Crenk

Tom over at the income diary has been keeping track of all the incomes from some of the worlds top bloggers. These income lists have always interested me, because I just dont understand why people actually believe these stats and think they can emulate them. The blogs dont seem to explain what sites are fully involved to make this income because with some of them it is from their own blogs, but others its from numerous blogs. I also reported about this topic back in December to work out if you thought these figures were fact or fiction. Im still not convinced either way.

The top bloggers by monthly income:

Over at the Spinning Around blog, James has a great list he is keeping up-to-date of the top UK Marketing weblogs. The list is based upon the AdAge Power 150 and I have attached his most up-to-date list from the 1st May.

If you feel that you should be included, you can get in touch with Ad Age here, who will sort you out. As soon as you’re in, I’ll pick you up in this filleting of the AA chart.

I really looking forward to seeing if James make a nice badge for the sites on the list. I would be sure to place it on Crenk.com. Also, im a little surprised that James doesnt promote the list a little more on his site, because it is a big draw point to the site.

I also just wanted to point out that I came across another great blog that is not UK based, but i thought was worth a mention, DailyWritingTips. There currently is a post that is rising on digg, 44 resume writing tips.

The BBC has long been toying with the idea of blogs. Today SixApart have announced as a nice piece of PR that they are running the blogs for the BBC on their software. The blogs themselves are for individual shows and for individual people. Each blog has its own distinct style and design. As a collective the design really lacks imagination and format. If you would like to know where you can find this lack of imagination please head to the blog network home page.

Im not too sure if i should really write about Crenk’s competitors, because giving them some extra publicity for free is never a good idea. However, i really wanted to run through some of my favourite technology sites and let you know which ones are actually worth reading and which ones arent.

Currently, here at Crenk we have already compiled a Crenk-ed List, which lists some of the best sites on the net. I just wanted to take this a little further and tell you more about some of these sites and others.

Technology News and Analysis:

This area of the blogging world is centered around several key sites and there doesnt seem to be many new up and coming blogs. The leaders are Techcrunch, Silicon Alley, Read/Write Web, Mashable, VentureBeat, Gigaom and Webware. Recently, we have also seen the demise of Mykinda and Blognation. There arent too many blogs on the rise and starting to compete with the big boys, but the main new site is CenterNetworks. CenterNetworks has recently taken on a few more contributors on a frequent basis and im sure brings in a nice income for Allen Stearn.

There are also lots of the older sites out there that seem to be in decline, for example Rev2.org and Programmable Web.

Web Product Analysis:

Currently, this niche is quite easy to get into and there arent too many major players in this area. There are 2 sites that really seem to be growing very quickly at the moment and thats MakeUseOf and Sizlopedia. Both of these sites have seen great growth in the last 3-6 months and i can seeing this continue and possibly overtaking some of the larger technology news weblogs.

Technology Ramblings:

There are so many tech gurus out there with blogs who just like talking about crap. Examples are Scoble, Calacanis, Battelle and Feld. Are any of them actually worth reading? Hell Yeh! However, i am also really keen to see a collaboration by such a-listers. That would be a must read and would provide a entire discussion area in one simple site.

This all being said and done there has been a lot of discussion last week about comment Michael Arrington from Techcrunch made about getting a few high profile blog sites together and taking the market by storm. I think he was a bit ambitious about some issues, but overall it is a good idea and up until now there has been no collaboration between high profile bloggers. With more and more blogs coming into the blogosphere everyday, collaboration and networking is definitely the way forward. So look out for some of these high profile blogs mentioned to start combinding their efforts.

Today Forbes.com have officially announced the creation of a Business and Finance Blog Network, comprising of a community of pre-screened, influential business and financial blogs.

The network will allow advertisers to target a highly engaged, exclusive niche audience of senior business decision makers and affluent investors easily and effectively. Four hundred-plus blogs have already joined the network, with many more expected to sign on before the official launch in the next few weeks.

Nick Ricci has been appointed General Manager, Sales. He will be responsible for overseeing the sales, marketing and promotion for the Blog Network as well as the Forbes Audience Network (FAN), which launched in November 2007.  Nick joins Forbes.com from About.com, where he served as Senior Vice President, Sales and Ad Operations. He has also held senior sales management and marketing positions at Times Mirror Magazines, Cox Interactive Sales, and Hachette Filipacchi Media US. Nick is already in the process of hiring and building a dedicated network sales team.

“I’m thrilled that Nick has joined Forbes.com to oversee the sales efforts for the Blog Network,” added Spanfeller. “He is a seasoned executive with several years of sales and marketing experience who will play a key role in driving the network’s success.”

Crenk is one of the four hundred blogs that has already signed up to the Forbes.com network. Im not too sure how the network will perform, but the expectations are high and from all reports so is the CPM rates that we can expect. Overall, this initiative seems to be a step forward for Forbes, who are trying to cash in on selling advertising across their network and then potentially grabbing millions more impressions from these blog partners.

Over the last few weeks there has been a surge of blog sales at various prices, but will your blog be next and what will your site actually be worth.

We have seen the Bloggy Network sell off their most popular blogs to Splashpress Media (Bloggy now to focus on Blogflux), Blogging Fingers sold for $6000, Ryan Shamus sold for $2500, OneMansGoal sold for $8500, NxE sold for $8200 and Shylock Blogging for $4000.

These sites have had a great mixture of statistics with relevance to visitors, pageviews, subscribers and blog life. At present because of this a lot of bloggers are trying to work out how these blogs have be evaluated, with mixed views. 45n5 divides subscribers by the sale amount and then average the amounts per subscriber, thus averaging about $30 per subscriber. This $30 per subscriber seems to be a great amount to judge if you should place advertising on your site for the little income in the short term compared to the value you will have from subscribers in the long term.

If you site currently has 100 subscribers and has been making $200 per month ad revenue, but your subscriber growth has been slow. Wouldnt it be a better idea to remove the ads if your goals are set beyond 6 months so that you can allow subscriber numbers to grow at its full potential. There is no point monetizing your blog as much as possible in the early days unless you are looking for an income or getting ready to sell.

Additionally, how come there isnt a place online that specifically provides auction space for blogs that are trying to sell?

I have been reading Techcrunch today and Duncan Riley talks about Scoble and some comments he made about the new Techmeme Leaderboard. Scoble said that the leaderboard would the death of blogging. Duncan has tried to comment by arguing the point that most of the leaderboard are actual blogs, well 64% in his words. All this is pretty much irrelevant on what percentage are actual blogs or not, because is it still classified as a blog if there are more than one author?

Overall I just think the list is pointless and it just boosts the ego of the few that are on it! It has the same relevance as most of the lists you see around the place about the “top 50 bloggers” or “top blog awards”. Pointless!

In this day and age there are so many technology weblogs out there, how do you know which ones are worth reading and which arent and dont some of these tech blog combined to strengthen their push power.

I have long been toying with ideas of how to expand Crenk and which areas will actually help readers in the overcrowded space that is tech news. There are a few ideas I will be exploring over the next few months but for the time being I am looking for some writers interested in either Guest Blogging or Lead Writing on Crenk. If you might be interested please let me know via our contact form.

Anyways back to which tech sites are worth reading. There are really 10 or so big tech news sites that are really driving traffic numbers at present, but how does a smaller blog break into the market? Techcrunch, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are all growing fast and they are based around very professional writers and good journalists. Here at Crenk we would like to compete on traffic numbers with the above 3.

If you have a smaller technology blog and would like to help build the next large Technology Blog site, then please let me know and submit your articles or becoming a fulltime writer. With every article you submit, if the material is used you will receive credit for the article and links to your site.

I love people that come up with ideas like this and instead of trying to complicate it they just provide the basics. Feedjit provides real-time traffic data on your blog. It is so simple im sure my little sister could even use it. Just cut and paste in the code into your site and it is ready to go. There is no registration and it’s completely free. They also track popular links across blogs, so if your site is the first to link to a popular site, your blog may appear on their home page, which im sure is not going to boost your traffic, but it is just a nice touch.