Written on April 9th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse

15 Blogging Tips and Tools - Blog Case Study

Case Studies 20 comments

The following post was submitted by Easton Ellsworth as part of the enternetusers Case Study Series

Hello! I’m Easton Ellsworth, associate editor for the Know More Media network of blogs about business. I blog at Business Blog Wire about corporate blogging. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah with my wife and baby.

Know More Media launched in December 2005, using the publishing power and search-engine-friendly nature of blogging to establish an online network offering business news and information on a wide range of topics. Blogging makes it incredibly easy to publish on the Web, and has done wonders for our organic traffic (traffic from search engine results and other links instead of from paid advertising).

Business Blog Wire was one of the first six KMM blogs. There are now more than 45 KMM authors publishing about 100 posts daily to 50-plus blogs!

I published my first post on October 17, 2005 and immediately found blogging extremely enjoyable.

We currently monetize our blogs using a mix of Google AdSense and affiliate programs. So far, so good. Blogging is like farming: You typically must spend months of arduous labor before you can finally reap the fruits of your work.

Since I began tracking my blog’s traffic a couple months ago, I’ve averaged about 70 unique visitors and about 130 page views per day. You can see my Sitemeter stats here. Note: Since I began posting three times a day instead of one, my traffic has approximately doubled.

My future ambitions for Business Blog Wire include more reviews of corporate blogs, more interviews with corporate bloggers and more collaborative projects with my readers. I believe that the Web has tremendous potential as a tool for human collaboration - the Wikipedia is a shining example of that. And I hope to invite more of my readers to work with me to help other business bloggers be successful.

My favorite part of blogging is the fine people I have come to know in the blogosphere. I find it pleasantly ironic that the biggest names in blogging are typically the easiest to talk to - that is, they answer your emails and even your calls, and are almost always willing to help you. Lesson learned: ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE. Do not be afraid to ask big questions and big favors of bigtime bloggers. Just remember to do unto others as you would have them do to you, and you’ll reap what you sow. “Enough preaching, Easton,” I hear you saying. Okay, enough - but I promise that following these simple ideals will bless your blogging experience tremendously.

Eight excellent tools I use:

1. Movable Type makes my blog publishing as easy as cake.
2. Newsgator enables me, as a network editor, to review every KMM post on a continuous basis.
3. Cocomment helps me track my online conversations.
4. Firefox improves my productivity with its speed, tabbed browsing, extensions, security and bookmarking features.
5. Gmail simplifies my email tasks.
6. Writely (what a godsend!) speeds up my word processing and notetaking.
7. MS Excel lets me keep a record of all kinds of statistics for our blogs and authors.
8. Know More Media has developed a special Author Control Panel (see http://www.knowmoremedia.com/2006/03/press_release_on_our_author_co.html) that eliminates most of my worries as a blog editor and blogging mentor.

My seven top blogging tips (from personal experience):

1. Post FREQUENTLY. Use a feedreader and write constantly about what you learn.
2. Think of your readers. What would help them the most? Write that.
3. Love your visitors. Encourage them to leave comments and contact you personally. When they do, take the time to personally thank them and invite them back.
4. Be different. Share your own original thoughts and projects.
5. PERSERVERE. An unending stream of good posts outdoes an intermittent trickle of outstanding ones.
6. Never stop learning. Your appetite for new tools, new practices and new knowledge must be insatiable.
7. Go out of your way to selflessly help people, and you will be amazed what rewards you will receive.

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Written on April 8th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 02:04 pm by Darren Rowse

Celebrity Blogging - Blog Case Study

Case Studies 20 comments

The following post was submitted by Matt Triplow as part of the enternetusers Case Study Series

Hello, my name is Matt and I run a number of blogs, let me tell you how I have gone from a money sucking website to multiple blogs bringing in the cash.

I originally started off with a fan site www.aliciakeysfan.com for the artist Alicia Keys in January 2002, but in April of the same year was heading off to University and realised I would no longer be able to update my site as there would be no FTP access. So I looked in to a news type of system and stumbled across b2 (the origins of the popular Wordpress blogging system). That was the birth of my very first ‘blog’, the idea and system worked great enabling me and others to easily update the site from anywhere.

Over the next few years the site continued to grow well, but nothing much changed with how the site was run and the increasing hosting costs were putting a strain on my student finances, due to this I considered closing down the site on more than one occasion.

I will now bring you right up to January 2005 (my blog has now been running nearly 3 years). I was just about to close the site down due to financial strain, when my girlfriend found and suggested Google Adsense. I was always against ads, but Adsense was very different. I signed up and added a ’skyscraper’ ad down the right hand side of the blog, and the next day was excited to see I had already earned $8 or so. I quickly realised that in just a few days the blog would earn enough to cover the cost of the hosting and more. Having now seen the potential earning power of my blog I worked hard on improving the Google Ads on the blog. I moved the skyscraper on the right higher up to a more prominent position, I added a ‘banner’ sized Google Ad to the top centre position of my blog, right above the news, and also changed the Ad colours to blend in with my blog design colours. This had a dramatic improvement on my earnings (+200%), and the banner ad was well out performing the skyscraper, as it was closer to the action.

I was now in the dreaming frame of mind dreaming about the money making potential of blogging. I knew I could still improve my Alicia Keys blog to some extent, and thought, if I could make $300-$400 a month from one blog, what is there to stop me making that amount or more from x10 or more blogs each? At this point our dream was just a ‘maybe it’s possible?’, until I found enternetusers! and found this dude called Darren was living our dream! This provided much encouragement, enthusiasm and knowledge to work more on blogging.

After discovering enternetusers and fuelled with enthusiasm, blogging and SEO tips, my girlfriend and I launched Paris Hilton Online.Net. With this extra knowledge we improved both sites, by modifying the highest earning ad (the main banner) by splitting it up into two ‘half banners’ and having small random photos (php script) of the artist next to the ad, this drew more attention to the ads and improved CTR by nearly twofold. Later on we removed the poorly performing skyscraper ad down the side, and replaced it will a better performing ‘link unit’ ad.

We then changed from b2 to Wordpress as it offers a lot more features. We made each news post its own page, which has a small Google Ad right in with the text, which wrapped around the ad. The page titles reflected the post’s title, and also made use of ‘nice url’s’ by using Permalinks, this enables the url to have keywords. We then used Google sitemaps, via the Wordpress plugin to push all these new pages into Google.

The best change we made, (which could also be seen as a mistake from the past) was to remove all Adsense Ads from the image galleries, and forums, as these provided very very low CTR, which I believe lead my account to be ‘Smart Priced’. Shortly after removing these ads, the CTR for the whole account climbed, so did the earnings.

We are now relatively up-to-date on my blogging story, I now have a number of blogs all earning money, and I am at my ‘think big’ stage, where we have created our latest blog, www.celebsource.org, all designed with Adsense very much in mind. The blog includes everything that I have learnt over my 4 years of blogging, in terms of design and SEO. It targets the large celebrity field rather than individual artists to reach a much wider audience. One of the problems with this blog was correct Ad targeting for articles and categories for the selected celebrity, as there were many other celebrityâ•˙s names on the page, this was solved by the use of section targeting.

Just quickly, here are some other smaller ways I monetise my blogs, Mercora paid me $100 a month to have a small search box on my blog, also a number of concert ticket selling websites have contacted me to sell tickets on my site, for a 7% commission.

For those of you who are interested, I am currently earning about $1,000 a month from blogging, and it continues to grow each month! In less than a year I have gone from earning $-30 a month (hosting costs!) to $1,000. One year from now? Who knows!

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Written on April 8th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse

Some Assembly Required - Case Study

Case Studies 8 comments

The following post was submitted by Thom Singer as part of the enternetusers Case Study Series

A year ago I attended a business lunch where the topic was blogging. I like to write, and was awaiting release of my first book, but did not know about blogs. The panelists spoke about how easy it was, how popular blogs were, the benefits of SEO and the ease of getting started. Later that night I started “Some Assembly Required: The Biz Dev and Networking Blog“. I used Blogger.com as my platform solely because that was what the panelist had recommended (and because it was free).

A year later I have learned a few things:

1. Traffic is hard to get. But with over 100 regular readers, I feel okay about my blog. If there are tricks to jumping to the next level, I am still looking for them.

2. Spam comments were ridiculous. They drove me crazy until I turned on the verification. People abuse blogs, and hide behind anonymity….that is bad.

3. SEO to my blog and my website went through the roof because I post 4-6 times a week. That has been a huge perk. Search engines like fresh content and regular posting is the key.

4. I have made some new friends with other bloggers who write on similar business topics. Bloggers have their own version of social networking. These people have become valuable resources for me and my career (outside of the book and the blog)

5. I have sold copies of my book to many who read my blog. (That makes me happy). That was the purpose of starting the blog…and so that part is successful. It also is an interesting topic when I do speaking events around my book.

6. It takes real dedication to keep a blog current. If you are not posting regularly, your blog becomes stale. A blogger must be committed to posting daily (or close to daily). People have so many choices they will tune you out fast if you are not providing new material.

7. After a year, I am still “new” to blogging. To gain real traction takes a long time. I hope to see the regular readership and traffic go up in the second year. I find I still have a lot to learn.

8. Sites like enternetusers and the Blog Herald are important tools to read. They helped me learn without having to make some of the common mistakes. They also inspire me to keep going with their reports of others who drive their traffic, monitize their blogs, etc….

9. Blogger.com is not as flexible as I would like, but it would be hard to move at this point, so I just have to deal with the limitations.

10. Blogging has turned out to be a therapeutic experience. Writing everyday allows me to teach, vent and / or clarify thoughts. I am more focused at work and at home because of my regular writing.

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Written on April 7th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 09:04 am by Rachel

Tips for enternetuserss from Getting Real - the new e-book by 37 Signals

Blog Design, General 11 comments

Hi! This is Rachel Cunliffe. I’m a blog designer from New Zealand and I thought I’d share with you some enternetusers tips from 37 Signals’ new e-book, “Getting Real” (which is selling very well).

If you haven’t come across 37 Signals’ products such as Basecamp, Backpack, Tada, Writeboard and most recently, campfire, it’s worth your time to find out what they offer. I’m finding Basecamp invaluable for managing my blog design clients.

As I read the e-book I realised that there’s also a lot of insight, encouragement and tips for (pro)bloggers. In fact, 37 Signals recommend their book for anyone who is an entrepreneur, designer, programmer or marketer working on a big idea. Their thoughts echo many of Darren’s posts here at enternetusers too.

Here are 10 tips from the book along with some comments.

1. “Build less. Less features, less options/preferences.” I’m a strong advocate for less blog clutter. Some examples: ask yourself how much of your sidebar is really necessary. Are social bookmarking icons needed? Chicklets? How many blog-speak terms are on your blog that a casual visitor from a search engine will understand?
2. “Build for yourself. When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you’re passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you’ll truly use it and care about it. And that’s the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.” Does your blog solve a problem? Does it offer something useful not found elsewhere? Are you passionate about it? As more and more blogs are made, originality and usefulness are of prime importance.
3. “If your [blog] doesn’t excite you, something’s wrong. If you’re only working on it in order to cash out, it will show. People can read between the lines.” Authenticity and passion. You know it, I know it, we can all tell when we visit a blog.
4. “Be Yourself. Differentiate yourself from [other blogs] by being personal and friendly. A lot of small [blogs] make the mistake of trying to act big. It’s as if they perceive their size as a weakness that needs to be covered up. Being small can actually be a huge advantage… fewer formalities, less bureaucracy, and more freedom… they can communicate in a more direct and personal way. Being small means you can talk with your customers, not down to them.” The number of times I’ve read blog about pages where it makes it seem as though there’s a massive staff team behind the blog, when really it’s just one person…and I wish I could get to know that person…
5. “What’s the Big Idea. What does your [blog] stand for? What’s it really about? What makes it different than other similar [blogs]?”
6. “Ignore Details Early On. Work from large to small. Success and satisfaction is in the details…[but] success isn’t the only thing you’ll find in the details. You’ll also find stagnation, disagreement, meetings and delays.” If you’re working on getting your own blog up by yourself, just start blogging first. Don’t worry about Adsense optimisation, getting the design perfect, adding on forums and other nifty features. Just start writing. I’ve seen many blog projects abandoned because people get bogged down in the details of tweaking everything to be just perfect before launching the blog, or writing on it. “Just get the stuff on the page for now. Then use it. Make sure it works. Later on you can adjust and perfect it. Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building. You’ll see what needs more attention. You’ll feel what’s missing. That’s when you need to pay attention, not sooner.” The latest trendy plugin can wait. Find out if you need it first.
7. “Don’t waste time on problems you don’t have yet.” I recently recommended to a client who wanted me to go through a long series of steps found on a forum for search-engine-optimising phpBB that he wait to see if his forum gets used and there’s a lot of content in there that he wants search engines to pick up. “Don’t sweat stuff until you actually must. Don’t overbuild. Increase hardware and system software as necessary.” Think your blog should have a forum? Do you have the user-base to make it a successful forum yet? Worried your host can’t handle a digg-effect traffic surge? Upgrade your hosting plan when you start having traffic problems. “Create a great [blog] and then worry about what to do once it’s wildly successful. Otherwise you may waste energy, time and money fixating on something that never even happens.”
8. “Half, Not Half-Assed. Beware of the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to [blogging]. Throw in every decent idea that comes along and you’ll just wind up with a half-assed version of your [blog]. What you really want to do is build half a [blog] that kicks ass. Stick to what’s truly essential.”
9. “Hold the Mayo. Ask people what they don’t want. ‘If you could remove one feature, what would it be? What don’t you use? What gets in your way the most?’ More isn’t the answer. Sometimes the biggest favour you can do for customers is leave something out.”
10. “Rinse and Repeat. Work in iterations. Don’t expect to get it right the first tie. Let the [blog] grow and speak to you. Let it morph and evolve.” Revisit your blog’s design and functionality regularly. Instead of just thinking your blog needs a new look after a while, ask yourself what’s working, what’s not. What can be improved? What don’t I need any more?

This is a tiny sample of the thoughts and applications found in “Getting Real”.

Disclaimer: there is no affiliate program for e-book sales ;)

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Written on April 7th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 01:04 am by Toby

RSS: Blog’s Friend or Foe?

Business Blogging, Miscellaneous Blog Tips, RSS 21 comments

Is RSS is the downfall of building relationships and commerce on blogs? First, let’s set the record straight. I’ve drunk the kool aid. I get it. I love RSS and that new orange icon is pretty cute too. The ability to read huge amounts of information in one place, receive it at the second it’s published and not worry about email spam is awesome.

When Darren asked if I would help “blog-sit” enternetusers I couldn’t say no. Last time I guest blogged here I met the talented Peter Flaschner from the BlogStudio. It led to a great bloggy relationship with Peter redesigning the skin of Diva Marketing. However, as creative as the design is, it doesn’t matter squat if the content of the blog is read in a reader. Nor do your ads or affiliate links show you the money if your readers never click through to your site.

Oh sure partial feeds may entice click throughs and not having live links in your feeds is another (spammy) way to go. Visitors coming in from the search engines might click on a link or two but it’s the folks who know and trust you who are most likely to click and convert…and that’s what makes the cash register ring or new sign-ups for your newsletter or site visits that go deeper into your blog. Keep in mind that comments and trackbacks are useless features without click-throughs to your blog.

What’s the solution? Should we kill off RSS? No way Jose! RSS is a valuable tool. Who wants to remember to click on Favorites on a daily basis?

The challenge is ours, as bloggers, to encourage those click-thoughts to the blog by creating -

1) enjoyable on-blog experience: look and feel, navigation, layout
2) providing information that can only be obtained by clicking through to your blog: podcasts, articles, photos, videos, terrific blogroll, archive links
3) including cues in your posts that talk about value-added content on your blog: new podcast tells how to go beyond the enternetusers status to zillionarie!

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Written on April 7th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse

The Story of Colblindor - Blog Case Study

Case Studies 13 comments

The following post was submitted by Daniel Fluck as part of the enternetusers Case Study Series.

I am reading some blogs about programming for quite a while now but never ever thought about starting my own blog. Until two month ago where I stumbled across a talk of Robert Scoble at the LIFT06 conference in Geneva. His talk was about what blogging really is and what you can achieve through it. This fascinated me immediately. Deciding in this very moment that I have to join the blog community I didn’t have a clue on its implications.

As being a retired programmer I was keen on setting up my own blog site, which turned out to be the first hurdle to take. My first post was on February 15th surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.on a programming topic. The second one the day after on some completely different topic. After a few days of “blogging what comes to me mind” I came across enternetusers.net which taught me differently.

As a first conclusion I deleted all my posts and started from scratch. It took me quite a while to figure out on which area I want to settle my blog. The niche topic “Color Blindness viewed through Colorblind Eyes” made the race. In the beginning I asked myself: Is there really enough to write about and will I still be writing on this topic in one year? But this thoughts were gone after a few days of daily posting and browsing the internet.

The first days were quite difficult to manage because I still had to learn so much, adjust my blog site to my needs and in the meantime try to post some good stuff. Technorati, statistic services, the blogger community, blogs to keep track of and browsing the web for new ideas and maybe even some news. I am still struggling with this. It takes so much time and usually I am not done with my post in only fifteen minutes. And as I want to post every day this is still a big effort to me.

Right now I am redesigning my page. Up to now I used one of the standard themes but my ambitions grew. And as the design has to look “great” and reflect my topic this takes some more days of work.

After a bit more than one month of blogging I am addicted. At the moment my investment is around four to six hours a day. In return I count between ten and twenty visits each day. Some readers are coming back once in a while. Others just end up at my page through a google search and are not always satisfied with what they find.

As being a blogging-greenhorn I have these two questions:

Where do I find readers? I am searching the blogosphere for a few keywords and started commenting here and there. But how can I find good blogs from others and readers who might be interested in my topic? The top 100 are just to busy. I would prefer some blogs on niche topics with good content, but it’s hard to find them. Usually they are writing just about everything and that’s not what I am interested in. Is there maybe a niche top blog site or something like that?

Do you write in advance? As described above it takes me everyday quite some time to get my article posted. Is there a good technique about writing? Let’s say: I try to write a pillar article early in the week and some small ones ahead as well. Then everyday I can decide which one of those to post or get some news up on my blog. Or is writing every day a must?

For me this blogging experience already payed off. I learned so much the last weeks. And as I am not a native english speaker (I suppose you could tell) it pushes my language and writing skills a lot.

Robert Scoble’s talk - it started blogging experience.
Colblindor - my blog, if you like to visit.

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Written on April 6th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 03:04 pm by Darren Rowse

Buy BlogWild Today and Get $50 off Six Figure Blogging

Pro Blogging News 1 comment

My partner in SixFigureBlogging, Andy Wibbels’ new book is coming out today. It’s called Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging.

I’ve got an advanced copy of the book packed in my suitcase to take on holiday - but I took half an hour today to skim through it and it looks like a great introduction to business blogging. It looks comprehensive yet not overwhelming. Andy’s gift is in breaking complicated things down into easy to understand and doable tasks and BlogWild is yet another example of this.

As part of the book launch promotion, if you purchase the book on April 6th (one day only) through Amazon.com (it costs $12.97), you’ll receive $50 off our Six Figure Blogging course. I’m biased but I think the book and course make a great combination - the book walks you through setting up a blog and the course introduces you to ways of making money off it.

Buy the book now over at www.GOblogwild.com.

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Written on April 6th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 01:04 am by Brian Clark

How to Sell Information Products

Other Income Streams, Blogging for Dollars, Writing Content 32 comments

Wouldn’t you love to have your very own product to sell?

More and more bloggers are looking to diversify their income streams, rather than having all their eggs in the AdSense basket. Others are just now discovering blogging, and they recognize right away that it is an ideal platform for information sales business models.

For my very first guest article here at enternetusers, I’d like to share a few tips about utilizing a blog to both create and sell information products. While it’s possible to sell information products created by others through affiliate programs, I’d like to encourage you to consider creating something yourself, as it puts you in the absolute best position in the online sales world.

The good news is, if you already have a blog, but no product, you’re on the right track. And if you have neither a blog nor an information product in development yet, you will definitely want to consider starting to blog first. I’ll explain why below.

So, without further ado, here are 7 tips for creating and selling information products with blogs:

1. Blogging for Product Ideas

I believe it’s important that you have a great deal of either knowledge or passion about any topic that you develop into an information product. Knowledge makes it easier to create something valuable. However, if you lack knowledge, but have a great passion to learn about a certain subject, it can be even better. You’ll approach the topic with “new eyes” that allow for a fresh perspective and your enthusiasm will carry you through the learning curve.

Once you know the general topic, start blogging. You don’t necessarily need or even want to know exactly what your product will be, unless you already have an idea you think can’t miss. Even then, blogging allows you to have interaction with your readers that will give you valuable market insight. Comments and questions that you receive will be guideposts, and you can also survey your readers.

The secret to hitting a home run with an information product is to ask your readers what they want.

2. Blogging the Product

In the case of traditional books and e-books, there’s a trend gaining steam where you literally “blog the book.” Blogging on a regular, set schedule is a great motivator to actually get the writing done. It can also take you in new and better directions thanks to feedback, so that you actually get a better end result.

Some people react badly to this idea. Why would anyone buy something that you’ve essentially published for free online? Well, due to the reverse-chronological order of blog posts, it’s a really bad way to digest large chunks of information. Having the same information in book or even PDF format is much easier to deal with. Plus, your readership will be small at the beginning anyway, so by its very nature, your blog isn’t giving away the whole story.

The key is getting the book finished. There will be plenty more people to sell it to once it’s done, even if none of your current readers buy it (which is doubtful).

3. Blogging for Affiliate Relationships

One of the most important reasons to blog first is the relationships within your niche that you will develop. You should be producing content that gets you noticed, and networking with other blog owners that have complimentary audiences.

This can get you links, which leads to traffic, subscribers and eventual buyers. But the relationships you establish have much more value than that. Those key people can also become your affiliates, joint venture partners, and a source for crucial pre-launch feedback and testimonials.

Recruiting quality people to sell your product for you is harder than many people think. But it’s a whole lot easier when you have built up credibility with your blog, well before you start selling anything.

4. Excerpts That Sell

A tried and true method of enticing prospects to buy a book is to offer a couple of the initial chapters free of charge in PFD format, in exchange for an opt-in email address. You can deliver the chapters via email, which then allows you to follow up with reminders, special offers and promotions.

Excerpts work because generally the first chapter or so should naturally make a great selling tool for the rest of the book. Why? Because a well-structured e-book or report will first tell the reader what they are going to read before getting into the actual meat of the book. Great opening chapters that succinctly explain the subject can sell plenty of e-books when the excerpt tactic is used.

5. Tutorials

You can also tell and sell via a mini-course or tutorial that explains what the content is all about, as well as highlighting the benefits of having access to it. And remember, information products don’t have to be in written format. They can be audio recordings, teleseminars, screen capture and/or video presentations. Therefore, your complimentary tutorial should be in the same high-quality format that hints at what the learning experience will be like after purchase.

6. Sales Page

No matter what pre-selling technique you use, you’ll still need a sales page that entices people to click through and order. At a minimum, this page should have a great headline, restate the core benefits of your product to the prospect, and follow those up with the features that support your benefits. This can be a confusing distinction, so for more information, here’s an article I wrote about the difference between benefits and features.

The idea is for your blog, combined with your excerpt or tutorial, to have pre-sold the reader, so that they simply scan your sales page and scroll down to the order button. But it’s still important to have a substantive, low-hype sales page, with plenty of those testimonials that you acquired from key people in your niche and from select subscribers. A money back guarantee also helps boost sales immensely.

The sales page is there to remove any lingering doubts, and to make the transaction as risk-free as possible to the buyer.

7. Pay Per Click Marketing

Once you have all of the above in place, plus a shopping cart and product delivery mechanism, you can start looking at strategic return-on-investment (ROI) marketing. Now that you have something you can charge for, it opens up all sorts of traffic-generating avenues beyond blogging and affiliate relationships.

Now, instead of trying to make money with Google AdSense, you can switch to AdWords and target niche keywords that drive qualified prospect to your site. You may want to send them straight to a page that offers the excerpt or tutorial, rather than your sales page. Remember, it’s all about pre-selling. Make sure you offer a subscription to your blog as well, so you can build relationships with people who are not ready to buy.

The Best Business Ever?

There’s no better business in the world than being both the manufacturer and direct seller of your own high-margin product. Information products may be the best product of all, as it takes only your mind and your time to manufacture them, and some smart blogging to sell them. Blogging can help you identify and create a saleable product, and then help you sell the product by establishing affiliate relationships and acting as a platform that points prospects to your promotional tools.

Brian writes about blog, email and RSS marketing strategies at Copyblogger.

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Written on April 6th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse

Is Your Niche Nichy Enough? A Tale of Two Adsense Blogs

Case Studies 31 comments

The following post was submitted by Lindsay B as part of the enternetusers Case Study Series

Nothing is certain in the blogging-for-profit world. It’s hard to predict which sites will take off. Sometimes the blog you funnel twenty hours a week into has mediocre earnings. Sometimes the dinky little blog you spend an hour a month on suddenly starts paying the mortgage every month. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could pick winners from the start? Well, maybe we can…

By now, you probably know pro-blogging success (AKA making money) depends on finding the right niche. Focus on a specific topic, and you draw readers interested in researching and potentially buying something related to that topic. Whether you’re into affiliate programs or pay-per-click advertising, it’s easy to capitalize on a niche audience.

So, the question isn’t about whether you should be blogging about a niche; it’s about whether or not your niche is… nichy enough. Is it too big? Too broad? How do you know for sure? If you’re not earning what you think you should be earning, your problem may be you’ve chosen too general a niche. Let me use two of my blogs as examples of what works well and what (alas) works less well.

Home Improvement Ideas (henceforth known by the unassuming title of Blog 1)

In this blog, I write about all sorts of products and trends for the home, everything from granite countertops and wood floors to remote control range hoods and jetted bathtubs. I post at least twice a day, and it’s coming up on 1,000 entries. I put a lot of effort into finding neat things to write about, and many of my posts have received links from high profile gadget and luxury blogs. Despite that, the blog receives less traffic and makes less money than another blog of mine…

Fireplace Lowdown (henceforth known as Blog 2)

I started this blog on a whim because I’d recently researched gas fireplaces and had some potential content. Because this was an on-a-whim blog, I didn’t want to bother with a domain name and all that, so I set it up on Typepad, where I already had an account. I started posting once or twice a week, and it recently broke 200 entries (math whizs in the audience will note this is significantly fewer posts than Blog 1 features). Blog 2 hasn’t exactly been a link magnet, yet this small blog gets more traffic and makes more money than Blog 1.

Let’s take a look at why. I’m the first to admit there’s room for improvement with ad placement in both blogs (writer != designer), but that wouldn’t change the fact that Blog 2 gets more traffic than Blog 1, even though both are about the same age and Blog 1 has five times as many posts. so, what’s the big difference?

(If you said the scope of the niches, give yourself a pat on the back.)

I could argue that both of these blogs have a niche focus, but one is obviously more specific than the other. Blog 1, with its home improvement theme, covers a broad topic (all of you people creating generic “gadget” blogs, take note). Blog 2, on the other hand, talks about something specific: fireplaces.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a blog covering a broad spectrum (after all, doesn’t Engadget have a huge following and presumably make lots of money?), but based on my experience, you have to put a lot more time and effort into making those broad-topic blogs profitable.

There are two big reasons:

1) Specific niche audiences are more likely to click (they’re not browsing the Web because they’re bored; they’re researching a product/service, probably in preparation to buy).

2) Search engines understand niche sites extremely well and broad-topic sites… less well.

Let’s compare Blog 1 and Blog 2 as a search engine might.

Blog 1 is broken down into categories like Lawn & Garden, Windows & Doors, and Kitchens. A human being can see how those topics relate to each other, but what about the search engines? As smart as Google is, I bet it just sees a bunch of categories without much in common (no shared “keywords”).

Blog 2, however, has categories like Wood-burning Fireplaces, Gas Fireplaces, and Fireplace Safety (not every category has “fireplace” in it, but enough do that a theme should be obvious, both to people AND search engines).

This, of course, is basic search engine optimization. Focus on a niche, and use niche-relevant keywords in titles, posts, categories, etc. Darren has talked about it. Any webmaster forum covers it. And yet… many of us would-be “pro bloggers” aren’t doing it.

Maybe it’s time for us to look at our niches and decide if they’re “nichy” enough.

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Written on April 5th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse

LeftLane News - Blog Case Study

Case Studies 49 comments

On September 26th, 2005, I started a new weblog called Leftlane News. It’s a blog all about cars and the automotive industry. It targets car enthusiasts, thus the name ‘left lane’ news. (Sorry Darren, I know in Australia the fast lane is on the right side.)

Anyhow, the site just turned six months and the traffic growth has been nearly exponential. There have been a few days where I’ve even had more traffic than my competitors from Weblogs Inc or Gawker. And I’m a relatively independent blogger (not part of a blog network), so this should be inspiration to anyone looking to take on the giants.

I remember being inspired by Steve Pavlina’s growth chart. Now it’s my turn to hopefully inspire some other bloggers out there.

I’ve found the best way to bring traffic to your blog is by having some kind of unique content. This doesn’t necessarily mean “original content” in the traditional sense, but you need to have something that others don’t. Video has been great attraction for me. The reason video is good is it can’t be easily reproduced, copy/pasted, or whatever. Rather, it requires people to link to you. Photos are also great, especially if you have a large gallery that requires linking. It’s impossible to paraphrase video, audio, or photos, and that’s why those types of media are wonderful.

Another thing to consider when trying to get links to your site is this: It’s not necessarily your best stories that will attract attention. Some of my most popular stories have been things that I would not necessarily post if I didn’t think they’d garner attention from outsiders. Your best articles, your most interesting reports are NOT the stories that will bring traffic. Often, it’s a story that reaches slightly outside of your niche.

For example, Darren didn’t get Slashdotted for giving great advice to bloggers. He got Slashdotted for showing his income for a certain month. So when writing articles there should be two possible goals 1) Writing for your readers (95% of what you should do) and 2) Writing to get outside attention (5% or less of what you do). Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a really good article can fall into both categories.

Here are some examples of three possible types of stories I’ve done:

1) “BMW M7 a possibility, after all” — You’ll never see this story on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, Fark, or Memeorandum. I write for car people, and that’s who the vast majority of my stories are from. If I post 20 stories in a day, you can bet most (if not all) of them will be like this.

2) “VW strikes again: Un-Pimp My Ride” — I had a hard time deciding if I should even post this. It wasn’t really “car news,” but it was damn funny. I decided to post it, and got thousands of referrals as a result. Many would consider this a silly or trivial post, yet it brought in tons of new readers who can now enjoy the above type of story.

3) “Dodge Challenger Concept unveiled” — This is one of those stories that is both very important to my core readers, and has mass appeal to

outsiders. It was on the front page of Fark and some other major sites, if I recall correctly. This is, of course, the ideal type of story. But they’re hard to come by.

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