Flogger Friday
This is the first of my Flogger Friday posts.
Let’s face it, everyone has to let off steam at sometime. A ProFlogger is no different; after a hard week flogging away at the keyboard, I like nothing more then unwinding with friends. I unwind in many different ways from mountain biking, to partying. Flogger Friday is the place where I will post what I am doing for the weekend, or what you will be doing, or did.. ;-), depending on which is the most interesting. Let’s prove that Floggers are people too.
Flogger Friday is the day when everyone starts preparing for the weekend. Even Flogger’s have lives, so Flogger Friday is going to be the place for general ramblings. If you are doing something fun, exciting, crazy, or even boring, I want to hear about it.
The comments or emails I find the most interesting will be written up in the Flogger Friday post. I may even create a Friday Flogger Hall Of Fame so that people can see the biggest Floggers. If you have photos or videos to back it up, even better, I want to see them and so does everyone else. This is your chance to become a famous Flogger. so get to it.
One advantage I have is being in Australia, this means that my Flogger Friday occurs before most other people. So to kick things off, for my contribution to the first Flogger Friday, I”ll tell you what I am doing this weekend.
This weekend the ProFlogger is going to a Surfgirl Ball. Living in the tropics, surf, sand, sun and bikini babes form a large part of daily life; yeah I know it is tough, but someone has to live it. Anyway, this Saturday the annual Miss Surfgirl Ball is on. This basically means that everyone gets dressed up, tanked up and ogles all the bikini clad babes on stage and dances the night away. Of course, being the Snag that I am, I won’t be doing any of that. Yeah right.
After the ball, my group is meant to be going onto a nightclub and meeting up with some other friends who are coming out after a birthday party, so if that happens it could be a very big night.
I am taking a camera with me for the night, so if there is enough interest in the comments, I’ll be doing a follow up post with pictures of the night. I hope to post this sometime on Saturday, although this is totally dependent on how hammered I get on Friday. If the night ventures too long into the next day, I may need a certain amount of recovery time.
I shaped up pretty well after the last ball. I woke early after a couple of hours sleep, before going downhill a little bit. This did not last too long, and I recovered reasonably quickly, coming off life support around 11:30am on Sunday morning. I was breathing unassisted by mid afternoon. My mates didn’t shape up quite so well.
Anyway, I look forward to your comments / emails and hope that we can make Flogger Friday the best day of the week.
Also if you want to be a sponsor of Flogger Friday, get in touch with me at ProFlogger.com, it would be good to offer prizes to the Web’s biggest Flogger.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Online Advertising Explained
In order to advance from Floggerdom to full blown ProFlogger, you need to earn some money, but maybe you are still struggling to wade through all the terms used to describe the various ways of making money online from advertising. Here, I’ll explain the things you need to know to get you on your way. Note this only relates to online terms.
Common Online Advertising Terms
You have probably seen these terms and TLA’s mentioned all over the place, but you may not know what they mean. What can make it even more confusing is that some of the terms in the list are used interchangeably. I’ll list them in alphabetical oder and give a simple explanation to clarify them for you.
- Affiliate and affiliate marketing- An affiliate essentially enters into a contract with a supplier to promote a product or service. Links on your site (the affiliate) direct users to a sales promotion or product page of the company. Affiliates earn money either by click-throughs, leads, or sales generated by their promotional efforts.
- Click through - Clicking an advertisement to reach an advertiser’s web site.
- Conversion rate - This is the percentage of actions per number of visitors to a web site. Actions can include sales, registrations, subscriptions or downloads.
- CPA - Cost per action. Payment is based solely on qualifying actions. This means that you only get paid when a specified action is completed, such as a sale, registration, etc.
- CPC - Cost per click through. The measurement of cost on a per click basis.
- CPM - Cost per thousand impressions. So if you charge a CPM rate of $10 for advertising on your site, that means for every 1,000 impressions your site receives, you earn $10. If your site gets 10,000 impressions, you earn $100.
- CTR - Click through rate. This is the average number of click throughs per hundred impressions.
- Impressions - The number of times an ad is seen by your vistors.
- PPC - Pay per click. Similar to CPC, the advertiser pays the publisher for qualifying clicks.
- PPI - Pay per impression. Similar to CPM, you earn money based on the number of times the ad appears on your site.
- PPL - Pay per lead. You earn money based upon the number of leads generated from ads on your site.
- PPS - Pay per sale. As it suggests, you get paid for sales generated by ads on your site.
These terms are relatively easy to understand once they are laid out for you like this. The question is, which one works the best?
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Blogging Zoom Latest Fad Or Genuine Traffic Generator
It seems every month there is a new gimmick to give your blog massive growth. This month it comes in the form of Blogging Zoom. Will it be the nirvana of traffic growth for your blog, or just another flash in the pan?
What Is Blogging Zoom?
Blogging Zoom is basically a Digg for bloggers. I’ll let them tell you:
“Blogging Zoom is a place where bloggers can share content that they and other bloggers have written. Blogging Zoom is the perfect place to go for people that are tired of the mainstream media and content. The users of Blogging Zoom determine which content is valuable and which content isn’t. ‘Zooming’ or voting positively for a post or article will give it more exposure and with enough Zooms, your content will hit the front page to be showcased to the masses.”
Blogging Zoom is built upon the Pligg platform (something I have experience with from it’s very early days). Now without going through the code of the site, there doesn’t appear to be any extra functionality built into the site. It looks as though it is using the same basic codebase as the one you can download yourself from Pligg.
What Makes It Different?
The developers, Courtney Tuttle and Vic Franqui, claim that the advantages of their site over the countless others out there are:
- As a blogger, you are encouraged to submit your own content.
- Only blogs can be submitted.
- They will use their SEO skills to expose the submitted sites to the search engines. I am not exactly sure how this is going to work, but will wait and see.
- They will ban spam blogs from the service. All I can say is good luck with that.
In a post on Courtney’s blog, the title says “Blogging Zoom - The Blogger’s Coup Against The Mainstream Media Monsters
“. This basically means Google. Now I am all for reducing the power of this behemoth, but I can’t see how this will be achieved by BloggingZoom. I mean, if it really became an issue, Google has unlimited means at its disposal for negating the service.
As it appears pretty much an out of the box Pligg system, there are things that can be improved, but I would expect that to happen once the Courtney and Vic spend more time on it.
As you can see in the image below, Blogging Zoom has seen some massive growth since launch date. Whether this is maintained will be determined on how successful it is at driving traffic to the blogs. I wish them luck and as a further test of the service, I let you know how much traffic this post generates.
Update: Vic commented that they are not going after Google, but rather the big media players such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox and the like. Apparently they love Google… 
He also pointed out that they have made changes to the underlying codebase and that more are on the way. So stay tuned for an update.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
If A Blogger Blogs In The Forest Will Anyone Hear?
OK, strange title I know, but what it refers to is blogging in isolation and I don’t mean locking yourself away and being a hermit.
What I am talking about here is what many bloggers do. They blog away, writing content with the hope that eventually someone will find it and suddenly all of their great writing will bring recognition and their pockets will bulge with wads of cash.
Well you could try this and if you are really good, it may eventually pay off; the problem is though that you are more likely to get sick of it a long time before then and either give it away completely or just lose interest and reduce your posting frequency. Either way, you have put in a lot of effort for minimal reward.
Get Yourself Noticed
If you want to make the big bucks, you need to get yourself out there. Now this doesn’t mean going up to total strangers in the street and asking them to be your friend, that is just creepy. And it doesn’t mean that you take up a hobby like stalking. What you need to do is start to participate in the conversations on other blogs in your niche.
This involves linking to posts on other blogs as well as commenting on their posts. There are a couple of provisos here though.
- Do not spam, that will do far more damage then good
- Do not post rubbish, if you cannot add to the conversation, do not post
- Do not flame, that will not win you too many friends
Do not try simply cold emailing another blogger if you do not know them or have not participated in their posts. Most people, especially ProFloggers get way too much email as it is and yours can simply get lost in the swarm. Of course, many will simply ignore you as they do not reply to cold calling emails. However, if you have been linking to them and participating in the comments on their blogs, you will start to become known, which will make them more inclined to respond to you when you do email them.
The other advantage of all of this is that you will not simply be noticed by the blogger themselves, but also by their readers, which is another reason for making your posts and comments meaningful. If you want others to take notice, you have to provide quality and give them a reason to want to check you out.
So, stop blogging in isolation and start making a name for yourself.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Inspirational 14 Year Old Blogger
If you are looking for a bit of inspiration with your blogging, then you may like this story.
Carlo Ocab is a 14 year old blogger from the Philippines. Carlo has a great post on how he managed to get to the front page of google and beat bigger players like Bidvertiser with 3,000,000 backlinks. Not a bad effort. Carlo explains his 7 Golden SEO tricks that helped him achieve this. I won’t rehash them here, but will give you a quick overview. The rules are pretty standard SEO, but Carlo presents them in a pretty simple fashion, so you can easily get your head around it.
He uses a h1 tag for his keywords. He tries to limit each page to just a single h1 tag and uses other sizes for the remainder of his headings. He goes on to detail domain canonicalization (don’t know what it is? Basically if you site is available with url’ such as www.yourdomain.com as well as yourdomain.com. you need to ensure that it redirects to just the one domain.). Various SEO tools will highlight this for you.
Something you may find of useful is an example of a robots.txt file for preventing google indexing duplicate content. Google really hates duplicate content, so this is worth taking note of.
Carlo has other tips in the post, including his last one, just have a go. Head on over and see what you can learn.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Mad Web-hosting Special
As you can see in the header at the top of this page, my Web-host has gone mad with Thanksgiving spirit and is offering a great hosting package. If you re looking at getting your first hosted site, or looking for a better host, I can recommend this host.
The AN Hosting “One Size Fits All” Plan
Take a look at what you get.
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Host 999 domains on one account (up from 20 domains)
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Free website builder
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All this for only $4.95/mo with no setup fee!
You have to be quick, as this offer is available only until midnight Thanksgiving day.
Remember, this offer is only good until midnight, November 22nd so it’s for a LIMITED TIME ONLY, click here to grab you package now. This offer is better than everything else out there and more reason why AN Hosting is the best web host around.
I have been using this host for several years now and have found them to be very reliable with excellent support. Stop being a flogger and move up to a host that gives you more.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
BlogRush Rejection
Waiting for me in my email this morning was my rejection from BlogRush.
“This message is to inform you that
we have carefully reviewed your blog:
ProFlogger
http://www.proflogger.com”
“And your blog did not meet the
strict BlogRush quality criteria.”
“Reason Your Blog Wasn’t Approved:
Not Enough Posts”
“Therefore, your blog has not
been approved for use in our
network.”
“Please do not take this decision
personally. We have decided to
only approve the highest quality
blogs for our network.”
I won’t, the site is only a couple of days old, so there aren’t a lot of posts on here yet.
It will be good to see if, once the site has more content if they will let a flogger in their network then. I am sure there are other floggers already using BlogRush, so one more flogger couldn’t hurt.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
The Beauty Of Blogging
One of the really great things about blogging and making money online is that there are virtually no impediments to beginning. This is completely different to starting a business in the offline World.
Something that I think affects many people looking at starting an offline businesses is fear. Fear can be one of the most damaging elements to anyone attaining success and reaching their full potential.
We are all familiar with fear in one form or another, but the fear I am referring to here does not generally permeate to the same extent as the fear you experience say if you are the one having to pick up the soap from the shower floor in San Quentin.
The fear I am referring to works far more insidiously. It begins differently, and works itself up until it prevents you attaining the things you desire.
In the offline World this fear begins with a little voice I’ll call ‘what if’.
- What if I lose my job?
- What if the business is not successful?
- What if interest rates go up?
- What if something happens and I need to put more money into it.
In the online World though, and especially as far as blogging goes, you don’t really have any of these problems. You can begin with basically no monetary outlay, there are essentially few risks and therefore fear is not really an issue. Even if you get sick of it, you can simply walk away, something that is pretty hard to do with an offline business.
Beauty of Blogging
Here is a short list on the beauty of blogging.
- You get to pick your own hours
- You choose what to write about
- You can make money doing something that you like
- Startup costs are very low
- Ongoing costs can be quite reasonable
- You can express your creative side
- It can lead to other opportunities
The other good thing is that you can meet some interesting people and form good friendships, not just with fellow bloggers, but with your readers also. Although to date I haven’t made any new friends through this blog; mind you, it has only been live for one day.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Paris Hilton - Celeb 2.0 What She Can Teach You About Marketing
I have to start this post by saying that I am not a Paris Hilton fan. I actually think she epitomizes how vacuous celebrity can be, but that is another topic for another blog.
What Paris Hilton has shown is that it is possible to build a very successful brand and make a lot of money without any content or talent; think of it as Celeb 2.0.
How Did Paris Get Her Big Break?
She used a common technique, she created a controversy when copies of her own user generated sex video hot the Internet. This is quite a lot to suggest that this was not the work of some evil ex-boyfriend, but rather a carefully orchestrated plan. Either way, a controversy was created and Paris and her publicist built upon it to create the brand.
A similar technique (without the sex tape aspect) has been employed by many successful blogs today, with quite a few now at the top of their respective niche.
Content
The Paris brand is similar in many ways to several of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies. If you look at the top Web 2.0 sites you will see that the success and popularity of many of them is built upon the content created by others; think Digg.com, Myspace.com, etc. Paris herself has tried her hand at other things, pop career, movie career, etc. without any of them taking off. Sure she has the Simple Life, but that came afterwards, the brand was already built by that stage.
Attention
In the blogosphere, if you don’t have attention, your chances of garnering significant traffic and higher returns for ad revenue is greatly reduced. The clever thing about the Paris brand is that it does not restrict itself to facts to garner attention. A lot of the Paris myth is fabricated, but it creates attention. Paris built her entire brand around creating attention.
Now attention by itself it of little value unless you do something with it.
Affiliate Marketing
So what exactly does Paris do and what does it mean for you as a blogger? What Paris does very well and what she is paid massive amounts of money for is exactly what many of the most successful bloggers do. She heavily promotes products. Think of the Web’s top earning bloggers and affiliate marketers and you will see that they do the same. They use their attention and talk about others. Just like Paris, the good ones do this without people even realising it.
So airhead or not, her ability to build a brand and market herself, thus creating attention and a revenue stream is quite exceptional and something that is worth taking note of.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
Top Bloggers Blow Off Blog World Expo
There is a bit of flack flying around after Blog World Expo, with a couple of very notables not attending.
Apparently there was an advertised session titled The Cult of Blogging which was to be presented by Leo LaPorte, and ‘A’ listers Om Malik & Michael Arrington from TechCrunch. This session was running a little late in starting, as Leo had run over time in his keynote. When Leo made it to the stage he made the following announcement:
“This was supposed to be a session with A-Listers talking about the cult of blogging. Om Malik has hurt his back and won’t be able to join me.â€
“Michael Arrington forgot to come.â€
So Om has a bad back, fair enough I guess, but Mike having forgot, that doesn’t really wash.
For Mike’s part, he totally denies that he ever agreed to attend and says that the fallout will prevent him from speaking at conferences again, except for one or two for friends next year. He also does not appear to be real impressed with Leo for saying that he forgot, or blognation for posting their story. For Leo’s part, if he was up for the session and at the last minute was told that Mike would not be attending for an unknown reason, and that he would have to hold the can, you can imagine that he would be a little pissed about the whole thing.
The conference founders are still claiming that Mike agreed to come, so it is a little difficult to really form a judgement unless we actually see the communication between the parties and I can’t see that happening too soon.
You can read more at blognation and eMoms.
Update: Andy Beard has a good post on the whole saga. He mentions some aspects of Michael’s denials which do not quite jell, such as the excuse that he hadn’t noticed all the publicity surrounding his attendance. I must admit, I had my tongue planted firmly in my cheek when I read that. And the reasons for it all? I think Andy is pretty correct in his interpretation. Lots of links and free publicity, both before the event and after the non-appearance.
Don’t forget to stay up to date with all the latest flogging news.
