social media

How to be a successful blogger

25th July 2011 7 Replies Christopher Roberts

This is the conclusion to a series of articles in which I shared with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

So there we have it, the first Technology Bloggers series has been brought to a close.

For the last six weeks, every Monday I have released an article as part of a series, explaining how and why Technology Bloggers has become such a successful blog in such a short space of time. This is the last article in that series.

So what have we learned over the series?First off we learned the importance of a reputation in blogging. If you have a positive one already, great, if you don’t have one, you need to start to build one to become known on the blogosphere, and to run a successful blog. A reputation can give you authority and respect in your niche.

Second we learned how promotion is a key factor in blogging, and how you need good promotion from the start to have sustainable success. Utilise social media and your online connections. Also, make sure you comment on friends blogs and if you have a blog or website already, plug your new site there too!

Then we learned about how respect is a key part of blogging. To conclude an entire article in just one sentence: basically, if you respect your readers, they will respect you, hence why we are a dofollow technology blog 🙂

The fourth in the series taught us why competition in blogging is important. Competition in blogging helps you to gain readers, especially commenting readers. Competitions contests themselves can also attract many people to your blog, from others on the net.

In the penultimate article in the series (excluding this article), we were shown why it is very important to give your readers lots of ways to subscribe to your blog. Email Subscriptions, Facebook and Twitter are what we use, although no-doubt that list will change in the future 🙂

The final article in the series taught us to follow the experts in blogging to succeed. You can either learn what works and what doesn’t work for yourself, – the hard way – or you can look at the experts, and see what works for them. Learning form your own experience is good, learning from others is more productive and wise.

The end of this series has got me buzzing to write another, but what about? Is there anything technology, blogging or science or related that you would like me to either teach you or research for you?

Any suggestions? Throw them at me below 🙂

Thanks for following the series and all also thanks for all the comments along the way. I hope you have learned something useful, which you can hopefully apply to yourself and your site 🙂

How promoting your blog’s launch is key to an early success

20th June 2011 4 Replies Christopher Roberts

This is the second in a series of articles in which I hope to share with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

They say that if your parents give you a good start in life, you will go far. It is of course possible to go far by yourself, but a good start significantly improves your chances of greatness.

I believe that you can apply this ethos to blogging too. A good start to a blog, usually (with exceptions of bloggers who lie/cheat etc.) helps towards guaranteeing the success of a blog.

For a blog to be given a good start, one key thing is needed: promotion. Promoting the blog can be done in various ways, as I am about to explain.

10 years ago, blogging was in it’s infancy, and you could argue that social media didn’t even exist. Now social media is one of the most powerful tools that a blogger can have in his inventory.

I believe that social media played a part, (not a massive one, but a valid one all the same) in the initial success of Technology Bloggers, via helping promote the blog.

Technology Bloggers has a Facebook page. Now this would be a missed opportunity if I didn’t use this article to get a tiny plug for the page in, so here it is. Please like Technology Bloggers for updates straight to your feed. How? Click ‘like’ on our sidebar button, it really is that simple!

Anyway, we also have a Twitter and YouTube account. These all established the blog across the social web before the blog had even started posting.

At the time the number of people following our social media pages was relatively small, but, if just a few people are subscribed and visit the site, see the great content, cool design, dofollow links etc. and tell a few friends or even better, blog about the blog, then that’s a lot of traffic gained from a relatively small number of subscribers.

Social media only played a small part in our promotion though. This technology blog had a lot more than that to get it off the ground!

about.me and Technorati

When the blog launched, I registered Technology Bloggers with Technorati and about.me. These further advanced Technology Blogger out into the world wide web.

Again only a few people are likely to have initially found Technology Bloggers via our about.me profile, or our via searching for technology articles in Technorati and having our blog come up. Hoverer, again these few people all add up.

Friends Sites

The majority of our Technology Bloggers traffic initially came from referrals from sites that I regularly visited and commented on or guest blogged for. The importance of comments is very great.

Comments can help to generate you a lot of positive traffic, and valuable links. The people who’s blogs you comment on are likely to visit your blog, so too are the commenters of that blog, especially if it is one with a ‘tight community’.

Guest blogging is also a great way to get traffic quick. On behalf of Technology Bloggers I have guest blogged in an attempt to raise the blogs profile. Finding high traffic, good quality sites with large reader numbers, which allow guest posts is a gift.

Guest blogging is very very useful as it helps to get you known around the blogosphere to both bloggers and comments. It also helps you to get quality, keyword rich backlinks to your site. Guest blogging can also give you a new perspective on blogging and a sense of direction.

My Other Sites

If you are thinking of setting up a blog, website or forum you would be daft not to use your existing sites to help promote the newbie. I did exactly this for Technology Bloggers at it’s launch. I wrote about it and linked to it from my website (Christopher Roberts Website) my social blog, my philosophy blog and my (now archive) technology blog.

To sum up…

When starting a blog it is really important that you promote it in as many ways as possible. You could look at financial advertising, or simply just use social media, online profiles and links from your own site. Build yourself a reputation up and promote your blog in as many ways as you can think, and you are sure to have a smooth and fairly rapid launch.

If you are looking to start a blog, good luck. Also stay tuned to this series, as you may find some more useful info in next weeks article. Finally if you ever need any help, contact us via our contact page.

How do social media sites make their money?

17th June 2011 23 Replies Christopher Roberts

Facebook has an Alexa traffic ranking of 2. Not a very big number is it? If you have never heard of Alexa before, you may think that that isn’t very good, but what it actually means is that it is the second most visited site on the net – the first being Google.com.

Twitter has and Alexa rank of 9, LinkedIn has a rank of 16, Flickr 32 – the list goes on.

This means that these sites need some serious server power to handle the millions upon millions of visitors they get each day. The problem is servers are extremely expensive to buy and run, due to them needing to be kept cool and have a super fast internet connection, both download and upload.

So how do social media sites run if it is so costly? Where do they make their money? How does Facebook make it’s money? How does Twitter make money? How do LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter, Bebo, Flickr, Myspace etc. all make their owners billions?

It’s complicated…

Unfortunately I cannot provide you with a hard and fast answer which applies to each social media site, as they all use different methods, but what I can do is tell you how individual sites like Facebook and Twitter make their money.

How does Facebook make money?

On Facebook there are adverts, you may have noticed them at the side of some of the pages. Often they are very well designed to blend in with the theme of the site, so that you almost think that they are just more recommended pages.

These adverts will be potentially get hundreds of millions of views each day. This probably means that they cost a fair bit to buy, so ‘the Facebook Team’ will be cashing in big time on them.

So Facebook make their money through advertising, right? Well actually only some of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. The exact figures are only known by a select few, but I would estimate that less than half of Facebooks revenue comes from it’s adverts. So where does the rest come from?

Facebook credits.

Since Facebook introduced it’s credit scheme last year, a whole host of new applications and offers have sprung up, all giving you the option of using Facebook credits to provide a service (e.g. watch movies on the site) or improve an experience (e.g. level up faster in a Zynga game).

Facebook currently takes 30% of the money spent on credits for itself, and at just over £2 for a movie or 25 ‘farm cash’ that doesn’t really seem that much.

However, with over half a billion registered users, if each user buys just 50 credits (around the price of one movie – £2 ish) a year, assuming the 30% cut Facebook gets, it could be turning over almost £1 and a half billion each year, on credits alone!

With over 400 games and apps where users can go and spend their money, Facebook are sure to be gaining a lot of cash via their credit scheme!

Facebook has recently been valued at a figure of somewhere around £30 billion ($50 billion) but in the future, who knows how high this figure could climb!

How does Twitter make money?

Twitter has no ads, so how does it make it’s money? Twitter is a microblogging platform which many users use from their mobile phones. Twitter charges users who update their feed via mobile, and it generates an awful lot of money through this.

Despite it costing mere pence per transaction, often users will update their feed mutiple times each day. Millions of users posting millions of updates, many from mobile devices, every day is why Twitter is now valued at almost £5 billion.

Twitter is still a multibillion pound firm in the making, as I am sure it has may more money making schemes and pans up it’s sleeve ready to launch in the near future.

Other sites

How do Foursquare make their money? Well a lot of it comes from their recent deal with American Express, in which I believe it is making around the same amount as Facebook per transaction, although it doesn’t have the same sized member base that Facebook has.

Many other sites like Flickr and Bebo currently don’t appear to be making any money, as their founders set out with a goal of improving the web, not making money. However in years to come no doubt these sites too will become as successful and profitable as Facebook and Twitter, that is of course if we don’t all just switch to using the two giants: Facebook and Twitter!