Written on December 13th, 2005 at 11:12 am by David Shawver
2005 Search Blog Awards
I forgot to mention that over the weekend I was told I’d been nominated in Search Engine Journal’s latest Search Blog Awards in the ‘Search Engine Marketing and Contextual Advertising Blogs’ category.
The list of blogs in the awards is pretty comprehensive, I’ve just surfed through quite a few of them and added a number to my Bloglines account (like I need any more!). Only pity about the awards is that the surveymonkey voting platform doesn’t seem to allow the blogs names to be made into life links which makes surfing through them all a little slow and laborious.
Anyway - there are some great blogs in the list that should keep you occupied for hours if you’re into SEO or SE news.
Written on December 13th, 2005 at 10:12 am by David Shawver
How Much Did You Make from Adsense Last Month? - Poll of the Week
This week’s poll is one we’ve done before - it will be interesting to compare the results. The question is:
Last month, how much did you make from Adsense?
By ‘Adsense’ I mean all Adsense earnings including referrals, search earnings, RSS ads, Adlink Ads and in Content ads.
To get your total log into your Adsense account, hit the ‘My Account’ Tab. Then hit ‘Payment History’ and look for your ‘earnings’ figure.
If you’d like to comment on this poll do so in comments below. If you’d like to do so anonymously leave a fake email address - I understand that many publishers do not wish to put names to their figures so am happy for this.
It’ll be interesting to see what the average enternetusers reader earns from Adsense. We’ll run a similar poll in the coming weeks looking at a couple of other ad programs.
update: This poll I’ve added one extra category that I didn’t have last time I asked this question - it’s the under $10 category. I’ve done this because last time the lowest category was ‘under $30′ so I thought this might shed a little more light on what the make up of this group was. Otherwise the categories are exactly the same. It’s not meant as a technical or scientific poll - but rather to give us an idea of what bloggers are earning using this tool.
Written on December 13th, 2005 at 10:12 am by David Shawver
13% of enternetusers Readers Own 10 or More Blogs
This week’s poll of the week has certainly produced some interesting results.
The question was ‘How Many Blogs Do You Own?’
Here’s the results in graphical form.
The results surprised me a little. For starters it’s the biggest response I’ve ever had to a poll with 940 responses so far. I’m tempted to leave it up until we reach 1000 (just because I’d like to see it tick over into 4 figures) but won’t indulge myself and will start another poll shortly.
Getting on to the actual results of the poll:
I’m not really that surprised that the biggest category was people responding by saying that they owned only 1 blog (32% of respondents). The shape of the graph is fairly predictable in some senses although I was a little taken a back by the 10+ category. 13% of respondents have more than 10 blogs. Over 1 in 10 of you are doing some heavy levels of blogging (of course this is if you’re keeping them all up to date)! I suspect this number is higher than what we’d find in a similar survey across the whole blogosphere as one strategy that many bloggers attempting to make a living from blogging use is multiple blogs.
The vast majority of enternetusers.net readers however are blogging with less than 10 blogs. 66% have 3 blogs or less, 75% have 4 blogs or less and 80% have 5 blogs or less.
update: thanks to the numerous people who suggested a ‘0′ blogs category. I know of a few people who would have voted this way - it was an oversite that I made in setting up the poll and I didn’t realise until several hundred votes were already cast. My apologies - next time I’ll add such a category.
Written on December 13th, 2005 at 07:12 am by David Shawver
Cost Per Keyword (CPK) on the Rise
Interesting article over at eMarketer on the Cost of Keywords which has this interesting graph that plots what advertisers are paying for keywords.
What stands out to me in the graph is obviously December but also the difference between this July to September and July to September of 2004 where there has been a significant increase in what advertisers are paying.
I’ll be interested to know what this December’s graph looks like. I’ve noticed in this past week a marked increase in my average cost per click on Adsense.
Thanks to Tom from Scared Monkeys for pointing me to this article via email.
Written on December 13th, 2005 at 12:12 am by David Shawver
Developing e-Products
Chris has posted a couple of good posts on related topics over the weekend. Both focus upon bloggers adding income streams to their business through selling products and not just relying upon advertising or affiliate programs.
- Monetizing Through Packaged Content - looks at the topic of repackaging your blog’s content up into an e-boook.
- BlogCommerce - talks about selling products from your blog. It gives some of the advantages of selling electronic, subsriptions and physical products.
Both posts are worthwhile reads. As someone who has experimented with this a little in a similar way to what is described with the six figure blogging course (which has had some good sales since launching the home study version) I’d add that thinking of ways of repackaging content and adding products to your blog can be well worthwhile in terms of potential income.
However there are a number of questions I’d ask before rushing out and writing an e-book including:
• Do you have something of value to offer buyers? - it’s not just as simple as copying a few of your better articles into a PDF and slapping a price on it. Do you have something that people would be willing to pay for? Is the topic one where there is much interest at present? What are the main benefits of what you’ll be selling?
• Do you have a profile/readership to help you sell your product? - using the example of Six Figure Blogging - I think I could have put together a very similar course 12-18 months ago. The quality would have been quite similar (although there are obviously some time specific elements in it) but I very much doubt we’d have had many people sign up for it simply because most of those who signed up did so because they had some respect for Andy or myself. While we’re not the most famous bloggers going around the past year has seen our profiles lifted to a point where people were willing to spend money and time investing into our product.
• Are others likely to help you sell your product? - while your own profile is important in directly selling your product it is also worth considering where secondary sales will come from. The most • successful online products that I’ve seen have reached the heights that they have largely because of word of mouth, often helped along by affiliate programs. This is again partly about your own profile and whether other webmasters/bloggers respect you but it’s also about luck, networking and the incentives you offer others to spread the word for you.
• How will you collect payments? - I’m not the most technical person going around and so this question and those surrounding it of logistics was one of my major sticking points. Setting up an e-commerce system that is simple to use for both buyers and you is essential.
• How Much will you charge? - Pricing is always something of an unknown for any product. What is anything worth these days - especially when so much is available for free online? Some products won’t sell unless they are cheap - others seem to actually sell better when they’re more expensive as they are perceived to have more value. Is it better to have lots of sales at a low profit margin or a few sales at a high profit? I don’t have ‘the’ answer to the question of price but it’s definitely one to keep in mind right up front because it will help you work out how much time and energy to invest in your product.
• Do you need to do it alone? - While the temptation is to develop these products alone so as to maximize profits it may be worth developing partnerships to help both with the product writing but also the logistical end of things.
• Are their other alternative products? - In the same way that blogging has become a crowded part of the web, so too is the online product/ebook/course market. It’s worth doing some research into what others have on offer. What is their pricing? What gaps are there around their product?
• What level are you pitching your product? - Many successful online publishers of resources like these have multiple products at a range of levels. I chatted with one online entrepreneur a few weeks ago about her product range and she told me that she was very intentional about producing a number of products at different pricing points and entry levels. She has entry level/cheap products which then lead users onto her intermediate products which in turn lead users onto more advanced and comprehensive products (most expensive).
• Are you willing to offer support to users? - It’s one thing to lock yourself in a room for a few days/weeks to write an ebook or to develop a course - but are you willing to service those who buy it by answering questions, updating it over time etc? The more products you develop the more admin there will be around it. While I know some people argue that selling online resources is a passive income stream in my own experience this is not completely the case.
I’m certain there are many other questions to consider when putting together these types of resources but these are some that come to mind.
I’d love to hear what other’s experience of selling products online are. Do you have any? What success have they had? What products do you buy and why have you (or haven’t you) bought them?
Written on December 12th, 2005 at 09:12 pm by David Shawver
Is Squidoo Optimized Well for Search Engines?
I’ve played around with Squidoo today and started a couple of lenses just to test them out. My first one is one by the same name as this blog - enternetusers - Helping Bloggers Earn Money.
My initial impression of Squidoo is mixed. I can see a few applications for it but am not too sure I’ll be using it too heavily.
One of the things I’ve been wondering about it is how well it will do in terms of SEO. Will the pages there rank highly in search engines?
While SE traffic might not be the prime goal of Squidoo I suspect it’s owners wouldn’t mind if their pages rank well. So how well is it optimized for Google and Yahoo!?
The first thing I always do when looking at SEO of a site is to check out the page’s title. Look at the top of the browser you’re using to see this.
In the case of my page the title of it is:
‘Squidoo : Lenses : enternetusers - Helping Bloggers Earn Money’
Title tags are of real importance with SEO and if I were to judge Squidoo on their choice I’d give them a 5 out of 10. It passes but only just.
I’ve given them a pass because the page I’ve created does have it’s keywords in the title but this is only because I’ve chosen a page title with keywords in it. If I’d decided to be a bit more obscure with my page title it would have gone without in terms of keywords.
This is a bit of a lesson for Squidoo users - make sure you choose your title carefully. Similarly you’ll want to choose a URL extension carefully also as this impacts SEO also.
So how could Squidoo improve their SEO from a title perspective?
Probably the most obvious fault from this perspective is that the first words in the title are ‘Squidoo’ and ‘Lenses’. The first words in a title are generally thought to be the most powerful words in terms of SEO. While I understand ‘Squidoo’ and ‘Lenses’ are there for branding purposes (and who am I to tell Seth Godin how to do branding!) they don’t help the pages created there at all in terms of climbing the SEO rankings.
If branding were not a consideration I’d leave out those two words completely and just use the title chosen by the lens-master to be the title. A compromise would be to put the ‘Squidoo’ and ‘Lenses’ at the end of the title.
In terms of other SEO principles there is probably a lot that can and will be said about Squidoo. Here are a few brief observations:
- metatags - while most people don’t believe they have any impact there is no harm in optimizing them. Their description tag uses the first few of the introduction text you write so SEO will be dependent upon the luck or skill of the lens-master. The keyword metatags are the 5 ‘related tags’ that lens-masters select in setting up their blog. This is a good idea. Probably the main benefit of metatags in Squidoo is actually in Adsense optimization as it’s thought that they have impact upon ad relevancy.
- tags - one of the hints that lens-masters give about the topic of their lens that perhaps that could be used more in the SEO of pages is the ‘Related Tags’. Lens masters can choose any tags at all. While these tags do appear at the top of the right column they actually feature quite low on the page’s source code. Perhaps one way to help search engine bots to take more notice of them would be to have them feature in more than one place on the page and higher in the code.
- Interlinking - another suggestion that comes to mind is for them to have more prominent interlinking to other related sections of Squidoo. at present there is an ‘explore related lenses’ link but it doesn’t link directly to any other pages on Squidoo except for a search results page. If instead they automatically linked to a number of other related lenses this would not only encourage people to be visiting more than one lens in a visit to Squidoo but it would also help with SEO as SE bots love interlinked sites. While there are lots of links to deeper within Squidoo from the banner and footers which the SE bots will love there is little relevant interlinking directly to and from lenses unless lens-masters take this initiative.
- Fresh Content - Search Engines love freshly updated content. As I’ve surfed around Squidoo this afternoon I’ve visited some lenses that seem reasonably updated but also quite a few that are not. One good thing in Squidoo’s advantage here is their RSS module. I would suspect that lenses that utilize it could benefit from doing so as it is one ever changing element of the page. Of course you’ll want to carefully choose what RSS feed to select to ensure keywords and content are relevant. Another suggestion I’ve seen some make about fresh content is to add comments modules which can add a freshness to the page also. Of course comments sections bring many other challenges with them.
- Domain Name - This is similar to the title tags situation. One of the downsides of having a shared domain with many pages is that the term ’squidoo’ appearing in it won’t really help with keyword profile. Smart lens-masters will choose a keyword or two as the extension to the domain.
- Domain Name Registration - Earlier in the year information became public that indicated that Google now look at domain name registration length as an SEO factor. Domains registered for long periods were ranked more highly than short ones. Squidoo lucks out here as they are only registered at this point until 06-01-2006. It’s not a biggie but everything counts in this game.
- Inbound Links - While there are distinct disadvantages of having a shared domain there are also some advantages. The cumulative impact of having having many sites with many inbound links from other sites is one of these advantages. My enternetusers Lens might not get a lot of inbound links but other popular lenses inbound links could benefit me.
There are many other SEO factors that we could judge Squidoo on but I’ll leave it at that to this point.
As I mention above - there are other factors to consider also. SEO shouldn’t happen at the expense of a site’s other goals and it might be that at this point SEO of factors like title tags are secondary to building a brand. This is probably true in other areas I’ve mentioned above.
Written on December 12th, 2005 at 05:12 pm by David Shawver
Yahoo offers Movable Type for business bloggers
Six Apart and Yahoo have announced a partnership as Yahoo will use MovableType as to provide small businesses with websites through it’s existing small business web site management service:
‘Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.
“This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business,” he said.
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.
Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.’
Congratulations to Anil and the team at MT.
found via blog herald
Written on December 12th, 2005 at 11:12 am by David Shawver
Weekend Events
I’m back after my weekend ‘off’. It was definitely off in terms of blogging however a very busy one on other fronts with weddings (one of them my sister) and other personal commitments. I took close to 1000 photos over the weekend something I really enjoyed.
Of course having the weekend off means that big news is bound to happen on a pro blogging front and this weekend there were a few stories that I’d have covered if I were here.
One of these is that BlogAds secured a big deal this week with MSNBC. They signed up over 800 blogs to a campaign they are running, their biggest campaign they’ve ever signed. I’ve got the campaign running on a couple of my blogs.
Also in news being reported everywhere this weekend was the sale of del.icio.us to Yahoo! Looks like the big online players are continuing to buy up emerging technologies and services. One has to wonder who will be next. I wonder who is courting Digg for instance.
I’m sure there are other stories that have broken over the weekend. I guess I’ll discover them as I wander through my RSS feeds today.
Hope your weekend was good.
Written on December 12th, 2005 at 10:12 am by David Shawver
Fund Your Love of Blogging
The next post in the b5media 12 days of Christmas series is from Nikki, one of our newer bloggers who has joined b5 as a result of our merger with the About Weblogs network. Her blog is on fashion accessories and is one of the AW blogs that we’re still to bring across onto a new domain and design. I hope you enjoy what Nikki has to say.
Hi, I’m Nikki from The Fashion Accessories Blog and I’m here to talk to you about the pros and cons of advertising on your blog. The upside is easy - you get to make money doing something you love. The downside is not so pretty - you can lose portions of your readership, you can destroy your design, you can lose your credibility, and more.
So how do you integrate some money-making ideas without losing the focus of your blog? It’s actually pretty easy. Advertise products and services that apply to your blog topic.
Blogging about dogs? Include your favorite collar accessories and link to them with pictures via Commission Junction.
Blogging about the real estate process? Include a Google AdSense banner in your sidebar that will pull up real estate related links.
Your readers won’t be as rebellious if you are including advertising that is applicable and useful to them. Some may speak out against your desire to make a few dollars, but if they’re not willing to help fund your hosting costs with a Paypal contribution, try not to let their comments get to you.
On the other hand, if you’re including distracting ads from a multitude of random companies - and your followers can’t find your blog categories because they’re buried far beneath the fold, don’t be surprised if you find your pageviews beginning to decline.
Happy blogging and happy holidays!
Written on December 11th, 2005 at 10:12 am by David Shawver
It’s all about the lifestyle
I’m Jayvee Fernandez, editor of Cellphone9. Though I feature a lot of tech news and product reviews, I believe the competence of C9’s content hinges more on buying advice, product comparison and taking product reviews one step further from being more that “matter of
fact.”
Though it may not seem like an obvious difference, there’s a big shift in focus when people talk about blogging about technology versus blogging about the technology lifestyle. Case in point - when people turn to me for buying advice on what the best gadget there is out there, I always throw back the question - “What are you going to use it for anyway?”
If you take a look at the bigger tech blogs in the blogosphere, you’d notice that they are characterized by a witty pen (err keyboard), pre-press release rumors, and product reviews slash features in various forms. Engadget for instance does the whole Unpacking thing, which is sorta like a geek strip tease and can be, often times, arousing to the geek eye.
There are so many tech blogs around, maintained by enthusiasts like you and me. But how does the small gem outshine the big one? Sometimes it just has to do with the polish. What I’m saying is, if we take tech blogging from the point of view of a gadgeteer’s lifestyle, then I think we’re on to something.
Blogging with the tech lifestyle in mind is a very huge niche that offers several advantages to aspiring bloggers:
First. Like all lifestyle blogs, they tend to get very personal. This is the nature of the beast and you will agree with me that if Ronald McDonald blogged about his burgers, it will be a better read than the greasy diner guy who fries burgers all day. The tech lifestyle is no different. If you’re famous like Leo Laporte, then great. If however, you fall into the category of the geek next door (like the rest of us), it would be great to start out by introducing yourself through your gadgets. You get to answer questions like:
What was your first phone? Why did you buy it? What clothes do you wear to hang all your gadgets? What do you do for a living? How do these gadgets help you cope with work?
You are the authority of your own gadget life and people will, hopefully, read you when they discover why you bought the gadgets you have.
Second. I’ve been checking my blog stats and it seems that the two more popular entries being visited / commented are the ones that have reference to commercial titles like the Ragnarok Poring Mouse and the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children mobile phones. The post title really counts.
If you want to increase your page views by a few, it could help to include already-popular pop culture references. Everyone loves Final Fantasy. Ragnarok has a strong cosplaying cult following. It’s very Google-able. Think of topics where pop culture and technology mesh. I can think of several already, by just mentioning Sanrio’s Hello Kitty technology line.
Third. When doing product reviews, it could be helpful to measure by comparison, and not by numbers. Whenever I assign product reviews for my magazine, I always make it a point to tell my writers to do a “while you use it” review. Compare the two sets of sentences:
Set one: The Palm T|X measures 4.76 x 3.08 x.61 inches and weighs 5.25 ounces. It has a 312MHz processor and 128MB of flash ROM.
Set two: The Palm T|X is as it is named, the size of your outstretched palm. Because it is rather long and thin, it is advisable to immediately purchase a hard case to avoid a snapping disaster in your pocket or in your bag. It weighs as much as a desktop mouse and will easily fit your shirt pocket without being too droopy.
Though readers do love the tech specs, it would also be good to provide some real world feedback on how these gadgets all fit into your person.
For questions, comments and suggestions you could send me an email to jayvee[at]b5media[dot]com. Cheers!
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