Blogging - Bloggercises

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Blogging - Bloggercises

Orble challenged by Kiwi blog site

November 12th 2008 19:08

Haven't I seen this all before? Are they copying someone's business model? Is Orble's dominant position at risk? And look, they're offering a "commission equal to 75% of the revenue derived from their page views". Where's my abacus - oh, they only take 25% of what you earn compared to Orble's 50%.

The gauntlet is down. The heat's on. Let the Bloggisloe Cup commence.

Advertised 13 November, 2008, here.

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Do you know a lot about movies, music, politics, sport, personal finance, business, or health?

Would you like to share that knowledge with tens of thousands of readers while earning money for your writing?

Then join the Digital Advance blogging community!

Digital Advance publishes three popular New Zealand websites: Voxy, Guide2 and Recommended. We are on the look out for people with something to say to create topic specific blogs (ie: frugal living) for our community of readers.

What are the benefits of blogging for Digital Advance?

Greater exposure: Joining Digital Advance gives you instant access to a thriving community of readers and commenters.

Voxy, Guide2 and Recommended have quickly established themselves as leading New Zealand destinations for independent 'how to' guides and topical news - reaching 75,000 people each month.

You'll get more traffic from search engines because Google and Yahoo! favor websites with lots of frequently updated content and incoming links.

Make more money: As a group we are able to attract bigger advertisers and charge higher advertising rates. Many major advertisers refuse to deal with blogs unless they reach a certain traffic threashold.

We will help you find the most lucrative monetising opportunities and help you get the most financial value out of your writing.

What do I get paid?

The more traffic you bring in, the more you earn!

Bloggers earn a commission equal to 75% of the revenue derived from their page views. For bloggers who generate 20,000 or more page views per month, the guaranteed minimum revenue you will earn is $200 per month.

What kind of bloggers are you looking for?
We value writers who are creative, resourceful and internet-savvy.

Previous experience blogging for online audiences is a plus -- but not essential.

How do I get started?

Email us at blogs@digitaladvance.co.nz with the following:

Three sample posts of at least 400 words. These posts should show off your ability to write in different styles (for example, show that you're able to write concise guides as well as interesting commentary). The three sample posts MUST be on topic. If you are linking to existing work, those must be on topic too.

Five concrete and specific ideas for future posts. Include details and/or an outline of the meat of the posts. For example, if you plan on writing about effective budgeting techniques, please list briefly what some of those techniques would be.

We're looking for smart, helpful and insightful writing. We love stories that are authoritative, extremely useful or highly entertaining.

Matt Harman
blogs@digitaladvance.co.nz

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging

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10 rude rules for troubled bloggers

October 15th 2008 03:50

1.
Stop moaning. Stop whining and pouting and looking for someone or something to blame for your blog's lack of success. Admit that this is your fault. Yes, it is. Go on, say to yourself, "This is my blog, this is my responsibility, this is my doing." There, feels strange doesn't it. That's because you are now ready for point two.

2.
Learn to adapt. If you really believe you know everything there is to know about blogging, stop reading now.

3.
Learn grammar and learn to spell. No, you can't. Maybe five per cent of bloggers are good spellers and grammarians and those five per cent aren't moaning about their blog's stats. They're too busy trying to become better writers.

4.
Learn to write. No, you can't. Maybe two per cent of bloggers are good writers. And those two per cent aren't moaning about their blog's stats. They're too busy trying to become even better writers.

5.
Find guides on writing and blogging and headline-writing and presentation and subject focus and search-engine optimisation and reader interaction. Learn what "value-added" means. It's all on the web. Find guides and really read them. Pretend it's dear old Great Uncle Ebeneezer's last will and testament and you may be mentioned somewhere in the small print. Caveat: Most of those guides are badly written.

6.
There are positive and negative aspects of everything. It's easy to write about the negatives. A sensationalist snapshot of a bigger picture, add two sneers, a jeer and a hoot - 10 minutes and it's done and posted. But it's short-term gratification. It's garbage and you know it and so do your blog's long-term readership numbers.

7.
Look up the word plagiarism. Okay, now avoid it like a pustuled maggot.

8.
Clichés are the first resort of the impoverished writer. If you don't get that, return to point one and start all over.

9.
Don't mention yourself in your posts. Never ever. Unless you know what you're doing. But you have to learn how to write first.

10.
Learn patience. If you've read this far, you may be starting to think that a fresh start may be needed. Yeah, I know, it's a cruel world. But it's survivable - this I know from experience. Think of everything you have done so far as an apprenticeship. It's a question of whether you want to create something worthwhile, or whether you'd prefer to fool yourself that you have created something worthwhile.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Grammar, Spelling, Writing

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A 10-step guide to blogging riches

October 4th 2008 05:36

Masthead from the blog.fl-2 blog

1.
Step 1 is to understand that this guide, like any other guide likely to be read by a lot of people, has a misleading title. There is no guarantee of riches. Understand that the vast majority of people who start a blog with the hope of making a lot of money will fail to do so.

2.
Be patient. Be very, very patient. All blogs start out equal and even blogs destined for greatness will crawl at first. Your hit count and individual and link reader numbers will grow slowly. Think 12 months.

3.
Don't fall for the psychological numbers trap. You will be tempted to count down the minutes to the arrival every day of your numbers update. You will receive sage advice not to put too much store in these numbers. You will nevertheless stare catatonically at the numbers and will them to morph into four- and five-digit, steroid-bulked, mutant future descendants of themselves. This must be avoided. What I do instead is type the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet where I can stare at all the numbers, arranged neatly in chronological order. Use soothing background colours.

4.
Choose a 'niche'. This, along with content, is the most important advice you will receive. The world's two best-read blogs are about gadgets. Orble's most successful blog is about cars. The 850,000 daily readership Dooce blog is about motherhood. Write about your hobby; write about about the subject area of your PhD treatise; write about a focused area you know about. Search engines - and in the blogosphere they are deities with absolute power over your future - will see you better and more often and more regularly if you have a subject-specialised blog. If you want to write about three or four different subjects, start a blog for each of them.

5.
Choose a domain name. This will be the web address of your blog. The name should reflect the nature of your blog - www.chocolatebiscuits.com is not a good name for a blog on stamp collecting. Go to a domain-hosting site and do some domain name searches to see what is available (try Telivo).

6.
Buy your own domain name, which is a relatively cheap and simple experience, and register it on a hosting site, which is a relatively expensive and confusing exercise. The venerable and credible WordPress (see point 7) recommends bluehost. Congratulations, you now have your own presence on the world wide web. It may look like a picture of my wife in a blizzard with her back turned to the camera, but it's a start. Think of it as a blank page upon which your future will be writ large. A guide to this tricky stage is the book Problogger: Secrets for blogging your way to a six-figure income. This is another of those tantalisingly named books which promise the world, with those promises delivered in 200 pages of content which could easily have been distilled to 10 pages, but in this case at least you get honest advice. See also their related blog, itself a blogging success story.

7.
Install WordPress. This is optional - if you know HTML coding and are high-end graphics-capable, then by all means create your own blogging interface, not forgetting to optimise it for advertising, search engine visibility, visitor statistics etc. WordPress, a free, widely-used blogging interface, does it all for you. Read all about it here.

8.
Learn everything there is to learn about advertising on your blog (try this link for a start). Read all about Google AdSense and, perhaps, some if its competitors (this blog looks at the biggest alternatives).

9.
If you don't already write well, learn to do so. We can't all write like Hemingway or Hiaasen, but we can all try to write with sufficient technical accuracy to allow readers to focus on content rather than grammatical incompetence. This is where it all starts and ends. Content is king, queen and entire royal dynasty, and unless your content is unpublished nude photographs of Sarah Palin you are going to have to work hard at generating visitor numbers. That is done through quality material. It is a crucial message, and the eyes of most people just glaze over when they hear it. There are plenty of bloggers who have been posting regularly and diligently for two years with the expectation of making money, but their blogs still earn a pittance. Some then lament that, having built a blog, the riches didn't come. Why? It is about quality content.

10.
Blogging is one of the most gratifying creations of the internet. There are so many reasons to get into it, all with guaranteed success: we all need mental as well as physical exercise, and blogging is a great way to keep the neurons ticking; it is a community and therefore a way to meet people, especially people with similar interests; it is an ideal motivation for lazy writers, and there are many of us around. Just about the only reason to get into blogging that is not guaranteed success is to make money out of it.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Writing

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For he's a jolly good bellow

September 29th 2008 00:53

I heard someone call my name. It was close to first edition deadline and I was deep in concentration, wrestling with a Page 3 story. Body copy too long, good headline idea too short. Good headline ideas never fit close to deadline.

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