February 11, 2012

Speed Links

There are a couple of posts on other blogs you may be interested in this week.

The first comes from Common Sense with Mark. Well CommonSense meet No Nonsense.

Mark wrote a post on whether the actions of some people in the Blogsphere were of a herd mentality and just following the A-List bloggers. This does go on quite a bit, but in a manner that I see nothing wrong with. While every blog should strive to be unique in terms of content, what is wrong with trying to generate a little traffic to your blog. Afterall isn’t that why people spend time and energy creating the content. They want people to read it. Most of Mark’s post deals with the various traffic generation trends of late such as blog rush. Blog rush was touted a little before its time. I was even guilty of this in some of my posts, but the main reason people jumped on BlogRush was because of the name behind it. Its pretty much a given that round one was a bust, but I would not be surprised to see a round two implementation of blogrush.

Mark goes on to talk about the ever ending quest for more subscribers and more comments. Of course people want these things they are what helps to make a blog popular. If you are writing a blog and do not want readers or subscribers, why don’t you just keep it on your hard drive and get it off the net.

Sorry Mark, I don’t see a lot of CommonSense in this post.

My second link is on a subject that a lot of the A-List bloggers about blogging have been touting lately, but this one did not make Mark’s list and that is including images in your posts. I personally like images in the posts as long as there are not too many and the image is somehow related to the post. The problem for me has been finding the images that I can freely post without copywriting problems. Skelliewag to the rescue with the guide to find incredible Flickr images for your blog. There are some decent suggestions in the post and I will definitely be bookmarking it. I’ve been using Live Writer lately to write on blogs and it has an addon you can download to help you find Flickr Images and insert them. It works great with WordPress, but the search for images is a little awkward. This post should help me with that problem, so you may start to see more images around here soon.

Big Pimpin

Lara from I Make Money On Facebook has posted an article about traffic generated form Facebook and how its the worst traffic on the net that caught my eye. Lara provides some insight into how Facebook works in regards for utilizing it as a traffic generation technique which has some possible merit. I’ve never really got Facebook really but with Lara’s help, I’m starting to see how it could be a powerful tool if utilized properly.

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Flagship Blog Building Project

DoshDosh has an interesting post on his blog recommending building Flagship blogs. The concept he lays out is interesting, but I’m not sure how practical for most people. The concept involves creating a Flagship blog( as he calls it) every 30 days for a year.

The idea is to build up a blog and follow a development cycle on a monthly rotation. If done properly then after a year you would have 12 blogs in various niches that could be sold for a profit. The idea sounds reasonable in terms of it could earn the person a lot of money, but there is also a lot of risk in such an endeavor.

First you need to find all the domain names for your various niches. That part probably won’t be that difficult for most Internet Marketing types. Chances are you already have numerous domain names registered that you have not built out into sites yet. I know I have a few.

The main time constraint is content. Now if you have plenty of money, you could contract out the content, but if all your content is contracted out how is this really a blog. A blog should have a unique voice. Readers are attracted to this as they always know what they are going to get. Now there are exceptions, sites like Engadget come to mind, but these are few in between. This endeavor could get very expensive in a hurry. If you want subscribers to a blog which is a must if you intend to make money off advertisers or to sell the blog eventually. Buying unique blog posts could get very expensive.

Then comes the whole process of advertising your blog. This could also get very time consuming. I suppose if you had a great deal of great content and then paid some high profile bloggers such as John Chow to review your blog, then this may take care of launching you into the blogsphere and you may gain some subscribers. Of course this is always a risk as people who subscribe to a blog such as John Chow’s probably are not interested in your blog on other niche topics that may not cover making money. So for this to be effective, you will need reviews on other sites within your niche. This may not be easy to obtain as a lot of people won’t pimp another blog the competes with them for SE rankings. Of course I’m sure you could pay them enough money and they would do it.

Blogging is a time intensive task and unless you have hords of cash( which is probably not something everyone has) then it would be very hard to make this work out to your benefit.

Of course you could take DoshDosh’s idea and use it to build one or two blogs and do it in a development life cycle that allows more time. Say you push the cycle out to 3 months or 6 months, then that would give you time to properly perform all the needed tasks in a time frame that meets your needs. AS you build revenue through this process you could reinvest your profits into outsourcing the time restrictive tasks. This would allow you to build more blogs and eventually reach the level of Flagship blog building DoshDosh mentions. The important thing I got out of the article was that you should develop a plan for blogging. This will help you maintain a consistent schedule and as a result build a better blog.

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Additional Benefits with Entrecard

You may have noticed the little Entrecard button on the side of this site. I’ve been running it for a couple of days and so far I’m much more impressed than I am with Blogrush. While Blogrush seemed to take off on this site at first it has dwindled and it really now just taking up space. I’m going to leave it for a few more days or maybe even a couple of weeks, but I have a feeling I’m going to have to chalk this one up to experience and dump it.

Now entrecard seems to be different. I was not in the network but a few minutes when I had my first advertiser request. Of course I’m sure that is because when you first get started the credits it takes to advertise is lower. Once people start dropping cards on your widget, then the cost to advertise on your blog goes up. It has to work like this to keep the economy in balance. So the newer members are a lot cheaper than the ones who have been around for a while. So for everyone quit dropping cards on Shoemoney‘s card. His prices keep going up and we all want a chance to have our advert placed on that site :-)

As far as the unexpected benefits, I’ve noticed an increase in the number of comments on this blog since joining the network. Since a lot of the people who are commenting are also Entrecard members it stands to reason that they are finding posts and commenting as a direct result of Entrecard. This is great and shows that Entrecard is not only a traffic generating network, but a networking vehicle for bloggers. As time goes along and more people join the network this is going to prove to be a powerful tool for helping blogs grow. Keep up the good work Entrecard and if you have a blog and have not joined yet, get to entrecard.com and add your blog.

I have also implemented the Top Commenters plugin in the sidebar. So if you want a free link from a PR4 site with the No Follow link turned off then make some comments. I do reserve the right to delete any comment that does not add value to this site, so if you want to comment then please do, but make the comments useful to other readers. Spam will be deleted as always without any warning or reason.

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