Defog The Blog week1

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Defog the Blog! Making Blogs, marketing & making money in the Blogosphere Hope Windle

description

this is a course about blogging

Transcript of Defog The Blog week1

Page 1: Defog  The Blog week1

Defog the Blog! Making Blogs, marketing & making money in the BlogosphereHope Windle

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Defog the Blog course schedule

1: Research the field

• Intros• History• Research• Make a blog

2: Review• Reviewing

Blog making • Uploading

images• How to add

gadgets• Track & find• Where’s the $• Adsense

3: Go!• Show & tell• What do

we do now?

• Biz Plan moving forward

• Next steps3/24, tonight 3/31, next Tuesday 4/7, next next Tuesday

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Tonight’s schedule:

Stop, Research, Prioritize

• Why here? • What is it? • Let’s dissect a few good blogs• Lets look at Blogs• The Blogsphere, Blog Rings & How the Money

happens • Blogs out there & you 8-8:45

• Homework and what you want 8:45-9

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What do you want out of this class?

Why are you here?

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What is it?

• A blog (short for web-log) is a website in the form of a journal, with dated entries regularly posted with thoughts of any kind... In French, the equivalent term invented for the occasion is "joueb" for "journal-web"!

• Linking to other blogs is how people make money..Archive posts is helpfulRSS feed: Real Simple Syndication

• WIKI collaborative space of a group of people are editing• Can do that with Blog but usually one voice versus many

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• You are connecting /selling only to people who are interested in what you're offering.

• Only the Internet can let you select and refine your leads to this extent.

1stweek: Stop & Research

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Willie Crawford was an Air Force officer flying C130 cargo planes. Knowing how to do that was pretty valuable, but Willie wanted to do something else. He didn't know much else but one thing he did know was how to cook chitterlings.

He set up Chitterlings.com, started producing a newsletter and then a recipe book that is still doing six figures.

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Other ways the money works• The ways in which it's monetized are:• affiliate programs

(e.g., Commission Junction, Linkshare) -- if I recommend a sweater at Saks (for example) and people click on the specific link I give them, any purchases made at Saks during that visit (directly from my link) earn me a small commission (generally 3% to 15%) of the entire purchase

• it's part of the advertising network BlogHer, also -- the company gives me ads to run on the site (lederboard and sidebar) and my site makes a few cents every time a unique visitor views the page.(This is a BLOG RING)

• to a much lesser extent, Google Ads also -- the blog makes a few pennies if people click on specific links (but no purchase is required and no money is made based on traffic alone).

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The Blogsphere…Let’s go hunting..

Go to Defog the Blog site,

http://defogtheblog.blogspot.com/

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In class Homework: What are you passionate about?

1. Research Blogs..sites you LOVE, HATE, why?

2. Hard sell versus no sell?3. Investigate Design &writing styles4. Post comments: Defog the Blog

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Blog search engines & portals• Technorati

www.technorati.comThe gold standard of blog search engines

• Feedsterwww.feedster.comOne of the first RSS search engines on the web

• Blog Pulse http://www.blogpulse.comTrend search tool

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Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft’s Life Labs and co-creator of the blog search engine Blogpulse, used data from Blogpulse to visualize hyperlinks between blogs . His images show that there are a few thousand blogs clustered at the centre of the blogosphere linking to each other and to many other sites at the edge. Further analyzing this central cluster he found two sub-clusters, one focused on politics, the other focused on technology.

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Rather than simply depicting links between sites, the image visualizes where people leave comments and how often, i.e. activity in the network that goes beyond reading updates. I believe this kind of analysis is very valuable. It reveals another layer of influence in social media: While social media is more democratic than traditional media, since potentially everyone with Internet access can raise her voice, the share of those who not only watch but actually create content is lower than you might expect.

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History of Blogs• History• Main article: History of blogging timeline• Main article: Online diary• The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger[48] on 17

December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999.[49][50][51] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.[52]

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On 6 December 2002, Josh Marshall's talkingpointsmemo.com blog called attention to U.S. Senator Lott's comments regarding Senator Thurmond. Senator Lott was eventually to resign over the matter.

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Basic starter books, others welcome

• Click Here to Order, Stories of the world’s most successful internet marketing entrepreneurs, by Joel Comm, Morgan James Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-60037-173-8

• The Rough Guide to Blogging , Navigate the Blogosphere by Jonathan Yang, Rough Guides, ISBN13:978- 1-84353-682-X

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Homework:

• Research the title of your blog.• Play with Blogger,

if time, set up your blog. • We will work on your blogs in class

next time we meet.