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| Duncan Riley talks about His Experience with TechCrunch and Future Directions Posted: 06 May 2008 01:32 AM CDT Good interview over at BlogHerald with Duncan Riley who today finishes up as a blogger at TechCrunch. The ground covered in the interview is great listening - from how he landed the TechCrunch job, to what it’s like to dealing with the email on such a position, to dealing with trolls in the TC comments, to work/life balance, to working with video, to what he’s doing next (starting a new website at The Inquisitir)… and more. All in all I found it to be a really interesting interview. I found the first half better than the 2nd - but it was all good. Listen to the interview with Duncan here. |
| Where Bloggers Get Their Biggest Levels of Traffic Posted: 05 May 2008 02:57 PM CDT Last week I asked readers about their biggest sources of traffic to their blogs. The results reveal a fairly striking winner - Google.
The comparison between Google and ‘Other Search Engines’ was fairly amazing - but what did interest me was the number of bloggers reporting Social Media sites as their number 1 source of traffic (15%). I’m sure if I’d asked this same question 18 months ago that they would have barely registered on the results. |
| Posted: 05 May 2008 09:11 AM CDT Post Post Post… yawn… Post Post Post… sigh… Post Post Post… eyes glazing over…
Most bloggers who have been blogging for a sustained period of time go through patches where either they feel less energized, inspired or motivated to blog and/or where they sense their readers becoming less engaged or a little bored. This is totally normal and if you feel it’s happening to you at the moment you’re not alone - it happens to us all at one point or another. The key is to get over the hump and keep pushing on because it’s often in these patches that bloggers give up. One of the things that many bloggers find helpful to get them over these times is to start some kind of a ‘project’. You see the problem is that it’s easy to get into a somewhat monotonous cycle with a blog where the posts all begin to merge into one in your mind (and in the mind of your readers) and everyone is lulled into a fairly zombie like state. To snap everyone out of it some kind of ‘project’ can work. By project I’m not thinking of any one thing - but rather some sort of endeavor that is a little out of the blue or different that goes beyond a single post. The idea is to do something that shakes things up a little - for both you as a blogger and for your readers. Let me give you five examples of Blog Projects:1. A Series - perhaps the most common and doable projects for most readers is when they run a series on their blog. I’ve written before about the benefits of writing a series (and how to put a series together) but one of the main things I like about them is that they can help to build momentum on a blog for both readers and bloggers. There’s nothing more motivating for me to publicly say that I’m going to write 5-6 posts on a topic over a week! 2. Competitions - a well run competition can bring a lot of energy to a blog (note the emphasis on well run - I’ve written about how to run successful competitions previously). They can grab attention, draw readers to do something (instead of lurking) and even bring a fresh influx of readers. 3. Reader Project - I’ve run numerous ‘group writing projects’ (and variations of them) here at ProBlogger. You can see how I’ve run them here and here but really there are no ‘rules’ with these types of things and bloggers have run many projects that involve their readers. They key for me is to do something interactive - get your readers doing something, submitting something or engaging with you or one another in some way. 4. Try a New Medium - I can think of two things that I’ve tried for the first time in the last year or so that have brought energy both to my readers and I. They are regular Video Posts and using Twitter. Starting to experiment with a new medium can be a lot of fun and give you a new lease on life (and blogging). The key is to not drop your blogging at the expense of the new thing. I’ve seen a lot of bloggers drop their blogs as they’ve increased their use of Twitter and in my mind this could be something of a mistake. Don’t throw away what you’ve done previously - but use the new medium to build on it. 5. Start an Experiment - this isn’t something I’ve done a lot of myself but I’ve seen other bloggers start ongoing or short term experiments on their blogs. The idea is to announce that you’re starting to experiment with something related to your topic and then document what you find. a recent example that I’ve seen is my brother-in-law Sime who earlier in the week announced his seven day quest to have his photography published in mainstream media. Experiments like these give you motivation to post but can also be fascinating for readers to watch. These five examples are just that - examples of things that I and other bloggers have tried. There are no doubt many more that others could add to the list and I’d love to hear about some of your own projects. What have you tried? What worked? What did you learn? |
| AdSense and Feedburner Ads a Step Closer to Launch? First Ads Seen in the Wild Posted: 05 May 2008 08:33 AM CDT It looks like the integration of AdSense ads into Feeburner feeds is a step closer with reports surfacing that AdSense ads have been seen on RSS feeds that look like this. This ad was seen on the feed of Inhabitat (found via Digital Inspiration). The images are served as image maps not JavaScript. Here’s hoping that this will perform better than the previous AdSense for RSS program that has been in beta for a couple of years now! |
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