Archive for January, 2008
Essential Application for Bloggers
Darren over at Problogger posted a great blog today called ‘14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers‘.
Normally I’m pretty savvy with Mac Apps and usually know what’s good, bad, and all that but there’s a few apps that Darren mentions that I had never heard of so I decided a bit of further investigation was necessary.
A Business Is Born
Those of you who actually know me know that I’m a fairly driven guy, you know that I’ve always got a load of work on and am constantly coming up with ideas and trying to see them through.
My most recent achievement is the music website I’m With The Band which focuses on the Australian music scene, and most importantly the local scene around Newcastle and the Central Coast, is going great guns. We’ve recently moved over to a Wordpress blog installation and are still developing that so that our readers get the most from the articles, we’re also about to go live with advertising sales and if that goes as planned I’m With The Band will start paying contributors for ‘featured’ content, we’ll also have some dollars to put back into the scene in the form of either a band competition or a compilation cd..
Big big ideas!
So while this is quite an achievement, and hopefully a semi-profitable one, I’ve already come up with my next project and have actually started it!
Big Brother Down Under - part II
My post the other day criticizing the Australian Government’s decision to filter all incoming internet content in an ‘opt out’ system seemed to get quite a lot of hits, around 500 odd actually. Normally my traffic is around the 200 - 250 mark but something about that post brought in quite a bit of extra traffic, probably because it’s just a bit of a restriction on our freedom of speech..who knows…hrmm
Playing catch up
For the first time in a long time I ignored the callings of my computer all weekend, it was actually quite good.
We had a wedding on Friday afternoon, then another one on Saturday which went till some time past midnight, and Sunday was spent doing pretty well nothing.
Anyway, this will be a super short blog this morning as I have 200 plus emails to wade through and about 400 something updates in Google Reader…plus I need some breakfast and a coffee..
Talk to you this afternoon, take it easy.
Tips for your blogging adventure!
After a post on Problogger this morning, as well as a few email questions in the past, I decided it was about time that I wrote up a short post on what I do when I’m stressed and cant think of anything to write on this here blog.
It’s not the easiest job in the world to be a blogger, particularly if you’re trying to make some money of it and hopefully grow it into a business. I’m trying to achieve something similar to this in 2008 so it’s very necessary for me to write regular posts and hopefully interesting enough articles that people keep returning or atleast become subscribers.
Anyway, let’s get started on this list of things that help me blog;
- Golf - When I’ve been stuck in front of the screen for a few hours and really need to get out and clear my head I head out to the local driving range and work on my game. Normally I’ll start coming up with ideas for future posts about 2-3 minutes after the last ball is hit. I’m guessing it’s all about getting outdoors and into the fresh air and getting some endorphins amped up.
- Photography - Another thing that tends to give me some writing inspiration is shooting photos. It’s quite zen like going out to shoot one particular subject, I like to de-construct objects across multiple photos. Worse case scenario you’ll have some photos to publish on your blog, it can help create a dialogue between you and your readers.
- Scribbling - I keep a little black notepad with me pretty well everywhere I go now. I’m always scribbling down little notes about things going on around me, things I hear on the radio, things people tell me. Whenever I get stuck for ideas I know I can open my blogging diary and come up with an article reasonably easily.
- RSS Feeds - Probably the biggest single ‘idea maker’ for me is the rss feeds I’ve subscribed to. I have about 100 or so daily feeds on a wide range of topics from making money online, creating a zen lifestyle, fashion news, medical news, and music news, that download to my Google Reader automatically and I’ll go through them all and see if there’s anything that jumps out at me enough that I’d like to write my own opinion on the subject while quoting the original source naturally.
These are a few things that work well for me. They may not be for everybody, particularly the golf one, but hopefully they’ll give you some ideas on how you can bust out of those writer’s block moments that we all have from time to time.
Anyway, I’ve got a wedding to get ready to go to so I’ve got to go and get organised. Have a rocking day.
Cheers, Matt
Big Brother Down Under?
There’s been a couple of news articles here in Australia which have really caught my attention in the last week or two. Both are quite topical in this age of freedom of speech and the government ’spying’ on and or monitoring our activities as citizens, and to be frank they’ve gotten me a little angry.
Let’s get the first one out of the way.
Last year the Howard government spent some 85 million dollars on providing content filtering software to Australian households in an attempt to protect our children for ‘the evils of the internet’. Now don’t get me wrong I believe that the security of our children should be top priority however I think that the way that the government has previously gone about it was poorly done and to be honest I believe a lot of the responsibility should come back on to the parents and how they’re teaching their children to interact with the world.
Well the Labor Government agrees with my opinion that the Howard government did it incorrectly as well, they’ve since come up with their own ’solution’ which they’ve dubbed ‘Clean Feeds’. Basically these ‘clean feeds’ mean that the content that you are viewing on the internet would have to be approved through a filtering system on your ISP’s servers before it hits your web browser…hrmm tell me I’m wrong here but wont this slow down the already woeful speed of adsl in Australia, not to mention the unfortunate people who live outside of areas that have adsl available to them and are still on dialup?
Another area that will be effected is the freedom of speech and information in Australia. What’s to stop the government from filtering out content such as this that speaks out against such a system, not a lot I’d say. Just like I can add a ‘competitive ad filter’ on my Google Adsense account to stop the display of an advertisement that I dont feel is appropriate for my blogs audience, so could the Labor Government to stop any anti-government movement..Australia or North Korea??
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has been quoted as saying;
“Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road,” he said. “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”
In my opinion the Minister is using this child pornography tag as a scare tactic so that it becomes easier for the Labor Government to get this legislation through without losing too much face on the issue of freedom of speech.
Again I’d like to know where are the parents while their children are surfing the internet? Why are you not keeping an eye on what your children are doing? Why are you not educating them on right and wrong? Sure curiosity normally gets the better of kids, and I’ll admit sneaking a mate’s dad’s hustler magazine down to the shack we used to hang out at when we were kids, but if you’ve taught your kids about right and wrong, respecting other people, and have generally taken an interest in their activities then in most circumstances your kids will grow up to become good respectable people.
Back to the ‘clean feeds’ issue. Well it turns out that this ’service’ that will be provided by your local friendly ISP will be an ‘opt out’ service as opposed to an ‘opt in’ service, so what does that actually mean? Everyone who has an account with an Internet Service Provider in Australia, be it Optus, Bigpond, whoever, will be automatically subscribed to this service. If you do not want this filtering on your service you will have to ring your ISP and tell them that you would like the ‘clean feed’ filtering removed from your account and you will have to answer a questionaire, which will no doubt be entered into a database which the government will no doubt have access to…hrmmm sounds sketchy to me?
Techcrunch have their own say on the subject here, and you can read the Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety by downloading their pdf here.
There’s also this fantastic ‘propaganda‘ video here on You Tube.
Google Adsense gone BONKERS!
As an Australian blogger it is typically harder to make money from advertising sales on your blog, specially when you’re quite new to the blogosphere, but quite often this can be overcome by joining in on one of the advertising networks like Pay Per Play, Google Adsense, Widgetbucks, Bidvertiser, etc. and to make things a potentially a little more profitable all of these programs have affiliate sales setup where basically if you refer people and they join up you make a little extra too.. There are loads of people who make the largest part of their blog revenue by these affiliate programs, me included.
Well today is a landmark day where if you’re an Australian blogger located in Australia, Google will now no longer pay you for your referrals….wtf..
I’d been out this morning working on my golf swing down at the local driving range, and by the time I’d gotten home and logged into Google Reader I had 4 different subscriptions reporting on this and two of them being a couple of big bloggers who I dare say will be very affected by the upcoming referral changes.
For a bigger and better perspective head over to Problogger or Shoemoney to see their respective thoughts on these changes…
For me it will mean a revenue loss amounting to maybe $50 a month, for those guys I’d hate to guess how much it will add up to but I dare say we haven’t heard the last of this however I’m quite happy now that I removed my Google Adsense referral buttons a few days ago and that I signed up to the new audio advertising network Pay Per Play which is looking like it will be a real solid income generation network.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Decrease Your Advertising, Make More Money
For a while now I’ve been an avid reader of John Chow’s blog, amongst other lesser know blogs, where as a reader / subscriber I was being told about a load of different online money making opportunities via affiliate systems, online businesses and straight up advertising channels.
Wanting to test a lot of these things out I signed up for accounts on Bidvertiser, Widgetbucks, TTZ Media, Linkworth, Amazon, as well as a few other ‘pay per click’ websites, I also had a pre-existing Google Adsense account. The result of signing up to, and installing all their code, was that I have ended up with a messy looking website and has my revenue increased at all…..the answer is big fat NO, granted that my network of blog readers isn’t very large but I’d still expect to see a slight increase in revenue in the last month or so.
So what am I going to do from here?
Well starting today I’m scrapping a majority of the advertising on my blog. I’ll be keeping the 125 x 125 buttons up the top, the Entrecard ad, and the Blogrush widget as they are all actually bringing traffic to my blog…particularly the Blogrush widget which has been running hot for me for the last week or so! I’ll be dumping the Google products referral button, the Bidvertiser sidebar ad, the TTZ Media advertising under each post, and the Amazon widget. That’s a whole lot of blog real estate I’ll be getting back!
So how’s all this going to help me make more money?
Now while I’m getting rid of multiple revenue streams I’ll actually be adding one back in, good ol’ Google Adsense. From what I’ve experienced, and seen on other peoples blogs, Google’s Adsense is probably the best at determining what it should be advertising on your blog. It’s much more complimentary to your articles as opposed to some systems that are displaying consumer electronics when you’re posting about sporting goods. The other reason I’m switching back to Adsense, and am expecting to make more money from it, is that it’s a more trusted network and therefore people are more likely to click on the adverts rather than clicking on something they are not sure is legit like the TTZ Media adverts that are currently running.
Will this all work for me, will I start making more money, will I crack the poops and re-install all the other code, who knows….only time will tell.
Come back at the end of the month and check out my income report, either I’ll be laughing or you will.. Either way someone will get a chuckle out of my ‘gamble’..
Cheers Matt
Pay Per Play, The Next Big Thing?
Affiliate programs, pay per click advertising, direct advert sales, and whatever other thing you’ve tried to monetize your blog with is about to become OBSOLETE! Simple as that! Kind of worrying hey?
You’re probably like me and have spent plenty of time over at John Chow, as well as many other ‘making money online’ websites, trying to learn from these guys and gals who got their starts years ago with making money online back before many people viewed Google Adsense ads and ‘Site Sponsor’ ads as a bit like spam, before all these Windoze applications came out that block online adverts, and before a lot of the affiliate programs were so full that only the guys right at the top were actually still making money.
Well I’ve got some news for you, and if you get in reasonably quickly you can actually be amongst the people at the top who are making decent dollars.Let me introduce Pay Per Play Media.
Pay Per Play Media is a new advertising service which is just about to start up that basically pays you for every visitor to your website. That’s right, every time someone visits your website you will earn revenue, and all they have to do is just visit your blog where they will hear a brief audio advert. And that’s it.
It’s so simple that anyone can earn some bucks with this system, you just have to get in early before they close their affiliate program off!
What are you waiting for, head on over to Pay Per Play Media and sign up now!
