Written on May 13th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 05:05 am by Darren Rowse
New Blogging Rhythms
I have found in the last month that my blogging rhythm has changed quite considerably.
My Old Blogging Rhythm
A year or so ago I used to spend a higher percentage of the time I dedicated to blogging actually writing content. I was blogging as a solo blogger (no network affiliations) and the administrative demands of my blogs were quite low.
As a result I used to spread out my posting rate pretty evenly through the day. I would write a post, then move onto email, check RSS and then maybe write another post. I was averaging 25 or more posts per day.
My New Blogging Rhythm
The last month or so things have had to change.
The changes have largely been the result of different circumstances and demands on my time (being a part of a large network of blogs like b5media has been a bit part of that). It’s also probably partially as a result of blogs growing which increases the administration levels needed to maintain them (ie moderating comments, responding to emails, participating in discussions etc).
These changes have not always been easy to handle - some days lately I’ve felt like I’m barely keeping on top of things - but just this week I’m noticing that I’m beginning to change my blogging rhythm to accommodate the different circumstances. Some of the changes have included:
- Writing in Longer Blocks of Time - Rather than posting spontaneously throughout the day I’m now setting aside specific time for writing content. These times are longer blocks which are spread further apart. In one such block of time I might write 5 posts for a blog (for example I just completed three longer posts for Digital Photography School and now have set myself the task of writing three enternetusers posts).
- Utilizing Advance Posting - In a sense what I’m doing with the longer blocks of writing time is building up a stock of content to be used in the coming day or two. So on a blog like Digital Photography School where I have a posting rhythm of one post per day I’ve just completed three days of posts which frees me up to focus my time on other things. For enternetusers the rhythm is different as here I write a longer post each day and then include other more spontaneous news posts between them. I obviously can write the longer posts in advance but do need to keep on top of the daily news. I use WordPress’s advance posting functionality to automate the new posts going up on the blogs.
- Reducing Posting Frequency on Some Blogs - I’ve naturally moved to posting less frequently on a few of my blogs (and as I mentioned a month or two ago have let others go completely). Instead of writing 2 posts per day on these other newsy link blogs I’m now posting every second or third day and when I do am posting a few more posts at a go. This is not ideal but to this point is the rhythm I’ve adopted.
I’ve not really intentionally done any of these things. Instead they have come pretty naturally over time as the need for change has arisen.
Written on May 13th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
My Link Lust for Lifehacker
Over on my link lust post (thanks to everyone that contributed) a reader asked me to name my own lusted after links.
My answer was that while I could think of sites that could send larger amounts of traffic that one of my favorite places to get a link from was Lifehacker.
The reasons for this (in addition to it being a great read and it being an honor to be featured) are:
- It sends a nice first wave of traffic. The numbers of visitors from one of their links varies but it can be in the thousands over a 24 hour period.
- It is ‘nice’ traffic. One of the problems with sites like Digg and Slashdot (who can send ALOT of traffic quickly if you get a well placed link) is that there’s a certain element of users of those sites who have a rather cynical and snarky way of interacting with the content that is linked to. While it is a minority it can be a little overwhelming as the total numbers of their users are so big.
- Secondary Links. I don’t know their exact demographic but I suspect that a reasonable number of Lifehacker readers have blogs because the numbers of ’secondary links’ (ie links from bloggers who find the content from Lifehacker) is quite large. This happens also with other large sites but for it’s size Lifehackers secondary link levels seem pretty high.
- Social Bookmarkers. Similarly I suspect that many Lifehacker users must be pretty regular users of social book marking sites - particularly Del.ico.us. My reason for thinking this is that when Lifehacker links up to one of my posts I notice that a few hours later it will usually appear in the delicious popular page. Often there is a flow on effect from this also including a third wave of link ups as well as other social bookmarking sites picking up the story (especially those that feed directly off del.ico.us.
In effect what happens when Lifehacker links us is a viral wave seems to kick in that can last for a few days. It might not be as spectacular as some other links that you can get but the impact is significant and I suspect has a profound impact upon things like increasing loyal reader levels and helping a site to become established in search engines.
Of course it’s worth saying that the impact of a LH link will vary considerably from time to time depending upon how they link up and what the topic is. Life hacker readers are obviously big on some things but not others and I’m sure there are other sites around in different niches that have a similar impact when they link.
Written on May 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 04:05 pm by Darren Rowse
AdBrite Announces Inline Ads
Adbrite (aff) have announced this week that they are moving towards giving their publishers ‘inline’ ads.
Inline ads are those links you see inside of content (often green or made to look different to other links on a page) that have a little popup window that appears when your comes into contact with the link (see picture below for an example).
This type of advertising causes quite a bit of debate among bloggers. Some like them because they don’t take up too much room (unless your cursor is over them) while others feel they are too close to looking like a link and are therefore a little deceptive.
What do you think? Would you try them?
Inline ads are CPC ads (ie you get paid per click). You don’t have to manually put them into your blog - other ad providers who use them provide you with a piece of code to put into your page that does it automatically for you. In a sense they are contextual ads but I do know of some bloggers who have been using them in conjunction with AdSense ads on the same page through other ad providers (you’d want to check this with AdSense before using them).
There’s no real word at this stage on when they go live with them but I suspect they’ll be popular with some bloggers.
Written on May 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:05 am by Darren Rowse
Comparing Blog Platform Trends
Rachel’s done a fascinating little comparison between 5 blog platforms using the new Google Trends tool. The following graph plots the amount of people searching for each platform in Google since 2004. See if you can work out which platform is which before you head over to Rachel’s blog to get the all important color key that reveals which one is which.
Find out the result here.
Written on May 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 09:05 am by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - 12 May 2006
Here’s a few interesting links that I found on my travels through RSS-land this morning:
- Steve is blogging at new blog Why My Blog Stinks about different aspects of blogging that you should do if you don’t want your blog to succeed. It’s kind of a reverse psychology enternetusers which was inspired in part by my post on how to guarantee never earning more than 0.14 cents per day with AdSense. He’s written posts like don’t be funny, act like you know it all, don’t face bloggers block properly, don’t find a rhythm and more.
- Another blogger who’s using one of my posts as inspiration for some writing of his own is Stanley from Blog for Money who is writing a series called 18 Lessons I may have learnt about Blogging which is based upon my 18 lessons about blogging post. He’s taking each lesson in turn and putting his own spin on it.
- Easton has written a post about three services he uses to keep track of the comments that he leave on different blogs.
- Steve Rubel shares 25 things he’s learned on Google Trends already.
- Lifehacker features blogger Steve Pavlina in their latest ‘How I work’ interview.
Written on May 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 03:05 am by Darren Rowse
April Earnings Update
April’s earnings totals are coming in this week and I thought I’d give a bit of an update as to what the month looked like in terms of earnings for my personal blogs (note the points of clarification below).
I’ve ranked the main income sources that I’m involved with from highest earners to lowest earners (see graph below - click to enlarge):
- AdSense - 32%
- Chitika eMiniMalls (aff) - 28%
- Miscellaneous Affilaite Programs - 17%
- Private Banner Ad Deal - 11%
- Text-Link-Ads (aff) - 5%
- Six Figure Blogging Sales - 3%
- Amazon - 2%
- Miscellaneous Ad Programs (includes Feedburner RSS, BlogAds, Adbrite (aff), ValueClick) - 2%
Points of Clarification:
- the Chitika eMiniMalls figure is an estimate of what the audited figures are likely to be based upon the last few months auditing percentages (for me it’s been in the 12 - 18% range).
- the total income for April is over five figures for the month.
- these figures do not include a little consulting work that I’ve picked up in the last month or so (not a major focus for me at this point).
- these figures are earnings from across my own personal blogs and do not include earnings from b5media (which includes enternetusers). To this point as b5 owners we’ve not drawn any earnings out of the company.
- these figures are before I pay any outgoings (ie I have one blogger that I pay on a a revenue share basis for a couple of my blogs and I pay someone to find advertising for me). Total outgoings are probably around 10% of the income.
Written on May 12th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
YPN’s Ad Placement Advice Compared to AdSense Advice
The YPN blog has posted a few ad placement tips based upon eye tracking studies that find that website users view pages in the following pattern:
They recommend a leaderboard ad above the fold between content and the top navigation bar.
Secondly they suggest using vertical skyscrapers to the right of content.
Thirdly they suggest rectangle ads in content.
I find this interesting strategy as it’s a little different from AdSense’s suggested ad placement which suggests the following ‘hot zones’.
The Yahoo advice of ads between content and the top navigational bar fits reasonably well with the AdSense heat map but the skyscraper to the right of content is a point of difference in the advice between the two contextual advertisers advice.
Both suggest ad inside content do well.
Ultimately the last advice they give is probably the main thing to listen to:
Each site is different, and each publisher has different goals,” Margaret notes. “Publishers should experiment with different placement, layouts, Reporting Categories and Ad Targeting combinations to achieve the best outcome.
Written on May 11th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 02:05 pm by Darren Rowse
E-Commerce Management Tool Question
Does anyone have any suggestions about services to manage the sale of e-products.
I’ve had a number of people recommend Ultimate Affiliate Manager which I’m toying with the idea of trying out but I’m interested to see what others have used.
Ultimately I’m in the market for a product that will deliver e-products (downloadable), collect payments, manage an affiliate program and automate as much of the process as possible. It’d also be good to have an auto-responder tool and for it to be server based.
And of course it all needs to be idiot proof so that even a non techie like me can get his head around it.
UAM seems to have all the things I’d like - but it’s Perl based and my server guy is a php/mysql guy.
Interested on people’s experiences and recommendations if you’ve used this or any other similar services.
PS: I’ve already had two other recommendations - Professional Cart Solutions and 1ShoppingCart (which I’m told are the same thing just branded differently).
Written on May 11th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:05 am by Darren Rowse
Google Trends - A Useful Blogging Tool
One of the new tools released by Google yesterday was Google Trends which opens up their Zeitgeist service to enable users to graph the search trends for different keywords since January 2004.
I’m sure this will be a tool used by bloggers quite a bit as it will enable to them to track the topics they’re writing about and the buzz around them. For example a topic I’m following is Digital Cameras. Here’s it’s trend:
The ‘letters’ correspond with a key that gives you news items that might explain what was happening at certain times to cause spikes and troughs in the graph.
The tool also allows comparisons between related search terms. So in comparing Digital Cameras (blue) and Camera Phones (red) we find:
For interests sake we’ll throw in a non related search term - ‘Blog’ (in orange) to see how popular that is as a search term:
Applications for Bloggers with Google Trends:
Visual Aides - I’m pretty sure we’ll see these little graphs used within posts by bloggers quite a bit as they write posts about trends and compare everything from political parties to breakfast cereals (although there needs to be a certain level of searches for a term before it is tracked - ie there’s no graphs for terms like ‘enternetusers’ etc out there.
Blog Research Tool - The other application that immediately sprang to my mind on seeing this was how useful a tool it will be when starting a new blog and narrowing in on a niche (including which keywords to target). ie if I wanted to choose between a blog on skiing or surfing the graph reveals what level of interest people using Google have in each (skiiing is blue, surfing is red):
Obviously both are popular but skiing is more seasonal while surfing is pretty constant. This is useful information to know in setting up a blog.
Add ’snowboarding’ (orange) into the mix and you see a less popular term - again useful to know if it was a choice between the terms.
Lastly if you’d narrowed your niche down to ’skiing’ you can use this tool to help you think about which specific keywords might be popular. For example add the word, ’skis’ (red), ’slalom’ (orange) and ’snow’ (green) and you find all kinds of interesting information:
Found via Inside Google.
Written on May 11th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 09:05 am by Darren Rowse
Welcome Livewire Readers
Welcome to readers of The Age (and Sydney Morning Herald aparently) who may have found themselves here after today’s LiveWire interview (no online version this time - but I’ve taken a photo of it to the left, click to enlarge and read if you’re interested). update: there is an online version now. You can read it here.
If this is your first time to enternetusers.net then let me give you a quick tour of my online home. Grab a coffee and make yourself comfortable while I show you around.
Firstly, enternetusers.net is a blog that is devoted to helping bloggers improve their blogging and explore ways to earn an income at the same time by writing about topics that they love - here’s a couple of links to give you a little information about me and about this blog.
If you’re new to blogging you might find this ‘what is a blog?‘ article and my recent series on Blogging for Beginners helpful.
If you’re interested in blogging for money here’s one on how bloggers are making money from blogging.
If you like what you read here you can follow my future entries (I write several times per day most days) in two ways - firstly I send a free email newsletter every week which you can subscribe to and secondly if you read RSS feeds you can subscribe to mine here.
The article also mentions my Digital Camera Blog and b5media.com (a blog network that I co-own).
Thanks for stopping by - I hope you enjoy your stay at enternetusers and b5media.
PS: The photo is one that they shot for another interview (last year sometime) - I’m not sure why they used it as the gadgets in the photo don’t connect with what I talk about in the article and they did send another photographer out for this article - odd).
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