blogvp

It’s 2:10AM as I’m starting to write this and it’s another 1 hour and 50 minutes until my next polyphasic sleeping nap. I wanted to address the issue of 5 Reasons Why Starting a Digital Camera Blog Is A Stupid Idea.

Some time ago, I was reading Darren’s entry on how he became a six figure blogger and I thought: “Cool, all I have to do is start a digital camera blog. Link to all kinds of reviews and sometimes write up my own review and BANG I’ll be a six figure blogger.”

Well, that thought didn’t last long after I realized what it would take to actually pull this off. Why don’t you get a nice beverage and follow what I’m saying here.

5 Reasons Why Starting a Digital Camera Blog Is A Stupid Idea

1. Initial Fire Burns Out Fast - when this idea of starting a digital camera blog entered my mind, I thought it was a huge idea, something like a huge dry forrest of innder fuel to drive me towards the next six-figure blogging success, but that was before I analyzed everything that was involved. And I didn’t try out the idea. Once I did think the whole idea through, and try it out for a week or so, I realized that instead of having this huge supply of energy and drive for this to succeed, my forrest was actually just worth a load of firewood into the fireplace. First realization: I have to make sure that I have enough drive, fuel and desire to at least have me going enthusiastically for six month (after that we can always flip).
2. No Enthusiasm=No Results - I’ve known this before, but somehow it just gets blocked when new things come around. Somehow I thought it would be different with my new digital camera blog. But then I realized that although I loved taking pictures on special occasions and I do own several digital cameras, I wasn’t pumped up enough about digital cameras to be spending several hours per day writing about them. Then I came up with an idea that if I wasn’t going to write about a subject without getting paid for it, I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to continue and shouldn’t be starting a blog devoted to that idea.
3. Too Much Noise In The Market when Darren started his digital camera blog sereral years ago, there weren’t as many blogs about the subject as there are now. The market was not as overpopullated. Now, the digital camera blogs world is oversaturated, with everybody and their aunt thinking they’re going to strike the motherload, but they’re wrong. It’s only a matter of time before they realize what I realized and we’ll have another dead blog. Third realization: research the current field for saturation and potential (without looking through the money lens).
4. Are There Enough Readers? - one of the draw to starting a niche blog in an unsaturated market is that you’ll be the only one or one of the few, so more visitors will come to read what you have to say and interact with your blog and with you. But when you’re starting a digital camera blog, you’re looking at competing with hundreds of other sites for the same visitors. When the visitors visits a niche blog, he didn’t just read the same thing on five other blogs, you’re it, you’re the only provider, so the visitors will be more likely to leave comments and interact with the blogs.
5. Long Term Vision? - Another idea that came to my mind when I was thinking of starting that digital camera blog was if I could see myself running the blog five or ten years from now. I realized that in order to have something that was worth reading and later possibly selling, it would have to be taken care of in the best possibly way, with the long term vision in mind, because if I only thought short term, the product that would come out of it would be somthing I wouldn’t be proud of.

So from now on, whenever I come across a new blog idea, I apply this DigitalCameraBlogCheck before going any further and investing anymore brain power, hope this works for you too.

starting+a+blog, blogging, getting+started

So I’m browsing the regular blogs that I read and I was thinking… what’s a good idea to blog about. A lot of different thoughts went through my head and then I thought about doing a local blog and seeing how that turns out.

What I’m starting is the Boise Real Estate News with the focus on the local real estate market.

Thoughts to keep in mind:

• Visitors - there will be visitors that are local, but I’m betting that a big chunk of the traffic will be people from out of town who are looking to get into the hot Boise real estate market.
• Existing “market” - Overture keywords tells me that there were 5108 for “boise real estate” last month, and this is only for that keyword and only on that engine. How much traffic is google sending?
• Domain name - a quick search revealed that the domain boiserealestatenews.com was available. This was a good choice because it has the main keywords that I’ll be optimizing for in the domain name and the “news” implies something fresh and new all of the time, it’s “news” right?
• Always updating and fresh - I’ve set up a script to automatically pull news from Google:News and format it nicely and put it up on the site. I’m currently sticking to “boise” and “real estate” from the news section of Google. This will make sure that I always fulfill th “news” portion of the domain.
• Original content - I’m thinking of how I might do this. One idea that seems like a good idea is to contact the local real estate agents and ask them to submit article for us to publish and include their information at the bottom after the article. I’ll also look into getting real estate article from ariticle databases.
• Competition for #1 spot - because the real estate is really hot in the boise area there’s a lot of competition, but I’m not worried. Most of the sites are home-brewed with Frontpage or something similar to that. The only thing that is going for the existing sites is that they have been around longer then my site.

There are many different plug-ins for managing images with your Wordpress blog, and I’ve testing most of them. Most of the plug-ins specialize in doing one thing or another, but I came across Iimage-Browser and I like it the best.

Iimage-browser has everything a pro blogger needs.

• Image uploading is done by clicking and your browser, no more using an FTP client to upload - this saves a lot of time
• Automatic resizing, if you want the images to be resized so it’s standard with all other images, this will do it automatically for you.
• Thumbnail creation - this plugin will even create thumbnails for you automatically, very cool
• Generates the code, and automatically inserts it into your post - it’s a breeze

If you’re a Wordpress blogger, you should give it a try.

wordpress, image+plugin

Since the last Adsense note that typography (which is the “study” of fonts) matters a lot in advertising, I’ve been doing a lot of testing and I think I’ve nailed it.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve discovered the exact font and font size that Google Adsense uses, and that is….

H2 bold 11px Verdana

I’m testing this out on one of my blogs and I’ll let report the results here. If you try this, and I recommend that you do, let me know it affects your results.

UPDATE: Admoolah reports you might also try: font: normal 13px/17px arial,helvetica,sans-serif;

google, adsense, adsense+font, blog+design

So I was chatting with some serious bloggers and the discussion came around how would we, as bloggers, fix Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and related services. There was many ideas, I think we came to at least 10 good ideas, but the two at the top were:

• Better stats - fix the stats. Nobody does great stats, at least not with a lot of hacking from the blog owners. What would be nice is for Google to actually reveal more of the stats that they keep on everything and empower us with it. We would be even more happy. Because testing and stats are some of the most important numbers in blogging.
• Provide a server side solution - don’t rely only on browser side JavaScript, give us something that can be embedded in PHP, that way we won’t have to worry about the people that turn off the javascript. And if google or somebody else did provide PHP instead of JavaScript, that would give us more control, and we would be able to track it better for better stats and customize it.

If you have other ideas, please let me know.

google, adsense, ypn, yahoopublishernetwork

Here are some quick examples of how some sites incorporate Google Adsense into their sites. (The wrong/right will be discussed at a different times).

I’ve gone ahead and got screen captures of the sites, since they might change. I’ve also put a red box around the ads so they will be easier to see.

1. Example 1. At bottom, blended with links. Site link here. Screen capture here.
2. Example 2: Blended with links. Site link here. Screen capture here.
3. Example 3: Links with pictures: Site link here. Screen capture here.

adsenseexample, adsensedesign, adsense

If you’re an active web user you probably already have heard about AJAX. I think Ajax is really cool and powerful and nice to play with. Flickr is an example of Ajax, as well as Gmail.

Bloggers pay attention:

Our goal is not have the flashiest site, but the one that works and brings in visitors. So our focus is more on content, TEXT. Text is what the search engines (espcially google) love to eat. That’s what they stive for.

Google and other search engines CAN NOT click on a whole munch of dynamic/javascript links to find your data, they want it up front, easy to access, and searchable by a bot.

Our goal:

If you want to incorporate AJAX or other related technologies, do so, but don’t make it your main content and make sure to have a lot of text and content besides it.

Conclusion:

I’m going to be playing around more with AJAX, but my focus will still be on content/text for attracting the search engines and visitors.

ajax, flash, blogging

Darren has a post about Top 10 Blogging Mistakes. So I quickly changed some of this site to make sure that I didn’t have any of those mistakes.

The tips that I find most useful are:

- Have a bio on the blog, it gives it that human dimension.

- If you’re stuggling with proper titles for your pages, read Slashdot for a week, they have great titles that convey the message clearly.

- You can now read about me. And my picture is up there too.

- I’ve also decided to stay relevant to the message of this blog and not deviate in any different area, which is easy to do.

UPDATE: Jim Kukral also has a few words to say here. (BTW: there is NO place to tell me what Kukral ( the name, not Jim, he’s famous) means or where it came from, sounds very interesting.)

blogmistakes, bloggingmistakes