• Leaving Quality Comments
• Use a friendly, inviting tone on your blog
• Don’t steal other people’s content
• Write quality content on your blog
• Be appreciative towards those who help you

Now some of you may not care about what kind of reputation you have. After all, any publicity, even bad publicity is publicity, right? Well, I’m going to examine a case that I think might change your mind.

This case involves the site The Geek Boys (I won’t link to it because I don’t think what he did was right). As some of you may know, Alexander Batista, the man running The Geek Boys, developed a sort of notoriety for stealing the theme of Darin.cc. Alexander received a lot of backlash, and a lot of pageviews from this little scheme. In the end, he claimed that he only did it to prove a point, that you don’t need to pay a huge amount of money to a company like Unique Blog Designs in order to get a good looking theme. He did prove a point, and that is that developing a bad reputation can hurt you big time when it comes to blogging.

Alex has since attempted to redo his theme, and his approach towards making money online. Now he is using a different theme, and is aimed towards “buying his way” to the top. While it is an interesting concept, it appears that he is having trouble gaining advertisers who want to show his ads. His first attempt was with Carl Ocab. Carl decided to back up Darin and asked Alexander to clear things up with Darin first. Carl and Alex did appear to make up, as Alexander now considers them “best friends” but I haven’t seen anything on Carl’s blog, or seen an update on Alex’s blog in quite some time.

He developed a nice spike from the bad rep that he got, but it appears to have gone away just as quickly.

So what do you think? You can take a visit over to www.thegeekboys.com to check out Alex’s blog. I personally think that what he did hurt him a lot in the end and damaged his brand. Do you attempt to develop a good relationship and reputation with other bloggers? Or do you not care?

A Dry Erase Board

I think that this is extremely key for anyone who is blogging. A white board is excellent for jotting down ideas, and also provides a large canvas near your blogging setup that you can just look towards for ideas. My personal suggestion, and what I’m going to do when I get to my new place is to do this with it:

• Split the board into several sections, using electrical tape (or whatever other method you like). Label each section for each of the blogs that you have. If you only run one blog, include all the topics in your niche that you wish to cover.
• Create a section for any goals you wish to meet for the blog for the next quarter (3 months). These are going to be goals like technorati, alexa, backlinks, and perhaps monetary goals.
• Create a section for any ideas for blog posts that you might have for each blog, so this way you can keep track and look here if you ever get stumped.
• Keep track of advertising prices on your blog, and update this as needed. This way you have the information readily available, and you can tweak it here.

Having all of this information near your desk can help keep you organized and make your blogging much simpler. Being able to keep track of everything is extremely important.

A Journal/Notebook

These can be immensely helpful. Having a journal or notebook that you can carry around with you all the time is great for jotting down ideas, or even writing entire posts out if you’re not near a computer. I can’t tell you how many ideas I’ve lost because they were in my head and I never wrote them down. It really is a shame if you lose a lot of posts this way. It’s a simple thing you can do, and I’m positive you will have more ideas than you can possibly write about in one day!

Books and Magazines

Did any of you think this one would be here? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. A great way to become an authority in your niche is to do a lot of research about it. If you’re going to blog about movies, like I do, get a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, so you can have some news to write about, and a little look into the inside of the industry.
Remember, Reading is just as important as writing when it comes to blogging. I recently wrote how important it is to read as well as write when you blog. I stress it again here… read about what you are going to write about, so it at least seems like you know what you are blogging about!

So there they are, my suggestions for offline blogging tools. What do you think, and what do you use offline when you are blogging?

Anyway, how has this blog been doing since it’s started? Here are a few of the statistics:

Google Pagerank = 2 - I’m actually pretty pumped about this. I’ve done pretty well I think. It’s good enough to at least get a start on becoming a major authority in this blogging niche, and I do plan on that. I’m pretty happy that a majority of the blogs in my network (perhaps even all) have a pagerank now. This should really help with advertising, as it makes all of the mentions on this blog worth even more! I haven’t changed the pricing on advertising though, so you may want to check that out!

Alexa Ranking - 1,067,921 - Not bad considering the age of the blog. I do agree that other blogs have grown faster, but I probably haven’t worked too hard at promoting this one. I wish I had promoted it more, but it does seem to be doing ok regardless. Many people will say that Alexa rankings don’t really matter, since they are skewed towards the people who use the alexa toolbar (which I don’t use), but it is a metric that still matters. If it didn’t matter, then no one would check them out and they would be out of business. The fact that people still use them makes them matter.

Technorati Authority - 16 - Rank - 517,455 - Again, not too bad considering how new the blog is. Many of the links coming in are through Entrecard link love, which many people posted, and I’m very grateful for. I hope that I can create a lot more content that you guys will link to, and hopefully comment on. A contest should help things out here too, which would be great!

If you haven’t already….Add to Technorati Favorites

So there it is, that’s how this blog stands about a month in. I’m pretty happy about it, and I hope that you will continue to join me as I try to help all of us gain some more Blog Greens! How have your blogs been doing… anybody seen huge increases in your rankings?

Today, I’m going to try to explain CTR. CTR stands for Click Thru Rate. A lot of people and companies use this term when showing how many people have “clicked” on a certain ad or link. Generally, the higher the CTR, the better the performance of the ad. A high click thru rate on a link can be good and bad for your blog though. Here’s why:

• A high CTR on a link generally means that you’ve linked to a great site, or had some awesome anchor text that you used. This means that you link only to high quality content, which is good!
• High CTR on your link also equals a higher bounce rate, which could mean people are leaving your blog as quickly as they come, which is bad.

You can form your own opinion on this of course, and I would like to hear it, so please leave a comment.

Keep in mind that click thru rate is very important when it comes to making money online. If you are interested in doing this, you should know how well your ads perform, and this is one of the metrics that is involved in determining it. For example, a zero CTR on an ad is terrible, and you should examine how the ad looks, it’s placement, or if its even appropriate for your blog.

You can calculate CTR using this simple formula:

#clicks / #impressions * 100% = CTR

So, if you have 1 click on 100 impressions, you have a 1% CTR. Pretty simple, right? Now that you know what it is, all you should worry about when it comes to Ads is improving it. People also use CTR to promote their sites, showing you how high the CTR generally is on their website/blog. Look for high CTR if you are going to purchase advertising.

If you use Google Adsense, they show the click through rate of their ads on your site. How good is yours?

Image Courtesy of www.davegreenbaum.com.

There are many ways to obtain direct ad sales. You can contact people to see if they are interested in advertising on your blog. You can try giving away some ads, and have those people blog about the results that they have out of clicks coming from your blog. There is obviously the most direct way, where people come to you and look to advertise on your blog. This is probably what would make you the most money in the end.

If you are trying for direct ad sales, here are some tips:

• Make sure that your blog becomes relatively well known in its niche.
• Set up an Advertising page, and let people know what is available.
• Make sure that the ads available are above the fold, in desirable locations.
• Don’t leave too many empty locations. What good is it to have a ton of spots on your blog for advertising if they are all empty? At least fill in some of the spaces that are available.

Once you have established yourself and are starting to get the ad sales in, make sure that you manage your ads well. One way to do this is with the OiOPublisher plugin. It’s a plugin that I learned about from John Cow, and while this blog isn’t big enough to need it yet, I’m hoping that one day soon we’ll get there. For anyone looking to purchase this plugin, you can currently obtain a free copy from Ian Fernando’s blog. He’s giving away 3 copies of the plugin to people who blog about direct ad sales on their blog. Since I was going to blog about it anyway, I figure why not do it now and enter the contest at the same time?

If I win, I might be convinced to start a contest and give away something here!

Anyway, remember to consider the content when you are selling direct ads, and make sure that whatever banner or links the site provides is appropriate to your blog. If not, it could end up hurting you more than the money will benefit you.

What sort of tips do you have with Direct Ad Sales?

I’ve been using Auction Ads for a while, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed because it is so hard to convert. I had thousands of impressions, but only a couple clicks which never led to any sales. I had a few referrals too, but nothing ever came from them, so I’m assuming they had just as much difficulty as I had.

Anyway, there is good news about this. All US traffic has been converted over to CPC instead of CPA. This is great for publishers who got a ton of clicks but never any actions. Non-US traffic remains as CPA. However, the CPC scheme only applies to publisher accounts which have been made into premium accounts. The email says that they will be evaluating all accounts to determine if your account is a premium account. I don’t specifically know what that means, but I hope that my account stays a premium account. I may try the ads on this site, and let you know how it converts.

If you have lots of US traffic, I suggest you try out ShoppingAds as an alternative to Google’s Adsense program. It may end up being a bigger earner now that they have switched to CPC.

What do you think?

• Wordpress
• Blogspot
• Writing
• Problogger, John Chow, John Cow, etc.
• Twitter

However, I think that an extremely important aspect of blogging is reading. I’ve already expressed before that getting out there and reading feeds in a feed reader is important. However, to expand on the concept of reading, you need to go out and find some other blogs or websites to read in addition to your own, or just your friends, especially if you want to establish your blog in the blogosphere. Without reading other blogs, you can’t really have much say on what you are doing right or wrong when it comes to writing your own posts, promoting your blog, or even running ads on your blog. Yes, you can do fine without it, but I highly suggest that you don’t!

What other people have to say often has high value, especially if they are writing about what you are trying to write about (or are in your niche). A good example of a good blog post is a response to something someone has blogged about. Didn’t agree with a film review? Write your own review and link back to the other review as well. That way you can start a conversation on your blog about what other people thought of the movie, and will likely gain from getting feedback from the other person. Who knows, someone might stumble upon your review and really like it, finding that they hated or really liked a movie as well. It can only increase your authority in a niche.

So where to start reading? Some great blogs that I read that provide tips for blogging are:

• Problogger
• Daily Blog Tips
• John Chow
• More Merchant
• John Cow

You can also improve your writing by leaving comments on these blogs. Often times they will draw readers back to your site, to read the quality posts that you’ve made. Of course, you have to master the art of commenting, which I will write about later. Just keep in mind that Reading and Writing are both important aspects of blogging, and you can’t really do one well without the other.

I admit, I really liked One Man’s Goal. It was another “make money online” blog, but it was more than that too. It wasn’t like all the other blogs, in my opinion. It was more personal, and made it seem more possible that I could make it online as well. I actually found the theme for this blog through the site that Bryan set up when he sold One Man’s Goal. I followed him over there, but it wasn’t the same. One Man’s Goal wasn’t the same with Austin in charge either. He did a good job, but didn’t post frequently enough for me. It just didn’t feel the same.

That’s why I’m so glad Bryan was able to purchase his old blog back. I’m sure that things will return to normal soon over there, and a ton of the readers there will be happy to see Bryan back. I wish Austin all the best, but I’m sorry, you just weren’t the same.

I do wonder who won their RSS Contest, but I think that’s a moot point now.

Anyway, welcome back Bryan! I look forward to reading all of your tips and your journey towards becoming a huge dotcompreneur.

The themes are being given away by Blogging Mix, and its really quite a simple contest. You can find out more details of the contest here, but all you really have to do is link to the contest, review the theme you would like to try to win, and leave a comment… it’s that simple!

Now which theme am I going to aim for? Well, after a tough decision, I figured the one that I would most like is Brian Gardner’s Revolution Magazine Theme. You can catch a preview of it below.

It really is a great theme, with a clean, magazine style look, allowing you to feature categories as well as posts. It even has a spot for a featured youtube video. I think that this would be really great for my movies blog, Intermission at Work. It needs a redesign! I love how you can have many different categories, with the most recent posts, as well as the large images to go with the posts. Trust me, I’ll be putting up more images as soon as I get my hands on a copy of photoshop… I’m just waiting for a Mac Version. (Mac Fiend here).

Well.. it may not be the greatest review, but it sure is a great theme.. and I hope I win it! As for the contest, it ends on January 28th, so you still have time to get your entries in. This is a great way to obtain a Premium theme if you don’t yet have the resources to purchase your own!

Now think about the thousands of other bloggers out there who are trying to get the word out about their own blogs. There are so many bloggers out there, and a lot provide valuable information. It’s just really difficult to visit each and every single blog every day in order to read up, and leave comments which aid to the conversation. This is why I suggest getting a feed reader. Personally, I use Newsfire. Of course, this is only available for Mac, but there are plenty of other ways to subscribe to a feed.

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Live Bookmarks
• Email

It may also help to know what an RSS feed is. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it is doing exactly what it says, it is syndicating your blog. All of your posts and images will be transferred into your feed. When setting up your feed, I suggest using Feedburner. You can direct your feed through them, and gain many statistics and widgets telling you how many subscribers you have, live visits to your feed, as well as click throughs on your site. Feedburner also has many tools which allow you to promote your blog, so get over there and check them out!

Now that we know how to subscribe to a feed, and what a feed is, why is it important for YOU to read other people’s feeds? I feel that this is very important because it allows you to stay current on all the blogs that you might be interested in, and is a free way to help those that help you in your blogging endeavors. Many people are proud of their feed counts, and often have contests geared towards people who subscribe to their feed. This is actually a really good way to promote your blog, and I will likely be doing something like that really soon. Anyway, using a feed reader can help you get your daily dose of blog reading, and allows you to click through and leave comments easily, all while keeping track of the blogs you read the most!

I hope this has helped you understand why feeds are so important! Why don’t you sign up for my feed to find out more?