The Blog According to Buzz

Over the Christmas holidays I took this blog writing thing up again. For about 2 years I wrote one on MySpace, got sick of the spam and pulled it. I worked on getting a new site and design and then decided to try my hat at monetizing.

John Chow made nearly $200 000 last year just by running little ads on his website, I thought it would be fun to try.

Month 1 is done and here is the Google AdSense earnings report for the cyberbuzz media network (including The Blog According to Buzz and cyberbuzz):

Google doesnt like me to give too much traffic detail from AdSense, so really all I can tell you is I made $18.81.

Using Google Analytics, here’s a better look at the traffic on this site:

I had over 4000 visits to the blog last month, more than 100 a day - not bad. Most of my traffic is from referrers. I’m working with my pal Meg on boosting my Google Juice, but for now it’s word of mouth getting the people to the page.

Because of the way the blog is structured, with the latest posts fully written on the front page, there’s not a lot of drill down traffic - people get what they need up front without having to check out other pages.

The most popular pages are:

The Front Page - 36% of traffic
Have You Accepted Tom Cruise as Your Personal Saviour - 3.1%
Pages Tagged “Britney” - (and y’all thought nobody really cared?) - 1.7%

I do have other monetization on the network, including Kontera, TTZ Media, aLinks and others, but revenue from them was negligible.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Seriously, the internets were brokened at the house today, haven’t had a reliable online presence all day. Sorry, no blog for you!

BTW, the logo is on a tshirt I bought my brother for Christmas.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Back at it in the glorious sunshine for a new week!

    - Today is Blue Monday, statistically calculated as the worst day of the year. 

    - It's also Black Monday as global stocks took a HUGE header.  Sucks if you're near retirement, if you're young just look at is as all the stocks are on sale, and it's a chance to stock up! You know, like a BOGO event at Payless.

    - Yes, it was a wild weekend in the TDot for CBC's Test the Nation.  Team Blogger won it, and I've been blogging all about it.

    - In the US, it's Martin Luther King Jr Day.  It's not our holiday, but it's still a great chance to stop and reflect on the message.

    - America seems to think they're over it, but the more they focus on race and gender, it proves they're really nowhere close, are they?

    - I warned you last week not to sit too close to watch Cloverfield!

    - Meg Fowler may be single, but she prefers football to dating.

    - If you prefer dating to football, check out Cravin Misbehavin - cheap tickets on sale tomorrow. I'm giving away tix all week if you know your candy trivia, the theme this year is Candyland!

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Bloggers are modern historians. We’re taking pictures, writing down and documenting everything that’s happening around us.

With 36 bloggers last night at Test the Nation, the event will properly be entered into the annals of Canadian Trivia History.

Here’s the rundown of who’s writing what, so far:

Miss 604 - No Spoilers Here
Miss 604 - Nerd on Top
Photo Junkie- Team Blogger Photos
Canadian Entrepreneur - Sweep! Sweep!
Calgary Grit - The Answer is Bee
Jon Arnold - Bloggers 1 Rest of World 0
Lainey Gossip - I Love Winning
Right Between the Eyes - Don’t Wanna Brag, But ..
Nunc Scio - The Sweet Smell of Blogger Victory
BlogTo - Backstage Celebrity-ish Interviews
Celeb Edge - SMRT on the CBC
Unsweetened - We Will Blog You
Pen Machine - Yay for the Indoor Kids!

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Team Blogger pulled a clean sweep at CBC’s Test the Nation on Sunday night. Did you watch? Up against a killer football game, and the finale of the Amazing Race was some tough competition, I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it.

Most of our afternoon was spent sitting in wait. (At the studio at 3p for a 7p shoot time, *yawn*) With a gaggle of celebrity lookalikes in the room, it made everyone mingle to run and get a picture with Paris, or House, or Kiss. Check out the backstage pics at The Tea Makers.

We had the highest individual score (57/30), highest average team score (50/60) and highest celebrity score (Samantha Bee 49/60).

It wasn’t even close. Personally, I score 52/60. Not bad, had a blast, lost my voice and got to touch the trophy. (see my previous post about the Stanley Cup - you’re not allowed to touch it til you win it!!)

Here’s the rest of the smartest people in the country:

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

We’re in Toronto for CBC Test the Nation. Good God it is cold.

It’s “only” -6, but man it’s damn cold. It’s a different cold than Vancouver, Toronto is a dry cold, or whatever it is, it just hurts! My ears were burning, that kind of cold. Your nose hairs (yeah, i got em) get crusty, that kind of cold. You scream “Mother of God!” every 20 steps, that kind of cold.

We’re staying at the old SkyDome Hotel, now a Renaissance. I took a flight with Rebecca, Miss 604 and Kerry-Ann, Lip Gloss and Laptops.

Here are some pics from Rebecca’s post about our adventures so far.

That last picture was taken by Duane Storey at the airport. He tagged me as “Tod Maffin” on his Flickr listing, so I will represent our Mother Corp Mentor in spirit.

We met Karen Barnaby from Team Chef and the Fish House in the elevator on the way back from dinner. She doesnt think the chefs stand much of a chance, they spend too much time in the kitchen!

Tomorrow morning it’s breakfast and a trip to the Hockey Hall of Fame before kicking some ass on Test the Nation. You can take some practice tests to get ready, if you want.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

I am a John Chow disciple. I subscribe to his RSS feed, and while his blog trumpets how to make money by creating a blog, often it’s an excuse to blog about a restaurant he’s eating at so it becomes a tax deduction.

Regardless, John offers up many great tips on ads, affiliate networks and other sorts of things you can throw up on your site to make some cake.

Earlier this week I made a post about Google Ads and how I think they’ve become invisible to many blog readers. I was eagerly messaged by many friends, including John, urging me to remove the post since, according to Miss 604, “the first rule of AdSense is you don’t blog about AdSense.”

Maybe my point wasn’t made properly, today I’ve run into 2 separate posts basically saying the same thing I was saying: ads on the internet are becoming invisible.

My readers made it clear via their clicks that they were totally uninterested in Google AdSense sidebar ads. After a few short, unprofitable months with AdSense, I switched my strategy to targeted, in-context advertorial content. [Electrolicious]

John trumpets Kontera as a solution to advertising within a blog post. My cyberbuzz site has Kontera added to it. Links that are double underlined are paid external links. They look a little bit different, but still blend in with the flow of the site and don’t stand out.

In a way, there’s already a trend against ads not working as well as they used to on blogs. PR agencies have been trying to get positive reviews and posts on their products almost from day one, but with PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and whatnot, there are more organized ways to get recognition. You can make a decent amount of money by selling your content this way, and several hotshot bloggers are for sale. [The Blog Herald]

I even read another example of how radio ads and endorsements are starting to fall on deaf ears as well.

I use the example in the book where I listen to Daily Source Code with Adam Curry, and he kept talking about his great experience flying Virgin Atlantic. He was talking about Virgin because, you know, he’s a human being and he loved the experience. Well, guess what? When I was flying to the UK and thinking about which airline I wanted to fly, I ended up flying Virgin - all because of one person - one person’s not even overt recommendation, but endorsement. I’ve never met this person before, but I trusted him. I just felt like I trusted him. I trusted them because I listen to him regularly. Gee, that sounds pretty familiar. [Hear 2.0]

So the blog as personal advisor works far better than the blog as advertiser. Local blogstar, Miss 604 is running into what can only be described as a “tech ceiling.”

… when a Vancouver blogger wants to promote restaurants and businesses in the city, what does it take to get a company to hop on board? For example, I’ve personally been told by at least thirty people that my (unsolicited) blog post recommendation to visit a certain butcher shop/deli turned them into faithful regulars of the establishment - score! Blogging equals links equals customers.[Miss 604]

Endorsements work, but they have to subtle endorsements. The Electrolicious example fully details how she went about monetizing her site, and if you’re thinking about working the money magic, it’s a good read.

John can tell you all about how he makes $450 for a ReviewMe posting, and that might be another option for you to chase down.

Me? This blog is about me bitching about things I find interesting and think you might find interesting as well, I don’t know if selling myself is quite the right way to go about things (yet).

So my original post, which I won’t repost because of the advice of my Google-Fu friends, was basically correct - ads are invisible.

The ones you don’t see aren’t working, the ones you don’t even know were there, are.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.

It’s a shirt that features an equalizer that lights up and bounces based on sound around you. You have wires going from the front of the shirt to a battery pack and microphone in your pocket. It’s the PERFECT shirt to wear to represent the Blog Nation on Test the Nation, BUT…

Can you imagine the look on the faces of security at the airport as I stroll up to the scanner with a battery powered shirt complete with wires? Yeah, that would go over well. So the cool T-Qualizer T-Shirt will stay at home.

Instead I think it’s all about the boy. The Zizou shirt will be worn. With pyjamas. (they asked us to wear what we normally wear blogging)

The best part about being on Team Blogger is that we’re not really stars, but stars will be there. Andree Lau is excited to meet Surreal Gourmet, Bob Blumer, to chat him up about his Medoc Marathon where he ran 42 kilometres across vineyards and sampled wine along the way. I hadn’t thought about it, but I’m excited to meet him too.

For his show Glutton For Punishment he assaulted a stage of the Le Tour de France that included L’Alpe D’Huez! That’s a dream of mine, I can’t wait to hear about it.

Other celebs on hand will be Debbie Travis, Farley Flex (Canadian Idol), Carlo Rota (24, Little Mosque on the Prairie), Samantha Bee (The Daily Show), Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica, Top Model) and many more chefs that you’d recognize from Food Network Canada.

CBC’s Test the Nation goes Sunday at 8. It will be taped in Toronto. Where they have winter. -9? Ick.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.

PlentyofFish.com is worth $10M a year, according to a recent article in the NY Times.

Markus Frind, the Vancouver based creator, works about 10 hours a week. Nice.

Markus doesnt really have to do much other than maintain the servers and make sure the website is online, all the content is created by the users. The more users, the more the content, the more content, the more users - it’s not a vicious cycle, it’s a brilliant cycle.

That’s what social networking sites crave, they create the place where people congregate, the people create the content that keeps them coming back. Facebook works the same way.

I’m not really wanting to create a social network here, but I am looking for some help. I have hundreds of blogs I read each day, entertainment, food, news, local, tech etc. but I dont have a good photography blog. Something basic. I bought the Panasonic FZ18 as a Christmas present for myself, and I’m still trying to make it work.

So, which photo blogs do you read?

For that matter, which other blogs do you read that you’d like to spread the word about?

No personal pimping here, this is an old fashioned word-of-mouth, tell-two-friends-and-so-on type of post.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.

Election fever has gripped the continent.

It’s Romney v Huckabee v McCain v Edwards v Clinton v Obama and even Canadians who can’t hang a chad are glued to CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews trying to understand what the hell a caucus and a primary is.

You may not be able to vote in the American Election, but you can vote for the Canadian Blog Awards.

Some peeps you may wish to support:

Meg Fowler - Best Personal Blog [vote here]
Meg Fowler - Best Blog [vote here]
Meg Fowler - Best Blog Post [vote here]
The Blog According to Buzz - Best New Blog [vote here]
The Blog According to Buzz - Best Media/Celebrity Blog [vote here]
Miss 604 - Best Local Blog [vote here]

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.