Why Quantity Matters

Blogging offers a way for you to build a website one page at a time. Anything goes in terms of the content you choose to publish and the purpose you want to achieve. Realistically speaking, however, if your blog doesn't have visitors, then even the most wonderful content you create won't achieve your purpose.

It's equally true - especially in the beginning - that if your blog doesn't have enough content, you won't find it easy to attract visitors. Even your early subscribers and other people you know well will stop visiting your blog if there is nothing new for them to see. (Wouldn't you?)

What's more, there are many promotional tools and income generating possibilities out there that only allow you to participate when your blog has a minimum number of "quality" posts that fit with the description of your blog.

Below are some concrete examples of early quantity benchmarks for new blogs that you might want to keep in mind.

With at least 5 posts you can:

• get your blog listed in search engines
• get your blog approved for listing at blogging communities like Entrecard, BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog
  

With 10-15 posts you can:

• list your blog in most blog directories

With minimum 30 posts you can:

• sell advertising on your blog through systems like ProjectWonderful (and others)
  
• apply to earn money writing sponsored posts to your blog through sites like PayPerPost
  

PLEASE NOTE: I have been waiting for the ourwwworld team blogs to have a minimum of 5 quality posts each so that we can start some ourwwworld contests that could win you some bonus cash for Christmas. Any blog currently in the ourwwworld sidebar that does not have a minimum of 5 posts relevant to your stated topic by 15 November will not be able to participate, and your blog will be deleted from the sidebar until you've caught up with the rest of the team. For those of you who already have reached that 5 post target, congratulations - and sorry for the delay!

Keep an eye out on 15 November (internet willing!) for the contest details.

Promoting your feed

The pic above shows the latest subscriber statistics for our team at feedburner, which is the service that's installed on the ourwwworld blogs to let people subscribe to your feed.

Subscribers are people who have chosen to receive news that you've posted something new to your blog. Your feed is the technical term for the technology that will automatically alert them. Depending on how the subscribers themselves choose to subscribe to your feed, they are either sent an email when you have posted something new or alerted through an RSS reader that updates them on many blogs that they might be following.

Your feed's subscribers are your blog's most important asset. The more subscribers you have who've chosen to follow your blog's feed, the less work you have to do getting visitors. When combined with income generating mechanisms, a blog with 100 subscribers could be well on it's way to becoming sustainable (ie, it can probably pay for itself and earn a little something extra for the blogger). A blog with 1,000 subscribers or more could be worth several hundred dollars per month or more to the blogger.

Growing your subscriber base takes active effort, but it's not very difficult to start. Once a way to subscribe is installed on your blog, the most basic and obvious way to get people to subscribe is to ask them to.

In the beginning, before a lot of people you don't know start visiting your blog, the best place to start asking is among the people you do know, who you also know how to reach online. Here are some very simple ways to start promoting your feed today:

1. Send an email to your family, friends and supporters letting them know you've got a new blog that's ready for subscribers, and ask them to subscribe. Don't forget to include your blog's URL, with the http:// part so that it's clickable (example: http://ourwwworld.blogspot.com)

2. Ask the people closest to you to send an email to their friends and family, asking them to subscribe as well.

3. Use facebook, twitter, ned and/or other communities you participate in to let your online friends know you've got a new blog, and ask them to subscribe. At the very least, mention that they can subscribe so that you put the idea in their heads.

4. Write your blog address on some small pieces of paper or on the back of some business cards, and keep them in your wallet. When you run into a friend who you know spends time on the internet, give it to them and ask them to be sure to subscribe.

A word of caution - do not ever allow yourself to be disappointed or offended when everyone you know personally doesn't subscribe to your blog's feed. Some people will, some people won't. Some might respond to your email request months after you send it, and some might never respond at all. That doesn't mean they don't like you, and it doesn't mean they will never visit your blog. If they've subscribed in an RSS reader, you can't see who has subscribed anyway. So don't worry about how many people don't subcribe. Focus your emotional energies instead on the people who do subscribe, and do your best to make it worthwhile for them to stay subscribed!

Once you also start promoting your blog in blogging communities, directories and search engines, people who don't know you personally will start to visit. You'll have to work a bit harder to get them to subscribe. Some bloggers use contests and giveaways to get people they don't know to subscribe to their feed; others use sneakier tactics that I won't go into here. By far, the very best way to get subscribers from among folks you don't know is to regularly produce unique and worthwhile content, that makes visitors want to come back for more.

If you liked this post, please subscribe to the ourwwworld feed! You can choose how to subscribe in the sidebar, or click here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ourwwworld. By the way, to find the address for your ourwwworld blog feed if you ever need it, right click on the link in your sidebar that looks like the one below and copy the link location:

subscribe in a reader

One last thing I'd like to ask, especially of those of you with ourwwworld blogs: please visit the other ourwwworld team member blogs and show your support to each other by subscribing today!

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Understanding Google Adsense

The last time we looked at our google adsense report was 1 month ago, at which time there were requests for more information about what it all meant. Now that October has ended, let me finally respond to that with a look at our 2 month results.

The Google Adsense program connects paying advertisers with webpage creators (like us!) by matching up words that advertisers bid on, with webpages that have those words in them. If you look at the "Ads by Google" boxes on the ourwwworld team blogs, you will notice that many of the ads relate to stuff we've been writing about. Every time you write about another subject, the ads on your page will change. The more content (blog posts) you produce, the more opportunity Google will have to match advertisers with your page content. When the ads become more relevant to the content that's on your pages, people will be more likely to click on them. That's the theory anyway. When the ads get clicked on, we get paid.

The report below specifically and only refers to the "ads by google" on the ourwwworld team blogs that look like the ones circled in red on the screenshots at the beginning of this post.



To help you understand what the report means, here's some definitions:

Channels: understanding that many Adsense account holders have multiple websites with different kinds of content, the Adsense program allows me to set up different channels that keep track of how the google ads I'm running in the various places I tell it to monitor are performing.

Page impressions: this number is equal to the number of times google ads have been viewed on that channel. It counts our own visits as well as the visits of anyone else who views our pages

Clicks: this number tells us the number of ads running on that channel that were clicked on. Always remember you are not allowed to click the ads on your own page. Google will know, and shut the account down - they own both Adsense and Blogger so they have the ability to know a lot about your activity.

Page CTR: this is the number of clicks divided by the number of page impressions to give us an indicative percentage of how many visitors have clicked on an ad. More than one ad is shown on each page, and a visitor might click on more than one ad when s/he visits, so this is only indicative. We are paid for each click that occurs, whether it was clicked by the same visitor or not.

Page eCPM: this is another indicative measure that Google provides us to be able to compare and evaluate the performance of our ads. It refers to what that channel is earning per 1,000 page impressions. Since many of our blogs have not yet reached 1,000 page impressions, for most of us it's only a projection.

earnings: that number is the most significant, because it is real (not just for evaluation purposes). It's the actual amount that the advertisers whose ads were clicked on are paying us (through Google) for the clicks we've received. Some ads pay more, some pay less, and some also occasionally pay just for being shown on our page. The amount paid per click or view depends on the words that actually appear in our pages and how much advertisers are willing to pay for having their ads shown wherever those words appear online.

Interesting to note is that LifeInAfrica.com is currently performing better than all of our blogs combined, even though Ads by Google ONLY appear on the home page right now. Here are those figures from the same 2 month period for comparison:

Channel: lifeinafrica. com
impressions: 1,760
clicks: 65
CTR: 3.69%
eCPM: $11.34
earnings: $19.96

I don't claim to understand exactly why the Adsense earnings at LifeInAfrica.com are so much better than the rest of the channels we're running Adsense on, but I am working on putting the Adsense boxes on more pages there so that we can earn a bit more for the organization on a monthly basis.

Please ask questions if there's anything about this you don't understand!