Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

Three Kinds of Blogs: the Passion, the Job, or the Splog?

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Having browsed quite a few blogs over the last few months, I’m beginning to find that many blogs fall into three categories, and three categories only:

1. the Passionate Blogger: Done by someone who cares for their subject, the main focus of their blog, someone whose passion shines through in their blog writing, their detail, etc..

2. the Business Blogger: Written by someone who is either assigned or self-assigned by his boss/business or whatever, it is thorough, detailed, and specific. But it lacks the real passion from the first type, maybe sporadic, and fails to excite its reader..

3. the Splogger: Written purely for cash, to milk the ads served by an advertising system (fill in the name here), it is usually not well focused, staggers from topic to topic, advert to advert, reader to reader, and after even casual reading, it becomes obvious that the blogger is trying to cash in on Payperpost’s recent generosity, ReviewME or Blogitive’s opportunities…

Which kind of blogger do you aspire to be like? Why?

Increasing your PageViews…

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Wow! I found a good pageview target for my blog to aim for. Currently, the page views are hovering between 1.73 and 1.43 this week. I read on here that aiming for 2.0 is a good target.

Then I searched Problogger.net for some info, and they said:

After surfing the top 50 blogs listed there (I couldn’t find stats on 6 of them) I found that on average they have 1.7272 page views per visitor. The highest any of them had was 3.3 page views per visitor and the lowest was 1.1.

There is more to this article that is worth reading, including the fact that blogs lower down the scale didn’t vary as much as one would think. Now that is food for thought!

What is your page view? Vote or comment here… Do be honest! Also, any strategies that you suggest would be great!

Google Ads: Should blogs have them or not?

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Lorelle VanFossen posts an interesting question, If I Had Ads Here, Would You Click Them?, this is very much an issue that IB has been struggling with as well.

Hosting Google Ads: Would you?
The more observant of you will have noticed that I did run Google Ads on this blog for quite a while, but in the end I have removed them. I actually liked them quite a lot because I felt that they added a certain legitimacy to my blog for a while, but then I read over the TOS from Google, and felt that they were too limiting for me:

* revenue is uncertain;
* ad quality isn’t always suitable;
* too many limits on what can be done;
* a click through rate on my blog that just was awful;
* I’d prefer not to have fraudulent click issues;
* I couldn’t use Blogmad or BlogExplosion to promote my blog (though many others do so, in contravention of Google’s TOS).
So, for the meantime, I have decided to remove ALL Google Ads from this blog. You may still see them by accident! Do let me know. Perhaps for other kinds of websites, I would still use them; in fact, on some of my other non-blog sites, I have actually retained the Google Ads. It’s just that I don’t find them effective on blogs. Any ideas why?…

Clicking on Google Ads: Would you?
I don’t have a problem clicking on Google Ads when I see them. I usually do that because I see something that catches my attention. I have an instant preference for ads that are relevant to the content I have been just reading. But I can’t stand some of the particular ads that occur from time to time. The big bugbear I have is ads like those here where the ads are wedged right up against the text. The other kind of ad that I hate is the Flash ads where the ads flash all the way; in fact they are so distracting that I have to navigate away from the page. In fact, I recently installed an ad blocking tool for FF2.0 only to get around those awful ads.

Hope this answers Lorelle’s question! Any comments?

Further Reading:

A Review of My First Year of Blogging provides some good follow up reading on Adsense on your blog. And a further article here quotes:

The more realistic conclusions here is that AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads – all this results in a very low CPM rate.