Written on May 3rd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 01:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Google Updating?
I’m not sure exactly what’s going on but I suspect that Google is doing some tweaking/updating at present as I’ve had a number of bloggers emailing to report that they are seeing greater shifts than normal in their SERPs (the position of their site for certain keywords in Google). There also seems to be quite a bit of discussion going on in a variety of threads at WMW (more than the normal level anyway). It could be one of Google’s normal minor updates or maybe something bigger is brewing.
I’ve also talked to a few Australian bloggers in the last few days who have noticed significant changes in google.com.au’s results and some UK based publishers who are noticing google.co.uk changes - perhaps what we’re seeing is the results of localized updates.
My own sites are a little higher than normal in terms of Google referrals but it could just be a seasonal thing. Time will tell.
Written on May 3rd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Comment Spammers Harvesting Genuine Commenter’s Details
Comment spammers are getting trickier.
Today I had a comment which I thought was from a regular reader of enternetusers. It had their name, their email, their URL but the comment was a link to a parked domain with just ads on it and the IP address was not the person who the comment claimed to be from.
Spammers are harvesting genuine comment leaver’s details and using them to leave comment spam with them in an attempt to get past bloggers.
So rather than just scanning comments and allowing anything from familiar names you might want to take a closer look at what the comments are actually saying.
Written on May 3rd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:05 am by Darren Rowse
Happy Birthday 9rules Network
A big congratulations to the team at 9rules Network for 1 year of building blog community and raising the bar when it comes to quality blogs working together! As a network these guys have had a year of highs and lows (as any start up does) but they’ve come through it stronger, more beautiful and pushing creative boundaries.
See the celebrations and leave your congratulations in their core team’s 1 year anniversary posts at:
- Scrivs - One Year Down
- Colin - Three Six Five
- Mike - 9Rules Network Fame
- Tyme - 1 year already?
Well done 9rules - I raise my coffee cup to you on this morning and wish you well for many more years of blogging!
Written on May 3rd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 10:05 am by Darren Rowse
Yahoo Publisher Network Terminates More Publisher Accounts
This morning I’ve had an email from a very disgruntled YPN publisher who has received a phone call from YPN saying that their account has been terminated because they have used MySpace to send traffic to their ‘legitimate’ website which has YPN. The thrust of the reason given to them for the termination was that the traffic being sent was not of a ‘high enough quality’.
Looking at the forums on the topic it seems that this publisher is not alone.
This could be a second round of such terminations. A couple of months ago I reported a batch of publishers having their accounts terminated for having too much international traffic.
update: Jen has more comprehensive news of this development with some interesting commentary at MySpace.com and Yahoo Publisher Network apparently don’t mix
Written on May 3rd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 05:05 am by Darren Rowse
Four Figure Blogging
Ben at College Startup is writing a useful series of posts on ‘How to Become a four figure blogger’.
So far he’s put together 2 parts (read them at part 1 and part 2). Here are a couple of key quotes from the series so far with a few of my own comments on each:
“If you have any hope of earning $1,000 a year from your blog you’re going to need traffic. You don’t need much, I am on track to earn over $1,000 a year and I am averaging well below 500 unique visits a day.”
This is stating the obvious but is a key point. Traffic is essential if you want to develop a blog that makes money (unless you’re going to get into some click fraud scheme). A blog doesn’t just make money - it needs people viewing it, interacting with it and participating in it. As traffic grows the potential it has to earn an income also rises.
“People don’t want to click on advertisements in your sidebar. Strategically placing affiliate links within posts gets a much better conversion rate. I’m not the only person who has discovered this - any professional blogger will tell you the same thing. People are much more likely to click on a link within a post than they are to click an obvious advertisement on your sidebar.”
Ben is talking about ‘affiliate programs’ here and not ‘advertising’. A common misconception that many new bloggers have is that once they have traffic all they have to do is put affiliate program buttons in their sidebar and the money will start rolling in. While it is possible to earn some money from such an approach Ben is correct in saying that links within content to affiliate programs are much more effective than sidebars.
This technique is often referred to as ‘deep linking’ and it works best when the links in your posts are genuine, relevant, transparent and helpful to your readers.
I’m looking forward to the rest of Ben’s four figure blogging series.
Written on May 3rd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:05 am by Darren Rowse
Making Money While Others Do the Work
Over the weekend I made close to $1000 more than my normal level of earnings without doing anything different at all.
In fact I didn’t intend to make the money and for 24 hours or so I didn’t even know anything abnormal was happening.
How can this be so? Let me explain….
12 or so months ago I discovered an e-book that related to one of the niches that I blog in (I’m not going to name it as I don’t have the author’s permission to talk about their strategy). The e-book was a quality product and was quite relevant to my blog’s topic and so after buying it myself and reading it I began to promote it on my blog. I used a variety of strategies including a review of the book, linking to it prominently from my blog and by working with the author of the e-book to promote it with some articles that they wrote for me.
The results of this were that over time I referred significant traffic to the sales page of this e-book.
Some of those who I referred purchased the e-book (and earned me a commission each time) while others (the majority) just signed up for free taster products and free email newsletters that the author provided. The key was that the author of the e-book captured (with permission through an opt-in program) the email details of many of my referrals.
In the early days I didn’t earn a lot from this program (probably around $25 per week) but it was a nice little bonus.
Over the last 12 months the author of the e-book has produced a number of other e-products ranging from free tasters through to more expensive membership programs. He’s really grown in reputation in the niche and instead of branching out into numerous different topics he’s going deep into the one he started with - producing an array of products that all relate to one another.
The great thing for me as one of his affiliates is that each person I’ve referred to him over the last 12 months earns me an income on any purchase that they make not only the first time they purchase something but ANYtime they purchase something for as long as he continues to produce products.
Last Friday the author released a new product to his email list. The product paid a commission of around $30 per sale to the person who referred the customer (me). Over the weekend 33 people made the purchase (and more have signed up since). I’ve not had to do any work at all since sending this traffic to the sales page of the e-book - the author has done all the work since this time by building his reputation as a quality producer of content.
Heres hoping he’ll continue releasing more products because I’ll continue to refer traffic for as long as he does.
Take Home Lessons:
- Find quality affiliate products that have high relevancy to your blog’s topic
- Seek to build a relationship with the developer of the product (they will often offer you resources to help you promote it)
- Be patient with these types of affiliate programs (in the early days I was a little disillusioned with this affiliate program because most of the traffic I sent didn’t make a purchase but just signed up for the free stuff. While there is little short term gain in this the long term impact can be quite lucrative if the program is developing quality new products). Please note that not all affiliate programs are like this - most have a limit to how long after the referral is made that you earn a commission. Finding affiliate programs with long or indefinate time limits and you can make significant money over time.
- Going deep into a niche (like this author has done) is a very powerful thing - particularly if you’re going a route of developing e-products for sale.
One last thought:
While I’m doing pretty well out of this affiliate program the actual owner of it must be making some serious cash. For every dollar I make he makes one from the same sale. Keep in mind that I’m just one of his many affiliates and so over time (and as he collects more and more members of his online community at many different levels) he grows the potential earnings of each new product in his range.
The model that this person is using is one that I’m seeing more and more bloggers getting into both as affiliates but also as producers of e-products.
I suspect that in the year ahead we’ll see this area grow further as bloggers work out that their expertise in their niches can not only be monetized via advertising and affiliate programs but by directly selling their expertise to readers.
Written on May 2nd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 08:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Australian AdSense publishers Get EFT at last
I just had an email from AdSense telling me that they’ve just enabled EFT direct deposit payments to ALL Australian AdSense publishers. They had previously made this available to some publishers but I’m assured it’s now an open thing. The set up process takes a few steps but once it’s done it’ll cut down a few trips to the bank and delays in cashing cheques.
Written on May 2nd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 02:05 pm by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Blog Case Study - Digital Photography School
Last week’s experiment with Vidcasting brought a lot of positive feedback so I’ve decided to make it a regular thing. This week I’m testing blip.tv (still in beta) to host my video. Let me know what you think in comments.
In this week’s vidcast (6 minutes and 23 seconds) I walk you through my latest ‘blog’ Digital Photography School. It’s an experiment on numerous levels and I talk you through some of the theories that I’m testing there.
By no means is this new project finished - I’m not satisfied with many aspects of it yet but as I say it’s more of an experiment than anything else and I’ll use it as a blog case study both in this vidcast but also in the coming months as I continue to develop it. In this way I hope to give a practical example from startup through to maturity (hopefully) on how I set up a new blog.
Hopefully it will also be a useful blog for some of you who are interested in improving your digital camera technique - if that’s you you might wish to subscribe to it’s weekly email newsletter or RSS feed.
Of course any link love that you can give it will be much appreciated!
Here’s the Vidcast.
update: So far my experience with blink.tv has been reasonable. Uploading was pretty easy although it turns out they were doing a few changes to their system as i did and there were a couple of error messages. All’s well now.
One downside is that I can’t see an option to watch the video from within my blog - it opens up in a window of it’s own. Perhaps I just can’t see how to do this and it’s a feature but that’d be one thing I’d love.
update 2: If you’re having trouble viewing this version of the video you might like to try it hosted at YouTube. I’ve posted it here.
Written on May 2nd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 01:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Drupal 4.7.0 Released
Drupal (a blogging platform) users will be excited today to see Drupal 4.7.0 has been released. New features include:
- Multiple Block Regions: Were you feeling constrained by only two choices for block placement? You can now dynamically specify as many block placement locations as you want.
- ‘Offline for Maintenance’ Configuration: You can now easily configure your site to display a friendly notice to visitors when you have to take down your site for maintenance.
- Free Tagging Support: Free tagging functionality is now built into the taxonomy system.
- Site-Wide Contact Form: You can now easily enable a contact form page that will let you easily collect feedback from your site visitors.
- Author Information Block: There is now a block you can enable that will display author information alongside posts.
- Public/Private Profile Fields: You can now specify permissions for profiles on a per-field basis.
- Block by IPs/Hostname: It is now possible to block users by their IP address or Hostnames. Good bye trolls!
- Aggregator now Supports Atom: It is now finally possible to aggregate Atom formatted feeds like those created by Blogger.
- Aggregator Generates RSS Feeds: It’s now easier than ever to use Drupal to power ‘Planet’ like sites.
- RSS Feed Settings You can now configure how much content and how many items to publish in your RSS feed.
- Better Search Index: The search module indexer is now smarter and more robust
- Advanced Search Operators: You can now search by advanced search operators (e.g. phrase, node type, etc.)
- Custom Search Results Ranking: The search module now lets you weight search results by keyword relevance, date of post, number of comments, and number of views.
found via an IM from Regan
Written on May 2nd, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 10:05 am by Darren Rowse
BlogBurst Officially Launch
I’m seeing a bit of buzz around today about BlogBurst
TechCrunch advises that BlogBurst officially launches today.
BlogBurst is a service that syndicates blogger’s content to mainstream media. The publishers using the content pay a CPM based fee to BlogBurst for the content and the blogger gets free exposure and a link back to their blog (they don’t get paid for it).
Since I mentioned BlogBurst a number of months ago I’ve heard from quite a few readers who say that they’ve been approached by them to become publishers. Quite a few have signed up already.
I’d be keen to hear from bloggers in comments below (anonymously if you’d prefer) if you’ve been approached and to hear about how you made the decision either to join or to stay out of it. If you’ve had articles published already I’d love to hear how that went also.
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