Archive for: make

How To Make My Blog Stand Out From The Crowd?

Yesterday I was having a great conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick (Vice President of Content Development at RWW, not sure what that means) about how to get your blog noticed in the current environment. The discussion started with me posing the basic question “how can I get my blog noticed because we seem to be producing very good content but not getting the rewards”?

It was first mentioned that Problogger is the best source for this information on the web, however I have been reading his site for many years now and most of the content seems to be getting a little reproduced. Additionally, Problogger talks a lot about social media and how to use it to your advantage, but these days everyone has been reading those articles for year and most bloggers use StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Buzz and other very proficiently. If most bloggers are using these tools to their advantage then you still have the same issues, how to stand out from the crowd?

I know that here in Europe a blog that has been on the rise lately is TheNextWeb, but I know these guys have been writing that blog for several years now and they also have one of the best technology conference on the mainland of Europe. Therefore if I want to improve my readership it is a little difficult to just start a conference, or is it worth adding some add-ons to the site such as job board, marketplace or others?

Content is also a major player in this issues, cause most good bloggers say that content is king. However, I think that content is king when you are either a small blog or a large blog, but definitely in the middle content isnt king and it is all about promotion and push.

This is main problem with web 2.0, noise! Currently, there is just simply so much noise in most niche’s, so why instead of writing individual sites and keeping a little revenue, maybe the plan should be to join forces with other blogs and create a larger blog and take a smaller slice of a much larger pie.

I propose this question to you, “how can I get my site to stand out from the rest, especially considering we produce amazing content that is much better than the majority of our competitors”?

The Blog Sale Rush… Are You Next!

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?