Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger
Debbie Weil writes that Charlene Li has apparently brought in close to one million dollars in business to her employer, Forrester, in the last year – all through her blogging.
That’s a 5000% Return on Investment!
‘That’s based on her calculation that her $14.95 / month account with TypePad triggered $1 million in new business for Forrester last year.’
If that’s not the best argument for business blogging going around at the moment then I don’t know what is!
Some Aussie bloggers and webby type entrepreneurs have started to self organize over the last couple of weeks and have decided to come together for conversation and a bit of evangelization under the name 2web. There’s only 8 of us at this stage and I’m sure others will join our number. To this point it’s just a site which aggregates our content but I’m excited about some of the conversation we’ve been having via email and the possibilities for collaboration and jointly promoting some of the emerging ideas around new media, blogging and dare I say it – Web 2.0.
Nik Cubrilovic talks a little more about how it’s come about on his blog. Others who are part of the fun are Ben Barren, Cameron Reilly, Martin Wells, James Farmer, Alan Jones and Richard Giles.
If nothing else it’s a great group of people to hang out with and it’s great to see the Aussie voice emerging.
As I mentioned earlier today, I’ve been one of the alpha testers of Performancing’s new Metrics tool. We’ve been using it on a number of b5media blogs over the past couple of weeks (including ProBlogger) since Nick approached us with the opportunity.
I’d actually heard of the package previously in chatting with Nick a number of months back and from that time was very excited by what they were proposing to include in it for a number of reasons:
So when Nick asked us to test their alpha version I jumped at the chance. Here is my first impression review:
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There’s a fascinating article over at the Financial Times by Tom Glocer of (head of Reuters) on how Old media must embrace the amateur which has a lot of talk about new media. Here are a few snippets:
Greetings, fellow Probloggers (and those who aspire to be probloggers). It’s somewhat surreal to be posting here. Darren’s highlighted who I am pretty well (though I’m not sure where he dug up that photo!), so I’ll simply add that my strength lies in WordPress. I have been an active part of the WordPress development community for some time, so it will be natural to pass along some things I know from my experience with the platform. Some of the tips I write about will be very easy for some, and hopefully there will be entries that challenge even the most advanced. As long as someone is learning, I’m happy.
A few days ago, Darren posted an entry about ad placement that took an interesting turn in the commentary that followed.
Commenter Tom asked:
What is the plug in that you use to put the ads between the 2nd and 3rd post, or do you do so manually?
That, my friends, is the tip of the day. WordPress is a very flexible platform that allows for quite a bit of “munging” to make things work right. For starters, the basic building block of WordPress is a block of code called “The Loop”. It is called that because, literally, it is where the posts for a given page are “looped” through repeatedly to be displayed on the blog.
The standard Loop in the index.php file, is a block of code that might look a bit like this: [Read more...]
One of the things I’ve enjoyed about ProBlogger in the last 12 months has been that I’ve ‘met’ (virtually of course) a large number of amazing bloggers who know a whole heap more about blogging than I do in a variety of areas. I’ve been experimenting with finding ways to highlight some of them lately in a number of ways other than the traditional linking up way.
For example during my Blogging for Beginners series I had approached a few good bloggers to contribute pieces. I was very happy with what they came up with – so much so that it made me realize that there are some aspects of blogging that others are probably better positioned to write about here at ProBlogger than myself. I see my own strengths as lying in monetization, SEO and in some of the conceptual stuff – but am weaker when it comes to the technical side of things.
As a result today I approached Aaron Brazell with the idea that he start a weekly (at this point) column on ProBlogger that tackles some of your more technical questions.
Aaron won’t be a stranger to many of you – he’s already written three popular posts here (10 things you should know about WordPress 2.0, Tag, You’re It! Leveraging Tagging for Your Blog and Kick Your RSS: Jumping on the Syndication Bandwagon) he’s also the blogger behind Technosailor and is one of our b5 bloggers (editing our Sports Channel).
So expect to see Aaron’s first post shortly (within the hour). As I say he’ll be looking at more technical aspects of things and will be posting on a weekly basis to start with. If you have questions/suggestion for him to write about feel free to leave a comment in his first post and if you have comments on the idea of adding a second blogger to ProBlogger I’d love to hear them.
If you’ve been watching the rise of Weblogs Inc over the last couple of years and want to hear some of the behind the scenes story of the AOL sale then you might want to listen to an interview with Jason Calacanis recounting the story on a techcon TPN podcast. Jason talks about the highs and lows of the last couple of years, the sale itself, gives some entrepreneurship advice (resiliency is the word) and talks about the wider industry (it’s frothy – not a bubble). Well worth the listen.
There’s news on Reuters today on a $90 million pay-out from Google over a click fraud case. While that kind of money isn’t massive in the scheme of things at Google it’s the precedent that is worrying. As the article says – some believe that click fraud is the ‘single greatest risk to Google’s advertising-dependent business model’.
This is the reason why Google have continued to crack down on those breaking their TOS over the last year – their business depends upon it.
Thanks to Aaress for the email tip.
update: More on the story at Search Engine Watch.
Google’s AdWords have just allowed advertisers to start targeting sites with certain demographics as readers.
You’ll see below on the screen capture from my AdWords campaign some of the options for targeting that Advertisers now have according to gender, age, income, race etc.
This means that Google are now tracking the demographics of AdSense publisher’s readership using comScore data. They are only tracking this data on US readers from what they say on their AdWords site.
This is a good deal for Advertisers but how do you feel about them gathering this information on your site’s readers?
It’d be interesting to see how this information impacts advertisers targeting sites but also to see whether publishers will work out a way to find out what their own site’s demographics are by using AdWords. I can’t yet see an easy way to do it – but I’m sure it’d be possible.
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My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like Digital Photography School and TwiTip - Twitter Tips.
In 2002 I stumbled upon an article about ‘Blogging’. I didn’t know it at the time but that moment changed my life. Read more about Darren or contact him. Connect with me on Twitter at , Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
