Written on July 9th, 2005 at 11:07 am by Darren Rowse
Serial Blog Buyer on Valuing Blogs
Blogging Pro’s new owner (Jacob) has written a good post (in response to this one)on some of the factors that he, as a blog buyer, takes into consideration when valuing a blog to buy. Whilst current earnings is a factor for him he writes that Traffic levels are perhaps more so. I’ll let Jacob explain:
‘The more visitors you have, the easier it is to start the website on the moneymaking track. What kind of traffic do I like? Well for me, the most appealing traffic is search engine traffic. It is a lot easier to make money off of search engine traffic. Why? Because search engine visitors(as opposed to people who have bookmarked or subscribed to your site) have never seen your ads before. This is an advantage because they are more likely not to have seen the same ads over and over and over again on the site, and therefore more likely to click it. Case in point, CSSVault does terrible on Adsense and Blog Catalog does wonderful on it. This is all simply due to the fact that most of the visitors who come to Blog Catalog have never been there before.’
He goes on to talk about Page Rank, Incoming links and income levels. It’s an interesting post, especially keeping in mind that Jacob is a serial blog buyer (he’s bought up quite a few lately if my recollection is correct). Good post mate.
Written on July 9th, 2005 at 07:07 am by Darren Rowse
New Bloggers Join enternetusers Network
Paul over at Blog Logic announces that his network has a couple of new authors helping out on his blogging. This is great as over the past couple of months we were unsure if the network would continue - looks like things are on the up and up there.
I also am really happy to announce that at least two of my guest bloggers from June are staying on as permanent authors. Stan from the Daily News Blog will continue posting at the SEO blog and BJ from Adventures in Net Marketing will continue posting over at Camera Phone Blog.
Both BJ and Stan are great bloggers who have numerous blogs of there own so I’m very happy to be working with them and am looking forward to growing those two blogs to the mutual benefit of us all.
A number of other bloggers are set to continue also as I slowly work through touching base with the guest blogging team from June.
Written on July 9th, 2005 at 04:07 am by Darren Rowse
Bots, Aggregation and Content Creation
There is a helpful post of Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web that takes a balanced look at the topic of Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation.
It’s a touchy subject for many bloggers who see some automated content creation systems (particularly those that aggregate RSS feeds) as a threat to their own livelihood.
Richard looks at a number of Content Creation systems and ends up taking some middle ground, liking some systems and being very wary of others. It’s worth a read as this is a topic we’re going to have to grapple with more and more in future. In fact in the past two days I’ve had emails from 4 different software makers announcing these sorts of packages. In all cases I promptly deleted them as I could see that they were being pretty blatantly marketed to spambloggers.
As Richard notes in his post - systems like these can actually be used in positive and helpful ways (he gives examples) - the problem is that they can also be used to rip off the content of others and to clutter the web. I guess it comes down to the individuals using them to make a call on how they’ll approach their content creation.
What do you think about these systems?
Written on July 9th, 2005 at 02:07 am by Darren Rowse
Poor July Adsense Earnings
I’m interested to see today that there are a number of threads at Webmaster World’s forums that seem to be reporting poor earnings by Adsense publishers over the past few days. (for example here, here and here).
These sorts of threads appear all year around of course but particularly at this time of the year. In fact I’ve had a number of emails and IM’s from people today expressing concern about their Adsense earnings. Why are they down? I’d say it’s for a number of reason:
1. Summer - Whilst I’m currently shivering down here in Melbourne, the Northern Hemisphere is into Summer which is traditionally a flat patch for many websites. People are traveling and enjoying the great outdoors. Until we work out a way to get them surfing the web more whilst sunbathing, swimming, playing golf etc - many sites will have to put up with a little less traffic. Of course for some sites summer is peak time. I imagine travel sites, sports equipment sites etc would be doing ok.
In addition to lower traffic levels - many believe that advertisers decrease the amount they are willing to pay per click at this time of year as a result of the summer holidays. In fact my traffic levels are not too bad at the moment - fairly stable - it’s mainly a decrease in earnings per click that are bringing my overall earnings down (check out this thread for more summer holiday theories and information).
2. 4th of July - a fairly significant proportion of the web surfing market in North America had a long weekend. This always has an impact.
3. London Bombings - a number of bloggers and websites are reporting decreases in earnings today with lower CTR and traffic in some cases. This is understandable. I suspect web usage would be high at the moment (BBC’s site crashed and many others were very slow last night here) but most people were not searching for the type of information that they are normally looking for. Understandable.
My advice - take a ‘blogging as normal’ type approach. In fact while everyone else is on holidays either join them or work doubly hard on your blog so that you reap the rewards in the months ahead. Oh and remember that the Pre-Christmas rush is less than 6 months away!
Written on July 8th, 2005 at 07:07 pm by Darren Rowse
When Blogging Means More than Money
I emailed Cary Miller this morning to ask how hi Cancer NewsWatch blog is going (you might remember I mentioned it a while ago - Cary’s wife Lori is battling cancer and he started the blog (I think after a conversation we had) to do something positive in the midst of a pretty terrible situation.
Cary answered with the following email (I’ve got his permission to post it and have edited it slightly to delete a few personal things. I’m posting it because I think it’s an amazing story of how blogging can make a serious difference in the lives of both bloggers and their readers. Check out how other bloggers are rallying around Cary and Lori at this time.
‘Hi Darren, welcome back : D
And thanks for asking… things are going really well, I’m slowly getting the hang of what I want to post, and how often, and more importantly I’ve already made some great new friends, via Cancer NewsWatch and ironically, via all those great guest bloggers you had, and all the great commenters too. I’ve had some great, and rather heart-felt talks…. I really appreciate everyone supporting my efforts.
Oh! perhaps the biggest thing you missed, as far as my site is concerned, was that after reading about our story via enternetusers, Scott Randolph and his friends over at Triathlon Training Blog decided they wanted to run their triathlon in the name of Lori & I, and help raise some money for both cancer research, and also to help us out personally, as we are struggling with ever-deepening debt due to our situation. Anyways, I don’t know how much they’ll raise, but of course it’s the thought and support that really count. Scott had wanted to see if you’d mind writing a post about it, but you had just gone on your trip, and I thought it best not to bother you. Oh yeah, and then seeing that, Allen Heat, who is one of your loyal readers and is only 15, decided to dedicate a week’s worth of his graphic design downloads to Lori, too. What a sweet, sweet kid. He’s going to grow up to be something incredible, I’m sure.
The most exciting thing for me is all the cancer patients and caregivers I’ve made contact with through the blog, and I have to say that when someone writes something like “hey, I just wanted to say thanks for sharing your story, and all of your great research” it really touches me, and lets me know I am actually helping someone, and that is the greatest reward i could ever imagine.
Oh yeah, and it’s got my wife Lori a lot more into her own blog, which is starting to get a really great readership, and has helped her to really reach out and connect with people, which until recently she has had a hard time doing. That alone is priceless.’
I’m really amazed and excited by the way that blogging has helped Cary and Lori find something positive in the midst of a devastating time. I’ve long been a believer that blogging can make a difference, that it gives a voice not only to those seeking fame or fortune but those who have something profound to share with the rest of us about their lives. This is one of those times.
As the enternetusers community can I urge you all to stop by Cary and Lori’s blogs to give some encouragement but also to help out financially either directly or through the Triathlon Training Blog’s challenge if you’re able.
Written on July 8th, 2005 at 03:07 pm by Darren Rowse
How much is an AdSense website worth?
There is an interesting thread going on over at Webmaster World titled How much is an AdSense website worth? The discussion revolves around selling websites and determining what price is fair.
It’s interesting to see the variety of approaches people take to determining a site’s worth. The dominate theory seems to be its worth up to a year’s earnings (there is a wild variety of opinions on this ranging from 3 months income to 50 months income on this) but others consider a variety of other factors including how many pages of content there are, page rank, history of the site, incoming links, current site growth levels, originality of content, domain name etc.
I predict that these issues will become increasingly pertinent to bloggers in the next 12 months as we see more and more blogs selling. Hopefully some norms will emerge to help those of us in the selling market make good decisions.
Written on July 8th, 2005 at 01:07 pm by Darren Rowse
The Good, Bad and Ugly of Contextual Advertising
There is a good look at the Pros and Cons of Contextual Advertising over at Online Journalism Review today. Here’s a couple of snippets. Firstly a look at successful use of Adsense - they go to the usual suspects including Jason Calacanis:
‘For a general news site, the breaking news sections might not perform as well as lifestyle, travel, business and technology. One great example of a fertile ground for contextual ads is Weblogs Inc., the network of blogs set up by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Calacanis has used AdSense to help jumpstart his business as he also sells display ads on his 80-plus blogs that are very targeted into vertical categories — from digital photography to babies and pregnancy.’
And on the topic of relevant ads a quote from my favorite Adsense expert:
‘“Bloggers have a harder time with relevancy, particularly on their blog index page when they post frequently,” Slegg told me via e-mail. “Because Google indexes about once per month, writing a single entry about popcorn right before the [Google] bot visits can result in popcorn ads for about a month, even if the majority of the posts are about a tech subject. Targeting on individual blog entry pages is usually very good. This is why many of the news sites running contextual ad programs do not often run ads on the pages that change frequently, such as the index page and the subsection pages, but run it on the articles themselves.”’
Overall it’s a useful article which is worth a quick read if you’re starting out with contextual advertising.
Written on July 8th, 2005 at 01:07 pm by Darren Rowse
The Attack of the Dumb Ass Comment Spammers
Is anyone else getting attacked by dumb ass comment spammers?
I don’t mean people that are dumb because they engage in comment spamming - I mean they are dumb because they seem to have forgotten something in their spam - a link to their sites.
Today I’ve been hit with hundreds of them - inane messages like ‘I love your site - I’ll be back’ that have no link in the URL field or message itself. They all are of course from different IP addresses with different email addresses and all come in bursts.
Only frustrating thing about it is that because they don’t leave a link some of them don’t get picked up by my spam killer plug-in and need manual deletion.
Update: I have to say - thank goodness for the ‘Spam Karma’ plugin for WP. I just checked to see how many comments its deleted today. The count is over 2900 so far (15 minutes to go)!!!!
Most of them are these stupid linkless comments. Only a few get through thank goodness or I’d be losing a battle to keep up with deleting them all manually.
Written on July 8th, 2005 at 11:07 am by Darren Rowse
Tris Hussey on the Professional Bloggers Association
Lip-Sticking has a good interview with enternetusers Tris Hussey from Larix Consulting. In it he speaks a little about the Professional Bloggers Association which I’d been wondering about as it’s been very quiet of late after it’s initial burst of publicity. Is it just another one of those good ideas that bloggers have that goes no where or will something come of it? Tris writes:
‘The PBA went on a bit of hiatus. We all had great ideas, great plans, and then realized—wait, we’re really, really busy people spread out all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe! So, Paul (our most illustrious leader) has committed to getting it going again. I think the summer will be a great time to do this. Hopefully the lazy, hazy days of summer will bring it out of hiatus.
What to expect? Expect that we’re really going to hit the blogosphere with cool stuff. We’ve got some of the sharpest minds going in the core group. Unfortunately, we’re also some of the busiest minds. I want to promote professional blogging as a career, work on the value proposition for businesses, and serve as a group that can give fair and unbiased reviews of new tools and technologies. Not to mention have the coolest blog in town. Come on, with our talent pool, one post a week from the likes of Steve Rubel, Amy Garhan, Toby Bloomberg, you Jane, and many, many others. That’s draw enough!’
Looking forward to see what emerges.
Written on July 8th, 2005 at 04:07 am by Darren Rowse
Bloggers Block - Just Say Something
Peter has something good to say about those times when you have nothing to say - writers block.
His advice? Say something - even if it doesn’t feel too profound.
It’s a good point.
In fact it’s a strategy I use regularly and find to work for me. It’s quite amazing how often when you begin to write (usually complete drivel at first) that as you write you can often stumble upon something that’s pure gold.
Of course in these instances I usually delete the first paragraph or so - but some of my best posts emerged out of… well nothing.
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