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Last Thursday I published an article titled
Having an Opinion: The Secret Sauce for a Popular Blog. Today I want to talk about the other side of that coin.
As we discussed in that previous article, expressing one’s opinion clearly and strongly can be the secret to generating a lot of buzz and traffic. As you also know, on the Internet pretty much anyone can setup a website and publish his own content in a matter of minutes.
Put together those two ingredients and the result could be someone doing a lot of damage to your online reputation. In order words, the easier for people to express their opinions and to share those with a large number of people, the higher the important of managing your reputation online, and this point is valid for pretty much anyone using the web, from business entities to bloggers and individuals.
Not convinced this is important? Suppose you have just published an ebook or released a web service. After a couple of days one client gets really upset about the quality offered, and decides to write a chaotic review about it. Should some people link to his review, there is a great chance that his post will show up in the first page of Google for the name of your ebook or service, and now the damage is done. Potential clients that end up reading that bad review will stay clear from purchasing your product.
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Chitika have been rolling out their
new CPM ads over the last few days. These impression based ads will appear mainly on sites with a lot of traffic from non supported countries (they only serve their own ads to traffic from USA, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, UK).
In a sense these CPM ads are ‘alternative ads’ - so if a reader comes from Japan for instance they see the new CPM ad instead of a default ad or a Public Service Announcement. The theory is that at least you’ll earn something from the ad.
I can understand why Chitika are doing this and why it’d be attractive to many publishers. Most sites get at least some decent traffic from the countries that Chitika (and other ad networks) don’t support and to not monetize it is a pity. However….
What concerns me a little about these ads is that the announcement post says that it’s not just when someone from a non supported country visits your site but rather they say they serve them ‘when it makes sense’ to do so and give this example:
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Blogs are a great way to make money online. However, sometimes the money is made not from direct methods like
Google Adsense or
affiliate marketing.
Sometimes, all you need a blog for is to grow your personal brand as a guru or an expert and the money comes in many, many other ways.
I’m releasing the theme I use for my
work-at-home blog as
The Guru Theme so you can use it on your blog too. I basically created space for a bigger blog header, which is necessary if you want to band yourself well.
This simple theme is perfect if:
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I’m starting a new course this week (as a student) - it’s called WebVideo University.
Over the past 6 or so so months I’ve been experimenting more and more with using Video on my blog. It started out with just an experiment or two but the response from readers was so encouraging that I set myself the goal of running weekly (or as it turned out every second week) video posts.
Like I say - the response has been wonderful - there have been numerous benefits:
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As you know I write a lot about the power of social media to help you build your reputation online.
One of the case studies I share in my speaking about social media, personal branding and career success is of my good friend and mastermind buddy
Jessica Bowman who is an SEO expert.
After relocating across the US, taking up a role at
Yahoo, Jessica lost her role in the recent massive shakedown to everyone’s surprise in just 90 days after taking up her appointment.
Jessica has a blog that is well regarded in her field of expertise and as she has been providing excellent advice and tips there, she is well known by key influencers in the world of SEO.
This has led to her story and how she has successfully managed career transition since leaving Yahoo to be picked up by a major US glossy where she will be featured in their July edition (sorry can’t tell you who until she makes it public) and she is attracting great opportunities from consulting to speaking, all through her network both online an offline.
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Bloggers and webmasters know that every single visitor helps to build up traffic, right? If that is the case, you should make sure that Google is correctly indexing your images, and that people searching for related image terms will have a chance to visit your blog.
Here is a quick check that you can perform to find that out. Just head to Google, and click on the “Images” link on the top left corner. That will take you to the Image Search. Now you just need to type on the search bar “
site:yourdomain.com“. This quiery will filter only the results coming from your site.
If your images are getting indexed correctly by Google you should be able to see a whole bunch of them on the search results.
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If you are not using a social networking tool, then most likely you feel pretty ancient right now. Just about everywhere we look these days, social networking sites envelope us. As a matter of fact they slowly choke us to death or at least that is how it feels with the burden of having to join this and that site.
If you don’t
twitter, you are simply not cool these days. Alternatively, if you are not part of MySpace you are not in the loop.
Stumblers are also a force to be reckoned with, especially for bloggers. But who says so anyway?
Perhaps the millions of people who join these sites every month to converse with like minded people world wide. Or else the trend setters. Who knows, but what is clear is that social networking is robbing us of our time.
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This past few days have seen me experimenting with a new type of post here at ProBlogger -
Speed Posting.
I set myself the challenge to answer 20 or so questions from my Twitter followers in no more than 3 minutes per post. I then handed each post over to readers for them to continue to posts.
The Results? Well I had a lot of fun, got some good feedback from those Twitter followers who asked the questions, and there were a lot of great comments left.
Lastly - I wrote the following 19 posts. I hope you enjoyed them and will stop by those you feel you’ve got something to say on and add your thoughts.
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LeftTheBox asks “Hey Darren I know you post daily but do you try to post at a certain time each day?”
I certainly do! I not only set myself minimum post numbers each day but I’ve taken it a little further and narrowed down some daily posting windows that I aim for.
Really it comes down to a bit of research and experimentation to work out when the best time to post is (and I suspect it’ll vary from blog to blog depending upon where their audience is situation and even depending upon topic).
For me I attempt to have a fresh post go up on my blog in the morning US time. Here at ProBlogger my audience is fairly global but the majority of readers are in the Americas so I attempt to have something fresh for them for when they get to work, check their feeds over a morning coffee etc. I then also attempt to post something for the end of the day (US time). Then on days that I post a 3rd post per day (it’s usually more of a ‘newsy’ post) I attempt to put that up about 8 hours after the 2nd one just so that posts are evenly spread through the day.
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iamluc asks “How much traffic should you have to offer advertisements on your blog?”
“When should you put advertising on your blog?”
Funnily enough I’ve been asked this question four times in the last 24 hours so it’s probably a good time to answer it.
Before I answer the question though - let me say that there are numerous approaches to this question and if you ask a variety of ‘pros’ you’ll get a similar variety of responses. Here’s how I do it:
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Blogs are a great way to make money online. However, sometimes the money is made not from direct methods like Google Adsense or affiliate marketing.
Sometimes, all you need a blog for is to grow your personal brand as a guru or an expert and the money comes in many, many other ways.
I’m releasing the theme I use for my work-at-home blog as The Guru Theme so you can use it on your blog too. I basically created space for a bigger blog header, which is necessary if you want to band yourself well.
This simple theme is perfect if: Read more
