Blogger

I’m looking for a celebrity blogger who’s interested in the potential of eventually doing celebrity blogging as a full time career. In other words, the ideal candidate is someone who is passionate about celebrity culture, and loves being immersed in it.

The blogger should be familiar with WordPress, especially working with images.

The blog in question is Celebrity Cowboy.

At this point in time, I’m offering a scaled salary:

$100 for 3+ short posts per day
$200 for 6+ short posts per day
$300 + 25% profit share for 9+ short posts per day
$400 + 25% profit share for 12+ short posts per day
$500 + 50% profit share for 15+ short posts per day

English should be the blogger’s first language. We are mostly interested in a blogger who wants to take the last option and has a sincere interest in running a celebrity blog *full time* as a career. This is not a position for a part time blogger with little interest in celebrity culture.

I have strong evidence that 15+ posts per day, combined with heavy promotion, will quickly lead to a site that can generate enough money to support a moderate, full time salary. However, part of the success depends on the effort, attitude and ability of the writer. That is why we are offering a profit share and not a flat salary. We want the blogger to have invested interest in the success of the site.

For more information, please contact me at [email protected]

How Bloggers Can Adapt To Universal Search

Google’s universal search is a huge change to the organic search landscape. On May 16, Google told the world their super popular search engine would be filled with not just text based websites, but also images, videos, news, books, and maps. Yes, the search engine results pages (SERPs) like look a little different.

So, how can bloggers take advantage of these changes? How should our SEO, marketing, and traffic building efforts change?

VIDEOS

I think Youtube and other video sharing sites will be huge in the new search world. Google bought Youtube, so I’m sure they want Youtube videos to rank highly. And let’s not forget that Youtube is the fourth visited website in the world (according to Alexa).

It’s time to start testing video on our blogs. Camtasia and Cam Studio are screencast software that can help you make videos. And your webcam may prove to be a tool to help you reach the top ten of the SERPs. To really make a splash, you can shoot quality videos with a good video camera.

As an added advantage to making videos, traffic from web videos is pretty good quality. This traffic seems to convert better than other types of traffic. This means video traffic is more likely to click on an adsense ad, buy an affiliate product, or opt-in to a mailing list.

PRESS RELEASES

Another tactic to consider in light of universal search is making the news. With online press release site, it’s easy to submit press releases. As news items begin to rank higher, you’ll want to write press releases for your website and your niche.

If you have some money to spend, you can submit your press release at PRWeb. You’ll get traffic and a strong backlink. PRWeb used to be free, but now they charge $80 for a press release without anchor text and $200 with anchor text. If you don’t want to spend money, there are free press release sites like PR-inside.com.

IMAGES

Another thing to consider is the use of pictures and images. In many niches, internet users are looking for pictures. For example, I did keyword research for my wedding blog and found keyword phrases like “wedding dress pictures” and “wedding flower pictures.”

Furthermore, images are the first results on image related SERPs. You’ll get many visitors if you get one of your pictures on the front page of these searches. So, if you’re in one of these industries that love pictures, add more images to your blog with keyword-rich alt tags.

I’m in the process of transferring about 25 blogs away from Dreamhost. I’ve completed about 10 sites so far. Why am I transferring my blogs away from Dreamhost? Well, because they suck.

You really can’t put it any other way. I have blogs on three different Dreamhost servers. All three of those servers slow to a ridiculous crawl every day. All three of those servers go down at least once a week. All three of those servers disable vital backend WordPress functions when the servers are under stress (more often than not).

So Dreamhost sucks. That’s a fact and it’s not disputable. I wish I had known that they sucked last May when I first started using them. I wish I had taken the early warning signs more seriously. But I didn’t. I was seduced by low prices. And now you can learn from my lesson.

The fact is that crappy hosting cuts into the bottom line. I’m already seeing about an 8% jump in my AdSense earnings on the sites that I’ve moved away from Dreamhost to a fast, hoppy server. So much for all that money I saved with cheap hosting. The fact is that I’ve lost money. Now I’ve got to move on.

Ask yourself this question. Do you find yourself frustrated with your web host on a weekly basis? Do you notice slow load times on your blog at critical times of the day? Then suck it up and take on the task of migrating your blog to a quality blog host.

In the comments, let’s discuss 1) how to find a good webhost and 2) how to ensure that your webhost isn’t going to oversell their servers and 3) what are some of the consistently good webhosts out there?

I’m not too sure if there are many Performancing users who write literature on their blogs, but if you’re one of them, have you considered that the pieces you’ve published on your blog might be disqualified from appearing in literary publications and being entered into contests?

This isn’t an inconvenience for lit bloggers who just want to share their works with the world through online journals. It’s also not for writers who are already established (e.g. have published a book or have won contests). However, it is a problem for new writers looking to ‘break into’ the ‘offline’ (and often academic) literary circles.

When I began my first blog (Slip of the Pen) back in 2004, I wanted it to become the repository of my then-infrequent attempts at creative writing. Mercifully, a couple of good pieces sprung from the blog (or so I want to believe!). When I began to take lit submissions seriously, I naturally turned to those few good pieces. Being a lit industry n00b and all, I was disappointed to learn that these pieces couldn’t be accepted by many respected lit publications, both print and online, simply because they’re already considered self-published. Some journals even explicitly mention ‘blog posts’ as unacceptable submissions.

I personally believe this system sucks, especially if the lit blog in question isn’t monetized (and thus highly personal). But I didn’t and still don’t have a choice – I confess that I’m now writing pieces with a “publication first, blog later” mindset. It has paid off in terms of writing credits, but yeah, there’s been a trade-off – my lit blog’s content is becoming less diverse. Its recent posts have been narrowed to a single genre, that is, personal essays.

For the lit and other art bloggers (photography, paintings, comics, and so on, though I don’t know if the ‘self-published’ term applies to these works) who can see themselves in my shoes, deciding which work to put or not on blogs can be a tricky issue.

Will you save the best and post only the ‘good enough’ works? This might be construed as disrespectful to your blog readers, as they’re virtually on equal footing with print readers, and thus deserve the same quality. Will you post only the pieces which have been earlier published in journals? You’ll lose out on the early feedback and (hopefully) constructive criticism from your blog readers – and feedback is a blog’s forte. Not to mention new and raw writers need feedback, badly.

I guess one thing will help solve the problem a bit – writing more. More works to choose from, more room for a “publication first, blog later” mindset. This works well with spacing out your posts and sticking to a regular posting schedule. For example, if you post in weekly intervals, you need to resist the urge to post that spanking new masterpiece of a poem immediately a day after the last entry.

P.S. Technically, the term “literary blog” doesn’t just pertain to blogs with original works of writers and poets; the term can cover blogs that discuss books, feature other writers and their works, and deal with literature in general. I narrowed the term’s use here for simplicity’s sake. 😉

It doesn’t matter.

Ia Lucero’s post on the Perils of Problogging is an interesting read for Performancing.com users, who more or less look to earn money from their blogs. The post has also been picked up by a couple of other blogs, most notably by The Blog Herald.

In the post, Ia raises a lot of points, ranging from bad site monetization choices to blogs being given a bad name by the numerous unoriginal “money mills” out there. My attention was piqued by one line she wrote (emphasis added):

With the abundance of article sites out there, amateur probloggers (what a paradoxical term!) think they can get away with posting unoriginal content, an especially attractive tactic since minimal effort is required.

Hmm, “amateur probloggers”? Does that pertain to Z-listers earning mere Adsense cents a week, or part-time probloggers? Heck, what makes a problogger in the first place?

Darren Rowse has a guest post by David Wilkinson about it, and so does Michael who talks about it in a country context. For me…

I don’t really care. If someone blogs and makes money from it, whatever the method or ethics, then he can trumpet to the world that he is a problogger. I’m hoping he doesn’t give the ‘job title’ a bad name by filling his site with content o’ junk and loads of poorly placed ads, but really, that’s out of our control. Why, how many people regard lawyers and salesmen with suspicion? (Not to offend our lawyer and salesmen friends out there.) For every profession, there’s somebody out there who thinks it’s make-believe or a joke. We’ve got to live with that.

I believe the best way to approach the word “problogger” is with guarded recognition, especially during the blogging industry’s formative years. It’s a title that is secondary. Because before you blog, you might be already a freelance writer, journalist, corporate executive, web designer, comic artist, and so on. I guess this is why many people – even those who already earn substantial amounts from their blogs – go “Huh?” when given the word “problogging”. They see blogging as just a supplement to their incomes and an extension of their main jobs. This POV in turn conflicts with full-time bloggers who eat, breathe, and live by their blog earnings.

Now, I’m really interested in hearing your feedback on this one: Do you call yourself a problogger? Do you get weird reactions from friends and relatives when you tell them you are one? And what alternative job titles do you use or suggest your problogging comrades use?

Me: I call myself a problogger; it’s proudly displayed on my tech blog’s sidebar. Yes, I’ve gotten dozens of “Whaa?” faces, especially from those who own only LiveJournals and other diary-type blogs. More recently, when somebody asks me what I do for a living, I simply say, “Writer”. (Many think it’s too generic, but I believe it’s just one of the most elegant titles in the world.) And if the person who asks me looks like a Net user, I chip in, “Website owner” or “Webmaster”.

How about you, guys?

SplashCast

SplashCastMedia offers their SplashCast video slideshow device, which is quite possibly one of the most interesting and robust available. Each slide can be a document, image or video. You can search for and selectively include images from Flickr and videos from YouTube, or upload your own. You can compose text documents in their SplashCast console. The alternative to a customized show is to specify either a Flickr or YouTube RSS feed. You don’t have control over the items, however, a new release is coming, with many more feed-based features. You can see examples at 901am.

Slide

Slide has standard web slideshow features, allowing you to build a presentation with a sequence of images you choose. You have a several viewer options in terms of size, shape, skin, and type of transition. Where Slide differs from most similar packages is that you can give it the URL of any RSS feed where each item contains an image and produce a slideshow out of those pics. That means you can use custom feeds from, say, Yahoo Pipes or other Web 2.0 mashup tools.

ThinkFree

ThinkFree has a viewer plugin for the WordPress blogging platform which supports various Microsoft Office files (documents, spreadsheets, presentations). Clicking on an appropriate link brings up the display of the file in question.

To incorporate ThinkFree in other web applications, there is a viewer API. [via Mashable] The plugin itself supports ThinkFree files, which are compatible with the above-mentioned Office files.

The only drawback I see from using this plugin is that your “office” content may not get indexed by search engines. Although I haven’t tested it yet, so I may be wrong. On the other hand, if you upload Office files to your web server and link to them from your blog posts, those files will definitely get index by most of the major search engines.

When we we’re children, doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like “the terrible twos.” As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.

Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.

Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I’m thinking of today is when I used to think

that being good and smart is everything. Yeah I was that way once.

It could be a stage we all go through.

What Could I Learn from Them?

Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistics, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say “hello.”

In other words, people in their world are as flat as baseball cards.

Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, “problogger,” Search Engines don’t read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn’t stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.

People understand when we don’t care about them.

What’s more interesting is that, if we’re looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.

First some will start to email, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back favors they’ve asked.
Whether we make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn’t really matter. If we treat people as “less than,” they will find a way to let us know. Here are some ways that they choose.

• They stop reading our blogs.
• They tell other folks how they’ve been treated.
• They remove links or stop linking.
• They post about whatever made them feel that way.

Let’s face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can know even other ways that folks remind us they are people.

The fact is if we worry only about beating the system, and ignore the people who read us — we have to wonder why we’re blogging. It hard work to game the system and the gaming process never ends. . . .

But getting loyal readers and having strong relationships makes blogging easier every day.

So much so that I came back to this post — just to write that last sentence.
Liz Strauss

Doctors name the stages of growing up with cute names like “the terrible twos.” As a teacher, I can tell you that developmentally certain ages are, as a group, easier to work with than certain others. Five year olds are gentle givers. Eight year olds are too. Nine year olds are little lawyers. And all bets are off when any age has the letters t-e-e-n in it.

Why am I telling you this? Well, believe it. Adults have similar stages. None of which I ever wish to return to.

Now, not all of us go through all of the stages for the same amount of time. but all of us experience them in some way or fashion and learn the lesson that comes with them. The lesson that I’m thinking of today is that people really don’t count only the system does.

What Could I Learn from Them?

Some bloggers focus only on SEO issues. They spend their lives gaming the system. They play digg and similar sites. They find ways to link to higher page ranks. They monetize their blogs within a an inch of overweighting the entire Internet. When they look at another person, what they see is a series of statistice, that describes whether a relationship with that person is worth the time it takes to say “hello.”

In other words, people in their world aren’t people they are stacks of statistics, flat as baseball cards.

Now that might seem like a way to get to the top of SERPs or higher in Alexa or Techornati, but, “problogger,” Search Engines don’t read your blog and often the traffic they send doesn’t stop long enough that to see who wrote the post.

People understand when we don’t care about them.

What’s more interesting is that they find a way to let us know.

If we’re looking in the wrong direction, people will let us know.

• First some will start to emai, offering to write something for us. Some will ask whether we are okay. Some will begin to take back faors they’ve asked as our time, our credibility, and our willingness to treat them with respect by telling them what’s going on takes away their generosity of spirit.
• Whether you make a $1.00 or $1,000,000 doesn’t really matter. If you treat people as “less than,” as one-dimensional creatures who are all the same, we are reducing them to some lowef level of the food chain.
• People know when they are being treated as less than people. Smiling from strangeers does not make trust or credibility, especially when the issue is open for the world to read in a cathedral in Scotland.

Separating people into those who can help us gain value and those who can’t is bad in real life and bad in blogging.

What happens is that the people find a way to tell you that. Here are some ways that they choose.

• They stop reading your blog.
• They tell other folks about what a slick blogger you are.
• They remove your links or stop linking to you,
• They find a way to tell the folks that life without you works for them,
• They tell all of their friends about the negative experience they had while working with or for you.
• They post about whttever neative act you might do or they tell your boss.

Let’s face it. None of these reactions are particularly pleasant. Perhaps you can think of even more.

The fact is if you worry only about beating the system, and you ignore the people in it, the people will find a way YEs, you would both know about it and feel that it happened. Hopefully, you’d figured out that the most complexs systems was guilt to serhumans durin hours that personnel didn’t want to work.

So let’s quite puttung people in those tiny little groups and soon enough you’ll be ready so that you can make an appropriate apology and perhaps even start on building a real rapsody of singin each other’s praises.

Liz Strauss