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 dearly love my MacBook Pro, but one thing I’m struggling to find is a good blog editor. By good, I mean as good as Windows Live Writer.

I’ve tried many blog editors for the Mac, but none offer the ease of use and functionality of WLW. I’ve been using Qumana for quite a while and I think it’s the best of the bunch, but it really doesn’t like it when you write a post and save it for later use. At best, it seems to lose all the formatting and, at worst, it loses half the post. Not good.

So, I’m now writing this with WLW under Windows XP using VMWare’s Fusion for Mac. And it works a treat. I’m using it in Unity mode, so WLW just appears as a window in my lovely shiny OSX like any other application.

Yes, it means going back to Windows daily for my posts, but I can live with that with Fusion. At least until something better comes along native to the Mac.

So, over to you! Let me know about all those lovely Mac blog editors that I haven’t found yet!

I’m not sure whether this is good news, or bad, but my lad (who’s 10) has decided to turn his hand to blogging!

He’s blogging on the subject of the stupidity of various decisions at his school. I’ve told him not to use any real names or places!

I know I’m biased, but it is funny (I’ve had a word with him about the typos). He’d be delighted if I could get a few visitors for him, so head over there now and put a smile on his face I’m pretty sure he doesn’t yet know how to track where visitors have come from, although I could be wrong.