Dealing with Negative Criticism of Your Blog
Luckily most of our criticism or critiques have been manageable, I know the weaknesses of Blog about your Blog better than anyone. I can always take the bad with the good.
What about when it’s all bad?
Negative Criticism
What I like most about Entrecard is the shop. I’ve even turned into a shopaholic. I’ve been able to get several links as well as permanent links from reviews. I’ve been very happy and impressed on the quality I’ve gotten just for a few entrecard credits. However, our last review, didn’t go as well.
Recently I purchased a review from Nothing of Particular Interest (their website is no longer available, I wonder why?). I can’t seem to find the cost it was, but it had to be only a few 100 credits. I was drawn to it by first of the page rank and second of the low alexa score.
Yesterday before the review was published I received a message.
“Hi! Your blog review is done, but I will say, it is overwhelmingly negative. Having said that, if you would like me to pull the review, I will be happy to give you a full refund. I wouldn’t want you paying for a review you’re not happy with.”
I said it was fine and to go ahead and publish. It couldn’t be that negative, could it?
Well, it was. Everything from the quality of our site, to our grammar was called into question.
I was given advice that really didn’t matter for our blog. Moving our entrecard widget isn’t a necessity and it does just fine in its spot. Our entrecard price is twice of NOPI’s. Why move it?
I was also criticized about our Project Wonderful price of having a ‘minimum’ bid.
On the subject of Project Wonderful, I noticed he has no ads there. A more in-depth investigation (read: clicking the link) shows that his default price is $0.50. That’s a BIG no-no in advertising.
Our current advertiser is paying $1+ per day. Their’s? 10 cents.
I’m not saying there weren’t valid points, because there were. However, going in open minded, the review turned negative and our blog never was given one compliment. Being in ‘business’ for a year, 10,000+ visitors per month, and almost 600 RSS readers, I have never received a critique that harsh.
So what?
That’s only one person with a blog. The best thing we can do with that, is take it the best way we can. Improve our quality, our posts, and our blog. That way, the next person to read and visit our blog won’t think that way. All I could do was really address the issues of the review, thank them for their input and time. Then move on.
You have to remember, try not to be negative as well. It only makes you and your blog look worse. I have received several mean or rude comments at Blogging Zoom. With that I’ve tried my best to be as civil and professional as can be. Getting into a name calling match is not only unprofessional but stupid as well.
Ignore It
Another method to a bad review or criticism is just to ignore it completely. Why not? If you have nothing nice to say, then say nothing at all.
Many of the bigger blogs or websites take this method for two reasons. Any press is good press. Secondly, it’s impossible to address every comment. The worst thing someone can do, in my opinion, is respond negatively back.
“I hate you and your blog.” Okay, I hate you too, your blank blank *insert bad name*. Sounds childish doesn’t it? “Thank you for your comment, we will try to improve.” Sounds a lot better.
Any comment, good or bad, is essentially good. It means at least someone is reading!
How do you deal with negative comments on or about your blog?
Comment Friday for February 8th
Sometimes I hate Alexa! We have a great traffic day, yet our rank goes up. So weird to try to predict!
If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 200 entrecard points.
This week I was wondering how many people use WordPress? If so, did you install it yourself. If your not on WordPress, would you pay someone to set it up for you?
Taking WordPress to a Whole New Level!
The folks at Automattic (guys behind WordPress) released a very cool new theme recently which takes WordPress to a whole new level.
The Prologue theme turns your blog into a Twitteresque site – with much of the same feel, layout and functionality. Some people are even suggesting this could be a Twitter killer.
I don’t believe this will have any effect on Twitter, but this theme opens the door to many an opportunity. It wasn’t long before I started dreaming of the possibilities and after a couple of hours of work – RankScale.com
RankScale is a place for online marketers and bloggers to plug tools, sites, blogs, and other resources they come across. The site is nothing special – but it does demonstrate just how powerful WordPress is and what can be achieved.
I have got plans to do some quite a bit of custom coding work on RankScale which will greatly improve the experience – but let me know what you think of the concept. (plus you always sign up and grab some free link love!)
I’m sure many a similar site will be built using the great new Prologue theme and I can’t wait to see what other developers come up with. My quick project was just a cosmetic job (fiddled with design etc..) but amazing things could be built using Prologue + plugins + clever coding!
Find me and all my articles at my new blog – Marketvice.com
Getting Paid to Take Surveys Online
Signing up to take surveys often scares people away. There are plenty of scam survey sites out there. Never give your credit card information, if they need that, something is definitely wrong.
There are some, however, that are very legit and you can earn some extra money for your ‘opinions’. You just have to know which ones. Lucky for you, I have signed up to several and been paid by them all.
Quick Survey Tips
Besides not entering credit card information, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Taking surveys do require some skill. For example, if you are taking a survey about movies, it may be a good idea to answer that you’ve seen and been to some movies lately. Sad to say as well, surveys can be racist. Selecting “21 male white” usually disqualifies me from many surveys. Survey sites often want variety so different nationalities are needed.
Be consistent. I’ve noticed with certain survey websites, the more consistent you are, the more surveys you get. Eventually you will even get to try products as well as bonus surveys that pay more. Several times I have been rewarded 15$ for survey. This was for watching something on TV, a DVD or trying a product.
Which survey sites should you use?
SurveySpot
SurveySpot is the one I would recommend most. I’ve reviewed SurveySpot before after using it for a couple of months. I have mostly good things to say about them. Surveys are consisten, fair pairly paid, and there are chances and contests to win even more money. The only negative is that you don’t get paid right away. Sometimes it takes a few weeks for them to credit your account for the survey you’ve taken.
The biggest attraction to Surveyspot for beginners may be the 5$ minimum payout. Just for taking a few surveys for money, you can earn your payout. We usually get our payments anywhere from 2 weeks to about a month.
Checking my payment history, I’ve earned about 375$ dating back to March 07. The money isn’t huge, but as you can see it is pretty consistent. Click the image to see my payment history.
GlobalTestMarket
GlobalTestMarket is a little bit different. By taking surveys you earn points. By earning points, you can then cash that in for cash. To earn the minimum payout you must earn 1,000 points which is worth 50$.
I’ve been paid once by Global Test Market (50$ and some cents), but I never really got back into it. I think they are one of the larger survey sites, so I often miss survey opportunities. Surveys are just a part-time thing for me, so I got behind on this service. It is definitely one to look into, obviously it pays, but I found it wasn’t for me.
SurveySavvy
SurveySavvy may appeal most to bloggers, because it is the only one with an active affiliate program. (GlobalTestMarket has one but you must apply. I’ve been declined.) I’ve referred 28 people to SurveySavvy so far, with an average of 1$ per completed survey by my referrals.
The reason SurveySavvy is at the bottom of the list is because they don’t offer as many surveys as the others. I get maybe a handful of surveys per month. However earning $money$ per every completed survey by your referrals is incentive enough to sign-up and promote it.
Do you take surveys for money? If so, do you work with any of the three mentioned?
WordPress Structure Theme
I’ve wanted a complete blog makeover for some time on this blog. However, to get the good designers to custom make it, that runs a pretty penny. When re-designing Blogging Addiction I chose one of my favorite new themes.
Structure Theme
Justin Tadlock designed the structure theme. Make sure to upgrade to a newer WordPress to use it.
“Description: A theme for news/magazine sites with a blog-friendly option too. It includes built-in video and image features that easily allow you to customize your site. There are content blocks that you can place virtually anywhere on the page.”
What I like most about it, is that you can manipulate it (very easily) to however you want it. Whether you want it magazine style, featured posts, full or half posts, you can make it however you want.
The features are easily customizable, especially to start. You can add your feed subscriptions just by giving the URL etc. This theme is definitely for a moderate WordPress user, but easy to learn.
Features
There are some features that definitely should be mentioned.
- A custom home page to look like a news or magazine site (optional normal blog layout for the home page)
- Related Posts plugin support
- Plugin support for Popularity Contest by Alex King
- WordPress 2.3 tag-ready
- Placeholders for ads. Good sizes for 125×125px ads (must have for new themes)
- Widget-Ready sidebar (not designed for them, kinda aligns it weird, but nice to have)
From the sounds of it, this theme really needs pictures. I think any type of photo blog may work really well here.
For more information about the Structure Theme you can view and download it here.
Structure has to be my new favorite theme, Whats yours and Why?
What is Bounce Rate?
The term “bounce rate” may be thrown at you sometimes when someone is discussing how successful advertising or a promotion might be. But, What is Bounce Rate? I never knew exactly what it was, but I figured I didn’t want anyone “bouncing” off our blog. So the lower % the better.
Bouncing off your Blog
What does Bounce Rate actually mean? Well the question was asked, and answered on the Bloggeries Forum. Jay of Online Opportunity handled the question very well.
A bounce is when a visitor lands on one page of your site, and doesn’t visit another page in your site.
They could, potentially, look at that one page for a very long time, and still be considered a bounce.
Bounce rates basically measure how interesting other pages of your site are to your visitors. Depending on what your site is, you may or may not be worried about bounce rates.
A site that has product reviews, for example, might have a high bounce rate if the single page that someone lands on answers all their questions about the product so they don’t need to go anywhere else on the site.
So What Does Bounce Rate Matter?
Well for some things it doesn’t. I would assume visitors searching for your site via google etc, may bounce more, after they find the answer or query they are searching for.
Bounce rate may also effect which advertising opportunities you wish to pursue. If you are getting a lot of hits from a certain advertising opportunity, but they are leaving your page without clicking other pages of your site, that may be of less valuable to you.
It may also influence which social media sites you want to promote your content on. When we were dugg our bounce rate was at 95%+, which meant that many of the users visited our digg page then left, probably never to return again.
Finding your Bounce Rate
The only tracking system that I know that calculates bounce rate is Google Analytics. Analytics is easy to set-up on your blog, it only needs a simple code. After the code is added you can explore tons of stats that include bounce rate.
Do you pay attention to your bounce rate? If so, what is it? Make sure to share it with us and the Bloggeries Forum.
January 2008 Stats and Earnings
I skipped last month’s report due to some time issues. Here’s checking back in to how BAYB is doing.
Traffic
According to statcounter, our traffic was 11,887 unique visitors. Stumbleupon and social media, along with google has help us pick up our monthly visitor total.
RSS Feed
Our Rss Feed count has been pretty much the same. Our high has been about 580. We aren’t keeping on track with the recent increase, probably due to the fact we haven’t run many promotions. I’ll try to roll with something next week.
Popular Articles for January
- Affiliate Marketing with Incentivizable Campaigns
- Social Media Could Put You on the Map
- Search Engine Traffic Is Easy With Tech Support Posts
- Optimize your Google Adwords PPC Campaigns
Earnings
Google Adsense: $13.05
TLA: Another big 0
Sponsored Reviews: $156
Direct Review: 45$
Private Ads: $132
Scratchback: 20$
Kontera: 3.12$
Project Wonderful: $12
Pepperjam: 40$
That brings the grand total up to 421.17$. Which is an increase of the last few months, but a lot of it has been an increase in affiliate earnings. I hope to keep up the earnings, as well as earn more with my other ventures.
How did you do last month?
The New Weekly Contest Roundup
Hi everyone! Today starts a new version of The Weekly Contest Roundup. I’m gLf from About Blog Contests and I’ll try to follow the steps of Contest Beat: the best and simplest blog contests from the net, weekly delivered for you all, here at BAYB. If you have a blog and if you want to easily win a contest, read on and find how to get free tech stuff and free money.
1 Year of Hosting
The first blog contest is from International Freebies. To celebrate her new domain name she’s offering a Professional Shared Hosting Package ($99.50 value) from Think411.com. This includes 5GB disk space, 25GB of Bandwidth and unlimited sub-domains. To enter simply write a post about this contest (100 words min, with link to the contest post, the site homepage and to Think411.com) and subscribe to her feed by email. Then leave a comment with the link to your entry. Nothing more.
Ends on February 28th.
A 40GB Media Player
Domprofessor’s marketing blog is giving away a brand new ARCHOS 504 Media Player (or $200 by Paypal, if you prefer). You have many ways to enter and gain points (more points, more chances to win!). You can simply write a few lines about his contest, add his site to your blogroll or Stumble/Digg one of his post. Check out the contest post for full details.
Ends on February 29th.
$25 Every Week
Finally, some cash! Mixed Marked Art is running a great weekly contest that will run forever. Write a one time post on your blog (250 words min, with link to the contest post and the site homepage) and you will have a chance to win $25 every single week of the year, plus a link to your blog. You may win only once per month. No deadline.