I'm a genius. Literally. Intelligence-wise, I'm in the top 1% of people worldwide. And along with that superior intellect comes the uncanny ability to tell when someone is faking it, when they're not being genuine. It doesn't even have to be in person. I can read your blog post and tell whether or not you know what you're talking about. Sometimes it's obvious, but other times I just know, despite the fact that I can't put my finger on exactly why.
That's pretty arrogant isn't it? But that's apparently the way I think, judging by some of the things I've tried to pass off in my life. Whether it's tests, essays, term papers, research projects -- you name it, I've tried to fake my way through it. In more recent history, it's been blog posts. I can go back over the past year and find several posts where I wrote hundreds of words on the very shakiest foundations of knowledge, or where I tried to hide my true intentions for writing. Did I really believe that I was one of the elite few who could tell when people were faking it? It seems so ludicrous now that I'm aware of it.
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Well not long after Spivot redoes their site to do a much better job of respecting the rights of bloggers, myLot comes along and shows us just how bad Spivot could have been.
Check out one of the latest posts from Emergiblog on myLot (nofollow applied to that link). Not only do you have a scary layout of giant ad/excerpt/giant ad/tags/giant ad, but the "view full article" link opens the post in a myLot frame, not in ... Keep reading »
Lisa Sugar had an inkling that her online celebrity gossip blog PopSugar was on the right track when Banana Republic called in July 2006 and offered to buy up all the ads for a week -- six months before she had even hired an ad seller. -- "The Sweet Spot," Forbes, April 23, 2007
How would you like that? A huge advertiser calling you up out of the blue to offer you money. Judging by the size of ProBlogger's readerbase, I imagine most of us would consider it a dream come true.
Care to venture a guess as to how many visitors she was seeing at that point, though?
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In my first post about the 90-Day Challenge, I forgot to mention that one of the things that made me want to give you motivation for blogging consistently for 90 days was Al Carlton's answers in this Bloggers Face-Off. I was stunned that someone who had only been blogging for 18 months could have 30,000 page views every day and more than 20,000 feed subscribers. Think about that: 20,000 subscribers. Unreal.
Then I read that he writes 10 to 15 posts a day, has 5 writers on staff and blogs 5 hours/day sometimes. That's the first time the light bulb really went on for me: unless your content is ground-breaking, miss-at-your-own-peril kind of stuff, you've got to be consistent. And even if your content is that vital, you'll still lose a ton of people if you don't blog regularly.
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I ran into Labor Nurse when she submitted an essay for our scholarship contest over at Nursing Jobs.org. Her essay definitely stood out, and I spent some time reading her blog. Very, very entertaining, so I asked her if I could interview her for Ask Shane. She kindly agreed, and I think there's a little something for everyone in our conversation; we covered quite a bit of ground. I hope you enjoy it!
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A month ago yesterday, I made a open attempt to start ranking for "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan" as part of an example of how important <title>s are. Well this morning I discovered that that was an even better idea than I thought it was.
Not only am I now ranking fourth in Google (as of this writing), but 14 of the last 100 visitors to ... Keep reading »
Christine Kane has written a great piece about "18 Stupid Mistakes Bloggers Make in their First Year." It's an outstanding read and definitely worth a trip over there. I love it because she nails so many things. You can tell she's only been blogging a year because all those beginner mistakes are still so fresh in her mind.
She's also got a great-looking blog to boot. It's worth a trip just to see that.
You've probably heard many times about all the free visitors you can get from search engines. Well SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science -- and art -- of getting a site to rank well in order to get as many of those visitors as possible. The great thing for you as a blogger is that you don't have to been an SEO expert to see quite a bit of search engine traffic to your site because most blogs are tailor-made for ranking well in search engines.
Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it's hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular.
However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you're set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you'll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages.
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If your blog is good and you're blogging consistently, you'll be successful.
That's it. Two conditions. If it sounds simplistic, it's because we don't think enough about that second part: blogging consistently. Most bloggers start off with a passion and excitement, only to have it wane within a few weeks or a few months.
Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm a firm believer that you have to get out there and do something to find out if it's really something you like to do or something you're good at. You can't just read a book about it and know. So flaming out after trying something for just a little bit isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. I've started and abandoned too many projects to count, and I'm glad I did. It's only by trial and error that I've narrowed in on what I really want to do.
So this guarantee isn't for those of you who have found out that you don't really enjoy blogging. It's for those of you you who do enjoy it and are looking to take your blog to the next level.
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Back in February, I wrote about "The Top 3 Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Blog" -- number one being advertisers:
Dedicated advertisers are usually your best source of revenue. They pay a much better rate, they’re a guaranteed revenue stream every month, and they tend to stick around. The only downside is that you usually need to have really healthy traffic levels to make it worthwhile for advertisers to work with you directly.
I noted later in the comments that what constituted a "healthy traffic level" really varied from nice to niche -- some sites may be able to attract advertisers with a tenth of the traffic of others; it's just so dependent on what type of readers you're attracting.
Additionally, you definitely want to avoid monetizing too soon. Very few things can kill a site quicker than letting your advertising overwhelm everything else.
Let's suppose, though, that you do have healthy traffic levels for your niche and are indeed ready for advertisers. How do you go about finding them?
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