Sorry for the last couple of days lighter posting – its the weekend and our focus for the last couple of days has been pretty much upon buying this little house that you see pictured.

Yesterday was the auction and thanks a pretty good deposit from the past six or so months of blogging income we were successful in being the last bidder standing (after a pretty fierce bidding frenzy). I’m thinking of unofficially calling our new home The House that Blogging Built.

So I’d like to take this moment to thank a few people for what has been a pretty amazing year of blogging. I realise that in many ways the purchase of this house is not really about me, its very much been a collective effort. Firstly to my partner ‘V’ who ,for some reason that neither of us really understand, let me dedicate significant amounts of time to blogging, even when in the early days it was only earning a few dollars per day. She initially gave me 6 months to work my butt off on being a full time blogger (before I’d have to go get a ‘real job) to see if we could build it into something substantial. She saw the potential and gave me room to follow my dream.

I’d like to thank the five million or so readers who have read my blogs in the past year or so – without them this would obviously have been impossible. I thank the thousands of bloggers around the world that have linked to my blogs and who have therefore been responsible for these readers.

I’d like to thank Rachel for her great blog design and Regan for his hosting of my blogs – both have gone above and beyond the call for me. Also I’m grateful to a few companies that have been sending me cheques each month. They include Google’s Adsense, Amazon, FastClick, ClickBank, Trade Doubler, AdBrite, BlogAds, Commission Junction and LinkShare. And lastly to the many smaller companies and individuals who have sponsored my blogs with text and banner ads. Its amazing how every bit helps.

Ok – thats the end of my academy award speech – now its time to get back on with some serious blogging – after all its only paid the deposit so far!

InsideBlogging are looking for a wacky blogger. If you think you fit the bill you should head over and express your interest in the blog that they say has a ‘Fark / CollegeHumour kind of humour’.

Update: Jeremy posts more information on this at his blog and says the applicants need to be in a position to post 3-4 posts per day. Oh and you have to be an ‘oddball’ type.

Just spotted two worthwhile posts on a couple of my favourite blogs:

- Articles Build Blog Readership – ‘As you place a number of articles on several websites, you will accomplish more than one goal.

You will establish yourself as an expert in your field, and other people will call upon your ideas and information. The recognition of others, who are interested in the same topics and site themes as yourself, could lead to some paying business in other ways.’

- Making your blog sticky and keeping Casual Viewers – ‘The moral for bloggers is simple: making your blog sticky keeps viewers longer. Look at moral ways (by this I mean without popups etc) of getting casual visitors to explore your blog further, it may well increase repeat visits, and potentially improves your stats and your advertising revenue opportunities. Including a link to recent posts at the end of individual posts is one way of doing it, but there may be others.’

Do you know of (or run) a quality ‘Entrepreneurial’ or ‘Business’ Blog that deserves a bit of extra attention? Do you read one that you wish others knew about? Nominate it now in the 2005 Business Underblogger Awards! Read on to find out how!

Now that the 2005 Business Blogging Awards are out of the way and that some of the higher profile business blogs have had their recognition, I want to propose that we hold the ’2005 Business UNDERblogger Awards’.

Huh?!? What’s an ‘Underblogger’ you ask?

Well it all started a couple of years ago when on my personal blog I wrote a post asking people to nominate quality blogs that they knew of that didn’t have the exposure that they deserved. They are Underblogs – as in they fly under the radar despite the fact that perhaps they deserve to join the select few that tend to get nominated for mainstream blogging awards.

I was amazed by the response that I got when I opened the first ‘Celebrating the Underblog’ awards in 2003 – 100 nominations in all. In 2004 I did it again and ended up with around 500. It was a massive response and whilst in the process a lot of blogs were nominated that I personally didn’t enjoy the exercise did unearth some amazing blogs that I continue to read to this day. I had a lot of feedback from bloggers thanking me for the exposure but also for helping them to discover new quality blogs.

So I got to thinking the other day after the Business Blogging Awards that whilst the project did unearth some great blogs that I’d not heard of before – that there MUST be more out there that didn’t receive a nomination that deserve some recognition.

[Read more...]