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Finding your own voice

December 31, 2007 By 11 Comments

In the spirit of the new year, I thought I would start off the year with a series post. This will be several part series on finding your own blog voice and how the A-List bloggers can teach you to find it without even knowing they are showing you. I had originally only planned on making this a single post, but as I got into it I realized in a single post this is going to be way too long.

I’ve been spending a lot of time browsing various blogs around the web. As a member of Entrecard just as a side benefit you find yourself on a lot of blogs with a lot of different types of content. These niches range from making money to personal blogs to humorous blogs as well as quite a few others. At first I considered this a waste of my time, but the longer I spend with this system the more similarities I see, but also I see a lot of differences. The main differences do not come from the content as a lot of it is good, but in the technical expertise of the various bloggers. Some bloggers are quite astute when it comes to the technical side of things such as SEO, web design, traffic generation( well sort ) and some don’t have a clue about the technical side but are very good writers. Some think they have a clue even when they don’t and this goes for both sides of the equation.

But neither of these items are the similarity I’m referring too. I’m referring to the raising of hands screaming at the A-List bloggers saying hey look at me. Some of these blogs do this so much that its hard to figure out what the blog is actually about. Some of these are quite amusing such as Not John Chow’s John Chow is Dead post I’ve been guilty of linking to some of John Chow’s or Darren Rowse’s posts in the past and I will again, but not for the point of begging either of them for attention. Did do it for the trackback link :-)

I read both these bloggers almost every day because sometimes there are some decent tips to gain knowledge about blogging. A lot of these tips come from the Guest Bloggers and not the actually author of the blog. But still you have everyone saying hey John look at me, I’m so special if you would just look and give me a link then I’ll be great just like you. One thing is certain if you want his attention then pay him $400 bucks for a review and then he will pay you some attention. You can determine this for yourself if you look at the number of paid reviews posted in the past month. The one thing I find missing from John’s blog is actual good information you can use to build your own blog. Some people say the same thing about Darren and Problogger. Of Course John does not beat around the bush in this area. After all the title of his blog is I make money by telling other people how much money I make. He never says he is going to help to teach you to make money like he makes. Sure there are tips on the blog, but not actually how he does it. John says he made 27K in November. Whether you believe him or not is up to you.

Lets look at that number a little bit. The top four money makers follows:

  • Private Ad Sales: $12,854.84
  • Affiliate Commissions: $6,579.67
  • ReviewMe: $4,400.00
  • Text Link Ads: $2,012.66If you add this up you will get $25,847.17 or the majority of his money. With the most coming from Private Ad sales, but I’ve never seen anywhere on his site information on how to attract advertisers, well not directly. The second best earner is from Affiliate commissions. I would guess a lot of the commissions come in the form of commissions from other bloggers who have signed up under John in some tiered structured payout program such as WidgetBucks or Bidvertisor. John does post Affiliate links in posts so part of this probably also comes from those links.Now I have no doubt that John is very successful at what he does and how he does it, but is it more important to act just like John or find another way to gain attention. You don’t need John’s attention you need the attention of your readers. After all if I was going to pick someone to emulate then I would copy ReadWriteWeb, I bet if John would tell you who he wanted to be like then that may be one of the sites he wished he could become like.

    Well tune in tomorrow for the next installment. You may want to subscribe so you don’t forget and miss it. Where we analyze Darren Rowse and maybe even get closer to the point of finding your own voice for your blog. For now take a look at both of the Year in Review posts from John Chow and ProBlogger. As they will help set the tone for the rest of this series. While you are at Problogger you may want to check out some of the posts about what was done to improve your blog in 2007. These are all posts from other people and there are some really great tips. My favorite is how to Improve your blog with networking but in all the entries are some great food for thought.

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    Entrecard Again

    December 24, 2007 By 8 Comments

    No not another post about Entrecard. I had decided not to post about Entrecard for a while. After all I’ve written several posts and even had a guest post on this subject. I had told myself I would not write any more posts on this subject for a while, but I read a couple of posts that have inspired me.

    First is from the Evil Woobie with What Does Entrecard mean to you. This post was in regards to What’ Have You’s post on Entrecard

    I’ll let you read both posts to make up your own mind, but the main points of the conversation revolves around whether Entrecard traffic is worthless traffic.Evil Woobie contends that any traffic is not worthless and I agree. The biggest part of blogging is to build a brand and the more eyeballs you can get to see your content the better you are. Now these people may not perform some action to help your blog on every visit, but just the fact that they stop by provides you with that opportunity. This is where Entrecard excels. The system is built on the fact that you must visit other sites to earn credits. Some people will just come to your site to drop their card. I know I’m guilty of just dropping cards without really reading content, but I also tend to scan the blog as I’m waiting for Widgets to load. If one of the articles catches my attention then I read and most of the time even comment on the article if I have something to say. I don’t really think I’m some unique individual in this regard and I see a lot of other entrecard bloggers doing the same thing on this blog. Comments are up since I joined Entrecard and I’ve received quite a few links from other bloggers to various posts.

    What Have You suggests that Entrecard is more of a social site instead of a traffic generator type site. I agree and disagree. It does generate traffic as my logs can prove and it is a social type site. Of course some people will have higher rankings in the social aspect of the site. This is true of any social interaction type site. People who have been in the system the longest have higher credits to advertise on their site and they also have more credits in their account which to use for advertisement on other blogs. But this is not always the case.

    I know of sites that where members of Entrecard before I joined the system and they have a cheaper price to advertise than I do. Currently its 120 credits to advertise on this blog. Which is normal for this time of the day. My price ranges from between 120 and 140 credits per day. It usually starts out on low end and then increases as the day goes along. This has been happening for days. There must be some correlation between my actions and the price of my advert. There is.

    The social aspect of Entrecard also controls the price. not directly, but indirectly. The price is calculated based on the number of times someone visits my site and drops their card. The number of times this happens is a correlation of the number of times I visit other sites and drop my cards on their sites. So that is where my price comes from. I drop cards those people see my card in their inbox and they return the favor and drop their card on me. If I look at my stats in Entrecard the blogs that have the highest price are also the ones who always drop their card on my site just about every day.

    So it stands to reason that just like any other social type site. You get out of Entrecard what you put into it. If you are lazy and do not dedicate a little time to Entrecard then you won’t realize the benefits. This is true of StumbleUpon, BloggingZoom, Digg or any of the social type sites. If you are lazy and try to take shortcuts then you won’t get the true benefit of your actions.

    Now this is not true of everyone. I would guess that John Chow or Problogger do not need to drop any cards and they get plenty of drops and organic traffic from Entrecard without any interaction on their part. This is because everyone is just trying to get their attention in hopes of a mention from one of those blogs. But that is their position, they rest of use have to work at it.

    Blogging is hard work and for you to be successful at it then you are going to have to work a little. Having a successful blog is not just about writing content that others want to read. Writing is only one part of the equation. You also have to get out there and spend time on promotion. This is what I consider Entrecard as a method for me to do. The time I spend on Entrecard not only helps me to promote my blog, it also allows me to interact with other bloggers who I may have never found without this system.

    One of the actions a lot of the a-list bloggers recommend as a method to increase readers on a blog is to comment on other blogs. I have combined my commenting time with my Entrecard time. This allows me to kill two birds with one stone. Now I still comment on blogs outside of the Entrecard system, but since I’m already on a blog to drop my card, why not leave a comment at the same time. It would take me just as much time to comment any way and an entrecard drop is just gravy.

    So even though I don’t agree with everything about Entrecard and I’m not sure it can maintain this long term, it is a great system for the little bloggers( Which most of us are) to increase traffic and exposure in the blogsphere.

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    Earnings Report

    November 25, 2007 By 2 Comments

    Well in the following of people such as John Chow and Darren Rowse, I decided to do a earnings report for this blog. Now unlike John and Darren I won’t break everything down into separate areas but just give you an overview of this blog’s earning power. This figure does not reflect anything to do with any of my other sites revenue as I treat this blog a little special than everything else I do on the web. Drum Roll Please, Are you ready? Here it is I have earned Zero dollars from this blog the past month. Wow great I’m rolling in it.

    Now you may ask what is the reason for posting this? The reason I’ve earned Zero on this blog is not from a total lack of traffic, while I don’t have the numbers of the A-List blogger‘s, I do have some traffic. Not anything stellar but in comparison to some people out there who do not get any visitors at all or get 20 per day, its better. I average between 300 and 500 unique’s a day with with a little over 300 RSS subscribers. These numbers are not stellar either, but they are something to work with. Some people over at the Warrior Forum would say you are not monetizing it correctly.( I’ve come to the conclusion that most Warriors are idiots, but that’s another post.) In fact, I have not monetized it at all. I just put up a couple of ads this week, but historically I have not tried to monetize this blog at all.

    At one time I did run some Adsense ads, but that turned out to be a total waste of space as I got very few clicks on the Ads. This type of site is not optimum for doing well with Adsense. At the advice of John Chow, I did decide to to try out BidVertiser to see how it may work. I ran Kontera for a while and I may do that again and I’ve posted an occasional Affiliate link in posts. I’ve earned a few dollars over the life of this blog, but not anything to brag about.

    So why make the post? Well I decided to post this as a statement for myself. As I said I’ve been reading a lot of John Chow and the more I think about it, I really like John’s writing a lot better than Shoemoney or Darren Rowse. I’ve heard stories about how a lot of people don’t like John. Perhaps because he tells you to get off your ass and do something. I’ve learned over the years that a lot of people don’t like you pointing out their weaknesses. I have decided that I’m tired of working the 8 to 5 or 10PM job and I want to do something else. This blogging thing looks okay. Its not hard to do, you just have to build up an audience and you have to do a little work. I originally planned to do just that with this site, but I got lazy. I went for a long time without really posting in a frequent and timely manner. This is probably one of the worst mistakes a blogger can make. I went for a time when I did not post at all and even when I did it was just links to other blogs and added no real value to my blog. This stunted the growth of this blog and did not really help me at all. I plan on changing that.

    I’m going to start monetizing this site. While my goal is to start making it pay the bills, I’m going to try to do it in a manner that is not intrusive. I’m also dedicating to actually posting more. While I won’t commit to posting every single day, I will try to do a lot better at actually writing something every couple of days.

    One of the issues I’ve had with writing is finding topics to write on, but again listening to John Chow I may have a way to overcome that problem. One idea John suggested was to gather ideas from the comments of your visitors. This struck home as I wrote a post a couple of days ago about How Article Marketing does not work. One of the comments was very insightful and a point was brought up that I did not consider in my original post. I will need to write a follow up post and clarify my position on the matter as well as acknowledge the fact that the comment actually made some valid points against my original argument. Great idea John and I’m glad I decided to finally read your money making guide that was sitting on my hard drive. For anyone who wants to earn a little money through their blog should probably head over to John Chow dot com and subscribe to his newsletter. As a prize John will give you a copy of this book. He does not try to sell you anything other than giving up your email address for his list. There isn’t any one time offer and John even makes statements against the practice and also separates himself from the so called Internet Marketers who do employ these practices. John actually got me to thinking hard about whether I should associate myself with some of these so called marketers, but that’s a topic for another post.

    So there it is my Earnings report. I’ll promise to do this again next year and I’m betting the results will be a lot different for this blog than this year.

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