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The Business of Blogging: What do you do with your earnings?

Over at College Startup I wrote an article this morning entitled Five Effective Ways To Re-Invest Your Profits. The basic point of that post is that the best way to become rich off the Internet is to slowly exchange roles with your money: put your money to do the work that you used to do.

Writing that article got me wondering what the average blogger does with his or her earnings. Do you keep 100% and use it for spending money? Do you reinvest 30% and keep 70% as salary? Or vice versa?

So let’s use the comment section to share our personal strategies for handling the money we get as (pro)bloggers. I think it will be helpful to all of us to get a picture of how other bloggers use their earnings and maybe “borrow” a few tips;-)

The Only Way to Beat Bloggers’ Block

For some people, blogging is as easy (and fast) as talking. These people are rare – good conversationalists AND good bloggers (or maybe they just appear that way?).

For the rest of us though, blogging is NOT as simple as saying our ideas out loud, simply because our ideas are NOT clear enough.

Blogging, especially good blogging, can be excruciatingly painful when you just cannot transform the thoughts in your head into a post in your blog editor.

There are many reasons why this could happen – stress, whether from being over-worked or just poor health and distractions can jumble up our thoughts and leave us grasping for the thread that can unravel the mixed up thoughts and turn them into a post so we can get it over with and move on to something else.

It doesn’t work that way always, and we get even more stressed out.

The way to beat it is a ‘Duh’ method – one that you’d say is so obvious that I shouldn’t even put it in words (but if it were that obvious, why are we still struggling over what to write?).

The only way to beat Bloggers’ Block is to:

Just Start Blogging.

Don’t fret about the 40 other post ideas you have written down that you want to put up (are you nuts?), or the affiliate code that you have to add to your older posts (is it worth your time?), or that OTHER blog that you haven’t been writing on for the last two weeks and you’ve fallen way behind on your work quota… etc etc.

As a society, we think way too much. There’s a time and place for everything – but when you’re working, you should be working, not thinking about it. At the end of the day, you might take out 3-5 minutes to review and perhaps another 5 minutes to plan for the next day, but apart from that, does it really help you if you go over the same pros and cons 300,506 times?

So the next time you’re stuck and don’t know what to say, open up a notepad file or something and start writing. Take action – put yourself under a deadline and force yourself to get things done before that deadline comes.

We all need to kick ourselves in the backside now and then – it’s good practice, I assure you.

PR10 Sites – They Do Exist

All indications are that the Google PageRank rollout is going on right now. Evidence is that a few sites formerly without a PR ranking now have one. But wait until Monday before you start worrying, as some PR indicators will fluctuate.

Now this isn’t something most of us will ever experience for our sites, but Jack Humphrey posted an article last weekend about a list of PR10 sites at Search Engine Genie. It’s a very short list, but proof that they do exist – in case you doubted anyone site other than Google.com has a PR10.

However, this list, as far as I can tell, is from Jan 25, 2007, and some of the sites listed – including apple.com – are showing as PR9, according to my SearchStatus for Firefox extension. Apparently Google lost a lot of PR10 pages as well, so we’re not the only people who suffer the decline. Except Google never has to worry about how much money their pages will earn from running someone else’s ads.

If you’re interested in a bit of PR10 history, check out the links at the bottom of the list, which show PR10 sites as far back as early 2004.

Generally speaking, don’t get too obsessed about the PR of your sites except for ad networks that use it to measure what you’ll get paid for ads. I’m a firm believer in organic growth of backlinks, but I use the term “organic” very broadly.

Performancing more important website than Drudge Report, Google confirms

The DrudgeReport has been assigned a PageRank of 6 in the latest PR toolbar rollout. Performancing has a PageRank of 7. According to an official at Google (we’ll call him Tim “the toolbar” Thomas for the sake of confidentiality), “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of [a website].”

According to Google, Performancing.com is more important than DrudgeReport.com.

Congratulations Performancing staff. Job well done;-) The most powerful company in the world has spoken, and you’ve come out on top!

pMetrics Debuts With PageRank 6, Advertising Rates Go Up ;-)

pMetrics looks like it has been assigned a strong PR 6 in the August 2007 toolbar rollout. That means that the early-bird advertising rates have now expired.

But don’t fret. You can still get great deals on both text links and graphic ads on a subdomain that has over 885,060 backlinks. Leverage our 4,000+ pMetrics users and massive backlink strength to jumpstart your business quickly and efficiently.

Pro and Blogger pMetrics members can pick up a link for $45/month. Non-paying pMetrics users get a link for $59/month. Everyone else can get a link for $79/month.

Just get in touch with me at [email protected] to get your ad campaign started today.

The 5 Step Guide To Being An Effective Mobile Webmaster

Whether you’re flying half way around the world to close a new big development contract or just driving a few hours to your local tropical resort, most of us in the blogging / webmastering / SEO world are increasingly mobile. As my frequent flyer miles have climbed over the past couple of years I’ve found that there are a few steps you can take to minimize the inconveniences of traveling and the costs it imposes on your business. Rather than write about the latest and greatest technologies and gadgets, the following tips are all things that I actually do and find beneficial on a daily basis, so I can feel confident in saying that they’d help you remain both connected and mobile as well.

1. Buy A Crackberry.

Yeah, I know its annoying to watch the a-hole in the car next to you trying to read his emails while driving, but a Blackberry (or Treo) really will revolutionize the way you’re able to do business. Rather than having to drop everything and open up the laptop to see if that important email has come in, you can just quickly check it on the blackberry. Its especially helpful if part of your team is on the other side of the world, because it gives you the freedom to go out and enjoy your evenings without worrying about holding your team up as they wait for your response.

2. Stick With One Airline

I’m usually skeptical of brand loyalty, after all Shell and Exxon both provide the same product so why pick one over the other? But in the case of airlines, if you repeatedly fly with the same airline your leverage increases dramatically. By no means to I fly every week, but just because I always fly the same airline, I never have to wait in security lines, get my baggage before other customers, and when something goes wrong I get shifted over to another flight while others get delayed. Regular customers often don’t realize that it only takes a few flights a year before these benefits start accruing, so when you can, pick an airline and stick with it.

3. Shift To Online Apps

Let’s face it, webware is still years away from being a full replacement to your laptop. But there are a lot of things that webware can do just as well as traditional software, while providing you the mobility to access the information from wherever. Try to move as much of your day to day operations to online webware, and you will be surprised how often you need to access something quickly and don’t have access to your laptop.

4. Get A Garmin

Webmasters can navigate the internet superhighway with ease, but when it comes to a regular highway we’re often lost. I used to think that Garmin’s were useless and unnecessary gadgets. Now that I have one, I can’t believe the amount of time it has saved me when running errands for our business or making appointments.

5. Get eFax

The fax is perhaps the worst technology ever invented. They never work right and are slow as hell. Unfortunately, not everyone has jumped on the scanning trend, so if you want to do business today you need a fax number. The best way to be able to send and receive faxes for your customers but retain your mobility is with a company like eFax. There are a number of these companies, eFax is just the one I’ve used before. But its remarkable how much better it is to be able to send and receive faxes through email rather than being tethered to your phone line.

Blogging Trailblazers And Copyists

Deborah wrote a thought-provoking piece a couple of weeks ago about whether traffic (visitors/readers) or money should come first when blogging. She also talked a little bit about a radio interview she’d participated in where they drilled for information about making money online.

Deborah’s post struck a chord with me on two levels:

  1. about the focus on money by the media, and
  2. the resultant copycat bloggers who think it’s a fast way to get rich

In this post, I’m going to talk about my personal experiences of both these points.

Passion Versus Profit?

Our story follows the blogging dream: we started a blog about something we loved, and after a while, visitors flocked to the site to comment and read our latest posts. The industry became familiar with our blog and started to cooperate with us, improving the information we were able to provide to our readers. We got interviews, exclusives, etc.

To promote the blog, we circulated some press releases to the media and secured a number of radio and newspaper slots on local and national programmes.

The single biggest question from all these journalists wasn’t “how’d you manage your stellar success and build such an amazing website?” It was “You couldn’t be running this website for free – how do you make money?”

Now, I can tell you in five minutes how we make money online. AdSense, TLA, FeedBurner, IntelliTXT, etc. But ask a sweeping question like that and you’ll miss the vagaries of fluctuating CPC, the frightening dips in revenue during the summer months. These wild generalizations about blogging miss out on some pretty important stuff in their rush for AdSense cheques.

Some of these journalists would do well to study the success rates of most bloggers and how much an average blogger can expect to make, rather than hyping it up as easy cash.

Hard Work And Enthusiasm Comes First

Although we had adverts on our site at the beginning, the earnings were poor. That’s because the traffic was poor. That’s because we had very little content and no backlinks other than the odd directory submission. The WordPress theme needed to be optimized and myriad other little things had to be done to improve the site.

The bottom line? We worked our asses off. My wife wrote the content and I managed backlinks, SEO and a bit of offline promotion. I tracked other sites writing about our topic on Technorati and made comments where I could. We experimented with MySpace and promoting ourselves through new social networks to different levels of success.

Other bloggers will recognize the hard times too. There were times for us when we almost threw in the towel. Traffic growth was incredibly slow, and often we felt we were wasting our time. But our fanbase was growing and we blogged on.

Copycats And The Get-Rich-Quick Bloggers

These are the folks who think a five-minute WordPress install is their key to massive riches. They see a condensed blog post about how someone made money online and assume that it’s easy.

The most personal example for me was after we’d done a newspaper interview. A friend of ours suddenly joined our forum and started posting. While we were initially pleased, we discovered he’d done it to drop links to a blog he’d created. Worse still, the blog was on a very similar topic to ours and absolutely plastered in AdSense!

Anyway, I deleted his spammy posts and he disappeared from the forum for a few months. We kept an eye on his blog, but it seemed to die a death. A few months later, he came back with another blog, on a different subject. Again, his posting rate was poor and the site was covered in AdSense. I’m sure he’s sitting in front of his computer, checking AdSense incessantly, wondering where his millions are!

Finally…

And that’s my point people. It is no accident when a website (blog or otherwise) succeeds. Generally the people behind those websites carry a passion and determination that shows in their work. They tweak their blog themes, promote their sites, write great articles and people are attracted to those sites. They tell their friends about those sites. They link to those sites from their blogs.

This post was written by Gerard McGarry. Gerard is a music blogger for Unreality Music and designs websites at Scribble Designs.

Smart PageRank Review

It’s that time again: Google PageRank rollout. Many of us were expecting it’d be done at the end of July, but since the changeover typically happens on a weekend, and since it didn’t happen last weekend, the next best guess would be this coming weekend. Everyone who tends to do so will want to be measuring their own PR.

When the PR rollout does happen, some bloggers will rejoice, some will wail, and others will say “meh”. Love it or not, Google’s PageRank metric does gauge something about your website or weblog – mostly about your incoming links, with several other factors added on to detect “good” things such as “natural” link growth or “bad” things such as naughty backlinking schemes, etc. And several ad networks use it gauge how much you should be paid for your blog whoring activities. (Hey, I do it too.)

Now PR (Google PageRank), if you’re not familiar with it, is a measure that big G came up with a few years back to tell you how important (or not) your website is. And as would be expected, lots of little blogger boys and girls tried to game their PR. Others just wondered how to do that or even just to determine that Golden measure. I mean, if you’re not using Internet Explorer (no truly serious, aspiring pro blogger should), you don’t have the benefit of the official Google Toolbar with PR indicator.

There are number of other options available for checking PR, including Smart PageRank. Smart PageRank’s service works like this. If your site’s URL has enough data for it stored in the various Google data centers around the world, Smart PageRank returns it – both for the www version and the non-www. it also provides some other information:

  1. Your site’s value, based on their own formula. Obviously, this is mostly for amusement. What you think your site is worth is rarely the same as what a potential buyer might feel. Plus, a site’s value often depends on non-public factors like revenue.
  2. Whether a claimed PR for a site is fake or real. This is useful if you are buying a domain name with supposed PR. There are ways to fake PR, and unethical domain sellers don’t tell you this. Unfortunately, there are a couple of pagerank tools that are completely unreliable, but buyers and sellers at SitePoint Marketplace and other domain/ site auction sites use them, not knowing any better.
  3. The number of backlinks to your site, according to Google, Yahoo, and others.
  4. The number of pages on your site indexed by Google, Yahoo, etc.
  5. Buttons for display your PR, etc.

They also have:

  1. A backlinks analyzer that lists the URLs of pages elsewhere that link to you, and what the PR of that page is. If you want to know whether each linking page uses “NoFollow”, that option is available. The Backlinks analyzer itself is worth your time to try.
  2. A Firefox extension, the Smart Toolbar, which I’m assuming works similarly to the SearchStatus extension. (Time did not permit to try this.)
  3. A suite of other SEO tools including domain lookup, whois, bookmarklets and more.

They do not, however, have a PR predictor tool – although many of these are not particularly reliable anyway. There are other ways to estimate future PR on your own, which I hope to cover here eventually. Have a look at Smart PageRank for the present time. Don’t forget to check your pages before and after the new Google PR rollout – which should be happening very soon.