Buying A Blog – Tactically Advantageous or an Achilles Heel? - DailyBlogTips |
- Buying A Blog – Tactically Advantageous or an Achilles Heel?
- The Web 3.0 Documentary
- And Here Is How I Work…
| Buying A Blog – Tactically Advantageous or an Achilles Heel? Posted: 11 May 2010 08:37 PM PDT  This is a guest post from Adam Diver. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here. I would say over 90% (actually there is no way to actually know, but my assumption makes better reading) of bloggers started out by creating their own unique blog. Included in this assumed 90% of bloggers would be myself. Being a “web log” it makes sense that any blogger would like to personalise the experience as much as possible to reflect them as a person and a blogger. However starting a new website is always difficult and it may be advantageous for many new bloggers to buy an established blog as opposed to creating their own from scratch. About 6 months ago I actually bought an established blog to use as my own, Scribblescratch.com. I don’t write this because i’m compelled to promote my unbelievably high quality blog everywhere, but merely to add some context to the idea of buying an established blog. I have started my own blog and I have bought an established blog, with each option having their own advantages. The experience of both sites has allowed me to reflect on some of the issues bloggers may encounter with both types of blogs, particularly when starting up. Blog = Web LogI have already touched on this but its an important point so I will re-iterate. The greatest amount of consideration has to be, “how does this blog reflect me as a person and as a blogger; and how does the blog fit with my blogging ideas and goals?” For the most part a blog is an extremely flexible platform and established blogs can be changed considerably until they reflect your goals. The main issue here is the domain name as it remains as the only definite permanent fixture of the previous owner. Lets say your niche is pets, but specifically you write about how much you love dogs. You could not really justify buying an established pet blog with a domain such as siamesecats.com. It would just make your blog hollow. So you need to consider how important your domain is to you and how well an established blogs domain can fit in with your blog. ContentWhen you buy an established blog you will no doubt have some content already published and indexed. This can be a double edged sword in that whilst you have something for your visitors and search engines it may not be relevant to your needs. With scribblescratch my content was both good and bad. Part of the blog included 20 plus unique wordpress templates with the rights to use as I wish. But the blog itself consisted of 1000+ post from a female designer about her designs and personal life. Obviously these post were not aligned with my personal views and aspirations for the site. Needless to say I removed the post, much to the disliking of her loyal readers. But those readers were never going to like what I had to say anyway, so what was the point of pandering to them. It was quite funny to see the comments on my first post when I began changing the content; “who the hell is Adam”, “Oh No, Teresa has your site been hacked, I checked the about page and there is a picture of some boy” where probably the pick of the bunch. TrafficWithout doubt, the hardest part of starting a new blog is getting traffic. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if no-one sees it, it becomes worthless. I know how deflating it can be to write post after post, only to check your traffic statistics and find that only a handful of people have even seen it. Buying an established blog can alleviate these initial pressures. It does not mean you don’t have to continually actively promote your blog, but it sure makes promotion a lot easier. Particularly if you use social traffic methods, getting an article dugg or tweeted becomes much easier if there are social visitors actually viewing the article to begin with. One thing to consider is how related the traffic is. I have already mentioned how I had many female visitors looking for content on the personal life of the previous blogger. The chances of them reading my new post are about the same chance as Conan O’Brien getting another gig on NBC. So on that basis buying an established blog for traffic would be pointless. However in my case the blog had a lot of traffic for its free wordpress themes (i.e bloggers), which is exactly the type of traffic I was targetting. Buying an established blog for traffic that won’t enjoy your content is a pointless exercise and can be a costly one at that. Be sure to view the traffic sources of an established blog and decide if that type of traffic will be suited to what you have to say. RevenueSimilar to traffic, revenue can be excruciating to make at the beginning of a new blog. Generally it is all one way, in that you keep investing in your blog and see no returns. Whilst I don’t speak for the most successful bloggers I can assure you most of the bloggers out there went a long time before seeing any returns. Possibly the best thing about buying an established blog is the revenue it already generates. Even if its not much, it can help pay for your hosting, domain renewal and promotion. Its a hell of a lot easier to stay motivated when your actually making some money. SEO and LinksWhilst blogs (and their post) are notoriously quick in being indexed and ranked by the search engines, it doesn’t mean that buying an established blog is any less advantageous. When it comes to search engine rankings, backlinks are still key. Consider how much you would pay for 500 or 1,000 natural one way links? Compare that to the price of an established blog. Not bad hey. In addition to backlinks, domain age and content age still factor prominently in the search engine algorithms and an established blog is practically cheating. My own blog had over 120,000 inlinks, mainly from the free templates. The home page had a pagerank of 3 which has now become a 5. Whilst that doesn’t automatically mean my content will rank well any new post I write in essence has a related PR5 link from the blogs home page straight away. Whilst I have obviously come across pushing the advantages of buying established blogs that was by no means my initial intention. I am not biased to either method of establishing a blog, so long as it fits into what you want to achieve through blogging. From my own experiences buying an established blog made blogging so much easier and allowed me to focus more on content as opposed to generating traffic and revenue. However it leaves a little hole in my heart to know that I didn’t create the blog from the ground up and that I had to initially upset and disappoint some loyal readers to the blog. Something I haven’t fully explained is the process of buying an established blog is not as easy as I may have made it seem. It is an art in itself and requires a lot of research. Perhaps I may be allowed another guest post to explain this in detail. Until then keep your options open and best of luck in your blogging endeavours. About The Author: Adam Diver writes primarily for his personal webmaster and design blog Scribble Scratch. He aims to seperate myth from fact through experimenting with products, services, theories and myths help by many in the webmaster community. Original Post: Buying A Blog – Tactically Advantageous or an Achilles Heel?  |
| Posted: 11 May 2010 11:36 AM PDT  If you heard about “Web 3.0″ or “Semantic Web” please raise your hand. If you are not really sure what the terms mean please raise your hand. I am guessing we all raised our hands twice huh? Anyway today I came across a cool documentary by Kate Ray, called “Web 3.0″. The video was licensed under the creative commons license, so I am embedding it below (RSS and email subscribers might need to visit the site to see the video player). Some takeaway messages:
Original Post: The Web 3.0 Documentary |
| Posted: 11 May 2010 07:59 AM PDT  As you probably saw, last week I published a group interview where 12 top online entrepreneurs shared their work habits. Some readers emailed me and posted comments asking how my answers would have been to the same questions, so I figured I would write a post with them. Here we go: 1. How many days do you work per week? 2. How many hours do you work, in total, every week? I am trying to push this up though, to around 75 hours per week. This would mean 12 hours on full time days, plus 3 hours on Sundays, which I think is doable. Why am I trying to work more? Because I don’t consider myself particularly talented, so I must worker harder than my competition if I want to beat it. Hustling, as Gary V. would say. Obviously you need to optimize other aspects of your life to make this possible without going crazy. For example, having a home-office (or an office you can walk to in 5 minutes) is a must, so you don’t waste time in the car. Secondly, it is also important to plan your sleeping time, exercise time and diet carefully, to make sure your body will keep in shape, too. Finally, you also need to live a pretty minimalist life (e.g., no television, no video games, going out once per week only and so on). And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is the “right” way to live, nor that everyone should do it. It is just the way I wanna live, because it allows me to focus on the thing that is important to me right now (i.e., building a successful business). Other people will have different goals/important things in their lives, and this lifestyle might not be suitable for them. 3. Do you have a fixed work routine? How does it look like? One aspect I need to improve is to finish the tasks I start before moving on. Sometimes I am writing an article and I open RSS reader to check the latest headlines. Needless to say that this is terrible for your productivity. 4. How many times per year do you take vacations, and how long are they? Just to give you an idea earlier this year I planned a 5-day vacation with my girlfriend, where I would bring my laptop to work only a couple of hours a day and get the essentials done (i.e., answer emails, write a post and make sure the sites were working properly). Upon arriving there we found out that the hotel had no Internet access, and the 3G modem that I took with me couldn’t find a signal because the city was not covered by the mobile operator. Long story short we stayed one night and returned home the following day. You can guess how happy she was…. What I try to do instead is to take 2 or 3 weekends away every year. Usually I go to the beach with some friends and try to surf. It is not ideal, but enough to recharge the batteries. 5. How many hours per day do you spend on email? I would guess 2 hours, which is more than what I should. My goal is to limit the email time to 1 hour per day, so a session in the morning for 30 minutes and a session in the afternoon for 30 minutes. I need to get more disciplined to achieve that though. 6. When you are not working, what are you doing? I have a couple of hobbies. The first one is weight-lifting/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I train at least 5 times per week, and have been doing so for many years. The other one is playing the saxophone. I am not that good, but I sure get a kick from improvising some blues. Other than that I just go out or watch a soccer match with friends occasionally. Original Post: And Here Is How I Work… |
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