Jason has an excellent post on The Zen of Delegation which I’d highly recommend for anyone considering following Weblogs Inc’s footsteps with multiple blogs on a network.

Of particular interest are the three mistakes that he’s learnt over the past year or so. These are valuable lessons, two of which (I’m not paying anyone yet) that I’ve recently started to learn also – or are at least grappling with myself on a smaller scale.

‘Error one: Most writers want to get a revenue split. WRONG! Most writers want a steady pay check.

Error two: One domain name (i.e. www.weblogsinc.com) with sub-domain names (i.e. http://apple.weblogsinc.com) is better then multiple unique domain names (like http://wwwEngadget.com, http://www.autoblog.com, or http://www.tuaw.com). WRONG! Stand-alone domains do better.

Error three: One common design for all blogs is more appealing to advertisers and users because it builds trust and familiarity. WRONG! People love a unique look and feel above the benefits of a standard design.‘

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The last month has been both an exciting and difficult time for my blogging business. Whilst I’ve started numerous news blogs and seen good growth in traffic in them my more established and larger blogs have suffered from Google’s latest update and are yet to show any signs at all of recovering. As a result my daily income from blogging has plummeted to 30% of what it was sitting at for this time last month.

Despite the massive drop in traffic every one of my blogs (except the newest few which are yet to be indexed) jumped in page ranking and now sits between 4-7. So the news is mixed and to be honest the roller coaster ride is taking its toll somewhat on me.

Somedays I find myself with high energy levels – working hard on writing quality content, developing partner relationships with other bloggers, coming up with ways to diversify my blogging and other days I wonder if its worth the long hours for the benefits gained. I’m still earning a full time wage (around the average Aussie wage) for my efforts, but while the next google update could see things return to the heights that they were they could also see another fall in traffic. I’m not complaining…. really I’m not (although it sounds like it doesn’t it!) – I’ve always taken the attitude that I’ll surf the blogging wave for as long as I can – each day is a day more than I ever expected it to last!

Having said that – this type of existence is not always easy – it makes planning for the future difficult – like any small business owner would find. The highs are high and the lows are low – the life of a problogger.

Yesterday whilst feeling pretty gloomy about my blogging and trying to motivate myself to reach my 25 posts per day goal (I made it, but only just) a friend emailed me to tell me that he’d spotted a mention of my sites in an Aussie computer magazine. In the front they have a column where they track the highest traffic sites in Australia and my livingroom.org.au domain (which hosts a number of my blogs including this one) came in at number 1 for one of the ‘personal sites’ category. The stats came from HitWise who measured our traffic as accounting for 16.18% of the whole ‘personal sites’ category. Whilst I felt a little guilty about topping the category because technically my domain hosts a few different sites I then looked at number two on the list and realized that they host over 2200 sites and number three is the blog of one of Australia’s biggest Newspapers.

I don’t know how they measure their traffic and I’m not sure if my blogs truly deserve to fit into the ‘personal’ category (apart from them all being written by one person…) but the news gave me a spark of hope that perhaps what I’ve been building is a little more significant than I’d been thinking. Of course the Australian market isn’t huge, but I’ll take any glimmer of hope at the moment.

So we soldier on!

I’ve been watching a site for a while now that both intrigues and concerns me – again because it is using the content of a blogs for its own personal gain – without asking permission from the publishers concerned. I’ve been wondering how to respond to this site and am yet to go to them directly to raise my concerns and would like your opinion here first.

The site is Gadgets99. They promote themselves as a source for gadget news and are basically a site that tracks a collection of technology blogs via their RSS feeds. They collate these feeds by category and by blog. It is a handy service I’ll admit (hence it intriguing me), however it does concern me also as the site is of a commercial nature and is using the content of bloggers to generate an income without their permission.

I know this because they track one of my blogs without having ever contacting me. They also use the RSS feeds of some other more prominent sites like Gizmodo, I4U and Bios Magazine.

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