Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

If you’re ever leafing through blogs that do sponsored posts there seem to be two basic styles that people use when writing them.

First, there are those which are pure advertising. They have written exactly what the advertiser has asked for and nothing else. Commonly in these you’ll get extensive repetition of phrases along the lines “you must visit this site”, “you really must visit this site”, “this is a great site to visit”. You might think that nobody would do that but that’s taken from a real-life example where those phrases were used in the first, and only, short paragraph about the product. It’s quite clear that the writers of those know next to nothing about the product and they’re a shining example of why google felt it necessary to knock a wide range of blogs down to PR0: they add nothing to the information available on the Internet.

The other type are quite different. Yes, they have the links that the advertisers asked for but they use those merely as starting points to write about the topic. Frequently, you’ll find that these posts are much longer than the length which the advertiser asked for. They don’t scream out “buy this” and often don’t even mention the advertiser by name. In fact, they’re often hardly distinguishable from a normal post on the blog which is really how it should be I think although perhaps some would argue that these are very much subliminal advertising and would prefer not to find at the end of a post that they’d been reading an advert. I don’t agree with that point of view basically because this style of sponsored post tends to be an advert only in name and, by and large, they’re normal posts except that they have a link in them that ordinarily wouldn’t be there.

What’s very common too is that the first style tends to be associated with absolutely dreadful spelling and grammar whilst the second type read more like an article for want of a better word.

Ironically, the first type are more commonly what advertisers want yet the second type are much more effective in providing the in-context links that they actually need. Just as in real-life, people often ask for what they want rather than what they need!

One very easy way to eat up a whole day (or sometimes days) is to start thinking that you’d like a new theme for your blog and then get going on looking through what’s around.

There seem to be thousands of themes knocking around these days and nearly all of them free which makes for something of an overwhelming range of options.

Narrowing them down is far from easy. OK, you can usually rule out those with one column (no sidebars to play with so the screen content seems to go on forever) and four columns (too wide for most screens around these days) but beyond that there’s not much you can do to thin out the numbers.

Sure, they are all tagged with keywords but the relevancy of many of them is very debateable so you end up having to work through large numbers of them to find what you’re looking for. Oh, and do you really know what you’re looking for in the first place?

Finally, there’s the “small” problem that you don’t really know how your blog will look ’til you try out the theme. Net effect of this is that I’ve downloaded about 50 this afternoon and started looking through them.

So far, I’ve a short-list of three for On A Postcard (now flying with the new theme) and something similar for this blog although I’ve not quite got the “perfect” one for Foreign Perspectives yet.

Whilst almost all places listing opportunities for sponsored reviews say something to the effect that they’re expecting good quality English spelling and grammar, it’s becoming increasingly common to see absolutely dreadful grammar being produced by the advertisers themselves.

Consider just a few examples from one recent opportunity which I rejected simply because the English was so bad that I couldn’t work out what their product actually did… “After install and run it on the computer which connecting to projector” which presumably means “After installing the software on the computer, run it whilst it the computer is connected to the projector” and it goes downhill from there. I still haven’t worked out what “Normally, the projector in a meeting room is connected with a computer in default.” actually means nor “Anyone attend the meeting need download a pre-customized client from the company server.” for that matter.

This is from an opportunity currently listed by ReviewMe who usually are pretty good grammar-wise on the adverts.

Now, I accept that it’s written by a Chinese client of theirs but surely the ReviewMe people could take the time to tidy up the English for them? After all, this is a high paying opportunity so they’re going to make quite a bit of money from it.

I thought that it was time I spruced up the look of the blogs that I run so I’ve been looking for a new theme off and on over the last few weeks. Today though was a bit of a marathon session when I picked up over 20 potential themes and am in the process of trying them out on the blogs.

It’s a very easy way to find yourself at the end of the day with nothing of any consequence done as there are dozens of sites listing untold thousands of WordPress themes, the vast majority of which are free.

I’ve barely scratched the surface but to give you some idea of where you can look, here’s very much a partial list of places:

http://www.wordpresstheme.in/
http://www.devhunters.com/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
http://www.wpskins.org
http://www.bobek.co.uk/blog/
http://www.themesbase.com
http://themes.blogflux.com
http://www.themebot.com
http://www.fresheezy.com
http://www.freewordpressthemes.com
http://www.ithemes.org
http://www.themes.rock-kitty.net
http://www.WPThemesFree.com
http://www.web2feel.com
http://www.wordpresswow.com
http://www.themes.iwebnet.org
http://www.themevibes.com
http://www.wptheme.net
http://www.bloggingthemes.com
http://www.wpsnap.com
http://www.freewpthemes.info
http://www.webpuffs.net
http://www.freelayouts.com
http://www.templatenavigator.com
http://www.osskins.com/
http://www.unmatchedthemes.com
http://www.thatsprofound.com
http://themeboss.com/
http://themes.mygreencorner.com/
http://wptemplates.org/
http://www.wpthemesarchive.com/
http://www.themehq.com

Which doesn’t even include the (dire) WordPress theme viewer itself!

One of the problems with paid posting sites is that the majority of them expect you to know how much your blog is worth which, for most bloggers, is the one thing that they know next to nothing about.

That being the case, you often find “high value” bloggers writing substantial posts for $5 when they could just as easily be writing shorter ones for $50. They’re not crazy, they just don’t know what their blog is worth.

So, it’s nice to see that SnapBomb have taken away all that guesswork. Signup with them and within a few minutes their system produces a price range for your blog. Why the range? Well, as they explain on their blog most blogs will have a certain base value but that value can be enhanced if the blog is particularly attractive to an advertiser’s campaign. Thus, you can have a range from, say, $25 to $100. A generic post might get the $25 end of that range but if you’re in the right market segment for a campaign you’d get closer to the $100.

Also good is that signup is pretty much instant and there’s no delay before you can start writing posts for them. Payment is 60 days after taking the post and you’ve 12 hours to do the writing.