eXtra For Every Publisher

One of the bloggers I hold in high esteem, Liz Strauss of Successful Blog, has a weekly badge handout for those bloggers she thinks are worthy of being considered Successful and Outstanding Bloggers or SOB’s. I recently asked her to look at my project here and was pleased to see my name on this last week’s list.

I am officially a SOB as part of her week 97 badge handout.

Some other blogs listed in Week 97 include:
Emerging Customer
North x East
Small Business Trends

Check out the full list over at Successful Blog.

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Earlier this year, I attended a conference in Toronto, Ontario Canada called Mesh. There were lots of great people there from all walks of life, and during one session a person I was sitting near and myself began to talk. He had an office job and was interested in the whole blogging “thing”.

I told him that I was a full time blogger, and that my boss had paid my way to be at this conference. He was shocked. To him, problogging meant being able to pay for his coffee bill every month. He thought that the market was too saturated now, and he would never be able to shed the confines of the nine to five world, and blog about his passions.

It was really hard for me not to get too excited about what I do. I tried to calmly explain to him that there are still huge areas that people had not explored, and that there are new content publishing companies starting every week. I also made sure to tell him about all the pitfalls, problems and virtual walls in the way of attaining his goal.

At the end of the conversation, he seemed rather pleased. He knew that the road would be difficult, but sometimes just knowing that the opportunity is there, no matter how remote that possibility is gives certain people a reason to carry on.

So if you are having doubts about blogging for money, and are worried about market saturation, or the number of bloggers out there, then you are focusing on the wrong things. You should be showing your passion, networking, and constantly learning about how others have made it to where they currently are. If you give it everything you have, then there is no reason that you can’t make it as a problogger.

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David Airey, who does amazing logo design work and someone I have been trying to get to know better, has set up an absolutely amazing contest for his blog’s anniversary.

He has set it up to include some great prizes from a variety of different people and amassed an amazing number of products and services for the prize draw.

His Gold Award package makes me super excited as it includes:

• Logo design from David Airey.
• Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill
• Personal marketing / advertising plan from Maki of Dosh Dosh.
• One year’s hosting and blog setup from John Boardley
• Signed copy of Blogging Tips by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress.

The other prizes include USB Thumb drives, telephone conversations with some amazing people, and advertising.

The advertising prizes interest me as well, especially since Xfep is still very young. The advertising opportunities include:

• 728px by 90px banner ad for 30 days above the fold on The Blog Experiment, courtesy of Sara. This is quite a new forum for bloggers, but already there are approximately 5,000 posts! You must supply your own artwork.
• 125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Smart Wealthy Rich. An excellent donation from top blogger, Jonathan.
• Ad icon located site-wide in the top left of Blog-Op, courtesy of Chris Lodge. Another kind gift from a fellow blogger in Scotland.
• 30 day text link ad shown site-wide on Contest Blogger. This is a great way to advertise your very own blog contest. Blogging is about giving something back, so get your contest featured.
• 125px by 125px image ad for 30 days on Freelance Folder. Another superb offering from Jonathan a.k.a Smart Wealthy Rich.

The great thing is that anyone can enter David’s contest, and getting one entry is as simple as subscribing to his RSS feed or e-mail feed, and then contacting him with a secret code that you’ll find within.

A great contest, and good luck to everyone that enters.

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One of the smartest posts I have read recently comes from JohnCow.com called “We Got Fired!” where Bob writes about spreading himself too thin, and getting rid of certain projects. What is ever better is his usage of a point system to decide what stays and what goes. It is a little difficult to be so rational, but I am sure it works very well.

Here is a snippet from the article:

We took out a notepad and jotted down all our domains. Each domain/project would get a rating between 0 and 5. Anything below 3 is going in the dumpster! Might fetch a penny or two by someone who thinks the project is worth seeing through. Pennies you can put in the projects you’re dedicated to, hence improving them!

I have to say that this is something I struggle with all the time, as I work more and more for Bloggy Network, I have less and less time for the projects I would like to do. This has lead me to give or sell some of my greatest ideas to Bloggy Network in hopes of seeing them come to fruition.

It is hard not to want to do everything, but focusing on a few projects will help them become more successful, and leave less of a chance of burnout, something that I have faced a few times in my blogging career.

Check out the full post at JohnCow (not a misspelling).

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Darren Rowse, as part of his 31 Days to a Better Blog project, posted about finding a sponsor for your blog, something he has a fair bit of experience with.

He gives some great tips in the post, but one stood out to me more than the others:

If you have a smaller blog and haven’t had a sponsor before don’t aim for the stars straight away. It might be worth starting out by approaching smaller retailers, websites or companies in your niche and see if they’d be interested in some sort of partnership rather than aiming for the very biggest ones right up front. I did this a couple of months after starting my first digital camera blog and emailed 10 online digital camera sites to see if they’d be interested in advertising. 3 of the 10 bought small ads on my site (I think it was for something around $15-$25 a month). It wasn’t a lot of cash (and I didn’t have a lot of traffic to send to them) but I learned so much and made a little money in the process.

With so much competition out there, it can be very difficult to find sponsors for your blog. I have been lucky a few times, and have become friends with most of the people that have sponsored one of my sites. I didn’t make a ton of cash off any sponsorships, but it out performed AdSense, and networking connections are worth much more than pretty much any sponsorship.

Check out the full article on Problogger.net.

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