Archive for May, 2008

There are countless “Make Money Online” blogs. Blogs attempting to make money by blogging, blogs trying to teach how to make money blogging, and blogs trying to make money online by teaching how to make money online. Many of the latter hadn’t made a cent off blogging before starting a blog on making money online.

Enough all ready!

Blogging is all about the content. You can have the coolest design ever, and some good monetization options in place, but if your content isn’t any good, you won’t be making any money. Repeat after me: Blogging is not about making money. Blogging is, first and foremost, about the content. Yes, if you have good content, and can build up your user base, you can make money. But it should not be your prime focus.

Shift your focus to producing interesting/funny/useful content, and building a following. Yes, you should put some thought to monetization, but don’t dwell on it. The dollar signs are an optional, pleasant side effect of blogging, not the important part. The content is the important part.

When you start a blog, pick a topic that you have a lot to say about; a topic that you can see yourself writing about for a long time into the foreseeable future. And please, do not write about “making money online!” Trust me, it’s not a good niche to get into. It’s overcrowded with John Chow and John Chow wannabes, not to mention it’s kind of ludicrous anyway. Blogging is about content, not making money, therefore it’s not a great topic to blog about.

Just remember: Blogging is all about the content. Focus on the content, and the money will follow.

Photo by Tracy O

• 150+ RSS Resources - Traffick did well more than one-up me.
• Why You Must be the First, in Google’s Search Results at Least! - The clickthrough rate varies that much…just between the first two spots in he results? Scary.
• Skribit - Find Out What Your Readers Want You to Write About
• Sun Changes Its Mind, MySQL Tools to Remain Open Source
• Toolbox CSS - “a collection of common styles that can be useful on any web project.” Some of the suggested classes are worth defining, though I think the author could have done a little more.
• To Cache or Not to Cache?
• 5 reasons I won’t be getting on the open id train - I’m not really a fan of OpenID either. The solution to having too many accounts? Let your browser remember passwords for you. Share a computer with other people? Make sure you’re making use of your OS’s user account features.
• Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done - Lifehacker presents a post on “Getting Blogging Done.” I agree that #9 is very useful. I use the Firefox extension, er, extensively. The Copy Link Text extension makes it really easy to put BlogBuzz together.
• Now More Than Ever: 50 More Excellent Blog Designs - Another Smashing collection of interesting blog designs.

Forget all about PageRank. Fill your posts with links to related posts, on your blog, and more importantly, on other blogs. Don’t hoard PageRank, and try to keep visitors on your site. Send them to other sites, and hope they come back. If you have a good blog, they will.

A little counterintuitive, isn’t it? You send your visitors away, in order to get more?

Yep. It works because, by linking to someone, you’re ending up on their proverbial radar. If they notice that you’ve linked to them, there’s a good chance they will read your post, and possibly link back. If everyone was stingy with their links, the web wouldn’t work very well, would it? You wouldn’t have traffic from people linking to your posts. As a reader, even, you would have a much harder time finding things, and would miss-out on posts that you would find useful. Without links, the web wouldn’t be the web.

But the New York Times doesn’t ever link to anyone!

No, they don’t. Most of the Dead-Tree Media (or Dinosaur Media) don’t really understand the web. They don’t really like it much either. They would prefer to hang onto their existing, failing, business model. Since they can’t do that very well, they try to “break the web,” and make it work the way they want. They hoard PageRank, and try to keep people on their site, where they’ll be bombarded with ads, and help to inflate their traffic stats. Oh, and sometimes they don’t like it when you link to them either…

Link, and you will get links. That’s how the blogosphere works.

You’ve probably seen the “universal sharing” icon Alex King put together for Share This. Unfortunately, it’s now owned by the people behind ShareThis.com, and has some slightly annoying terms attached to its use.

Alex King’s Share Icon is “now wholly owned and trademarked by ShareThis.com/Nextumi Inc.” That’s kind of against the overall idea, is it not? Look at the standardized RSS icon. It was developed by Mozilla, for the Firefox web browser, but it’s a open-source-style idea. Everyone uses it, and it represents RSS. The icon means “this is a RSS feed,” not “this icon is property of Mozilla, and we recommend that you use the linked feed with our web browser.” An icon like this should be fairly open. Branding should not be mixed with something like this.

The Open Share Icon Project’s goal is to get the ball rolling with a new, much more open, icon. Pictured above, the icon looks pretty good, and shares (pun unintended) the same green look of its predecessor. The creators say that the icon represents “one cupped hand passing ’something’ to another cupped
hand (as in ‘pass it on’ or ’sharing’), and at the same time works as an ‘eye’ reference (as in ‘look at this’).”

I’m glad that someone is making an effort to introduce a new Share Icon, and I think the Open Share Icon Project has done a great job with their icon. However, I have some advice for them: Use the OpenShareIcon.com domain you have (yes, I checked…), and set-up a nice, clean page to showcase the icon, along with a large, unmissable download button. Include a link to your Google Group, for news and discussion. I think it may help the spreading of the icon a bit.

Right from the start.

If you have ads on your site from the beginning, your readers aren’t going to complain when you add them in. (Though my advice to the whiners would be to read the article in their RSS aggregator.)

Unfortunately, when you’re starting out, there aren’t a lot of options for ads. You have the ubiquitous AdSense, then you have affiliate programs, and a sprinkling of smaller ad networks.

My advice: Use AdSense in the beginning, and see how well it works with your site. Use some affiliate programs lightly as well (for products you recommend, not just because it’s an affiliate program). Eventually, when your site gets to a reasonable level, transition from AdSense to direct-selling ads (e.g. 125×125 ads).

Most design galleries showcase interesting/well-designed/etc web designs. Elements of Design is not like them. Brought to you by the Smiley Cat Web Design Blog, Elements of Design focuses on individual elements of designs.

Some examples include:

• Search boxes
• Comments and Comment Forms
• Pull Quotes
• Pricing Tables
• Headline Typography

It’s an interesting idea, and a welcome source for inspiration. I’ve often wished there was a place to find inspiration when working on a small part of a larger design. I think I will find this useful in the future, provided I can remember the site’s name, as I tend to forget when I most need a site…

If you do much design, or if you just appreciate good design, the site is worth a look.

Check your blog’s statistics. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they mainly typing-in your blog’s URL, coming from search engine results pages (SERPs), or are they being referred to you from other sites?

Google Analytics puts an overview of this information on their dashboard, and offers more detailed data on a separate page.

The Traffic Sources chart on the Analytics Dashboard provides some valuable insight on your readers, and how they view your blog.

What do the numbers mean?

• Referring Sites, er, refers to how many unique visitors came from other sites. E.g. blogs linking to you, traffic from social bookmarking sites.
• Search Engines - the traffic coming from SERPs.
• Direct Traffic - People who manually typed your domain in.

Direct Traffic is mainly composed of the people who visit your site frequently. This includes RSS subscribers manually visiting your sites, as well as links clicked from desktop RSS aggregators.

Referring Sites means “pretty much anything coming from another domain.” This includes social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, links clicked from web-based RSS aggregators, and links from other blogs.

Optimally, you want to have a significant amount of direct traffic, signifying loyal readers, plenty of referrals, and some steady traffic from search engines. The ratios between the percentages depends on many factors, such as your niche. If there are a lot of blogs in your niche, you may have a lot of referrals. The same goes for if your site is popular among the StumbleUpon and Digg crowd. Smaller niches may have more traffic from search engines than referrals.

How are your blog’s traffic sources proportioned?

Web Resources Depot has released a free Admin Template for use in web apps. It’s a three-column design with a row of tabs, for navigation, along the top. With some modifications, it would work well for a web application, if you were developing one.

Personally, I would use the design during development, and swap it out with a unique theme when all the coding work is done. But if you’re trying to put together a web app, and you don’t have any design know-how, and don’t want to hire a designer, you could conceivably use this. I’d just recommend customizing it a bit, so it doesn’t look like you have the exact same template as someone else.

You can view a live demo of the template, and download it here.

• Get ready for an increase in splogs… Hackers managed to Break Google’s Blogger CAPTCHA
• Logo Design Process for Just Creative Design’s Award Winning Logo - Just Creative Design goes through the design process for their interesting JCD-Pencil logo.
• Alert: Possibly Related Posts Feature on WordPress.com Blogs - Yet another reason to host your blog on your own web space. Wordpress.com’s new “Possibly Related Posts” feature is a prime example.
• Speed Posting - the Aftermath of Answering 19 Twitter Questions in a Weekend
• Most Creative Blog Designs - Alec Rios presents Most Creative Blog Designs, a gallery of ten well-designed blogs.
• Websites you shouldn’t have missed in April 2008 - A Smashing Magazine-style “Best of the Month.”
• Rethinking Blog Comments: Much More Than Just A Quick Way to Get Web Traffic
• Free Developer Icon Sets - Outlaw Design Blog, trying to get back on their feet after a major data loss, has put out a large collection of icon sets.

It’s May 2008, and this month’s featured WordPress theme is Simple. A live demo is available.

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