Nick’s

I just recently purchased some books from amazon that are all web related and thought I would write a summary/review of one of them that I purchased which is the problogger book.

Introduction
The book is by 2 different bloggers: Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. This section talks about how they got into blogging and how it is usually never an overnight success in the blogging world.

Darren: Worked multiple jobs while he started blogging until he could finally become a full time blogger. Had multiple blogs running and his most successful project would be problogger.net , he also co-founded the b5media network which is a network of bloggers.

Chris: Mainly an IT guy that ran a science fiction web site, personal web site and various other sites. Played around with building affiliate marketing websites, freelance writing and programmer training. Most popular blog would be performancing.com and he has a personal web site at chrig.com.

Chapter 1 - blogging for money
General overview of what a blog is and how it is different from a regular web site. Things such as it is updated more often and typically encourages user interaction in the form of users commenting. Various benefits from blogging such as fame, networking, making money and traffic. Different monetization methods for blogs such as affiliate marketing, adsense, paid reviews, sponsorships, and advertising. Indirect monetization methods such as your own freelance work, advertising yourself to be a speaker, consulting opportunities and various other services that you can advertise on your site. Breaks down the different reasons people blog and which advertising method will work best for your particular blog. Measuring a blog’s success using various methods and metrics such as unique visitors, trackbacks, feed readers through feedburner, search engines and technorati.

How to make a blog appealing by taking a look at blogs you like and answering the following questions:

What does and doesn’t appeal to you?

What content does the blog provide?

How often is the site updated?

What reaction is the blog looking for from readers? Shock, amusement, happiness..

Blog Tools mentioned: http://technorati.com/ | http://tools.seobook.com/ | http://www.seomoz.org/tools | http://www.alexa.com/ | http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/

Chapter 2 - niche blogging
How to define your niche in the blog world and make sure that you will be interested in the long haul with your specific subject. It is important to define your niche because from a reader’s perspective they are probably not interested in the exact same subjects as you. They may be interested in xbox 360 pages and first person shooters or sweet games like GTA IV! but that same reader may not be interested in hiking or parenting. This way if you are able to make your audience more specific then it helps when the reader is going through your articles. Other benefits to having a niche blog are having a community that is already devoted to your subject to connect through your site, specialized authors, more specific advertising, direct ad sales since you have a general idea of the audience, easier to rank higher in search engines since it is a more defined subject, can always expand into a closely related niche if you find there is enough to write about. Things you have to keep in mind though when coming up with your niche are

How interested are you in the topic?
How long will the topic be popular or is it at the moment?
Is it’s popularity growing or shrinking?
Is there someone else already blogging about this or what other similar competition are you up against?
Will you have enough content to write for at least 6 months?
Is there a way to make money out of the niche?

Tools mentioned: AdWords | Google Trends | Technorati | Google Blog Search | Wordtracker | Yahoo Buzz

Cool tip that isn’t in the book or so far at least. Go to google alerts and setup an alert with your domain name in the alert or your name or any other piece of information you want to track. Pick a type and then have it emailed to you however often you want. This helps in monitoring activity and buzz around your blog and specific topics.

So far I like the read and I’ll post more when I have time.

When first posting your feed to igoogle it takes a little while for it to pull in new posts that you write. Unless you are digg, engadget, or some other already well known and highly visited site. When you first put your site feed on igoogle it can take anywhere from 4-72 hours and then as time progresses you should see faster updates to your igoogle rss widget for your feed. Just make sure that the url you are using for your feed is getting updated when you have new posts to your blog/cms/application.

Xmap is a very useful sitemap component for joomla which basically lets you generate a sitemap out of your menus. You can choose to use all of the menus or just your main menu, whichever works best. You can then link to the sitemap component from a menu item and see a sitemap in a human friendly form on your site. Xmap also generates the xml version for search engines such as google and yahoo. It isn’t extremely obvious where that is located at since it isn’t sitemap.xml so I thought I’d post it to save someone the hassle of looking for it. It should be here…

http://mysite.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&sitemap=1&view=xml&no_html=1