Written on September 19th, 2005 at 08:09 pm by David Shawver
Partial Poll Results - Building Blog Readership Tips Wanted
The initial results of the poll that I have currently running in the sidebar which asks readers of this blog what topics they want advice on here at enternetusers are coming in and I am interested to see what seems to be emerging so far.
The runaway leader so far is a request for tips on ‘Building Blog Readership’. It’s interesting that this is the number 1 result so far because I’ve been working on developing a resource on this very topic. It won’t be ready for a few weeks - but those of you wanting to learn how to grow your readership might like to stay tuned.
The results of the poll so far are:
- Building Blog Readership - 93 votes
- Adsense Optimization - 73 votes
- Writing Content - 69 votes
- Search Engine Optimization - 53 votes
- Blog Design - 44 votes
- Blogging Tools - 36 votes
- Other Advertising Systems - 28 votes
- Affiliate Programs - 21 votes
- RSS Advertising - 17 votes
There is still 6 days to go of the poll so it’s too early to make any major calls - but I’m interested to see that with the exception of point two (Adsense Optimization) the points that focus upon income streams are actually at the bottom of the list and that people seem more interested in other aspects of blogging.
Written on September 19th, 2005 at 04:09 am by David Shawver
Blog Crushes Revealed - Round 2
Readers are submitting their Blog Crushes thick and fast now. In addition to Round 1’s submissions I have great pleasure in presenting 15 more lovebirds (or love-bloggers). If you want to join their ranks follow the instructions in this post. In the mean time - here are the latest crushes:
- Colbert has a crush on Liewcf
- Allan has a place in his heart for EyeFlashes
- Kobayashi loves Steve and Darren
- Jerm has expressed his love for Kim the Awesome Dictator Princess and Mussolini
- Ben has the hots for Home Office Voice, Entrepreneurs Journey and Trevor Cook
- Chris is smitten with adiktd - too hot for radio
- Christian has a thing for me
- Angie is spreading her love around to 13 bloggers - Gina, Darren, Andy Wibbels, Ken Leebow, Heather/Dooce, Overhead in New York, Overhead in the Office, Mridu Khullar, Wendi Speciale, Carrie Colbert, Scrapability and Kim (I think I got them all).
- Tiago is dedicated to Pop Gadget
- Liz loves S.L. Cunningham
- Christine is dedicated to Steve
- Flyaway-Weblog has a crush on WandaLust
- Melissa is all gar gar over MOMster in Paris and Daddy Types
- Modern Guy has his eye on Mimi in New York
- Charlene loves Mr Nice Guy, Cafemama and The Sarcastic Journalist
Written on September 19th, 2005 at 12:09 am by David Shawver
Jason Calacanis Interview
Interesting interview with Jason Calacanis over at his blog today - it gives an up to date look at the Weblogs Inc Network. Well worth the read.
‘The business is growing about 9-12 months faster then I thought it would. However, we’ve got a couple more years of really hard work ahead of us before this becomes this become what I consider a “real business” (i.e. over $10M a year in revenue).’
Looks like things are building well over at WIN!
Written on September 18th, 2005 at 06:09 pm by David Shawver
Tell Me What You Want from enternetusers: Poll
I’ve just added a poll to the sidebar that gives you as readers an opportunity to tell me what type of tips you’d like me to focus upon here at enternetusers.net in the months ahead.
I’ve chosen 9 of the topics that I regularly get questions on from readers. While the result of the poll may be that all are selected equally (you can choose as many as you like but can only vote once), I’d love to get a sense of what the felt needs of readers are at present.
If you would like to expand on your answer and/or suggest other areas feel free to do so in comments below. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to give everyone what they want - but I want to at least give readers an opportunity to help set the direction for this blog in this way.
I’m looking forward to see what you have to say both through the poll and via comments. The Poll will go for a week.
Written on September 18th, 2005 at 05:09 pm by David Shawver
Signatures in Comments - Poll Results
A week ago I started a poll here at enternetusers.net asking readers whether signatures in comments should be allowed on blogs.
The poll was in response to a post that I’d written arguing against the practice which generated a lot of comments both agreeing and disagreeing with my argument. I realized pretty quickly after the comments started rolling in that this was a touchy point and that while many agreed with my stance that quite a few felt passionately that I was wrong.
I wanted to test this in a more anonymous way (I suspected that some disagreed with me but were not comfortable to do so publicly in comments) - so I started the poll.
My suspicion was correct. It seems that quite a few readers are Pro signatures in comments - 56% in fact with 35% against them and 8% undecided.
While I will admit to being a little perplexed by the result (when I wrote the original post I was convinced most would agree with me) I’m willing to publish the result and say that I’m in the minority. I’m not sure there is really a right or wrong here - but after the discussion and poll I’m a little more open to the idea of signatures in comments.
I still have these reservations about Comment Signatures:
- I still have concerns that such practices makes fighting spam comments difficult
- I do wonder where the practice will end up (I really hope we don’t end up with comment threads being like the terrible mix mash of signatures that we see on many discussion forums)
But I do take on board the arguments of many of my readers in the comments of the previous post and can see that if used responsibly it could be argued that signatures are a good thing.
I have decided to change my policy on them here at enternetusers a little. If you’d like to leave a signature I’ll allow it if your comment is relevant to the post concerned. I will delete links in comments that are obviously just trying to get a link from my blog or who leave too many comments that don’t really add to the conversations taking place. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m happy to give you a link in return for your comment and participation on this blog - but please don’t abuse the privilege - if I sense you are your comment will be edited or deleted.
Commenters should also realize that I have spam filters in place which may or may not regard comments with links in them as spam. They filter comments on numerous factors - links in comments are one of these factors so you do increase the chances of being filtered with signatures. I use these filters because I get thousands of spam comments on my blogs per day - I’m sorry for the inconvenience but its a sad choice that I’ve had to make to use them.
A Final Piece of Advice
Lastly let me say that I’d urge bloggers to consider the fact that 35% of bloggers are anti signatures in comments (a further 8% have indecision about them). This is good to keep in mind as you comment on blogs (this one and others). It means that over a third of the blogs you leave comments on could be offended, annoyed, angered or put out by the practice.
I’m not sure about you - but this figure alone is enough to make me hesitate before engaging in the practice. My advice to bloggers is to only do it if you know its ok or if you have some kind of relationship with the blogger concerned. I only ever leave links in comments if they are relevant to the topic of the blog concerned - and even then I think before I add them.
Written on September 17th, 2005 at 06:09 pm by David Shawver
Favicons on Blogs
Today I had a nice surprise waiting for me in my inbox - an email from Tiago who had kindly taken it upon himself to design me a favicon for my blog in thanks for the advice I’d given him and others through this blog.
For those not familiar with favicons - they are the little tiny 16×16 pixel pictures that appear to the left of a site’s URL. They also appear in the tabs of firefox and in bookmarks on some browsers. - in my case Tiago had taken the ‘p’ from my logo and constructed one as follows.
He then pointed me to this favicon instruction site which told me how to add it to my blog - it took about 2 minutes.
I’ve been meaning to add a favicon here to enternetusers for some time as it adds another element of branding to the site, increases useability for tabbed browser users and those who use bookmarks regularly to surf - but unfortunately it’s always slipped to the bottom of my ‘to do list’ - so a big thank you to Tiago.
Written on September 16th, 2005 at 04:09 pm by David Shawver
Blog Crushes Revealed - Round 1
It’s time to reveal the first 11 Blog Crushes that readers have for other bloggers.
- Actionberg has a thing for True Hoop
- Bonnie loves Miss Snark the literary agent
- Chris Owen has been admiring ‘MrG’ from Genuine Blog
- Redd is going weak at the knees over Dooce
- HART loves Comic Strip Blog
- Miha is smitten over Duncan and Darren
- Dee has a serious thing for Marilynn Griffith
- Tim has unrequited love for Jenstar
- Cary is devoted to Lori
- Mike has expressed his love for Joi and Creating Passionate Users
- Kim gets into a lovey dovey frame of mind and talks up Angie, Shai and Cayolyn
Do you have a blog crush on another blogger? It’s not about having a ‘real crush’ - but do you admire another blogger? Write a post about your blog crush with a link back to the central blog crush page and then let us know about it so we can add you to the list there. You’ve got until 21 September to get your entry in. In the process you’ll spread some blogging love to another blogger and highlight your own blog a little too.
Written on September 16th, 2005 at 03:09 pm by David Shawver
4% of Bloggers Generated $100,000+ in 12 Month Period: Study
James at everyhuman emailed me to day to let me know about a thesis that he’s just published on Blogging. He describes his research as follows:
To give a brief over view of the paper, it was written for people who have a basic understanding of Blogs. I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.
I carried out quantitative research by twice sending out a survey via email to 750 Bloggers who are ranked by Technorati. A total 174 Bloggers filled out the survey.
Some of his key findings included:
- 49% of survey participants use RSS readers to collect information for their Blogs
- 5% allow commenting on their Blogs
- 33% of the Blogs use Google AdSense for advertising
- 22% use BlogAds
In a 12 month period:
- 45% of bloggers did not generate any revenue at all from their blogs
- 40% generated under $5,000
- 4% generated over $100,000.
Of course it’s worth keeping in mind that the sample size was 174 so 4% is around 7 bloggers. One might argue both for or against whether this is a true representation of what all bloggers earn. I can’t see a breakdown of the types of bloggers surveyed so far in the paper but it would be interesting to see what type of spread of respondents there were in terms of topic, location and other demographics.
You can download the full thesis here (PDF)
Written on September 15th, 2005 at 11:09 pm by David Shawver
Is there Room for Another Blog Network?
Today in the Six Figure Blogging call we talked a little about Blog Networks and took a look over a number of the bigger and emerging blog networks that are opening up around the wider blogging community and it was interesting to see not only the variety of blogs within networks - but also the variety of flavors of networks themselves.
On one hand you’ve got Gawker - a network of blogs that shamelessly goes after the young male audience who have disappeared from in front of television screens in recent years. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have Shiny Media who in some of their blogs are targeting young women.
Then we have the massive Weblogs Inc who has more of a shotgun approach - 75+ blogs (It’s probably more these days but I find it hard to count beyond fingers and toes) on a wide variety of topics with an even wider array of authors (although their writers profiles don’t seem to be that high I’ve been noticing recently - or is that just me?).
Flip across to the 9rules network (please remember that they are anti capital letters when you link to them - or the wrath of Scrivs might come down upon you) and you find a very different beast again. A growing collection of blogs who band together in a very loving, relational, non controlling collective type network. There is talk of making money - but it seems to be more of a club atmosphere so far in its early stages.
Then there is weblog empire (launched in the wake of the impressive Blog Herald), blog logic (which has a diverse group of blogs including one on dry walling!), creative weblogging (have a wide array of topics and have dropped their YPN and Adsense ads on the same page in the last few days) and the new Bloggy Network (looking to add not only blogs but blog tools) to mention just a few of the other blog networks that are around - each with their own spin.
Of course there are many other blog networks out there - I seem to discover at least one per week these days - but the question is…
Is there room for one more?
The next week or two will see that question answered (just between you and me)…
But in the mean time I thought it might be fun to have some discussion about blog networks and where people see the gaps in the market as being? What do you notice about existing blog networks? What is missing? What is being overdone? How would you go about starting a network?
Written on September 15th, 2005 at 12:09 pm by David Shawver
Comment ProBlems on enternetusers - Solution at Hand?
I’ve had feedback recently from readers of enternetusers that some of you are having trouble leaving comments due to my spam filter being too harsh on you.
Please accept my apologies for this. I’ve been under a massive comment spam attack (thousands per day) for a couple of months now at this blog. My spam filter catches virtually every one of them - however in doing so it seems to kill a few genuine ones also.
One way around this if you are one of the people who is being blocked from commenting is to register as a user of this blog. You can do this via this Registration Form.
This SHOULD allow you to comment on any post without being blocked by the filter. Let me know if you have any further problems.
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