Archive for November, 2007

Content is King – Only if you Advertise it

zerosharednickels.comA little case study that I've been looking at the last few weeks has made me come to the realization that content is nothing without advertising, and advertising is nothing without content. That certainly puts us in a quandry now doesn't it? How can you have great traffic without marketing or advertising and how can you create great content without having people to read it an qualify it as great?

The site that I've been watching fairly closely for this case study is the ridiculously funny and off beat humor of the guys over at www.ZeroSharedNickels.com. If you've never heard of them, and you most likely haven't, go check them out at some point. I guarantee that you'll get stuck reading two or three posts at a time.

The level of quality writing that they have is top notch. It comes across on a lot of different levels, both social commentary and humor, as well as insightful and thoughtful at times. Of course it is always sprinkled with a dose of dark, jaded sacasm. On top of good writing, they provide home grown illustrations to bring each post to life, and make you smile.

A quick glance at the site will reveal no advertising, no rss subscribe button (as of 11/29/07 at least) or any of the wordpress era hallmarks of monetized blogs. So marketing and advertising is minimal if not non existent on the page, does this mean that the content sucks? Of course not, but it does mean that the average traffic cycle for this blog is around thirty visitors a day. I asked, thats the number they gave, which is about the normal average for most blogs that are still starting up or have not marketed themselves widely yet.

With a blog that has great content but no readers, is the content still truely great? I would say no. In order to qualify for greatness you need to be judged by something, be it peers, random people, history etc. While history may judge you're blog as great, I doubt we'll be around long enough to find out. This leaves us with your peers and random people, which in order to reach them we need marketing.

One of the first lessons you'll learn in trying to market crap is that you're marketing will be much harder then if you were trying to market something good. That statement leads us right back to that of content is king. If you've got great content you're marketing should be much easier to accomplish. Content and marketing go hand in hand, they are not something you can separate and make manifest on their own.

Bloggers that run their own sites and do everything from blog to market need to understand how to write good content that will be easily marketed. There exists a fine balance between marketing content, and content marketing. Keeping this in mind when writing for your blog or website will help you maintain an easier approach for you're marketing campaigns and social media blitzes.

If we go back to the case study of www.ZeroSharedNickels.com, and look at the depth of content from a single post, we can easily come up with multiple marketing strategies. This type of content appeals to everyone on a different level, which I'll call a Super Niche. Niche marketing has been all the rage the last few years, and still is a very good way of advertising specific targeted products. Super Niches are developed from content that can span multiple niche topics. ZeroSharedNickels.com can jump between a lot of different niche topics in a single post, and still be niche targeted with advertisements and marketing schemes.

Do you have a super niche site? Is your content great? Have you been able to effectively market you're content? If you answered no to any of those questions you need to reavaluate the harmony between you're content and marketing. There is a synergy that needs to be maintained in order to maximize you're potential.

Make More Money by Saving Money

couponWhen it comes to making money online, one of the best ways to do that is to save money offline. I've seen post after post about people quitting their day jobs and going to be a full time blogger, or problogger. Not everyone is Shoemoney, and don't think you can obtain his level of success overnight. I gaurantee you he worked his ass off to get where he is, and you can too.

One of the simplest ways of making money is saving money and making it work for you. Every dollar you have in an account can be making you money by just sitting there accumulating interest or being reinvested in a stock portfolio etc. Now this doesn't mean you shouldn't reinvest you're earned money into your blog to make it grow, but you need to find a balancing point where you can take say 20% of you're earnings and put them into a savings that doesn't get touched. The rest you can pay bills, get advertising etc.

To help you save the most money, you should be aware of any deals that will boost you're savings. One website that I check out fairly regularly is Couponchief.com. It provides you with a wagon full of money saving coupons. If you're going to be buying stuff, you should find the best deal right? See you're grandmother had the right idea when she showed up at the grocery store with a bag full of coupons.

I like Couponchief.com. becuase they will link you directly to the store you want to shop in. For example I went and did a quick search for Bestbuy deals as I have one really close to my house (which is a good and bad thing!) and came up with dvd's for 3.99$. Can't really beat that. Not that I need to be watching any more movies, I already own about a closet and a half full, but you get my point. Saving 10$ on each dvd if you were going to buy a bunch adds up very quickly. You can then take that money and put it into something useful for you're blog, lets say advertisement on Adwords for example.

So the next time you're contemplating buying something online, go check out Couponchief.com, and compare that deal to the deal you may have found if you just walked into the store alone. Do this for say two or three weeks on typical items and compile the savings difference. Take that amount of money, split it 80/20. Put the 20% into a savings account, and then spend the 80% on your blog in some manner. This money management thought process should give you some extra in the bank, and some extra income coming from you're blog.

If you've come up with a money solution that works for you, please comment and share!

Weekly Linkage – 11/29

linksAdvice from the devil - This is a fantastic post that everyone should read. Has a great listing of advice and thoughts from the "devil". Worth a read at lunchtime while you're sitting in a cubicle, trust me!

Image Collection 1 - A random collection of images from the web. Interesting photos.

16 Things to do after starting a Word Press Blog - What a great list of things you should do when setting up a new word press blog. Even if you have an existing blog you should read through this list and make sure you've done most of it. Pretty good advice.

A Sweet Keyboard - Saw this and thought I'd link it. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but damn it, I'd buy it just because it looks cool.

Mixx.com - A new social network site, like there needed to be more right? Well yes, there does need to be more alternatives to Digg, and Mixx is one of them.

The Measurement of Social Media - Great post on setting objectives in social media markets.

LinkBait 101 - Learn to link bait from the ground up. Go read this post if you're looking to get more visitors to your site.

This week's links brought to you by a healthy dose of SPAM, the only meat you'll ever truly need.

Affiliate Marketing Experiment One

Affiliate marketing and monetization of blogs is always a hot topic in the blogosphere. You can do a search right now and find about three million entries on it in fact, if not more. With that being the case I want to know which program you like best and why, or which program sucks the hardest and why you'll never use them again.

Every week I read about gurus making thousands of dollars a day from affiliate marketing - which I might add is highly possible, but takes time to get to that process. I'm looking for programs making fifty to five hundred dollars a day or month. These are the type of extra cash programs that can benefit the everyday blogger.

This little experiment of mine will be running for two weeks. During that time write up a new blog posting and contact me with the link etc. I will be collecting a listing of the best entries and will make a finals post about it after the two week period.

Here are the rules to participate:

  1. Write a post on your blog about one affiliate program that you belong to or have belonged to in the past. Describe how the program affected your blog and how you managed to profit or crash and burn horribly. Theres no real limitations here so be creative and insightful.
  2. Send an email through the Contact form with your name, post title and permalink of the post.
  3. After two weeks, I will collect all the entries and make a final listing of of entries and post on the best entries. Possibility of prizes - but you'll have to wait and see on that! So get entering.

LinkWorth Controversy

faceMany of us bloggers are always on the constant search for better paying advertising programs, myself included. Within this search I found www.linkworth.com and read all through it etc etc. Seemed like a decent program so I went ahead and signed up to test it out some, even wrote a posting about it because I thought it was a useful tool in the post TLA debacle.

Long story short is that I have since parted ways with LinkWorth, purely due to the fact of me not promoting it with the attention I should have, and also due to the fact that I did not see much coming from LinkWorth itself. I find the LinkWorth user interface a bit odd to begin with, but the way the advertisers see you're website is still a bit of a mystery to me, and to a lot of others I think as well.

In doing some more research into LinkWorth I found this blog post at Adesblog.com on how LinkWorth might be using him as a promotional tool to get their name out and single him out etc. Which is kind of shady if you ask me, but not completely off the moral compass either. He goes on to post about how he's making 900$ a month etc, but that several of his readers had reported signing up through him and making zip.

Now that wouldn't really make it all that much of a story until I started to read on further down through the comments section where users were continuously posting how little if any money they were making from LinkWorth, when low and behold a LinkWorth representative posts a scathing comment in rebuttal to the post. Well now, I thought to myself, this is going to be interesting seeing how this pans out. Adesblog.com then reposts back stating very mildly that he's sure LinkWorth is doing a good job and not being all black hat etc etc. Wtf?!

So now I've got some bells and whistles going on in my head, and get thinking to myself that Adesblog.com might be trying a reverse marketing ploy in conjunction with LinkWorth. Think about it. Adesblog.com posts a linkbait article "bad mouthing" LinkWorth (when in fact he states he's making good money from them), and then LinkWorth retorts on the blog with a scathing comment, and then they are all hunky dory? Controversy is always good for a blog to get noticed.

To me this seems all too preplanned out and smells like a reverse marketing campaign to 1) read the article, 2) sign up for LinkWorth, 3) boost the already well established affiliate earnings for Adesblog.com. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not bashing this type of marketing, or condoning it either. I think as a blogger or website owner you need to decide what type of marketing campaigns and public info you're willing to put out on your site.

I'd also like to point out here that I am in not trying to discredit Adesblog.com either, its a great website that I visit pretty often, and I hope they get some traffic from this post at the very least.

On another note it is interesting to see that LinkWorth actively comments on blogs, if indeed that truly is a LinkWorth representative. Has anyone else had this effect from LinkWorth. Whats you're opinion on them? Do you use other affiliate programs, if so what and why?

Have an opinion on this? Comment below.

Anyway here's the link to the post directly if you're interested in reading it more.

<Edited by Admin>

Upon further discussion with Ades, he was indeed singled out by LinkWorth and used as a promo tool basically. This just further solidifies me on the ex LinkWorth bandwagon. So if you're going to try out LinkWorth just keep an eye on them!