PureBlogging

Since the new eBay CEO John Donahoe has been in charge, a lot of changes have been made. His most recent change is that the eBay affiliate program will be moved from Commission Junction to an in-house solution. The eBay Partner Network is the new home for the service and all eBay and Half.com affiliates have until the 1st of May, 2008 to convert to the new network.

The eBay Affiliate Program claims more than 100,000 members globally. Thus, I’m not really sure why they used Commission Junction in the first place. CJ is great for small to medium advertisers , but eBay really doesn’t have this problem. However, on the other side of the coin this is a big loss for CJ, who will be losing one of their biggest advertisers.

A few months ago I decided to include some banner ads on my primary blog. It was a difficult decision because I preferred to keep the blog ad-free, but the income from the ads allows me to devote a bit more time to blogging. Through this experience I’ve learned a lot about selling ad space, although I’m sure some bloggers with more experience selling ads have a different perspective. In the few months that I’ve had ads on the blog I have been able to fill all six spots pretty easily. Here is a look at what I have learned, I hope it can help you.

No Third Parties

First, I should say that I have no experience using third party services that help you sell your ad space and take a cut of the money. I have stayed away from them because I don’t think they’re necessary. I’m open to your opinions on the matter, but personally I plan to always sell the ad space myself and keep all of the money (well, all the money that the tax man doesn’t take). Third party services can save you a bit of time, but in some of my other points I’ll give you some advice for saving time in other ways.

Set Up an Advertising Page

It’s a good idea to have a page dedicated to providing information to potential advertisers. You can see an example by looking at the page David set up here at PureBlogging. Provide as many details as you feel comfortable providing and give potential advertisers a way to contact you. A detailed page will save you a lot of time responding to email inquiries.

Have an Email Template

One thing that I have quickly learned is that many people will email you asking for details even though your page is right there. Some people visit the page and some don’t. Almost every day I get emails from people who are asking me about the details of advertising, and most of their questions can easily be answered on the advertising page. I’ve basically created a brief template that encourages them to visit the advertising page and I provide a few additional details such as the recent traffic totals. Most of the inquiries I get are from people who are looking for something for free and not really interested in paying for an ad spot. In this case, I hate to waste a lot of time with emails, but I also don’t want to blow people off or make a false assumption. With the template I can save time and still give them the info that they want.

Have a Targeted Audience

One of the main reasons that I’ve been able to sell ad space pretty easily is because potential advertisers know who they are reaching when they pay for an ad on my blog. All advertisers are concerned about getting their promotional material in front of the right people, so a highly targeted audience is extremely attractive to them.

Encourage the Purchase of More than One Month at a Time

About half of my advertisers have purchased one month at a time and the other half have purchased anywhere from 2 to 6 months. This saves time for me and it means that I won’t have to worry about selling the space for a few months. As traffic has increased to my blog I have also raised the prices for ads, so I was initially hesitant to sell future ad space at the current price. I eventually decided that if they are willing to pay up front, I’ll gladly sell at the current price, and I haven’t regretted it at all. I would encourage you to do the same, but that’s a personal decision.

Some bloggers offer a discount for purchases of longer terms, and this can be very effective. I choose not to do this because I feel that if my prices are increasing they are essentially getting a discount by locking in for a longer term, as compared to buying each month individually.

Actively Pursue Advertisers

Although I have sold all of my ad spots, they haven’t all come to me. I have sent out a few emails to those who I thought may be interested and this has been surprisingly effective. I like to visit other blogs and websites that target a similar audience as mine, and I click-through on the ads. Then I’ll find a contact form or an email address and send a brief email with the details of my traffic and the prices that I’m offering. I’ve been surprised at how well this works. About 1/3 to 1/2 of my advertisers have come this way, and I’ve sent about 2 emails to get 1 advertiser on average.

Keep Your Prices Competitive

I think one of the reasons that I’ve been able to fill all of my spots each month is that I’m not asking an outrageous price. Of course, the price depends on the specifics of your blog and of the offer. If your prices are higher than the competition you’ll have to spend more time finding advertisers. Personally, I’d rather make a few less dollars from each advertiser and spend less time on it. Good prices also encourage advertisers to lock in for several months at a time.

Be Flexible

If you’re running out of time to find your last few advertisers, why not offer a slightly lower price? I haven’t had to do this yet, but I was one day away from doing so. I’d rather make sure each spot was filled even if it means giving a cheaper price. I’ve had poor results with banner ads for affiliate programs, so they’re not a good replacement option for me.

Ask Your Current Advertisers for a Renewal

If your advertisers are not contacting you to purchase another month, don’t assume that means that they aren’t interested. Try to get in the habit of thanking your advertisers and asking them if they would like to continue. If they’ve seen good results, most likely they will.

Keep Track of Contact Info for All Advertisers and Potential Advertisers

I have a folder in my email with inquiries from potential advertisers that didn’t pan out. Next time I need to fill a space I have a list of warm leads waiting for me. These people have already shown an interest, they just haven’t taken that final step. Also, keep track of the email address of your current and past advertisers. Those who have advertised in the past may be interested in doing so again in the future. Every now and then you can send them an email to see if they have any interest in starting up again. I’m planning on eventually starting another blog on a similar topic, and when I do I’ll already have a list of potential advertisers to contact.

Don’t Hold Spots

You’ll quickly see that some people will ask you to hold a spot for them or tell you that they are going to send payment in a few days. I politely remind these people that I can’t hold a spot and I’ll gladly give it to them if a space is still available when they send payment, but if someone else pays first they will get the spot. There have already been a few situations where I could have missed out on selling a spot because of this reason. For me it is a first come pay, first served approach.

Have a Good System for Tracking Payment

I quickly learned that with 6 advertisers each month it can be a lot to keep track of. I set up an Excel sheet with a different tab for each month. When someone sends payment I go into the sheet and enter them into how ever many months they paid for, plus I record the date of payment and the contact information. Additionally, I like to keep the receipts of payment from PayPal. Now I can look at a tab for a month or two down the road and see how many spots I will need to fill.

Keep it Relevant to Readers

If the ads on your blog can provide some type of value to your readers they can actually be a positive. On the other hand, if the ads are for products or services that are of no interest to your readers they will be an annoyance. Keep it relevant and it will be better for you, your readers, and the advertisers.

Last week I put up a link to my DIY Moleskine PDA video. Part of the process, of course, was finding a good site to host the video. Here are the three finalists.

YouTube. Ladies love him, men want to be his friend, give a big Las Vegas welcome to a dear old friend of mine, you all know his name: YouTube. (Wild sustained applause.) Truth be told, I don’t like YouTube much. It’s like Sears — first on the scene, it was a respected powerhouse for many years, and still commands pretty strong name recognition. But at the end of the day, I’d rather stick with its competitors.

What’s great about YouTube is that people spend a lot of time on it, just looking at video after video, so you’re guaranteed some views of your work simply by the law of averages. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into people visiting your site; they may be more likely to simply check out the next suggested video.

YouTube’s performance is also finicky to a degree that’s pretty unacceptable, considering how well its competitors work and the general state of technology today. I’d wager that I’ve had to reload about half of all the YT pages I’ve looked at, simply because the media player refused to load the video all the way. I expect that from some crappy embedded Yahoo! player; I can’t believe the granddaddy of all Web video doesn’t have a better interface. When it comes to posting videos, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that someone might not be able to watch the whole thing.

Metacafe. Metacafe is sort of the opposite of YouTube, with very little name recognition but a much more dependable interface. I feel like users probably associate Metacafe with cheesy, ebaumsworld-esque videos of guys in banana suits setting themselves on fire, and thus don’t give it the propers it deserves.

But MC has a great user interface and relatively quick upload time. The drawback is that it takes a bit longer for your video to show up online than if you use YouTube, where it pretty much shows up moments after it finishes uploading. The wait isn’t terribly long, but if you’re liveblogging and need to get something up NOW, you might run into trouble.

Revver. The best thing about Revver is that allows you to monetize your video based on the number of views it gets. I’ve never used Revver, so I’d be interested to hear about anyone’s experience with it.

Revver’s page seems a little light on details as to how exactly its users get paid. And the hardest part of Revver — speaking from a creator’s standpoint — is that Revver’s panel of admins has to approve your video… and approval can take a few days. I found this out a little too late; last week’s video was my first foray into Revver territory, and my deadline would have approached faster than the admins’ approval. This is a great security measure from Revver’s point of view, and I have no arguments with it, but it does require the artist to do a little creative planning.

Oh, and embedding any of these on your blog will require a plug-in based on your blogging platform and video host… just a reminder.

In the end, I went with Metacafe, simply because of the great interface. I also posted to YouTube, since I already had an account there, but overall I think Metacafe will be my #1 choice for future videoblogs.

Part of being a blogger is to write interesting content, but another part of your job as a blogger should be getting to know your readers. When you learn more about your blog readers, the following could happen:

1. Increased affiliate sales. Knowing more about your blog readers helps you decide which products to promote.

2. Repeat visitors and new subscribers. Once you get to know more about your blog readers, you’ll be able to give them what they want. Moreover, if you write the content they want to read, they might subscribe to your RSS feed.

Now that you know the possible benefits to getting to know your blog readers, I’ll tell you how you can learn more about them…

1. Post a “call to action.” A “call to action” is where you’ll ask your blog readers for suggestions on topics they’d like you to blog about. See “Your Assistance is Needed, Please” as an example of a “call to action” post.

2. Monitor your blog’s stats. Your blog’s stats will tell you which of your past blog posts are the most popular, where the largest percentage of your visitors come from and what days of the week you get the most visitors (schedule your blog posts for these days). A great program for gathering these stats is Google Analytics, which is free.

3. Poll your blog readers (weekly or monthly) to collect demographics. The polls will not only tell you more about our readers, but you could post the results on your “Advertise” page. Some questions you could ask in your polls include annual income, occupation, age, gender, online shopping habits (what do they buy the most) and what type of books they read. Let’s elaborate on those possible poll questions, shall we?

The annual income of your blog readers helps you decide what kind of products to market. For example, if the majority of your readers have a low income, you don’t want to sell them products and services that are too expensive. Instead, focus on marketing products and services within their budgets.

When creating a poll to determine the annual income of your blog readers, make the question a multiple choice (i.e. Less than $20,000; $30,000 - $49,000; More than $50,000). In addition, let them answer all your polls anonymously. To do this, just include the question and the choices. Don’t ask for their name or e-mail address. Besides, many may not participate if you ask for this information, especially when they’re revealing their income.

Ask them to choose their occupation. Some choices could include professional blogger, professional writer, website designer, editor, publisher and/or etc.

When attempting to determine the age and gender of your blog readers, you could create a two question poll to collect both the age and gender. Furthermore, you can make the questions multiple choices or allow them to type in their answers.

By asking your blog readers what they buy the most when shopping online, you’ll be able to offer products that you know the majority of your blog readers buy. This too could be a multiple choice poll, but list choices related to your blog. For example, a blog on dog grooming probably attracts readers who buy dog-grooming products, so you could include choices such as dog toys, books on dogs and/or etc. Be sure the answer is set to allow your blog readers to select as many products as they wish.

Allow your blog readers to tell you what types of books they read. Then, if you’re not already a member of Amazon Associates, join and create a widget for your blog’s sidebar that includes books based on the results. If the greater part of your blog readers enjoy books about blogging, then include those books in the widget. Later, you can change the books on your widget by logging in to your Amazon Associate account.

What are you waiting for? Start getting to know your blog readers today, and then deliver what they want based on your research and polls.

All the cool stuff happens at the edges of things. In nature, the transition between two ecosystems is called an ecotone. The two ecosystems overlap each other and the give and take between them is greater. Between a positive and a negative charge, a transfer of electricity takes place. In an extreme form, we call it lightning. When the first world and the third world commingle, opportunity abounds for everyone. At the forefront of any field, be it technology, music, art, whatever, there is the edge.

But not just the edge. There is the edge of the edge: the “cutting edge” or the “bleeding edge” we call it. That’s where the juice is. That’s where you want to think about being. If you’re in the middle, you’re in a very crowded space and it’s hard to stand out. The people in the middle look to the people at the edges for ideas and for inspiration. The cool stuff happens at the edge and makes its way towards the mainstream (where, of course, after a while, it isn’t cool anymore, but there’s always new cool stuff coming down the path).

Being on the edge makes you a transfer agent for the edge heading into the mainstream, and you can siphon that energy. You can build a smaller audience at the edge that grows and becomes mainstream after a while. You can make money off of the difference between economic and technological “ecosystems” by occupying the ecotone area where there is overlap. You can blog from there, from the edge.

photo by Binary Ape

Like most writers, I like to spend a lot of time reading about how to write. There’s lots of really useful information out there, and it’s a better way to rationalize procrastination than playing Chain Factor or watching Mythbusters reruns. Here are a few of the best resources I’ve found on my travels around the Web — some of them have actually helped me, and I hope to integrate those that haven’t into my writing as soon as I become a more responsible and productive person. Which should happen any day now.

10 Benefits of Rising Early from Zen Habits. Technically this isn’t specifically about writing, but it has helped me to become an early riser, which has helped my writing and overall productivity dramatically. Whenever I wake up late, I always end up working late into the night — which means getting to bed late, which means the cycle starts all over again.

10 Steps to Creating the Habit of Writing from Write to Done. I particularly like the “No Exceptions” rule — again, I find when I fall out of the writing habit, it’s very hard to get back into it.

The Greatest Sales Letter of All Time from Copyblogger. I could easily place the entirety of Copyblogger’s material on here and be done with it, but that would cross the line from “lazy” to “really pathetically lazy,” and I’m not quite there yet. A great example of writing that achieves its goal with absolutely no fat or prevarication.

Ten Timeless Creative Writing Techniques, again from Copyblogger. At the risk of inching closer to that “really pathetically lazy” label, I offer this as well. The information in this post helped me turn half-decent ad copy into something that I’m really pleased with.

How to Rewrite from Justine Larbalestier. Justine, a real, honest-to-goodness fantasy writer, tells the hard truth about the revision process. Spoiler alert: It ain’t easy.

Title Tags: First Impressions at the Search Engines from Flyte Web Marketing. This post isn’t big on details, but it really helped me to understand the importance of title tags in selling Web copy.

How to Write and Use Description Meta Tags on Your Web Pages from Zero Million. The page is a little ad-heavy, but this is a really great tutorial for writing great, concise meta descriptions. The first piece of advice (”Write Like a Journalist”) was the best for me (but that may be because I used to be a journalist).

Is the Net Good for Writers? from 10 Zen Monkeys. Long article. Good read. Quite a bit of insight from a wide variety of writers, Web entrepreneurs, publishing professionals and overall geeks.

How to Write Faster, Better and Easier from Pick the Brain. When I first read this post, I hated it. “Duh!” I thought. “Who doesn’t know this stuff?” Then I realized that while I knew the information presented here, I rarely practiced it. A good reminder of what a good writing process entails.

Live and Write from Ask MetaFilter. Some great advice in the comments here. Particularly good is the final comment about dream writing vs. lucrative writing.

10+ Unusual Ways to Make Easy Money on the Internet if You Love Writing from NicheGeek. Some of these are a bit on the skeezy side (”Social Bookmark Whoring?”), but it certainly got my creative muscles pumping.

The Complete Nobody’s Guide to Writing Query Letters by Lynn Flewelling. I dread writing query letters. It almost makes me thankful I don’t have a finished novel under my belt. But this tutorial is thorough, and gentle on the first-timer.

An Introduction to Journal Writing from D*I*Y Planner. This post really helped me get over my self-consciousness when it comes to journal writing. I used to get upset if every entry wasn’t Chatwin-quality. Not any more.

Hack Your Way Out of Writer’s Block from 43 Folders. I’ve used each of these suggestions at least once. The Brian Eno reference is also cool.

Lost in Your Own Writing? from JCM Enterprises. Good advice overall here. Also, it references one of the two best dramas currently on network TV. The other one is Battlestar Galactica. No arguments please.

50 Tools That Can Improve Your Writing Skills from Dumb Little Man. All 50 tips are from the Poynter Institute, one of the most respected journalistic institutions in the nation. Many of these are technical rather than conceptual, so I’d wager this is the most useful item on this list. That’s why I finished with it.