Tag: devdawn

Although the site is relatively new, over the next few weeks I won’t be posting as much as I have in it’s up-till-now lifetime. Sad I know, don’t cry … it’s okay.

Ahem. There are projects on the boil. Most of these are being worked on right now, and are taking my time. The biggest is of course my "paying me a salary" project. Which has precedence, and is rather large. The others are smaller, but have a more immediate relationship with Dev Dawn. One, in particular, will be rearing it’s head here in an Alpha, or Beta. I’m not exactly sure about where to break those things up in functionality terms. When does it move across from one to the other. That sort of thing.

That’s all for now.

On the weekend, we had the pleasure of watching Pimp My Ride. Man alive, it was a blast. Haven’t had such a good laugh in a long time. Some of the stuff they do to those cars … Wish I could have a satellite on the top of my vehicle.

Anyway, onto the actual body of this post.

It’s been a long road (well, 2.5 weeks now), since I got properly into blogging. Since I signed up for Google Adsense. Since I started pimping Dev Dawn in any way I could find out about (see Paul’s Article that got me really started).

What’s the deal with AdSense? After a few days, I’d made about 3 dollhairs (i mean, dollars … heh heh, funny David Spade quote).

Now, I know this is a new blog, and that it takes time, probably a year or more, to get anywhere. I’m cool with that. But it got me thinking.

Making money from ads is more than just attracting people to your site. Web Traffic is a different beast, although related. Just because you get a thousand/million hits a day, doesn’t mean you’ve got the best site for making money from ads.

If you were getting a million hits a day, then I guess the percentage of people who were hitting the ads would mean you’d make a fair amount of money anyway. That’s not a problem … although still, most of us don’t get that many hits in a day. Or a month. Or a year.

To maximise your ad revenue potential, I’d say you need to not only attract traffic, but have the site content that puts people in the frame of mind that will make them click on ads.

Dev Dawn isn’t one of those sites. It’s a site about Ideas, Development, the sharing of Information.

Have a look at the top three Technology BogTopSites sites right now. Elliot Back, Digital Camera Reviews, and no1 at the moment, Forever Geek.

It’d be interesting to see their advertising stats. Each of these sites showcases products, interesting things. If I’m browsing the Digital Camera Reviews site, I’m gonna be looking for a camera, or I’m going to be seeing what’s the best. If I see an ad that gives me a great deal on a piece of equipment I need, then because I’m already looking at a site that’s about reviewing products, then I’m going to be in a "buy this" frame of mind.

This stands for every possible niche I guess.

In fact, you could take this and develop the idea further. If you can, in some way, get the reader into the correct frame of mind, you maximise the potential for ad clicking.

This post has gotten frayed at the end. My ideas aren’t as concrete as they were when I started. Will require more thinking, but the beginning is there.

Pimping sites is still a new frontier. I’m sure we’ll be discovering exciting methods for quite some time.

Thanks for reading.

Here’s all my collective knowledge (oh so much) from the past few days of becoming a "full-on blogger", if indeed there is such a phrase.

1. There are a few awesome articles out there to help. Especially How To Boost Your Blog Traffic by Paul Stamatiou. Use Google and Technorati (and any others) to find them. Most are rehashes, some are gems, others are downright horrible.
2. Develop a strategy for the site. Nothing is too little to think through. What purpose do your posts have? Do you just look at other news items and comment (maybe …)? Do you write about your own ideas? Are your articles about things that people will want to hear? Are your articles about something that you feel is important, and everyone who doesn’t like it can … well.

   Strategy. Think through where your headed.

   Of course, this is a Newbiary, and I’m only a few inches along the road … so maybe all my thoughts are wrong. Still, I’ll find that out on the journey.

3. Be active in the community. Target a number of other blog websites. Comment on their stories, and don’t do it with the obvious reason of plugging your own. Do it because you have read the article and agree/disagree. Show interest, and hopefully people will show interest in your own site.

   This is part of the overall site strategy. You can be as specific as you want. Write a little webapp to keep track of who you are targeting. Send out an email invititation to some kind of event on your site.

4. Get accounts with sites like Digg and Slashdot and shoot them your new articles.

   Be prepared to endure a lot of non-events. You might push fifty articles and have none of them get onto Slashdot. It might be more like five hundred. Digg is a little easier to get exposure, but people will tell you what they think.

   If your post is a couple of lines of commentary on another post (news, etc …) that you found, then be prepared for flaming. In Digg, the best course of action is to post the actual news link.

   There are more sites. If you use WordPress, there’s Blogs of the Day. The other main site I’m constantly checking (you put their tagging linking functionality piccie on your own site) is Blog Top Sites. More specifically, for Dev Dawn, Blog Top Sites – Technology.

5. Which leads to … always be advancing the site. Dreaming of new functionality, but also looking around at what is happening elsewhere. There will always be a new direction to take, something more to implement.

   I like the idea of having a strategy for never being static. Work hard at making a fluid plan, that will be able to grow with changes in the community, but also with changes you wish to implement. Don’t be afraid to try something new.

   This is the beauty of the inter-web. And because blogging is a relatively new idea (old idea, new technology), there is still plenty of stuff to be thunk up.

6. Lastly, you have to suck it up. Receiving flack is going to happen. I’ve gotten a little (minor) in the last couple of days, and because this is my first serious venture into the world of blogging, my feelings were very, very close to the surface.

   "What! How dare that person say that I suck!"

   It’s gonna happen, and we have to suck it up. Not ignore, but take it … work it … use it.

‘Nuff said. Thanks for listening/reading … be true to truth, and start thinking. Always.

So it’s a little bizarre. Just fired up the ol man to wave, friction reducing vehicle (ha ha, Surf Ninja’s, you funny movie, rob scneider before he was famous) … I mean, this mornings Inbox contained an email from the Other ads people, saying that my site wasn’t quite right. Now there aren’t any naughty videos/pics that I know of, and the content is right up click-alley. I guess it must be the traffic.

So in a month I’ll try again. Because in a month … TOTAL DOMINATION. I mean … < hem >, Phase Alpha of my plan for the subversing of the Internet Nation will be complete.

Anyway. The planning for the next phase of some kind of plan is well underway. The vision of Dev Dawn is still about community, the sharing of ideas, about Information :: Conduits Of, Interfaces To (heh, man I love that little phrase). More Soon.

As an aside, I’m very keen to implement some form of Comments functionality using the Ajax understanding. I’d love to see other sites which have this working. Not neccessarily WordPress sites, any and all are good.

You should be able to see the beginnings of a document library here on Dev Dawn. I’ve put up the first Article, Clarion’s Purpose Today. It’s not much, but it’s a start. And we gotta start somewhere.

In other ramblings, I got excited about October’s hits on the site. Now, bear in mind that I’m a newbie into this world, so these numbers will probably cause you to giggle and point and laugh … but anyway. They jumped from 300 in September (which would probably cover just the devs here) to more than 3000 for October. That’s pretty cool.

I’m excited. Not sure whether they are spybots, or trawlers, or some new-fangled breed of cyber-hound dogs tracking down unsuspecting bloggers … but it’s nice. Nice.

If you are a reader/visitor/regular, a hearty shout-out thanks to ya! Much appreciated. I promise to never put Google Adwords on here, well … at least until the daily hits break a thousand. That would be pretty awesome in my newb-log experience.

‘Nuff said.