Author Archive
The Custom Post Background WordPress Plugin
Monday, February 15th, 2010
This plugin was designed by a college buddy named David Sherret who lives over on DavidSherret.com. He may or may not be open to suggestions for changing the plugin.
The Custom Post Background plugin for WordPress adds a great deal of visual customization ability to your blog posts and page appearances. It allows you to easily change the background of individual blog posts/pages using CSS or an image URL (with or without a x/y/both repeat).
At the main menu, CPB lists all of your pages/posts and displays any background settings that are set. For any page, clicking on the edit button will open up a sub-menu with fields where you can then make your background customizations.
As you can see, you can change the background with CSS/URL of image to apply to only the background of the post, only on the background of the home/main page, or both pages.
The ”Color” field option allows you to quickly make background changes using the background-color CSS code. You can enter any color (such as “red,” “blue,” “green”) or enter a hex value, like: #A9A7A7. You can also change the whole page background (not just the post background) of any individual post with the ”Display as page background on post page” option.
How to change the main width of your blog
Monday, February 15th, 2010
If you are like me, you are constantly changing the layout and design of your blog. Viewing the same design elements can get tiring after a while and sometimes, a change is necessary. One of the simplest design alterations you can make to your blog involves changing the width of your blog post area. Here I will lay out instructions on how to widen or make narrower your post width and you will not need any coding experience to follow them.
Back when blogging was for the most part streamlined (the age of blogger.com), and design options were limited, blogs tended to have very narrow widths. Narrow widths allow for less text per line (causing less of an eye-strain for readers) but also cheapen the overall feel of the site. Wide widths can get the blog more of a professional look but also make it more difficult for the reader because of more text per line. Finding a compromise that fits your site perfectly is the key.
To alter the width of your blog, you first need to open up your style sheet. This will be named style.css in WordPress and can be accessed by clicking on your editor button under the appearance tab in the admin control panel. After you have clicked on the editor button, you should be taken to a screen called “Edit Themes,” and you will see a list of files on your right hand side.
- Click the Stylesheet (style.css).
- Sift through the code and look for a comment (will begin and end with a “/*”) that says “posts” or something similar. If you do not see a comment that says “posts” or anything similar, look for a div class or id (will look like div# or div.) that is titled “posts” or anything similar. More likely than not, your blog posts will have their own custom divider with custom styles. It will be easier to find the “post” div if you look for a line of code under it that looks like this: “width: 600px;”. The width will probably be over 300px.
- Under the post div you just identified (either by looking for a comment or at the name of the div), look for a line of code that specifies width. The value will most likely be measured in pixels (px) and you can change it to your liking.
- Click the update button at the bottom of the page (which is blue if you are using the default WP admin theme).
- Preview the changes by clicking the “View Site” button. If the width is not to your liking, change it again in the Stylesheet.
If you are having difficulty changing the width after reading this tutorial, please don’t hesitate to ask for help by leaving a comment.
How to use tags properly on your blog
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
The purpose of tags is to easily allow readers to read blog posts of a similar nature or on the same topic. The use of tags in a blog is not meant to increase search engine ranking or provide a navigation menu (although they can serve these purposes) but to simply allow the blogger to more specifically categorize a post. After all, a blogger cannot create a separate category for every blog post that has a logical connection with another.
Say, for example, you blog about a speech Barack Obama gave at your school. You already have a blog post about Barack Obama’s state of the union speech that you wrote last year and you want potential readers to be aware of that. What do you do? Create a new category titled ‘Barack Obama’ or ‘Barack Obama Speeches’ in your sidebar categories? No, you simply create a tag titled ‘Barack Obama’ so readers can click on that tag at the end of your post and be taken to a list of other posts with that tag.
Choosing tags wisely
When choosing a tag for a post you should always make sure the choose something simple and easy to remember. If you want to create a tag for two blog posts, each involving a speech Barack Obama gave, you should use ‘Barack Obama’ not ‘Barack Obama Speeches’. Your tags must be arbitrary and broad because, otherwise, you will never use them again and end up having 1,000 tags (600 of which are only used by one post) on your blog. Remember that tags are all about grouping posts together. They are the same as categories except they are more specific.
If you use tags properly, your tag cloud (if you are using one) will fulfill its purpose properly. The tags with the most articles will appear in larger font and will display to your readers how important that particular topic is to you.
Here are some examples of bad tags:
- riding a bicycle at night
- making waffles
- doing push-ups
- riding the waves
- watching polar bears
Here are some examples of good tags (what the above bad tags should be instead):
- bicycle
- cooking
- exercise
- surfing
- zoo
Below is an example of what a tag cloud will look like if the tags are chosen correctly.
Author: Luca Cremonini
Can you guess what the blog is about for the above tag cloud? You should be able to realize that the blog is about web design. Notice how all of the tags are very broad terms.
Keep it simple and broad! And don’t worry about grouping too many posts in the same tag. It rarely happens and, if it does, that just means you have an extreme interest in a particular topic.
Seeing a blank white screen on your WordPress blog?
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Problem: The admin control panel nor any pages on your blog cannot be accessed. All that appears is a blank white page. The problem is common for WordPress bloggers who have just recently made edits to essential php files or have too many plugins running in the background, causing PHP to malfunction.
Solutions:
- Check your themes functions.php file. This file is a frequent contributor to the infamous white screen of death problem. Check for a blank code after the ?> character — this extra space can screw up your entire blog. If you don’t know what your functions.php file should look like, download your theme again and re-upload the functions.php file.
- Try changing the WordPress theme to default. If your blog works in the default theme, then you should re-install the theme you had been using.
- Try deactivating all your plugins by changing the name of the plugin folder, wp-content/plugins, to something different. If WordPress works after that, than you know you need to get rid of some plugins or try the below step.
- Define the memory usage for PHP. You can do this by adding: define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’); to your wp-config.php file. If the problem is memory related, this should fix it. Try higher values if 64M does not work.
If none of the above solutions work, it might be a good idea to re-install WordPress or contact your host.
Blogging for money part 4: placing advertisements on your blog
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
In the wide world of Internet advertising, there exists a plethora of options and techniques to monetize your blog through advertising. When the web first began, services like Google AdSense, ClickBank and Chitika did not exist. The only way to advertise would be to place custom image banners that linked to a particular product or service that was being sold. This technique is still used by many advertisers today and it will be touched upon briefly in this article (because it is the most basic) but it should first be mentioned that these highly customizable advertisements are not a good choice for low popularity, low traffic blogs. Serious custom banner advertisers are not going to pay monthly commissions on a blog that receives 2,000 visitors per month; unless the traffic is highly targetable for that particular product or service, it just would not be as practical as some of the other methods explained in this article.
Image banners typically come in industry standard sixes: 729×90 (also called a leaderboard), 485×60 (full banner), 234×60 (half banner), 125×125 (square button), 336×280 (large rectangle), 120×160 (skyscraper) and 160×600 (wide skyscraper) are the most popular. Various other sizes are used but the above are the most common.
Author: Adzaar.com. Images are scaled (not actual sizes).
Bloggers who agree to feature an image banner on their site usually get paid a monthly rate. Depending on the amount of traffic and value of the visitors, the monthly rate can range anywhere from $10 to $1,000 per month. Some site owners will use a script to report on the CTR (click through rate or the number of times the image is clicked on) of particular advertisements and impression count. It is rare for site owners to charge through impression count (the number of times the banner image is actually viewed) but some advertisers may prefer it.
Featuring image banners on your blog is something that probably should not be considered until you have over 1,000 unique visitors per day. Even then, you should wait till advertisers contact you (generally through your blog’s contact form) rather than looking for advertisers. You are much more likely to be paid a higher monthly rate if the advertiser has contacted you rather than vice versa.
Monetizing your site through pay per click (PPC) advertisements
Pay per click (PPC) means that you are paid every time a visitor clicks on an advertisement featured on your blog. Because of their seamlessness and feasibility, PPC methods are the most common choice for bloggers to make money from their blog. Services like Google AdWords allow Internet marketers to create their advertisements for their particular products and services and complementary services like Google AdSense provide a means for those ads to be displayed on websites and blogs throughout the world wide web.
Signing up for a Google AdSense account (so that you can start serving their ads and be paid per click) is a simple 1 step process that only requires you have a billing address (so you can be paid) in the U.S. and other countries. In can sometimes take a few weeks to be approved for AdSense but, if you have no prior history with the program, you will typically be accepted within a week.
Once you have your Google AdSense account, you can immediately begin serving ads on your blog. Simply sign in to your AdSense account, select your options (how big and what color you want your ad to be), generate the code and place it on your blog. Google will automatically crawl your blog to determine what links/images to display on your advertisement. You can chose to display image only or text only ads before you generate your code in your AdSense account. Keep in mind that, after you first place the code, Google takes some time to crawl your page and may not display the ad for 10-15 minutes.
If nothing displays on the ad for over an hour than it is likely you do not have enough content on the page you are placing the ad on. You should always place your advertisements on content rich pages that have a lot of text (at least 200 words). Google’s spiders are best at crawling text and determine what to display on AdSense ads through keywords contained in surrounding text.
That is essentially how pay per click (PPC) works. There are services that vary from Google AdSense’s model; some services, such as Chitika, display ads based on where the visitor is from or what search term he used in a search engine to arrive at the page. AdSense, however, is the most popular and most bloggers resort to AdSense because it is simply the most reliable high-tech ad service out there.
Once you begin serving advertisements with AdSense, you will be able to track the amount of clicks your ads get, as well as how much you are paid for those clicks. All of this can be done by signing into your AdSense account which will report, daily, impressions for your ad channels (a setting you must configure when creating the ad code), CTR, amount paid per click and various other statistics. Your daily AdSense report page will look like this:
CTR is the click through rate or percentage of times an ad viewer actually clicks on an ad. Page eCPM is the amount of earnings per 1,000 ad impressions. A CTR rate of 2% and an eCPM of $2.00 is considered good. There are a variety of ways these statistics can be improved (i.e. changing ad placement, changing content) but I will not detail those ways in this article. All of the statistics for the screen shot above (the first screen you see when signing into AdSense) are the combined statistics for all the AdSense ads you may be running. For individual statistics, you must assign channels to individual ads; then AdSense will collect data for those channels and display them in your reports.
Making money blogging through affiliate links
Monetizing through affiliate links is probably the second most popular approach for making money blogging. The method usually involves placing a text link or image link that takes visitors to a third party site that is selling a product or service. When that visitor makes a purchase at said third party site, the affiliate is credited a commission (percentage of sale) payment. Affiliates and vendors (those who sell products) are connected with each other through affiliate programs like ClickBank. The affiliate program, known as ClickBank, not only provides the means in which the affiliate link can be tracked (crediting commissions for each sale) but also handles all payment processing.
There are many transactional logistics involved when a sale is made through an affiliate link. That is why affiliate programs make it so much easier for vendors and affiliates by providing:
- A means in which the customer can make a payment for a product or service
- A means in which the affiliate (the individual who referred the customer to the product or service) can be payed a commission
- A means in which the vendor who provided the product/service can be paid
In addition to the above, an affiliate program provides the means in which affiliates find out about a vendor in the first place (and then make the decision to promote the vendor) as well as vital analytical data (i.e. how many visitors you send through an affiliate link for each sale). With that being said, using an affiliate program like ClickBank is absolutely necessary for bloggers looking to monetize their site through affiliate links.
Important things to remember about making money on your blog by placing advertisements
Using PPC program like Google AdSense and affiliate programs like ClickBank are probably the two single most popular methods of earning money blogging. There are other methods such as selling private image banner space (touched on above) and selling your own product (not through any affiliate program); but PPC and affiliate programs are probably the most important and certainly best for beginners.
Here are some important things to remember should you decide to make money from your blog through advertising:
- Do not bother placing ads if you have no visitors. Too many affiliate links and AdSense ads can hurt your search engine rankings, so if you are not advertising to anyone, there is no need to place advertisements on your site. First get the visitors, then consider advertising to them.
- Avoid placing too many advertisements throughout your site. This will subtract from the quality of your site and, in addition to getting poorer search engine rankings, you will get less returning visitors because they will view your site as overly spammy.
- Consider ad placement and surrounding content above all for pay per click advertising. Where the ad is placed on the page will greatly affect your CTR (click through rate) and the surrounding content will determine what will be displayed in AdSense ads.
- Consider your site visitors’ demographic when placing affiliate links. The same rules apply for ad placement but you should also consider what products and services your visitors will be interested in (based on demographic) when choosing an affiliate product to promote.
- Do not (for one minute) think that you can fool Google by clicking on your own AdSense advertisements. Their intricate system will flag your account and possibly suspend or cancel your account. After this is done, there is no way you can apply for another AdSense account unless you are doing so under a different name.
Thanks for reading the blogging for money article series! You have now made it to the top of the blogging for money pyramid and can now understand all the essential elements of a blog that earns revenue.
The Blogging for Money Pyramid
If you have not read any previous articles in the series, I encourage you to follow the links below.
Blogging for money part 1: the need for unique and quality content
Why use self-hosting for your WordPress blog?
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
One of the greatest features of WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging content managment system (CMS), is the option to host your blog for free at WordPress.org.
For many bloggers, this option is quite viable, but for many others free hosting with WordPress.org can severly limit the blogging experience
Below is a list of drawbacks for hosting your blog at WordPress.org.
- No unique domain name. Instead you are able to choose a WordPress.org subdomain.
- No ability to place ads in your site. WordPress states this in their support section.
- No easy FTP access, making it more difficult to upload files to your blog directory.
- No Automated, Scraper or Affiliate blogs. WordPress.org expresses a great disdain for these types of blogs and reserves the right to drop them.
- No Search Engine Optimization blogs. Meaning blogs that go wild with SEO tactics are frowned upon, and run the risk of being dropped.
- No Warez posting on your blog. Quite a drawback if you are into digital pirating.
In short, it’s best not to host your blog with WordPress.org if you are looking to blog for money. Installing WordPress on your own domain is incredibly easy and with the highly affordable price of domains and hosting, there should be nothing stopping the commited blogger from taking that route. However, free hosting at WordPress.org addresses basic blogging needs, and is great for people that are just looking to get a feel for blogging. Check out free domain registration and web hosting reviews.
Buying resell rights for your blog
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
Ever wonder where bloggers get their content? How can they possibly have time to write/design the immense amount of unique quality content that many successful web publishers have? The answer, much like the answer to most of life’s problems, is money. They purchase the material! That’s right, many of bloggers don’t even create their own material!
Purchasing your material with resell rights is how they do it! However, this process of purchasing material is not as easy as it seems. Many times, reseller packages contain outdated and overused material. This is why you must be careful when determining what content to buy. Compare the price with the overall quantity and quality (as described) of the package. Don’t be an impulsive buyer.
It is also wise to know what kind of resell rights you are buying. Master resell rights means that you have permission to resell the content and resell the rights to resell the content. This is the most coveted type of resell rights. The second best is regular resell rights, or just resell rights. This means that you can resell the content but you cannot resell the rights to resell the package. You’ll find that there is a considerable drop in price from master to regular resell rights.
Most bloggers purchase standard resell rights because there is usually no need to have master rights, especially if you are just using the content to complement your site. You may want to start with Webresell.net to purchase quality resell content. The prices for packages from webresell are extremely reasonable, but you may be able to find content packages of your own for an even better price if you do some extensive googling!
Blogging for money part 3: search engine optimization
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
Blog Search engine optimization (or SEO), is the process of improving the amount of traffic your blog receives by purposely increasing rankings in search engines. Being able to achieve good rankings is key to your success when blogging for money.
What is blog SEO?
SEO is not a practice that can be easily summed up. Some people devote their entire profession to learning the techniques of search engine ranking, and few (if any) have ever truly been able to crack the code.
The good news is that you don’t need to become an expert or do massive amounts of research to get your blog ranked well in Google! As a matter of fact, Google tells you exactly what you need to do in their webmaster guidelines.
If you skim through their webmaster guidelines, you will discover that good design and content is all you need for successful rankings. Although this is very true, it’s somewhat of an overstatement by Google. Yes, you will receive more lasting traffic with good content and design, but these guidelines were published much to Google’s advantage. Good content is only a small piece of the pie.
Don’t forget that Google is a search engine, and the largest most successful search engine in existence. Their objective is to rank the most relevant, quality sites, and to provide the most positive experience possible for its users. But sometimes Google’s interests conflicts with the interests of the struggling Internet marketer. This is why I recommend observing these three stalwart SEO tactics that have always proved faithful over the past decade.
1. Add meta tags to your blog
Meta tags are simple snippets of code that tell search engines information about your page. Meta tags always go in the header HTML of your page. If you are using Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to edit the meta data of your blog.
There are two meta tags that you need to understand for the SEO of your pages, meta description and meta keywords. Meta description is the line of text that appears under the link to your site in search results. If you search the term ‘Google’ in the Google search engine, the site ranked highest is www.google.com. If you look above the green link, and below the large text link titled ‘Google,’ you will see these two sentences, “Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.” That text is Google’s meta description tag.
To insert a meta description in HTML, simply type:
<meta name=”description” content=”The description of your page here.” />
In-between the <head> and </head> tag of your pages. If you are using a blogging service like Google Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to change this in the administration.
Meta keywords is a bit less important than the description tag. Basically, when search engines were first created, they did not have the advanced spidering capabilities as they do today (they weren’t able to crawl pages to discover what content was on a page). Hence W3 (the World Wide Web consortium), gave webmaster’s the option of telling search engines what their pages were about. They could do this by inserting the meta keywords tag. Now outdated, its influence on rankings is questionable, and most search engines are known to ignore meta keywords. But unless you are trying to hide the keywords that you are targeting from competition, it can’t hurt to put them on your pages!
To insert meta keywords in HTML, simply type:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc.” />
In-between the <head> and </head> tag of your pages. If you are using a blogging service like Google Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to change this in the administration.
Note that every single page or post within your blog should have its own unique meta tags. Google praises pages with unique meta tags, and frowns on pages that use duplicate meta tags.
2. Take advantage of headlines
This one’s a given. Google, and other search engines, look very closely at headlines to determine what your page is actually about. You can use the <h1> tag to laser target search terms. One problem people have with using the <h1> tag is that it’s too big, and that it affects their page cosmetically. This problem can be solved using a simple little CSS trick, but you should check first if you are able to use custom CSS with your blogging service.
Basically CSS (cascading style sheets), defines attributes for text and content of your page. It can alter the size/look of what your page will display as <h1> text.
To do this, simply type:
<STYLE TYPE=”text/css”>
H1 {font-family: The font you want, e.g.: verdana; font-size: The font size you want, e.g.: 12pt; color: the color you want, e.g.: black}
</STYLE>
Into the head of you page.
3. Build honest links to your blog
It’s no surprise Google rebukes people purchasing links from other sites to boost their site rankings. These are the kind of practices that un-foil all of the hard work Google engineers undergo to produce a search algorithm that ranks relevant, quality sites. In Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google tells us to avoid “participating in link schemes,” and to ask ourselves the questions “Does this help my users?” and would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” It’s almost as if Google has ethical convictions about organic site promotion.
At any rate, it does help to obey Google at all times. No, it is not a democracy, its an absolute totalitarian dictatorship and Google is the unquestioned leader. Although it may seem like the tough way out, refraining from forbidden site promotion activities could really help you in the long run. Really, the best way to build links to your blog is by getting links naturally with good content, submitting articles, and building Squidoo lenses.
Ezine is the Most prominent site for article submission, and Helium (a huge community of casual writers) just started allowing embedded links in articles. There are a ton of other sites out there that publish articles for free, and they are all but a Google search away…
As, I mentioned Squidoo is another great way to build quality links to your blog. Squidoo was originally created by a leading Internet marketer who sought to make the process of creating stand-alone web pages easier. It grew rapidly in the year 2007, and has become a necessary tool for search engine optimizers everywhere. Not only can you get great contextual links from lenses (the term for Squidoo articles) for free, but you can also get unprecedented amounts of traffic from individual lenses. This is due largely to the fact that Google had a love affair with Squidoo when it was first created, and has since then rampantly indexed, and ranked pages.
You are now almost to the top of the blogging for money pyramid! Congratulations on making it this far, and please read on to the last (but not least) important step to making money with your blog: advertising. Click here to go back down the pyramid to the frequent blog posting article.
The Blogging for Money Pyramid
Blogging for money part 2: frequent posting
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
Frequent blog posting is something that needs to happen if your blog is going to hit success. Remember that success is always synonymous with difficulty, but can be achieved with a good rational, and much determination. If followed literally, these five tips will help you retain a frequent posting status, which will ultimately secure a frequent earning status.
1. Understanding your commitment
When you’re considering blogging for money, it is important to understand the commitment you are undertaking. This is because many people who blog for a living, actually spend more time blogging than they would for a real job. If you want consistent earnings, you need to give your time up consistently. One way you can do this is by setting a time quota like, “I will blog for 2 hours every day,” or by designating a specific time like, “I will blog at 3 p.m. every day.”
Value persistency to you commitment, rather than quantity of blog posts or the amount of success your blog receives. A flaw is rarely found in the commitment itself, but more often found in the resolve to follow the commitment.
2. Understanding your competition’s commitment
The majority of bloggers don’t make any money whatsoever. Although many of them don’t set out to make money, they all set out to gain readers. And guess what? The more bloggers that are out there, the less those readers become available.
Do a simple search on Google and examine a few related high ranked blogs. You might find that their commitment far outweighs yours. If this is true, you might want to consider blogging in a different niche.
3. Train yourself to blog constantly
It takes an incredible amount of discipline to force yourself to blog more than once a day, and it is very time consuming. Blogging for money is pretty much equivalent to being your own boss, and there aren’t many people out there who can boast that they are self-employed, are there? This is because of the fact that it requires an incredible amount of discipline. You need to train yourself to keep a consistent blogging schedule, and you need to stick-to-it if you want to maintain an audience.
4. Avoid ‘blogging guilt’
Not only do we sometimes not feel like blogging, but we simply don’t have the time to. Sometimes, school, kids, social life get in the way of blogging life and that is to be expected. Surprisingly, blog experts say that the best thing to do is to avoid being guilty about your lack of posts because the guilt that is associated from this is in fact, anti-productive.
Many times, bloggers, and all writers alike, enter into a form of writer’s paralysis when they fret over their lack of productivity. It’s kind of like trying to exercise again after not doing it for a while or having negative thoughts about it.
5. Blog when you’re not blogging
A useful piece of advice I’ve been given on several accounts by experienced bloggers is to blog when you’re not blogging. This means to create an archive in your head of things you want to blog about. When something unusual happens to you, or you have an interesting thought, make a mental note to blog about it later.
If you’re the kind of person that is forgetful, bring a notepad around with you; jot down ideas, and possible headlines for your blog posts. You don’t need to write any paragraphs or even sentences, you just need to create an outline. The more you use this method, the better you will become at it. At one point you should be able to create an entire blog post around a single headline without having to look at outside sources. You have a brain, and there’s more information in there than a multitude of books. Tapping that information is just a matter of patience and persistency.
Frequent blog posting is the second level in our wonderful blogging for money pyramid. Read on to part 3 to find out what the next level is. Click here to go back to part 1, the need for unique and quality content.
The Blogging for Money Pyramid
Random Topic Generator | Blog Topic Generator
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Who wouldn’t need a random topic generator to help come up with ideas for a blog post/term paper/dissertation/marriage vow? That’s why I created this nifty little topic generator that uses JavaScript, AJAX, MySQL and PHP to give you random topics at the click of a button.
Enjoy. And be sure to leave a comment if you found the topic generator useful or if you think it is an absurd waste of space on this blog (or the www for that matter).
WordPress 2.8 visual editor buttons not displaying
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Sometimes the WordPress 2.8 upgrade does not successfully over-write the latest version of the tinyMCE javascript file located at wp-includes/js/tinymce. Because of this, your visual editor buttons may not appear or may not be working when you go to edit a blog post.
The first thing you want to try is resetting your browser, and logging back in to WordPress.
If that does not work, simply find the ‘tinymce’ file located at wp-includes/js/tinymce in the unzipped folder of your WordPress 2.8 download, and replace it with the file in your blog’s online file directory (wp-includes/jc/tinymce).
When you are finished, your button display on the page that you use to edit a blog post or create a new one should look like this:
Blogging for money part 1: the need for unique and quality content
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Blogging: The art of telling the whole world why they don’t need to listen to you. Or is it something more? Can we expect to make an honest income off this new form of social media? Yes we can.
But first, we’ll have to learn some of the basics.
An ideological look at blogging
If we look at the art of blogging ideologically, we can say that blogging is the exchanging of ideas through social interactive media. We put out information that we have learned in our daily lives into a digital form that is consumable to others. In other words: we are offering a product.
But is this product tangible? Is it meaningful or, more concisely, is it valuable? These are the questions that need to be addressed before you can consider making money blogging.
The Internet is a gigantic source of information; as a matter of fact, it’s the largest directory of information on the planet. We have to ask ourselves, does the information that we provide add to this global information directory or just create more clatter?
Being in the Internet marketing business for some time now, I can say from personal experience that pretty much anything dispersed over the Internet has little monetary value if it is devoid of originality. Originality is the key to blogging for money.
I first began my Internet marketing business by building upon what others built. My logic was that the value of the content itself wasn’t as relevant to making money as bringing people to the content was. I thought that it didn’t really matter what kind of information you were using; as long as you got the people there, you could advertise to them. I, like many novice Internet marketers, was wrong.
The truth of the matter is, people don’t want to consume old or irrelevant information. People want what’s new and hot, and they go out of their way to find it. How do I know this? Because of the nature of informational networking.
The explosion of informational networking
Now what do I mean by ‘informational networking’? I’m sure you have heard of Facebook or MySpace, so you must know what social networking is, but informational networking is much different. Social networking, like Facebook and MySpace, essentially networks people (our personal information, pictures, and opinions), while Informational networking networks other forms of media such as news, articles, and blogs.
Informational networking exists to root out the irrelevant and undesirable content. People are more inclined to subscribe to one source of information that portals them to all sources of information. That source would be reputable, because it’s networked by people and not by machines (like the Internet was before social and informational networking appeared).
Google has done well by mechanically networking all forms of web media (websites) with its complex search engine indexing algorithms; but the web has now taken a turn to favor other indexing methods — methods that can’t be defeated by scrupulous search engine optimizers and spammy websites. This kind of indexing is done by real people; indexing done by popularity — by democracy — rather than mechanics.
That was the idea that founded informational networks like Digg, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz, and the like. We want relevant, good information and we want it fast. We don’t want to have to take the time to filter the good info from the bad. Heck, that’s why Google was so successful in the first place.
The need for speed
If we didn’t care so much for expedience, we would be inclined to subscribe to a form of media like a newspaper or magazine as our only source of information. The reputation and relevance is there but it’s just not fast. In the case of a newspaper or magazine, we have to wait to read up on things that are happen the very same day.
With a blog, we can get that information now. That is the key difference between the blogs and print mediums. Implementing our blogs with quality and relevance will push the information consumer to switch from a more traditional source like a newspaper or magazine.
It is overly apparent that there is an explosion of this particular form of media in the last few years. Back in 2001, did you even know what the meaning of the word ‘blog’ was? The web, and quite possibly the entire world, currently has a love affair with bloggers.
We, the populace, love the idea of hearing from people at the same level as us; we love the idea that it’s fast and free and, most importantly, we love the idea that we can contribute to it.
Acknowledging all of the above concepts lays the essential foundations down for understanding the art of blogging for money.
The next step is just as important but narrower in the sense that it builds on the need for unique and quality content. Picture, if you will, a pyramid. And at the top of this pyramid is the ultimate goal of achieving revenue from your blog.
The Blogging for Money Pyramid
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