Blogging

December Competition

Posted on December 4, 2007
Filed Under Monthly Competition | 3 Comments

Well, following November’s successful competition here at Blogging Web 2.0 it’s time to announce the competition for December!

As I won Monika’s competition at her Writer’s Manifesto Blog for last month, I decided to recycle the prize money and put it up here – in stages. I’m a great believer in giving back what I take out, so it seemed a really useful way of using the money rather than simply spending it on myself (ok, that’s also a nice thing to do with money…).

As the success of this blog is more important to me than a few case-loads of beers (aw, I like beer!) I talked it over with Monika and we decided that the best way to go would be to keep the competition the same for this month and keep attracting new guest bloggers to participate by posting as many (relevant and original) articles here as they can and the one who posts the most by midnight GMT 31st December 2007 will win the money. Simple!

How much money?

Well my first impulse was to put up the whole hundred, but then thought it would be better to split it over two months. That’s because Monika has put up the prize money for the first two months here and its well and truly my turn to do the same.

But…

This blog is still young and isn’t paying for itself yet. While it has done phenomenally well in it’s first two months of existence, it still needs more readers and contributors to push it along. It’s only by increasing our traffic stats sufficiently will we warrant touting for some advertising revenue to start making it pay. That will come soon enough as long as we keep working it as hard as we are and promoting it to the outside world as we’re doing.

So we decided it would be best to spin the money out over 3 months with December and January prizes at $30 and February at $40.

In three months we aim to be generating sufficient income from this blog so that further competitions will be sponsored from it’s own earning rather than from our own pockets – the way a business should be run!

So we ask all our current guest bloggers and friends to join in and post away as before and tell your blogging friend about us so more will join in the fun!

Remember, each post you publish here gets you a one-way back-link to your site. We’re already PR2 and the way we are going that will increase with the next round of Google page rank reshuffles so your existing as well as future links will grow in value as this site does. Plus as our traffic grows, more people will see your work and some to your blogs to see more, so everyone benefits from this.

So please get posting and anyone reading this who hasn’t already joined in, feel free to jump on board!

Monika and myself look forward to you joining us!

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.o

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Blogging and Wordpress

Posted on October 5, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | 3 Comments

www-with-reflection.jpgAs a blogger we need a suitable platform to express our inner most thoughts or so they say. It certainly is true that without a blogging platform there won’t be any blogs. And with the multitude of available platforms out there it is sometimes hard to choose which one is best for you. I have tried to compile a list if available choices but recommend that you do some research on the ones that are of interest before you step head first into a possible disaster.

Alternatively you can just start out here to try out blogging. Starting a blog needs a bit of prior planning as you don’t want to make the same mistake I did. I have started and stopped about 6 blogs all up since late 2005 until I decided to get serious with my Manifesto Blog. The thing is that if I had started right all that time ago, I would now have some serious page rank as well as opportunities to monetize the blog.

I have found Word Press to be the perfect vehicle for my blogs. The navigation is easy to understand and after the initial “getting to know phase” I feel right at home with any Word Press theme. Word Press and Blogger are the number one choice for most bloggers and each one has its own advantages.

I found that with Blogger it is easier to get started and design a blog initially.

With Word Press it takes a bit more time to get to know how it all works but therefore there are way more options in the back admin section. Plus configuring a Word Press Blog is not too hard once you learn a bit of html and php.

Before you jump onto a paid blog it would be advisable to get your feet wet with a trial. Even if you just sign up and muck around with the admin section trying to style things with html. Practice is the best way to learn and will get you to be able to design the blog of your dreams eventually.

Anyway, blogging is time consuming and fun if you are passionate about it like Terry and me. The beauty about free blogging platforms is that you can get your feet wet before you get serious.

Happy blogging

signature.jpgMonika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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What’s in a Page Rank?

Posted on September 29, 2007
Filed Under Promotion | Leave a Comment

Page Rank is a pretty important topic in the blogging world, especially with regards to those bloggers who are, or in the near future intend to make money from their blogs.

For the rest of the world wide web, page rank has been the theme of many a discussion as to its merits, usefulness, value or otherwise. Many website owners dismiss page rank as irrelevant to their businesses, whereas others covet a high page rank in order to secure lucrative advertising deals in the ongoing quest to make money from their online endeavours.

From a blogger’s point of view, then, how important is page rank?

That depends on what you want your blog to achieve. If you are using your blog solely for keeping an online diary of your life and actions to share with friends and relatives, then you probably couldn’t care less about page rank. For that matter, terms like SEO, back-links, web 2.0 or much of anything else related to promotion and marketing are probably of about as much interest as a central heating system would be to a homeowner in Darwin.

But if you are working hard at your blog with the intention of using it to make money online, then a good page rank is one of your top wish-list items. That’s because the advertisers who will likely fund your online enterprises when your blog has matured will be more likely to part with more funds from their advertising budget when you are the proud owner of a high page rank. Of course, other factors will also sway their decision. Rankings from Alexa and Technorati also play a role in the final decision as to how much your blog’s advertising space is actually worth to advertisers. That’s because they all give a good pointer as to how much traffic your blog is receiving.

The more traffic you can prove your blog is attracting, the more your advertising space is worth.

Simple economics, really.

It works just like a magazine. The higher the distribution and readership of a magazine, the more they can charge for advertising space. That’s because advertisers are willing to pay for exposure. The greater the exposure and the more people that will see their ad, the more they are willing to pay, because they know that they will recoup that cost many times over in greater sales figures.

So when you are blogging to make money online, especially from potential advertisers, your page rank does count. It can make the difference between driving out of the car showroom in a top of the range Mercedes or a basic bottom of the range runabout.

Now which would you prefer to be riding around in?

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

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Building a Social Network

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Social Networking | Leave a Comment

Blogging for yourself is a fulfilling pastime, but as in every blogger’s life you’ll get to the stage when you want to have your blog visited and read by a wider audience than just your auntie and those mischievous kids next door who have managed to hack into your wireless network!

One very positive way of spreading the word about your blog around to a wider readership is to build a social network of other bloggers by getting out there and visiting them! Of course you need to do a little more than just visit, but that’s the way to get started.

By visiting other blogs, you’ll get to find some that are written on a similar theme to yours. Of those, some will be good, well written and updated often while others will be less well written and their posts will be erratic with long gaps in between. Well, then you start making notes of the good, the bad and the downright ugly amongst other blogs that you visit yourself.

The good blogs, or those that you would be proud to have hosted yourself, you bookmark and plan to revisit. The others you simply scrap and don’t go back.

That way you gradually build a list of good, well written and obviously enthusiastically hosted that are relevant to your niche. These are the bloggers that will form your new social network. When you return to each of these blogs, you spend more time reading through the posts and when you find one that spurs your imagination - leave a comment! Make sure you put your own blog’s link in the relevant box so that the blog owner knows where you’ve come from and then go on to the next. You then repeat the process.

Don’t expect much response to begin with, although if the bloggers that you visited are really enthusiastic about their blogs then they will see your comment and will probably come and visit your blog out of curiosity. If they like your blog, they may even leave you a comment on one of your posts!

If you keep this up, you’ll gradually build a rapport with the owners of the blogs you frequent and may even be invited to write a post as a guest on their blogs. Then you’ll know you’ve achieved what you set out to do - you’ve built your own social network of bloggers and by continuously widening your sphere of blogs your social network will continue to grow along with your readership.

Easy, when you know how!

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.0

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