Written on January 16th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse
Weekend Link Round Up
Some links that I found in my RSS feed after returning from our weekend road-trip:
- Scrivs writes a post that has generated some interesting discussion in comments at Why Blog Networks Will Fail This Year
- Jeremy has delayed the start of the auction of the big blog he’s brokering a deal for as a result of some serious offers. There’s lots of speculation going around as to what blog it is and whether it’s a good move to try to sell it with this strategy but from the snippets I know I think it’ll work out.
- Chitika have announced that they have finished auditing for November (payments on the way) and December (payments to come at the end of January. I’m yet to go over the results of my audits in detail but November’s results look similar to Octobers decreases and Decembers look better (the changes they started on 1 December must have helped in my case). They also announced that the extra 10% bonus that they gave in November was extended into December. Get full details at their blog.
update: just also noticed that they’ve added a new date reporting system to their stats. Up near the ‘filter by channel’ there is now a ‘view’ drop down menu that allows checking of stats by ‘All’, ‘last 7 days’, ‘this month’, ‘last month’ or ’select dates’. This will make their stats quite a bit easier.
Written on January 16th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse
SixApart Launch Affiliate Program
SixApart (the creators of Movable Type and TypePad) have just announced an affiliate program. You can earn 10% per licence if you recommend someone to Movable Type, $3 per trial subscriber for TypePad and 20% of paid subscription (up to $5) for LiveJournal referrals.
Written on January 15th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 02:01 am by Darren Rowse
Award for Best Blog Awards - Nominations Open
It’s that time of the year when every second day there seems to be a new blog award announced for people to nominate blogs for and then to vote for.
So I thought maybe it was time for someone to run a ‘blog award award’.
I’m going to do it next week - it’ll be kept really simple. There will be one category:
‘The Award for Best Blog Awards’
In order to run such an auspicious award we do need some blog awards to vote on and so I now hereby formally open nominations. What’s your favorite blog awards? It could be a big general one with multiple categories, it could be a small one which focuses on a particular industry. Pretty much anything goes.
When I get back from the weekend I’ll compile a top 10 and we’ll start the voting process. Of course there will be a category for ‘I hate blog awards’ so that those of you who detest them can get it off your chest. Otherwise it’ll be a bit of fun - nothing too serious - if anything we can do it with a bit of tounge in cheek attitude. ;-)
Written on January 14th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 06:01 am by Darren Rowse
Investment Blogging
Nice post by Chris again over at Performancing - Maximise Your Income With Common Sense:
‘Answer this, what is the basic unit of blogging? The blog post. Each post is like an individual worker in your workforce. Some posts might work harder than others. Some attract more attention than others. Each earns you a little revenue, together they are your means of gaining income. So common sense point number one; it makes sense that if you grow your work force, your body of work within your blog, that your income potential will grow.’
I love the ‘posts as workers’ analogy - very cool.
I was talking to someone recently about this very same topic and I used the analogy of each post being like a small deposit into the bank.
When I was a kid my parents would give me 20 cents each week to take up to the teller in the bank (back when banks had humans to serve you) to put into my savings account. They taught me the power of investing from a young age because my 20 cent pieces added up over the years and with the help of some interest and a few gifts from Nana Rowse saved up for that cool dragster bike I’d dreamt of.
20 cents by itself doesn’t get you much but consistent deposits can add up to something quite significant.
The same is true with blogging. Each post by itself might not have much impact in terms of traffic, ad revenue, incoming links (or any other way that you might measure it’s success) but write a few posts a day for a year and you’ll find yourself building something with a higher chance of ’success’.
Written on January 14th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse
Do you find Google Analytics Helpful
If you’ve been waiting for an Google to reopen it’s doors to Google Analytics users your wait might almost be over with an announcement to that effect on their update page.
‘We’ve added enough capacity that we are re-opening signups on an invitation basis. Many of our users who previously submitted their email address to us will be receiving an invite shortly.’
While there was certainly a massive buzz about Google Analytics when it first launched I’ve heard very few reports of people using it recently. I’d be interested to hear how people are using it?
I’ve had it installed on a couple of my blogs since the day it went live - but realized today that it’s something I’ve not used for about a month.
While I find the tools it contains helpful the main reason I’m not using it is that it’s just not smooth enough for me. It might have improved but loading times were slow and statistics too out of date for the type of information I use regularly. I like to know what’s happening on my sites at a glance with up to the minute figures.
I’ll probably use Analytics on a big picture level when I do monthly or quarterly reviews but I doubt it’ll ever become a part of my daily blogging rhythm.
Written on January 13th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:01 pm by Darren Rowse
AdSense Ties your Secret Blogs To You
If you have a blog that you don’t want anyone to know about and you use AdSense be careful about activating the ‘advertise on this site’ feature. Jensense points out that it’s one way that can give away who you are. Of course the other way is to do a source code view of a site and look at the publisher code which is something I’ve done once or twice - I even confirmed one of Jen’s sites was hers once when I saw a site that I thought was in her style using the source code method.
Moral of the story - it’s pretty hard to hide on the web!
Written on January 13th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 07:01 am by Darren Rowse
Turning your Weaknesses into Strength and Threats into Opportunities
Nice post over at Jason’s blog on Turning your biggest weakness into your greatest strength - in it Jason talks about how Weblogs Inc’s biggest weakness was always servers going down (I hear his pain) but that this past week or so has seen them kicking some goals in that area - especially after CES and MacWorld’s keynote adress when Engadget was getting serving up to 87,000 pages per minute (imagine their CPM figures!).
‘One of the best feelings in business/life is to turn your biggest flaw into your biggest strength. That’s one of the things I love to do… figure out what we really suck at and figure out how to make that the thing we’re best at (I’m going to come up with a term for it). We just did that: three months ago our server skills were the worst in the industry, now our server skills are second to none.’
Jason’s just said something pretty obvious about growing a business, but also something quite profound. Paraphrased tip of the day:
‘Figure out what you really suck at and figure out how to make that the thing you’re best at.’
I don’t remember much of my university days (I studied Marketing) but there is one statement that one of my lecturers said that has run in my ears ever since. It was with reference to SWOT Analysis (where you analyze a businesses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). The statement was that one of the key things he’d learned in business was to look at Weaknesses as potential Strengths and Threats as potential Opportunities. The point he hammered home was that if you can even just begin to think this way that you’ll begin to see result - if you can actually achieve success in it you’ll grow your business.
Jason and my lecturer are saying the same thing.
As I said - it’s pretty obvious really but something that I know from my own experience that is easy to ignore. Laziness, fear, the size of the task, lack of resources, time or skills - all of these things and more can hold a blogger back from tackling a problem on their blog - the challenge is to break through them and actually do something.
As I look across my own blogs I can see some glaring problems on a few of them that I’ve been procrastinating about for a few months - maybe it’s time to do the obvious and fix them.
PS: As I sit here reminiscing on my University days I find myself remembering a few other things that my lecturer said about SWOT analysis (this may or may not be of interest to all - so feel free to tune out if you like).
Strengths and Weaknesses are generally internal things within your company. In Jason’s case the server problem is an internal thing that has potential to bring down WIN and is therefor a weakness.
On the other hand Opportunities and Threats are generally external things, often outside the control of the business themselves, that can make or break a company. For example a threat that faces WIN might be the rise of a new technology that means people find their content in other places than online.
One of the bonuses about Threats is that quite often they are things that not only impact your own business but an industry (where as a weakness can be unique to your own business). This means that if you can actually turn a Threat into an Opportunity and realize that Opportunity you have the potential to pull away from the competition. Many companies have made names for themselves on this principle of business.
Written on January 13th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse
Is enternetusers an Infomercial Blog
Eric at Subnixus just posted a post titled The Infomercial Blogs which caught my attention tonight for a number of reasons - the main one being that he writes that enternetusers, Jensense and his own blog are like infomercials. I’ll not do his post justice by paraphrasing it so feel free to go read his post to get the full message - but below are a few quotes with some of my own thoughts (this could get a little long and rant like - bare with me as I think out loud):
‘I had watched sites like enternetusers “help bloggers make money” for a while. I thought to myself, “Here was a site that was making money, by telling others how to make money, by explaining how his site was making money”. I couldn’t help but get that infomercial feeling. “If you order my free CD I will teach you how you could be making $10,000 a month on Ebay, all from the comfort of your own home!” Anyone ever seen that one? Well enternetusers was the same… come to the site for the “free cd” and leave spending $280 on his “Six Figure Blogging Course”.’
On one hand I think Eric’s got an element of truth to what he says - I think we’d find if we had heart to heart conversations with them that most bloggers experimenting with ads, affiliate programs, products, donation jars or any other potential income source will at one time or another have grappled a little with the temptation to be a bit infomercialish - but I wouldn’t limit it to blogs that write about making money online - I’d widen it out to most entrepreneurial bloggers and take it a step further and say it’s something most businesses are tempted with.
I caught a 5 minute grab of Dr Phil on TV today as I ate lunch (please don’t tell anyone) and he took a couple through ‘five ways to fix their family’ - all of which were from his latest book. I opened the paper today and saw a helpful article written about how to select a digital camera - of course it was totally surrounded by ads for digital cameras. I was in our local hardware store yesterday and saw the tail end of a free workshop on how to build a mailbox and of course saw the hard sell by the demonstrator who had a range of helpful mailbox building products ready for purchase. I was at a craft market on my recent holiday and saw a guy running a free table for kids to make greeting cards and then selling their parents card making kits. I took a painting course with my wife last year and our teacher tried to upsell us to the next course she was running at the end.
I’m not sure what my point is - except that I think many businesses use a variety of tactics like Eric describes - many are a lot more explicit than others - quite a few are more manipulative than anything I’ve seen on any of the blogs Eric mentions (unless I’m blinded to it by my own greed?).
‘The truth is that people don’t need middlemen to tell them how to make money from their blogs. Every tip you see on enternetusers, Subnixus, Jensense, etc… can be found on one site: Digital Point.’
Once again Eric is right on one level here. I’ve never hidden the fact that what I write here comes from a variety of sources including forums like Digital Point. However I would argue three things:
1. Digital Point is similar to the blogs Eric refers to in his post in on some fronts. Whilst it’s a different medium to blogging, it too has ads, it recommends products and it too has information that can be found in other places. I would argue that this isn’t a bad thing - in fact it’s brilliant, as can be seen by the thousands of loyal readers that it attracts.
2. One thing that Digital Point provides and that blogs like Jensense and hopefully enternetusers also attempt to give is a place where a large amount of information on one particular topic can be found in the one spot. When I first started blogging on a commercial level I spent many many hours scouring the web for information relevant to bloggers seeking to make an income online. While I found site’s like DP I never quite found anything that was aimed at the blogger specifically and that provided the blogger with the mix of topics that they’d need. So I surfed around many sites to find it. If there had been one site which focused upon blogging I’d have been it’s biggest fan but there wasn’t one - so I pulled all the information I’d learned together to make one and gave it all away for free.
“But what about your $280 course? That’s not free!” I can hear you say. That’s true. But as I’ve written previously in talking about SixFigureBlogging - it’s a course that similarly condenses the lessons I’ve learned into an even more concise and focused form than the blog can. When people have asked me why they should do the course I’ve always said that if they have time to read all the archives of enternetusers (currently around 1870 posts) that they probably won’t learn much more by doing the course except for the more up to date information and to hear it in a verbal conversational form from two bloggers with different experiences - (ie Andy brought his own expertise and experiences to what I know). Most of those that I’ve spoken with that did the course didn’t have the time and were willing to pay for someone to collate it into something they could digest in a more focused way.
3. Eric writes - ‘People don’t need middlemen to tell them how to make money from their blogs‘ - true they don’t ‘need’ it. The information is all out there for free - but the fact is that some people don’t have the many hours I had to find all the information I needed by sifting through a variety of forums (DP must have tens of thousands of threads) and sites. People may not ‘need’ site’s like enternetusers but I’ve found that they certainly want it. Once again the phenomena of ‘middlemen/women’ is not just restricted to blogging (although I’d argue most niche blogs on any topic function in this way) - it’s something that happens on a grand scale in wider culture. People are willing pay a premium for others to do work for them to provide them with services, information and goods that they could potentially get for themselves much cheaper or for free but which they don’t have the time, patience or expertise to get for themselves. This is why enternetusers seems to have gained some popularity and why SixFigureBlogging has interested some.
‘Don’t kid yourself. These sites are created to make money by recycling information you can find on Digital Point, Site Point, etc… I know, because I have been doing it for three months. I have made over $2500 from ads and referral programs on this site since it started.’
I can only speak for myself on this one - but while I’m certainly aware of and from time to time read sites like DP and SP - I’m not in the business of simply recycling their information. On occassion forums have inspired posts (I always link to them when they do) but I’m much more inspired by other bloggers and my own experiences. I would argue that there is one thing that forums or even other blogs don’t have that my blog does have - and that is my own story. While my story is not the ultimate story I tell it every day as I write (sometimes directly and sometimes through my comments on what others write) and see people respond to it. This doesn’t make my blog better than any other blog out there - but it does make it unique (as every blog, and forum, is unique as a result of the stories and experiences of it’s writers).
‘And finally, don’t put any faith in enternetusers, Jensense, Subnixus, the list goes on… in the end, we just want you for your clicks. Take us with a grain of salt.’
Speak for yourself Eric.
While I agree that people shouldn’t take any one person, blog, TV show, newspaper etc too seriously I take exception the statement that I am just in this for my reader’s clicks. If there was truth in that statement I’d have given up on enternetusers after a few months of writing it. No offense readers - but you just don’t click that much (and I kind of like that about you you web savy lot)! If I was only in blogging for the cash can honestly say I’d be pouring the hours every day that I put in here into other ventures.
While I’m not adverse to the idea of making money from enternetusers (and it does make some) - I have a much much wider mix of motivations for this blog. While some are selfish (happy to admit that), many are not.
Eric asks ‘So why this post?‘ - and to be honest I’m not sure. While I think it does bring out some interesting points for discussion (I think we SHOULD talk about the temptations for example) I’m a little puzzled by where his posts leaves his blog Subnixus. Is it only going to post tips that can’t be found elsewhere? Are the ads going to be taken off? Is this just a release of some sort of a guilty before the blog continues on as normal? I’m not wanting to pick a fight but I’m interested to see how his post that is to ‘call out our entire niche‘ impacts his part in it.
I’m not wanting this to turn into a flame war or bitch session - but am interested in discussing it further (although I head off tomorrow morning for a weekend away to marry yet another couple up in a rural area of our state so won’t be here to respond much for a few days).
I’m happy to be told if people think enternetusers is Infomercial-ish (perhaps infomercials are different here from elsewhere but the ones we get give no worthwhile information at all and are just about promoting themselves - hence my strong reaction to being compared to one) - and interested to hear what other’s experiences are on the topic.
Written on January 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 05:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Blog Platforms - Poll of the Week
This week’s poll is on a topic I’ve been wanting to investigate for a while now. The question is:
What Blog Platform Do You Use Most?
Are you a WordPress fan, MovableType, Drupal, Blogger.com, TypePad or do you prefer one of the other many varieties of ways of getting a blog online.
I’ve added the ability for you to add your own blog platform if the one you use isn’t in the starting list already.
Just to define the question (some people always ask for clarification) - the one you use on more blogs than any other blogging platform. If you only have one blog - the platform that runs it.
I’m also interested to hear the things you like and dislike about your blog platform in comments below.
Update: due to the large numbers of platforms being added this poll might be shortened and ended after the weekend or my sidebar might end up being three times longer than anything else on my pages! :-) So if you’re going to vote - do it soon!
Written on January 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 05:01 pm by Darren Rowse
Blog Network Poll Results
The last Poll of the Week (which went for around 3 weeks while I was away) asked the question:
Do you Blog for any Blog Networks?
The results were simple.
Of the 574 respondents - 70% said No and 30% said yes.
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enternetusers Sponsors
Team Blogs
Blogs from b5media management and staff members.-
internetusers
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Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video
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Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video
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network Apparel website Sell Homemade Video
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enternetusers
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Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video
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b5media Mobile RSS
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