Ramblings
Blogrush is Dead
Just a quick note to let you know that the often controversial “BlogRush” is having its life support pulled and as always, the legend John Reese has a few words of wisdom to add about it.
Check out John’s blog post about it at…
http://www.income.com/blog/2008/10/29/the-death-of-blogrush/
I am very impressed when someone is open about something like this and critics beware…. unless you are successful like John then keep your negative comments to yourself. I too have had many failures and each one is a huge lesson learned and made me that much better for the next project.
Online Publishing Is Changing
This is a hugely exciting time to be an online publisher. It used to be the case that if you wanted to earn from ads on your website, there was only one thing to do.
You signed up to Google AdSense, pasted in the code, optimized the units and brought in traffic while following your stats.
You still have to do that. But these days that’s just the beginning.
You always have to mix in Kontera and Chitika, WidgetBucks and ShoppingAds. You have to make room for affiliate links and referral units. And you have to understand the value of video units and gadget ads too.
And that’s just the beginning.
Tips For Creative Use Of Spam Email
If you are like me you probably get tons of spam emails every day. I usually get between 400 and 500 every single day of the week even though I’ve set up several rules in Outlook Express to deal with all of it. I’ve eliminated about 30% of my spam lately with the rules, but lots of it still comes in.
Sometimes I read the subject lines just for a laugh and then delete the long list of emails. But it seems as of late, the subjects have been getting more and more creative with lines on the order of cataclysmic world events, Bill Clinton engaging more deeply in his sordid lifestyle and then the most creative one I’ve seen ever:
Three Reasons Why You Should Network In Person
The Friendship Aspect
First and foremost is the friendship aspect. It is super cool to meet other people in the same field as you. You’d be surprised how quickly friendships spring up among those that you network with.
For example, after your pho meet up (as mentioned before), the Toronto bloggers decided to get together this week again for another meal (Here is the link for the Facebook event. If you’re in Toronto, you should definitely attend!). Our first meet up forged a bond of friendship among many of us. What this does for you is gives you a person to talk to about your industry related questions and even a cool new friend to hang out with and spend some time with.
The point is you never know what kind of amazing people you can meet with networking in person. If you’re shy, try and go out on a limb, it’s definitely worth it.
How To Make StumbleUpon Your Servant
Tried this method before and it worked quite well. Overall I got around 300K legit views, no paid to surf whatsoever. All I did was to use StumbleUpon. Most of you may say that’s normal, to get a couple hundred thousand views from Social bookmarking site. I don’t think so, simply because I don’t take StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking site. SU is totally different from Digg and the users are also more subject based. Unlike Digg, user sees whatever that is on their frontpage. It’s almost like a visit to the toilet for digg, come in and go.
What’s The Magic?
I tested this on my site letscafe.com. Basically I treat every post as potential viewer subscribing to my content. The content you show on your site reflects what your site is all about. From my experience, funny stuff does really really well on StumbleUpon. All you need to do is post some funny stuff once a week and wait for the magic to begin. Like I said, your content reflects your site. So don’t overdo it or people would think your site is suppose to be a humor site (That’s the last thing you want). To make sure that doesn’t happen, title your post something like “Your Site funny moment of the week” as an example.
