The most basic and relevant and working approach in my opinion is to think of famous (or not so famous) writers (online or offline) that you like. Why do you like them at all? Blogging is the same. You write something and some people eventually like it and want to continue to follow what you are writing. That’s all about it.

Therefore, sticking to a certain topic may make sense. I’ve always thought about Irvin Yalom as an example for this case. He has around 10 novels and many other text-books for clinical psychology. I am ready to read almost everything he is about to write because he writes very good, meaningful articles, novels, etc. For this example, a coherent context is a must because when I buy a new book (this is pretty much the same when you wait for your favorite blogger’s next post) of Yalom, I expect that book to be about psychology and then clinical psychology, and then psychotherapy, and even then about dynamic psychotherapy.

Another example where the topic is not that much important is Umberto Eco. I am waiting for his every next book. He is writing novels (I don’t take his other writing in this example but they are also worth reading, he is one of the best philosopher and semiologist alive!) in a fashion that I would love to read them. I would go and buy his books even if he has written and printed them on a toilet paper. It doesn’t make a difference for me.

People in the 21st century are following some blogs as if they are following a tv series. For some blogs, I can clearly say that they are the replacement (if not successor, but I am sure they are and continue to will be) for tv series. Dooce is an excellent example of that. Tens of thousands of people are waiting for her next post and they follow her like a tv series. Some people who know that I don’t like to watch tv may think that I am making fun of her by saying that. But I don’t. I appreciate that she achieved such a fan base.

If Dooce today had to move to blogspot, people wouldn’t stop following her. Imagine that she continues writing in some address like dooce-heather.blogspot.com . Do you think she will lose visitors? I don’t think so. Maybe that would be a criteria when she first started writing there but I am doubtful about that. If that would be true, then what about Zenhabits.com by Leo Babauta? He started his blog in blogspot and then moved to self-hosted wordpress.

What I want to tell you is to stop thinking about details like where to start. Thinking about this is like trying to prepare an unnecessary introduction for your sale, when people are already accepted to buy it. That is to say, if you believe that you have a talent which will help you write something menaingful that people would want to follow you, then begin right away.

That’s all about it. Content, content, content. And then some more content. Only then, social bookmarking, facebook, twitter, flickr or whatever would make sense to work on for distributing your content.

Similar Posts:

• The (not so) new address
• Google’s Power Readers
• Gift of Blogging
• If content is king, vertical content is god
• Got Blog?

I don’t think that those bans are related to Adnan Oktar, because he was suing in Istanbul courts, however this one was a decision of Diyarbakir court.

UPDATE: (see above update) There is still no information about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the bans in Turkey. He is bringing any content on the net to the court which supports Darwinism and mentions his name as a creationist. But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still a suspicion.

Blogger.com is censored in Turkey. I’ll keep with details posted later. The ban created a huge response in Turkish bloggers almost immediately. We just see this when we try to reach blogger.com or any blog on *.blogspot.com:

blogger.com censored in Turkey

image credits: Aylin Özdemir

Similar Posts:

• (update) Facebook probably banned in Turkey, details are sketchy
• Youtube censorship in Turkey doesn’t end for months now
• Turkey is in a race with China on Censoring the net
• Using Blogspot for pro-blogging
• The (not so) new address

Similar Posts:

None Found

“I never click on ads.”

It’s almost a badge of honor to say that. The subtext is, “I’m too smart/busy to waste my time doing that,” or perhaps, “I don’t want someone to sell my attention.”

But the real effect is that you’re starving great content.

I can say this because there are no ads here but,

If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.

Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet.

If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don’t have to buy anything (though it’s fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click.

You still get what you pay for, even if you pay with attention.

With all due respect, I should say that his post is meaningless. Far from the imagination of an ordinary Seth Godin post.

Edit: Seth Godin felt the need to explain himself further on the subject.

Similar Posts:

• How to choose a web designer in the 21st century?
• Myths, truth and opinion on pay per click (PPC, CPC) advertising
• How to transfer a single post or selected posts from one blog to another?
• Creating original content
• A fast way to increase advertising revenue for your blog

On the other hand, some may need to have their blog monetized instantly. This can be fast and bring you a relatively less income however this is a method anyway.

To achieve this, you have to mimic blogs like boing boing. This imeans, you will become a news blog. By news blog, I don’t necessarily mean a political one or a blog about finances, that’s not necessary. You have to have editorial skills and you have to pick posts and articles, images, videos, any interactive thing that may interest people and then post about them. By “about them” I mean that you will not copy and paste them. You will select a blog post, and blog about that post. You will select quotations from that post and use them in your own post and comment on them a little bit.

That’s what boing boing does and they are very successful. They are successful in their editorial skills. They choose wisely, they don’t choose randomly. And remember, there are around 30 posts on boing boing every day.

If you believe that you have this editorial skill and you can also make wise selections around the blogosphere and the web, you may quickly establish a user base and a little profit by doing that. I assume you have already made the optimization about where to put ads. I am not going to talk about this here because that’s another story.

By blogging about blogs, you are going to build backlinks and they will help you grow in your search engine visibility. It will be much better if you keep this meta-blogging in a vertical manner. For instance, you can only choose to blog about blog posts that are about parenting. Or only about cars or only about gadgets. Get it?

Since you are going to post about 30 times in a day, this would bring quick attention for search engines. Search engines love updates.

Other blogs that keep this strategy are: kottke.org, the blog of Matt Mullenweg (he is not doing this for monetization purposes but he is a good example for what I am trying to tell here anyway), and many other blogs about web 2.0, widgets, themes, etc.

There is one other advantage in this. Such meta-blogs do not exist for a variety of topics. There isn’t any famous one about recipes, flowers, art, etc. which means there are already niches out there.

A drawback of this strategy is that you have to put content everyday. Because what you do is not time-less. You will be about actuality. You cannot say after six months, “that much content is enough for me to post less from now on”. That’s not possible. You will see sudden drop in your traffic and thus in your advertising revenue.

I can’t suggest this strategy for myself but this doesn’t mean that it is not working. It does work, I have done it in the past and I was successful. However, for myself, I want to build an hotel now so that people come and go and pay their rent… endlessly.

Similar Posts:

• How to choose a hosting service for your blog and why?
• Gift of Blogging
• Top things you should know about selecting a blog topic
• How to choose a web designer in the 21st century?
• If content is king, vertical content is god

I won’t disclose sites from which I gather proxy information for obvious reasons but I have to tell you something interesting about two of the proxies I used.

One of them shows itself as it is from Liechtenstein. However while using it, when I surf to Google.com, I see an option below the search box and the anchor text is “Go to Google Bahrain”. The proxy is indeed in Bahrain.

Another strange thing is when I use proxies from Saudi Arabia, they work for many many long times. No downtime, and you can use it virtually forever. There is one Saudi Arabia proxy that I setup for a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago and it is still working.

People who work with proxies and surf the web are familiar to change them usually within a day or two because this is their life time. Therefore, it is strange to have a proxy working for weeks without downtime.

Moreover, on both proxies (both in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia), there is still censorship. You cannot watch videos on Youtube which are flagged as adult. You cannot look at pornographic material. Further than that, I observed that I cannot look at videos on Youtube which are about satanism.

On one hand, providing a working proxy with minimal or no downtime is a good service to the world. On the other hand, they still serve to the purpose of cruel conservatism. Yet, a non-stop working proxy is suspicious. I am not sure whether they collect user information there or not. Providing such a durable proxy requires investment and I wonder who is / are the people behind it.

Similar Posts:

• Youtube censorship in Turkey doesn’t end for months now
• YouTube Forbidden in Turkey by Court Order
• Turkey is in a race with China on Censoring the net
• (update) Facebook probably banned in Turkey, details are sketchy
• A fast way to increase advertising revenue for your blog

• Obama and McCain campaigns
• Mike Allen, POLITICO
• Chuck DeFeo, Townhall
• John Dickerson, Slate
• Mark Halperin, TIME
• Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
• Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek
• Patrick Ruffini, The Next Right

Similar Posts:

• Contraversial approaches to successful blogging
• Does Google Adsense need more total quality management?
• Wordpress’ default theme and template are a complete mess
• Seth Godin is completely missing the point with internet advertising
• How to transfer a single post or selected posts from one blog to another?

Blogs and websites that seem to be professional about money making and problogging are suggesting things that are not always true.

The most famous topic on that issue is publishing excel files of keywords that are believed to be highly profitable when clicked. This is a corrupt perspective and will not lead you to a profitable blog if you don’t use your mind instead of keyword lists.

For instance, network security solutions and auto insurance quotes are supposed to be two highly paid keywords when a related advertising is clicked.

However, you can never be sure about how a reader came to your blog or website and via which keywords is she searching something. Moreover, you can never be sure about whether the advertiser has selected those keywords while making his selections for that particular ad.

The one and the only successful aspect of keyword research (on your side as a publisher) could be choosing a topic and not choosing single keywords or phrases to blog about.

If you insist on establishing your blogs on keyword selection instead of topic selection you will almost always end up with frustration. You should also know that especially with Google, keyword advertising companies are highly sensitive towards playing with the system.

If you want to make money by blogging, all you have to do is to look after some profitable topic, not after profitable keywords. Then you should research on that topic and post meaningful articles (short or long, that’s not a big deal but it has to be meaningful and helpful to your readers). Then you have to be patient and observe what is happening in terms of traffic and clicks.

Similar Posts:

• If content is king, vertical content is god
• Myths, truth and opinion on pay per click (PPC, CPC) advertising
• What to expect from contextual advertising and how to go about it?
• Got Blog?
• Prologue

Personally, many people use whether web based e-mail like gmail, yahoo or hotmail as well as pop3 e-mail which is provided by a web hosting company or their ISP’s. In that case, now that we have a lot bigger webspace than we do in the past, it’s not a big deal to archive your e-mail. If you use pop3 e-mail than you can use e-mail archiving capabilities of your e-mail client like thunderbird or outlook or evolution etc.

If we speak on a corporate level, things may change a little bit. Archiving e-mail on a corporate level may require a certain e-mail archiving software as well as specific network security solutions.

In-house communication is something important to save. If you don’t use your own communication solutions instead of the conventional e-mail than you have to have a system something like gmail (with all the capabilities like archiving, labeling, spam protection, encryption, etc.). Gmail is providing companies with a variety of archiving and search solutions. I am sure that there are a lot of companies that provide similar services as well as network security.

When we sit on our foot at home, we usually don’t think about how big some online communication need how big spaces in server rooms but when you try to imagine the scale, you may start to think about it.

Similar Posts:

• How to choose a web designer in the 21st century?
• Top things you should know about selecting a blog topic
• WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage
• What to expect from contextual advertising and how to go about it?
• Creating original content

For the majority, having a blog and linking to other blogs from that blog is not part of the everyday life. Many people keeping a blog are people that are not technologically challenged. Most of this not technologically challenged people are very much interested in the web and other technologies.

So, naturally they dominate the blogosphere. They dominate the most important notion of the web: linking.

If you blog about electronic gadgets, the probability you will be linked from other blogs is much higher in comparison to the case that you blog about flowers or decoration or art or real estate.

There is no immediate solution or correction to this. This is a matter of literacy and illiteracy. The more people get used to use the web and blogs efficiently the more we will have an equally distributed and highlighted content about everything.

On the other hand, let me finish this post with another detail in favor of none-technology topics. They are rare. All of them are still a niche. Any none-technology subject is still an area that you can built a web-content providing business and thus you can have advertising profit easier than a technology related blog.

I would strongly suggest to have a blog about a topic which is out of the area of technology. This would really make money.

Similar Posts:

• Annoying Technorati Search Results
• What to expect from contextual advertising and how to go about it?
• Creating original content
• How To Keep It Together In A Web 2.0 World
• Do we expect comments or affection? How do comments affect your blogging?