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New Bloggers Tend To Focus On The Wrong Things

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Everyday five million new people start blogs. Okay, the number’s not that high, but you get the idea. A lot of damn people decide to become bloggers every day. I think it’s great. I know I jumped right into blogging without a second thought and I’ve been earning cash ever since. I won’t deny that to anyone. But I think many of the people starting blogs these days need to make a realistic assessment of what they hope to accomplish.

Many fields in blogging are well covered now. If you plan on starting a derivative blog in a competitive field, you face an uphill battle in gaining a readership. Since you’re blog is new, you’ll be competing with tons of established blogs. It will be tough to get people to switch over to you, or to even add you to their list of resources. This conundrum can be solved, but it means you need to shift your focus to what really matters at a blog.

Yes, I’m referring to content. The knowledge that blogs need great content is well established. But new bloggers really need to let that nugget sink in. You can’t make it with slapped together content, and you won’t succeed by following the exact trends that everyone else is reporting on. Your content needs to be somewhat special when you’re first working on your blog. If not, people will quickly pass and move on to a better blog.

The exact type of content you produce doesn’t matter. It’s more important than you try for the following:

1. Content that’s well written and well researched if technical in nature
2. Content that is tightly focused on your chosen niche
3. Concise content that has a chance to go viral in the sense of attracting links that bring traffic

Once you write such content, you will be forced to do it again and again. Blogging doesn’t get that much easier, despite having an established archive. You will always have to bring something unique to the table, or your competitors will eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

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A.P. Picks Fight With Bloggers, Backs Down

It’s getting obvious to just about anyone that old-line newspapers are in their death throes. The A.P., an organization that’s owned by 150 newspapers, has decided to fight back against the erosion of their business model by new media, in a good old fashioned ham-fisted way which indicates their heads are completely up their asses, decided to threaten one blogger at the “Drudge Retort, by having him removed 7 items that contained quotes from A.P. articles.

Of course, the blogosphere got wind of this move and was all it over with negative criticism, prompting the A.P. to effectively say they’ll settle down and think of an alternative. In essence, they don’t want any bloggers even quoting their stories, so the battle promises to be an interesting one. The very basis of the blogosphere has been built on “fair use” and quotes so the A.P. will really have to fight everyone to expect changes.

They said they’ll be issuing “clear standards” about what can be re-quoted, but personally I wouldn’t trust much of what they’re saying. They’ve fired an opening round in a new phase of the war between old media and new, and you can’t put this genie back in the bottle.

What do you think of the war between the A.P. and bloggers?

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You Want To Make Money Blogging? It’s As Simple As A Country Girl

Making money blogging is the easiest damn thing in the world. I can’t believe I hear people cry about how tough it is. There’s so much information out there on how to get started and what to do, that you must not be paying attention. Or, it could be as simple as the fact that you aren’t working hard enough, and you’re the type of person who gives up easily when confronted with opposition. Hell, I’m not pointing any fingers, but let’s go over how to make money blogging one more time.

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Commercial Blogging Has A Unique Set Of Challenges

Blogging is a relatively new media, but it’s starting to mature in many ways. More and more money has been invested by companies as they attempt to “control” the conversations in the blogosphere. More commercial content isn’t a bad thing. Without a profit incentive, much high quality content wouldn’t be created, and it certainly wouldn’t be free. But being a commercial blogger has its’ own set of issues.

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Pounding Away In The Blogging Trenches

That’s what I’m doing. I’m still pounding away in the trenches of blogging. I’ve never made the A-list, never had a ton of RSS readers, or followers, but I have learned to manage to blog profitably. Currently the efforts of my wife Heather and I are pulling in $2x,xxx. dollars per year, and have been rising steadily. Since we started in March 2006, and didn’t invest any capital in the business, I’d say that blogging for dollars has been the profitable endeavor we thought it would be.

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Summer Blogging Plan

Summer is here, as evidenced by the first warm weather I’ve seen around these parts in what seems like years. Summer is a bittersweet time for most internet marketers. On the one hand, who doesn’t love the great warm weather? But on the other hand, we all know it’s a seasonal time of year for most keywords. This makes the Summer challenging, because it’s one time of the year where we really can’t afford to drift off and lose our intensity.

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Buzz Bissinger Braylon Edwards

Buzz Bissinger, Braylon Edwards, and Will Leitch recently appeared on “CostasNow” to talk about sports blogging. Buzz Bissinger came across as a complete numbnuts. Here’s a guy who’s completely threatened by new media and has the audacity to claim that blogs are the cause of the “dumbing down” of America. I hate to tell this arrogant S.O.B. that real “sportswriters” have had more to do with the dumbing down of America than bloggers ever will.

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Twitter Is Down A Lot

Twitter seems to be having more than their fair share of woes from a technical standpoint. The site doesn’t seem to be stable at all.

Not only hasn’t been responding for direct access, but their badge is slowing down my websites! You have people linking to you for free and you can’t even keep your site up.

Even a simple search online for “Twitter Down” shows over one million results. Apparently people are noticing and commenting.

Truthfully, I never use the site much when it is up, so I’m not really complaining too bad. But it seems like the service is down more than up lately.

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A Strategy For A High CPM Low Traffic Website

Let’s say you have a website that has high CPM, but low traffic. How bad of a situation is this? IMHO, not too bad at all. It means you’ve found a niche that pays well, but you haven’t gone far enough in developing traffic. It’s much easier to fix a website like this than one that pays low CPM. No matter how hard you work on a website with low CPM, you end up regretting that you can’t get more for your visitors.

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Online Advertising Is Still Growing, Barely

Every day I read another story about how online advertising is growing. Good. As soon as we start reading stories saying the opposite we’ll have to worry about overall trends. But for now it appears that companies are committed to marketing online, and are committing their long term budgets to the effort. That should bode well for anyone who’s publishing content online.

I also have been catching more reports of companies looking to advertise on social media. This should also bode well for the average blogger, because most blogs get readers from the social media sector. Both of these two trends indicate that there will be more money available for bloggers in the future.

I do see one sign of trouble today, and it comes from this New York Times article.

While search advertising remains strong, there are signs that the growth in online advertising — particularly in more elaborate display ads — is slowing down. In the past few weeks, major online-advertising players, like Yahoo and Time Warner, have posted mixed results.

And online publishers may be getting less money for the ad space they do sell. The prices paid for online ads bought through ad networks dropped 23 percent from March to April, according to PubMatic, an advertising-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., that runs an online-pricing index. Large Web publishers fared the worst in PubMatic’s study, with the prices they received through networks dropping 52 percent.

Ouch. It looks like a double whammy is hitting. There is a slow down in growth and publishers are earning less per click. It looks like any of us who plan on staying alive need to continue to operate in hustle mode.

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