Staying Positive with Blogging

I don’t want to start sounding like a self-help site or anything, but I felt compelled to write this post. There are days when you won’t feel like blogging, or that you just want to “stick it to the man” or “rage against the machine”, and we all go through them, but if you want to keep your readers, it is usually best to stay positive.

Most people like to surround themselves with positive people, watch television shows and movies that have positive endings, and also read blogs that have a good message or a positive personality.

Negative blogs can quickly depress your users, thus eventually depressing your blog statistics as they all leave and go somewhere else.

So before you post about hating something, take a break, think about what you want to write, and ask yourself if it can be done more constructively. If the answer is no, then take a longer break, and do something you enjoy before coming back to the topic at hand.

Now, I just need to learn to take my own advice.

Originally posted on September 18, 2007 @ 9:30 pm

John Chow’s August 2007 Income

John Chow has released his August 2007 income report, and it is pretty amazing. The summer is usually a rough time for bloggers, as advertising income drops to record lows, but not for John Chow as August saw him bring in $17,828.61.

To put that into perspective, that is half a year of my income, generated by his site in one month.

Affiliate sales continues to be the blog’s biggest money maker. I promote a bunch of different programs, with an emphasis placed on programs that pays a residue income. The best performing affiliate program for August was Text Link Ads, accounting for $2,500 of the $7,244 affiliate income. Yes, I make more from the TLA affiliate program than I do from the TLA links.

Google AdSense posted its second worst performance ever. It now accounts for less than 3% of blog income. This month it will account for zero. Yes, the ad network that started John Chow dot Com will be eliminated from the blog. This illustrates the importance of spreading out your income sources.

There is only one John Chow, and so I doubt I will make that kind of cash from my projects seperate to my employer, but I can assure you that building one tenth of what he has done is achievable by anyone with persistence.

Originally posted on September 3, 2007 @ 3:09 am

Xfep is a Week 97 SOB

Successful and Outstanding BloggersOne 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.

Originally posted on September 2, 2007 @ 5:26 pm