We’ve been stumbledupon!

According to our new Firestats plugin
Last 24 hours : 1685 page views and 794 visits

I stumbled a few of Lee’s posts and that got the ball rolling! According to statcounter we almost reached 1,000 pageviews yesterday!

If you are wondering how you can get stumbledupon, read this great article by one of our very own Chris from Blog-Op. StumbleUpon can obviously be a great source to get traffic. Also a way to get addicted, keep stumblin’!

Chris From Blog-Op Writes:

Keep stumbling good stuff, write review & don’t spam, your network will grow and you will benefit. The best thing about SU though, is the sheer amount of great new sites that you’d never normally find. It results in a never ending stream of interesting stuff to blog about as well.

I realise that there are lots of survey sites about that promise big earnings but here is a genuine one – though, in this case, big earnings are not promised!

You Gov are looking for people to join their panel with a view to completing surveys and polls for payment.  This offer is for UK, USA and the Middle East only.

You Gov are a genuine company, quoted on the London Stock Exchange, and the results of their surveys etc. are often seen in national newspapers or quoted on television.

Earnings for completing the surveys isn’t mammoth.  I’ve been trying them out and for each one you get about 50p or £1.  What is good though is that they have now updated their commissions for referrals. 

What members now earn is pound for pound what people they have introduced earn for the first three months.  This still won’t make anyone rich but could possibly make some extra cash – and with a reliable, established company.

See what you think, more info here. 

Good luck,
Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission

This blog is quickly becoming me airing my blog writing dirty laundry! As I think about the topics to write here I find myself challenging the way I write my various blogs. It isn’t always fun to highlight one’s own faults but it can be rewarding and in the long run I’m hoping to become a better blogger for it.

Have you ever regularly visited a blog and been blown away by how each and every post is well written and entertaining? Even if a post is just saying that today I went out and bought the Spike puppet from Angel, when written by certain bloggers they can turn a snack into an entertaining meal.

I can’t say that I can honestly tell you what the secret is behind every one of these writers but a lot of the ones that I discussed it with had a similar habit that I thought I might share.

Editing.

Groan.

You probably shared in my groan there if you are anything like me, when I write a blog piece I often get to the end of the post and just hit the publish button whilst caught up in the rush of having finished a post and hopefully having gotten my opinion across.

More often than not I’ll check out how the post sits on the page and find myself reading through and realising that I’ve left things out or have very poor punctuation. So after the horse has bolted I find myself having to go back in and edit out my errors. Even when I’m doing this spot fire run I’m generally only targeting the mistakes that I’ve found before and give little thought to overlooking the whole piece.

The next time you are writing a post, particulary a long one I want you before you hit the publish button to stop what you are doing and take in a deep breath, maybe go and get yourself a drink or take a quick walk. Then come back to the post that you just wrote and read it over in the editor. Look not only at your mistakes but also the overall flow of the post.

Does the first paragraph make you want to read further? Does it make sense? Are there any in jokes that need explaining? Have you forgotten to link anything?

I can’t promise that this will make your posts more popular, if you are writing for yourself then you decide what makes a good post and if you are writing with a particular audience in mind they decide. If you do take a moment or two to edit your work I can assure you that your posts will become more consistent and that will make your blog better and bring readers back.

One last thing though. Too much editing can ruin a piece so don’t obsess too much. One or two quick run throughs should be plenty unless the piece has real problems in which case you should consider coming back to it in a couple of days anyway.

How to write a good post title?

To answer this, have a look at: writing a great post title

What’s cooking at Kos Island?

Not much really: if Kos Island in Greece was an exciting holiday destination, I wouldn’t have any time to blog away. Yet it is more like a MFT place: Made For Tourists. The tourist season will start next month, meaning that all the Greek living overseas come back and start catering to tourists again.

Meanwhile it is quite, so quite that Turkish Bodrum a ferry trip away is now more tempting than ever. Let me get my ticket and update you in my next post.

I’m so guilty of this.  Very often I will write a great blog post and put some vague title that doesn’t really sum up the content and won’t drive readers to take the time to read the rest of the article.

The reason why so much emphasis in on headlines in newspapers is because it is these attention grabbers that will get your readers hooked on what you are actually saying.

Take my heading on this post – pretty boring and straight to the point.  Yes this is what the topic is and you will probably know what it’s about already.  But are you excited about it?  Does it conjure anything up in your mind?  Ironically by illustrating this point it’s very possible I have lost some readers immediately!

Try taking a little extra time thinking about your title.  Over at Copyblogger.com they even suggest to write the title first.

Giving a little more thought to my topic title try this one (I’ll pop it in bold to try and catch some wandering eyes!)

Get more people reading your posts by using great titles. 

There.  Not going to burn up the world but it will create a little more interest to someone reading the headings in their RSS.

I have found two good blogs I would like to share with you all.

First, I want to tell you about Link Donating. LogHomesCabin.com has great offer running. Its basically a charity drive. The rules is as follows:

1. Link to Kiva
2. Email me and point me to that link
3. I will link to you
4. I will donate one US dollar for Kiva for your link
5. I will write about your site

Each month he picks a new charity to donate to. I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to take part in this! So check out this months charity Kiva.

The second blog I have actually just asked to become a contributor to. A Links Blog is basically just that. You ask to have your link displayed and they will add you to their link list. That’s a free link for all you that are Technorati obsessed. There are over 40 blogs now added, so get your blog listed now! I may start blogging on th4ere weekly, and will begin to mention our BAYB blogs 🙂

On your blog do you allow swearing? I run a couple of sites and my current rule of thumb is if I get a message that contains maybe one or two swear words I’ll just #%&* them out and let the post through. If the message itself is unnecessarily vulgar or offensive or just plain inappropriate I will delete it.

Some people get very upset and up in arms about deleting comments but I am of the mind that it’s my blog and if I don’t appreciate the tone I can remove the comment. It’s a personal guideline that i follow. A little like I can’t define pornography but I can tell you when I see it type of thing. I certainly don’t mind someone disagreeing with me or having a different opinion. It is those differences that make the blogosphere great. I just won’t be talked to in that tone in my house LOL.

So on your blogs do you have a written set of rules?

Do you clearly establish a set of guidelines for contributors to follow?

On my own blogs 99% of commentators have picked up the general vibe of the site and behave accordingly. In fact i think in my time blogging I’ve deleted maybe two messages. To be fair one was a set of messages. They were completely off topic and were hijacking the general theme of the site and the other one barely even registers in my memory. I’m sure there was another but I can’t for the life of me remember it.

With the first one I spoke to the person via email and advised why and eventually we just agreed to disagree. The second one i vaguely recall just deleting it as it seemed to be just a one off visit and i can’t say I’ve ever heard of them again (or maybe I have LOL and i just don’t remember deleting their comment!!!).

Actually just recently I deleted a comment over at mybloglog just because it was a bit more graphic and unnecessary than I wanted appearing in my profile. Once again it’s my profile and I’ll cry if I want to.
So I would love to hear from EVERYONE! I promise not to delete anyone’s comments (well within reason LOL). Lets get a discussion going on this so new bloggers can learn from us more established!