Blogging

I was speaking with Tris earier this evening, and he drew my attention to a nasty little case of blog hijacking involving Blogger, and Gmail. According to his post about the hijacking, its been about 24hrs since the distraught blogger put in a help request to get Google to help her get her blog back, but still no help.

Come on Google, you should know better than this. When the shit hits the fan, someone needs to hustle before things get out of hand.

See Tris’ post for the full scary details, and if you have Blogger and Gmail account, start taking some steps to protect yourself from similar problems. Changing your password immediately would be a good first step, and reading Chris’ post on personal information would make an excellent 2nd step.

I have just worked out this morning that two days ago was my seventh Blogiversary! My first ever blog post was February 1999. It was great looking through my old life but one thought stayed with me after reviewing my old entries, how much should I have made public?

One of the weird things that started happening after I had been posting for a while was I would be contacted by people I had never met. At that time I called the site my journal, I don’t know if the word “blog” had been coined yet. I wasn’t really part of any blog scene so my visitors came from search engines and clicks on newsgroup and discussion list signatures.

I got some very weird messages. People would email me like they knew me, really over familiar. I would get people asking to meet up because they were coming to England. People would ask how my wife and daughter were. They would comment on my photographs. I think I shared too much now thinking about it, I even had details of our new house on there – we could have had visitors!

We tell people that to get people involved in your blog you need to put across personality, people need to feel connected. Can you do that while keeping a distance? How personal do you need to be to have personality?

If you look around at some of the top bloggers, they all vary in how much personal information they share. Scoble gives quite advance notice of his travel plans, he even has his contact details right on his blog. We know about his family life. Darren Rowse very explicitly says he does not like to share too much and is very selective about what he does divulge.

I think Darren has it right now I have thought about it. Scary thing is, even though Darren is ultra careful he still wound up with a stalker making a physical attack on his house!

Thankfully they do not feel threatened now it has been resolved but I think there is a lesson for all of us, be careful how much you share. It frightens me now to think of how much I have let slip over the years, how much information I have put out there for anyone to read.

Your blog is not worth risking your families safety for.

If you haven’t heard about the Blogonomics Blog Cruise yet, it’s high time you did. Apart from the fact that a whole bunch of great bloggers will be speaking and conducting workshops over the four day carribean cruise in October, you’ll get to have a beer with me aswell 🙂

Im very pleased to say that I will be joining Robert Scoble, Steve Hall, Tris Hussey, Darren, Duncan and Jeremy from B5, and a whole bunch of others in speaking at the event. We will also be conducting a 2hr workshop on a subject soon to be announced (it’s all a bit 007 at present, but check for my next post, i’ll explain a bit more…).

So, if you’re looking to have a few days fun cruisng the carribean, meet some great bloggers and generally running riot aboard ship, go sign up, I know it’s going to be GREAT!

If you are struggling to think of a topic for your new blog then I have an idea for you. Past advice has been to follow your passion, or failing that to follow your expertise or if all else fails, follow the money. This idea is a little different and there is a ready made pool of topics just waiting to be exploited!

Succumbing to peer pressure I finally started playing with 43things, you know that “web2.0 social networking” doodad? While it seems to me the web application equivalent of those Livejournal 20 question “memes” that teenage girls like to share it did give me inspiration.

Lots of people want to learn new things

The idea of 43things is you go into the tool and enter all the things you would like to do or achieve. Kind of like a goal diary. Having entered all your goals and ambitions then you can start “networking” with other users.

One of the things I would like to do is to learn french. Well apparently so do 1994 other users. See where I am going with this?

Content ideas on tap

I started my Digital Photography blog after playing with my new DSLR and realising to get the most out of the hobby I really ought to learn it properly. After talking with a couple of friends we decided if we were all going to learn we might as well share notes and what better way than to blog it? (Well, a wiki would have worked too! Heh).

The great thing about blogging while you learn is all the topics you struggle with, learn and blog about will be the same or similar that any beginner will face. One of the problems with being an expert is you forget what Mr and Miss Noob find difficult. Your audience will connect with you because you are one of them.

You learn, visitors learn, you earn

For your own learning it is great too. Not only do you learn more by trying to explain to others but other people will read what you write and answer your questions and fix your mistakes. I got confused about a particular piece of DSLR lense terminology and posted a question “I’m confused, help!” – straight away I had four comments all clearing up my confusion, you can’t beat it. Yes I could have posted to a forum but this way I was helped, anyone visiting my blog is helped, and the way my blog gets interlinked it will stay for the lifetime of my blog. Win win and win – fantastic.

Tap the resource

Once I realised that learning blogs were a great option I started looking at 43things again. I realised anyone ought to be able to look through the list of example “things”, find one that inspires and write a blog about any one of them. Not only do you get to learn something new, you get to blog about it and hopefully earn some pro blogging income at the same time knowing that there is potential traffic available!

What are you waiting for? Get learning, blogging and earning!

What do people think is the preferred layout for maximizing adsense revenue for:

• a blog’s home page
• an individual post page
• archive and category pages

We’ve got 3 ad units and 1 link unit available for use per page. Is it best to utilize them all, or will that be ad overload and cause you to lose viewship? And which ad units work best for you guys? Have you found link units to be effective, as well?

Which blogs that you’ve come across do you think have the best layouts for maximizing their adsense income?

Which of the 615+ wordpress themes that are out there are best suited for both SEO purposes, easy to read for the viewer, and maximized revenue (assuming that you insert your adsense code into the themes, of course). (check out the wordpress theme viewer to see a sizeable number of them demo’d). Which of those themes can be best monetized?

And lastly, where does everyone stand on the ‘ads blending into the site vs standing out’ controversy?

I look forward to reading people’s responses to my numerous questions 🙂

Many years ago, webmasters worked out that owning directories was a great way to give yourself links, get free content in way of submissions and great revenue by putting affiliate links dressed up as real listings on the pages. Google didn’t like this much, and nowadays, most directories are worthless in terms of link value because of this.

Now we’re all blogging though, the “craze” has started again. And im not finding it any more charming than I did last time around. The problem is, that this years crop of content spammers dont even have the skills to realize their efforts are in vain.

And you know what? Spamming mulitiple guessed email addresses at performancing.com is NOT a good way to garner favor and respect in the community.

Flookie.net – STOP Spamming Bloggers!

Really, of all the stupid, idiotic, underpants on head crazy misguided things you could possibly do to get a new site off the ground, spamming peoples inboxes, bloggers inboxes, has got to be the stupidest.

And apart from that, directories…

• Were shit 3yrs ago
• Are still shit today
• Are not used by humans
• Are in most cases a bad link move on the part of bloggers
• Are disliked, for pretty good reason by major search engines
• And are consequently, a waste of everybodies time

Sheeeesh, we’ve been here so many times. do we have to do it all again with blogs? It wasn’t any fun the first couple of times, and it wont be any better this time.

God help me, i’f I get another sodding email saying “we really like your blog!” from a bot to an email address that is not printed anywhere on the web I’ll scream.

Just give it a break, it wasnt a good idea then, and guess what?

It still isnt.

Sometimes I wonder how I’ve managed to build some successful blogs when I spend 70% of my time, well, wasting time. Question: If I had spent all those hours building engaging content instead, how much further ahead could I be by now? In no particular order, my top 8 pro blogging time wasters:

1. Reading blogs – Obviously it’s something we all have to do, to stay up with current news and events, get fresh ideas, challenge ourselves, etc. But it’s easy to get addicted to reading blogs; instead of spending 70% of the time reading and 30% posting, perhaps you should spend 30% of the time reading and 70% posting. You might think, “Yah, but my knowledge would suffer” – but ask yourself, out of those blogs you read, how many are posting the same thing? If you cut out half of them, would you really miss any news?
2. Replying to comments – So some guy writes an interesting comment that begs reply. Do it: it’ll show readers you’re engaged, and build community and repeat traffic at your site. But what about those d*****bag antagonizers who make some smart aleck comment each time you post? Ignore it. Replying to it probably won’t build community, traffic, or revenue. Remember, you don’t have to reply to everyone, and you probably shouldn’t.
3. Commenting at other blogs – Yes, this can be valuable in building your reputation and profile, especially when your blog is new. There comes a point, though, where you should consider putting your reply/rebuttal on your own site as a blog entry. This has the added bonus of being link bait (many bloggers will link to people who specifically disagree with them).
4. Refreshing Google Adsense earning stats – Actually, this is one of the things I like about Commission Junction – they seem to update every 24 hours. So there just isn’t any motivation to login (after I do so once, during morning coffee)
5. Checking the Sitemeter – Probably something you should do once a day. If other bloggers are linking to you, you want to know, if for no other reason than to engage in conversations at their sites to strengthen whatever relationship you have with them. But there’s no reason to refresh the stats every 30 minutes!
6. Tweaking the CSS – I just had to get my homepage to be WAI AA compliant. It feels soooo much better now that it’s done. Will the time spent doing that give me a positive ROI? Probably not. (It probably would if I had a gigantic ecommerce site – but I don’t. I have a small static homepage, and some blogs.)
7. Tweaking the Adsense – Hey I’m the biggest Adsense optimizer guy out there, but there comes a point where the diminishing returns are screaming at you: “Go make content!!”
8. Reading Performancing – Just kidding. If you don’t do this every day, your blog is practically guaranteed to fail.

What sucks up your time?

You can write, people like your style and enjoy your work. But you can’t make enough money from advertising to pay your bills. What can you do? Have you considered blogging for hire?

“Professional Blogging” does not always have to mean selling advertising space or joining a blog network. Corporate marketing departments are slowly getting the idea that blogging could be a good thing for business and are looking into setting up blogs. While some begin with every intention of maintaining their blog using internal resource, as many realise that this is not realistic. That is where you could step in.

There are a few options, you can freelance your writing to companies or even “Ghost Blog“. Ghost Blogging involves writing for a company as if you are part of the company. You “become” a member of the staff, in some cases pretending to be the CEO or some other high powered executive. In other cases you might be nameless, write under your own name or take on a persona of someone in HR or PR. Personally, as a consumer and as a blogger, I prefer the straight and honest approach of writing as yourself.

You could say that Scoble is not far from this scenario. Scoble didn’t always work for Microsoft. While many Microsofties do blog, you could say Scoble was hired to provide a blog-voice for the company. OK, the post at Microsoft is taken but there might well be companies that you could apply your blogging skills for.

Another scenario is writing about a company on behalf of that company in your own blog. This is not so much an advertorial, more a transparent and upfront relationship like a spokesperson. You could say Hugh Macleod fits into this category with his pimping wine and bespoke suits. It is clear what the relationship is between him and the companies he represents and the companies receive a lot of attention they would not have without his work on their behalf.

The best part of all this is while it pays well, you could earn hundreds or thousands depending on the niche and the amount of work you do, but also it doesn’t have to take all your time. There is an opportunity to blog for income and then use your other free time to blog your own projects if you wish. It’s a good job to have too, compared to other ways of making a living. Blogging for a company can have many of the same benefits as blogging for yourself, no geographic ties, no need to 9-5 in a office, no commute, etc.

As well as being able to write well, you need to be able to connect with the companies audience and provide useful, interesting information. All your skills in research will be required and also you need to be able to talk the talk fluently. While it is probably best for you to already be an expert in the niche depending on your learning skills and the amount of support you get from the company in terms of facts and news you might be able to blog without any prior knowledge.

So how do you get these gigs? The obvious route is to pitch yourself to likely companies directly. Another route might be to find out the marketing agency of a company you are interested in and talk to them. Failing that more companies are now advertising on job boards and putting out tenders in freelance writing sites.

I think depending on the niche and the time commitment I would be happy doing this. Could you see yourself blogging for hire?