Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger
Rajesh has a screen shot of a dual language AdSense ad unit which displays one ad in Englishh and one in Hindi.
I’ve seen dual language ads before and always thought they were probably a glitch in the system but in the last few days I’ve talked to a number of people who think that it could be more than that.
Whether they are a new feature, a glitch or a test AdSense are doing is anyone’s guess really.
Found via Amit
coComment has announced an update to their blog comment tracking system. The improvements include:
It seems like the developers of coComment have been listening to their users and adding features. I’ve not used coComment myself but know of a few readers of ProBlogger who do – I’d be interested in hearing some reviews of what your think of the new features.
found via Easton
Back when my wife and I lived in a hip loft on the east side of downtown Dallas (read: back before the kids came), I used to take the dog for walks in our funky little neighborhood just north of Deep Ellum. There resided an artist who worked and lived out of his studio, where he crafted eccentric sculptures out of recycled iron and steel scrap.
I’d often wonder as I walked by his place if it was worth his while to have a website to gain a wider audience for his work. Back at that time, just after a monumental Internet bust that resulted from outrageous amounts of money being spent to promote sock puppets, I wasn’t sure if the guy could attract enough traffic from a web presence to actually make sales, no matter how good his work was.
Fast forward to 2006.
John Unger is an artist in rural Michigan who works and lives out of his studio along a lonely highway, or as he puts it, “dead center of the middle of nowhere”. John makes eccentric art and sculptures out of recycled scrap materials, such as propane tanks, old cars, rivets, and bottle caps.
Here’s the cool thing. John sells quite a bit of his work thanks to his blog.
Why? Well, when other little blogs like Boing Boing (and many others) take notice, amazing things start happening in terms of traffic and sales. That’s something that the e-commerce people of the late 90s just never got — it’s the little guy with the unique product that can gain the most benefit from worldwide exposure.
Basically, anything that can be sold by catalog is a perfect candidate for Internet sales. And when you create a “catablog,” you have no worries about printing, distribution, copy space, or often even advertising costs. You don’t even need a fancy $10,000 ecommerce site or a merchant account thanks to PayPal.
John Unger basically uses a “two blog” structure powered by TypePad. One blog is more of a general nature about what’s going on with his studio, and the other is his catablog of items for sale.
John not only makes unique products, but he knows how to present those products via photography and copy that sells. Let’s take a look at one of his items and how he presents it.
I’m slowly getting through all my RSS feeds from being away – almost there! Here’s some more posts that caught my eye from the past couple of weeks:
The following is an answer from Jeremy Schoemaker from ShoeMoney and Webmaster Radio’s Net Income Show responding to my one question interview question of what he’d do differently if he had to start his blog over again.
First off – Great question! If I could go back to last summer when I started blogging I would have redone my url structure. Right now its / %year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ but I would have liked to just have done /%postname%/ I could always change it now but the redirecting urls and all that is such a pain in the butt. There are really so many things that come to mine that I would like to do different but then maybe my blog would not be what it is if it was different? Maybe my bad grammar and bad web design makes it what it is ?
SEOmoz Blog has a worthwhile read titled 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic which explores the following methods of traffic generation:
#10 – Targeting Unmonetized Searches
#9 – Creating Controversy
#8 – Maps & Mashups
#7 – Event Coverage
#6 – Top Ten Lists
#5 – Online Tools
#4- Graphic & Web Design
#3 – Leveraging Social Networks
#2 – Blogging & Blog Comments
#1 – Reporting Remarkable News
#0 – Offering Something Incredible
All good common sense tips. randfish gives the ingredients, process, results and examples of each in his article.
Nick Denton has announced that the content sharing partnership that Gawker had with Yahoo has ended.
The reasons – it didn’t generate them much traffic, didn’t seem to convert them many new readers, the demographics of Gawker and Yahoo didn’t really match up and Valleywag’s coverage of Yahoo Media head probably didn’t help.
A few weeks back I wrote a post titled No-one links to the linkers. It had quite a few comments left on it but one (it was one of the last ones left) caught my attention above the others and as I read it I knew instantly that I could not possibly leave it as a comment hidden away on an old post. It was left by Tony Lawrence (who comments here as pcunix) who has given me permission to ‘promote’ it to be a guest post here on the main blog. Here it is:
My name is Tony Lawrence and I’m a recovering linker.
Like most of us, it started out with a friendly “links page” – just a little something extra I added to my site to list other related sites of value. Today we’d call that a “blogroll” but back then it was just a “links page”, and every site had one. Not wanting to be different, I had one too.
As time went on, I added a lot of content to my site. I mean a LOT. I worked hard at it and really made it a very useful resource for my niche. I built significant traffic and although I really paid no attention to such things back then, I started getting a lot of affection from the big search engines. Life was good.
Then one June morning in 2003, I discovered Adsense. “Cool”, I thought, “I’ll
make a couple of extra bucks from the site. Why not?” I applied, was approved, and started running ads. Cool beans, I thought.
Imagine my surprise when I woke up the next morning and found $40.53 in my Adsense account. Wow. It wasn’t millions, but it wasn’t just pocket change either.
The next day was $51.95. There were $60.00 days, even $70.00 and $80.00 days. This Adsense stuff was great.
I wanted more.
Well, how do you get more? Obviously, more content. So I stepped up the pace of my writing. Where I had been posting perhaps a few times a week, I now wanted to post a few times a day. Many times a day, lots of posts, because posts carry ads and ads mean money. Post, post, post.
Jason Calacanis has posted a post that could be the begin of professional social bookmarking (someone better register prosocialbookmarker.com). He’s offering to pay 12 or so top users from sites like digg, reddit, MySpace, Newsvine, Delicious and Flickr to submit posts to Netscape.
Read about it at his post at – Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users
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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.
