Written on May 29th, 2005 at 06:05 am by Darren Rowse
Choosing a Topic for your Adsense Blog
Do you remember Michael Buffington who back in Febuary started a grand experiment in blogging for dollars by starting the Asbestos Blog - a blog designed for the one intention of making money from a blog with a topic which is always touted as attracting high paying Adsense Ads?
Stephen Baker from Business Week Blog does a follow up post on the grand experiment and tracks how it fared after the initial burst of traffic from those attacking Michael for blatantly using his blog to chase a quick buck. Stephen writes:
‘Check out his site today and you see that the last post was in mid March. Buffington has backburnered it. Turns out that blogging for bucks, he says, “was really hard work.” That might be the most useful lesson his experiment leaves behind. In the initial burst of publicity, he was picked up by Slashdot and traffic rocketed. But as the weeks wore on, he was spending lots and lots of time trying to be the definitive guide to things asbestos, and traffic trailed off.
“There aren’t that many people who want to visit an asbestos site,” he says.’
It’s a good lesson for all Pro Bloggers wanting to explore niche blogging and illustrates that when choosing a topic it’s important to look for high paying keywords.
Also worth considering are factors like:
- Will you be able to sustain writing on your chosen topic in the long term - are you interested enough in the topic to write on it every day?
- Is there a market for your content (ie do people search for it?)
- How many others are writing on the topic? (high paying ads tend to have a lot of competition which makes it hard to get highly ranked in Search Engines.
Written on May 29th, 2005 at 02:05 am by Darren Rowse
How Important are Blog Categories?
Paul Chaney asks if Categories are important to a blog?
‘How important are categories when it comes to blogging? For example, popular blog platform Blogger doesn’t even offer them, something I think is a flaw in their design.
In my opinion, categories are very important and for a number of reasons. First of all,
they’re useful to the reader. Categories serve as the means of navigation on a blog.
Secondly, they are important from a search engine standpoint. Technorati.com uses a folksonomy called “tags” for organizing the way it returns search queries. The site looks at blog categories as tags. Without categories, you’ll have to use a special piece of HTML code - which you may wish to use anyway - for tagging purposes….’
So how important are categories to your blogging strategy?
Written on May 29th, 2005 at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
Google Page Rank Gone?
Discussion forums around the web today are buzzing with talk of major problems (or are they just changes) at Google. Earlier in the day Google’s cache server was down and more recently people have started noticing Page Rank has disappeared on many sites - including Google itself.
Of course this has caused a lot of discussion and rumors - ranging from Google scrapping Page Rank, to Google having some sort of melt down, to changes about to be rolled out to Page Rank.
They say ‘no news is good news’ - but I’m suspecting that changes like these put the SEO industry into a spin as they try to work out what’s going on.
Stay tuned for future reports on this issue as they come to hand.
Update: It’s been over 24 hours now and some are starting to panic. Check out some of the following discussion forums for the latest speculation:
- Webmaster World
- SEO Chat
- Cre8aSite
- Search Engine World
- Digital Point
- Web Workshop
- SEO Guy
- SitePoint
Update II - PR seems to have returned today over two days after it went away. No news yet as to what the issue was.
Written on May 28th, 2005 at 03:05 pm by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Network Guest Blogging Developments
I’ve been quiet today here at enternetusers because I’ve spent the day getting my blogs ready for me not being around for 4 weeks in June.
As I mentioned a week or so back - I am attempting to put at least one guest blogger on each of my blogs to keep them ticking over whilst I’m away. The response to my call for bloggers has been quite amazing to say the least. There are over 40 bloggers involved across my mini network and they are some wonderful people. I’m actually quite excited by some of the conversations that potentially could emerge during June - not only here at enternetusers.net but on all of the blogs - I almost wish I could stay home and read them all…. almost.
There are still a few slots for those of you who missed my initial call for bloggers or for those of you who have been wondering if you should do it. If you’re interested in any of the following blogs please contact me as soon as possible and I’ll add you as an author. I’ll put them in the order of what is more urgent to me.
Printer Blog - one position still available
Camera Phone Zone - one positions still available
Laptop Blog - positions now filled
Robotics Blog - positions now filled
PDA Blog - positions now filled
UAV Blog - one position still available
Pharmaceutical News - positions now filled
As I’ve said previously - don’t volunteer if you’re feeling pressured to participate - I’m not writing this to get a response that way - rather let me know if you want to participate out of either an interest in the topics, the desire to put your name and blog out there (you get a link back to your blog in the byline of each post you write) or because you want to experience what it’s like to blog on an established blog (a couple of those who’ve signed up are first time bloggers).
I can give you a few RSS feeds and sources to watch if you are wondering where you’ll find things to write about and I don’t expect daily posts - 2 or 3 a week would be great though.
If you’ve signed up as a guest blogger you should have gotten an email by now - except for those who are doing enternetusers.net (they should go out in the next 24 hours - unless tonight’s party is a really good one).
Written on May 28th, 2005 at 04:05 am by Darren Rowse
Volvo’s $60,000 Sponsorship of AutoBlog Podcast
Business Week reports that Volvo are buying into a $60,000 sponsorship with Weblogs Inc’s new Autoblog podcast. This sponsorship will be for the first six months of this new podcast and is the biggest podcast sponsorship that I’ve noticed so far.
Written on May 28th, 2005 at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
Should Bloggers Learn about Change Management?
The debate continues over full feeds or excerpt feeds. Robert Scoble is de-listing Chris Pirillo and Chris Pirillo tells him (in an indirect way - along with everyone else who has de-listed him) to kiss his ASCII.
I run 20 blogs which between then have thousands of RSS subscribers - all who’ve signed up to feeds that are unashamedly excerpts (they always have been). In two years I’ve had just a handful of complaints about my excerpt feeds. Today I started to wonder why this is - when others seem to be under attack.
Part of it is probably that Chris has a lot more subscribers than I do - the more there are the more individuals that there are kicking up a stink.
Another reason that I suspect is coming into play here for Chris and others making the switch from full feeds to excerpts is that they’re changing things mid stream. In my experience this is always a problem and is something that needs some change management.
Don’t hearing me as critiquing them for changing their feeds - I understand their reasoning and support them in it - however there are consequences of doing so and this is a lesson worth learning for the rest of us.
I mentioned this the other day on my should new blogs have ads post where I argued that one of the downsides of adding ads later is that you run the risk of disillusioning your loyal readers by changing the rules mid stream.
Of course - every blogger has to change the rules at one time or another - it’s part of the nature of bloggers to tweak, change, experiment - but I guess it’s worth keeping in mind that every choice we make not only has the potential to impact us and how we operate our blog - but those readers we are in relationship with.
Perhaps we need to learn more about change management and helping to bring our readers along for the ride? Perhaps its about creating a climate of change for our readers which helps them to not only accept but expect the changes of direction we take. Or perhaps we just need to learn to be a little more stable and make less spontaneous changes that will unsettle readers?
I’m brainstorming here - what do you think?
Written on May 27th, 2005 at 02:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Adsense ‘Choose Your Own Ad’ Feature Being Tested Further
It looks like Google are testing on a wider level the features I noticed back in October on one of their test bed sites.
1871 Media has noticed ads that allow readers of your blog to change the ads viewed to ones of a new topic.
It’s surprising on some levels that such an approach would ever work - as a web user I’m not sure I’d ever as a site to show me different ads - but obviously they’ve found this approach to be somewhat successful because they’ve been testing it for 8 months now!
I guess this shows that contextual text ads are becoming a more accepted part of the web and that some users are actually proActively using them to find the information that they seek.
In some ways this new feature is an extension of their ‘adlinks’ format which also gives readers an opportunity to choose to see a page full of ads on a topic. I’ve been using this format on most of my blogs for a few months now and have found it to be quite effective on some of my sites - largely depending upon where they are positioned and the topic of the blog.
Written on May 27th, 2005 at 12:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Marketing Sherpa Readers Choice Blog Awards
Marketing Sherpa is running their 2005 Readers’ Choice Blog Awards with a great selection of marketing, PR type blogs to choose from.
Written on May 27th, 2005 at 11:05 am by Darren Rowse
Blogging and podcasting in Australia
Just yesterday I was looking at domain names for a blog about Australian Blogging - I was toying with the idea of inviting a few prominent Australian bloggers together in a group blog to help raise the profile of blogging in Australia (as well as our own).
Today Trevor Cook emails me to tell me about his new blog - Blogging and podcasting in Australia. Looks like being a great blog - Trevor is a wonderful (and prolific) blogger who I’m coming to respect a lot. It’ll be on my daily reading list.
Written on May 27th, 2005 at 10:05 am by Darren Rowse
Extreme Niche Blogging
Aussie photographer Pete Walsh has taken niche blogging to a whole new level and has started a blog on one of the narrowest topics that I’ve seen a blogger tackle. His topic - the Epson Stylus Pro 4800 printer. Peter upgraded his printer to this new model and is documenting his experience with it.
This is niche blogging to the extreme and an interesting project - over time he’ll develop the most comprehensive information going around on this printer. I’m not sure how well it’ll go at generating an income through his ads but I’m sure it’ll be useful for anyone out there considering buying this printer.
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