Photo author: dullhunk

Pictures can sometimes make or break your post. A good, suggestive photo can work miracles with your traffic and, implicitly, with your income.

Are you confident that your blog post for today can make you £1? Then why not garnish it with a matching stock photo from one of the many distributors like StockExpert or iStockPhoto?

I don’t mean all the posts, only the ones that are representative for your work - guides, how-to advice, various lists… I regularly use SXC (StockXpert’s free website) and Flickr for the photos in my posts, you should too. But when you reach a certain threshold with traffic and income you can switch to more exclusive sources. One credit with iStockPhoto or StockExpert will run you £1 and $1 respectively (a little less in bulk). This will enable you to download one photo in web resolution (400-500 pixels wide), perfect for blog posts.

There’s only so far you can go with free stock photo sites, as the photographers who post their work on them are usually semi-pros and even pros will hoard their best work for paid stock websites. But as I said, don’t underestimate the power of free photos; just choose wisely.

When you feel confident with using paid stock photo sites establish a photo budget (per month or trimester for example)… say you plan on posting 35 posts the next month and for 15 of those you want to use premium stock photos. Plan ahead and purchase credits in bulk as you can get discounts (5 StockExpert credits cost $4.99, but if you buy 50 at a time it’s only $39.99 - so you save roughly 20%).

Final advice - don’t forget to check out the exact terms of service you agree to when obtaining photos from paid sites. There are limitations to the ways you can use photos; most notably the fact that you usually aren’t allowed to use them in modified works, such as logos, banners and so on. It’s possible to obtain full usage rights, but that usually costs more than a credit worth. Make sure you fully understand the agreement (a lot of Legalese there, but it’s not that hard once you get used to it) and stay within the set boundaries.

And just going out on a limb here, premium stock photo credits could make excellent blog contest prizes…

Photo author: ecstaticist

Back with part two of this series - for part 1 click here

In part 1 I talked about effective ways to start multiple blogs effectively, interconnecting those through cross-linking, hiring writers and directing their work. In this second part I’d like to write more about what to do once you have an established base on which to build on.

So here are a few tips that might help you if you’re asking yourself “OK, now what?”.

1. Start a flagship website/blog for your network.

A place to summarize stats, announce news, in one word - give details about your other blogs and your network. See for example the website of Bloggy Network.

2. Centralized ad sales and serving

Direct ad sales are the most profitable money maker for your network. Unlike running ads for adsense, Chitika etc. you keep 100% of the income, can charge premium rates and can better filter what ads you show Building on the above idea of the flagship website, directing potential advertising customers to a central page where they can see all your inventory can result in increased income. You can offer package deals (for example, if you have 4 blogs on finance you can offer a deal for advertising across all four). For advanced ad serving and tracking you should host your own ad server (OpenX for example is an open source solution with very advanced tracking and serving capabilities. It was known in the past under the name of phpAdsNew).

3. Contests, prizes and giveaways

Everyone loves free stuff and you can gain a lot of readership by holding contests. You don’t have to give away tangible products, like iPods. Try working out a deal with an advertiser where he supplies a prize for a discount in his usual rate and for additional promotion (a mention in the post announcing the contest for example). Again, take the example of a finance blog. You can offer a consulting session with a top adviser, or access to a stock trading course, whatever you can work out a deal for…

4. Use social media sites the smart way

Different social media networks send different type of traffic and the effect on your blog may vary. For example, RollingMarbles gets more traffic from StumbleUpon then from any other network and for a non-news website this type of traffic is better than, say, Digg traffic. StumbleUpon sends a steady stream of visitors as opposed to Digg-fueled “spikes”. Instead of splashing buttons to tens of social media sites on each post, try focusing on the ones that have the most potential for your particular scenario.

5. No surrender, no retreat

Once you’re in this, keep it up. Don’t fold because you haven’t made a profit in your first month. Keep going, but analyze your situation constantly. Maybe your writer on a particular blog isn’t really connecting with the audience. Maybe it’s time to try out a new ad set-up. Whatever it is, tweak it until it works.

That’s not to say that when a blog isn’t performing you shouldn’t be radical in your actions. Flip it*, start again with a new one.

This concludes the RollingMarbles crash course on starting a blog network. In the future I am planning to write in more detail about all the topics discussed in Part 1 and here.

*Flip it - sell it or otherwise try to recuperate as much of your investment as possible.

Photo author: fullo

Numbers. As large as possible, as many as possible. This is what ultimately all bloggers need. Whether it’s visitors, RSS subscribers, pageviews, indexed pages or god knows what else, the more the better.

But what do you do when you’re nearing maximum expansion on your extremely tight-niche blog, for example? When it seems there are, physically, no other people in your target audience than the ones currently reading your work? If you can’t build up any more, build to the sides. Expand in other niches and build a blog network.

But how do you expand into other niches most effectively and with the least technical hassle? I can think of a few ways…

Take for instance Darren Rowse’s b5media blog networks, one of the largest and most successful ones out there. B5media covers a lot of broad topics from Beauty to Video games, with multiple blogs covering various smaller niches within each topic.

Now, the way all these blogs are built strikes me quite squarely. Browse the b5media homepage a bit, expand a few categories and open a few tabs with several blogs of your choosing. Do you see it? The same basic template, with other colors. Darren found something that works and went with it over and over again. It saves time and a lot of money. But I’d go ahead and standardize more than just the template. This brings me to the first tip:

1. Pick a way: the old-school way or the WP Mu way

To think of it, you should do this first… I would favor the old-school way of one WordPress installation for one blog. The upside of this would be that your blogs would be totally independent. Anything going wrong would hit only one of them, whereas having one big WP Mu installation just begs for something to go wrong and bring your whole network down all at the same time. It’s also easier to have your blogs on different hosting accounts, servers or even webhosts, all for the sake of network safety and de-centralization.

On the other hand, a WordPress Mu install holding many blogs would most likely take up less resources and be easier to configure and modify in case you want something changed (for example if an ad needs to be moved from one place to another on all the blogs in your network). In spite of this obvious advantage, I’m still not convinced that Mu is stable and ripe enough to be trusted with your whole blog network. Moving on to another tip: [Read more]

Photo author: Vermin Inc

…give up? No, you try and try again (and for me this is the second “again”).

I’m one of those people that used to write blogs but for various reasons gave up. First there was a tech/gadget “blog” (it used a CMS called e107 instead of WordPress) I wrote as a senior in high-school. Then there was a t-shirt blog I started called SickHabits. Day in, day out I posted what I thought was interesting, nearly ground-breaking (let’s be honest here, I’m not dellusional) content about the subject, mixed it with my own opinions and thoughts. I soon realized it wasn’t really like that.

So what went wrong?

[Read more]