Many people use YouTube for content in their blogs. (In case you have lived under a rock for the last 2 years) YouTube (www.youtube.com) is a video hosting website. Adding videos in your posts does enhance your content. Using videos for example in a fly fishing blog will help your users learn to fly fish quicker. Most people respond well to video content, as it generally explains things much faster and the information is retained by the reader for longer. So how do you find out about videos before everyone else does ? Read on to find out

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Today’s gripe about the blogging world is about blogs who sell out to advertisers. More and more I see that blog authors are too quick to accept money from anyone out there to line their pockets. I don’t have a problem with a golfing blog mentioning some golf equipment, because at the end of the day it is somewhat related to the content of the blog. Hey, we all want to make money online, but there are some who just push it too far. Also I don’t see a problem with people making money, why would I, I make plenty from my blogs, but I do try to make it less obtrusive. Here are a few examples of bloggers cashing in a bit too much :

Example of advertising posts taking away from a blog

Just this week I saw a some posts [1][2] from one a new commentator on the blog, Houndsgood.com. While the content is great, it’s about dogs, and it’s regularly updated, this person seems to want to make a quick $15 on advertising skin care products and some sweep stakes to win USB flash drives. I’m sure there are lots of opportunities out there to get some sponsors, I know my dogs blog has some sponsored posts, but they are still in line with the topic.

Don’t over push your advertisers

Again I’ve seen a lot of bloggers praising their sponsors to high heavens, virtually every few days. Take sponsor to host his blog 2 weeks ago, he has mentioned them 5 times. Granted one was to say he was moving, and one was to announce a contest, I still feel that reading about TopHostingCenter.com is starting to get a little bit boring. In fact this was one of the reasons I’ve removed him from my RSS feed reader (not that he cares I’m sure).

Taking care of advertisers

It’s true that the advertisers are the folks who pay the bills, but you need to remember that you shouldn’t let them run your blog. For my advertisers I make it clear that review posts will be honest, upfront and impartial , and if they don’t like something they can either take down the whole post, or suck it up. This is one of the reasons why I ask for payments in advance of me reviewing something.

As for banner advertisers, I try to keep them prominent enough, without distracting or tricking people to click them. Also I ask my advertiser for banner that are not to flashy and are more or less in line with the style of the blog or website.

Taking care of readers

This post is really all about taking care of your readers. I mean if you don’t look after them, they don’t have any reason to return to your blog. They are the reason in the first place that you are getting advertising (be it based on your RSS subscriber count/Alexa Ranking/UV/etc). Without readers your blog will stop to get advertisers.

Tips for getting blog advertisers

Too many bloggers try to get advertisers on their blog when they are only getting less than 500 Unique Visitors (UV) per day. They start to sell these little square banners for $5/month, just so they can make a little bit of cash. Now if it your aim to make money online, and the $5 is making a difference to your bottom line, I’m sorry to say, but you still have a long way to go. I would say forgo having ads until you are over the 1k UV per day. And then start to approach advertisers directly, like online per stores for your pet blog, or golfing holiday agencies for your golf blog. Present your traffic to them, and the keywords that bring people to your blog. Of course start of small, and work up, offer your ads for 1/2 the price you think they are worth. Remember it’s better to have 4 advertisers paying $40/month, than 2 paying $80/month. Advertisers can be like sheep at times, if they see that there are respected companies advertising on your blog, it can be the case that they are more likely to take you up on your advertising offer.

Try and get your advertisers to work with you, and you will, in the end, be successful with your monetization strategy for your blog.

btw. anyone know why tylercruz.com is down ?

I’ve just seen that Yaro, from Entrepreneur’s Journey has done a little redesign on his site. But I must say I am a little disappointed, Here are some of the reasons why his page is not so great IMHO.

1. The page size is 0.43MB, which is starting to be a little on the big side.
2. The number of objects is high, 107 to be exact.
3. There are 78 images in total on the page, so that means 78 http requests for these. Which are about 0.3MB in total.
4. There are about 14 external CSS files linked.
5. also this logo seems to be a little on the plain side IMHO. I don’t think it really does him justice.
6. The main page is very long, in fact it’s over 10 thousand pixels long right now. This means that the average user would have to scroll over 10 page lengths to find the footer of the page. Click here to see 1/10th image.
7. The rounded edges at the top of the page look pixelated.

Maybe the redesign was done in order to give him more screen real estate to sell to advertisers. But then again who I am to say what is good and what is not ? yaro has about 25K RSS subscribers, where as I have about 200.

This morning I saw the message that wordpress 2.5 is released (version 2.4 was skipped, and they decieded to right on to 2.5). The admin panel has a new layout and design, here is part of the my admin panel.

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It’s been awhile since I have posted here on the blog, and this is just a little update to say that yes I’m alive. I’ve been busy trying some new things, even bought my first car (in cash) so things have been hectic. One of the reasons why I haven’t posted recently is well because I didn’t have anything worthwhile to post. I feel that the blogging guide is expanding nicely, and serves as a nice blogging guide. I’ve also gotten a few emails from people thanking me for my efforts in explaining blogging so simply.

Since I release my Wordpress Plugin last month, I’ve also gotten a few offers of work, to custom program some things ! For me, a self thought programmer it’s great to see that people actually like my ideas and my programming.

RSS subscribers increasing when you don’t post ?

One strange I’ve noticed, and which is the reason for this post, is that since my last post on March 3rd, almost a month since now, my RSS subscribers has risen by 50%. Granted they are not quite at Tyler’s level yet. It’s funny to think that more people have subscribed when I am not posting regularly. Here is a screen shot from my FeedBurner account:

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If you are looking for an introduction to Website Analytics (i.e. looking at the statistics behind your visitors to your blog), then you should watch this video.

It is based on this blog post. This is a video by Avinash Kaushik, an Evangelist for Google Analytics. He ddoes a great job talking about the background and the strength of web analytics.