Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

It’s been a while since I looked at our stats on Feedburner so I was really surprised to see that we’re now sitting at around the 75 mark vs 30 just a few months ago.

Where are they all coming from?

Well, a number of them seem to be various feed aggregator services which have been picking up on a number of my posts in the areas of finance and travel. That in turn is creating a steady stream of new incoming links for the blog. Surprisingly, quite a large chunk are picking up on the sponsored posts which just goes to show that taking sponsored posts is a good thing for a blog (even aside from the money, of course).

Even more surprising though is the rapid rise in incoming links to Whole Earth Guide which is looking like it’ll hit PR3 by Christmas (ie at the next pagerank update).

Having said that, perhaps the most ludicrous figure is the number of incoming links to Crystal Consultancy which despite consisting basically of one page has the largest number of incoming links of any of my sites!

It looks like Pay Per Post lifted their 2 posts a day limit a little too soon as the number of opportunities on offer and the average payout from those available has dropped like a stone.

A few weeks ago, there would typically have been something like 100 posts available with maybe 1/3rd of those averaging around $7 to $10 or thereabouts. However, today there are still only 28 offers and only six of those are more than $6.

In fact, it’s worse than that as five of the six aren’t really available to me and the seventh is already used up.

So, nice idea to move the posting limit up to 3 per day but they need to pull in more advertisers or the whole lot will be cleared out very quickly indeed.

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.