sandwichesandapples

I’m only casually interested in the issue of blog advertising. I’ve written on it before here. I’m not sticking ads on S&A and I just don’t care about ads in general. They’re a lousy user experience 95% of the time. Maybe more.

Anyway, a few days ago a pal was telling me he was looking for software to build a social website and I remembered an article I’d just seen in my Reader from Smashing Apps: How to Create Your Own Community Website for Free. I sent it along.

A day later he emailed to draw my attention to the comments section of the article (which I’d have missed since the comments weren’t in the RSS feed version of the article that appeared in my Reader).

Comment by Rubric B on May 25, 2009 @ 11:00 pm
Nice that Boonex happens to be an advertiser for this site. Article seems a little biased: what are the specific “pluses and minuses” of how to use this software?!

Comment by Andrew on May 25, 2009 @ 11:36 pm
@Rubric B… also, check out the URL… looks like an affiliate link to me…

If this is an ‘affiliate article’ then be upfront about it.

Comment by giedrius on May 26, 2009 @ 12:26 am
Whatever you do, do not use boonex. It is poorly written software : your developers will hate you if you will want to customize it to suit specific network needs (aka need extra functionality). We used it for couple projects, and it became usable once we ripped out almost all boonex code.
Also, it has security risks. If you create boonex website, put all mentions of word “boonex” in images, so worms wont find and attack your site automatically. I wrote about boonex in my wordpress blog and see bots searching for boonex on my site with cross-site code exploats.
There are good alternatives for it : elgg, insoshi, or host it on Ning…

Given that information, it does appear that Smashing Apps wrote up a piece of software simply as a quid pro quo to a sponsor. And that just makes me think the article (and others on the site) are bullshit. And that’s a really bad spot to put yourself in as a publication. They could have responded to the comments in the comments or in a separate post but they didn’t.

A week later Smashing Apps thanked their sponsors for the month including Boonex.

I had a former client ask me this question today:

from what you’ve seen in traffic [on his site] what kind of revenue stream do you think is likely with the traffic here?

My reply:

Frankly, I have no idea how blogs make any money. I’ve had modest success with AdBrite.com and Google’s AdSense.com. But on blogs getting hundreds of hits per day, those still only draw about $5 a month, if successful. I think one method blogs have had success with is putting ads in their RSS feeds to serve those users who read blogs in an aggregator like Google Reader. As a user though, I don’t like that experience.

BlogAds.com seems to do very well for certain niche blogs. I know it’s used to great effect by the top gossip blogs. I had some luck with it but to get any advertisers at all, I set my prices as low as the service allowed.

I think an effective strategy is a combination of many efforts. BlogAds, AdSense, Amazon Affiliates. If one jumps out as a money maker, drop the others and hone that one.

It’s a difficult proposition to make money on a blog based solely on traffic. At a BlogCon a few years ago, I sat in a panel with Henry from BlogAds and he was peppered with questions from bloggers wanting to know how to get Levis and Coca Cola to advertise on their blogs. I thought this was the wrong strategy. I just wanted the bar down the street to buy a $10 ad on my music blog. I still
think that sort of local niche could work well for the blog and advertiser. But it’s a lot of leg work for a little money.

I know that’s not a really satisfactory answer. Take my remarks with a grain of salt because I’ve thrown in the towel as far as making money on blogs. To wit, in two and a half years, I’ve never received a payment from Google AdSense because I’ve still not reached their minimum payout.

That said, one place to start would be here: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/. There is a lot of great information about improving your blog’s search engine results. With popularity, there is probably money.

Those remarks are actually tempered. It’s not just that I think it’s hard to make money blogging, I don’t think you should even try. Especially not on a personal blog. But even on single-author blogs that cover a certain “beat” (political blogs, for example), I doubt the efficacy of advertising efforts. Even if they bring in your server costs each month, they’re generally a lousy user experience.

I still use them on sites I create but I usually pick one ad solution and stick to it rather than plaster all sorts of ads on a site. But in those instances, I still don’t like them and wish for a better solution.

I read blogs through Google Reader because I follow more than 200 blogs and I couldn’t do that without using some kind of aggregation tool. One of the great benefits of using Reader is that all the blogs I read are equalized in design — every one is displayed in Google’s default Reader style, not the individual blog’s design. This gives every blog a very plain text feel. (continue reading…)

Finally, my friend asked:

What would you recommend/include in a list of top 5-10 things a blogger needs to know about html? I have plenty of people around me at work that know html well but I’d like to be able to deal with style (like the list question you answered before) and other issues on my own…you know, be somewhat self-sufficient without getting too deep into html.

I think bloggers should understand the basic rules of opening a tag and closing it. A closing tag looks similar to its opener but with a slash in front of the tag: e.g. </strong>. There are some basic tags that I think bloggers should be familiar with: bold (<strong>), italics (<em>), images (<img>) and links (<a>). There are other handy tags like <blockquote> and <ol>, <ul> and <li> that are good to know. (continue reading…)

The next question from my friend is:

What are your thoughts/feelings on Twitter/micro-blogging?

Like any serious web geek, I have a Twitter account. And I’ve posted maybe 5 tweets. I just don’t see a good way to use it for myself.

But I love completely simple web apps that only do one thing. Twitter just isn’t for me… at this time. But at least it’s not another we-do-everything-app like MySpace, Facebook, Virb, etc.

I just had a client meeting where we discussed blogging, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, et cetera — all things to increase their web presence — when I suddenly was able to define exactly what it is that I’ve heard from so many clients:

They want website activity without being active themselves.

I had one client in particular who was very concerned about increasing their website’s traffic, their stickiness, their activity. I made one simple suggestion: blog. “Oh, we don’t have the time for that.”

You can see the paradox.

I know many companies are hiring bloggers and social media experts and I think these are moves in the right direction but I wonder if they’re not corporatizing something that maybe shouldn’t be that corporate. Websites are easy to make look good and function well. But so often we complicate websites (usually at the client’s behest) and make them harder for clients to understand. So clients don’t get it that blogging is totally easy to do, helps their site stay active, improves their search engine ranking, and creates stickiness.