Blogging Amateur

On the left-hand side of my blog underneath my labels and personal profile there is a vertical strip of Google Ads. Last time I checked they've generated just a touch under $2 of revenue in about a quarter of a year of blogging. Money this blog does not generate.

Originally, I had a dream of slowly building my blog readership and perhaps turning 5 or 10k in ad revenue every year. Now, just three months into my blogging venture, I could care less about the cash. I'm simply having too much fun writing about what I'm truly interested in. There's no feeling of pressure to produce content that's going to turn a buck for me -- content that may not interest me that much. I've tried that before and those blogs have died a quick death.

Zieak.com's post on how not to make money blogging sounds familiar to me. Point one sums up the state of my blog nicely.

"I write about many different things...So my randomness appeals only to people that know me and wonder what I'm up to."

And even that may be stretching it.

Twither Blogging?

Ruebel explores the possibility of blogging as one of the main forums for personal expression being slowly replaced by social networking and Twitter type sites.

Damn! I was just getting started here.

Full-Time Bloggers

While there are very few people making significant money as full-time bloggers there is a growing trend to hire and retain employees that have blogging skills. The skills desired are writing of course and also maintenance of the blog itself.

One guy's take,

“There’s almost an ecosystem of jobs that have emerged around blogs,” said Paul
Forster, chief executive at Indeed.com, a job search engine with postings from more than 5,000 sources. “It’s an emerging area where there are many more opportunities related to the blog rather than being a dedicated blog writer.”

Perhaps as businesses become more and more enamored with blogging and its marketing benefits, they will create positions within their corporate structure for employees who will blog exclusively. Companies employing such a strategy would have to be careful that these employees wouldn't simply become shills or regurgitating mouthpieces for executive management.

Much of the credibility earned that individual bloggers who write about their companies on their own time is due to the fact that they aren't afraid the criticize their employers. This may be the major stumbling block to effective company blogs in the future. The internet herd can sniff out a bullshitter pretty darn quickly.

shawn bentler...92.3 krock?

Fun news via Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. Google has launched a service, Hot Trends, that captures the most searched for items each day in the Google browser.

Among the top 100 on this day are:

• ship s lowest deck
• french birth certificate
• brian leetch
• lyrics to this is my now

Brian Leetch! I'm assuming the Ranger hockey player from the 90's? It's an eclectic list to say the least. It would be great to see numbers associated with these searches. How many individual searches separate number 1 from number 2? Or number 50 from 100? How about number 100 to 10,000? I have a sneaking suspicion that the list may not mean much in the sense that 100th search on Hot Trends may not have that much more in the way of individual searches then the 1,000th or 10,000th ranked search.

How long until someone games Hot Trends so they can spam the Google browser with searches for an item on their own blog or website?

And tom selleck knocks in at number 90!

Post Lengths

Stew shares his thoughts on how many words your blog posts should average. Graphs figure prominently in his article. ;O)

Daily Blogging Method

D. Rowse shares with us his daily procedure for sifting through all of the web stuff he's tasked to read and track in order to keep his blogging business humming along.

My process is using Google Reader and my Windows favorite folders. Reader is currently holding around 25 websites that generate a couple hundred posts per day. In my favorite folders I have another 40 websites that don't have RSS capabilities.

Having an aggregator for the first time is fantastic. I don't know if Reader's the best out there so I may pick another one to give Reader some competition one of these days.

Analytics Upgrade

Google unveils it's new analytics for blog traffic tracking. Stuart Brown provides the overview.