2010 March

Dave Sifry

March 28, 2010 By Jeffrey Leave a Comment

When looking for a subject for this week’s “The Sunday Morning Post” the choice was an easy one; however, once again it would seem that I have stumbled upon a subject that is hard to define, yet has made a huge contribution to this and many fellow Bloggers. No birth-dates, no children, no wife, no working on a family farm….. just cold, hard facts. Dave Sifry is all about the cold, hard facts. I’m not sure this post will make for a warm and fuzzy read, but it’s sure to be educational.

Dave Sifry is an entrepreneur with over 20 years experience in the I.T industry. Most recently, he founded Technorati, the largest blog search engine in the world. He is Chairman of Technorati’s Board of Directors and served as CEO from 2002 to 2007. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave lived and worked in Kobe, Japan for Mitsubishi Electric, and speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. While he now lives in foggy San Francisco, he has an interest in the outdoors and is drawn to Yosemite, in his hometown state of California.

Dave was a co-founder and the CTO of Sputnik. Prior to Sputnik, he was co-founder, CTO, and Vice President of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc, having built Linuxcare’s services infrastructure.

Dave is a recognized expert on leadership development, blogs and the massive changes in the digital media environment, Open Source development, and the Linux operating system.

He is also the creator of Projectdocs, an online document management and collaboration service, and Hoosgot, a lazyweb service. He served on the founding Board of Directors of Linux International, the Advisory Board of the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Technical Advisory Board of the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement.

Like so many of my subjects, Dave no longer keeps a regular Blog, which is truly our loss; his last entry at Sifry.com was on April 19, 2009 and titled: Great Kids Afternoon Project: Claymation! He does, however, leave in his absence a hard-earned understanding of the Blogging Process with his train of thought. React quickly, make your post easy to read, link, optimize for the search engines and don’t forget to post! Now, those are cold hard facts!

Filed Under: The Sunday Morning Post Tagged With: Biz Stone, Blogger, Dave Sifry, Evan Williams, Google, Jack Dorsey, Jason Kottke, Meg Hourihan, Stumbleupon, Twitter

Now Comes The Money, Right? Wrong! – Lesson – 12

March 27, 2010 By Jeffrey Leave a Comment

As I mentioned last week, no one can monetize your Blog for you, you have to make that decision all on your own. However, I can provide you with a template of sorts. I’d love to have you carry all of my products on your site, but if your blog is about Honey Bees, I don’t think that the “Bloggers Market Guide to WordPress Installation” is going to be a big seller, and you can throw out the idea of the auto-parts banner ads too.

When just starting out, you will be reading about how to make a ton of money doing this or that with your Blog. I can tell you right now, that your earnings from your Blog are going to be dependent on your traffic. You’re going to be needing to see about 1000 visitors a day before you are going to be able to see any income at all.

Now, if you are loaning money out at 2% interest per annum, than you are going to be making sales right out of the box. But if you have a general Blog, It’s going to take time to build up your traffic and your income. To that end and with this in mind, you should not be in any hurry.

I would advise for you to think long-term right out of the box! I have known Pro-Bloggers that waited until they were at the very top and I do mean the very top and then they decided to monetize their Blog only to find out that their business model was all wrong and had to start over. Did, you catch that, I said “business model“, that’s right your Blog is a business and you have to run it that way, like a business ……… right out of the box!!!

You essentially have two ways to go; one with advertisers, and two promoting products, both yours and someone else’s. As a Blogger, did you catch that, AS A BLOGGER, you need to stay away from Google adsense, commonly referred to as “Bloggers Welfare” and affiliate promoters like “Commission Junction” and “ClickBank“.

Can you make money for adsense? Yes, if you want to spend 18 hours a day managing static blogs. Do you really want that as a job? Can you make money with “ClickBank” and “Commission Junction“, you bet you can ……. if ….. if ……..if, you are an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketers don’t run or manage Blogs, they do landing pages, period!

How is this ever going to work? Glad you ask! See lesson-13.

Filed Under: Featured Content Tagged With: Blogger, ClickBank, Commission Junction, Google Adsense, Monetize Your Blog

My 1000th Twitter Follower

March 24, 2010 By Jeffrey Leave a Comment

Well here we go again, it’s time to reveal my 1000th Twitter Follower. My 1000th Twitter Follower actually came on Bloggers Market’s first birthday! How cool is that? Now, I’m not going to go over the “Ashton Kutcher” thing again or his 4,679,706 followers or the 151,591 followers that he has gained since I gained my 500. Instead of 435 years to catch up, it’s going to take an additional 63 years for a total of 498 years, think of it as a tortoise and the hare kinda story. And yes, yes, yes, count me as one of Mr. Demi Moore’s followers. And if you must and you just can’t resist; go for it, here’s the link: http://twitter.com/aplusk Ok,Ok, so I did do the “Ashton Kutcher” thing, I just could not help myself. Mr. Demi Moore indeed!

First up is “Stuart Fripp“. Stuart Fripp is indeed my 1000th Twitter Follower (image balloons falling all around) Stuart hails from BERRY, NSW, Australia and reading from his bio: “Leader in Personal Development and Internet Marketing. Trainer of Attraction Marketing. Founder of Team Path to Freedom. Passionate about Motorcycle Racing”.
Stuart has a website that seems to be dedicated to travel and lifestyle and MLM Marketing, however I just not so sure, so you should go by and give his site a looking at.
Here is a quick bio from the site: “Travel Ventures International is a leading multinational conglomerate headquartered in London, United Kingdom. TVI Express is a dynamic company dedicated to bringing today’s lifestyle-conscious consumers the most superior travel and hospitality products & services, as well as providing a unique opportunity to promote TVI Express through Independent Distributorships”. Here is the link to “TVI Express Austraila“.

Now, I’m wondering who will be my 5000th Twitter Follower? ……. I’m just sayin! Look out Ashton Kutcher!