Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger
Eric Kintz has written an interesting post on Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore.
I like some of what Eric’s got to say but do not agree with it completely for all types of bloggers. Perhaps it’s a bit too simplistic a statement to make. Below are Eric’s headings in bold and a few of my own thoughts under each outlining where I agree and disagree with his statements:
Yesterday I started talking about how to end blogs well and today I want to run through a number of factors to consider when asking whether you should end a blog or continue with it. Hopefully in pondering some of these questions bloggers will be able to make a a good decision.
Keep in mind that not all of the questions will relate to every blog. In actual fact each blogger needs to take a look at whatever goals they have for their individual blog and to see if they are on the way to meeting them before making this type of decision.
Here are a few factors I generally consider before pulling the plug on a blog (stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on how I suggest you actually kill one).
do you have the energy or time to maintain your blog?
Blogs don’t just happen and good ones take significant levels of time and energy – without them you might just be kidding yourself that you can keep things running for the long term.
does the topic of the blog interest you?
A blog not only takes energy to run but it actually can give energy to a blogger if it’s on a topic that they are passionate about. As i look at my most successful blogs that have sustained themselves over time that they are all ones with topics I am interested in – others that I’ve had less passion about have tended to die pretty natural deaths.
is the topic one that others are interested in?
It’s been a while since I did any speed linking – so here’s a few links I’ve been meaning to blog about from the last 24 hours.
In an update to the Adbrite loading problems that I mentioned a couple of days back I today had an email from Adbrite apologizing for the problems and giving an update on their server upgrade.
They pointed to a graph showing the outages in the lead up to the upgrade and the lack of problems since.
They say that they are adding more servers and upgrading load balancers still to ensure faster loading times.
As a result I’ve put Adbrite ads back on this blog and am hoping it will not slow things down again. The problem with the way that Adbrite runs their ads is that if they go down it impacts everything else on the page they are on that comes after it on the page’s source code. This is a problem in my eyes because it brings their publisher’s pages to a standstill every time they go down.
Hopefully it’s something they can continue to improve in the coming months.
In similar news – Text Link Ads have also sent an email to publishers in the last week saying that they did have similar problems earlier in the week. As a result they’ve provided publishers with new code that means that if their servers go down again that the page will continue to load. This means TLA publishers need to change the code on their pages (not a fun thing if you have many blogs like we do at b5).
The Blogging Goals Group Writing Project is picking up steam with another 44 entries in the last 24 hours (that’s our new record). Here are the latest submissions:
I’ve also added each of these links to the central submissions page here. Keep your entries coming (one per blogger please) – don’t forget that Thursday is the cut off.
Last week’s blog poll asked ProBlogger readers to let us know whether they were male or female.
I said at the time that I was testing a theory that I had and that I’d share that theory after the poll ended. Here’s what I was testing…
During my first group writing project I noticed that I had a lot of submissions from bloggers that I was not familiar with. I also had the realization as i saw the submission come in that quite a few of them were from females. The reason that this stood out to me a little was that as I thought about the split of males and females who comment on ProBlogger I realized that it was largely guys who seemed to leave comments.
I began to wonder whether guys males felt more comfortable with the whole commenting thing and/or whether females tended to respond better to other forms of blogging activities and invitations (like the group writing project which is a different form of reader interaction). I decided that while the anecdotal evidence seemed to point to this that maybe I should test it.
So I started by trying to ascertain what the split between mail and females readers were here at ProBlogger. The split of those who responded to the poll were 28% Female and 72% Male.
Then I looked at the percentage split between the genders in the group writing project. This was a little more difficult as it’s not completely obvious what gender all bloggers are. My guesstimation is that 35% of those participating in group writing project were female and 65% were Male (not too dissimilar to reader split).
Lastly I took a random sample of 300 ProBlogger comments from the last month (it took a little longer than I was expecting) to look again at the gender split there. The results of that were that in that 300 comments 10% of comments were left by Females and 90% by Males.
I won’t make a sweeping statement about all blogs because my ‘research’ was based solely upon ProBlogger readers and I also won’t claim that my ‘study’ is conclusive as there is plenty of room for error – but it does seem that here at ProBlogger that females are under represented in comments and/or males are over represented.
In contrast to this females participated in the first group writing project at a higher level than males did.
Why this is the case I’m not completely sure as I don’t have expertise in gender studies but I do find it very interesting. Perhaps this is isolated to ProBlogger but I’d be interested to hear what others think about it from their own experiences. Perhaps, considering the above ‘findings’ the comment section below is not the best place for such a discussion – but feel free to respond as you feel comfortable with your theories and ideas.
Christian decided to do a follow up post to last week’s Blog Polls series in which I mentioned a number of blog poll tools. He took the tools I mentioned and has done a comparative review of them at Comparison of Services to Create Online Polls.
There comes a time in many blogger’s lives when they are faced with the decision of whether to let a blog die or whether to continue with it. This week I want to explore the why and how of letting blogs die. You see there are many great resources around on how to launch a blog successfully (here’s my blogging for beginners resource) but very little is written on successfully ending a blog.
The idea of a successful blog death might seem a little strange but looking at the numbers of blog’s that are inactive around the blogosphere – I suspect this resources will be as relevant as all the blog launching posts.
Today I’ll start this series with a look at some of the common reasons ‘why’ blogs die. The list could be quite long I’m sure but if I had to identify the main 4 reasons that I regularly see for blogs ending this is how I’d sum it up.
1. Quick Death - Often this point comes just a few weeks into a blog’s life as the initial excitement of the new project wears off and as the reality of what it is going to take to maintain it hits home. It also comes when the realisation that only a handful of people (if anyone) is reading the blog and that it could take quite a long time before the fame and fortune that they’d dreamt of is a reality.
2. Life Crowds the Blog Out – Sometimes a blogger lasts longer than the initial few weeks and the decision comes as a result of other life factors crowding out the blog. We all lead busy lives and quite often when the stress or demands of life rise, one of the first things to slip off our radar is the blog. Posting that was daily slips to once or twice a week at first and we tell ourselves we’ll get back to it when we’re a little less busy – but the reality is that before we know it the only posts we write are explanations of why we haven’t been blogging and that we’ll be back to normal soon.
Quick Online Tips has started a Giant Blogging Terms Glossary – head over and let them know what you’d add or subtract.
Join Over 321000 Readers
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.
