Well, it’s been quite hard for me atleast, this blog started growing really big time near the end of january and since then I wanted to see what would I get if I actively tried to get more RSS readers, after several offers of email and rss subscription I finally have more then 500 rss readers.

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First of all I’m sorry for not responding to any mails you guys might have sent me!

A few weeks ago i stopped getting emails from my readers through the contact form, i thought its because i was not doing as well as i was before, i tried to use the contact form myself and found out that the server had a function disabled, which was enabled around 15 mins before this post and I’ve tested it as well.

So, once again I’m sorry about the inconvinience, and a note about this month’s blog income report, it will be much less then last month’s since none of my advertisers could’ve contacted me, the listings at other sites about advertising all linked to my contact form (which wasn’t working). so, yeah i guess, live and learn

Make sure your contact form is working by using it once or twice every once in a while.

Envy Blogging is the term i use to define when a blogger creates content similar to an already established and popular blog online in hopes of attaining the same traffic over a short period of time. At first it’s pretty harmless and well intentioned, like giving out their own opinion on the matter and leaving trackbacks to get the traffic to come towards them, as soon as that starts working for them, it gets hard trying to keep up with the ferquence of the content coming their way, the work tht they have to put into content now is much harder and before they know it they are copying quotes and important paragraphs from those blogs onto their own and making it their own content and at some point even this becomes harder, letting your content creating abilities fade away is the worst thing a blogger can ever hope for, the moment you actually don’t have anything to say or don’t have the will to write more is when a blogger becomes a spammer, this is where harmless opinions turn into spam, yep, this is how spam blogs are created. The ones that use your feed to copy your own content leaving the original blog a trackback.

Alot of bloggers can find spam links in their wp dashboard everyday that come from blogs that have copied their content without any permission.

Although i think blog envy can make really good bloggers over time if they keep at it and try to develop their own skills more but the most conversions that I have seen are for the worst.

photo credit: Thuy Pham

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Shoemoney had an interesting video a while ago, here it is (watch it before i carry on)

Paid links aren’t all bad, there are several types of paid links going around and just a few of them are:

• Sponsored reviews
• Sitewide links
• in-context links
• Sponsored wp themes
• Spam comments
• ..etc

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There comes a time when you have to decide whether to do all the blogging yourself or have other authors contribute content to your blog as well. Depending on what kind of feel you want your blog to have, your decision will make a long-term effect on your blog. Let’s go over what each option has to offer you and your readers.

First things first, let’s go over what kind of effect doing all the blogging yourself will have on your blog(s) and readers. If you want to create a more personal feel to your blog, this could be the option that appeals the most to you. With just you blogging, your blog is centered on your personality. While this can be good, it can also tend to overwhelm you with work. This would be more likely to happen if you have multiple blogs. While you would spotlight your personality more by being the only one blogging on your blog, you will also limit the amount of diversity that is shown within blog posts. This isn’t saying that you won’t blog about the different topics your niche has to offer, it’s just saying that different people have different ways of doing things and you may not notice certain things others tend to notice.
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thA few days ago john chow talked about videos being the next wave in the blogging world, i strongly disagree here, content was , is and always will be king no matter what new methods might come up. To be perfectly honest i think videos are tacky and horrible for serps, unless you provide a text transcript for the video…much like two versions of the same post one in video and one in text. Although it may seem unlikely but while watching videos to learn something you might look over something crucial or might not understand something properly that can’t be explained any further whereas text is far more easier to edit and update.

Now heres my list of cons in video blogging.

1. Less authority, more entertainment.
2. More hassle on the author’s end.
3. Not being able to make videos unless you’re in top shape
4. Losing out on the smaller ratio of readers, the ones on dial up. I used to have dial up and i hate waiting for videos to load for hours..
5. Alot of pressure to completely explain a point otherwise lose a whole video
6. Minimizing in-context ad sales
7. Devaluing serp value
8. Low or none seo advantage
9. Less links
10. Simply more work

The list of pros..

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I’ve had a few questions that were lengthy enough to be answered in this post, brazilman commented on my blog income report for jan (pretty late) and asked a few questions:

According to whois blueverse.com has been registered since 2006? Did you buy this domain in Jan08 with backlinks and PR already? Or the site has been online for longer then jan 08 but you just started earning in jan08 is that it? Can you tell us how long you were working on the site before jan08?

This blog was infact registered in late 2006, and then was used as a twitter for my daily activities no matter how lame they were, later on i moved this blog on to Gurilla.net for a while then i realized what i really wanted to do with gurilla so i moved it back here near june of 2007, i didn’t start serious blogging till september 2007, with absolutely no monetization and zero income from it, i had to build it up to the point where i can risk spending a grand on the theme that you see so that it’s more attractive and would finally start earning some money. Late december i paid UBD for a blog design and early Jan i had the theme that you are looking at right now.

Right after the theme was placed i had alot of ad sales (some of which are still advertisers here ).

Hi, would you be kind enough to tell me how many unique visitors you were getting back in january and how you were getting them?

• January - 9,000 uniques
• Febuary - 20,000 uniques
• March - 10,000-14,000 uniques
• April - 1,000 uniques so far (5th april)

The time has come to go through all the great blogs that exist within the Blogosphere. The blogs that are considered to be the best of the best by Blueverse are found here. There’s only room for 5 blogs, so competition was fierce and only the best survived.

• ProBlogger
  This is a pretty popular blog among bloggers that actively participate in visiting other blogs to learn more and see what’s going on in the world of blogging. Darren Rowse takes the time to help fellow bloggers learn new ways that will help maximize the success of their blog. You will always see something fresh when you visit ProBlogger. There are other useful blogging tools that Darren offers at his blog. One of the best tools is the ProBlogger Job Board. This is where bloggers can find jobs and blogs looking for bloggers can post jobs. This is free to use if you’re looking for a blogging job. As you can see, ProBlogger has a lot of benefits to its readers.
• BlogCatalog
  BlogCatalog is a blog directory that also provides some good networking benefits to those who pay a visit. You might as well give it a try even if you just want to add your blog. There is also discussions about various topics in the blogging world that you can take a part of. If you feel the need, start your own and see what kind of a response you get from fellow bloggers. Another good benefit is that there is quite a few groups that you can join to improve the exposure of your blog and learn some useful techniques that you can utilize on your blog.

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With the popularity of blogging increasing every day, there are many useful tools available to help with your blog. I’m sure everyone appreciates any help that they can get when they’re blogging. By using some of these tools, you can save time and headache.

1. Stock.xchng
If you are needing images for your blog or blog posts, this is a great place to find some great stock photos. This website is used by many web developers and individuals every day. Some of the stock images may cost some money while others are available for free. Flickr is great but sxc provides a hell lot bigger collection of usable images for your blog while flickr mostly has copyrighted and/or personal photos.

2. Feedburner
Feedburner is an RSS tool that is used by tons of bloggers around the world. You can add an array of features to your RSS feed by using Feedburner. Feedburner is considered one of the most effective feed marketing tools ever, it offers a wide selection of tools to help you optimize and promote your feed along with awesome stats on how many subscribers you have and what they use to subscribe and for more advanced stats they also provide information on views and clicks on your feed items. Its a must have for all blogs.

3. Pingoat
Pingoat is a tool that pings (notifies) the different services that keeps track of blogs and publishes the blog content. This will let the service know that your blog has been updated and they will begin to crawl your blog to find out what has been added. This can lead to increasing the incoming traffic to your blog.

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Any one can get random traffic by throwing money around but it takes a few simple steps to make those visitors stay and keep reading your blog, its a few tips you can use to create interactivity and curiosity among your visitors , just enough to keep them coming back for more. These are all the tips and tricks i use to increase my subscriber count daily.

1. Curiosity

This one is way too obvious, readers love series of posts so if you have started a series such as “Making a WP Blog” which will contain around 8 posts then that will attract alot of readers from that certain topic and if you add a little line at the end of each of those posts like “Making a WP Blog 1 of 8 - Subscriber here for the next posts in this series!”, this will obviously lead to your feed and will end in you getting one new subscriber for everyone that visits those articles. To make this series of posts better you need to know that every step of the series has to be well detailed and carefully explained, you’ll need more then just common information to get more out of your series.

2. Presentation

Presentation matters, most of the time it counts for 70% of the marks you get for your essays in college, the more creative you get the more you please the readers, I like to use pictures to spice up my posts, sometimes videos to just as well to explain my points further. A good example here could be SEOmoz’s whiteboard Friday where rand talks about different aspects of SEO on video. Less Reading = Wider Audience.

3. Authority and Networking

Who you know in the industry matters alot, even if you have alot of good tips and tricks it helps to interview big names once in a while to boost up your readership, if your readers know that you have the reputation and ability to interview big names such as Shoemoney then they might wanna listen to you more its more intimidation then pleasing. Intimidation works for alot, it’s not just about who you know its about having a relevant content on your blog from other blogs in the same niche, that gives the blog the perfect SEO boost!

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