Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger
If you’re in Sydney or will be there for adTech – Sara from the Bargain Queen has mobilized the Sydney Weblogger Meetup Group for a get together at the Arthouse Hotel on 7 February from 7.00pm.
Details of the Meetup are here. I’ve already RSVP’d.
Hope you can make it – should be a fun night!
Bill Belew at The Biz of Knowledge puts together a list of 66 Successful Bloggers and What they can teach you (taken from a book by Ted Demopoulos titled What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting – aff). There’s some great blogs there if you’re looking to improve your blogging!
I’ve been wanting to review Eric Giguere’s Uncommon AdSense (aff) e-book for a while now but after reading it then got crazily busy – to the point where I couldn’t do it justice.
Please forgive me – this will be brief – but having read it I thought I should at least give a few reflections.
Eric wrote this e-book on the back of his previous offering “Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program” (Eric Giguere) which was, by his own admission, a very entry level introduction to AdSense as a way of earning income online.
Uncommon AdSense is Eric’s book which steps things up a notch and is aimed at beginners through to more experienced AdSense users.
My initial reflection on it is that he’s achieved that. Uncommon AdSense does step up a notch (or a few).
If you’re a very experienced user of AdSense you probably won’t learn heaps (although Eric managed to remind me of a few techniques that I’d forgotten and shared a few tips that I’d not used before) but if you’re at the beginning of your journey it is one resource to consider investing in.
What I like about Eric’s style is that he’s not into hype.
His resources have a much more humble and realistic presentation of what can (and can’t) be achieved with AdSense than many others writing on the topic. In fact at times he could probably do with a little more hype. I know he’s planning a revamp for his sales page – and I agree it needs a bit of a work over :-)
The other thing I like about Eric’s approach is that he doesn’t just include ‘AdSense tips’ in his book but shares a few of his tips on good website practices.
The book has 102 pages, 41 sections and comes with bonuses (including free updates – something Eric’s already done with the latest AdSense policy changes).
Lastly – Eric offers a money back guarantee – so if you don’t learn anything you can always get your $47 back.
Buy Uncommon AdSense here.
Another big announcement over at Performancing’s blog today (seems to be one a week at the moment).
New CEO, Chris Garrett, has announced that they are closing Performancing Partners down.
This comes of server woes, the resignation of Nick Wilson as CEO, the calling off of a sale of Performancing to PayPerPost and the ending of their metrics program.
Wow – it’s been quite a month!
With Performancing Partners – any ads currently running will remain until the end of the month when the program will be discontinued.
I feel for Chris – he’s a great guy who seems to have inherited a leaking (sinking?) ship.
I’m also saddened that their Partners system didn’t work. I suspected there was trouble this past week when their server problems were causing some of their publishers sites not to load (it brought ProBlogger to a standstill for a few hours) – but I had hoped they’d be able to work it out as it was an ad network with potential.
What is the future of performancing?
They still have their firefox plugin (although they’ve rebranded that) and there is still the blog and forums. To be honest – I loved Performancing the most when it was just a blog. They produced amazing content and generated wonderful conversations. Perhaps it’s time to go back to that?
Just under two years ago I signed up for and reviewed a little service called MyBlogLog for the first time. Back then it was a metrics service to track outbound links from a blog – but nothing much more.
Since that time I’ve linked to them and reviewed them a few more times as they’ve added features – although in recent times I have to admit I’ve not really paid much attention to my MyBlogLog account.
That was until today when I found out that ProBlogger has it’s very own vibrant community.
I’d not done anything to build my ‘community’ except happen to be a member (for their metrics package) – but now this site has 539 ‘members’! You can join it at the ProBlogger MyBlogLog Page.
I’m not really sure what to ‘do’ with my community. I’ve added the MyBlogLog widget to my sidebar (scroll down a bit) – but I’m unsure what else to do.
I know I see a lot of My Blog Log widgets around – but I’m wondering if anyone has any wisdom to share on what they do with their ‘community’.
Is this just an ego thing? A bit of fun? Or is there some point to it all? Forgive me – I’m just wondering a little about what the point is.
Keen to hear from MyBlogLog junkies!
I mentioned this in passing last week after my interview with Shoemoney – but today we’re officially announcing the next Elite Retreat San Francisco which will run between 19-20 March.
I’ll be one of the leaders/speakers on this 30 seat conference and I’m really excited about it.
Other Speakers are Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney and Mr six figure earning in a month), Lee Dodd (aka $222,718 man and forums/social networking expert), Aaron Wall (aka SEO Book author), Neil Patel (marketing consultant) and Kris Jones (aka online media expert).
The last time Jeremy and Lee put on Elite Retreat I was quite jealous of those attending and wished I had the time to get along as an attendee. The idea of spending two days with 5 or 6 experienced and successful webmasters was something I thought was worth the expense (and no – it’s not cheap).
So when Lee asked me if I’d consider being involved in the next Elite Retreat I jumped at the opportunity. The fact that I’d be in the US with my family at that time anyway was a bonus and made it possible.
Before I said yes I asked a few of last year’s attendees what they thought about the event and they gave me some very positive feedback. Some said they are coming back with friends.
What I love about the concept is that it’s not just one person talking at the front of the room but that many of the sessions are interactive and based upon the needs and experiences of attendees. There’s also plenty of one on one interaction with leaders.
So what do you get for your money?
Apply to come along here – it’s a hand selection process (ie not first in best dressed) so put a little time into your answers as our aim is to put together a great team of attendees, not just leaders.
Aaron has put together a worthwhile post for WordPress users wanting to upgrade to WP 2.1. It’s called 10 Things You should Know About WordPress 2.1 which outlines some of the new stuff that it has including auto-saving drafts, new image upload handling, new visual editor interface and merging of links and categories.
I’ve had a play with WP 2.1 and as a WP user I enjoyed it a lot. More functional but very familiar and easy to get used to.
Earlier in the month Chris Pearson wrote a post that I missed but which I think deserves a look if you’re interested in directing more traffic to your site via Google – well via Google Image Search.
In it Chris outlines how to optimize images that you might use on your blog to increase the chances of them being highly ranked in Google Image Search.
Speaking from personal experience – the optimization tips works and I would recommend following his advice.
In short – make sure that before you upload an image that you name it with relevant keywords for your post and that you use the ‘alt’ attribute (again with relevant keywords – I make them the same as my image name) when adding your code.
Now some people might say that traffic from Google Image Search doesn’t ‘convert’ in terms of becoming loyal or in terms of revenue.
My experience is that this is not true for a few reasons:
I suspect that traffic from Google Image Search doesn’t convert as well as other traffic – however at some levels traffic is traffic and getting eyeballs on your blog via any means gives you the chance of ‘conversion’ (what ever that might mean for your particular site).
But Wait There’s More
I should also add that many SEO experts that I’ve read believe that the technique that Chris outlines will also help with SEO in Google Search (and other search engines).
Having the keywords of your post appear in your image tags is just another small onsite SEO factor that tells Google what your post is about. While it might not be as powerful as other techniques it all adds up and is a good habit to get into when using images.
Found via Fitness Mantra
Ahmed has posted some reflections on the recent sale of three blogging related sites (Blog Catalog (sold for $40k), EatonWeb (sold for 10k) and 2RSS (sold for $7k) which all sold for between 24 and 100 times monthly revenues.
His conclusions:
There’s some interesting conclusions there.
Those of you who have sold websites and blogs – what lessons would you add to those that Ahmed has posted?
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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.
