eXtra For Every Publisher

So many people have been asking me what my new job is, and it really hasn’t been ready to talk about, but today I wanted to cover a bit about the project, and so I have to talk directly about it. So, for all of you wondering what site I am working on, you can find me over at College Crunch, where I am today working on The College Crunch Gazette, a blog that will focus on getting a university degree.

To run this site, and its blog, I have needed to add two dozen plugins to the WordPress installation, and while we are still waiting on the custom design to take advantage of some of these plugins, I have already started producing content for the site.

This will be the largest single site I have ever worked on. For comparison’s sake, I have created over five hundred posts on this blog over the last year, and the required content pages alone will come to more than half that amount, with the blog building out a content index of around five hundred posts in the next six to eight months or so.

The amount of research I have to do for this topic is also immense, as I learn the differences between the American and Canadian educational systems, as well as their relationship for those grabbing their education across country borders.

Starting a new blog from scratch is something I haven’t done very often, as I only took over Blogging Pro, and Forever Geek as well as being a single contributor on many multi-author blogs.

I am very excited about the challenge and hope that you will all check out The College Crunch Gazette, leave comments, and ping me if you have any post-secondary stories you would love to share.

Share

One of the issues I have is that I am not a big time information gatherer, and I don’t really dive into the statistics and information I get. Some people I know can look at a table of information and draw some many useful business related conclusions from it that I sometimes sit their awestruck as they do it.

It is a skill that I am slowly learning as I dive deeper into working on projects where profit is a key goal. If you can’t find ways to collect the data you need, and analyze it in a way where you can create an actionable plan that will get you closer to whatever goals you might have, then you should also be finding ways to learn this very important, and highly profitable skill.

What are people searching for when they find your site? What do you want people to search for to find your site? What are people clicking on? What are they avoiding? What key factors go into building your traffic? When people leave your site, do they click on an external link?

Breaking down the patterns can allow you to manage your visitors in a more efficient way, bring on advertisers that are closer to what people visiting your site are looking for, or capture traffic that you otherwise would have missed.

We are fortunate in today’s web world that when you operate a site, you can get data pertaining to just about anything you might need, so don’t let that information go to waste. Lastly, don’t let the abundance of data stop you from reaching your goals. There are days where I try to get into data processing and analysis, and I just get overwhelmed, and end up wasting time. Don’t let this happen to you.

Are you good at understanding the psyche of your users? How did you acquire that skill, or was it natural? Let me know in the comments below.

Share

I was recently talking to a friend of mine about how you can make money online. He does a podcast, and was looking for sponsorship. I was telling him that even if he could get a CPM rate of $10 for every thousand plays that the show gets, with the thousand plays per weekly episode, and selling three ad spots, he’d only be looking at $120 per month.

After realizing that getting one thousand listeners per episode wasn’t easy for him, nor any podcaster, I immediately wondered how well podcast advertising scales. Surely it deals with the same sliding CPM rates that blogs and other forms of advertising get, and so the higher the traffic, the less money for every thousand listens he’ll get.

So estimating a maximum audience of ten thousand plays per episode, four episodes a month, and three sponsors per episode still paying $10 CPM, he would only be making $1200 per month for what, in my mind, would be an outrageously popular show.

Seems like there aren’t really any super easy ways to make money online and that it always comes back to creating a large enough audience that you can sell something, be it services, products, or advertisements, but the audience required to make a full time living off the web, is probably only achievable by two percent of those willing to chase it.

Share

As most of you know, I am getting really anxious and excited to buy an iPod Touch. I think, as a blogging tool, the iPod Touch could be very useful to me, but I don’t want to be the dummy that buys an older version a few weeks before the newer, better, and cheaper version is released.

How do I know the new one will be better and cheaper? Well, the Digg founder, Kevin Rose, spills his inside insights and while his predictions haven’t been extremely accurate in the past, he echoes much of what many others are saying with regards to what we can expect from Apple in September.

I guess my question now is, will I be able to get an iPod Touch in time for Blog World Expo in September?

Share

Is it just me, or are the themes being released today all starting to look the same? For a while people were trying new things, but it feels like everyone has retreated to the tried and tested two column designs with the most basic feature sets possible. There are very few innovators in the space anymore as people try to quickly push out “decent” themes so they can get as many back links as possible to their blogs.

If a theme can’t make you go “wow” from the design, or quickly see the potential as a framework for many diversely designed blogs, then maybe you shouldn’t release it.

There are reasons why certain themes are more popular than others. They are either better designed, or coded in such a way that they can quickly be built upon. Take note theme developers, as there is still many more cool things that can be done with regards to WordPress and theming.

Share