Blog Goodies

Blog Network List ranked by perceived value. Some of the values might be a bit off because they don’t factor in niche, monetization methods, or share of voice within local markets.

Daniel Pink writes on splogs:

What’s the answer? Part of it is technological - search engines and blogging tools that are more difficult to manipulate. But part is also Newtonian. In the ever-reacting online world, just as spam begat junk filters, splogs are begetting splog monitors like SplogSpot and SplogReporter. These sites compile lists of fake blogs and serve as consumer watchdogs for the blogosphere. Unless, of course, they turn out to be splogs themselves.

A good start to killing the splog problem would be the day Google started policing their own content network, but until then the best we can hope for is interviews from Matt Cutts.

Tony Pierce, easily one of the top 10 bloggers, talks about how he would blog for hits. Funny examples of how to get people to want to read or link at your stuff, and then Tony ends off with

if i wanted hits id change everything about this blog and do everything differently but i dont think about hits any more than i think about ads and i dont think about pussy either

which is why i get all three and then some

and then some.

Voice probably matters more than anything else.

And this goes to show why SEO really does not matter as much for blogs

It is easy to link at a site that says everyone sucks.
It is easy to link at a site that calls out one particular well known person as being full of shite.
Self congradulatory industry specific coverage and awards are easy to link at.
It is easy to link at the person who tells me I spelled congratulatory incorrectly.

People want to post about something…sometimes you can create an idea that is easy to talk about or steal someone else’s idea by adding controversy.

I typically like to keep my stuff out of networks. A friend of mine who goes by the nickname Lots0 pointed out many times how he was once burned by being part of a network.

Sure sometimes your host will have problems, but if you pick hosts based on reliability then odds are pretty good your host will be up more often then most distributed system.

Blogger has the following issues

• huge splog problem
• lack of portability of link popularity
• makes your blogs seem less professional by being hosted there
• occassionally down for extended periods of time

TypePad has the following problems

• if you dynamically remap your hosting some of the registrar partners (such as GoDaddy) place an ad page at the root non www. version of your URL
• some people use their default URLs, but I do not like the lack of portability of link popularity
• last month their hosting was down so much that they let users decide how much free hosting they wanted to receive to make up for it
• this morning I am not sure if they had something wrong with their servers, but the sorry faketypepad.com unavailable messages this morning did not make me feel the service is all that trustworthy

Having said all of that I recently set up a number of blogs on Typepad and am wondering if I screwed the pooch. Should I have just put Wordpress on a wide variety of domains?

A few minutes here and there don’t mean much, but they do start to add up if you are building out a large network.

Andy Hagans writes a slick article abou how to improve the monetization of one of Weblogs Inc’s blogs.

They would probably increase their revenue at least 50% if they listened to it.

Why would anyone want to pay someone for creating a directory full of nothing but paid ads?

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/11/prweb315863.htm
Sorry I can’t live link because linking is a sort of payment…

There is nothing original or useful in or around the idea.

The hidden gem in that story is that people will promote garbage so long as you stroke their ego with it. The story has already been picked up by a number of bloggers.

At least the million dollar homepage guy sorta had an original angle.

A few years back I read a few books about blogging. I have read a large number of books since then, but here are a few mini reviews:

The Why of Blogging:
The Weblog Handbook - Rebecca Blood’s guide to blogging. Talks about the ideas associated with what is important in blogging. Things like using an authentic voice, why people would want to blog, etc. It is a book more about ideas than a how to guide. Hard to define or describe exactly, but somewhere around the same timeframe I also read David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Rebecca’s book reminded me of being a bit like that.

If you read a ton of blogs for a long time you will probably already get much of what Rebecca is talking about, but if you are new to blogs it is a great book to read.

The How of Blogging:
Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content is Biz Stone’s book about blogging. Short reviews of the various platforms and a few tips on using HTML. A few years dated, but still decent info. Geared more toward beginners.

While he reviews a number of platforms if you want to use a blog to make profit from it is important to keep control of your own data. I would probably recommend buying a domain and using Wordpress on it. Free, fast, and easy to use.

The ? of Blogging:
AdSense and other contextual programs like Chitika have made it easy for anyone who writes original content to make a few dollars off their blogs. Recently I noticed that there are starting to be more how to blog products advertised across various websites on how to make fat cash with blogs. Some of them are a bit questionable though.

Yesterday I saw an ad for a guide to blogging from a site that looked like it copied it’s design from Blogger and had a comming soon page for the blog on their site. Why advertise a site before it is even put together? I mean it only takes a few minutes to make an intro post…especially for a site selling something about blogging.

I think I am going to read and review a few more books. I always learning from the perspectives of a wide number of other people.

Gary Stein noticed some anti blog advertising logo linkbait.

It is a bit of a bitch to monetize certain audiences. That is why you see some successful entrepreneurs running a number of for profit sites away from their main blog channels. The blog channels give you credibility that can be leveraged elsewhere, but when you combine the business model right into the blog sometimes that can cost you links, especially if people think you make large profits from it and / or if you have a web savvy group of site visitors.

As you get more successful your time has more value, and some of the best websites outright suck on the profit per unit time. Some jackasses send bogus lawsuits that can cost 10’s of thousands of dollars. With society the way it is you have to look out on the financial front or you may end up getting crushed by some greedy arbitrary assholes who should rot in hell (although I am not naming names there hehehe).

When you have no boss and a broad array of interests and are more interested in learning than making money it is exceptionally easy getting pulled a bit thin running too many channels. Hard to know when it is time to consolidate, take time off, kill a channel, or what to do. Especially when you consider the effects current and future search algorithms and monetization methods may offer.

The blog space is ripe to be tapped for large profits, and I think if I put the same effort into it as I did my SeoBook.com website I could probably make 7 figures a year within 2 years. Not that I am all about money, but it is nice to know that if anyone ever tries to screw you over that you could make it hurt them far more than they could ever hurt you. My lawyers and this whole recent lawsuit deal taught me some valuable lesson about honesty and how that sometimes does not play an active role in the business space.

As the algorithms advance my SEO site’s time requirements increase logarithmically and people may not see that just by reading some of the day to day posts.

After you get mildly successful it is too easy to hold on thinking it will stay that way, but it never does. I need to be more effectively leveraging the stuff I have learned.

Hard to know when to let go, switch trains, or ante up all in. It’s not time for drastic changes yet, but I may look at some other stuff too.

Nick Denton announced he is killing OddJack:

So we’re closing down Oddjack by the end of the month. We’d rather concentrate our energies on sites such as Deadspin, which have buzz and a growing audience, and new launches, which have equal potential. The moral of the story: it’s easy to launch sites; much harder to make them popular.

Being the smart ass that he is, Nick asked Jason when they would be closing their dead blogs. Jason responded:

Why close them? They can sit there and get traffic, make Adsense revenue, and serve as a resource for folks. I think the model is to leave these sites up… I don’t see the point in taking them down.

The two big tips there:

• Archives have zero incremental cost. When blogs get past the break even point each additional day is more logarithmic profit growth (due to more content, more linkage data, and search engines trusting the sites more).
• New channels are cheap. A new blog can be launched for $20. If you already have a solid well known blog you can use that market position to market the new site at virtually no cost (other than time).
• Quality channels are a bunch of work. In spite of a ton of market research data you can’t be certain how successful a blog will be. In some markets it may make sense to make the least spammy channel, but if you are in a competitive field where there are other authors passionate about the topic it is much harder to build an audience large enough to monetize unless you put a ton of work into the blog.

Want to be a blog network mogul? A while ago I teased Andy Hagans calling him a blog overlord. He recently wrote on the subject.

Some stories are easy to sell and easy to print. This press release got this blogger the top Google News result for Bloggers and 3 interviews with local media stations.

Solid $30 investment. Great job Eric!