Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

One of the hardest parts of blogging when you’re starting out is the complete lack of feedback that you get.

In many ways, at the start it feels very much like you’re writing to yourself because of that. The other problem is that with the lack of feedback, many new bloggers lose the initial enthusiasm leading to the massively high rate of attrition that blogs have in the first three months.

Once you clear that three month hurdle, it seems to get easier though most blogs still aren’t getting much feedback even by that time. What’s different is that by that time you’ve just become too stubborn to stop writing regardless of whether or not anyone seems to be reading it.

However, if you do want some feedback, the easiest way to do it is to mention one of the main blogging sites. The likes of technorati and feedburner do read blogs, or at least the posts that mention them. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that somebody from Feedburner replied to a post I made months ago but then, if you think about it, blogs are their business so they need to read blogs.

Although the vast majority of the paid posts which we do are accepted without any problem, now and again you get a rejection, usually because we’ve missed something or other in the requirements or simply because we’ve mistyped a URL for one of the links.

Fair enough in those cases, and they’re generally easy to fix and resubmit.

What’s becoming more and more common though are rejections because the advertiser decided after he’d bought the advertising that really his criteria for acceptance weren’t those that he had stated originally ie he changes the goalposts. Now I do accept that it can be difficult to know in advance what you really want from a blog based advertising campaign but what’s not acceptable is to put a “ban” on someone who has written a post in good faith.

For instance, I recently received one of these “bans” which stated that my blog wasn’t hosted in the UK and didn’t cover female topics. In fact, it is with a UK host and this just goes to show that the advertiser doesn’t know that 1and1.co.uk actually hosts sites in Germany; regardless of that it is a UK hosting company. No, my blog doesn’t cover female topics but then the advertiser didn’t ask for blogs that did in his requirements, so why should it?

Or what about the one on plastic surgery who decided to pull the advertising after everyone had written about it in their blogs? Why loudlaunch agreed to let them do that, I don’t know.

Finally, there are the advertisers who choose not to approve posts for a very, very long time. This gets them free advertising all that time and they may well not approve the post at the end of it. Both Wendy and me are sitting with a number of posts for well over a month with no pay for them yet. Interestingly, sponsoredreviews only requires you to leave a post online for 30 days, yet how will the advertiser approve such a post if we, as we are allowed to, have deleted it once the 30 day limit is reached?

When Wendy and me started experimenting with the possibilities of running paid posts in our blogs it was just coming into the Summer and all the time it seemed to be a fight to get even a $5 post on some sites.

However, as we edge out of the Summer, we’re now in the situation where there are getting on for a hundred opportunities that are open to us each time we log in. OK, granted maybe half of those are only $5 but just a few months ago we were looking at something like a dozen available at any one time and most were $5. Tonight the first 30 are over $7.

That extra choice also brings the advantages that many more of the opportunities fall into the category of “interesting” and that the wordcount asked for can be as little as 50 words for payouts of $15.

What we’re also learning to do better is to check the opportunities available at an appropriate time. All of the main sites offering these paid post schemes are currently based in America so our original approach of writing the paid posts in the morning isn’t a good move as all we got was the leftovers from the night before. Simply checking in the evening instead pretty much doubled our takings overnight and combine that with the additional opportunities available over the Winter mean that we’re doing even better than that as we get more on top of the best strategies to use with these schemes.

Also starting to become noticeable is that the increased number of postings on the blogs is starting to attract other interest in the blogs. Nothing major from that as yet but ’tis early days.

As we move out of the Summer, the number of opportunities available on the pay per post sites is increasing quite rapidly as indeed is the range to choose from.

Surprisingly, included among this increased number is a large number of tourist/travel related ones which is perfect for me as they’re by far the easiest ones to write and they fit well into the overall theme of this blog too. However, it gets better because a number of them are in areas which I’m developing for our Whole Earth Guide ie people are paying me to write stuff that I’d be writing anyway!

What would be really nice is if I could get some of these folk paying for individual posts to sponsor the guide but perhaps that’ll come in due course. After all, I’ve only just started the first phase of promotion for the guide.

It’s easy to get very blasé about the science and technology that we use every day simply because it’s so familiar to us.

Just about everyone has been on a plane yet only 100 years ago to have been able to fly would have been a truly wonderous thing. About 50 years ago the head of IBM predicted that there would be a need for at most FIVE computers in the world yet many people would have around that number of computers or computer type devices all by themselves, each one of which is much more powerful than the five that IBM had predicted – even the humblest pocket calculator is more powerful than the computers used to land the Apollo spacecraft.

Anyway, to highlight some of these wonders we’ve kicked off a blog which’ll pick out some of these wonders that you probably hardly give a second thought too…. it’s living at An Age of Magic.