PureBlogging

Are you using Project Wonderful to earn income on your blog?  I recently started using it on my restaurant blog, and I’ve had some mixed results, but it has the potential to bring in a steady stream of income for your blog.  For those of you with newer blogs, or are just getting started monetizing your blog, it may be a very nice alternative to consider.  It is easy to set up, and you can start earning money right away. 

One of the things I like about Project Wonderful is that you can create ad boxes and advertising campaigns for multiple sites from a single account.  You won’t have to create a separate account for each of your blogs.  That really simplifies things.

Once you sign up and create your profile, you will be able to create an ad box for your site.  Once the box is created you will be able to place it anywhere on your site, so you will want to think through the placement and what size will work best before you create the box.  The ad box setup gives you a lot of options for size, number of ads displayed in each box, the way the ads are displayed.  You can set it up as a square, banner, or skyscraper. 

One thing you will want to pay attention to is setting the minimum bid.  You can set a minimum of $0.00 or higher.  The good part about setting your minimum to $0.00 is that you will get ads on your site right away.  Without ads displayed, there will be a “Your Ad Here” box displayed, which doesn’t speak well of your ability to deliver for advertisers.  On the other hand, a zero-bid allows other sites to advertise on your site for free.

One caution about creating your ad box: Once your ad box goes live, and there are ads placed in it, you will not be able to make changes to the size, configuration, or minimum bid amounts.  If you want to make changes you will have to create a new ad box and replace your existing box. 

Project Wonderful displays ads on a highest bidder basis.  Whoever bids the most will have their ad displayed on your site.  The bid placed is how much they will pay to have their ad displayed for one day.

Let’s assume you have an ad box that allows to ads to be displayed, with a minimum bid of $0.00.  Buyer #1 places a bid with a minimum bid of $0.00 and a maximum bid of $0.02.  Because they are the only bidder they will pay $0.00 (the minimum).  Buyer #2 places a bid with a minimum of $0.01 and a max of $0.02.  Their ad is displayed at $0.01, and Buyer #1 is still displayed at $0.00.  Buyer #3 then places a bid with a minimum bid of $0.02 and a max bid of $0.05.  The ads on your site would now display Buyer #1 at $0.02 (which was the Buyer #2 max bid), and Buyer #3 at $0.02. 

If those bid numbers look low, well, they are.  But it is a good indication of what to expect if your blog doesn’t have much traffic.  I have seen more popular sites that are charging more than $5 per day for each ad displayed, but you need to be able to deliver traffic for that much money.  Even the Project Wonderful homepage is only getting $0.80 per ad.

When a buyer is considering whether to place an ad on your site they will have access to Project Wonderful’s traffic stats for your site.  When you place the ad widget on your site, PW will be able to track your traffic count.  They will display that count over the past 30-days for any potential advertiser.  If that traffic count is low, the amount they are willing to bid is low 

For Bloggers that are just getting started, this means earnings of a few cents per day, but as your traffic count grows, so will your earnings.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with Project Wonderful.  What has worked (or not worked) for you?  Please share your comments so we can all benefit for our shared wisdom.

Be honest with yourself, how many times have you skipped reading a link love post by your favorite blogger? You’re not alone; many others, including myself, do the same thing. Why? Because we read blogs looking for content that will engage us not lead us to a bunch of links. I understand bloggers create link love posts to show their commenters they appreciate their interaction, but do we really have to show our appreciation with a list of links? No, we don’t! And with the following creative link building ideas we can show commenters our appreciation without disappointing our readers, while still keeping our content appealing.

Show link love with a resource link. Write your posts as usual, but somewhere in that post provide a resource link. You’ll link to a post on the commenter’s blog that’s related to your post. For example, if you’re blogging about writing engaging content and your commenter wrote a past post about how to find blog post ideas, then you could link a related phrase in your post to that commenters past post about finding blog ideas. The phrase in your content could be discovering blog post ideas or something similar that doesn’t take you off topic. This keeps your content the way it should be — interesting and informative — while still showing your appreciation to those who interact with you by leaving comments on your posts. In addition, it could bring your commenter more traffic than just placing their link in a list with other links. I’m sure your commenters will appreciate this link building idea more than the usual way of creating a link love post.

Show your appreciation with an Attribution. Choose a post written by your top commenters from their blog, and then add to their post (mention ideas or advice they may have left out) or write your take on it as a post on your own blog. Be sure you give each of them proper attribution. After all, the attribution is where the link love comes into play.

Write a profile on your top commenter. On a monthly or weekly basis, choose your top commenter and offer to write a profile on him or her. In your profile, link to his or her blog, and make sure their blog is related to yours so you don’t veer off topic.

Interview your top commenter. This is basically the same as writing a short profile on your top commenter, which can also be done on a weekly or monthly basis. Furthermore, you can let the top commenter know you’ll publicize the interview through social bookmarking, press releases, and etc. Also encourage your readers to share the interview post through social bookmarking. Not only will you be helping your commenters by promoting the interview post you did with them, but you’ll also bring traffic to your blog, and odds are the interviewee will publicize it as well, which will send even more traffic to the both of you.

Review their blog. Offer to write reviews of your commenters’ blogs. Again, make sure their blog is related to yours.

All the aforementioned link building ideas is much more interesting than a link love list, wouldn’t you agree?

To get started, create a blog post letting your readers know how you’ll show your appreciation to all of them who are top commenters each week and/or month. To keep this notice at the top of your blog, make it a header instead of a blog post. However, once you begin utilizing your creative link love building ideas on a consistent basis, you’re readers will catch on, and they just may begin commenting more, so they can earn themselves a link on your blog. After all, they’ll soon discover that your creative link love brings more traffic than making it onto a link love list.

If you have some of your own creative link building ideas for showing link love, please share them in the comments area below.

Blogging as we know it is changing. Evolving. Are you ready? Do you feel confident that you know how blogging is changing so that you can best position yourself to take advantage? I’d like to share with you my personal perspective on the changes I see happening.

Blogging is becoming more than text

This first one should be pretty obvious to most of us by now. The advent of multimedia for blogs is astounding. I know the first thing you will think of is video. Without question, video blogging has officially arrived. But video isn’t all their is. Anything that can be embedded into a blog post extends the blog beyond text. And if there’s one thing programmers and creative people out there are really gunning for, it’s getting you to put their widget in your blog posts. Consider the following:

• SlideShare
• Animoto
• PollDaddy

As more and more tools like these become available, blog posts will continue to be much more than text. If you’re not shooting video or enhancing your posts with multimedia, it’s time to consider it for your blog. Don’t do it without reason, but give people something more than just text to read when it helps to make more of an impression or provide further information. It’s one thing that will help your blog stand out and look fresher than other blogs in your niche.

Blogging is growing bigger

When you look at blogs like TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Engadget, and The Huffington Post, you can see how blogging is now the big time. Can your blog grow that big? Yes, it can. I can remember when TechCrunch didn’t exist and in the early days it started out with very few readers just like any blog. Of course, that didn’t last long, but that’s what great content and good connections to an industry will get you. I remember when the TreeHugger blog really was just a little WordPress blog trying to make a difference. Well, now they’ve made a difference and a bundle of cash, having been sold to the Discovery Times Newsgroup for $10 million. It was the right niche at the right time, with the right mix of content.

Blogging is growing smaller

At the same time, blogging is also growing smaller. So small, at first glance they hardly seem to be blogs at all. I’m talking about micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter and Pownce, and I’m also talking about “tumblelogs,” which are often single-column stream-of-consciousness style blogs. Twitter in particular has exploded in popularity, and has aspects of a social media site, although it is described as a micro-blogging platform, due to its 140-character limit on post length.

The first tumblelog was created by Christian Neukirchen, and it’s called Anarchaia. Tumblelogging for everyone is made possible through the free, hosted service Tumblr or through single-column blog templates.

Blogging is becoming easier

Blogging is becoming easier in many ways:

• Free, hosted platforms like WordPress and Tumblr, plus social media blogging like Facebook and Twitter make blogging easier than ever for non-techies to just get going.
• More web hosting companies have one-click installs for WordPress self-hosted, giving you more freedom in some ways, but still requiring way more technical know-how than your average newbie possesses.
• The ability to share content with embed codes is getting to be more well-known and easier.
• Creating video and pictures and editing them online is getting easier.

Blogging is becoming more difficult

In some ways, blogging is becoming more difficult. The bar has been raised. The stakes are higher. The markers we look for that tell us a blog is professional and that give a blog the greatest chance for success are not easy to implement without technical knowledge. It takes more to start a professional blog now than it once did. Just getting started can be overwhelming to people, leaving room for people to make a living as blogging consultants to help people navigate blogging.

Creating original content that stands out from the sea of millions of other blogs is also becoming more difficult as the number of blogs continues to grow. Can it be done? Yes. Even the most over-saturated of niches can be dominated by a newcomer. Who ever heard of Dosh Dosh or Skelliewag a few years ago? Nobody. And yet now they are two of the most popular blogs in the make money online and meta-blogging niches.

Blogging is becoming one part of what is called social media

Finally, the big one. This is one that bothers some people who are hanging on to ideas about how blogging is writing in the older tradition of writing. Not only is blogging beyond text, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s also beyond content, period. This idea of content on a the web as static words–the pixel version on ink on paper–is evolving into something else. The intersection and synergy of blogging and social media really highlights this for me.

A big part of why some bloggers are wildly successful has less to do with the content they create on their blog than their networking activities. Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn (more for business), and others facilitate this. Twitter is probably the most pronounced example of this stage in blogging’s evolution. Honestly, I don’t know whether to think of Twitter as a micro-blogging platform or a social media platform. It’s both, really. And you can expect further changes in this direction from other blogging and social media platforms, including WordPress.

Now that we’ve looked at some of the ways in which blogging is changing, I hope that this leaves you with a better perspective on this, and will help you make decisions about where you’re taking your blogging. I’d love to hear from you about how you see blogging changing. Please leave a comment below and let’s discuss!