Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
After the last pagerank update, we can feel the blogosphere mopping its brow in relief, or regret… depending on what the result was for bloggers. For hours, the google data centers were down and various resources are showing inconsistent results. Bloggers are panicking.
See, over the last months, contests upon contests sprouted all over, hoping to be blogged by other bloggers .. and fervently praying that the links are dofollow. I know a few bloggers who made a killing with paid reviews… Everyone went crazy with trying to get one-way links. With the sighs of despair caused by Alexa drops came the anticipation of the PR update this May.
Despite what people say about pagerank being unimportant, it is still what advertisers look at first, and hence a bigger deal to bloggers than they would admit. One of my blogs decreased in PR but a couple more increased. I don’t know how I should feel yet. I’m just numb (and still PR0).
^_^
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
After blogging actively for half a year, I could say that I at least understood some things about making money online. Here are some of the lessons I learned:
1. Earning from blogging isn’t going to work if you don’t know what your blog is about, and who will eventually stick around to read it. If it’s about you, because it is a personal blog, make sure that you know what about you people are seeing. For example…
My
evilwoobie.com blog is about a side of my personality that I’m comfortable with as I’ve been dishing out love advice for years now to my friends and their friends. I am aware that not everyone can relate to that side of my personality so I put up my
mommy blog (because I am a mom and darned proud of it). A lot who cannot relate to my evilwoobie blog can relate to my other blog. Therefore, I make sure that
the products that I recommend in one blog directly touches on the needs or likes of the people who read it.
2.
People can smell desperation, even online. I mentioned that I was selling this domain in
another post, but now you see that I’m using it. What happened? A buyer contacted me and said that within one month he will buy this domain (no posts, no website) for my asking price, 80USD. After reverting back to the old blogger subdomain for a month, the buyer renegotiated to 65USD, which was still ok. THEN, his final mail said that since this domain isn’t even indexed yet, it will probably cost him a lot to market it, so he’s offering me a mere 20USD for it.
Was I desperate enough to eat that up because it is
still cash that I could use? Hell no. And it isn’t injured pride that made me say ‘no thanks’, it is the search results for ‘divablogger’ or ‘diva blogger’ that made me stick with this domain rather than sell it for less than what I spend on
one lipstick.
While a lot of sites and forum avatars take on the name ‘Diva Blogger”… I AM the Diva Blogger with a dot com.
3. It’s not the amount of money you could earn, it’s what you have to do to get it. Are you willing to devote chunks of your time researching a product and the credibility of the affiliate network that pays you to sell it? Are you willing to risk your page rank and google love for 10 dollars per post? Every single cent that you earn online needs an effort on your part. If you feel that selling your soul completely and joining a multilevel marketing scheme designed to scam people is worth it, then by all means, sell out. It’s the how.
4. ‘Thank you’ goes a long way. We Filipinos have a saying, it’s “the person who doesn’t look back to where he started will never reach his destination”. A simple thank you or a return favor will make people stop and smile at you. More importantly, you’ll be able to move forward knowing that you acknowledged every single one of those who helped you in the first place.
I would like to thank
Entrecard for being my first real social network. Without it, I wouldn’t have met the following Golden people:
Sam Freedom for calling me a noob, which I am. This prevented me from closing my mind to things I could still learn from. Saphrym, for being real. Turnip for the marketing tips and for the occasionally sympathetic ear to my internet marketing rants. SEO Rob who introduced me to keywords. And the multitude of Entrecarders who visit my blogs. Thank you.
Posted in Blogging, Entrecard | 7 Comments »
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Like many starting marketers, I browse one resource after another hoping to obtain more information about this new world of online marketing. So far the concepts have been consistently complementary except for that involving niches in blogging.
1. Owning a niche and being an authority means branding yourself with it, putting your own spin on concepts and concentrating your efforts into marketing your niche in relation to your personality. The niche might not be unique, but you are, and that is what you capitalize on. Discovering schemes and innovating your own methods to promote yourself as an expert in your field could be tiring, particularly in a niche that is well-tackled by others, but if you do it right, you could be the next best thing in your community and followers (and the money) could follow. You become the niche, and somehow stand out amidst the sea of faceless others in it.
2. Joining the tide and getting your share. It seems that the easier way is owning the money without getting too involved personally, through a profitable niche, as what some ebooks preach. Following a system that has worked for others means not being entirely passionate about your niche, and just letting that system work its magic. This could mean concentrating on the technicalities of promotion rather than substance, with the guiding principle that while your content is impersonal and parroting that of others, how people reach it faster than the competition is key to driving in the profits (i.e. SEO).
I am partial to the first concept, though I know it will suck up more energy than the second. Yet there is still that nagging feeling of overdoing things when you can just join the bandwagon and still earn. Striking a balance between the two concepts may just be the key to being successful, but as of now, I’m still just learning how to reach that equilibrium.
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Let me talk about a service called live tv and how it could benefit bloggers. If you’re more of the talking and cam-on-me type, and you definitely want to keep on promoting your presence over the net, this could just be service for you. Think in terms of a live show or a live broadcast, where you are the star and your potential blog readers are your audience. By the way, how would you feel if you are having your broadcast and people are chatting about your show in real time? You think it’s fun? Then sign up, sweeties!
Posted in Misc | No Comments »
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
We all know about content and how important it is. We also know about time and how pitifully insufficient it is. Then we learn that keeping a few domains healthily updated is a key to earning through blogging. Furthermore, we discover that in addition to time being scarce and blogging demands being high, we must pay a lot to produce quality content on all our blogs, if we just don’t have the time to do so (ghost writers).
The solution to this is simple. Build your own blogging network. Aggressive, keypad-molesters who can write in perfect English. These are our blogging minions who potentially will help us build our blogging empire.
Who are they exactly?
1. Our friends we met online who we trust relatively well.
2. They are our family members and friends who still think of the internet as a fad
3. They are the friends of friends who get boggled by the idea of earning in dollars just by writing.
How do we turn these into minions?
1. Online friends - Give them a chance to earn away from their blogs. Build a popular community blog and let them post their quality articles, with the option of using their own adsense codes on their pages. The more articles they write, the more they earn through the traffic in the community. And, the more they post, the more frequently updated your blog is.
2. Family and Friends - Offline friends will be encouraged by shows of adsense checks or screenshots/printouts of paypal transactions. Reiterate, however, that the money came to you only through sheer dedication. Ask them to share a part of that by blogging too, and/or writing for you.
3. FOAFs - Friends of friends came by your name through referral. You must be at your most professional with this people and ask them to write for you in a way that is like a favor with benefits on their part. These are also the people who will potentially leave you hanging as they don’t really care about you as long as they get their dollar for the article. List their addresses and cellphone numbers on a wordfile and on paper.
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Writer Strike’s Over
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