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Raj Dash

Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 1: Determining the Top Blogs In Your Niche

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So you’ve decided to start a professional blog and you know it’s important to “own your niche”. That means that to successfully blog a niche, you need to learn from successful blogs. However, unless you’re following tech or gadgets niches, do you even know what the top blogs in your niche are? And how do you even define a “top blog”? Is it the one with the most pageviews? The one earning the most income?

Answer: It’s up to you to decide because it really depends on how you’ll define your own success, and thus how you decide what a top blog is. However, there are some metrics, ranks and resources that I use in combination to help me decide what the top blogs in a niche are.

Metrics/ Ranks

  1. Alexa rank. This rank is a relative measure of web traffic to a website. It’s considered to not be particularly accurate simply because measurements of traffic to a site are made via Alexa’s installable browser toolbar. Basically, if there are people who visit a site and do not have the Alexa toolbar, then their traffic is not accounted for. The smaller an Alexa rank is, the “better” it is.
  2. Google PageRank (PR). This rank is applied to each page of a site and is Google’s measure of the “value” of a page. The value is determined by some complex algorithm that only Google knows for sure. However, it does factor in the number of quality in- and outlinks on a page. Of course, as many of us bloggers found out late last year, Google thought we were all too obsessed with PR and did a shakeup, making the algorithm even more difficult to determine. Some of us gained, some lost, to our dismay.
  3. Backlinks. The number of links back to each of your site’s pages – from other sites – is arguably one of the most important measures of success. If lots of other “authority” sites are linking to you, then you are controlling the conversation. The drawback is that each major SE (search engine) has its own algorithm and thus the numbers can be wildly different. Google tends to be conservative, Microsoft very liberal, and Yahoo in the middle. At least the last time I ran my own “acid test”, which was around last summer.
  4. Technorati rank and authority. Technorati offers two measures of “importance”: rank and authority. The rank is similar in essence to Alexa’s but is relative to only those blogs that Technorati tracks. (Technorati does not track non-blog sites whereas Alexa does.) Technorati’s authority measure gives a sense of backlinks for a site. The larger the number, the more “authoritative” your site is.
  5. Pageviews. Pageview has long been an important metric to many bloggers and webmaster, simply because it’s such an atomic, simple measure. Though in and of itself, it’s probably meaningless. Pageview trend graphs are more valuable than the pageview count of your site on any given day. And a breakdown by URL is even more valuable (something that you get with both free and premium versions of Performancing PMetrics). Pageviews coupled with search traffic counts (below) can give you a better picture of the health of your site.
  6. Time spent. Some pundits decided last year that the average time spent on a site, per session, is more important that pageviews, and the lemmings followed along – including ad networks. Problem is, all sites are not created equal and to put this metric above pageviews isn’t always fair.
  7. Return visitors. For ecommerce sites, a valuable measure of success might be the number or percentage of returning visitors, since it’s often easier to sell products or services to such visitors. For a true blog, return visitors are also important.
  8. Search traffic. For some sites, including those that mask themselves as “blogs”, search traffic is more important than return visitors.
  9. RSS subscriptions. There’s a premise that people who use RSS readers are likely more technically savvy than people who do not, and that they’re more likely to be bloggers. Thus, they’re also more likely to link back to your articles. Whether this is true or not, when calculating ad payout rates, some ad networks do factor in the number of RSS subscriptions that a site has. Unfortunately, some networks only take into account Bloglines subscription numbers based on a premise that bloggers prefer that application over others. Depending on whom you believe, Google Reader is now more popular. Or not.
  10. Comments. For some bloggers, engaging the readership is far more important than anything else. The number of comments for the site is thus an important metric.

These are not the only metrics/ ranks but I’ve found these the most useful. I tend to use a combination of metrics, depending on my purpose. Keep in mind that some of the metrics mentioned above simply won’t be available to the general public.

Resources for Tracking the Conversation in Your Niche

While the above metrics/ ranks give you many options for defining a blog’s success, how do you actually find the top blogs in your niche?

Well, once you decide which metric/ rank is the most important, you’d have to start a list of blogs then refine the list. Or you can use a number of resources others have built and track the “conversation” that way. Or you can build your own custom tools. Here are some options:

  1. Text Link Ads Blog Juice Calculator. Text Link Ads put in a lot of work to come up with their custom Blog Juice Calculator. This resource considers the values of Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, Bloglines RSS subscriptions, and the number of registered backlinks. You could use the Blog Juice Calculator to rank a large set of blogs within a niche, then produce a shortlist of the most “authoritative”.
  2. Popurls. Popurls is a brilliant way of easily monitoring the conversation in the blogosphere. The problem is that it’s not focused on any given niche. And it can’t be customized. Not surprisingly, there are many niche-focused clones. Someone even came up with a WordPress theme that clones Popurls, and which can be customized. I’ve produced several clones (e.g., Bootstrapper.biz) with this theme. They’re publicly accessible but were customized for my own use so that I can monitor several niches one at a time. Of course, I have to figure out what “top blogs” to add first, and modifying later is a pain. Also, they are not robust and will occasionally show error messages. I’m working on a more robust WordPress-based setup, which will be released to the public (if it ever gets done).
  3. Techmeme/ Megite. Techmeme and Megite are two very similar web applications which show a clustered river of news in the tech niche. While both look very similar, Megite appears to be a bit more advanced. Regardless, the best I can figure is that both use “clustering” algorithms based on a set of keywords, applied to a growing set of URLs. However, the primary sites are “authority” blogs and news sites. Unfortunately, no one has come up with a clone of these – that I’m aware of – and I haven’t been able to reverse engineer the clustering algorithms beyond the theoretical.
  4. Social media sites. The simplest way to track a niche is to go to your favorite social media/ social voting site, choose the niche you’re interested in, and monitor the content submitted there daily. The problem with this is that there’s a lot of “noise”, and good new blogs are not always well-represented.
  5. Custom solutions. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you may have to build a custom solution. People who know me know that I’m a huge fan of the visual plug and play interface of Yahoo Pipes. Building a  Pipe, in my opinion, is so much easier than writing code from scratch – even for me, an experienced programmer. I’ve previously buil two Pipes that utilize the Technorati API to monitor the top blogs in a given niche. It’s one of the simplest ways to build a custom solution. I just sort blogs in a specific niche by Technorati’s “authority”, after searching for either keywords or tags. And they worked. For a while. Unfortunately, Technorati started changing their API, and Yahoo Pipes is still in beta (afaik), so Pipes modules are often being deprecated, thereby wasting my development time. Once Yahoo Pipes leaves beta, I’ll redo my pipes, then clone them – one per niche.

In a future post, I’ll provide a tutorial that covers the Technorati API, followed by another with a sample Yahoo Pipes integration.

7 Lessons From the Blogging Trenches: Cracking $200 per Month in Adsense

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Back at the end of Oct 2007, I admitted my long-term efforts to reach $100/mth in AdSense revenue on all of my blogs collectively. Embarrassing but true. Since then, I reached about $160 in Nov and just over $200 in Dec. However, January isn’t shaping up too well, and I’m not surprised – especially after Xmas. (Note: this doesn’t include revenue from other ad sources. My total take is still only about $475/mth, minus my partners’ shares.)

I’ll still be past $150/mth (AdSense) in January, I think, but not all of these earnings belong to me, since I’m partnered on some of the sites. So AdSense still hasn’t worked for me. However, now that I have a bit more time to devote to sites that I own/ co-own, I do see that a scientific approach works for certain niches. Here’s what I’ve learned since cracking $100/mth in AdSense (including emphasizing what I’d learned in October):

  1. Traffic. It takes a great deal of traffic to earn a living with just AdSense. And then some. And traffic is seasonal, as well as affected by holidays. Even important TV or sporting events will affect traffic.
  2. Low CTR. Many popular niches have very low ad CTR (ClickThrough Rates). I long ago gave up regularly updating any of my “how to blog” blogs. Instead, I casually add new content when I have it, and might occasionally get a dollar here and there. But my focus is down to about four niches instead of the dozen-plus that divided my efforts and earned me nothing.
  3. Diversify topics. If you are banking on just AdSense, consider diversifying with a few sites covering topics you’re interested in. But honestly, don’t fool yourself into believing you can maintain more than two active blogs on your own, especially if you are covering non-overlapping topics. I’ve given up that effort, but I do add new content once in a while to my mostly dormant older sites. The difference now is that I do it when I feel like it, not because I have to. And the net result is better quality articles.
  4. Supplement ads. Depending on your niche, throw in some CPM (Cost per Mille) ads to capitalize on traffic. Not all niches have suitable ad networks, but if you luck out, it can make the difference between giving up and sticking it out a bit longer. CPM ads are really useful if you plan to write and promote “resource bait”, which might bring surges of traffic that earns you at least $3-5 per thousand (per Mille) pageviews.
  5. Paid reviews. Personally, I don’t like doing these. They sometimes appear on my sites, but I often get a friend to do the review and pay them the full amount. But if you have a suitable niche and don’t mind, these can earn you some extra income. The problem for me is that they take extra writing time on top of what you already write.
  6. Diversify income sources. I still don’t believe MOST bloggers will earn a living with just AdSense. I’ve previously discussed many ways for alternate income (such as freelancing), and for using blogging as a means to promote your other income sources. This includes promoting your services and products. (For example, I hope to use blogging to promote my movies, once I finish film school. In the meantime, I’ll keep building my personal brand, as well as start promoting my future film studio name. I no longer plan to make a living from just blogging. It’s not satisfying enough for me.)
  7. Take a scientific approach. In the right niche, you can often count on a consistent average daily CTR for ads. Say it’s 2%. Work backwards. The daily CPC (Cost per Click) will fluctuate, and is affected by seasonal changes, but make a rough, conservative guess.

    Maybe you want to earn $1000/mth. And maybe you’re averaging $0.20 per click. That requires 5,000 clicks per month, or an average of 167 clicks per day. (Just consider that weekends are usually slower for most niches – something I’ve tested in about 15-20 niches.)

    If you’re averaging 2% CTR, then you need about 8,350 PV (pageviews) per day. If you are using social media sites and can figure out how to get at least 100 PV for each post you promote, then you’d need 83 posts/ day. Not a winning approach. This is where you need to put the most effort: efficient ways to promote your posts, even after the search engines finally index your new site. This is why you need to make lots of “social” friends.

    On the other hand, if you can pull 500 PV per post by using five or six social media sites, then you only have to do 15 posts/day. Not long ones, but you’ll still want to write at least 100 words/post, to escape “thin content” search engine penalties. Put some effort into maximizing  the effect of your blog posts.

Obviously, this 15 posts/day approach is not suitable for all niches. In some niches, readers simply won’t appreciate it. But the general principles I’ve mentioned still apply. Your niche might just have a rough scientific formula, though 3-5 quality posts per day might be all you need – especially if it has a high ad CTR, or at least provided you make the effort to promote on social media sites.

And when the search engines finally kick in and send traffic in the many thousands of pageviews per day, that’s when the revenue COULD go exponential. Provided you’ve done everything else right, and added a reasonable mix of CPC (e.g., AdSense) and CPM or CPA ads.

Building a successful blog is like playing a game of golf: there are dozens of factors you have to apply in sync. Here are a few:

  1. Adding timely content of at least 100+ words, if your site is newsy.
  2. Adding quality content that satisfies your readers and induces them to help you promote.
  3. Promoting your own content or hiring someone to do it for you.
  4. Having the most optimal layout of content, navigation, and advertising.
  5. Being consistent.

There are other factors, but these are the ones that come foremost to mind. You just have to find the rhythm that’s right for you and your topic.

Net Professionals: Do You Have a Work Contingency Plan?

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If you work for yourself and spend a substantial portion of your day online, have you consciously considered how important your computer and Internet connection are? Do you have a contingency plan if something goes wrong?

While it’s nice to keep a positive attitude, sometimes things just go wrong. Consider: This past Wednesday night, for the first time in several years, I decided to write down some “affirmations”. After spending 10-15 minutes typing into a mindmap all the great things that would happen in my life for the next two years – and envisioning it all – my computer shut down on its own. It wouldn’t turn back on until Thursday morning, only to display a message about the CPU being shut down due to some “thermal event”.

Of course, my heart beat rapidly. My entire work life, passwords, contact info, online banking access, etc., was on there. And while I had intentions of getting another computer because of the way I work, I hadn’t planned on it financially just yet. Out of worry, I did buy another computer last night (thanks to my brother and a generous loan from Ryan). The service guy did manage to fix the old one, after nearly an hour of working on it, but I’m relieved to have a backup.

At this point, I have some redundancy in my equipment and accessories. While I don’t earn much in ad revenue, I do make a reasonable income freelancing. So like any business person, I have to protect my income-earning ability by ensure I have the necessary tools, even to the point of redundancy:

(1) Computers: Usable computers:

  1. Two active desktops.
  2. One old backup desktop.
  3. One active laptop.
  4. One old IBM thinkpad that some idiot friend of mine trashed but might be salvageable.

I have four functioning desktops but one is an ancient Linux machine that’s painfully slow and which I don’t have space for. Another desktop used to be part of my old home recording studio. However, after I blew away the 17 Gb drive where all my raw files for over 100 compositions lived, I stopped using it.  This happened between backup periods, and it put me off pursuing a composing career. Live and learn.

(2) Internet connection: Active connections [*] and additional options:

  1. [*] Cable Internet.
  2. [*] Wi-Fi to go.
  3. Cellular data plan, for my Palm Treo.
  4. High-speed dialup.
  5. Satellite Internet.
  6. Powerline Internet.
  7. Municipal Wi-Fi

Cable Internet is my primary access, and as of last night, I activated a Wi-Fi to go modem as a redundancy measure. It’ll be costly but it’s a necessary measure for me. That’s because, when I move to Toronto next year, I want no downtime in access. With this modem, I plug it in in any large city here and I can get online. I mean, we all know how long it takes the cable company to show up, and I can’t take the chance that I’ll be offline for weeks.

Wi-Fi to go modems do use a cellular network, but there’s no phone involved. I did have a cellular data plan on my Palm Treo, but it was absurdly expensive – Cdn$100/mth for a maximum 250Mb /month of bandwidth. I’ll only reinstate it when I get back into photography or get into film school, since I’ll possibly need it for location shoots. When revenue permits and needs dictate, of course. [The hardest part of freelancing, other than the ebb and flow of income, is separating “want” from “need”, in terms of technology expenditures.]

I’ve tried satellite Internet in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was unreliable during storms (about every day in the summer). As for Muni Wi-Fi, Toronto is in the first stages of partial citywide coverage. The only other option I’d explore is high-speed dialup as a backup, but only when I’m at the point of hiring someone to work for me. I know that four types of Internet connection sounds like overkill, but I that over a single superfast point of access.

(3) Software: I prefer redundancy in various software categories as well – not just in terms of specific applications but also in platform (desktop, web browser).

  1. Photo editing/ vector software /diagramming.
  2. Screen capture/ video capture.
  3. Video players.
  4. Mindmapping/ brainstorming.
  5. Text/ html/ blog editors.
  6. Chat/ IM/ VoIP.

(4) Cashflow: This is a tough one. Because I do have a few small online partnerships, and because I usually pay the writers each month before I collect from partners, I need to keep a minimum level of funds in my PayPal account at all times. Then there’s funds in my bank account for personal use and a very low-limit credit card. (I don’t like debt of any form.)

Pretty much the only redundancy I don’t have is two phones. I haven’t owned a landline in about ten years. When I worked for the consulting division of Bell Canada, I did carry around two pagers and two cell phones. I looked like a doofus, but I had my own devices as well as those for work – a necessity of the job. I’ll admit, though, that I might succumb to an Apple iPhone sometime in the future.

Are you as redunancy-obsessed as I am? What do you to ensure that your web working will not be affected by some unexpected event?

Hitting $100/mth in AdSense: 7 Things I’ve Learned

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Today is a milestone day for me, and it’ll surprise some people. AdSense gave me a nice treat for Hallowe’en – but it doesn’t make up for the trick of my pagerank dropping on several sites I spent good money buying and/or building. At any rate, I finally cracked $100 in Adsense earnings in a single month, for the first time since I started using the ad network around April 2005. That’s a very long time, and has allowed me to reflect upon it. Here’s what I’ve learned:

  1. Focus. Stick to building one site at a time and reach a modest amount of success before starting another site.
  2. Build traffic. You need a lot of traffic to monetize through AdSense, especially in competitive niches and obscure niches.
  3. Fine tune. Don’t run AdSense on sites that are giving you low ad CTR (Clickthrough Rate). Try it out, but if after a couple of months the CTR is low, stop using it until you determine why.
  4. Refine. Make sure to blend ads into your blog/ site theme. Don’t hide your ads but don’t make them stick out like a sore thumb in terms of colors and borders.
  5. Refine some more. Try the rectangular and square AdSense formats. These apparently have higher CTR, though I didn’t keep track of any AdSense channels to prove it.
  6. Improve quality. Write quality content that you can promote with social media, and keep it up or you’ll lose readership. This will give you the traffic you absolutely need to monetize CPC advertising. If you have older posts you’re embarrassed to have, don’t delete them. Instead, when you can’t think of what to write, browse your archives and see if you can write a better version of a bad post.
  7. Choose the right niche. Consider that some niches simply don’t monetize well with any sort of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. One such is the “how to blog” niche. You’re better off running appropriate affiliate offers. It helps considerably if you some how introduce discussions of gadgets or software no matter what your niche. Any niche that has higher priced items tends to also have higher CPC (Cost per Click) ads.

But I don’t consider this by any means a success. That $100+ isn’t for a single site, it’s for about 50 sites. What’s more, it includes sites that I’m partnered on, and have paid bloggers – who will eventually share in the revenues.

My problogging goal is to build up to at least US$3000/mth in ad revenue by making sure less of my sites suck. I get paid in US dollars, and the Canadian dollar’s current exchange rate is cost me several hundred dollars per month. The film school I want to enter in 2009 costs Cdn$5,000/term [updated] and lasts for six terms over two years. Because I refuse to ever get in debt again, I have to come up with my own cash. And since I only work online at present, freelancing, consulting and ad revenue are my only income sources.

My approach will be to continue the way I’ve be going: maintain freelance revenue and increase ad revenue by putting more effort into my own sites. It’ll be quite some time, if ever, before I earn money making movies.

What are your pro blogging goals, and how do you plan to use your earnings? Will you use them to support a career change or some other dream that you have?

How To Blog a New Niche: 5 Steps.

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So you’ve been reading up on Performancing and other places and want to get blogging on something you have a passion about but don’t consider yourself an expert on. “Write what you know,” you’ve heard. So what do you do? Well, while I have my passions, I’m a generalist and a freelancer. Here’s how I start blogging in a niche that’s new to me, and build up my knowlege.

  1. Scope out the niche. Suss out some good blogs in your desired niche and add them to your feed reader. If there’s a lot of hybrid blogs – in terms of topics – build a custom Yahoo Pipe to aggregate and filter multiple feeds, then add the result to your feed reader.
  2. Set up my own blog. WordPress is my platform of choice (even though Performancing is a Drupal blog, in case you are wondering.) The number of free themes and plugins far outranks any other choice, afaik. If you want to, you can tweak free themes and plugins – or ask a friend. If you want to use WordPress as more of a CMS (Content Management System) to build a generalized site (with or without a blog), you can do that with relative ease later.
  3. Start small. Start by writing and posting 5-10 short (20-50 word) summaries per day around current topics, using a techmeme-type of site, or a popurls-type – if available. The summaries link to authority blogs. I include a bit of personal commentary, to develop my voice in the niche. You don’t always know what you feel about something until you write it down.
  4. Build your site’s authority. In newer posts, deep-link back to at least two relevant archived posts. This is critical to start as early as possible, and forces you to be creative. Don’t just use the name of your archived article’s title in the hyperlink’s anchor text; use keywords, get creative. (See anything here at Perf written by Ryan, Ahmed, myself and many others and scan for deep links and take note of what text is used.)
  5. Start to focus. Slowly expand your commentary and conclusions – thnks to more confidence from doing more research. The average per-post word count increases. Gradually over time, you can start writing “authority” posts, asyou learn more about the niche.

I’ve used this approach for a number of niches and found that, eventually, I get to a point where I know enough about a topic that I can hire myself out or do guest blogging. But of course, this applies if you are simply building your own blog(s).

The key thing to remember is that if you wait until you’re already expert on something before you blog, you’ve lost a lot of authority building time. This is a relatively safe way to build your knowledge, without pretending to be an expert. Yet you also slowly build your authority via your blog/ website. It works for me.

What do you when you want to blog in a niche you are not an expert on?

5 Things 2 Years of Problogging Taught Me

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It gets pointed out to me a fair bit that I seem to be all over the blogosphere. The fact is that I write for probably 1/4 the number of blogs that I worked on last year. I’m focusing on fewer high PR blogs. Or was until Big Daddy G smacked some of them with PageRank penalties. Now, the focus is writing for quality blogs.

To say I’m not worried would be lying. If sites are affected in earnings abilities due to the penalties, will that mean fewer freelance blogging gigs – my primary income source? However, I stopped considering blogging as a career on its own, so that’s a few less knots in my stomach. I’ve learned a few things in the past 2+ years:

  1. Blogging is like a game of golf. You could have skills in various facets of blogging, but if everything isn’t just right and synchronized, your blog will not be a giant success. Which is not to say that modest success is bad.
  2. Problogging is not a career for everyone. This is a conclusion from the last point: most bloggers will not make enough to sustain the work on their own blogs, no matter how hard they try not to suck.
  3. Try blogging for hire. The blogger for hire route will probably make the average good blogger more money than their own blog(s). I emphasize “good”. If you’re good, disciplined, and timely, freelancing is the way to go – especially if you’re finding less success on your own blog(s).
  4. Apply discipline: quality, not quantity. Don’t start more blogs until the first few have reached the minimum level of success you want for them. Seriously. It’s tough because as a generalist, I tend to be interested in a lot of topics. I sneeze and I’ve just registered another handful of domains. But for most bloggers, $50/mth revenue from one blog is much better than $1/mth from fifty blogs. If you can’t make one work, you can’t make fifty work. Most people do not succeed with too many blogs. Focus on 1-4 blogs maximum, build them up, then hire out. Then expand if you feel the urge.
  5. Blog as a means, not as an endpoint. In line with the above realizations, blogging does not have to be a singular activity. It can be a full-time career, but I’m no longer expecting it. If it happens, it happens. I’ll stay positive.

While many people are praising the fact that they can blog from home, after 2+ years of doing so, I’m actually missing the social aspects of working somewhere, with other people. Does this mean I’m giving up blogging? By no means. What I am doing now is using it as an effective supplement/ platform for earning money in other ways. In fact, today I spoke to someone from the Toronto Film School, which I’m hoping to enroll in for Jan 2009. I’m also going to go back to my photography, film reviewing, and scriptwriting. Blogging will not only move me towards those goals, it’ll sustain me for some time to come.

So what lessons has blogging taught you so for, in terms of your career? Do you use blogging in a supplemntary way for another career, or do you want to simply blog?

Google Turns PageRank into a Joke – OR – How to Get On With Blogging

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By now you’ve probably heard: Google spanked a lot of websites. Hard. Very hard. With a PR (PageRank) penalty, for yet unconfirmed reasons. Sites with a solid PR7 for 3 years, such as Search Engine Journal, dived to PR4. It’s probably disheartening but nothing new for Google. One of my sites had PR6 in Oct (Nov?) 2005, then dropped to PR5 by the next PR rollout, where it’s stayed since – though maybe not for long. Google regularly changes their algorithms, in their ever-pressing quest for relevant search results. Though this time, I think they let the proverbial Shakespearean Monkeys change the PR algorithm.

Still, as more than a few bloggers have said the last few days, PR is Google’s toy to do with as they please, even if it means dinging true authority sites. If your sites got dinged below PR4, then it’s possible you’ve lost some forms of revenue or soon might. Maybe. But there are alternatives to the ad networks, which you should start exploring so that you can get on with your business.

As Brian Clark from Copyblogger says in an interview at Problogger, the PR drop is the best thing that’s happened to him. Of course, Brian has just launched his fantastic new Teaching Sells workshops, complete with articles, audio and video. I’m signed up and have started scanning the articles, and they’re in line with my own beliefs pre-blogosphere: that selling content that teaches someone how to do something DOES sell. But it was easy to get blinded with the blog successes of the few, and then the competive facet of scoring a high page rank.

Ultimately, though, you should get on with your blogging and ignore PageRank (whoa, what a switch of stance), now that it’s kind of a joke. I mean, Copyblogger and Problogger ARE AUTHORITY sites in their niches – as are many of the others hit – and by definition should rank high. So that proves PR is now useless as a measure and you shouldn’t fret over it. Gaining relevant, quality backlinks should be your target (as always), but for their own intrinsic value, not for PR.

I still say blog as a supplement, not as an end-all. Consider freelancing and maximize your income. Or start exploring your knowledge and consider what you could turn into paid content. Are you a subject matter expert on any topic? Can you become one? If yes, then you have some options for earning online that go beyond Google AdSense and anything else that depends on PR: paid content in the form of ebooks, audio, illustrations/ visuals/ video/ screencasts, limited-circulation e-newsletters, subscription services and more. Don’t even rule out print books. Sell your knowledge, and use blogging to show your authority in a niche.

Why New Bloggers Should Become Active at Performancing: 5 Tips

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Ahmed wrote about the blogging opportunities that came avialable to him through Performancing. I completely agree with him.

I’ve been around longer on Perf than Ahmed, but only just slightly. There are a few lurkers here that have been around longer than me, but they don’t seem to participate anymore. That leaves room for you, dear new Perf member/ newbie blogger.

For all the Perf readers that have recently started following this site, let me say to you that pretty much every single paid gig I’ve received since Jan 2006 was because of my participation here at Perf. Some gigs were indirect, but Perf has played a major factor in my being able to work from home for over a year

Of course, I’m a blogger for hire and don’t put as much effort into my own blogs (something I’ve started rectifying this summer). However, you’ll learn lots here for your blogs, or for your hired work, from active, successful bloggers sharing their experiences.

I don’t want to single anyone out, but I will say you should read every post Ahmed and Ryan have written here, not to mention all our other guest bloggers. Go through the archives as well. Set up your own Perf blog and start writing about blogging/ related topics; build your profile. It might just lead you to work.

I’m especially going to say to every blogger that drops comments on job listings at Perf and say “pick me, i can blog for you,” I say prove it. Show what you know. Here’s what you should do:

  1. Sign up with Performancing so you have a blog here. Use a username with your name in it.
  2. Build up your profile page and write in it a bit about your current projects and what you are hoping to work on in the future. Link to any blogs you own.
  3. Start commenting on the posts here. Don’t be afraid to disagree, but do offer constructive criticism instead of insults.
  4. Start posting on your Performancing blog . Topics should only be about blogging/ writing, blog platforms, monetization, SEO/ SEM, SMM, productivity, finding work, work environments (e.g., at home), software/ tools, etc. [Personal Perf blogs should not be about anything else.]
  5. In your posts, link back to your best relevant articles elsewhere, as well other bloggers’ relevant articles on Performancing and elsewhere.

Do all that and… Well, there are a number of bloggers who are in a position to hire, and they keep tabs on Performancing activity. I, for example, am much more likely to hire you if you’ve been participating on Perf. I get to know you, your work (ability to write a sentence), thoughts, etc.