Tumblr Instant Mini-Blogs
Have you tried Tumblr yet?
The first I heard of Tumblr was when Leo from Zen Habits, kindly linked up to one of my posts using his Tumblr link-roll.
These light weight blogs are very simple to setup and they can be used on a subdomain like yourname.tumblr.com or on your own domain name.
Then just add a bookmarketlet to your browser and in about 2 clicks you can make a new entry to your Tumblr blog. The way Leo has used it is an excellent implementation as a list of note style posts that don’t warrant a full post on your main site.
The next time I heard of them was when Ed Dale began using them for his 30 Day Challenge. Anyone experienced in SEO would have guessed that this link-rich (each post gets it’s own “page” so these mini-blogs develop nice high quality links) platform, hosted on a trusted domain would turn into a spammer target.
It wasn’t Ed’s intention but when he broadcast out to all the 30 day challengers how to get “ranked” in Google for a keyword in about 3 hours using Tumblr, he and his challengers got slapped buy Tumblr.
Besides all the spam drama, Tumblr is a cool new entry into the blogosphere. I’ve created a blog setup notes Tumblr for my Ninja Blog Setup service. I did it as a place to store links like I mentioned above, but if it happens to rank highly in Google and send a little traffic to my main site…well, no complaints. 
You can use just links, or put a full post with an image or videos. Your mini blog has an RSS feed and can also import RSS feeds from other blogs.
It’s worth checking out Tumblr. If you set one up or discover any other cool uses or similar services, leave a link in the comments.
Update: I’ve discovered Jaiku, which is another mini-blog, similar to Tumblr, but Jaiku allows comments.
Oh my God! I’m so tired of reading on the internet!
Here is, verbatim, an email that came in via my contact form. It may be the best one I’ve ever received:
Oh my God! I’m so tired of reading on the internet! Could someone just simplify all these posts and tell me how to blog for money? I wanted to start a blog tonight — just to post musings — and I am so boggled by the blog instructions…
Of course I would like to monetize it! I don’t write humor for free! (All the time! I don’t write humor for free all the time!) Which site should I sign up with?!
There are TOO MANY of these BLOG FOR MONEY websites and they are all confusing.
Why doesn’t someone post the instructions in an easy to read format??!!Anonymous
I’m not really sure how to respond, so I thought I’d ask you guys for help.
In a way “Why doesn’t someone post the instructions in an easy to read format??!!” is what I try and do everyday, so I may not have been the right person to ask.
Do you share their frustration?
Do you know where “the instructions in an easy to read format” are located? Please leave a link if so.
Is it possible to outline how to “blog for money” with a few simple instructions?
For example:
- Choose a lucrative topic
- Post large quantities of significant “above the crowd” articles, images and/or videos
- Get involved in the money flow (usually via advertising) around your topic
That’s as simple as I can put it.
HELP! Please add to the instructions in the comments.
- Jon
Fielding the hard-hitting ‘make money online’ emails, so you don’t have to!
PS. Anonymous, if you find the instructions and do decide to setup that blog, I know a great WordPress installation service you may want to check out.
Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort
Derek Beauchemin ran a very useful series of posts about creating low maintenance and profitable niche blogs that is definitely worth checking out.
My goal for this case study is to build a profitable blog with minimal effort. I will be shooting for a minimum of $100 profit per month after all expenses (including content production costs). The blog should also be sustainable with no more than 1 hour per month of maintenance. The reason I have set the bar so low is because this is meant to be a process that can easily be reproduced, over and over again, for a large collective profit.
Here’s the links to the three stories in the series:
- Case Study: Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort
- Initial Steps For Building A Low Maintenance Niche Blog
- Promotion Goals For A Low Maintenance Niche Blog
I love this tip for choosing a topic:
… a good way to think of a niche is to browse Text-Link-Ads and see which blogs are “sold out†on all their links. That will let you know there are sufficient advertisers available.
Here are my tips that I’d add to the stories:
- Choose really high quality domain names, think re-sell value and long term investment.
- Hire a blogger, not a writer, that way you can include some of the promotional tasks in their job description and they will write posts with outbound links in them, better for building traffic. The cost is about the same and an experienced blogger can do more than a series of static articles.
- Systematize and document the process it so you can repeat is easily and have other people do all of it. The re-invest the profits into another niche.
- Go broad with your topic choice, as Derek has done. It will give you more options for promotion and ways to monetize your site once you’ve built it up a bit.
It’s a good series, some valuable tips for niche blogging and any affiliate marketers.
My Top 5 Hard Earned Productivity Tips
In the past couple weeks I’ve made a big jump in my productivity. It was a conscious choice, and the result of a fair amount of honest self-critique and reflection.
Here are the 5 changes that made the biggest difference.
5. Order and Prioritize your Tasks in Alignment With your Goals
I’m not quite to the point of not checking email, but I have cut it down and I have realized that it was a major energy drain, but it wasn’t the biggest thing holding me back.
The biggest one was that my actions were not aligned with my goals.
First, get familiar with my how to to-do and then you’ll be ready for the second phase of becoming a to-do list ninja.
Take each task and put them in order.
Does More Fun Equal More Money?
I’ve been thinking a lot about “fun” lately. I’ve been experiencing a lack of it in my business. Everything seems to turn a little gray, and I start to notice a distinct lack of creativity.
So I was intrigued when I received an email from Rich Schefren, pointing to a blog post of his called Are You Having Any Fun?
A core problem for a majority of entrepreneurs is that we fail to schedule fun into our day. We do this because we think we will get more done, but in reality this has the opposite effect. We end up becoming less effective, procrastinate more, become less focused, more burnt-out, irritable and stressed.
Most entrepreneurs valiantly squeeze all of the fun out of their day in order to schedule more time at work, as if hours in front of a computer somehow magically translate into additional income. But too much work and too little play has that all too common side effect of “work†time being wasted because we are simply not productive or can’t get started on the big projects.
And then it continues with a business payoff for having more fun:
What Produces the Best Results, Quantity or Quality?
Here’s a post that I found really interesting on CyberCashology called Are You Asking the Wrong Question? The post rambles a bit but here’s the part that rings true with me:
…the teacher of a pottery class split his class into two groups. He told one group their grade would be determined on the basis of the number of pots they made during the semester. The quality of the pots did not matter, only the sheer number of pots created. The other group was told they only needed to make one pot and their grade would be determined based on the quality of that one single pot.
Interestingly, at the end of the semester, the group that produced the large volume of pots also produced pots of much higher quality than the group that was being graded on quality. Who knows why but presumably the group that was being graded on volume didn’t spend any time “thinking about it.†Instead they just started doing and learned from their mistakes until they created high-quality pottery. The other group instead of developing their pottery skills by actually making pottery probably studied all aspects of making high quality pottery. They spent too much time studying and too little time actually doing.
The reason I know that this is true is that I see it all the time on this blog. Often I’ll write a story that I think is fantastic and it won’t get a single comment and seems to be received with a collective yawn. Then I’ll toss something up to fill space because I’m feeling guilty that I haven’t posted in 3 days, and it’ll get Stumbled, commented and picked up by an A-List blogger.
Why is that? I know the pottery example is true, but I haven’t figured out why, and more specifically why we don’t all get it not thinking so much?
Better Than Alexa?
A couple months ago I added Art of Money to the Quantcast system.
Introducing Quantcast Internet Ratings
Quantcast is the world’s first open Internet ratings service. Advertisers can find reports on the audiences of millions of web sites. Publishers can ensure their sites are represented accurately by tagging them for direct measurement. The service is free to everyone.
Now, as I’ve written about before, there are some serious flaws with Alexa as far as rating a site’s traffic goes. The reason it is inaccurate is because it only measures traffic from people using the Alexa toolbar.
Quantcast tries to solve this problem by requiring webmasters to place a piece of JavaScript on their site. This allows Quantcast to measure every visitor to a site and therefore get an accurate picture of a site’s traffic.
The downside, of course, is that they can’t offer a great comparison between sites until every site is being tracked.
The stats are actually quite accurate, and fascinating as they provide quite a bit of demographic information.
The really cool thing about this is if you want to sell advertising on your site, your potential advertisers will be very interesting in this information…which is exactly why the Quantcast system was created.
Take a look at the Art of Money page which has some basic traffic and ranking information on it.
But if you take a look at an top traffic site like ProBlogger, you can see the full power of the Quantcast system.
Give it a try for a couple months and see how your site stacks up. It would be nice if their system would catch on and become a real competitor for Alexa.
Text Link Ads – Don’t Miss the Easy Money
I confess that I haven’t really done any promotion of Text Link Ads even though they really are a killer way to make money. The reason I often neglect the obvious is that I figure my blog is not (by intention) on the cutting edge, so most likely everyone has already heard of these programs.
If you are already one of the many who are already aware of Text Link Ads, you’d probably rather go for a Stumble!
But, as I was doing my financial tallying for July I had two realizations that made me think, “what if there are people who read my site that aren’t using, or haven’t heard of, Text Link Ads?”
My blog is about making money online…It’s my duty to tell you of such revelations!
- In August, on my blog network, Text Link Ads will surpass AdSense as the number 1 income source
- On my personal sites I’ve earned more from Text Link Ads in 2007 than any other single source
Those are two very good, and surprising facts.
Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail
A cliche, and really I confess I don’t like cliches very much. Most of the time they sound great but they’re like telling someone who is trying to lose weight that if they would eat less it would solve their problem; kind of silly. But, of course often very true. Not having a plan is really a lack of belief or commitment.
I confess planning is skill that I have only recently brought into my online business. Let me clarify, not that I didn’t make a plan, I just didn’t follow it. At a certain point I would lose interest, or another plan would seem more worthy and I’d jump ship.
3 Whole Responses
My guess is that the relatively few responses to my “do you follow a plan?” question is probably due to the fact that most people trying to make money online aren’t following a plan (do correct me if I’m guessing wrong – but don’t forget there was a bribe valued at $100 for a decent comment) but how else could all the gurus be selling so many latest greatest ways to make money online plans?
The Folks Who Did Raise There Hands
All three of the responses were excellent, I’m sending a DVD to all of them.
Now I’m conscious that I must have a plan in everything in my life, because if you have a goal and little steps to achieve your goal is the right way to success.
Do you stick to it?
Everyday. 8+ hours a day. When I first started it, it was really rolling. Now, I am having to deal with the other things associated with implementing an idea: new domains, a website, pay processors, sales letters and copywriting, etc. Now I am realizing that the actual conception of the product is not as much work as getting the other stuff around it in place before it launches.
Why do I think it’ll work? Nothing is guaranteed but I have a better shot at it because as Newton says, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. I’m leveraging off existing success stories.
Thanks a lot for the comments. I’m inspired by them. I’ll be in touch to get your mailing address – which I won’t be selling to any third parties.
My Conclusion About Planning
I’ll add planning to my list of topics that everyone knows they should think about more but there is so little thrill in the topic, that no-one bothers.
My current list of these topics:
- backup – disaster recovery
- business systems
- planning
Since none of these topics can be wrapped in a “you’ll make $7000 by Friday” ribbon, they just aren’t sexy enough to get any significant attention.
It’s exciting to create a goal and then sit just dream about it with out putting a plan in place. Don’t forget though, the real Secret, is to take action towards a goal by following a plan.
How to Double Your Affiliate Earnings
This is a really valuable affiliate tip, that is also slightly embarrassing.
One of the first hosting companies that I began using when first started working online was Hostgator. I like them. There are cheaper companies, since they don’t offer a “pay for a year, and save a whack of cash” deal like most companies do, but I’ve always been satisfied, so I’ve always promoted them as an affiliate.
I’ve made quite a few sales for them too.
Today, I was searching through Commission Junction, looking for hosting offers for my new blog setup service site, and was surprised to find Hostgator as one of the hosting companies in their system.
You see, since I signed up as a client with Hostgator, I was given an affiliate link with them as part of my client account.
Here’s the rub, if I use the link I received from Hostgator as their client, I get $50 per referral.
If I use the link from CJ, the payout is $100!
It never even occurred to me companies would run different affiliate payout offers through competing affiliate management sites. When you run a search inside CJ for “hosting” offers, you’ll understand why they do it. The search returns many offers and most publishers will simply sort by payout. The only way to get noticed is to have a high payout.
The first take-away is to shop around for affiliate offers, even to the point of looking for the same company in different affiliate marketing networks.
The second take-away is to use link management software or domains for your affiliate links, so if you do change the offers you are promoting, you can do it in one place and update all the links on your site(s).