Written on July 12th, 2007 at 11:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Guess the Search Term and Win a Blog Mentoring Prize
update - this competition is now closed. The winner has been announced. Comments are now closed
OK - it’s time for a little enternetusers reader competition.
It’s called - “Guess the Top Search Term Competition” (or GTTSTC for short)…. catchy isn’t it!
Here’s how it will run. I’m going to offer a prize for the first person to submit the search term (via comments below) that brought in the most traffic to enternetusers from Google in the month of June.
ONE ENTRY PER PERSON (I’ll check IP addresses to make sure). Your first entry will be taken as your only entry - so be quick but make your entry count by reading what others have already said (first in best dressed).
Note - By search term - it could be a combination of more than one word.
The Prize - A month’s free access to the Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program. It’s a good way to check out Yaro’s great new mentoring program for free - you can unsubscribe at any time to avoid ongoing payments.
Judging - The Winner will be the first person to get the exact term right.
Do note - that my comments are filtered and some comments go to moderation and don’t appear on the post until I’ve given them the go ahead. As a result you might think you’re first for a term but someone else might actually be.
I’ll announce the winner in 24 hours so we can get a nice array of search terms submitted for a little fun. If no one’s got it in 24 hours I’ll start giving a few hints.
update - this competition is now closed. The winner has been announced. Comments are now closed
Written on July 12th, 2007 at 03:07 pm by Darren Rowse
FeedBurner Offers Blogger.com Blogs Integration
If you’re a Blogger.com blogger and a Feedburner user then you are likely to be pleased to hear today that FeedBurner has now made it possible to redirect your Blogger feed to your Feedburner one.
Just log into your Blogger account and head to your Settings page where you can enter your Feedburner feed address and save it. Done.
The beauty of doing this is that now you get a fuller picture of your Feed stats. Those subscribing to your old blogger feed will now be counted in the overall Feedburner count and you’ll now be able to track what they do with your feed like you can with those who were subscribing via the Feedburner feed previously.
Your feed counter might even go up a little (although in reality the number of subscribers to your blog isn’t really changing - it’s just counting everyone now).
Written on July 12th, 2007 at 12:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - 12 July 2007
- Common Craft shares some of the behind the scenes story of how they make their great videos - they’ve been producing some great work lately and it’s great to see how they’re doing it.
- Dean starts a series today on Buzz and Viral Marketing.
- Read Write Web has been hot lately with some great posts - including Blog Platforms Head to Head: Six Apart and Automattic Compared.
- Self Made Minds shares how they increased the CTR on their most profitable AdSense ad unit.
- London Times Online has an article today - Blogging for Dosh - I even got a quote or two in!
- Some scary statistics about comment spam - and people wonder why I get worked up about the topic! By the way - sometime in the next 24 hours Akismet will stop the 1.5 millionth spam comment on this blog!
- b5media launched it’d new Music Channel this week - with 21 music focused blogs on everything from Crooners, to Australian Music (yay!) to Jazz and Punk. Disclaimer - I’m a director, employee and shareholder of b5media.
Written on July 12th, 2007 at 11:07 am by Darren Rowse
ReviewMe adds Advertorials - My First Impressions
It looks like ReviewMe is adding another product to their range - this time it’s Advertorials.
On their Advertisers page they share what they are:
- You can browse our marketplace of top blogs and choose the blogs to run your message which you remain in full control over.
- Advertorials also feature full impression and click tracking so you can measure your return on investment.
- Advertorials are a great way to generate buzz and traffic while controlling the message and measuring your results!
They don’t seen to have officially announced it yet but what it seems like is that instead of the blogger writing the review - advertorials have more input by the advertiser. I’m hoping that they’ll be marked/disclosed as such (as they require for reviews).
OK - so as a blogger, would you use this type of service?
I’ve always had mixed thoughts on review posts. I think if they are on topic, genuine and disclosed they are one option to explore as a blogger - as long as you don’t become obsessed by posting too many of them and as long as they give actual useful information to your readers (and realize that for some readers they can be a turn off).
I personally don’t do paid reviews because I don’t want to put myself in that kind of position with my readers - however some bloggers seem to be doing well with them.
With advertorials I’m feeling similar thoughts - although am probably even further away from running them on my own blogs than running paid reviews. While I guess ReviewMe will give bloggers full control of whether an advertorial is placed on their blog (after seeing the copy) I think there are a couple of downsides to this as a blogger wanting to develop a community and relationships with readers:
- Disruption of Style/Voice - one of the potential downsides is that the voice that advertorials are written in could well be different to the voice that you write your blog on. I guess this will be a case by case thing that bloggers need to assess - but most advertorials that I read in newspapers and magazines have a certain kind of ’spin’ on them. I guess to be fair that this disruption of voice is similar to when you put a guest post up on your blog.
- Loss of Balance - the point of an advertorial is to sell something. Whether it be a product, brand or service - an advertorial is an advertisement of some sort and as a result it is not generally a balanced exploration of the pros and cons of that service. Is this what your blog is about - this is a call that a blogger will need to make for themselves.
I’m not about to reject the idea of an advertorial completely for all blogs - but I would suggest bloggers think carefully about running them or not (as I would encourage bloggers to do with any type of ad on their blog. Remember that everything that goes up on your blog either adds to or takes away from how readers perceive it - particularly those things that appear in the content areas of your blog.
They are my initial thoughts, having not seen many details of what the service entails. What do you think about advertorials on blogs?
PS: one last question that I have about this - will advertorials be unique from blog to blog? Seeing the same advertorial numerous times around a niche could become annoying to readers but also could have implications when it comes to SEO both of the advertiser and blogger - ie duplicate content. Knowing the smart SEO types behind ReviewMe I suspect they’ve given this some consideration and will be interested to see what they’ve come up with.
Update: Thanks to Patrick from ReviewMe who has made the following clarifications for us:
- all links within Advertorials are redirects, no direct links (this means they have no SEO benefit)
- all Advertorials BY DEFAULT are clearly marked at the beginning of the post as a “SPONSOR POST:” (good on the disclosure front).
Here in Australia if an article is an advertiorial they are actually marked with that word - I wonder whether this might be something to consider or stop confusion with readers wondering if it’s actually written by the blogger themselves. While I’m happy they are disclosing I think it worth pointing out to readers that a blogger did not write the post for fear of it being confused with a paid review that readers might think is unbiased. Just my two cents worth.
Written on July 12th, 2007 at 05:07 am by Darren Rowse
Amazon Updates User Interface for Associate
I just logged into my Amazon Associates account and they’ve done an update to their user interface.
There’s nothing particularly new to what they’ve done that isn’t cosmetic - but it is nice and will make checking daily stats a lot easier.
For starters you now don’t need to scroll through paragraphs of notices to get your daily stats. Now you see the table (pictured left) on the top right hand side of your reports page. It gives you a quick summary of your stats for the last day (or month - depending which you select).
On the top left hand side you see another little table (pictured right) - this one has your tracking IDs all in a drop down menu so that you can quickly swap from one to another (again, much easier than the previous method which was quite convoluted).
By the way - many Amazon affiliates don’t know about tracking IDs - they are the equivalent of channels in AdSense and help you track specific affiliate links (or groups of them).
One other change is that in the top right hand corner you can now select different locations - if you are an Amazon affiliate for their different geographical stores. You can’t swap from one to the other without logging in - but it could be handy for some.
Other report pages and the ‘build links’ pages seem to have been tweaked also - but there are not really substantial changes that I can see so far in them.
This is a nice fresh new look that makes the back end of Amazon’s Affiliate program a little more functional. My wish now is that they update some of their banners, search boxes etc to bring them into a more modern look and not like they’re something from a few years back.
Do you like the new user interface?
Written on July 11th, 2007 at 06:07 pm by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Job Board vs Craigslist - Guess Who Wins?
Last week I was saying to myself that I needed to get a testimonials page together for the enternetusers Job Board. It’s on my to-do list (along with 60 or so other things) but today Michael Gray over at GrayWolf posted a post that I think will make a great start. In his post he compared the results of advertising for Bloggers enternetusers Job Board vs Craigslist.
I think it’s safe to say that enternetusers’s Job Board won out.
“I started getting responses from both websites almost immediately. Once 24 hours had gone by I started evaluating the applications, and the results were pretty clear. The job applications I got from enternetusers were consistently higher quality than the ones from Craigslist. The applicants had more experience and were better qualified. At the end of the process, 6 of the 7 bloggers I hired came from the enternetusers Job Board.”
Add to that that Craigslist costs $75 per region that you want to advertise in and our Job Boards cost $50 to our global audience of bloggers and you’ve got some decent reasons to try the enternetusers Job Board if you’re looking for an experienced and qualified blogger!
Also - just a note for bloggers and advertisers - we’re in the process of updating the back end and adding a few small features. There shouldn’t be too many noticeable differences in this next update from the front end but stay tuned for a few ideas that will make the boards more useful.
Written on July 11th, 2007 at 05:07 am by Darren Rowse
Finding Domain Names - Bust a Name
I’ve never really been a big domain name collector - but in the last few weeks I’ve enjoyed seeing what names are out there and even picking up a few for a rainy day (for the distant future as I have no time for new ventures at the moment).
I’ve used a couple of tools for finding new domain names over the years - two of my previous favorites have been Domains Bot and Name Boy.
Today LifeHacker linked to a new tool which takes over as my new all time favorite - Bust a Name.
Warning - this tool is not only useful, it’s kind of fun. I just spent an hour on it and bought five domain names!
Written on July 11th, 2007 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse
How to Make Money Blogging - What We Wish We Knew
This post on how to make money blogging is part of the ‘What I wish I knew when I first started Blogging’ Series. In this post I’ll share readers comments on the topic of making money from blogs as well as some of my own experiences and advice.
When I asked readers for their regrets when it comes to making money there was a variety of responses - from bloggers wishing that they’d started experimenting with ads and affiliate programs earlier to others wishing that they’d never started monetizing blogs at all because it was a distraction from what they actually liked doing - writing about their topic of interest.
My Own Experience with Making Money from Blogging
I sometimes look back on my blogging with a twinge of regret that I didn’t get into blogging earlier and establish myself in my niches before ‘competitors’ did. I dabbled in making websites about 10 years ago (5 years before I started my first blog) and blogged for a full year on a personal blog before even considering that I could make money from blogging or starting blogs on any focused topic.
If only someone had told me what I now know - getting a foot in the door in my niches back then could have had some amazing payoffs.
Having said that - part of me is very glad that I didn’t ‘Go Pro’ or start commercializing my blogging too early. That first 12-18 months of blogging on a personal blog was very formative. I learned so much about communicating online, building community, writing and the way that blogs operate - to the point that when I began to blog on a commercial level I had a lot of skills that helped me grow those new blogs faster.
The other great thing about that first year or so was that it gave me a love for blogging. I blogged because I enjoyed it and not with dollars in my eyes. As a result I wrote about things that interested me and not what would make money.
In a sense, that first blogging experience was an apprenticeship or training ground for what came later.
I see a lot of bloggers rushing into commercial type blogs that I think could learn a thing or two from starting a personal blog for a few months (or longer). These blogs quite often are on topics that they think will make money (rather than things they know about and love), they quite often have ads slapped all over them (instead of presenting their content as the prime thing on the blog) and they quite often have content that is regurgitated from elsewhere, uninspiring and uninteresting.
These blogs rarely survive longer than a few months because the blogger gets frustrated by the lack of initial earnings (remember it takes a year or so for a blog to ‘hit its straps’) and has no real interest in the topic to keep them blogging.
Should a blog Be Monetized from Day 1?
There’s always been debate over whether to start monetizing a blog from the day you start it or not.
Now that I’m established as a blogger my own approach when starting a new blog is to introduce some income streams from day 1 in order to set good expectations with readers - however not to slap too many ads up all over your blog (especially in the early days). Note: I’m not contradicting my last point about doing an apprenticeship before getting into blogging for money - this is more for bloggers who have blogged before and are starting other blogs. I’ve written a lot more on this question of how quickly to put ads on a blog here.
Experiment with Different Income Sources
The other main advice that I’d give on the topic is to experiment with the many different ways of making money from blogs. There are literally hundreds of options for doing it and each method will suit different blogs differently. I semi-regularly post a list of the top ways that I make money from blogging and while AdSense has always remained in my top two earners the rest of the list has constantly been in a state of change as I’ve experimented with the mix of income streams.
Also, keep in mind that your blog has to directly make money from it. Some blogs will never make much money, however they have the potential to increase the profile of the blogger to enable them to enhance their earning capacity in some other indirect way.
Relevancy and Position
Another lesson that it took me a while to learn about making money from blogs was the importance of having income streams that are relevant to the content that you are writing about. I still remember in the early days slapping Amazon affiliate products up on my personal blog that were for the highest priced electrical goods I could find. Of course they never converted. I learned over time that a lower priced affiliate product could earn me much more in a post about that actual product.
The other problem with my early attempts at an income from Amazon was my placement. I stuck the ads in my sidebar (mainly low on the page). Of course affiliate products tend not to convert so well well over there - people need to see them and if they are close to your content (or better still, in it, they’ll do so much better).
The Importance of Good Traffic
I chatted with a blogger earlier in the week who told me that he was so frustrated because his site was getting so much traffic but that he wasn’t making much money from it. I asked for more details and discovered that the guy was bringing in hundreds of thousands of impressions each week but was making barely enough to pay for his server load (which was considerable).
When I dug deeper as to the source of his traffic he told me that he was buying it from a traffic generation service. He’d heard that all he needed to do was generate a lot of traffic and he’d be rich. I explained to him that there are different qualities of traffic and that depending upon it’s source it will convert very differently with different income streams.
Bought traffic generally doesn’t convert well with advertising or affiliate programs (in fact many ad programs will ban you if you use it). Similarly, traffic from social bookmarking sites like Digg is generally much harder to monetize with contextual ads like AdSense than traffic coming from a search engine.
Do work to get your traffic levels up - but understand that not all traffic is equal. It took me a year or more to really learn this.
Reader Comments on Making Money from Blogging
OK - enough of my ramblings. Here are a few of the comments that readers left on the topic of making money from blogs when asked what they wished they knew when they first started blogging.
Adam writes - “I wish I knew I could make money from them. ”
Rose writes - “About the thing that I only really regret is that I didn’t start adding Adsense sooner.”
Jason writes - “Ad positioning. I went from placing my ads in yellow zones in the beginning, outside the content, then finally I found a code for positioning ads within the content. If only I had known the importance of ad placement in the beginning I would have made a lot more money!”
Brandon J writes - “I still wish that I didn’t concentrate on the money part of it. I have less than one hundred readers and I can tell my site isn’t very “sticky”. Most of my decisions are financially based and I wish I could just write content without worried about how much money I’m making.”
Ankur writes - “Well I wish i had considered ad placement an important task in Adsense… just by making a slight change in my ad location… i have seen my revenues growing 6 times.”
Chris @ Martial Development writes - “I wish I had known that your choice of niche will affect your contextual ad revenue by a factor of 100! And that certain niches can therefore never, ever be profitable with Adsense!”
What do you wish you knew about making money from blogs when you first started blogging?
Written on July 10th, 2007 at 08:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Page Views - Are they Dead?
One of the popular stories going around today is that of Nielsen/NetRatings (an online measurement service) scrapping the basing of their ratings being based upon page views and moving to tracking how long people spend on a site. This is as a result of the increased use of video and tools like Ajax which mean people are not refreshing pages all the time.
There’s been some interesting observations being made around the blogosphere and Richard MacManus gives a few observations as it relates to blogging:
“Blogs are a good case where ‘time spent’ is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the ‘quantity over quality’ problem. It’s easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the ‘time spent on site’ figures for those blogs and I think you’d find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn’t. So in the case of blogs, I’d argue that ‘time spent on site’ is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.”
It’s interesting that he says this because I’ve noticed in tracking my own blog’s statistics over the last six months that I’ve been looking less at the page views count and more at stats like bounce rate (how many people leave the site without surfing deeper into it) and time spent on blog.
Page views still are something I do like to build in that they are still related to income (many of the income streams still have an impression based focus) - but I think we’ll see more changes in what the ad networks are doing also. Google’s been moving more focus to ‘Cost per Action’ and I still think we’ll see some attempts at some sort of an ‘Cost per Time’ ad network - or at least an ad network that refreshes ads over time.
So page views are not completely dead for me - but they’re definitely less important than they once were.
What metrics do you look at? Are page views still important to you?
Written on July 10th, 2007 at 03:07 am by Darren Rowse
Blog Hosting, Domains and Blogging Platforms - What We Wish We Knew
This post is part of the ‘What we wish I knew when I first started Blogging’ Series. In this post I’ll share readers comments on the topic of Blog Hosting, Domains and Platforms and will share some of my own experiences and advice.
There is always a diversity of opinion over which blogging platform and hosting method is best - but there were some recurring themes in the reader discussion on this particular topic. Let me attempt to summarize the main theme:
The most common regrets seem to have been starting out with some of the free blogging platforms (particularly Blogger.com) and using the free subdomain URL that they provide instead of starting out with one’s own domain and hosting.
While there is some real wisdom in getting a taste for blogging using some of the free platforms my advice to anyone who suspects that they might end up blogging on a serious level it is worth securing a good domain name and getting set up on a platform that you think you’ll stick with for the long term.
In terms of blog platforms - there is no right or wrong answer and while my personal preference is for WordPress the blog platform that one chooses needs to match with the blogger’s own preferences. Try a few out and see which you’re most comfortable with - but be aware that the choices you make early can impact your future blogging. There are import features to migrate from many platforms to others - but it’s easier to choose the right one up front.
My Own Experience with Domains, Platforms and Hosting
I started out on a blogspot.com (blogger.com) domain and platform. While this was a great way to test my passion for blogging (I was hooked within hours of starting) I did quickly move on from this set up to my own blog, with a professional design and a standalone blogging tool (I went to Movable Type initially). When I made this move I noticed a significant increase in traffic and got a lot more respect from other bloggers and readers. Whether this was due to the design, having a blogging platform with more features (Blogger.com was very primitive back in those days - it didn’t even have integrated comments) or being on my own domain I’m not sure - but I suspect it was a combination of all of them.
As I began to start blogging on a more serious level and started attempting to make money from blogs I began to start new blogs. My ‘mistake’ (yet ironically a reason I had some success) was that I started the new blogs on the same domain as my first blog (a domain that had nothing to do with the topics I was blogging about). This was a big mistake in some ways in that it makes branding those blogs difficult and makes selling them almost impossible. On the flipside of this ‘mistake’ is the fact that because they shared the domain of an established and popular blog they did very well in the search engines from their first weeks of existence and as a result they grew readership very quickly.
I learned from my ‘mistake’ in later blogs. For example enternetusers and Digital Photography School. Of course there are some regrets here also. I couldn’t secure enternetusers.com so went with.net (and eventually secured the.com at a significant cost). While I’ve still built a significant blog on the.net version I wish I’d pushed harder to get the.com earlier. With DPS I don’t like having dashes in the URL - however again the owner of the other version of the domain is asking a crazy amount for it - so I make do.
My advice is to set yourself up with the best setup that you can afford to do IF you’re wanting to do blogging on a serious level. Doing it ‘right’ from the early days will cause you less pain later. However - keep in mind that despite my mistakes I’ve managed to build some reasonably successful blogs. The domain name and platform you choose are just two elements of many that go into making a blog successful. They are important - but if you get it wrong you are not dead in the water.
Read more on choosing a blogging platform and selecting a name and domain name for your blog.
If you’re looking for a blog hosting option you might like to read this reader discussion on the topic.
Reader Comments on Blog Hosting, Domains and Blogging Platforms
Here’s what enternetusers readers said they wish they’d known on the topic of hosting, domains and blog platforms when they started out.
tejvan writes - “Use the best blogging software and try to avoid wasting time messing around with design and getting the blog to function. I learn’t through experience Wordpress is the best blogging software”
Leszek Pawlowicz writes - “Sometimes you really do get what you pay for. Blogger was free, some aspects of layout are easy, and it lowered the barrier to start blogging. But ultimately it just wasn’t powerful or flexible enough to do what I wanted. I wish I had bitten the bullet and gone with WordPress from the start.”
Heraldo writes - “I wish I’d started out on WordPress rather than blogspot.”
Mike writes - “I wish I had been smart enough to start the blog using a dedicated blog platform….”
Terra writes - “I wish that I’d skipped over the whole free blogger to wp.com sites and just gone straight to my own domain.”
Trula writes - “I’ve always had my own domain name, but I wish I had started using a blogging program from the start. From 02-05 I hand coded my blog, every single entry on it’s own old-school html page. Ultra duh!”
Antonio writes - “There are about 5-10 very successful blogs that use blogger and other free blogs like for example (seth godin, postsecret, etc). They are not on wordpress and still have tons of readers and subscribers. I think that content is what makes the blog not the platform.”
betshopboy writes - “The one thing I’ll do differently if I could start my blog all over again is to get my own domain name and host the blog on wordpress instead of my current blogspot platform, with subdomain name. Blogging with subdomain will always be a poor cousin to blogs with own domain name, no matter how ‘killer’ your blog posts are.”
What do you wish you knew about hosting, domains and blogging platforms when you first started blogging?
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