your Blog Posts - Battling Bloggers Block
Blog Tip 24. Say it Out Loud
Sometimes I think a lot clearer and come up with better content when I say it out loud before I write it. I wrote about this briefly in Tip 3 but I realized after writing that just how useful the technique has been for me over the years and decided that it deserves a post of it’s own.
As I mentioned in Tip 3, this is a technique I quite often use in my public speaking. If I’ve got a topic but don’t know how to say it I find verbalizing it (usually to myself) can be a brilliant way of bringing clarity and to explore the different options that might come.
As I speak I usually have a whiteboard that I scribble on to record where my one sided conversation leads me. When I use this technique I often pretend that I’m speaking to another person, trying to explain the topic that I’m exploring.
It took me a while to get used to the idea of talking to myself (they say it’s the first sign of madness don’t they?) but once I got over the fear of someone walking in I got used to it and quite enjoy the process. I find I’m often at my most creative in these times and it can lead me to some surprising results.
Of course you don’t have to do it to an empty room - you can find a real person to have a two sided conversation with - just make sure you take a pen and paper and take a few notes along the way.
You might even like to try recording yourself in these times - it could turn into a podcast if you find you’ve got a knack for it.
Read the rest of the Battling Bloggers Block series
Written on December 3rd, 2005 at 08:12 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika answers Audit Questions.
Chitika have responded to the many questions being asked of them by publishers after the recent audit over at the Chitika Blog. I won’t rehash it all here as I spent most of the day yesterday responding to people’s questions, frustrations, hurts and anger on the topic via IM and email - but if you’ve got questions I recommend going for a read.
Written on December 3rd, 2005 at 01:12 am by Darren Rowse
Reward Yourself - Battling Bloggers Block
Blog Tip 23. Reward Yourself
Tangent Time: When I was a kid my parents used to use a ’star system’ where they’d have a piece of paper on the fridge with a table on it with the names of us three kids and the days of the week. Each day we had the potential to earn up to three ‘gold stars’ (little stickers). Stars were awarded for good behavior, doing chores, not doing certain bad habbits etc (basically it was a behavior modification technique). When we got to 50 gold stars we were allowed to trade in our stars for a reward of some kind (usually food or toys).
In a sense it was an incentive program that taught us how to work toward a goal and learn a bit of discipline along the way (either that or it was a twisted child labor type of thing).
It’s actually a technique that I still use on myself to this day. While I don’t have a little table with gold stars on it - I do have certain blogging goals in my mind and I give myself rewards and treats to mark occasions along the way.
It needn’t be a big reward but setting targets to aim for in this way can be a good motivation to keep your blogging moving. I do this both on a micro level (ie at the end of big posts or for reaching a daily posting schedule goal) but also on a macro level (ie for reaching monthly and even quarterly goals).
What goals do you have and what rewards might you put in place for when you achieve them?
Read more about Battling Bloggers Block
Written on December 2nd, 2005 at 08:12 pm by Darren Rowse
Use Other Communications as a Base for Posts - Battling Bloggers Block
Blog Tip 22. Mine your other Communications - A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a podcast that really impacted the way in which I thought about creating content. It was an interview with online entrepreneur James Maduk by Michael Pollock.
James has created many online resources and in the interview he spoke about many things (some of which I didn’t completely connect with but other parts that were excellent). The main message that come out of it for me was the idea of not just creating content when you sit down to create content but to look at ways of creating content of different kinds while you did other things.
He used the example of answering questions from others in email. Instead of responding to questions via email (which can be a lengthy process) and at the end hitting send and forgetting about it - James suggests capturing the content of that email and using it in some way that is bigger than the email itself. For bloggers this might simply be using it fully (or part of it) as a post on your blog. For James it meant using it as some other digital asset - potentially an e-book or sellable article.
James talked about doing the same thing with phone-calls and conversations by recording them and turning them into a podcast - ie mining your other communications to use in your online entrepreneurial activities.
The beauty of this approach is that you end using time more effectively as you kill two birds with one stone by answering the email and also writing a post for your blog. It’s also good because your blog post emerges out of a real life need that someone has that has prompted them to contact you in the first place.
Of course you’ll want to pick and choose the times when this is appropriate. Your readers won’t want to have an insight into every email you send and you’ll need to get permission of the other person if you record a conversation or are revealing any information about them.
Read more of the Bloggers Block Series
Written on December 2nd, 2005 at 01:12 pm by Darren Rowse
Word Press Plugins for enternetuserss
The Hottest Post on enternetusers right now is I’ll Show you Mine if You Show me Yours - a post asking people to share their favorite WordPress Plugins.
I am a little overwhelmed by the response. Last time I checked there were 41 comments - each with suggested plugins.
Many of the plugins listed came up again and again and the majority had no URLs with them so I thought I’d attempt to collate your suggestions into a list that might be helpful for some.
The URLs are the best I could find and there may be better ones - but the list took me a couple of hours to collate so I’ll leave it as is. The numbers next to the first few are the amount of people who mentioned these plugins.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to update the list much/any more - but if you’d like to leave your continued suggestions (with a URL if possible) I’m sure other readers will find it useful.
Google Sitemaps 9
Spam Karma 2 - Reloaded 5
Related Posts
WP-ContactForm 6
Adsense Deluxe 5
Akismet 4
Ultimate Tag Warrier 3
Feedburner Feed Replacement 3
WP-Amazon 3
Auto hyperlink URLs 2
Email Notification Plugin 2
StatTraq
Page Navigation 2
Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter 2
WordPress Database Backup 2
IImage Browser 2
Paged Comments 2
Viper’s Plugins Used 2
Popularity Contest 2
WP-Googlestats
Subscribe to Comments
AJAX Spell Checker
Recent Comments
Audio Play
Rate My Stuff
ViewLevel2
evermore
PHP Exec
Most Wanted
Autometa
WP-Cron
Quicktags
WP Adsense
No Duplicate Comments
Polite-ifier
CSS Compress
Del.icio.us Bookmark This
Flickr Gallery
Heavyweight Categories
Live Comment Preview
Relative Dates
RunPHP
Extract Terms
Terms2tags
Force Word Wrapping
WP-cache
WordPress From/Where
WP Hardened Trackback
WordPress Hashcash
Adsense Logger
Bad Behavior
Cat 2 Tag
CA Chitika
Chitika eMiniMalls
Code AutoEscape
Paged Comment Editing
Optimal Title
Better Feed
Click Counter
IP 2 Nation
Random Words
Transpose e-mail
Batch Categories
Enhanced View
PXS Mail Form
SH-Autolink
Search Meter
Search Pages
Search Reloaded
Smart Update Pinger
Taggerati
x-Dashboard
CG Powerpack
PhotoPress
Subscribe Me
Secure Image
Ak-Bookmark/ak-subscribe
Blogs of the Day
Get RSS (couldn’t find URL)
Written on December 2nd, 2005 at 09:12 am by Darren Rowse
The car that blogging bought
Congratulation to Rick who has just bought a car with his blogging earnings - he’s called it ‘the car that blogging bought. Nice one Rick - that’s a sexy looking car! We’re looking at a Subaru too - but probably more of a family wagon :-)
Written on December 2nd, 2005 at 08:12 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika Audit Issues
Wow - I woke up this morning to an inbox full of emails with the word ‘Chitika’ in the subject line. Most of them from publishers concerned with yesterday’s audit where their earnings were reduced - in some cases significantly.
Jensense and Performancing both write critiques of the process and discussion forums are alive with Chitika publishers talking about the vast variation in reductions in the audit. These range from what I can see from 8% reductions up to a reported 70% from what I can see.
Chitika explains the auditing process on their support area with the statement:
‘Every month Chitika audits the clicks that we receive from all of our publishers sites. In the audit process we remove any invalid clicks such as: repeated clicks from the same ip, clicks from countries such as China and India, etc. This is done to protect our advertisers from fraudulent clicks.’
I had a chat with someone in Chitika management this morning about yesterday’s audit and it seems that the reason why publishers with the largest reductions were audited so heavily was primarily for reasons of traffic from non accepted countries.
This fits with my own anecdotal evidence as I’ve interacted with a few publishers in the last 24 hours who when I’ve asked them about the source of their traffic have told me that they get similar percentages of traffic from Asian countries.
My own reduction in this latest audit was around 13% in my own direct earnings and around 40% of my referral earnings. This makes sense to me as most of my traffic on the sites I have featuring eMiniMalls is US, Australian and European but I know enternetusers (which is where most of my referrals come from) has a higher Asian readership.
So - the question of what to do about Chitika is one many people are asking me:
Here are some thoughts that come to mind:
1. Firstly keep working on your optimization of your eMiniMall ads - I continue to see publishers using all the default settings which would be limiting performance. I’ve written about optimization techniques here and here.
2. The advice I was given by the Chitika rep this morning was to make the most of the new alternate ads feature that was announced yesterday. The whole reason for this feature is that if you have traffic from a non accepted country your ad space will be redirected to a more effective ad. For example I know one Chitika publisher with a lot of Asian traffic that is setting up his Chitika ads to show ads from Amazon Japan as an alternate ad. Smart move.
3. While I see a lot of people saying they’re going to leave Chitika I’d be careful about over reacting. Yes it may be valid to leave completely - but I’d be much more inclined to keep it running in conjunction with other ad systems and keep experimenting with ad positioning and optimization. If you’re getting audited right down to nothing then it might be time to move on - however even with large audits you’re still earning something from it and I guess then comes the decision about what else you could be running in those positions and if they’ll perform any better. If you can find something else to work better for you in certain positions I’d go with those options - but you might also want to consider putting Chitika in other spots.
Here’s a tip for Chitika. I think it would be a wise move to have a faster auditing system. By faster I’d suggest to work hard at building it into the daily statistics so that publishers are not presented with one figure only to have it reduced a month later. This is what Google does with their stats - they have smart pricing procedure that seeks to protect advertisers that none of us ever know the results of. Of course they have vast resources to throw at such a system that a start up like Chitika does not have - but it’s something that I hope Chitika will move towards.
Lastly I’d like to echo the thoughts of Andy at performancing who finishes with his post with a balanced and perceptive paragraph:
‘Getting an ad network up and running (with sustainable growth) is a monumental task, and it doesn’t surprise me that eMiniMalls is having issues. Even with these issues, they’ve come a lot farther than any other recent second tier ad network, and for that, I commend them. My question is, will they do what they need to do to work these things out and become a major player?’
I think Andy’s wise here. I suspect that getting any ad network up and running is a real juggling act of getting the formulae right between advertisers and publishers. Hopefully every time an issue raises it’s head they are one step closer to a solution that all can benefit from.
Update: I’d be interested to hear what people’s audits were like. Don’t mention specific numbers - but what kind of a decrease did you see? While there is talk around of publishers losing 90% I wonder what the average is. The big decreases get all the press and attention but what about average Joe chitika publisher?
I’ll start us off. My decreased earnings were 13%, a couple of percent more than the last two months. What was yours?
update 2: Chitika have just started paying October’s earnings to publishers via paypal (and cheque if you earn above the $10,000 paypal limit). Publishers earning above $600 for the month are being to fill in a W9 or W8 form for the US IRS and to fax it back to Chitika).
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