Picture from here

Fifty thousand to eighty thousand, that’s how many people will have read my main blog by the end of the year.   To me that seems huge.  Some guy (almost said kid) from a small midwestern town having that many readers.     That’s also just my main blog and not counting everywhere I actually crosspost to.

It just blows my mind, now I understand that in the blogging world I’m still extremely small potatoes.   If I wanted a larger audience I would target my posts more accurately.   I would be more active and work on bringing up my social network connections.   But I don’t.

I like my growth organic.   So far this looks like it’s going to be a good year.

Picture from here

The biggest waste - er maintenance period time I use is maintaining blogs.   This may seem trivial if you run one blog, but if you do 7-8 like I do it can reach a pain threshhold.  Recently I wrote on my main blog about the issues of coming with blog stories for my different ventures, this article is not about blog stories.  This is more the pain in keeping up with routine maintenance.

The two biggest issues I have deals with patching.  I had thought about doing an rsync across different blog installations to keep plugins up to date, however I don’t use the same plugins on every blog, and I’m the type of person that wants to remove blog clutter as much as possible.

To make patching on Wordpress easier I use a couple plug-ins.  For handling updates and patches for plug-ins i use one called Plugin Central.  This plugin expands on the latest wordpress’s plugin update feature by allowing you to update multiple plugins at once.   I love it.

For upgrading wordpress itself I utilize a plugin call Instant Upgrade.   This plugin updates to the latest wordpress version with the click of a button.  I would worry about updating my blog sofware if this didn’t take some of the intimidation out of upgrading I don’t think I would upgrade as quickly as I do.

Hopefully using a combination of these tools would make your life easier.

So it seems that someone read my ironkey review that I did and made a purchase through Amazon.co, this generated me referral money.  Granted it’s not much and at the current rate I’m years off of living on blogging full time, but it’s a start.

]]> http://journeytogetpaid.com/2008/07/29/i-made-my-first-amazon-referral-this-week/feed/ http://journeytogetpaid.com/2008/07/14/do-people-click-more-ads-in-the-evening/ http://journeytogetpaid.com/2008/07/14/do-people-click-more-ads-in-the-evening/#comments Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:03:16 +0000 creeva http://journeytogetpaid.com/?p=16

Picture from here

I’ve noticed an interesting trend lately.  It seems while I get 80-90% of my hits during the average work day time, almost all of my Adsense clicks I receive are clicked in the evening hours.   I had written early about studies that show only 1% of the people that read web page click ads, the question I have now is do they all click them at night and refrain during the daylight hours?

What type of ads are my sites showing that might be considered not safe for work?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Why do you blog?   Are you hear to make a quick buck?   If you have investors in you then you stand to make an immediate living in it.     For the ones that aren’t making their dream income, do you continue writing for the hope of eventually getting a pay day?   Would you still do it if you knew it was never going to come?

The reason I ask is that I noticed one of the sites that I followed last year was in a nomination to being one of the best new blogs.   As of March 25th the site has not seen an update.   I know one of the writers and I haven’t asked him about this, but I do know he is actively working on a new site.

I understand about stoppping when you run out of funding, but do you make a run at something build up equity and leave it hanging?  Your readers none the wiser about what has happened?

I understand blogging can be a business, but one thing your readers want from you is to be informed.   If you disappear and they notice you started another blog without telling them, how long are they going to continue to trust you?

This is the wolf in sheeps clothing, they made thair money and moved on to the next project.  I’m not going to preach that there is anything wrong with that, but I will state that it isn’t the nicest thing to do.

Your opinions?

Google is all about consolidation of data, there whole mantra is behind it.  They have released oodles and oodles of services that I utilize (yes I’m a google whore - there I said it), but only minimal correlation between the tools other then a common login.   Many of their tools generate reports or data that could be transformed into reports.  Some of their services it’s almost brain dead that they haven’t integrated the services.   Let’s go through the services and how I would design “Google Reports”.

The most obvious Google “products” I would lump together would be Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Adsense, and Google Adwords.  All four of these products are usually used together - so why can’t we get reporting for all three on one page?  All of these products can give a webmaster an overview on where his site(s) are going and what he can work on.   There is absolutely no reason to go through four different interfaces to get this information.   Yes I can set up email reports from some of them - but a singlular report and page to view them at a quick glance would be great.   If I click on something to drill down on it could then take me to to the specific related products page.  While we are the subject of Google Analytics - a listing of recent page views ala the way statcounter does it would be great.   To be honest that’s the only reason I still use my statcounter account.

Those were the four products that prompted me thinking about this in total from the beginning.   Now let’s move on to the other products, video for example.   Google Video and Youtube both fit different niches in the google video structure.   Youtube allows you to upload video more quickly but has time and size limits, Google Video however allows downloads and unlimited sized and no time limits when you use their external (non browser based) uploader.  Now Google Video’s reporting very frequently fails to work - loosing view and download counts so this needs to be addressed.   But a report that would include subscribers, views, and downloads would be fantastic.

Feedburner should be tied into analytics also for the amount of information it gives you and stats, while I’m on a mini rant here when are we going to be able to inject adsense into our feedburner items?

Now let’s break into the quickies:

Google Base - ok I still don’t understand this product so I have no idea.

Blogger and Page Creator would tie in easily with Analytics - so there is no reason not to make this automated.

Browser Sync - The number of synchronizations and all machine that you ahve synchronized against.

Calender - Ok trickier but the number of appointments from a given day/month/week

Docs - Number of edits, number of documents, space they take up, and how many of your colloboration documents have had edits.

Gmail - Number of emails received, sent, spam caught, most frequent contacts, amount of free disk space.

Groups - could tie into Analytics if your the group owner but beyond that - number of members and messages - how many new messages if your just a reader.

Igoogle - um no clues

Reader - number of stories read

Picasaweb - how many times each photo was viewed, who has linked to it, and any subscribers

Finally webhistory - the amount of searches performed, and a concise list of sites embedded in the reports.

I would want to see report being able to be generated automatically on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.   The ability to customize reports by date or time period would also be great.   The ability to atomically email them to you at a preset time would be fantastic.

The last feature I would add is an open API so we could plugin new reports and send them to google to collect and have other programs able to fetch and manipulate the data on a client side.  I know I’m asking pie in the sky at this point.

Google literally has all this data on us and more.  They are preaching data portability and openness so why don’t they consolidate and show us more of the data they are holding.  I’m not asking for all of the secret sauce just what’s relevant to me.  Combing the original few things before I went into quickie mode though would be utterly fantastic and an excellent starting place.

]]> http://journeytogetpaid.com/2008/04/11/googles-next-service-should-be-google-reporting/feed/ http://journeytogetpaid.com/2008/04/10/does-data-portability-hurt-you-in-google/ http://journeytogetpaid.com/2008/04/10/does-data-portability-hurt-you-in-google/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:29:59 +0000 creeva http://journeytogetpaid.com/?p=12

Yesterday on my main blog I wrote a quip on my battle for the search term “creeva” in google and how many hits it brings back.  It flucuates up and down and was more of a joke then anything.   However I started thinking about it a little more deeply last night.

I’m a huge crossposter, I don’t deny it.  My friends can track me down and find me whereever.   I manage to get new readers by utilizing diffferent sources to store my data.   When I wrote a blog post on my main blog, it gets copied or notification goes to many other sites.   The path it takes is that I write an article when I click publish it sends out the article to my myspace, my live spaces account, my vox account, my tumblr account, my suprglu account, my facebook news, my old blogger page, my xanga account, my livejournal page, my multiply account, and a google group for back up (that one is private though).   On top of that livejournal also sends it on it’s way over to my dandelife account.  I’m also copying things over to www.creeva.net which is my by beta testing blog.

If I listen to a song that get’s scrobbled to my last.fm account, upload a picture to my flickr account, digg a story, favorite a video, share an RSS news item, write an article on a blog other then my main (like this article) or mark something down in all consuming; these all get pulled into my main blog, which at that point goes through the data dissemination process all over again.

This is data portability at it’s finast (at least for the content side of the equation) and I work it well.   Some people prefer to go to a single location and that’s fine, that is what I have a main blog for.   Get everything from everywhere all in one location.   Google loves the idea of everything in one place, it’s their whole mantra.   However you will get penalized in Google for having duplicate content.   So my google score will drop theoretically the more places I cross post to that it indexes.

So by disseminating my content to everywhere in the world Google will penalize me in it’s search ratings.   It seems my main blog still gets the most traffic and it’s hits don’t suffer.   So all and all I don’t truly mind.   However I’m sure that sometimes I do suffer when my vox account for example rises to the top instead of my main account.

How can Google truly and actively support data portability when it’s anti ethical to it’s search rankings?  I can understand that it’s an attempt to fight spammers and such, but we all end up hitting pure spam BS blogs all the time.  The crap floats and rises to the top while the rest of things drown in the data deluge.   I don’t think that google necessarily needs to adjust it’s algorithm but in the coming months or years it will need to take it into account.

I need to start going through the hassle of all the unique plugins on this blog to make sure I don’t have any of the issues I had with my main.

Real world expectations on click through advertising - Click Through Advertising - The Evil Truth

Other ways of getting advertisers are available - A Reader’s Interesting Strategy on Getting Online Advertisers

How to protect your Social Security Number from Online Advertisers - How To Never Give Advertisers your Social Security Number

What are we going to discuss next week? Stay tuned to find out.

So you have your own blog but it’s something such as creeva.blogspot.com or creeva.wordpress.com, Both of these are acceptable, but if you read my previous about brand management you’ll know that building your audience to your personal brand can help get you a larger following.

Do I need a domain name?

In all honesty I can’t fully answer that question for you. What I can do is give you some pointers on how to choose a domain that can be personal or directed towards your target audience. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before you register any domain name:

• What are you trying to do with your site? Is it a personal site? Is it a tech site? Is it a business site? Now none of these really have any bearing on if you’ll ever make money - or at least that is out side of the scope of this article.
• While some people are just trying to drive massive traffic to their site, what do you want to do? There are loads of spam blogs out there that just show ads and may get thousands of hits a day. I think this people have ethically sold out, but I’m not here to judge you so pay me no attention. You could register a name based of typos and drive traffic that way or come up with something unique that helps you stand out from the crowd. The more unique the site is the more cliquish and faithful your users may become, but this is at a sacrifice of larger traffic goals. This is one of the things you need to consider if your going to be driving traffic to your site. The name is part of the brand and can make or break some sites.
• Is it worth the cost to you? There are many benefits to owning a domain name. Essentially at under ten dollars a year it really is a cheap investment, you can host your website, have personalized e-mail, and build upon your brand name in ways that aren’t really possible with blogger or wordpress hosting your site without owning your own domain to redirect them to these sites. Over time I’ll be writing more articles on what you can do with your own domain name and choosing the correct hosting service

How do you choose a name that’s right for you?

The questions here are similar to those from above so I won’t rehash them. My suggestions is make it memorable so no omgihavefreestuff.com. Choose something that something something about you or at least your site. Your brand is something you’ll build. Do not choose anything too long, this makes it harder for people to remember your address and it will effect traffic from return users. The shorter the better.

I personally know the agony of choosing a domain name for a project. A couple weeks ago for a project I was working on with some others I spent a good 10 hours running domain names by other people. We had a few that could work and others they thought were great for personal blogs, in the end it’s still an ongoing discussion - and we’re looking how we are going to proceed with that project. Not all of my domains that I have purchased have taken this long. I settled in on journeytogetpaid.com in a matter of minutes and had it all set up with the blog running within an hour of conception. Your strategy and length of time it takes to decide on a domain name is only limited by your creativity and your ideas.

Who do I buy from and how much do I pay?

Like everything else this is a personal choice, but let’s look through what I look for. First and foremost I check out price. I would not pay more then $9.99 for a domain name in this day and age and most people look at that as too high of a price. With coupons and cheap registrars there is no reason you need to pay $9.99 a year. The prices I usually go for is between $6.99 and $7.99.

Normally I register all of my domains in one spot and this is with goDaddy.com and they’ve served me well. Some people have issues with goDaddy.com, namely there are stories of yanking a users registration at a drop of a hat if there is a complaint (spammers be warned your domain will be yanked for e-mail spamming from what I’ver heard). Because of this I decided to track down another registrar that is not goDaddy but also is offering domains for $6.95 (not a bad deal, huh). The second company is Blackbeltdomains.com. This should give you two choices to choose from at around the same price range. The latest goDaddy coupon code I’ve used “OYH3″ - this will get you $6.95 .com domains.

Hopefully I have given you something to think about now go ahead and grab yourself a domain.

UPDATE: Wanted to let everyone know I received an e-mail from the original “owner” of the “OYH3″ code.  To support this user and get his other coupon’s go to his page that contains all of his godaddy coupons.

Any of you that have researched and delved into the world of online advertising to any extent have learned that most of these companies require you to give them your social security number. You may wonder why you have to do this and the answer is quite simple, they report the expense of paying you to the IRS. The IRS at this point needs to know who to tax for the income. Any money you make is subject to federal tax laws whether the advertisers report the money to the IRS or not. How you handle your taxes and reported income is up to you but remember the tax benefits for your cost of doing business:

• Write off hosting fees
• Write off domain registration fees
• Possibly write off hardware (I need to look into this one)

What are your choices?

Now we’ve already stated that the advertisers need to tax you somehow and your normal tax ID is your social security number. What other options do you you have? Well lucky for US citizens there are at least two routes you can take, an EIN (Employer Identification Number) or a TIN (Tax Identification Number). A TIN from what I understand works identically as a social security number for purposes such as employment or money received. An EIN gives you business benefits. With an EIN you can open a business bank account and you can apply for a business license.

How do I get an EIN?

Thankfully the IRS has made it easier to obtain an EIN than it has in the past. You can apply online. The IRS has setup a website that allows you to request one in just a few minutes. You will need to give them your social security number, but then again they already have it. You will more then likely choose a sole proprietorship and under business activity choose and other and when they ask for a description type in blogging (that does feel good). You don’t have to be a blogger, but I’m pandering to my audience.

After going through a few screens that are all logical and self explanatory (if you have have questions feel free to email us and we’ll answer them to the best of our ability). At the end of the process you are given your EIN immediately and a PDF with your documentation. While you can retrieve your number at a later time I would suggest e-mailing yourself the PDF for future reference. You now have a legal tax number you can give advertisers without giving them your social security number.

Why do I want this again? Why shouldn’t I just give the advertisers my social security number?

The simplest answer is how do you know to trust them? This is about keeping your social security safe from identity theft. If the advertisers database is compromised your social security number could be released for any and all to use. If it’s a fly by night advertiser that may be offering huge rates - their true business may be collecting social security numbers. By keeping your blogging business separate from your personal finance record you can maintain an easier separation from your day job and your online business.

I hope this was useful for you and it helps insure your personal security

Be warned though - some sites are trying to charge you for the privilege of getting an EIN which is free to you for the taking.

For more information on the online EIN application process go here.

One of our reader’s (rs - or Tom as he’s known non-virtually) read and commented on the article I wrote yesterday about click through advertising. It seems rs is considering a run for a bit of the advertising dollar but has learned through my article that click through traffic is not all that it is cracked up to be. His site “thought socks” is one of the sites that, like my own personal blog, is witty and insightful and generally smart. This also means he may suffer from the lack of click through traffic that I also suffer. Smart techno-literate individuals click on ads less then other demographics of the general population. This doesn’t mean there isn’t hope.

Instead of getting disheartened and giving up (like I stated you shouldn’t do) rs devised a unique method to generate interest in advertising on his blog. He is giving away advertising space for free. Now you may ask if he is giving away the milk why would someone buy the cow? There are many reasons for this but he didn’t post his authoritative reasons I will speculate some logical guesses.

1 . Offering free advertising gives him a track record he will be able to show either the person taking advantage of the free space in the future or another possible contact and turn it it into what they they should expect going forward for impressions.

2. This will allow him to work on growing his readership instead of worrying about making money. This will allow him to becoming a brand that he can market off of later.

3. Getting the right advertisers will be a learning experience for him to get to know expectations on both sides of the advertising fence.

If he manages to make this work correctly he may make it to the point in advertising that most bloggers want - page impressions. Page impressions means you get a small amount of money (usually a few cents or fraction of a cent if your not large enough to command higher dollar) for each person that visits your site and loads the ad. In the next week or so I will be writing more about page impressions.  I for one wish rs the best of luck and if my graphic designer had gotten my banner and button ads finished I may have taken advantage of the offer.

I’m Going to Be Rich….Not!!

While all of us would hope that click through advertising would pay for our home on the beach, for most of us that doesn’t seem to be true. I’ve been using Adsense for about 4 months now and so far the whopping total I have made is $0.11. Now I hope that I don’t spend all of that in one place. Wait a second upon reading the terms of the Adsense account it only starts to pay out when you reach for first $100.00. I guess that this means my great grand kids may be able to buy a candy bar when inflation has caught up to the point of the pay out.

Does This Mean I Shouldn’t Use Click Through Programs?

No, it doesn’t mean that at all. This means you are going to have tailor your site to give you the greatest likelihood of getting click through traffic to work for you. At this moment I’m going to tell you that I don’t have the answers. This is honesty and hopefully we are working on this journey together. Over time we are going to investigate on this journeytogetpaid.com on how to make the money you so crave to have. Does craving money make you evil? No, though it shouldn’t be your single goal in life. I never personally thought of Scrooge McDuck as evil, did you?

Why Doesn’t it Work?

Well the honest answer is that sometimes you are too smart for your own good. Do you write pieces that bring in people at your same intelligence level? Do you write a lot about technology and innovation? These really are things that work against you, and more then likely you should move to a page impression based advertising system (I don’t have one that I can recommend to you yet). The reason that it doesn’t work is think about yourself, when was the last time you clicked on an ad and actually purchased something? If your like me probably never or very very low chance. This means if your readers are as intelligent and interested in things that you write about as you are - you are gathering people that are less likely to get ads.

What Can I do Now?

The quick answer is start a new blog with a new focus or re-purpose your existing blog. Instead of dealing with technology or personal interests you should pick topics with a more wide spread appeal. If it’s something you can write about coherently it is never a sell-out approach anymore then you doing the normal 9-5 job. It is providing a service. If you are uninteresting on topics such as mortgages, pet products, or the average income of a laden swallow in India; you won’t get a reader base. If you don’t have a reader base click through ads still won’t work for you.

So I would say your best bet is to write on something that can be monetized to a level you feel comfortable with interacting with people. There is a chance you could start a spam blog based on a typo - but the rewards can be very low. While you’ll hear Internet legends of the squatter that has made millions of dollars off one typo - this really isn’t true. Maybe once upon a time but write now people are fighting over every last penny available online. I think you should maintain and use click-through advertising from which ever company you find is the best fit for you. I can say that it’s not the magic bullet you are hoping for.

Now the first thing to know as a blogger that you are your brand.   Whatever you do positive or negative effects your brand in tremendous ways.   It also effects your SEO in a way also, but I’ll get to that towards the end.   You have to decide how you want yourself as a blogger to be perceived.    If you want a spam blog that may or may not generate yourself a ton of money please stop now because some of the things I’m going to explain is just going to out you quicker to the general population.

You as a blogger is the primary asset for your brand, that being said if you have a collaborative blog, that blog in itself is a brand name and the authors are their own brand names.   If you are insightful, engaging, humorous, or interesting you can gain an audience.   The audience you wish to reach depends on yourself.   The blog I’m going to use for example is my personal blog at creeva.com.     This blog is the core of my internet persona (ironically not really the core of my journey to getting paid but my core nonetheless).  Where ever I post across the blog-o-verse I cross post the article to my home blog.   This allows ease of backup and exposure to the few people that take interest in me.

For those that don’t care about the fluff or personal lamenting I have the on topic blogs I work on (journeytogetpaid.com) this immediately separates readers from the two brands I wish to confer on to them, the brand of myself as a blogger compared to the brand of one of the blogs that I write.  This allows for a more personal dynamic of engagement between yourself and your readers.   You should always be personal - but I’ll never get asked if my cat is feeling better at journeytogetpaid.com.

Honing into the fact that you are your own brand management (Scobel is king of self-brand management) you have to target your own peer group.  This includes allowing other methods for readers and friends to contact you.   This gives multiple levels of engagement where you still have some control over the boundaries.   I went from google telling me “did you mean cirev?” when I did a search for creeva - to the fact now that I have over 6k hits on that name.    Is that good?  Well my friends can find me through all the various services I use - or the can engage me at my home blog with aggregates the data from far and wide.

Let’s take this story I’m writing right now.  When this is published it will be published on journeytogetpaid.com and crossposted to journeytogetpaid.blogspot.com (google crawls itself first hence the blogspot mirror) and creeva.com.   You may think that is the end of i, but far from it.    At creeva.com I allow my friends to read me from whatever social network they use and wish to follow me on.   Here is a run down to what happens when this story is crossposted and published over at creeva.com.

Creeva.com crossposts to the following sites

My livejournal which in turn syncs with my dandelife account

My Vox

My MSN Spaces

My Old Blogspot Site

My Xanga Site

It also through RSS feeds goes to these sites:

Sends an alert to my twitter readers

Sends a  notification as a blog entry into my myspace blog

Cross posts into my facebook profile

Archives as a line in my old tumblr account that I don’t know what I’m going to do with

Archives to my old suprglu account that I used to use as my lifestream.

Theoretically before anyone reads this article it will be published 13 places.  This is also before the spammers get to it and repurpose it for their own means.   My wife says she is going to blame me when the internet crashes.  Behind the scenes there is even a bit more that goes on, but that really isn’t publicly accessible since it has nothing to do with branding.

Why do I do this?

Different people know me at different places, but my writing is all me and I wish to share that with all of them.    I’m not as bad as some.   I actually at one point crossposted every song I listen to, thankfully I’m more selective at what I crosspost at this time.   It’s more relevant to what is going on and family and friends can have different levels of engagement with m.

I also use many activity specific type sites like flickr and digg which I don’t cross post to but have a level of engagement with other users there.   But of course my profile links back to my main site.    Whenever I crosspost I also include links back to where he article was originally published at.   This allows readers to traceback and find the information at teh correct source.   I use no subterfuge or magic mirrors to hide what I’m doing.   It’s all plain as day.

Seeing this is my journey to get paid I’m sure your wondering how I can monetize all these sources?

In short - I can’t, but passing the message and advertising myself to those that show interest hopefully have them trace back to the original article.   If not I have methods of importing comments from these diverse locations into creeva.com.  So if you leave a comment on my facebook account or my flickr account it get pulled back into creeva.com.  This allows full engagement with my readers and what they have to say.

So all I have to do to be popular is push myself out everywhere at once?

No, if your not interesting and don’t have any friends now, propagating your information will not help you get anymore.  If your not clear on your intentions or your readers think your being shady it can back fire on you.   It can get you on the dreaded spammer list in people’s minds.     Yes I could theoretically start 2000 blogspot domains and crosspost to all of them, but I don’t.  I just maintain the links I already have in the communities that I already exist.  I’ll migrate the method in which I interact with a service by sourcing material from the one I primarily use, but I don’t abandon the community I left behind.

This of course in some ways hurts me from a monetary perspective - but my branding gets better and recognition improves.  You will always have to write something people wish to read if you want to gain a steady and growing following instead of single SEO tricks to get people to click links without giving them any substance (that’s cheating).   Work on your own writing and enhancing the communities around you, this is what gives you a following and brand loyalty.