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Blog monetization is a very extensive and fairly inexhaustible subject to tackle, not only because of the number of actual monetization methods (PPC, CPM, Affiliates), but rather because of the sheer number of ad networks, that promise to sell your blog’s advertisement inventory and in the process provide you an income. I’ve discussed about ad networks and blog monetization schemes in a more through article, way back, but this isn’t where I want to go. I never like talking about making money online, because the subject seems a bit trivial to me (mainly because of all the filth in the niche), but I feel like I need to share this.

Thing is there are, literally, thousands of such ad networks that promise to turn your blog into a true money maker, but at the end you only end up with a few dollars in your pocket or either way, not a respectable amount anyway. You see, ad brokers are all ripping us off! Just about all of these ad networks perceive a very high commission, mostly around the 50% mark. Just think about it for a second, that means half of what you really make goes in other people’s pockets. Better then nothing at all, right? Wrong!

I won’t lie, on my other blogs I use a few such ad networks, but only on the blogs that are still in the beginning, and really don’t have any other options, or only to handle secondary ad inventory on the more established ones, but not even that lately. What I use to monetize my blogs then? Simple, I just sell ads directly to advertisers. There’s no more commission and I get to charge my own prices. I’ve just cut out the middle man.

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I’ve always been fascinated by how every man is unique. There’s no two alike in the world, no matter how much they’d physically resemble each other. Even if a person would share 100% of another’s DNA code, I’m positive they’d still be two different individuals, because, although they may look identical, they won’t think the same.

We all have our own consciousness, our own unique thoughts and views around anything that catches our interest and by having an independent mind you’re free to exercise those exact thoughts and ideas in any way you see fit. This is the catalyst for creativity and creativity is one of the main traits that defines uniqueness. So, rejoice fellow bloggers, for you are all unique!

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Commenting on the web is one of the most important factors that lead to the Internet social revolution, from the last few years. In the not so distant past, commenting and public social interactions on the web was more or less exclusive on forums and was limited by a series of complications. When blogs first became popular in the early 2000s, they were hailed and highly praised, not for their particular concept, but rather for their social innovation; a never before seen connectivity between the readers and the article authors. Readers could now freely and easily interact with the authors, publicly share and discuss the post’s ideas and form a bond with the blogger. In short comments from behalf of the readers made blogs what they are today.

Since then, a lot of things have changed on the web and in the blogoshere particularly. Commenting has also more or less changed, thanks to the ever expanding issue of spam, that’s lead to steadily decline of quality in blog comments.

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Last week I wrote about the habit of blogging. There I discussed about habits in general and how they fit into blogging, why gaining the habit of blogging is very important and finally how to eventually grow it. I’d like to think of the respective post as more of a initiation piece, for today’s article, in which I plan to lay down quite a few habits that make a blogger more effective, efficient, intelligent, interesting and well, let’s just say they kinda mark the difference between regular bloggers and, what’s commonly known as, “probloggers.”

I won’t limit the list to only habits, though. In it you’ll also find characteristics and traits, that highly prolific bloggers posses and which we all should strive to adopt. Continue Reading »

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

~Aristotle

Blogging demands seriousness, commitment, passion and of course consistency. These are the four essential ingredients, not only towards a successful blogging career, but a healthy and balanced life as well. However keeping up with the fast paced environment, that bloggers are ever so often subjected to, can be a bit of a impediment, especially for blogging beginners and amateurs. Apparently the biggest problem for most bloggers is consistency.

People tend to burn out really fast, after subsequently they passionately burned the midnight oil, during their first weeks, some just days, of blogging. Enthusiasm can be really swell, but the trouble with it is that it dies off pretty fast, so to keep on blogging consistently you have to asimilate it completely. It has to become a part of what you are and do completely, it has to flow throw your veins so to speak, and the easiest way to do that is to form the habit of blogging.

It’s just a matter of simple psychology. Every time your learn something new, your brain tries to connect dots, to form a pathway for neurological activity. If you repetitively perform an action, your brain will soon make behavior patterns and in term will improve your neurological pathway. This is the efficient way your brain handles routine. This is a habit.

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Apparently micro-blogging is getting more and more popular by the day and consequently its biggest platform on the web, Twitter, is rapidly growing as well. This means there’s a whole new emerging market of tech savvy, blogging experienced users that’s just waiting to be grasped. A great opportunity indeed!

But first, for those a bit unfamiliar with micro blogging and more importantly twitter, let me explain a bit how it works. Twitter is basically a service that allows you to update your status with short messages, of up to 140 characters, just like a SMS text message. What makes it so special is that it also has social elements, allowing users to befriend each other; in twitter this is called “following.” Whenever you’re following somebody on twitter you’ll be able to instantly receive their updates and keep up to date with someone’s status. Furthermore because mobility and fastness are of the utmost importance in micro blogging, twitter allows you to update your status via the web page, IM, mobile phone, blackberry or various other third party applications.

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WordPress is undoubtedly the leading blogging platform in the world, hands down. I’ve experimented with a lot of blogging CMS, from blogger, to drupal, to typepad and none came close (although I hold a particular fondness for typepad) to the versatility, reliability and support that WordPress offers.

Yesterday night, the fine people from WP released the latest and much awaited stable version, the WordPress 2.5 at the Dallas WordCamp conference and as always an update is in order. Apparently to celebrate the release, the WordPress official portal has also suffered a drastic re-design to go hand-in-hand with the new version.

My first thought though was “why 2.5? where did 2.4 go?.” I did some digging around and found that 2.4 was simply skipped, because the regular 120-day release cycle was extended. So basically this latest version is a two in one. WP 2.5 took almost 6 months (185 days) to develop, being the end result of countless hours of tinkering, tweaking, design and programming from behalf of over 110 contributors. Let me tell you though, the wait was worth it. The new version is radically different (364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions were changed) and brings in a lot of new features, both visible and invisible (nested deep in the CMS’ core).

I had the pleasure of playing around with some earlier versions of the 2.5 a few weeks ago (wasn’t particularly impressed at the time), including the RC2 release from a few days ago, but decided I’d post a review when the final cut came in. I upgraded right after it was announced last night (a friend ecstatically quickly e-mailed me), as always with no difficulties, clean and fast; played a bit with it and decided to sleep it over, so I better digest these new changes. Before going further with the review, if you haven’t update yet to the latest 2.5 version, please read Lorelle’s guide to safely upgrading WordPress.

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I’ve been blogging for a pretty long time now (give or take, 2 years) and in that time I’ve managed to see, experience and experiment a lot of things in the social media field, particularly in blogging. Because social media is such a volatile industry, in which new promising services pop out at a regular basis and disappear almost just as suddenly as they appeared, it’s very hard to predict what the next big thing will be, that will help you get your blog exposed or significantly increase your readership. However, I’ve found that one thing almost always stays the same and that’s the readers, the visitors. They’re the constant in almost any successful blog equation.

They’re the ones that can make your blog very popular and successful, by regularly reading your posts, posting comments, clicking ads etc. Basically we, as bloggers, wouldn’t manage to achieve anything without them. What I’m gonna try to do, in this post, is to dwell a bit in the average blog reader’s psychology. What I want to do is to make a write up of what makes them ‘tick,’ how, when and where they read your blog, thus by understanding what goes around their heads when surfing your blog, you can take the necessary steps to improve it.

I’ve done some research in the past few weeks and found that although people surfing blogs on the internet come from different ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds, they almost all behave the same way when reading blogs.

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• Patrick just recently wrote a very inspiring posts dubbed What you need to know about SEO in 2009. He points out that it gets increasingly harder for new comers to get a decent rank in search engines, while those who’ve started up early in a niche get easy traffic. He offers a few solutions though, the best being to think in advance.
• Steve and Adnan from Blogtrepreneur teamed up to write up an awesome resource for online entrepreneurs, that work well for bloggers as well, to aid them. The post covers exactly 101 useful resources, ranging from tools, apps, tutorials, social media websites, ad networks and so on.
• Here’s Darren with part 3 of his series about blog promotion from scratch. This time he’s tackled the point of paid advertisement, as a mean of publicity. A lot of bloggers kinda keep away from this particular promotion method, most probably because it employs paying from your pocket, but frankly it’s one of the best options for a rapid development plan.
• Also this week Steven Snell wrote a very comprehensive resource for Pure Blogging, in which he laid down 99 ways to improve your blog. This should keep you busy for a while.
• Skellie released a cool 27 pages long free ebook, called The Simple Web: A Philosophy for Getting What You Want.
• Stop being in such a rush every time you blog. Take a minute and contemplate upon your post, before you hit the publish button. Actually here’s 10 questions every blogger needs to ask himself before posting by copyblogger.
• Shankar just wrote a pretty nifty resource comprised of 10 brilliant firefox extensions you probably didn’t knew existed. Most of us bloggers use Firefox so I’m sure some of you’ll find it valuable.

Photo by More Altitude

Sometimes I like to think of blogs like people, because, due to their high social profile, they resemble in so many ways their human authors. Actually blogs are you want them to be, you dictate what gets posted and by doing so your blog takes on the meaning you give it, just like life. It’s just like your eyes are the windows to your soul, so is a blog a mirror to your personality. And just like life a blog will pass through several stages of existence from birth, to its moment of climax, to its inevitable death. During its lifetime, if it’s long enough of course, a blog will fluctuate numerous times on up-down scales and ever so often you’ll find that for a limited time it doesn’t go up, nor does it go down, but just stagnates. This is called a plateau.

Plateaus are pretty easy to recognize, you start off pretty well with a decent month to month growth, from all points of view, be it traffic, subscribers or money earned, but then you suddenly hit a dead lock, when everything comes to a halt. Blogs aren’t the only ones that experience it either, they’re just as well present in any form of activity, from guitar playing, to weight loss to writing to just about anything. What you have to understand about plateaus is that they’re part of the process of growth, it’s more of a psychological factor actually, if you link the opening part of the article with what I’ve said, then you’ll understand. Basically the blog needs to reach a point in which it can at least cope with the current level of exigences, before it can pass on to the next level, otherwise it will stray off in shallow ground. Such is the case with high traffic spikes. So you see plateaus actually are good… sometimes.

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