AdSense Introduce Reports for Link Units

April 15, 2008

I just logged into my AdSense account to check my nightly stats and found a new reporting option in the ‘Advance Reports’ section (pictured below). Now you can choose to view ‘Ad Units’ or ‘Link Units’ or ‘Both’. Ad Units are all of your normal ad units (text ads, image ads, video ads) and ‘Link Units’ are those little adlink unit ads that many bloggers use around their navigational areas that take readers to a second page of ads. it’s good to see these stats as they were previously all mixed into one in the advance reports unless you’d set them up in channels. Read more

Geoblogging - How to Geotag Your Blog

April 14, 2008

geotagging banner
The following post on geotagging blogs is by Rob O’Daniel from 2Dolphins. Remember the old adage, “The three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location?” Soon enough, that saying may even hold true in the virtual landscape of the Internet. Geotagging, or the process of adding geographic information (latitude, longitude, & other positional data) to almost any digital content is a quickly-growing trend. Once geotagged, media such as websites, blog posts, RSS feeds, images, or videos can be easily displayed on an online map or cross-referenced with other information about that area or location. Read more

Making Money as a Side Effect of Blogging (and a New Breed of Blogger)

April 14, 2008

Seth has some interesting things in response to the question - ‘How do I make a lot of money blogging?’ here.
“The best bloggers make money, but mostly as a side effect, not as a direct result of setting out to use a blog to make a profit. It’s just too long a ramp up time, too frustrating and too uncertain to be the best path to make a living.”
A few thoughts: Seth’s described my own experience of making money from blogging pretty well. I didn’t set out to do it at all. I blogged for a year before it even crossed my mind and even then it was initially an experiment (just like adding many blogging tools and features was for many of us in those days). Read more

8 Addictive Habits of Bloggers

April 14, 2008

addictivehabitsofbloggers.jpg As bloggers we face a wide variety of task each day in managing and building our blog. Productivity and efficiency is a must, especially for part-time bloggers. Standing in the way of productivity is a number of habits that tend to be extremely addictive and time-consuming for most of us. I think I have personally struggled with each of these at one point or another, and I’m sure that you can relate. Let’s take a look at each of these habits and how you can overcome the addiction. 1. Obsessing Over Subscribers The number of subscribers to a blog is probably the most common measuring stick for determining the blogs impact, importance, or success. As a result, all of us make an attempt to gain new subscribers on a daily basis, and many times this turns into more of an obsession than a goal. Read more

5 Ways Social Media Can Enhance Your Presentation Skills

April 14, 2008

Do you have to present at meetings at work? Or perhaps you are building your personal brand and platform as a professional speaker? Maybe you have a desire to get in front of the media on TV or radio? One of the great ways that I’ve developed my skills in presenting and in speaking to the media is not through attending courses but by two other approaches:
  • watching other presenters
  • speaking and presenting often - not always to groups of 200 or more people, but often to small groups of less than 40 people.
Read more

Network Blogging Tips

April 13, 2008

Do you blog for someone else? A blog you might want to subscribe to is Network Blogging Tips written by bloggers Jennifer Chait and Deborah Ng (both experienced bloggers blogging in blog networks).
“Here we’ll share tips, advice and ideas for those who blog for someone else. We’ll offer commiseration, jobs tips and even occasional leads.”
Disclaimer: Both of these bloggers are bloggers at b5media (the network I co-founded) - however I never realized they were doing this til I saw David blogging about it. Read more

Wikio, News Aggregator and Top 100 Blogs

April 12, 2008

I will be frank here, I think that the marketing rep of Wikio.com emailed me about 10 times on the last month to let me know about their new blog ranking system (as you can see perseverance pays off…). But I am not writing about them only in the hope of stopping the harassment: I also think that they have an interesting service. wikio.png Wikio is a kind of news aggregator, but with an interesting slant: surf and subscribe. That is, they feature a bunch of news and stories from around the web, but they also give you the possibility to subscribe either to local RSS feeds or to the direct feeds of the sources. The Top Blogs section is particularly useful. Basically they have a Top 100 list for several niches, from business to celebrities, from technology to sports. If you are trying to find some quality blogs on a certain topic, for instance, you could go there and browse around, and even subscribe to their RSS feeds directly from the Wikio website. Read more

Amazon Associates Program Introduce Carousel Widget

April 12, 2008

The Amazon Associates program have announced a new widget in the last day or two - it’s called the Carousel Widget. You can see one in action below with six blogging books. Amazon.com Widgets The unit above is a ‘carousel’ format (horizontal) but they also have a ‘ferris wheel’ format (vertical). Each come in different size options. Read more

10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less

April 12, 2008

This is a guest post on improving blog traffic from Courtney Tuttle. Courtney writes about marketing online at Court’s Internet Marketing School.

1. Create link clusters within your blog

A link cluster is a group of links that you can point at a post or page to improve its search engine ranking. Let’s say you have a post that’s ranked for ’stupid business ideas’. Edit 10 of your other posts to create links (using ’stupid business ideas’ as the anchor text) to the ’stupid business ideas’ post and you will surely move up in Google for that keyword. This process can be implemented in about 10 minutes and can be used for any keyword your site ranks for or is trying to rank for.

2. Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts

Read more

Why Do You Write?

April 11, 2008

Why Do You Write? In this post Muhammad Saleem asks why do you write? Muhammad is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on many social sites. image by mezone

Why Do You Write?

Sounds like an odd question at first, doesn’t it? The reason why you write actually has a big impact on how you write and what you write about, and understand that identifying this reason can actually help you write better and work faster towards achieving that goal. For example, when I first started writing online, I was writing a personal diary of sorts. Since I was writing it more as an outlet for self-expression and not as something for public consumption, the blog didn’t look very pretty, it was unstructured, and I didn’t care much about editing the content or writing regularly. However, when I started writing my first social media blog, I approached the matter very differently. What changed? Read more