Archive for the ‘Blogging Sense’ Category
by jim on June 27th, 2008
Today I decided to take a break. I’m out of the office, out of the house. Drove my car to the nearest mall to do the “mall rat” dance. I wanted to hit nature, but terrestrial rains said NO, wanted to brave it with an umbrella… but my sense got the better half of me. I’m in a mall… and “the dance” is no fun at all.
Now I find myself inside an internet access shop, typing away… surfing… then OMG (!) blogging! Today what kept me blogging was BOREDOM, the pure sense of the word. I didn’t want to go back to the office and I didn’t want to call it a day either.
BOREDOM led me to BLOGGING.
There are other reasons why I blog… but I never thought that BOREDOM would do it too. Come to think of it, I am getting all these brain drives and wadayaknow… it’s fueling my blogging drive.
Oh my… am I sick?
All I feel right now is the pure sense of sharing my thoughts… to you. A trusty mochaccino nearby, the YouTube tab on stand-by… and ooohhhh… bloggingpro.com
I’m not sick…. I’m A-L-I-V-E . :)
Categories: Blogging Sense
by David Peralty on September 21st, 2007
Make Easy Money With Google And AdSense is one of my favorite sites for reading about AdSense and Google projects in general, and with the Canadian and American dollar hitting parity, I really appreciated their latest post entitled “Google Should Switch To Euros“.
I have posted about the implications in a weak American currency before and so I have to admit, I would enjoy seeing Google switch their AdSense payouts to a currency that converts better to Canadian dollars, and is more stable.
Here is a bit from the article:
If you’re a US publisher then this probably doesn’t mean too much to you, but it definitely affects those of us on the outside, as Google’s US-denominated payments are worth less and less to us once they’re converted over. On the flipside, however, non-US advertisers should see their AdWords costs decrease because the conversion to US dollars for bid prices will be cheaper.
Now if only Google would switch to Euros as its base currency for advertising transactions. The exchange rate is much better…
Has the shift in the value of the American dollar effected you? Let me know in the comments below. I would love to hear some kindred spirits feeling the pressure due to the online economy being so cemented in the US greenback.
Categories: Advertising, Blogging Sense
by David Peralty on June 11th, 2007
So a friend of mine from Sweden made an interesting but valid point about the American dollar being weak: it is making him less money for the same amount of work. Thord Daniel Hedengren wrote on 901am about the problem in a post entitled “Get that dollar under control, please”
I lost equivalent of a grand (perhaps more when you read this, or less, depending on how the dollar moves compared to the Swedish crown) recently, just due to the dollar being down. That sucks.
The blogosphere is paying in dollars, but being a non-American blogger suddenly pays less. Will that change?
He is having the same issue that I am. I am Canadian, and our dollar is doing better and better against the U.S. dollar, and before I got my current job, I would have been happy to see our economy doing so well, but with my pay being in American dollars, the conversion to my local currency is creating a situation where I am getting less pay for the same amount of work.
There are some things that could be done, but they all mean charging more in the mind of an American employer for providing the same service. I could switch it so that I am paid in my currency, but as the U.S. dollar does worse, this will mean that their out of pocket expense to me would increase, and what if suddenly my local currency plummeted? Well, they’d be laughing to the bank.
While I haven’t lost as much in the conversion as Thord, I still notice the effect that the shifting exchange rates have. One month I can afford more groceries, and the next less.
It brings up some problems, that with my limited understanding of the global economy, I don’t have a good answer for. I just know that sometimes it pays better to be paid in the currency of another country, and other times in your own.
I also have to note that the U.S. dollar is still worth more than a Canadian one, so I am still bringing in more than if I set my rate in Canadian dollars at the same level as I am getting in American ones.
Categories: Blogging Sense
by David Peralty on May 25th, 2007
One of my favorite building alexking.org posts has to be the recent one on the monetization of his site. It goes into details on what has worked for him, and what hasn’t, something that will really help some bloggers, and maybe mislead others.
Monetization of a site really varies from site to site, but it is always interesting to see what successes others are having. Here is a bit from Alex’s post:
While I may not like the way it looks, “in your face” advertising definitely seems to work much better than tucking the ads away in a sidebar. Putting the ads at the top of the page seems to work a little better than in a sidebar as well, but I don’t like the way it pushes the content down.
However, this is my personal web site, so I can choose to keep the ads somewhat out of the way instead of trying to squeeze every dime I can out of the site.
I also recently turned down sponsored posts and an opportunity to put a flash banner ad on my home page. Sure it probably would have made a few bucks, but I felt it would really detract from the overall site experience. There’s definitely a “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” side of how you choose to implement advertising on your site.
This is something that all the Bloggy Network sites have had to deal with as we continue to make producing content our full time jobs. We have to balance our needs to pay our bills, without going too overboard on advertising, and sometimes it has to be a bit “in your face” but we try very hard to blend, and stay away from certain types of ads.
Check out Alex’s full post for more details on the things he has tried. A great article.
Categories: Advertising, Blogging Sense
by David Peralty on February 20th, 2007
Aaron Brazell has posted about his attempted Technosailor sale. He didn’t end up selling his blog, but he learned many valuable lessons worth passing on.
Here are a few:
- Perceived value is in the eye of the beholder. More specifically, no one values any site more than the owner. This is natural as the owner puts “blood, sweat and tears” into a site and sees value that maybe is not there. Do not think that depth of archives necessarily translates to value.
- Private is always better than public. Maybe my biggest mistake in this process was posting the auction at SitePoint. I recieved derision and ridicule by onlookers not interested in bidding, but interested in making sure everyone else knew how they felt. This was numerous people and it probably contributed to the anger mentioned in bullet point 3. The private discussions held with two particular parties, however, was quite good and open and honest. Though the sale did not develop as I had hoped, I definitely have a respect for the parties and would be interested in doing business in the future.
- Value is found in the blogger and this was an eye opener to me. I expected to sell Technosailor and be happy, but the interested parties were more interested in me. Though I was flattered, sometimes business gets in the way of business and no one wins.
Check out Technosailor for the rest.
Categories: Advertising, Blogging Sense
by David Peralty on December 19th, 2006
Over on the new Workboxers, David Krug has posted his system for making money off of blogs and websites.
He mainly flips them for a profit, which isn’t how I like to see people making money online, but is a reality of the business that sometimes the only way to make any money is in the sale of a site.
Here’s the Readers Digest Condense Method On How I make money online:
- Buy solid domains for my content.
- Avoid saturated marketplaces.
- Develop around 75-100 Articles.
- Build Links.
- Monetize.
- Build Income.
- Sell for 12x Income.
It is an interesting way to go, and again not something I recommend, but it is always interesting to see different points of view.
Categories: Blogging Sense
by J. Angelo Racoma on November 20th, 2006
A survey by conducted by online advertisement outfit DoubleClick has came up with 30% of the respondents clicking on banner advertisements, but a whopping 60% don’t click, but instead visit the advertiser’s website much later by directly entering the URL.
The finding suggests that consumers prefer to reach sites on their own, rather than by linking through advertisements. “People are engaged in the content they’re looking at the time that they’re exposed to the ad, and they don’t want to navigate off the page,” said Rick Bruner, DoubleClick’s director of research.
The study specifically refers banner advertisements, and not text ads, though. I would be interested in learning whether this trend also extends to text ads, particularly those that display adverts according to the context of the site content. If so, then publishers had better look for other payout schemes aside from pay-per-click, or at least sign up with systems that let users monetize site traffic based on impressions.
[via NY Times]
Categories: Blogging News, Blogging Sense
by David Peralty on November 17th, 2006
Some people were annoyed that my recent post was about the types of payment for posting, as well as a general overview of what paying for posting is like but not the exact values.
There were two reasons I left amounts out of the post, and they are because I’d receive probably many more negative comments by including the values, which even with the research I have done, and my own experiences would still be relatively arbitrary, and because I did not want to set a presedence.
But if that is what the public wants, that is what the public shall get. This post will be the second part to my previous post, and only talk about dollars and cents.
Salary
When paying a blogger salary, you are looking at either part time or full time most likely. For a full time salary, you should be paying them between $1200 and $1500 (USD) to start. Remembering that the person on the other end will have to pay taxes on this amount. This amount should also raise with experience and as the sites grow. Expect to pay a blogger with a year or more of experience around $1750 and up. Bloggers with higher credibility or even more experience deserve more, and could be making from reports that I have heard upwards of $3000 to $4000 a month.
If they are part time, you could probably cut all these values in half. Though it really depends on how much of a block of time per day or per week you want from the writer. I have one writer working for me for eight hours a month. I currently pay them $150 for that time. That comes out to be a nice $18.75 an hour. This is much higher than most blogs pay as most seem to top out around $10-$12 an hour, and an average starting wage seems to be around $6-$8 an hour.
I expect a lot when it comes to those eight hours though. With all of the posts being original content, with images, and so far, around half have been promoted to the front page of at least one social network, with a few being on the front page of more than one.
Per Post
Everywhere I look, per post rates vary the most. It really depends on what content the site wants the writer to deliver, and on what niche. I have seen rates as low as $2 per post, to upwards of $10 per post. The hardest thing to pin down for the writer is how many posts can you do in an hour?
If the type of posts they want are short, and you are highly knowledgeable about the subject, you might be able to do four or five posts an hour. So at $2 or $3 a post, that comes out to $8 to $15 an hour. If you are much slower at posting, and can only do around two an hour, then you will only be bringing in around $4 to $6 an hour.
This is something for both the blog owner and operator to decide as well as the blogger. Reaching a mutually beneficial deal can be very difficult.
On one of my blogs I pay $4 (US) per post, but I expect a little more from that writer, and knowing he can only produce around two of the posts I want an hour, he averages around $8 an hour. Who has the better deal?
Base Plus Percentage of Ads
Popularized by networks like b5media, getting paid via advertisement rates or base pay plus advertisement rates seems to be another popular method of determining a bloggers pay. Giving a blogger 100% of the first $100 of advertisement revenue, plus something like 60% or 70% of each dollar above that is a way to keep them striving for more, while being able to not go in debt paying the writer and later filling the publishers pocket a bit.
The problem can be, though, that you are writing six or more posts a week for half a year before you start seeing more than $100 a month for your work. Spending all that time and energy can be draining, but really there is no upper limit. If the blog you write on makes five hundred dollars in advertisement revenue, you can expect to bring home a good $380 of that, while the network gets $120 to continue promoting the site, paying a designer to make the blog look nice, or expand the features and blogs on the network which can in turn push more traffic to your blog and help raise advertisement income even further.
Some bloggers don’t think this is really fair, much of their work and effort is not seeing a decent turnaround for quite some time, but I have to say that if they went and did it on their own, it would take around three or five times longer most likely to see that $380 a month coming in.
Per Word
When doing a per word cost estimate, it really depends on the writer. Writers from traditional media think that they deserve five, ten or even twenty cents per word, but blogs are not newspapers or magazines. The readership, advertising, and other factors are not the same as print.
I would say that five cents per word is probably around the upper end for posting online, at least for starting. That would make a two hundred and fifty word article worth $12.50. You’d probably be more likely to see around three cents per word starting though for online publications.
Per Hour
This is pretty much like salary. You figure out what the blogger is worth, starting at around $6 to $7 an hour, and go up from there based on experience, and the amount of hours you are going to need on the site, and what kind of quality and time you want put into your posts.
I would say that many bloggers that I know are probably averaging between $10 and $15 per hour on their work, with some shooting up to the $25 an hour range when they are highly experienced, and they produce front page of Digg worthy stories every time they hit publish.
Really though, I think it comes down to what I said in my previous post.
Really, it all comes down to finding a passionate blogger that won’t break the bank, or run the site into the ground.
Don’t forget that bloggers will have to deduct around one third of what they are getting paid to pay taxes. So try to give them a bit more than minimum wage if possible. I’d hate to see bloggers living under the poverty line, just because of the lower end figures I have posted here.
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips
by J. Angelo Racoma on November 9th, 2006
If you’re monetizing your blog or blog network using AdSense, it might be a good idea to check whether you’re getting low-paying clicks from made-for-AdSense (MFA) sites. I came across a post on johnchow.com that explains how you lose and MFA sites win from their advertising cheap on your sites. I used to think that the competitive ad filter makes you earn less because you block out potentially high-paying ads. But it turns out to be the other way around–you actually get a lot of low-paying ads these days because of MFAs or splogs.
The purpose of the Competitive Ad Filter is to enable you to block specific ads, such as competitor’s ads, from appearing on your pages. Google allows you to enter up to 200 URLs. Most webmasters don’t block out any sites because they’re not an AdWords advertisers and therefore feel they have no competition. However, by not taking advantage of the Competitive Ad Filter you’re losing money to MFA sites and Arbitragers.
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Traffic to MFA sites are generated by advertising from Google AdSense and other PPC services. These sites offer a really low CPC rate so they can get the traffic as cheap as possible. If you’ve ever checked your AdSense account and see some 1 to 3 cent clicks, chances are it’s from a MFA site.
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A user clicks on an ad expecting to find information, not more ads. The funny thing is, Google can easily put a stop to this but they won’t because they make huge money from it – whether the click comes from your site or the MFA site, Google profits. Therefore, they have no incentive to shut this down.
What’s interesting to note is that from what I’ve read, Google does not seem to be acting on complaints about these MFA sites. Of course, they do earn from the AdWords and AdSense transactions on these sites, too. It’s quite shady, if you ask me. So what’s left for honest bloggers like us to do? The AdSense competitive ad filter is one good start.
A much easier way to block MFA sites and low paying CPC sites is the use the Ads Black List. This site will generate a list of 50 MFA sites for you to filter. If you become a member, the generated list increases to 200 – the current limit of the Google Competitive Ad Filter.
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By using the Competitive Ad Filter to block out the major MFA Arbitragers, you should see a nice increase in your Google earnings. If enough sites do this, it could force the MFA sites to increase their bids, or go under. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the Internet reads this blog, so don’t expect these MFA sites to disappear.
John even goes to share 200 URLs that Ads Blacklist has generated for him. But it’s probably best if you generate the blacklist based on your site’s URL, so the system can tailor-fit the sites to block based on your site’s keywords, and hence likely to actually appear on your site.
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tools
by J. Angelo Racoma on November 8th, 2006
“Is blogging kept alive by office-bound shirkers?” Jeremy Wagstaff asks.
Computing based on a single blog post (not enough time to do a survey for more, I guess; but the post had 250+ comments, which is enough for some statistical analysis), Jeremy comes up with an estimate of the times of the day people have made their comments. And he infers that people usually leave comments during work hours.
Allowing for time zones, and based on precisely one blog entry, I’d say the latter. Commenters generally seem to be doing it from work.
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This is what it looks like, starting at midnight:
0-8 6.6%
8-12 20.3%
12-2 16.2%
2-6 39.0%
6-10 7.5%
10-12 10.4%
Based on this very limited example (where comments — as usual — deteriorate into a slanging match between a few individuals) it’s clear that most commenting is done on work time, with the Post-Prandial Surf the most popular period. Despite the generous two-hour lunch window offered in the survey, fewer people made comments during that period than during the pre-lunch morning period, suggesting lunch time is too important to waste on reading blogs. And even if you only take the 8-12 and 2-6 periods as worktime, that still accounts for nearly two thirds of the comments. I’d say, based on this, the workplace seems to be the preferred blog-reading/commenting locale.
I’d be interested in seeing a larger-scale study of whether bloggers and blog comment-posters are, indeed working on company time. Are bloggers shirking on their employers?
Of course, for those of us who blog as part of our jobs or businesses, this would mean a good thing, won’t it?
Do you blog from work?
I wanted to setup an informal, online poll here, but our (blogflux) polling system is currently unavailable. I’d appreciate hearing from you on the comment threads if you do blog while at work. Then I’ll update this post with a poll when the service is up. Don’t worry, we won’t tell your boss!
Update: Here’s the poll!
Note that by “blogging from work,” I also mean commenting on blogs from work–sorry ’bout that.
Categories: Blogging Sense
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