blogging

This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately in relation to my biggest blog - FlightSimX. I’ve included a screenshot below, so you don’t need to visit the site to see what I’m referring to.

Now, the biggest “problem” for me is that dirty great AdSense ad right under the post title. I’ll be honest, I don’t like it being there. So, a few days back, I decided to move it to where the video is in the screenshot. To me, this made the site look a lot neater. The post itself consisted of, well, just the post, with no embedded ads. The problem is, people stopped clicking on the ad. Additionally, having closely monitored my stats for those few days, it seemed to make absolutely no difference to visitor numbers or the time those visitors spent on the site. Given that the ad revenue dropped to around 5% of what it was, I moved it back and now the ad revenue is back to where it was before the move.

Initially, I thought I was kind of not being true to myself. Here I was, deliberately “breaking” what I thought was a nice design to maximise revenue. But then I thought about it a little further. How often do I “read” my own blog? Sure, I look at it multiple times per day. I look at it to make sure the post I just made looks okay and to make sure I haven’t broken it with any recent modifications, but I don’t “read” my own blog.

I write the blog for other people to read. Given that my readers didn’t seem to mind the ad being there (using the stats as a guideline), I figure that that should be good enough for me.

So, a question for you all. Have you designed your blog so it looks good to you, or have you designed it to generate the maximum revenue?

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. I’ve been curious what would happen if I created a blog where anyone could write content for it, on any (legal) subject. It takes guest posts to the extreme in that the entire blog will be comprised of guest posts.

So, I’ve created It’s Your Blog. Head over there now to find out what it’s all about and be the first to post an article. If it gets big, you could be famous (well, maybe semi-famous) for being the first

Spread the word, Digg it, Stumble it, Mixx it, do whatever you want with it, but tell EVERYONE!

Darren from ProBlogger has come up with another great idea - an unofficial Blogger Appreciation day.

It’s all too easy to read all those posts every day in your favourite RSS reader without giving any real thought to the time and effort that has gone into them. As bloggers ourselves, we should appreciate it more than anyone, but it’s all too easy to take all that data and insight for granted.

So, I’d like to publicly say a big thanks to Darren for all his past work. I’ve incorporated many of his tips into my blogs and always look forward to reading his posts.

In addition to Darren, I’d also like to say thanks to some of my regular reads:

• Lorelle on WordPress
• Lifehacker
• TechCrunch

Thanks for all the daily info, folks and keep on blogging!

I was yesterday lucky enough to have my very first Guest Post published on ProBlogger.

The article is titled Pros and Cons of Niche Blogging and covers pretty much what you’d expect with that title. Being the author of 6 mostly niche-subject blogs, I figured I’d picked up a few tricks over the years, so it seemed the ideal subject. It’s attracted 24 replies so far, which I’m very happy with.

If you ever get the chance to create a Guest Post on a popular blog, I’d thoroughly recommend it. As you might expect, it attracts a few people to your site but, more importantly, it gets your name around and can also open the doors to a few new contacts. I’ve already had people contact me directly as a result of that one post.

Many thanks to Darren of ProBlogger for giving me the opportunity.

If you’d like a perfect example of why should think long and hard before leaving your blog in the hands of Guest Writers, take a look at the storm created over on TechCrunch when one such post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg apparently made it onto the very popular (one of my regular daily reads) tech blog without first being checked over by the blog owner.

Michael’s obviously keeping an eye on his blog whilst away, but not closely enough. His response was “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.”