Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Yahoo has launched a Digg clone called Yahoo Buzz

Mar 04, 2008 No Comments »

Maybe it’s an old news but I just came across it. Yahoo too has jumped on the social bookmarking websites bandwagon and has launched Yahoo buzz, a website where feeds are ranked according to the votes they get. But the ranking of the feeds not just depends on the number of votes they get, it also depends on the number of times the feed is searched for or recommended by e-mail. According to the grapevine right now Yahoo buzz will feature feeds only from the members of the Yahoo publishing network but I’m not sure how much of this is correct. Anyway, we will keep on seeing such websites popping up with greater regularity whether they succeed or not.

New York Times has launched Baghdad Blog

Feb 28, 2008 No Comments »

The New York Times recently launched a new blog called Baghdad Blog to enable its reporters from the Baghdad bureau to directly interact with their readers. One of the introductory posts says:

The Baghdad bureau of The New York Times serves as both home and office for 7 to 10 Western reporters, photographers and videographers, who work with a large Iraqi staff of reporters based in Baghdad and other cities across Iraq.

We talk with our Iraqi colleagues morning and evening about the problems they face in their neighborhoods, their dreams and those of their families. At night, staff members gather for dinner and discuss the news of the day: How close was that explosion heard this morning? Which military unit is finally going home? What is life really like in certain parts of the city and in the countryside? This blog is an attempt to include readers in our conversations.

War or peace, or rescue, blogs are continuously bringing people closer to each other. Today’s irony though, is, we don’t talk to our neighbors but we regularly interact with people, through our blogs, with people from other continents.

Should You Purchase a Popular Blog Just Because It Is Popular?

Sep 28, 2007 2 Comments »

A popular blog — NorthxEast — is for sale and bidding is going on. I was just wondering if someone buys this blog finally, what benefits would it bring to the new owner. Currently its strengths are:

• An established brand
• Lots of RSS subscribers
• Some great posts by the likes of Leo Babauta.
• Steady traffic

A blog, especially of the NorthxEast kind, is an extension of the bloggers who write for the blog. For instance, it is not just a post, but a post by a blogger called Leo whom people adore, or at least have strong feelings for. Once with the new owner, will the content go through some change or will it have the same orientation? What about the writers; will the same writers still be writing the same kind of stuff.

And what about the monetary performance? I have no experience regarding this but with 75,000 unique visitors per month, $175 per month as revenue is a bit low I would say even by my own blogging standards. 75,000 visitors means on an average 2,450 visitors per day. Recently I started (due to a fluke of course) drawing around 1,000 visitors per day at Writing Cave and that started generating around $5-$10 everyday with just Google AdSense. Since I don’t write there regularly and promotion of any sort is non-existent the traffic has come back to 150-200 per day.

So given the high popularity and a bit low revenue generation of NorthxEast does it make sense to buy it just because it is very popular? It depends how you look at blogging.

If blogging is merely a business opportunity for you then you have a 50-50% chance of making NxE a success. You’ll need to keep the momentum and if your revenue sources remain the same then you’ll have to increase the traffic multiple times of its current number to make some decent money. You can also explore other revenue sources and you’ll need to sell your blog to the advertisers more aggressively. You can also change the nature of the content. Most of its content, although very well-written, I’m afraid, is not unique. For instance, Maki’s blog has very unique, useful content most of the time and people can implement his suggestions immediately and improve their blogging performance. By the time people — people who really click the ads — reach NxE they’ve already read the stuff and so go quickly through the post, comment if they want to, and move on.

If blogging is a passion for you and you want to leverage NxE’s popularity I think then too, if you have lots of disposable money ($5,000-$15,000 is lots of money for me) then you should go ahead and buy the blog. You’ll have a ready platform. Just be sure the quality doesn’t suffer. There will surely be a sudden drop in traffic but I don’t think the RSS subscribers will unsubscribe en masse just because the ownership has changed. Provide them good posts to read and they’ll keep on reading.

Apart from that, if you have money but no blogging passion, don’t buy it. You’ll just waste a nice blog, and the effort that has gone into it.

Technorati Tags: northxeast, blog selling, popular blogs

50 Most Influential Blogs

Sep 12, 2007 6 Comments »

What influences you is a highly personal choice but there are things, personalities and events that affect a multitude of people and that’s what encompasses the NxE’s list of 50 Most Influential Bloggers and I think all the bloggers in the list deserve to be there. My personal favorites are:

• Neil Patel — SEO
• Leo Babauta — Personal development
• Rand Fishkin — SEO
• Om Malik — Technology and gadgets
• Brian Clark — Copywriting
• Pete Cashmore — Technology, Internet, SM, etc.
• Darren Rowse — Earning money from blogging
• Gina Trapani — Personal development and life improvement

There are some other great blogs but I hardly read even these regularly. I don’t get to spend much time on blogging (I’m desperately trying to change that) and whatever time I get I prefer writing posts rather than reading other blogs and interacting on them (hence, lack of traffic).

Technorati Tags: influential bloggers, top bloggers, blogging

People still don’t get blogging

Jul 10, 2007 4 Comments »

Blogging is a conversation. Also it helps you establish yourself as an expert — if you want to, that is — but otherwise, blogging mostly helps you articulate your thoughts without the corporate balderdash. Blogging in no way makes you less of an expert as claimed by Jacob Nielson. He says this on his web page (I won’t call it a blog post) that blogs are just for cheap products:

Weblogs have their role in business, particularly as project blogs, as exemplified on several award-winning intranets. Blogs are also fine for websites that sell cheap products. On these sites, visitors can often be easily converted and the main challenge is to raise awareness. For example, a site that sells pistachio nuts should post as much content about pistachios as possible in the hope of attracting quick hits by people searching for that information. Some percentage of these visitors will buy the nuts while visiting the site.

I think he gets this impression because he hasn’t visited some quality blogs. Even Google has an official blog and Google is in no way a cheap product. Anyway, that’s not the point.

He says you should write in-depth articles instead of writing blog posts because articles are well-researched hence are more credible. This is a silly assumption. Just because it is a blog post doesn’t mean it is not serious stuff. Many people spend hours researching for their blog posts. The basic point is, blogs are highly interactive, and people who fear interaction, fear blogging. Conventional journalists snigger at blogging because it allows readers to ask questions. Through a blog you can question the authority of the “expert” and you can also offer an alternative point of view. The old-school writers don’t like being questioned because they are not confident about their own facts and theories. The lack of communication tools used to shield them against direction questioning. Blogging demolishes that shield. Only a very confident person uses blogging to express his or her expertise.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog publishing, blog writing