Written on January 12th, 2005 at 09:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Choosing Complimentary Colors for your Blog - ColorMatch Tool
Have you ever struggled to select a color scheme for a blog? It’s pretty obviously looking at the disaster that I’ve designed here that I do!
So this ColorMatch tool is going to be very handy!
It is designed to help you select a 6 color palette for your blog. All you have to do is select a main color that you like using the slider and it will do the rest and come up with 5 complimentary colors. What could be easier?
Update: Michael from Figby has just posted a comprehensive list of these sorts of color matching tools for the design impaired. There are 14 in total - quality stuff!
Written on January 12th, 2005 at 02:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Understanding Adsense Statistics
There is a good post over at Webmaster world titled A few notes on Adsense stats where one user of Adsense writes some definitions of terms used in and lessons learned interpreting Adsense statistics. It won’t be much use to long term Adsense users but might be helpful in discerning what you’re looking at for Adsense Newbies.
Written on January 12th, 2005 at 01:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Chitika Contextual Advertising Launched
It seems that there is yet another contextual advertising system being launched that is specifically targetted at bloggers. It is called Chitika and promises to motetize your blogs and your feeds using contextual ads. They offer all the main formats of ads and seem pretty sstandard in terms of design and layout. They pay publishers 30% of any revenue raised from a click on the ads. This sounds low but there is no real way of comparing it to Adsense who does not publish the percentage that they pay out.
It looks quite similar to Crisp Ads - neither of which I can really test without removing the Adsense program from my blogs (Adsense forbids you using any other contextual advertising on your blog concurrently with it).
As always - I’m keen to hear your opinion on this ad program - write us a review and we’ll publish it with plenty of links back to your own site.
Written on January 12th, 2005 at 08:01 am by Darren Rowse
InsideBlogging - The Blog Consulting Company
Leave it Behind has 10 useful tips for building a better blog. Here are the titles of each section:
1. Use Categories
2. Use Titles
3. Publish During High Traffic Times
4. Syndicate Your Entire Post
5. Click Your Own Links
6. Develop an Authentic Voice
7. Tell Us Who You Are and How to Contact You
8. Don’t Be Afraid to Promote
9. Comment on Other Sites and Your Own
10. The More You Write, the More You’ll Have to Write Write About
Found via Inside Blogging
Written on January 11th, 2005 at 11:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Bloglines Revenue Models - A fine line to walk
I missed this snippet of a post by Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher late last year where he talks about the business model (income stream) for Bloglines in the future:
‘Eric was interested in the business model behind Bloglines. Not accepting my usual stock answer of “Volume!”, I detailed that we will integrating highly targetted contextual advertising into Bloglines next year, or “Adwords on Steroids” as Eric puts it (I like that description!). To reiterate what I told Eric, when we do start to roll out advertising, we will be very sensitive to user feedback, and we will be looking to our users to help guide us in this area.’
It will be very interesting to watch the rollout of such a system of ads for a number of reasons. Firstly I’ll be fascinated to see how their users (RSS subscribers) react to seeing ads appearing in or around their RSS feeds.
But secondly I’ll be interested to see how publishers react to it.
Some might argue that it is no different to Google putting contextual ads on the results of their search results - but I think it goes a step further. It depends completely upon the format and positioning of ads, but I suspect that they will have to be very careful and will probably get accused by some (many?) publishers for breaching copyright.
If a blog’s post is published on Bloglines in full and they slap a contextual advertisement do they breach creative commons copyright licenses (like the one on this site) that say that content cannot be used for commercial gain by anyone but the owner of the content? How will they get around this? Some possible approaches might include (none of which I could really see working):
- a revenue sharing agreement with publishers (this would be incredibly tricky and virtually impossible to implement due to the vast numbers of sites that they track)
- placing ads well away from the actual RSS feeds and not making them directly contextual to the feeds (this will cut down the profitability of the ads)
- running an RSS advertising service like Feedburner who are trialing putting ads in RSS feeds where they offer publishers a system of contextual ads in their feeds. Bloglines would take a cut of any revenues - in someways similar to the way Adsense works (again very complicated knowing number of publishers they would have to offer this service to).
Again - I do not know what Bloglines are proposing but I suspect they have a very fine line to walk with the introduction of ads. If they’d set a system in place from the beginning they would probably have more chance of success - but to bring in ads now could create problems. It will be an interesting one to watch.
Written on January 11th, 2005 at 05:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Blogger traffic soars due to tsunami
‘Traffic to Blogger.com leaped 73 percent (to 1.3 million unique visitors) in the week after the tsunami hit Asia, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. ‘
Read more at CyberJournalist.net: Blogger traffic soars due to tsunami
Written on January 11th, 2005 at 04:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Depression News Blog Launched
I’m really pleased to announce a new blogging project that I’ve been working on for the past few days - Depression News - a blog that will report the latest news and information about the symptoms and treatment of Depression. It is still in beta but is at a stage where I’m happy for people to start to use it.
Over the past 10 years in my work I have encountered many people who suffer from depression and have always had an interest in seeing them reach their potential in terms of health. In more recent years I have had more personal confrontations with depression and have always kept an eye on the latest news on treatment and studies into it. I am also passionate about advocating on behalf of those who suffer from depression or mental illness.
It seemed natural to extend this personal interest in the topic into a blog where others could benefit from my own research.
I have felt a growing urge within me in recent months to look for ways to extend my blogging in a direction where it not only is about making me money or satisfying the consumeristic urges of my readers to have the latest gadget - Depression News is one of the responses that I’m making and is an project that I hope to repeat many times over in the future as I develop my blogging.
Depression News is being hosted with the Breaking News Blog collective and uses Word Press as its backbone. I am funding it (and hoping to raise a few dollars for a local mental health charity) using Google’s Adsense and Amazon Affiliateship at present but am also open to other forms of sponsorship. The design is based upon one from Cre8d design but tweaked quite a bit in CSS by me.
I hope that you or someone that you know finds it a helpful resource. I’m open to it becoming a group blog if others wish to join in with some posting. Just let me know. Your comments suggestions on design and features are also welcome in comments below or via email.
Written on January 11th, 2005 at 03:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Can Blogging Produce a Passive Income?
Business Opportunities points to an article over at About.com on Passive Income that is worth a read. I think most of us would like to get to a situation where we could say our income earning is somewhat passive:
‘Passive income, on the other hand, is income that does not require your direct involvement. Some kinds of passive income you may be familiar with include owning rental property, royalties on an invention or creative work, and network marketing. If you want to earn more, work less, and have a decent retirement, you’re going to have to start creating income streams that do not require your direct involvement. Whether you’re just starting your business, or you’ve been running it a while, the sooner you start thinking about how you are going to shift your business model to create more passive income, the sooner you can achieve personal and financial freedom.’
The question I’ve been asked a number of times by friends is whether my blogging strategy is one in which I’m building a passive income?
Its a good question which I’d like to answer in the affirmative - but am beginning to see that I can not. When I first started blogging with a commercial mindset I had lofty dreams of my blogs getting to a point where they would be able to earn me an ongoing large amount of money - Passive. My hope that blogging would enable me to not only give up my day job but that it would enable me to give all of my time to community and charity projects that would benefit others (my true passion).
Whilst this is still my dream - I’ve since begun to see that my blogs will never reach such a status - they will always require someone to work on them to some level. The web is an increasingly competitive marketplace with new sites that will compete with mine being added on a daily basis to the internet. In order to compete long term there will always be a need for fresh content, new designs, upkeep of comments/forums etc.
I suspect if I let my blogs go in terms of upkeep that within a month or two I would see a downturn of income. It might be slow at first but I suspect that with most topics over time the income levels would drop off. In order to keep things moving forward I currently give at least 6-7 hours per day (7 days per week) to my blogging. I can see a day coming where I’ll be able to lesson these hours, but at this stage there is little passivity about what I do.
Having said this I hope to increase the passivity of the income I earn from blogging in a number of ways in the years ahead. I’d like to be able to be in a position in the next 12 months to employ others to write and upkeep some my blogs on my behalf. Secondly I suspect that more and more tools will develop in the coming years that will increase the automation of posting to blogs. Already my ability to post large numbers of posts in a day has increased with some of the tools out there. It is getting easier to find and write quality content quickly and this will only get better.
I also suspect that with time (and as I add more and more content) that the natural passivity of the income generated with increase.
Written on January 10th, 2005 at 04:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Companies that Fire Bloggers
The Bloggers’ Rights Blog is compiling a list of companies that have fired, threatened, disciplined, fined or not hired people because of their blogs.
I’m sure it is a list (currently of 28 companies) that will grow a little more in the years ahead.
Written on January 10th, 2005 at 04:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Blogathon 2005: Blogging for Victims of the Tsunami
I believe that Blogging can make a difference not only to the hip pockets of those doing the blogging but the wider community. This is your chance to join me in such a project.
On Thursday 20 January I will be blogging for 24 hours straight with at least one post every 15 minutes to raise money for victims of the Tsunami. I’ll be blogging at this blogathon site and would like to invite you to be a part of the project.
You can support the project in a number of ways - either by a direct donation, sponsoring the site (I’ll leave your ads up forever!), by helping promote the project or by helping me out with content or proof reading.
I’m particularly seeking some marketing/PR savy bloggers to help get the word out through the blogosphere about the project as the more who hear about it and visit the site the more we’ll be able to raise through donation or via sponsorship.
I’d also love someone with some design skills to design me a little button to promote the blogathon that I can give to other bloggers to put on their sites. Doesn’t have to be anything too amazing - if it could just say something like ‘Tsunami Blogathon’ or something similar. Any takers?
I’m attempting to make the project as transparent and accountable as possible so that 100% of all money raised goes through to our chosen charity who are doing some great work in the Tsunami affected areas.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me as soon as possible if you have any ideas or would like to lend a hand to the project.
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