Written on January 19th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 02:01 am by David Shawver

Blog Spring Clean Checklist

Blog Design 11 comments

Last week I did a spring clean of my office (although it is Summer here). It’s amazing how many bits and pieces one can accumulate over time and how they pile up to become an accumulative mess.

Blogs can also become messy over time in a similar way. Most obviously this happens when bloggers keep adding new features, buttons and widgets to their sidebars (I was on one blog yesterday that had more buttons than it had content). But the accumulation of mess can easily happen behind the scenes in the code of your blog also.

Rachel has just posted a Blog cleanup checklist that might be helpful in getting the code of your blog cleaned up. To be honest it’s something I constantly have struggled with as I’m not really wired in a technical way - but it is important every now and again to dig into.

The only thing I’d add to Rachel’s list is a section on cleaning up the front end of your blog. Perhaps something like:

11. Take a critical look at the information in your menus and sidebars. What is essential and what is just clutter?

and/or

12. Delete 50% (minimum) of the buttons in your side bar.

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Written on January 19th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 12:01 am by David Shawver

Finding Cheap and Free Stock Photos for your Blog

Blog Design 10 comments

If you’re looking for good cheap (and/or free) stock photos for your blog there is a helpful list over at Presentation Zen titled Where can you find good images?

found via LifeHacker

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Written on January 19th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 12:01 am by David Shawver

Dpoll AJAX Polls

Blogging Tools and Services 15 comments

DPolls is a new AJAX Polling system that has you can place into the posts of your blog (supposedly - and if you can see the poll to the below it seems it works).

I use the WordPress Democracy plugin to run the polls in my sidebar but one of the limitations of this is that you can only run one poll at a time. This might be a way around this.

This is my first go at them so I can’t really recommend them yet except to say that they seem to work pretty simply and are easy to set up.

So now you can vote and let me know what you think.

PS: it also collects gender and age details of those voting IF they are members of Dpoll. Also it’s possible to add a photos to the poll (something I didn’t do in this test) to further pursonalize it.

found via Weblog Tools Collection

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Written on January 18th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 05:01 pm by David Shawver

There’s Gold in Your Archives

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 11 comments

John from the Movie Blog just shot me an email with an experience he’s just had which illustrates one of the principles I tend to go on about here at enternetusers (for example here, and):

Hey Darren,

Just a little piece of information that supports one of the things you talk about a lot here on your site… OLD POST STILL WORKING FOR YOU.

2 spikes in traffic that happend in the last week were both based on old post.

I put up a post a LONG time ago about the Colin Ferrell sex video scandle… when it came up again in the news this week, my old post brought in thousands of visitors.

Then last night… The Golden Globe awards were given out. My post for “Golden Globe Award Results”, which I put up for the 2005 awards show (a year ago) is coming up at #1 on Google and driving huge traffic today.

So there you go… just another illustration about how you’re right about the value of old posts still working for you.

John’s discovered first hand the power of Making Money with the Archives of your Blog. I’ve written numerous times on the topic - another ‘how to’ type post that might be helpful for people wanting to explore this is Increasing the Longevity of your Posts.

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Written on January 18th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 12:01 pm by David Shawver

Sub-Niche Blogging - Lesson’s from a Baker Named Tom

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 8 comments

Warning: Tangent Ahead

A few months ago ‘V’ and I took a some time off to go on a weekend road trip to a country town in the North East of our state called Beechworth.

One of the interesting things about the lead up to the trip was the well over half the people we told where we were heading immediately would tell us about the Beechworth Bakery (in fact it was probably closer to 80-90% of people).

I wasn’t surprised by this as I’d come across the bakery a number of times over the past couple of decades. Firstly as a child visiting Beechworth but then in more recent years as someone interested in business and coming across the name of the owner of the bakery (Tom O’Toole) many times as an entrepreneur who does a lot of public speaking and who has written a number of popular books on the topic of how he’s built his business. Tom has a reputation of being a pretty zany kind of guy who has built a multi-million dollar business.

When we got to Beechworth the Bakery was even bigger than I remember it as a child - business has been good for Tom. The Bakery now occupies two levels and is a dominant feature of the main street of what is a reasonably small country town with a big focus on Tourism for it’s Gold Mining History.

We enjoyed a number of good lunches and coffees at the bakery over the weekend (as well as some other very fine restaurants which the town has) but I didn’t think much more about Tom and his bakery until this past weekend when we were traveling through two other rural towns/cities in another part of the state (Echuca and Bendigo) and came across two more ‘Beechworth Bakeries’.

It seems that Tom has gotten into the Franchise business and that there are now 7 ‘Beechworth Bakeries’ across the country.

As I sat having lunch in one of them last Friday I began to ponder what Tom had done.

His original business is now over 20 years old and as far as I can tell it’s only been in the last 4 or so years that he’s gone the franchise route. Over the proceeding years he’s built up a strong business in Beechworth and has built it’s (and his own) profile around the state. He’s done such a good job of building this profile that my recent experience shows that most people think of his bakery before anything else when the town of Beechworth is mentioned.

In many ways starting a bakery in Beechworth might not seem like the smartest business move to make (it has a population of 3500 - 4000 from memory) but Tom’s made it work.

There are many reasons for his success (his books have many principles that he set his business up by) but one of the powerful ones that I can see is that Tom dominated his niche - the niche of bread and cakes in Beechworth. Rather than starting up a bakery in the heart of Melbourne (a city of millions) where he would have been a small fish in a big pond and probably would have gone largely unnoticed - he picked a place where he could be the biggest fish.

It’s out of this domination that he’s been able to branch out into other locations via the franchise. Now when people are driving through Echuca, Bendigo or one of the other rural centers that Beechworth Bakeries are located in people are familiar with the name (and quality of his service) and are likely to pull in for a cake or two. By the numbers of people I saw in the two bakeries we visited this past weekend the strategy is working.

So what does this have to do with blogging as a business?

The Beechworth Bakery story (or the little bits of it that I know) reminded me of a number of conversations that I’d had with bloggers recently. One of the questions I’m being asked more and more is around how to become established as a blogger when you’re just starting out. With millions of other blogs being started every month or so on virtually every topic how does one get established when they don’t have a profile already or when they are not in a position to be able to afford a big advertising campaign?

This is a good question - and one that to be honest I don’t have ‘THE’ answer for. But one of the things I’ve been challenging people who ask the question to ponder recently is this idea of tackling a niche topic and dominating it. This isn’t new advice - but I’ve been wondering lately whether instead of tackling a niche topic whether it might be useful to break things down even more and target sub-niches.

Yaro and I talked about this in our recent podcast and I’ve found myself coming back to it ever since.

The example we used in the podcast was ‘digital cameras’ which is a topic I have done well with having started my digital camera blog a couple of years ago (I was at the right place at the right time). Of course these days it’s a lot harder to succeed with that topic because there are literally hundreds of sites (many of them blogs) on it. So if that’s an area you want to blog in a smarter way forward might be to find a niche within the niche that others are not dominating and to make yourself a name there. This is, in effect, what Chris Garrett (of performancing fame) is doing with DSLRBlog. I’m not sure if his choice of topic is strategic (he and those he’s writing with seem to be doing it out of passion more so than anything else from what I can see) but it’s a smarter move than starting a mega digicam blog. Of course the DSLR space is getting crowded now too (I know of at least 5 other sites on the topic) but it’s an example of a sub-niche blog.

Once you’ve established a name for yourself in a sub-niche it then becomes a little easier to expand into other neighboring areas of the niche (just as Tom is now leveraging his profile and is launching bakeries in other rural centers around my state).

I don’t believe that Sub-Niche blogging is the answer in all situations - but with the vast numbers of bloggers getting into entrepreneurial blogging I suspect it’ll be a direction many bloggers take - and one which a smaller number will have real success with.

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Written on January 18th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 08:01 am by David Shawver

Steve Pavlina Reveals Blog Earnings for 2005

Adsense 34 comments

Steve Pavlina has just posted some graphs plotting his 2005 Traffic & Adsense Revenue Growth which both show how well his site has been doing over the last 12 months.

Steve’s traffic has grown from 86,000 visitors in the month of February 2005 to a projected level of 715,000 visitors this month.

His Adsense earnings have grown in a very similar way rising from $53 per month to $4,700. I don’t see a total for the year in his post but it seems to be around the $14,000 mark which isn’t bad. Of course a third of that came in the last month so extend it out a year and you’ll see an income of over $55,000 even if the graph completely plateaus.

Steve’s graphs (see the Adsense one) show a very smooth increase in traffic and earnings and illustrate the power of sticking with a blog over a longer period of time.

It’s probably worth noting that Steve’s experience is somewhat exceptional and not the norm for most bloggers in terms of the levels of traffic and earnings he’s been able to grow. His rise has been remarkably quick and the result of some exceptional writing, viral word of mouth marketing and success in social bookmarking sites. Having said that the shape of his graph is reasonably typical from my experience. While the numbers for most are ALOT lower blogging is a long term venture.

Steve looks forward in his post to the future and what it could grow to. His last 12 months has seen increases in traffic of 21% per month and increases in AdSense of 50% per month (nice).

These levels of growth don’t look like tapering off from the graphs but my experience shows that they will at some point. But as he points out - even if he can sustain 10% growth per month over the next year he’ll be on target for some $10,000 months - and that’s just his AdSense earnings.

Steve’s story is a fascinating one to watch and one that I’m sure many are/will be inspired by.

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Written on January 18th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 02:01 am by David Shawver

Blog Platforms - Poll Results

Blogging Tools and Services 55 comments

As I said I’d do last week I’ve closed the latest Poll of the Week off because it was beginning to take over my sidebar. I found the results quite interesting. The question asked:

What Blog Platform Do You Use Most?

The results had a few surprises for me. While I was expecting a large showing for WordPress (around 37% of the 1000 respondents) I was intruiged by the large number of enternetusers readers using the free hosted Blogger.com platform (22.2% - or 222 readers). This figure was almost triple the number of Movable Type Bloggers. Another surprise to me was the large numbers of Blog platforms that I’d never heard of before. By the end of the poll there were 49 options. Thirdly I was interested that 2% of those taking part use some sort of ‘custom made’ blog platform (sometimes even hand coded).

I’ve graphed the results of the top 13 platforms (each had 10 or more responses) and grouped all the ‘others together’. The full results with all the ‘other’ platforms are listed below the fold.

Graphic powered by Keynote (click to enlarge a little).

Full Results

WordPress.org - 371
Blogger.com - 222
Movable Type - 81
Expression Engine - 40
TypePad - 35
WordPress.com - 32
Drupal - 25
Custom Made Blogs - 20
Text Pattern - 17
LiveJournal - 13
Mambo - 11
Nucleus - 11
b2evolution - 10
.Text - 9
Xanga - 9
SquareText - 8
SubText - 7
Geeklog - 7
Blogharbor - 6
DotClear - 6
Serendipity - 5
MySpace - 4
dasblog - 4
Joomla - 4
Pivot - 3
Blogzerk - 3
Typo - 3
Powerful Intentions Community - 3
DotNetNuke - 2
Bitacoras - 2
LivingDot - 2
iblog - 2
Sulekha - 2
xoops - 2
pmachine Pro - 2
Bloggers.it - 2
Tattertools - 2
City Desk - 2
BlogSoft - 1
Rediffblogs - 1
Jroller - 1
Community Server - 1
weblog.ro - 1
dotclear - 1
Blogsite - 1
mojblog - 1
Boast Machine - 1
Blog Drive - 1
Scoop - 1

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Written on January 17th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 11:01 pm by David Shawver

Selling a Blog - Interview with Duncan Riley from Blog Herald

Pro Blogger Interviews 25 comments

Big in blog news this week is the sale of BlogHerald (no official word that it’s sold yet but it looks like final negotiations are taking place). The price is said to be in excess of over $72,000 (USD). BlogHerald’s owner is Duncan Riley (a partner of mine at internetusers) so I shot him a request for an interview as the subject is so relevant to this blog.

Having never sold a blog of my own I’m fascinated by the process and so started by asking Duncan:

Why are you Selling BlogHerald?
A number of reasons. Firstly Ive identified that there is now a perception that I have a conflict of interesting writing about blog networks when I’m an owner of one. Whether this is fair or not I guess doesn’t come into it because the perception is there, despite me having written the blog for 3 years. Also becoming a full time enternetusers back in December means I can always do with the money :-) The capital from the sale will fund my mortgage for atleast the next 12 months and allow me to finish off my house whilst building up income from other blogs and from b5media.

One of the biggest topics of discussion around this sale is regarding the ’secrecy’ and the strategy of not publically announcing the name of the blog being sold – Why did you do it this way? What were the pros and cons of this move in retrospect?

I don’t think it was so much a secret: certainly those who asked for the information from Jeremy (who were interested in bidding) where provided the details commercial in confidence. Although there has naturally been a fair bit of talk about the sale imagine how much more there would have been if The Blog Herald had been named from day one? Basically I didn’t want a circus around the sale, and from a marketing perspective I believe a full public sale may have been detrimental to the brand.

Why did you use a broker (Jeremy) in this case and has it been worthwhile doing so?
Jeremy’s got the runs on the board as far as blog sales go, and for memory I think he was the first person to have ever sold a blog as well (a few years ago with Ensight). He’s got a lot of contacts in the industry + he’s in North America as well. Sure, in terms of blogging being in Australia isn’t a restriction for me, but in terms of being able to talk to people, broker deals…as you’d know the time difference works against us. I’d note its also why I think the blog will go on to bigger and better things in the future as well. Being in North America provides to new owner/ owners a lot of advantages in being able to actually talk to people in the industry when reporting on blog news, as well as attend things like blogging conferences and similar, things I’ve never been able to do.

In terms of it being worthwhile using Jeremy? I’d happily recommend him to others, he really know’s what he’s doing and he’s got contacts I simply don’t have.

Many people ask me how to value a blog – what factors did you weigh up when deciding upon an asking price?
This was in many ways the hardest part. Naturally I value it even more highly than what it sold for :-) I couldn’t give you an absolute way of calculating the value of a blog, but you’d be looking at things like
- profit of the blog and potential profit
- how long the blog has been going
- traffic
- PR and links inwards, and its place overall in the blogosphere
How you put a value on those things is another matter. We had 3 bids all pretty close to the same amount in terms of dollars so others have priced it in a similar fashion which is a positive. Because the market for sellling blogs is still very small its impossible to benchmark these things as well but I’d expect as the market grows this will change over time.

What will you do with the time freed up by not having Blog Herald (assuming you’re not continuing with it long term)?

I will be contributing for the time being, the exact length of time however hasn’t been finalised, although its likely to be a couple of months at this stage.

b5media has really become my full time job sine I went “pro” in December and I intend on using a lot of the extra time working in building up b5media.

I also would like to spend a little bit more time posting more regularly to my personal blog. Occasionally it will include blogging related topic but I’d like to explore tech and politics as well. Literally a free form blog of my thoughts and ideas. I also might pursue a couple of new projects, whether these are in b5media or outside of it has yet to be decided, but I always enjoy taking on new challenges.

If you were starting Blog Herald again today how would you do it differently?
That’s difficult to answer because I wouldn’t start The Blog Herald in 2006, its a lot more harder today to get your voice heard in the blogosphere and build up loyal readers and wide readership than it was in 2002-03 when your starting from scratch. In 2002 there was nothing around like the Blog Herald in terms of blog news, and whilst there are a few sites today covering similar area’s (Bloggers Blog comes to mind) and a few different imitators have come and gone, there really still isn’t a lot of other sites like it, in terms of the brand being stronger than the person (except of course for the uber-multi author blogs), for example when most people think of enternetusers they think of you, Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel. Certainly whilst a lot of people who read enternetusers would associate me with The Blog Herald, try searching a blog search engine for my name v The Blog Herald, and The Blog Herald will win out by a country mile. It was always meant to be this way, I wanted to build a brand, not me personally.

‘Do you want to buy enternetusers.net now? I hear you might have some spare cash!’
Given the price equation of The Blog Herald equated to enternetusers I’m probably about 75k US short :-)

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Written on January 17th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 04:01 pm by David Shawver

The Inaugural enternetusers Best Blog Awards Award

enternetusers Site News 7 comments

Ok - time for a little fun. I asked over the weekend for your nominations for the Best Blog Award Award (tounge firmly planted in cheek) and received 9 nominations via comment and email.

The list is not an exhaustive blog awards list (I did a quick search on Google and found another 20 or so very quickly) but it’s who you nominated :-)

So let voting begin!

update: in a strange twist of fate another Melbourne blogger is doing a very similar thing over at Anonymouslefty. As Swade points out in comments below - enternetusers might just have some competition in the Blog Awards Awards Award next year.

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Written on January 17th, surf Active Apparel website NBA Jersey zone.at 01:01 pm by David Shawver

Mister Snitch on Gather.com

Pro Blogging News 1 comment

Just a quick link (mainly to remind me to read it later) - Mister Snitch has an interesting piece looking at Gather.com - a service (currently in beta) which will pay content writers money for their content based upon traffic levels generated.

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