All About Content

Lee Odden reports on a new study by Omnicom Group’s Brodeur and Marketwire about how journalists use blogs.

He reports on WebProNews that:

• Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis
• One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs
• About one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page
• Almost half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers”
• Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting

I was just taking another tour of the Blogsvertise FAQs and came across this little tidbit:

“We are no longer approving Wordpress blogs [for inclusion in the Blogsvertise program] because Wordpress has made the decision to delete blogs with paid content on them. Sorry, please consider submitting another blog for consideration.”

It struck me as way over the top that WordPress would just start deleting accounts because it contained paid links and I was surprised I hadn’t picked up any stories about this before, given that I follow the industry very carefully. I did some digging around and found this item from November.

The WordPress terms of service include several restrictions on what can be posted, including: “the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites.”

After another read-through I determined that you’re not allowed to use their hosting and domain if you’re going to use your blog for commercial purposes; but that it’s fine to use the WordPress publishing platform to post paid content, affiliate links and that type of stuff to a blog that’s on your own domain and host.

This actually seems quite fair to me. If you’re going to be using up their bandwidth, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to ask that you not profit off a service they provide to you for free.

Whether you’re intent on monetizing your blog, or you just want to be seen as credible, you absolutely need to get your site onto its own domain. If you’re successful — apparently you can earn up to $10,000 in a month with PayPerPost — the domain registration and hosting fees will absolutely pay for themselves.

Click here for more info about Domain Name Registration.

Just haven’t been able get into a blogging mood lately. There’s plenty of interesting stuff going on (Google’s new ad inventory and its DoubleClick acquisition, Matt Cutts’ war on paid links, Stephen Colbert’s latest Internet coup…) but if I’m not in the mood to blog I’m not going to force it.

But I’m just taking a little break, not phasing out the blog. Which reminds me of another topic I’ve wanted to address: what is a good exit strategy for a blog? One of the blogs I follow for professional reasons just seems to have stopped updating regularly, if at all. This was a large blog with a strong audience and quite a bit of ad revenue. In another example, a blog I tried to start for work wasn’t getting any support internally and a decision was made to let it die. In neither case was anything posted to let readers know. Does anybody ever actually have an exit strategy for their websites or blogs?

Okay, I’ve moved the blog over to Blogger Beta. I’m hoping that a) nothing broke in the process and b) that this is a significant improvement over the previous platform. Blogger has always been far inferior to WordPress and MovableType, in my opinion, so I’m eager to see if the new functionality closes that gap.

Update: 2 Minutes Later
Sure ’nuff, something broke. It’s not archiving old posts correctly. Looks like it’s dropping the /archive/ subdirectory when it creates the links for the archives pages. (I also switched from weekly archives to monthly archives, but did this after I discovered the other error, so I’m sure that’s not the cause).

I’m cautiously hopeful this won’t be too hard to fix.

I should change the tagline of my blog to: I make mistakes so you don’t have to.

Update: Some Days Later
It wasn’t tough to fix in theory (just fixed the archive URL in Settings), but it’s still not fixed in practice. FTP keeps timing out before ALL of the pages are republished, so some of the links remain broken. I’ll keep trying, and once all the new (monthly) archive pages work, I’ll do redirects from the weekly archives to the new pages.

What’s the sound of random lunatics riffing? If a random lunatic hollers for his acne cream, does anybody care? And why don’t bloggers put on some clothes, anyway?

These and many other hard-hitting news questions are posed in the intrepid reporting staff of Time magazine (oh wait, that was a guest columnist).

Via Threadwatch.

Oh right, that wasn’t the question being asked. The author wanted to know if newspapers had any hope of being relevant in the future. It’s Old Media vs. New Media: Round 28.

Haven’t updated in quite a while, but worry not, I have not abandoned this blog. In fact, tomorrow is the one-year mark for this blog. I made my inaugural posting on October 17, 2005. If I dropped out of the Blogosphere before then I couldn’t be part of whatever statistic Technorati puts out next about blog abandonment. And speaking of milestones - I’m oh so, so close to qualifying for my first Google AdSense check. How I’d love to have reached that goal by my 1-year anniversary. (Only $2.01 to go… but in no way am I encouraging you to click on ads, since that is clearly against the AdSense ToS. Right?)

Anyway, besides being on vacation last week, the other reason I’ve been updating less frequently recently is that I’ve been working on a side project. Check out Melanie Phung does product/commercial photography.

I’ve got a bunch of new but as-of-yet-unfinished posts in the hopper. I’ll try to get back in the habit of posting weekly… unless of course I get a flood of paying photo gigs

Sometime a little while back it was Blog Day — during which bloggers were to share their blog recommendations. So what do I read regularly?

In addition to the major tech sites that already get tons of traffic (like Thread Watch, Micro Persuasion, the Technorati blog, the Search Engine Watch blog, Tech Crunch, as well as anything written by Google or Yahoo employees, etc) here are some other blogs you might not know but that I think deserve more attention.

1. David Seah: Better Living Through New Media
2. SEO by the Sea
3. Statastic
4. SEO Egghead
5. Creating Passionate Users

More bloggy content goodness on Melanie’s List O’ Links from SprayOnSalt.com.

Step One: Build a Crap Site

To make a site work good with AdSense or Overture the first step is in building a site that is totally useless or close to it. This is an important first step because you don’t want your visitor hanging around your site, you want them clicking an ad and finding another site. Otherwise you don’t make money.

So starts a wonderfully honest post on the topic of How to Make Money with AdSense Sites — the beginning of a thread by janeth on the WebProWorld discussion forum.

This isn’t one of those Pollyanna posts about how useless sites are evil and don’t really work — janeth claims she was doing about $10k a month with these made-for-AdSense web properties (although spending about $6k on keeping them running). In the end she’s getting out because the business model was too unstable for her.

Steps Two Through Ten: The Crappier the Better

If you really are interested on what it takes to earn a living on these ad-only sites, read the rest of her (somewhat snarky, but actually quite informative) post about what it’ll take to earn money as an AdSense publisher. (Then check out the leaked AOL query list to figure out which keywords you should be targeting.)

Nevermind the whole business of pitching your company’s press release to a blogger and crossing your fingers for a mention and an open dialogue about your story. A new service called Pay Per Post is starting an online marketplace to connect advertisers with bloggers looking to get paid for company-sponsored blog entries.

The pitch to advertisers is this: “Create buzz, build traffic, gain link backs for search engine ranking, syndicate content and much more. You provide the topic, our network of bloggers create the stories and post them on their individual blogs.”

Bloggers on the network will be able to go through “opportunities” like they might RFPs and pick what they are willing to do on their site. As a blogger, you then “create a post on your blog, paying attention to the Opportunity requirements the advertiser has set forth. Then submit the direct link back to us. Our team will review the content and either approve or deny the post.”

After Pay Per Post ensures the requirements have been met, money is taken out of the advertiser’s escrow account to pay the shill blogger for the posting.

As you can imagine, some people are outraged, especially since there does not appear to be any requirement for disclosing that these postings are in fact advertisements. The current issue of Business Week magazine even has a story called Polluting the Blogosphere which warns of a backlash.

Ted Murphy, Pay Per Post’s founder and the company’s blogger this weekend responded proudly: “I am meeting with a few different private equity groups next week to help blow this thing out. I am wondering if all this buzz and controversy is going to be a good thing or a bad thing. I guess the important thing to them is we are making money…”

Well, at least he’s being honest - let’s see if the paid bloggers will end up following his lead.

Oh my. Apparently the entertainment industry has embedded bloggers now. Let’s just hope these embedded bloggers don’t give away any information that could harm this country’s most important economic product, lest we play right into the hands of those anti-U.S.-cultural-domination zealots. Now if I could only make myself care.