Netizen

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

A Blogger Is Also An Editor

A blogger is a writer. We all know that. But a blogger is also an editor. I have to make this point because some bloggers feel they are cheating when they have a lot of links and a lot of video clips to go with their blog posts. You are not cheating, you are being an editor. It is perfectly okay to once in a while put out blog posts that are all links, or that are all video clips, no original writing whatsoever. You are telling your readers these are news articles or blog posts I read, these are videos I watched, and I recommend them to you. Actually, I would be suspicious if your blog posts are all original writing. If there are no links, at least a few links, I am going to ask, so what is the context? And images and videos add to the aesthetics. The best videos on the topic at hand I would say are indispensable. A video is worth 10,000 words, or more. YouTube makes it easy. The video code takes so little space. You don't have to worry about bandwidth issues. You embed. That does not make it cheap, that makes it user friendly.

YouTube is an essential tool for blogging. Zemanta is an essential tool.

Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Blog Daily

Image by just.K via Flickr

Blog daily. Take a day or two off per week, but otherwise blog daily. You must have one thing you feel really passionate about. And your blog has to revolve around that passion. But once it does, you are free also to rant about whatever else, whenever. But that one passion has to shine through. And if you were to read about 10 news items on any given day in your passion domain, you will find at least one topic, one subtopic to rant about that day. The more blogs that link to yours, higher goes your ranking, but that is not directly in your control. More often you blog, higher your search engine ranking. That is in your control. Blog daily.

Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Where Have You Placed Your Ads?

Image via Wikipedia

Until yesterday my ads were in the white zone, at the very bottom, and on the side bar in the middle. I had this if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude. Once I start getting enough page hits, revenue will follow, that was my attitude. But the point is, ad placement works at all page hits levels.

I moved my ads to the orange zone only yesterday evening, and already my earnings have gone up by a factor of four, and I am only half way through the day.

I made two major changes on my three primary blogs yesterday.

For now Nepal and Barackface have the most blog posts, but now my primary blog is Netizen.

I used to have only one blog post per page. Now I have three blog posts per page.
Now I have ads at the bottom of each blog post. That also ends up being ads at the top of two blog posts. So I have one in the orange zone, and two in the red zone now. And that has made a huge difference.

A less cluttered side bar also makes a blog more user friendly. And the footer now only has a search engine. That makes the blogs look cleaner.

And all this was very easy to do. For those of you familiar with the Blogger dashboard, click on "Layout." Then click on "Page Elements." Go to the box called "Blog Posts." Click on "Edit." There you can decide you want three posts per page and that you want to "Show Ads Between Posts." Google only allows for three ads per page, so three posts per page is a good number.

Because I now have three posts per page, now I don't feel the pressure to write particularly long posts. And so yesterday I had the busiest day ever at Netizen measured by the number of posts. So ad placement is not the only reason the earnings today are so much higher.

And yesterday I wrote my first blog post advertisement: Advanced Global Materials. Google makes money from ads, so can I. It is a problem only if all your posts at your blog are blog post ads. But as long as you maintain a healthy ratio between your regular posts, and your ad posts, and you clearly state at the bottom of a post that it is an ad, I think you are okay. (Sites That Pay You To Blog)

Like Deng Xiaoping said, to make money is a good thing.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Twitter Is Not Micro

Image via CrunchBase

Take the links away, and Twitter is not going to be fun no more, at least not for me. And I don't see what's micro about full blown webpages, news articles, blog posts, pictures, video clips. When I envision a tweet, I don't envision 140 stale characters. I envision a few words that point me to a weblink, more likely a tiny URL, that I might have the option to click on. That is not to say I don't enjoy tweets that are all words and no links. I do. But they are in the sea of links. That is why I enjoy them. It takes seconds to skim through an all words tweet, and usually another with a link is right below.

That is not to say I am a link clicking monster blindly clicking the links away. I pick and choose. But then that is why you carefully choose to follow people. Your library of Twitter contacts should be such that whenever you jump into your stream you find at least a few links to click on. I find that every single time. So when I go online, of all the places I could go to, Twitter ends up being the one with the greatest pull. You have to convince yourself it is not distraction, it is education.

Twitter is not micro. Twitter is smart. Can't do without Twitter in this day and age of information overload. Twitter allows for a smart consumption of information. You swim in the Twitter stream for half an hour, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 10, and you feel like you are in the loop, with the world. You know what's going on. You know all the right people. Heck, you follow them. They can't say no.

The tweet is the ultimate equalizer. Some of the fanciest names in tech put out tweets that are not that different from the kind of tweets I put out. I feel level with them much of the time.

After I have a new blog post, I tweet it, I don't submit it to Digg, or any of the similar services. I do use Delicious for bookmarking. But often time I just tweet an interesting link. I know I can track it with one Twitter search down the line. So I use Twitter also for personal bookmarking.

Twitter keeps my blog fresh. I guess there you could argue Twitter is indeed microblogging. But then, is it? My tweets tend to be link rich.

Demi Moore and I joined Twitter the same day. I have 230 followers, she has 520,738 followers. I am guessing she is better looking.

The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Cupcake: Android 1.5

Android has an interesting list of new features. Just like the distance from your laptop keyboard to the internet is zero, Android seems to envision that the distance from your mobile phone to the internet ought to be zero. That picture you shot from your mobile phone should end up straight at Picassa. Why download? Why upload? Why the drama? Same with video. Take it straight from the mobile phone to YouTube. Skip the download, upload drama. Online photo and video editing would be tackling the same problem from another angle.

The new Android looks to be muscular and ambitious.

Image by netzkobold via Flickr

https://twitter.com/Android_Bot/status/1522494989
Finance 2.0 Manifesto

On The Web

Android 1.5 Highlights | Android Developers
Sneak a Peek at the Next Version of Android
Android 1.5 Early Look SDK | Android Developers
Android Developers Blog: Getting ready for Android 1.5
iPhone 3.0, meet Android 1.5 | Tech Gear News - Betanews

In The News

Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders CNET News

Top 5 features in Android 1.5 (Cupcake) ZDNet Blogs

Google Announces Android 1.5 with Significant New Features Brighthand

Skype: Hub

AOL Time Warner could not build the promised synergy. Now looks like eBay and Skype are a repeat history case. Could this perhaps been predicted at the outset? Is a Microsoft going into hardware losing direction? Or is it reinventing itself? Nokia has reinvented itself many, many times over the decades.

eBay and PayPal were synergistic. Skype was stretching it.

But then will the Skype spinoff make enough money for eBay that the original deal will have been worth it? At 405 million, Skype has twice the community size as Facebook. When Skype got bought a lot of people were like, oh no, they overpaid. But looks like not. The founders of Skype would be happy to buy it back. The brand made half a billion last year. The two and a half billion price tag could be recouped in a matter of years.

Skype is a hub, it is a community, it is the iPhone of that big rectangle. And it is capable of doign iPhone like things. Yes, I am talking about applications. I have a feeling Skype will really take off when we enter the ubiquitous wimax era in a few short years. Now is the time to do the homework for the best possible positioning.

Image via CrunchBase

In The News

eBay to launch a Skype IPO in 2010 CNet
Next Office will come in 32-bit, 64-bit versions
Big media leads Webby Awards nominations
OutlookDeck brings Twitter concepts to e-mail
Analyst: Microsoft deal could save Yahoo $1 billion
Just how sexist is nudity in gaming?
Sun Microsystems debuts new x64 servers
Should Sun buy Novell?
Server start-up taps IBM-Intel tech, eyes Web 2.0
Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders
BoostCam does instant two-way video chat
iPhone to become a home systems OpenRemote
Microsoft fills Excel, Windows, Word holes
The final frontier: Solar power from space
Zune phone ad campaign coming?
MC builds up to 3 petabytes of virtual storage

The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter

Sex and the City

Image by hawaii via Flickr

I must admit there have been times when I have struggled with doing a Guy Kawasaki on Twitter: follow everyone who follows you. Should I? Should I not? I decided against the idea. For Guy Twitter is a broadcast medium. Noone else does that part better than him. His tweets get retweeted more times than that of any other. He is numero uno.

And there is Bhupendra Khanal, the top tweet in Bangalore, as in the one with the most followers:

Business Analytics: Twitter : Why unfollow who dont follow you?

He is a software guy, a CEO, who has come up with this program that allows you to follow or unfollow people about 50 at a time. He is brutal. He sees no point in following those who don't follow him. His following shot up to over 20,000 in a matter of months.

I decided I am biased towards an organic growth of my following, so I did not go down the Bhupendra route either, although we were and are good friends.

I found at Twitter what I did not find at Facebook. After I signed up at Facebook I realized my number one urge was to say hello to people I had never met before. Next thing you know I had about 1500 friends there. Then I signed up for this Facebook group that shall stay unnamed, and started emailing people in that group. Facebook deleted my account. 1500 friends gone. That was unfollow Facebook style.

I got another account, and now I have 500 friends, almost all of whom I personally know. Some are online friends I have never met in person, but we have interacted online enough that it feels like friendship. And I have over 40 friend requests and counting that I have decided to not accept, not decline either. If I end up chatting some of those and becoming online friends, I might still accept some of them.

At Twitter not only do you get to follow absolutely anyone you wish to follow, my number one dig has been this idea of being able to follow luminaries in the tech industry. Once in a while you come across this blog post or that which has recommendations of the people you get tempted to follow.

And clicking on the follow button is not enough. How well do you know them? Could you recognize them in your stream two months later? Could you name the company they might be associated with? Can you remember at least one blog post of theirs you have read?

How do you do all that? You spend some time on the profile pages of the people you follow. You read their intro. You reply to some of their tweets. You go read a few posts on their blog. You get to know them well enough that the next time they show up in your stream, their tweets look extra interesting to you. Each tweet by that person helps you know them a little better.

If you do that well enough, you just might strike a two way friendship, or rather followship, with a person who until recently was a distant celebrity to you. Like Craig Newmark, or Darren Rowse.

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Advanced Global Materials

Advanced Global Materials is a supplier of specialty raw materials and products from around the world. The company is based out of Brookhaven, NY. It supplies to major industries like defense, electronic, and power generation. Metal processing is its specialty.

Some of its offerings: hardware, fasteners, valves, flanges, plates, sheets, rod, bar, tubing, pipe, lugs, pins, inserts, hinges, fasteners, valves, etc. They deal with a wide variety of materials. "Services include milling, cutting, heat treating, export boxing, packing, welding, shearing, custom grinding, forging, flame cutting & saw cutting."

You can go here to take a look at its offerings and initiate online conversation with a real person on their end right away to start placing an order, or to place queries.

(This is an advertisement.)

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter

Jerry Yang, David Filo. That is a count of two. No wonder they got beat by Google. But if the count were not two but a billion, or even 200 million like Facebook which is what Twitter will have to hit on its way to the magic billion? Then what? Then are we talking some serious competition? I think so.

Twitter does not pay anybody to tweet. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing application. I think humans are going to take over the world. Unless machines fundamentally innovate.

If I were to take a really long view, I think this thing is going to be cyclical. Humans 2, Machines 1.

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element

Image via CrunchBase

Jerry Yang and David Filo camped in some trailer park on Stanford property and started creating a directory of all the interesting websites they came across. Jerry is human, so is David. This was when there were only a few hundred, then a few thousand websites on the web.

Then the whole thing exploded. Enter Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Larry once scared an Advisor by saying he wanted to download the internet, not one webpage, or website, or some data across the internet, but the whole damn thing. Sergei and Larry said humans can't, let machines do the search thing. And they won big.

But Twitter has all the buzz now. And Twitter is not exactly a search engine. But then it does something that Google does not do, and that is real time search. Their little search engine - the little engine that could - is still a machine, but it only bothers to search these little itty bitty tweets that get created by humans. The internet is more huge, and more explosive than ever before. And I am curious as ever. But I have only 24 hours in a day. So I guess I will let my circle of contacts act as a filter. JP Rangaswami out there in London has used the firehose metaphor to describe the internet. You are thirsty, but the internet is a firehose. How do you drink? Well, you use Twitter.

Twitter is not out to replace Google. But what if the power users end up spending more time on Twitter than on Google? Then Google has a problem on its hand.

The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Sites That Pay You To Blog

Image via CrunchBase

26 Sites That Pay You to Blog | How-To
Sites That Pay You to Blog
5 sites that pay you to blog! | Senserely Yours, | AdSense community
26 Sites That Pay You to Blog - Blog Forum - Bloggeries
Blog Sponsored Reviews - 5 Sites That Pay You To Blog Through Blog ...
Million Blog: Blog Advertising and Websites that pay you to blog
Sites That Pay You To Blog | Blogging, SEO and Online Marketing Tips
10 Sites that pay you to blog! | Black Hat CEO
best sites that pay you to blog | Tycoon Blogger
List Of Sites That Pay You To Blog

I did a google search on "sites that pay you to blog" and these are the first 10 results that showed up. Before that I had visited result number one on my own. But it felt to me like it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I did not want to have to visit every suggested site and see for myself. How do you see for yourself? Do you register and participate and see if it works? So this is what I proceeded to do. I made a list of all the sites mentioned in these 10 blog posts/articles. The more often a site has been mentioned, the higher its ranking. Then I visited all the sites to weed out three dead links I found. These are in alphabetical order.

http://451press.com 3 Mentions
http://www.associatedcontent.com 1 Mention
http://www.b5media.com 4 Mentions
http://beaguide.about.com 2 Mentions
http://www.blogburner.com 4 Mentions

http://bloggertizer.com 3 Mentions
http://bloggerwave.com 5 Mentions
http://www.bloggingads.com 3 Mentions
http://www.blogcharm.com 1 Mention
http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions
http://blogpayz.com 1 Mention
http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions
http://www.blogtoprofit.com 4 Mentions
http://botwmedia.com 1 Mention
http://www.buyablogger.com 1 Mention
http://www.buyblogreviews.com 2 Mentions
http://www.cashtalk.org 1 Mention
http://www.ciao.co.uk/reg.php 1 Mention
http://contextual.v7n.com/join.php 1 Mention

http://bloggerwave.com 5 Mentions

http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions

http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions

http://loudlaunch.com 6 Mentions

http://payperpost.com 10 Mentions

http://www.reviewme.com 8 Mentions

http://www.smorty.com 7 Mentions

http://sponsoredreviews.com 6 Mentions

http://www.weblogsinc.com 5 Mentions

Top 5

http://payperpost.com 10 Mentions

http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions

http://www.reviewme.com 8 Mentions

http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions
http://www.smorty.com 7 Mentions

Mind you, I have not had the chance to cross check them. I took them at their word as to what they were offering. And I have shared. If a few of these are scams, don't blame me. If some of them do no better for you than if you ran AdSense ads on your own, don't blame me. If some of them work wonders for you, don't give me credit.

And this popularity contest is flawed. I visited only a few of those, but the best so far to my mind was:

http://beaguide.about.com 2 Mentions

It is very hard to get in, but I went ahead and applied. They take four to eight weeks to get back with you. Their top earners make over $100,000 a year. About.com is a New York Times company.

How do you do well at blogging?

You have to be a good writer.
You have to have expertise.
You have to be passionate about your expertise.
You have to be able to attract readers.

Some will argue if you are a really good blogger, all you need is these three Google properties.

http://www.blogger.com
https://www.google.com/adsense
http://blogsearch.google.com

You blog, you post ads, and you go engage with other like-minded bloggers in their comments sections.

Don't get fooled. Blogging for a living is kind of like doing stand-up comedy for a living. It is very hard. Most people who try don't make it. Many people are happy just being able to do it on the side as part timers.

Think about it. All these sites are businesses. They are in it to make money. And you are going to help them make money. Most of them are out to act middle people between bloggers and advertisers.

The top authority on how to make money blogging is this guy in Australia:

http://www.problogger.net

He makes big money blogging. His tip: Adsense alone will not cut it, although it will end up your top earner.

And then there are those who say forget ads. Your blog is your business card. It helps you sell you if you have a skill to sell:

How I made over $2 million with this blog (Scripting News)

Also see: Home Based Business Opportunities Favorite, Find Out What Is The Best Program To Help You Make Blogging Money

How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Make Money Online
Make Money Online | Make Money At Home With A 13-Year Old
Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)
make money online Tag Page
2 Sure-fire Ways to Make Money Online — Pearsonified
How To Make Money Online - Forbes.com Fifteen billion smackers: That's the value Microsoft recently slapped on Facebook when the computer giant invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Mark Zuckerberg's online social-networking site. You could seethe with envy--or you could chase your own fortune on the Web. ....... Craigslist is another take on this model: The 25-person company, worth a reported $2 billion ....... Total page views per month: about 5 billion. ..... every pajama-clad blogger's dream: producing content supported by advertising dollars ........ To have any prayer of attracting large advertisers, sites need to attract at least 500,000 unique visitors per month ...... even if you do generate enough traffic, the "click-through" rates on ads tend to be quite low--in the neighborhood of one half of 1%. ...... Sure, you can make money online. But no one said it was easy.
Internet Marketing and Making Money Online | Dosh Dosh
Make Money Online
Make Money Online

Pages

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Sunday, April 12, 2009