Emhoo Blog

Chitika have been rolling out their new CPM ads over the last few days. These impression based ads will appear mainly on sites with a lot of traffic from non supported countries (they only serve their own ads to traffic from USA, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, UK).

In a sense these CPM ads are ‘alternative ads’ - so if a reader comes from Japan for instance they see the new CPM ad instead of a default ad or a Public Service Announcement. The theory is that at least you’ll earn something from the ad.

I can understand why Chitika are doing this and why it’d be attractive to many publishers. Most sites get at least some decent traffic from the countries that Chitika (and other ad networks) don’t support and to not monetize it is a pity. However….

What concerns me a little about these ads is that the announcement post says that it’s not just when someone from a non supported country visits your site but rather they say they serve them ‘when it makes sense’ to do so and give this example:

“if you are in Canada, and viewing a page with a Chitika ad on it, we will most likely show you a CPM Graphic banner because we are seeing more revenue from graphic ads for Canadian traffic.”

This is all well and good if you’re just looking at the bottom line (who wouldn’t want the most profitable ad served?) but the banner ads that I’ve seen so far are not what I’d consider to be of a high quality. They’re not relevant to sites (ie they are not contextual) and they look cheap and nasty. I hope that Chitika will work to attract premium brand advertisers - but in the mean time I’m considering opting out of the CPM ads at this point. Steve from UMPCPortal tells me he saw cheesy Ringtone ads on his blog and other bloggers are reporting similar low grade ads.

Opting out of the program (it is set to ‘ON’ by default) means you’re likely to take a hit financially so don’t do it without thinking it through but if you have a site where you don’t want banner ads appearing then you might want to consider this.

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Image by JettGirl

Today I was scanning through some emails from readers and it struck me that so many of those that I hear from are suffering from a similar ailment. Let me share a few excerpts from emails I received today and see if you can spot what it is:

“Darren, I’m just a small blogger but was wondering….”
“I’m no A-list blogger but I wanted to let you know…..”
“I’ve only got 70 readers a day….”
“My RSS reader counter is embarrassing….”
“I don’t know any HTML…. I feel like I have so much to learn….”
“I’m just starting out and don’t know much about blogging…..”
“In comparison to others I’m just a small fry….”
“I don’t write as well as they do….”

Notice something about all of these emails?

They all define themselves by something that they are not achieving, that they don’t know, that they don’t have….

Many of them are also based upon a comparison with others.

While I understand why they do this (many are emailing asking for advice and it’s logical to present a problem in such an instance) I wonder if it is also a little more than that.

My suspicion is that many of us as bloggers think of ourselves in similar ways and have “blogger inferiority complex“.

There’s are 3 problems with this type of thinking:

1. The impact it has on You

The main problem with defining yourself with words that describe what you are NOT is that it impacts the way that you think about yourself. I strongly believe that the words we use to talk about ourselves (spoken and thought) impact us.

No I’m not going to get you chanting positive mantras about yourself with the promise of it magically transforming your life but I do think that if you’re continually thinking of yourself in terms of what you are NOT that it has an impact and can be a limiting factor on what you ARE.

Also when your view of yourself is tied to what others do and achieve it can also be very limiting and stop you from actually be something that distracts you from your own true potential (more on this later).

My wife often encourages her friends to be more positive about themselves by using the concept of ’self fulfilling prophecy’. Sometimes when all we can see is what we can’t do or have not achieved it’s too difficult to move past it and these things not only are our present but they become our future also.

“”If we did all of the things that we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” - Thomas Edison

Edison is right - each of us has amazing potential, however unless we learn to see what we have and can do rather than focus upon what we can’t or what others are doing we’re likely to even catch a glimpse of what we can do let alone ever achieve it.

2. The impact that it has on your Readers

While most of the negative definitions of ourselves are generally kept to ourselves or are only spoken about in private - at times they do creep into our blogging and can impact our readers.

Sometimes this happens explicitly (I regularly see people apologizing to readers about the things that they don’t do well) and sometimes it happens more subtly.

I’m not arguing that we should pretend to be something that we’re not and to only talk about the positives in our lives (I think being transparent and honest with readers about our failures can actually be powerful) however when the negative self view becomes the dominating one it can’t help but impact readers.

If you can’t be positive about yourself why would your readers be?

3. The impact it has on other Bloggers

In a similar way - when you talk about yourself in terms of what you’re yet to do, achieve or become your words can impact other bloggers also. I noticed this particularly at the recent SXSW conference where there was a wonderful room set up specifically for bloggers.

As I interacted with bloggers I noticed three groups of people:

1. Those who pumped up themselves and their blogs beyond the reality of them. The ego and arrogance of this group (a real minority of those I met I should add) was something to behold!
2. Those who defined themselves by what they are not. Just like the email excerpts above this group quite often introduced themselves with a ‘I’m just a small blogger….’
3. Those who seemed to have a healthy blend of positivity and humility

It was interesting to see how these three groups of bloggers were received by other bloggers that were in the room. Group one was sniggered about, Group two tended to be talked to politely but people quickly moved on and Group 3 tended to be the ones that people gravitated towards. This third group was also the ones that seemed to get a lot of links after SXSW from other bloggers who were there.

If you want to grow your profile with other bloggers in your niche then I think it’s really important to get the balance right.

How to Define Yourself More Positively

Ironically this post has become a little negative hasn’t it! I’ve just spent the last 850 words talking pointing out how many of us have the problem of pointing out the problems in our lives….

Yes I do see the irony in this, however before I offer some more positives suggestions on how to dig yourself out of a negative framework it’s important to talk about the problem itself (the purpose of this post).

So how do you turn your negativity around and become a more positive blogger in the way that you think about yourself and your blog? I’ve got a post lined up for tomorrow with some of my ideas on the question but in the mean time I’d love to hear your suggestions.

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I’m starting a new course this week (as a student) - it’s called WebVideo University.

Over the past 6 or so so months I’ve been experimenting more and more with using Video on my blog. It started out with just an experiment or two but the response from readers was so encouraging that I set myself the goal of running weekly (or as it turned out every second week) video posts.

Like I say - the response has been wonderful - there have been numerous benefits:

• For starters I’ve noticed a lot of new readers commenting on the blog. It seems that video connects with a different kind of reader. While some prefer text others prefer audio/visual teaching.
• It’s added a more personal dynamic to the blog - when I was at the SXSW conference earlier in the year I had a lot of people come up to me because they recognized me from the video and had a lot of comments along the lines of ‘I feel like I know you from your videos’.
• It allows me to express myself in ways I’d not really been able to do before with just written words and still images. Being able to use body language and different tones of voice enables a different level of communication.

The problem with video on a blog is that it is a lot of work. It also means learning a new skills set and spending a lot of time on things like filming and editing - time that I would previously have put into other core blogging tasks.

I personally think that there is a lot I could learn to improve my video so recently when David Kaminski from WebVideo University contacted me to see if I’d be interested in promoting his video making course I told him that I wasn’t interested in promoting it - but instead I was interested in DOING IT.

If you’d like to join me in some learning the course starts on 1 May. It’s short notice (I’m sorry, I was meaning to promote this earlier but it’s been a crazy few weeks) but I’m sure some of you will have time to leap into it.

The course goes for 4 weeks in a ‘virtual classroom’ where you log in to get your classes (video based lessons - what else would you expect in a course like this).

The course isn’t just focused on producing talking head videos but has more of a sales angle to it (creating web videos that sell/web commercials).

I’m looking forward to starting the course tomorrow - hope to see some of you as classmates!

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Malayalam Radio from LIveAtEase

Author:
LiveAtEase

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In 2008 the growth in production is estimated to be about 0.5%. Only a few months ago, they were taking bets on 1 point something %. It’ll end up under 0%. A possible estimate is MINUS 0.5%. There’ll be a harsh recession, but Italian-style. The drop in production is equivalent to a drop in employment. A recession is translated into hundreds of thousands of fewer jobs. In Italy however employment will rise and the salaries will go down. It’s the trend of recent years.
How does it work? An employee is transformed into a precarious worker. A third of his previous salary, bye-bye pension and no safety at work (it costs!). The equation is simple. More recession=less salary, more precarious workers (and thus more jobs) and more who die at work. The number of precarious workers has arrived at about 5 million. There’s space for improvement. The whole Italian population. The abolition of article 18 that is under discussion is basically a help to the growth of precariousness and to employment. And also for dying of starvation. The recession is world-wide, but we’ve already won the world cup. Growth estimates in Europe and round about for 2008: Slovakia 7.4%, Russia 7.0%, Ukraine 6.4%, Poland 5.3%, Czech Republic 4.8%, Turkey 4.6%, Norway 3.4%, Ireland 3.2%, Greece 3.1%, Sweden 2.5%, Netherlands 2.3%, Hungary 2.2, Belgium 1.9%, UK-Germany 1.7%, France-Denmark-Portugal 1.6% (*).
We are the last of the last. But there are no real proposals for restarting the country. The reason is simple: to change, the equilibria on which the System is based, would have to be turned upside down. That on your own you never reform. How many are left producing real wealth in Italy? How many are parasites? The number of the former is going down. The number of the latter is going up before your eyes together with the number of precarious workers, the number of the new poor, the public debt. Before the euro, the lira was devalued, now we get into debt, with joy, the Nation with new issues of State Bonds.
The economic problems of the country, for example, Alitalia, are resolved by getting into debt. But it’s at breaking point. In 2008, we will pay about 70 billion euro in interest on the bonds issued. That’s about 4 budgets, Crikey! In 2009, the amount of interest will be greater, for three reasons. The first is that Italy is considered to be at risk and to compete with State Bonds of other countries it has to guarantee higher interest rates. The second is that the public debt is getting bigger. The third is that our production is going down. Towards the catastrophe with optimism.
(*) Source: Consensus Economics

Example of journalism:

La Repubblica (more than 16 million euro of public contributions annually to the L'Espresso Group) after V2-day reported: "In 50 thousand at Grillo’s show" and an article by Francesco Merlo.


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La Repubblica for the first of May 2007: "Piazza san Carlo where the Trades Union leaders spoke in front of 100 thousand people”

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This is a short post that might hopefully stop the flood of emails that I’ve been getting for the last 24 hours:

Google’s Page Rank seems to be updating.

Thanks to the 47 people who have emailed, Twittered and IM’d me to let me know.

While these updates can be a little exciting for some I’d encourage us all to….

Video created in September 2007

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Last month the ProBlogger Poll asked readers to tell us what their blog’s topic is. The results are in and it’s a fairly even spread across 11 categories. There were 3043 responses that categorized themselves as follows:

I was actually quite surprised by the evenness of topics covered. There is probably a skew towards ‘internet’ as that is the niche that this blog is about but it goes to show just how diverse the blogosphere has become.

Following is another chart of the same information - showing the percentages.

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The following post exploring the rise of Mom Blogs is by Michelle Mitchell from Scribbit.

In the Wall Street Journal’s April 10th issue Sue Shellenbarger interviewed Heather Armstrong (known to millions of fascinated fans as Dooce) and a gasp of surprise went up from print media around the country (even my hometown paper The Anchorage Daily News picked the article up off the AP wire).

But I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing surprising about Dooce’s super-stardom and in fact not only is it to be expected but other mom blogs are following in her wake. Mom blogs are poised to become the next big “It” when it comes to the internet–they’re gathering power like no other blogging niche and will only get bigger and better. Here’s why:

1. Moms can blog at home

You don’t need a PhD, an office or a small business loan to start up a blog and this especially appeals to mothers who are looking for ways to bring in extra income while they’re at home with their children. It’s a job that they can do while the kids are napping or away at school and allows women like me who have left the work force to raise a family to feel part of the tech age–always a benefit when your days are filled with diapers, dishes and drool.

Mom bloggers don’t have to leave their day jobs and they don’t have to make enough money to live off of–all they need is a little extra to pay for soccer lessons or a family vacation.

2. Moms need the sociality of the net

I couldn’t possibly count the number of days that I’ve spent without the live interaction of another adult (except maybe the clerk at the grocery store). Women want–no we crave and demand–social interaction and for those of us whose office is our home the internet and blogging opens up a new world of friendship, debate, learning and conversation. No longer do we have to pretend to hold conversations with Steve on Blues Clues just to talk to another adult, now we can blog. Women need to read about other moms’ struggles and disasters–it’s how we feel that maybe our own traumas aren’t so bad–and there are more and more moms daily that are discovering how the world of mom blogs helps them feel connected to other women.

3. Moms have a wealth of material to use

Tech blogs are just about technology, celebrity blogs are strictly about celebs but a mom blog could focus on parenting, protecting the environment, politics, crafts, food, homeschooling, gardening, household products, design, travel or just funny stories.

They’re usually written with an emotion and personality which connects with readers in ways that other niches often can’t and they speak about subjects that naturally carry strong emotions: home, family, marriage, children, the environment–all of which encourage dedicated readers. A blog about the latest techy gadget, while interesting, doesn’t carry the emotional weight that a post about home and family does. While other bloggers may sneer over moms posting stories about life with little ones and the oddities of every day life there have been plenty of writers from Erma Bombeck to Dave Barry to Jerry Seinfeld that have built careers on noticing life’s quirks and inconsistencies and mom blogs are cashing in on this.

4. Moms are record keepers

Blog means “web-log” and most blogs are started as online journals. Moms naturally tend to be the record keepers for their families whether it’s a newsletter, scrapbook or photo album and more and more women are turning to blogs as an easy way to keep their family’s diary. Staying in touch with Grandma, recording a child’s growth, these are the reasons women are turning to blogs and even though 99% of them will never see traffic outside of their family those who blog read other blogs. And who are they going to read? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not TechCrunch.

5. Mom blogs wield economic power

In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point he writes of the importance of mavens–those who are trusted for their opinions and who pass along information on what products, services and ideas are the best–and mom blogs are the maven nesting grounds. Moms want to know which products work and which don’t; they want to give an opinion on what’s worked for them and share their experiences with others and advertisers are just beginning to discover this advertising pot of gold.

Because women are generally the buyers for their homes in everything from clothing to food to minivans mom blogs talk about things that can be bought and sold, products that can be promoted and services that most households need. Proctor and Gamble, Sony or General Electric can throw up their logos on PerezHilton and that might make them look rather hip but if they can get Dooce to say she liked their stuff that’s when the sales start rolling in. You’ve heard “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”? Well she who does the shopping then blogs about it rules the net.

Mom blogs are growing and it’s not going to be too long before Dooce stops being an anomaly in the blogosphere and becomes the matriarch of mom blogs everywhere.

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It’s time for another ProBlogger Poll.

What is the Biggest Source of Traffic to Your Blog?

Is it search engines? If so which one? Is it RSS subscribers and loyal readers? Is it Social Media sites (and which one is it)? Do other blogs and sites send most? Or is it some other source of traffic?

If you want to base your answer on a period of time - do it for April (so far).

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this one. Feel free to expand on your response further in the comments on this post.

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OK - time for a ‘comical’ interlude.

I was just over at the ProBlogger Book page at Amazon and scanned down the page to see this:

OK - so what ProBlogger reader is searching for ‘no show briefs’?

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