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A fast way to increase advertising revenue for your blog

Osman S Borutecene — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:22:27 +0000

I choose the long and hard way to monetize my websites and blogs. This way consists of writing quality articles and establish a user base. This is a long term strategy. It’s benefit is it is like renting your home. You have to buy or built a house from scratch and then give it to rent. This way, you can have a decent income afterwards, without having to do too much to keep that income.

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.

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How To Keep It Together In A Web 2.0 World

Osman S Borutecene — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 21:57:57 +0000

Day by day, it’s getting more difficult to surf the net without losing your sanity. I don’t even mention the risk of getting blind between highly different color palettes.

Well, the trouble is that there are too much source of news out there. You want to stay updated and you don’t want to see bs at the same time. You have to eliminate and decrease your sources of news. Here are some tips to do just that.

Select a couple of technology evangelists and subscribe to their blog only. Keep the number of them at 10 max. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of Digg’s, del.icio.us’, slashdot’s frontpages and any sub sections that you feel it’s a must read for you.

The trick is that too many people blog about the same news and information but only a few people provide posts with valuable insight and credible information. You have to be selective.

Avoid getting distracted by news about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Myspace, and a couple more famous persons and web sites. You can be pretty much sure about that there is nothing new. If there is, you will always get informed by the blog posts of technology evangelsits that you have subscribed.

Don’t be deceived by top ten lists about best Photoshop tutorials, Youtube videos, hosting prices and alike. Those articles are usually made for making the front page on popular social bookmarking sites. If you will have the need, you can always make a search on those link sites and find them when you need them.

And finally, know that the web is for you and you are not here for the web. Web 2.0 is something that you will use. It is not there to use you.

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Robert Scoble Is One Clever Guy

Osman S Borutecene — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:53:28 +0000

Nowadays, I see posts about Robert Scoble and his blog and his job and his nearly everything here and there. These posts mostly talk about Scoble’s views on certain products that he writes up in his blog. Others are simply hate propaganda against Robert Scoble.

I don’t specially like or dislike Robert. I just think that he is a clever, special guy who likes to initiate discussions in a provocative fashion. His provocativeness is a must as a journalist. And yes, he is a journalist. He does interviews. He does it well, I think.

His provocative posts are generally about comparing two or more products or services. For instance, once he questioned whether Apple imitates Microsoft. There have been 230 comments under this post so far and he made people to come out and talk. Okay, I know that topics like Microsoft vs Anything can be quite intriguing at times but he has the ability to achieve more buzz than an ordinary Microsoft vs. Oranges and Apples kind of comparisons.

Another nice post to play with from Scoble was about why United States will remain dominant in tech. He claimed that United States will remain dominant in tech because Iran and some other countries mistreat their citizens. Robert Scoble knows very well that there are lots of countries on earth that are coming really close in competition on tech. I don’t think that his claim was sincere. I think he just knows how to make a buzz.

For a last example, I will mention his post about how Microsoft is gonna edge in on Google. I am sure that Robert is joking here completely.

Now, more important than all this is how and why people react to Robert Scoble. I feel disturbed by the hate propaganda that some bloggers carry out against him. I just don’t understand why they keep reading him if he discomforts them by his posts.

There must be something else, some other reason that some people hate Scoble and keep reading his posts. This isn’t just a love-to-hate situation.

My opinion is that those people don’t have the guts and the mindset to post like him. I think that is jealousy. Most people that blurbs about Robert Scoble blurb about him just because they think he gains and earns by something they cannot achieve. Those people cannot make something on their own, they feel needy most probably. Or at least, they cannot see the buzz he creates and they forgot that Robert Scoble is a journalist. One of his provocative posts was about comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X. He needs this to do his job. He needs to and must podcast about odd things sometimes. That happens all the time, all day long with a whole press and media.

Anyway, my suggestion to those suffering from the Scoblenvy: Go try and create your own buzz and content. You are free to add any interesting content to your blogs. Do it and try to make it better than Scoble, then come and blurb about why Scoble makes no sense.

By the way, among the ~~negative comments~~ blurbs about Scoble, the oscar has to go to Yuvi who is a 15 year old Geek wannabe from Chennai, India. He is a VB and C# guy, but is trying to expand his horizons. He is the best representative of people who like to blurb about Robert Scoble.

update: Another post from Robert Scoble that drive people crazy. Now it is iPhone. Well, another reason why I think that Robert Scoble has a playful cleverness. There are many people out there, important names who blog about the iPhone recently. They write down very decent things, evaluating iPhone and the future of Apple, swot of opponents etc. but none of them get the attention that Scoble is getting right now. This isn’t Scoble’s way, that’s just what we call “social psychology” among academic jargon.

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Saddam’s Execution and Visitors It Brings To Your Website

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 11:41:13 +0000

I see that Saddam’s Execution Video brought great traffic to many web sites that blogged or posted the video of execution from youtube and google video. Some of those blogs and web sites are about daily news, political stories, catch-all news stories etc. It is very natural for them to seek for the newest and brutal and most graphical video of Saddam’s Execution in Iraq.

However, there aren’t only such blogs and web sites that published this video. There have been many blogs and web sites where two videos of Saddam’s execution was published. Both the formal one and the one taken with a cell-phone’s camera.

Those posts and articles and the video brought a considerable amount of traffic to those blogs and web sites. Unfortunately, not all of this traffic is beneficial to web site owners.

Well, if you blog for the joy of blogging and you like to see the increase in traffic after you post something new, and if financial gain or public relations of yourself and/or your company isn’t your concern, then you are fine. Go for it. You have every right to publish anything that is not illegal.

But if you are a problogger or responsible from a web site that makes money from advertising, or an online shop, then you must be careful about how you provide your website with traffic, especially via content you publish.

Hundreds of thousands of web sites benefited from the huge traffic that Saddam’s execution video brought to their web sites. Most probably, the traffic wasn’t targeted. I have seen many blogs and web sites that published this video regardless of their blogs main topic. If you are after increasing your traffic because you earn money from targeted text links, then this has no benefit to you. Apart from not being beneficial, it would also harm your consistency on your content and thus may result in less targeted traffic than before.

Now, those blogs and web sites that experienced a huge traffic thanks to Saddam are going to experience a considerable amount of decrease in their traffic, if their topic isn’t executions of dictators.

Worse than publishing the video is publishing the video without any comments or your own thoughts or feelings on the subject because you have became the same with hundreds of thousands of other bloggers. No difference. The video can be found anywhere on the web.

By the way, the same holds valid for people that use common popular keywords for increasing their numbers of visitors. I have seen many blogs that put every post into categories or tags like Miss Nevada, Boise State, Google, Jobster, Zune, Edelman. Those are the most searched topics on Technorati. Or they put keywords like “Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Harry Potter, etc.” in their meta tags. I am sure they have gain tremendous amounts of traffic with those keywords. However it brings also a guarantee to failure when it comes to targeted traffic and efforts about earning money from targeted ads. Those blogs and web sites are eliminated by major search engines when somebody reports them or simply automatically as robots get more and more developed each year.

Targeted traffic is very important in terms of online businesses and Saddam’s execution is just an improvement to the world peace, not an improvement to your pocket.

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WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:45:29 +0000

WordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.

WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.

I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.

Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?

Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.

Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?

It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.

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Annoying Technorati Search Results

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:14:23 +0000

I like visiting Technorati and look for what is hot. However, especially in the last couple of weeks, some bloggers abuse Technorati search results by both tagging their every single post with the most searched 15 topics in Technorati and using these as keywords in their posts. That makes it really difficult if something you really need to search is on Technorati’s popular searches list.

I am sure that the Technorati team is working on that and I hope they come up with a solution soon. A feature such as being able to vote for search results would be interesting and help build a cleaner better Technorati search.

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