Hello,

I need some help. It's been a while since I've logged into performancing.com - and I can't find my metrics page? Is the feature still available? Help!

At the blog I launched last monday, we are trying a new experiment: we crafted a whole bunch of posts geared towards repeat visits, instead of one-time posts. Let me explain.

The normal post in the blogsphere is a one-time post. It encourages a reader to read the information one time, and then move on. This may be because the post is someone's opinion, or the information gets old, or the action suggested doesn't necessitate coming back to the blog.
The problem with one-time post blogs for professional bloggers is that you need to post a lot, often, simple to maintain new content to encourage readers.

However, when we set about to set up our site, we thought a lot about 'repeat posts'. A repeat post is best thought of as an aggregation of information - or putting a lot of stuff in one place, so people don't have to go looking for it on their own.

So for example: we focused on shopping sites. We created 'repeat posts' for some of the web's most popular stores. Our model (no secret) goes something like this:

1. the best cashback site for that store (1 link)
2. the best coupon code sites (usually 3 links)
3. rewards points for that store (varies - for argument's sake, let's say 1 link)
4. shipping/rebate center (varies - 1 link)

So our hope was to put these 4-6 links on one page, and that every time someone wanted to shop at a particular store, they went through our method. The hope was they would keep coming back to our site - because we had aggregated the links in one place. But our content NEVER changed. It doesn't have to - because the method is sound.

Thoughts? Do people have other ways to create repeat posts? We are looking to create high quality repeat posts for our blog, to reduce our own workload and provide something useful to our readers.

So along the lines of my last post, what are good ways to monetize blogs? I'm looking for categories (likes ads) versus specific programs (like Google Adsense). The ones I know about are:

1) Ads
2) Affiliate Links
3) Donations
4) Subscriptions/Membership

Any other ideas?

We recently launched a consumer information blog. We basically teach people how to save money, quickly, when shopping online.

When we started the blog, I struggled with how to monetize our site, from the beginning, as opposed to down the road. As a blog reader, I was becoming tired of ads being placed in posts. I understand the need to monetize blogs (and am all for it) but the inclusion of blog ads in the main text has often led to the break-up of ideas, making an article longer than it needs to be. Extra scrolling. It's also annoying to see multiple lines of Google ads placed within a short post (two - four lines), in essence just trying to take advantage of real estate in any way possible.

This shouldn't be construed as a diatribe against ads. I'm all for ads - there is no doubt that advertisements have driven a lot of services to be free. And I know when faced with putting ads in posts versus in the sidebar, the former is almost always going to get you more clicks.

So I struggled with what to do. My solution was to start finding affiliate programs, and signing up for them. Text affiliate links tend to be a lot less intrusive than Google/Yahoo/Other ad blocks. While their revenue tend to be different (focused along the actual production of commerce versus just a click), I felt that the use of affiliate links would be an adequate revenue source that would allow me to keep ads in the sidebar.

See: for example, take a site like ebates.com. Ebates is a good service, and I've saved money with it. And if I get readers to click and sign-up, we make $5.

Now I faced another difficulty: we want to provide good, honest, open information to the user. We ultimately feel that a lot of our articles will encourage people to come back, IF they save money.

Our policy was to write quality articles first, and then monetize them later: but how do you prove that?

Our solution was to write a full disclosure statement at the end of every post, detailing to the reader exactly how we make money. But I'm worried that this may not be enough - that the sheer fact that we have put a full disclosure statement will turn people away (why does he need a full disclosure?!?!), instead of encouraging them to trust our information. But I don't know any other way to get people to trust our information.

Read the rest of this entry