Sebbie on the Webbie

Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category

Turning readers into cash

The easiest way to turn your traffic into cash is selling ad space. That’s the theory. If you have visitors the money will roll in. However, I have found through years of experience that this just doesn’t happen unless your blog fits into a very detailed category of blogs.

The most important thing for a blog to have is “high paying keywords”. On the top of the list, is “domains Yahoo” which can bring in a ridiculous amount of $97 a click. Ninety Seven Per Click! I wish I made 97 a year of my blogs or websites! The keywords by themselves of course don’t solve your problems alone. You will have to have the blog, have traffic, then have keywords in your content and advertisers who are willing to pay for displaying an ad on your website. It won’t help me one bit if I repeated that keyphrase a hundred times on this page, because my blog is low ranking and I don’t even run AdSense here (because it makes no sense on this type of blog).

In addition, your topic determines what kind of keywords you actually CAN use on your blog. If you blog about making handbags at home by hand, you won’t normally slip in words like insurance, lawyer and viagra. Even if you did, once or twice, the keyword density would make it obvious that you’re not exactly blogging about those topics, and therefore the advertisers stay away. If you started using these keywords regularly, I’m willing to bet your hand bag making readers would be quite put off by it.

If most of your readers come from countries that are not high on advertisers radar, they can cut you out from the list as well. This localisation, or targeting thing is really great if you’re advertising a local business and you really don’t need traffic from the other side of the world, but if you’re the blogger or webmaster and your readers, as in “eyeballs on your page” are of non-american origin, you’ve got the short end of the stick again. You can combat this a bit by targeting your content to the same market as the advertisers would, for example, if you’re Finnish, blog in Finnish for Finnish people about something they can buy in Finland.

Then there are those of us, who are not prepared to plan their website under the conditions of what advertisers want them for. In our case, monetising is a lot harder. Our readers may be scattered all around the world, with just a couple in each country, or just a “wrong” country. Our topics are not keyword dense. We talk about creativity, psychology and imagination, and those are things that are priceless – in the true sense of the word. They are the best things in life, but even though your readers would put a lot of money on their hobby, there’s not much of a reason why they would put money on your website, or why an advertiser would like to spend dollars on advertising on your site. The bottom line here is, that if you want to turn that kind of a site into cold hard cash, you’ll have to think outside the box. How do we do this?

I wish I could give you an answer. I know you were waiting for an answer, but instead all I can offer is a place for a conversation, maybe you, my reader would have some ideas. Maybe you can just vent out your frustration about your popular blog or website being worth zip in money… I’m thinking hard about this, and I promise I’ll tell as soon as I come up with something that I can actually try out in practise.

This is great stuff people! If you’re running a self hosted WordPress blog, this one is a must replacement for your boring old static blogroll. As you’ve probably noticed, the blogroll links are not really that enticing in terms of clicking on them, unless someone is really hungry for reading, or know your blogroll is likely to contain very targeted blogs, there’s not much of a chance someone clicking on them. Sure, giving a blogroll link to someone is a favour in terms of link love, but there’s more you can do for the blogs you love!

Blogrolls are also a bit stupid because they require maintenance and you need to periodically check your links are actually up to date. As I was installing RSS Blogroll for my “thinking blog” My Dear Hard Drive, I noticed a lot of them were either completely broken, pointing in a wrong place or the blogger had updated some time last year saying they’re quitting blogging. Even though I visited some of the blogs anyway, I didn’t remember to update the blogroll when they stopped blogging. RSS Blogroll is going to fix that problem for you!

RSS Blogroll is a plugin that updates your favourite blogs feeds instead just the name of the blog and the link. It will give links to the latest articles written on your favourite blogs, and if your blogger friends are not updating – no problem, as their blogs will simply disappear from your list! Check out my RSS Blogroll on the sidebar for reference. Don’t you just love it?

I love personal websites (even more than personal blogs). To me they are the cream of the Internet, the very best of things. Sadly, they’ve got the worst reputation of all sites I think, because they’re often thought of as personal journals, more or less equally as interesting as reading someone’s shopping list of the day. Some are like that, of course, but when you find a good personal blog or a website… Wow!

The great thing about them is that they can reflect their owner freely, without topical restrictions, concern about SEO, marketability or anything of the sort. Sure, they’re hard to promote, and if you like a lot of people reading your stuff, you are bound to find it harder than with any other type of blog or website you may have. Unfortunately, the difficulty in promoting them is the reason why many of the bloggers quit or redefine their topic into something less personal.

In ten years, I haven’t even found a good term to describe different kind of personal sites, which can be anything from a politicians blah-blah about his individual thoughts within his party, to a house wife’s musings about what to cook today or how much poop did the little one produce today. In between, there are a multitude of different ways to write a personal blog, and they should have sub categories! Let’s have a think about it, shall we? (Please feel free to add your thoughts about the matter in the comments.)

Personal Blog or Website

• Artist’s blog -showcasing a person’s works of art and describing the process to create them.
• Politician’s blog – collection of thoughts, opinions and suggestions by a politician.
• Mommy blog – Actually probably the only type of a personal blog that has a clearly defined sub category.
• Online Journal – The other fairly well known type of personal blog, but with a lot of confusion. Reports of the daily antics of the blogger. (The original type of blog.)
• “A Thinking blog” – A collection of person’s thoughts of various matters, written in creative non-fiction, without the intent to showcase the writing as art, political view or philosophy, per say, but with the intent to stir thoughts, make a point and/or simply entertain.

For a writer, having a personal blog, the thinking blog -type, is just a must. This will help you to identify the topics and things you keep thinking about, and that will give you further help in finding the topics that will sustain your interest enough for an individual blog or maybe a full book! Even if nobody read it, it’s good to have. (My thinking blog is at http://www.sebastyne.net .)

Does this make sense or ring true to you? Do you think the personal blogs should have more status? Have you noticed how hard it is to even find a category suited for something like a thinking blog when submitting it to blog directories? Any other type you think should be on the list?

If you’re thinking of starting a blog but are concerned about your writing skills, don’t be. The best bloggers – in terms of traffic they attract – are often very average writers. The reason why blogging is so popular is that almost anyone can do it. As long as you can write with somewhat proper grammar and write coherent sentences, you’ll be fine. If your emails aren’t returned too many times with the question: “Sorry what did you mean by…” you probably write with enough skill to manage a blog.

A blogger should be fairly approachable to large audiences, and if their writing is very polished, people can literally shy away. For good writers, who are simply born good writers, I’d advice not to spend more than a half an hour writing a blog post, (possible research time excluded) so it won’t be too polished or too finished. People like to add stuff to your posts by commenting, and if you’ve thought of everything, that doesn’t really leave much for commenting – and a lot of people see the number of comments as a measure of a blog. (See my previous post.)

Most blog readers don’t expect you to be a great writer. This is not the medium that people expect that from, quite the opposite. Most bloggers are rather engineers than authors, so you just jump right in there and get started.

Most bloggers are hoping to receive comments to their posts. That is pretty much the reason they keep posting. If there isn’t any posts to their topics, they think nobody cares what they said and very likely stop. It’s still tolerable if you can tell nobody knows about your blog, but when you see in your stats that people read it but  nobody says anything, it can really drive you on the walls. I certainly don’t post as much as I would if there was comments on my posts, even though I have come to think the following:

The reasons I post a comment:

1) I read a blog post that is a fairly good one, but could be better. I have something to add or point out.

2) What the blogger said was so god damned idiotic, that I just have to tell them how things REALLY are.

Then there’s two reasons for not commenting:

1) The post was so pointless that it would be waste of my time to say anything.

2) The post was SO GOOD, that it would be pointless to say anything, because the only thing to add would be: “Hey, great post” and that reeks of someone after your Google Juice.

Now, the thing for you to do is to decide whether your posts are god damned pointless or simply amazing, and figure out which is the more likely reason for the lack of comments.

If you are a blogger, you would probably like people to read your blog posts. Maybe you have several blogs you would like people to read. You most likely have a Facebook account too, with people who are interested about what you’re up to on your friends list. Why not offer them your blog feed without having to teach them how to use a news reader?

And the How To:

If you have one blog

Facebook allows you to directly import one blog into your notes. Every time you update, a note is automatically created including your post in whole, notifying your friends. Your friends can then comment directly on Facebook or click a link to your blog (which you would probably prefer, but you shouldn’t get too demanding here.) Your friends are a lot more likely to comment than a random reader.

1 Go to Notes Import a blog -settings. (The link here should take you automatically there, but if not, you can find it on Notes-page on the side bar. Import settings.)

2. Find your blog feed and enter it into the entry box. (To find your feed, go to your blog, then look for the feed icon in the browser address bar or your side bar. If you’re on WordPress it is formed as www.yoururl.com/feed/ on Blogger it is formed as http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/)

3. Confirm

If you have more than one blog you want to import, here’s one way to do it:

1. Start an account with FriendFeed for blog entries only.

2. Enter the blog feed urls on the Custom RSS/Atom (Check above how to find your blog feeds.) Select the option “Include entry description as a comment”

3. Take that feed and follow the instructions on how to import one blog to Facebook. Unfortunately, FriendFeed will only import the headline and a link to your blog, but at least that forces people to actually visit your blog and is more likely they comment directly on it.

There are other ways to import blogs through Facebook applications, but unfortunately most of them import them only onto your profile and the updates are not included on the update time line on the Facebook front page. Because notes are Facebook standard apps, the updates will show up on the time line. In addition, some of the importers I’ve tried only update the feed if you manually tell it to update. To me that’s way too much trouble! :p