- LifeHack.org posts Six Improvements to Your Blog.
- Digital Inspiration has a useful post with a number of HTML tricks for Bloggers to give your blog posts a little style
- There’s a nice post over at Digital Point from a guy Burta who talks everyone through his journey of growing an online income from $10 to $800 per week (over a year) – via Yaro
- Shoemoney interviews SeoBlackhat on his radio show – while blackhat isn’t my scene it’s an interesting listen. I’ll be appearing on Jeremy’s show on 16th January so start thinking up questions and I’ll point you to a link to submit them to in the next week or so.
Written on 1/3/2007 at 2:27 pm by
Speedlinking – 3 January 2007
Written on 1/3/2007 at 5:50 am by
Case Study Update – Digital Photography School
I’ve been using my Digital Photography School as a case study over the past 9 months since it’s launch.
I’ve previously talked about it (at launch in a vidcast, then giving a progress report and then talking about some of my goals for it) but it’s been almost six months since I gave an update so I thought it was about time for another one.
A few basic stats to start with:
- The site has been running 9 months
- I’ve posted 178 posts to the site in that time
- I’m currently aiming for around 4-5 posts per week (one each week day)
- Numbers of subscribers to the weekly newsletter currently stand at just under 13700
- RSS subscriber numbers are currently at around 3000 (according to Feedburner). This oscillates between 2800 and 4000 depending upon the day
- This week the site is averaging around 8000 daily unique visitors to the actual site viewing around 17300 daily pages (again this varies a lot – and is higher than normal due to being dugg a couple of days back)
- The Flickr discussion group has 2900 members (of course not all are active) and it’s new forums have active 650 members.
- Earnings have been slow but steadily growing. Its nowhere near my most profitable blog when I think about the effort that goes into it or the traffic levels that it has. To this point AdSense has been my main focus but I’ve been hesitant to put many ads on the blog at this point – I’m hoping to build it up and then find a small number of sponsors to have premium sponsorship of the site. I’ve also introduced an affiliate program or two to the site which are returning good results.
Traffic has been up and down over the months since launch as a result of a variety of links from big sites and social bookmarking sites. But overall I’m pretty happy with traffic levels considering the length of time that it’s been live.
The last two months have seen a distinct rise in search engine traffic. It’s still not a massive proportion of overall traffic but as the blog gets older it continues to grow (ie we’re out of the ‘sandbox’). In my experience it generally takes around 9-12 months to really hit it’s straps in this way so it’s about on schedule.
Current Strategies and Developments:
Written on 1/3/2007 at 4:57 am by
Resources for creating a WordPress theme
Rachel’s put together a list of Useful resources for creating a WordPress theme which kicks a new series of posts for those wanting to create WordPress themes.
Written on 1/2/2007 at 7:03 pm by
ProBlogger Comments Competition Winner
Mid December I posted that I’d be giving a special Christmas present to one lucky ProBlogger reader who left a comment here at ProBlogger between then and Christmas.
Today I randomly chose the winner who will win a copy of each of the following 10 books that I rated as having the biggest impact upon my blogging last year.
- The Story Factor – a book that I’m currently reading about being influential and persuasive through the practice of story telling. Really enjoying this one.
- Ogilvy on Advertising – written by renowned copy writer David Ogilvy this book has a lot of great copywriting principles that translate well into blogging.
- Advertising Secrets of the Written Word - another copywriter sharing good common sense strategies for copy writing.
- The E-Myth Revisited – a business book that helps small business earners move from building themselves a job to building themselves a true business.
- Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands – I always rave about this book that looks about a paradigm shift in advertising and the rise of emotion, sensuality and more in branding/marketing.
- Unleashing the Idea Virus - the first book that I read by Seth Godin that back in it’s day rocked my world
- Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell’s classic book on ‘How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference’
- Join Me – I don’t think you can get this new any more but a great story of a guy who started accidentally started a movement and what he learned along the way. This is written almost as a novel in a humorous and easy to read style.
- Don’t Make Me Think – Common Sense Web Usability
- 1000 Most Important Words – a guide to unlocking our “passive” vocabularies and developing a keener appreciation of the richness of language
The winner of these 10 books is Rebecca from The Space Between My Peers for her comment on my post ‘What’s the Weirdest Thing You’ve Sold on Amazon?‘
Congratulations to Rebecca (I’ll be in touch shortly) and thanks to everyone for participating.
Written on 1/2/2007 at 2:32 pm by
Andy Wibbels Offers Half Price Blog Training Season Pass
A couple of years ago I came across an enthusiastic blogger by the name of Andy Wibbels who was putting together a 4 week course called Easy Bake Weblogs (aff) – a course for those just starting out in blogging to help them work out how to start a blog.
I took the course (not because I wanted to know how to start a blog – but because I was interested in how he taught it) and was really impressed by both Andy’s enthusiasm but also his ability to communicate in an easy to understand way that people seemed to be responding to.
I was so impressed by him that I got in touch and he interviewed me for a podcast.
That led onto more talks between us and the eventual development of a course that we wrote and produced together called Six Figure Blogging.
Since that time Andy has put together a number of other courses including Business Blog Basics, Podcasting Bootcamp, RSS Essentials and Keyword Essentials (aff).
He’s also written two books, Blogwild!: A Guide for Small Business Blogging (now in it’s second print edition) and Learning WordPress (an ebook).
Today Andy shot me an email to let me know that he’s decided to bundle all 8 products into the one bundle and offer them all as a Season Pass for 50% of the cost of them each bought individually.
What do you get?
- 3 Live Teleseminars (each 4 weeks long) – Easy Bake Weblogs, Business Blog Basics and Keyword Essentials
- 3 Self Study Courses (another 12 sessions) – Six Figure Blogging, RSS Essentials and Podcasting Bookcamp
- 2 Books - Blog Wild (hard copy) and Learning WordPress (ebook).
You get access to all the course materials forever and can repeat courses as many times as you like.
The price isn’t cheap, even at 50% off it’s $887.50 USD, but Andy’s courses are excellent and he offers a no-questions, no-excuses 60 day money back guarantee that I know he honors. He also offers a payment plan to break down the cost into monthly lots.
I know it won’t be for everyone, but if you’re looking for a great overview of blogging from the basics through more specialized areas including blogging for profit then this might be a package that you want to invest into.
He’s also offering existing users of these courses cheaper season passes to account for what they’ve already paid. Email Andy if you haven’t already heard about that deal.
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
