Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging

Charging For Advertising

8 Comments

In my last post I talked about how, suddenly it seems that my word is gold in some fashion, at least for my other two blogs anyway. Well, what’s also now happening is that I’m getting a lot of requests to put some kind of advertising on the main page of my finance blog, Top Finance Blog. This has presented somewhat of a conundrum, so I thought I’d express my thoughts in public here, in case someone wanted to jump in and offer alternative advice. You might have to take a quick look over there to offer advice on this.

First, I’m now hesitant to allow any text advertising on the blog. It’s not because I had it on this blog and it lost its page rank. It’s mainly because even back then on this blog it seemed out of place. I mean, I have other text links, but they’re associated with the blog itself or my own businesses. I consider a blogroll as being associated with the blog. The text link, though; I personally can’t figure out how it fits into the scheme of things, and I don’t want to go that route at all.

That means, second (I always figure there should be a “second” if there’s a “first”), the only thing left is a banner ad of some type. I don’t have a problem with a banner ad, because those I already have on the blog. I’m telling everyone that the largest it can be is 200×200, since that fits a side panel; I don’t see myself popping anyone else’s 468×68 banner ad into any of those posts, and I’m only running that type of ad at the top of each individual post through Commission Junction.

What I’ve been offering is to run banner ads at $10 a month. One guy said it was too high, others haven’t commented yet. I don’t think it’s too high at all; matter of fact, I’m wondering if it’s kind of low. I’ve also said the banner ads would be nofollow; I don’t think they like that either, but that’s my prerogative, right?

At the same time, though I’ve made the offer, I’d also have to figure out where I’d put it. Too high and it messes up the seemingly balanced site if people go from the main page to one of the articles. Too low and the advertiser might feel like they’re not getting their money’s worth, no matter what I charge.

Also, there’s the thing about relevance and location. I have a lot of UK companies wanting to advertise on the site, but I’ve stuck with American only. My thought is that most of my readers of that blog are from the United States, and I don’t want to intentionally be sending them to the UK for something they might want, then find out they can’t use it here. And relevance to finance is important as well; I’ve outright turned down products such as medical equipment because it’s not a medical blog of any sort, even if I do comment on medical finances and, of course, health care reform.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Am I being too tough or too lenient, and would you care about text ads, relevance, or location?

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Blogging

Now My Word Is Gold?

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A funny thing has been happening over the last couple of weeks, and I’m not quite sure why.

I have people writing me and asking me to look at their blog posts, then either write about it on one of my blog or actually post the entire thing into my blogs as a guest post. These are people I don’t know and have never heard of, and frankly, coming out of the blue the way it did, initially kind of freaked me out.

Then I got a little upset because I didn’t know these people. I’m sure every once of us has written something and wanted to share it with our friends who don’t follow our blog, or our wives and other family members. But I can’t conceive of searching for someone and asking them to go through all those hoops without building some kind of relationship first. And the idea of reposting an article from someone else’s blog; can’t conceive of that either.

One guy even told me how to do the entire thing; how presumptuous. To his credit, I did decide to go check the post out, and man, you think I write long posts sometimes. It was nearly 4,000 words, with pictures and graphs; almost more of a white paper than a blog post. When I told him I wouldn’t know what to do with that, because it was overwhelming, he wrote back to tell me how I could do it. After I wrote him saying that I didn’t know him, he’d never written anything on my blog and never participated in a discussion, and wasn’t following any of my feeds. He did say that he went through Google Blogs looking for folks who write things on his particular topic and my blog came up, so he was just submitting to everyone.

By the way, it’s not for this blog, but it’s definitely been for my other two blogs. I hadn’t thought my opinion on health care had gotten all that much further than just my own business blog, but I guess the word is starting to spread a little bit more than I had anticipated. And my finance blog is hitting kind of a renaissance as well. That one, by the way, now has all sorts of people wanting to advertise on it; but that’s the next post.

What’s your thought on someone you don’t know reaching out to you, asking you to read their stuff, then write about it on your blog? Do you find it intrusive or flattering?

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Blogging

Web Courtesy; Don’t We Deserve That Much?

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Once again yesterday I discovered that someone had pilfered one of my business blog’s posts from November and presented it as pretty much his own ideas. Well, maybe that’s not quite fair. After all, he did say he was reading a column that he had agreements with, then proceeded to write his post, using at least half of my words for his article. Kind of a rewrite, kind of a plagiarism that I still wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not.

I wrote a comment on the post saying I wasn’t sure whether to be mad because some of my content had been stolen, or happy that he had at least read the article. What I was thinking, however, is that I was upset that I hadn’t gotten any attribution for writing the article in the first place.

We all love having someone notice what we write. It’s pretty neat when people comment on our blog posts. It’s even neater when we find out that someone has written something based on an article of ours, and has linked to it in some fashion. Sometimes, even if they disagree with what we wrote, we love the fact that they’ve taken the time to talk about our stuff.

I like to think that I’m pretty good at linking to people whenever they write something that sparks a blog post to occur. I hope that whenever I do it that some of you follow the link back to the original article to read what that person had to say. I actually hope that sometimes you leave a comment there showing your appreciation for what they wrote, and mentioning where you might have seen the link to their post.

In retrospect, I might have been a bit harsh with the guy who wrote the post based on what I wrote back in November. After all, I found that same exact post on another site as well, and that site copied the entire post. That site has copied other total posts of mine as well; someone wrote me once saying it’s a foreign site that’s supposed to be similar to Digg, but I’ve never heard of Digg posting someone’s entire article. I could be wrong on that one.

I’m not giving these people a link, but if you want to see the site I’m talking about it’s here: luacheia.soup.io. And this is the direction to the latest post I know they took from me: luacheia.soup.io/post/33702719/Three-Syndromes-Consultants-Face. Part of me is wondering how many of my blog posts are on that site; I wonder if any of the posts from this blog are on that site. And in case you’re thinking about asking, I did write these people multiple times; no response. The hosting company is who told me they’re like Digg and that they can’t do anything about it; that just seems so wrong.

Blogging really is about community, in my opinion. When we can, we should open up our community to others whose stuff we read. Some folks do that once a week, like Kristi and her Fetching Fridays posts. But everyone doesn’t have to go quite this far. Think about how good you feel when you know someone has been inspired by you; do the same for others.

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Blogging

Blogging Step Six – How To Start Getting Visitors

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Recently I was asked by a friend of mine to talk to someone who’s just started a new blog and hopes to help it spread. I wrote 5 things that I believe are the way to go when you’re just starting out to get visitors to come to your blog. Actually, I believe all of these are good even with existing blogs if you’re not doing them, so I’ve decided to post what I wrote here, with a few modifications of course, and it will be added to my Blogging Tips at the top.



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1. Post each blog article to Twitter. Of course this means you have to join Twitter and have followers who will see those posts, and some will retweet them, which gives them the opportunity to be viewed by a much larger audience. Blogging packages like WordPress has many plugins that can help you automate the process; I don’t know if Blogger allows blogs to do it, in which case you’ll have to copy and paste your link every time, something I don’t have to do. As a sidebar, I hate Blogger! lol

2. Set up both Facebook and LinkedIn to grab each blog post. On FB there are multiple apps that will do it. On LinkedIn, you can set it up within your profile.

3. Comment on like-minded blogs. This one is the most time consuming, but the truth is that, unless you’re already famous, the best way to get visitors is by commenting on other blogs, mainly blogs that are similar in content in some fashion to what you’re writing about. People get used to seeing your name and will follow you back to your blog to check you out. Of course, commenting on other blogs works pretty well also, especially if it’s something else you’re interested in.

4. Add the link to your blog in every correspondence you send out, and of course to your website if you have one. In email, if you send email to someone who opens their mail online, it helps provide a link that, if they click on it, helps build up web prominence a little bit. Of course, being on Blogger, it won’t help as much. However, just to say this, by being on Blogger you’re going to get some random traffic because of that link thing at the top where it says “next blog”, but it’s not targeted traffic so you might not get many comments, or people who will stay long enough to read what you’ve written.

5. Send out one big email to all your friends and business associates, if you’re comfortable with that. Those are pretty much considered “friendlies”, and they’ll visit at least once, and some of them will subscribe and tell others. It’s a great place to start.

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Blogging

Is Your Blog Successful? My Version

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I’ve often said that you can get inspiration for writing blog posts from anywhere. In this case, I got the inspiration for this post from a blog called One Cool Site Blogging Tips (not to be confused with Sire’s blog tracking site Cool Blog Links, and this post titled Is Your Blog A Failure Or A Success? The conversation on that post wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be based on the title, yet it made me want to throw the question out to everyone else, so it did its job.

How does one decide to measure success? I think that’s the most important question for everyone to answer for themselves. It all depends on the reason you continue to write your blog. I say that because I started this blog for a much different reason than why I write it now, and as those parameters have changed, so have my expectations for it.

My original reason for creating this blog was so I could say whatever I wanted to say without worrying about being filtered or worried about how it might impact my business. I also had high hopes that I would make some money from it. So, when I first started writing it, half of the posts were geared towards talking about something that I thought I’d make money from, and the other half talking about some things that were on my mind, though not necessarily personal.

At some point, the blog focus changed to talking about affiliate programs, blogging, and writing for the most part. That was fun to a degree, but there wasn’t anything personal in it. Well, I have my writing style, so I guess that was personal, but I almost never talked about anything I was feeling, never taking a real stand on anything, just doing reviews. The thing is, to do a legitimate review takes some time to investigate, and, well, like everyone else I needed to make money, thus I was draining the bank account while doing a lot of that stuff.

Then in September, I changed once more. I decided I was going to start talking about a few more personal issues, more of my beliefs and the like, while still keeping up with some of what I’d talked about in the past. Though I’d still like to make money with this blog, the focus definitely moved from that direction a long time ago. I still put up products and the like, just in case someone has an interest, but mainly I just like to write, share my thoughts, and see how others respond.

So, based on all of that, how successful do I view this blog, which certainly can’t be called a niche blog? Overall I think it’s a fairly successful blog for what it is. I’m certainly not at guru status when it comes to internet sales, but I think I have a nice loyal group of folks I get to interact with here and there. And it’s changed a lot; the people I was talking to a lot between the middle of 2008 through the middle of 2009 has drastically changed. Many of those folks either stopped blogging or their priorities changed.

New folks have come along, in higher numbers yet, and that’s pretty neat. And I know when people comment here, they’re not doing it just to get a link onto a popular blog that offers them nothing except an opportunity to maybe steer people to their blogs by kissing up to the owner of the blog, who most of the time doesn’t even see their responses. Oops, let’s not get into that discussion again! 🙂

Yes, I think this blog is a success, and I’m happy with it. What say you about your blog?

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