A new version of AdSense Notifier has been released (which I’ve blogged on before).

I had posted a comment over on the blog of the developer of this handy Firefox extension. I was having some trouble getting the AdSense Notifier to work properly on Mac. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. Mincus, the developer, responded quite quickly. Told me to go back to a more stable version, which I did.

Now, however, he has released version 5.0, which fixes all the bugs. If you want an incredibly easy way to keep tabs of your earnings, install this extension.

Just wanted to welcome all the people who found us through the Metro. You can find out how we can help in our services page and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

As mentioned in the article Arieanna just left her job to devote her time to blogging related work. She recently wrote about it in another post on this blog. Together we write for a number of blogs including:

• Blogaholics
• Blogging Help
• Vancouver Coffee
• Baking Low Fat
• Cooking Made Simple (with Tris Hussey)
• Get Real
• Wireless Jobs
• Silicon Valley Jobs
• DVD Skills
• Qumana
• Qumana Investor Blog

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the article is available from the Metro website as a PDF.

I have taken the leap and have decided to turn ProBlogger.

What does this mean? That I will be officially working for myself as a professional blogger and consultant on a full-time basis. After much debate with myself, I decided to take the leap and see what I could make of the opportunities presented to me. I will be “officially” ProBlogger starting on Wednesday.

I’m really excited to be joining the force of professional bloggers along with others such as Darren Rowse and Tris Hussey. I also feel proud to be one of the first few women to take the leap into professional blogging.

So, here is a wrap up of some of what I’ll be doing. I’ll continue to write on all of our blogs, and maybe add a few more to the “Blogaholics Network.” I’m going to ramp up the services offered by our ‘official’ company name: Blogaholics Consulting. Our consulting site will continue to be Blogging Help. Some of the services that I’ll be offering include:

• blog writing on pretty much any topic
• blog setup
• SEO with blogs
• training sessions (blog intro, blogging basics, listening to the blogosphere)
• public speaking
• event blogging
• media purchases for blogs (read below)

At the same time that I’ll be monetizing our own blogs, I will be helping other bloggers out there achieve high yield sponsorship. Putting my marketing hat on to ensure that both the advertisers and the bloggers get the optimal deal. Right now I’m working with Darren Rowse for sponsorship on his Digital Photography Blog. It’s been great so far.

Ok, if that list is not long enough, I’m also going to be working with Qumana and Qumana Services. The latter is a bit of a duplication of the above services, but I’ll have the chance to work more closely with Tris Hussey to really tag team the effort. I’ll be working with Qumana on a blogging/marketing type role. Tris & I came up with the lovely title of Senior Blog Marketing Specialist. Very cool. I’m really looking forward to contributing to Qumana.

For the next couple of weeks I’ll be blogging for the Collaborative Technology Conference - I’m running a series of interviews with Stowe on the speakers and moderators who will be at the conference. The list is just packed with really interesting people. All the interviews are cross-posted to the CTC Blog and to Get Real. Hopefully I’ll be able to event blog the conference as well.

This is my current list of blogs:

Our blogs:

Blogaholics

Blogging Help

Vancouver Coffee

Baking Low Fat

Cooking Made Simple (with Tris Hussey)

Microbrewblog (coming soon with Tris Hussey)

Blogs I write on (or am soon to start writing on):

Get Real

Wireless Jobs

DVD Skills

Qumana

Qumana Investor Blog

So, it’s a pretty exciting time. I am just ready to load up my plate with more stuff that I am seriously passionate about. Want to reach me? Email arieanna AT blogaholics DOT ca

I was playing with our Feedburner settings today and discovered that they now offer the option of adding Adsense ads to your RSS/Atom feeds. Of course, you need to be approved by the Adsense program first. ProBlogger pointed me to the official announcement.

This is so far the easiest way of adding Adsense to your feeds. You don’t need to figure out where the code needs to go in the XML, it’s all done for you. Feedburner also allows you to configure which feeds will have ads: you can choose to insert ads only on posts that meet a minimum word count, and only to insert ads on all or every 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th post.

I’ve enabled ads on BloggingHelp’s feed. We’ll see in the next few days how effective they are.

Will Pate looks at the paid blogging model on the Raincity Studios Blog. My opinion has been floating around here and there. Especially since Blogging Help is one of the referenced professional blogger sites by Common Sense Journalism.

So, what’s my opinion. Well, I don’t really agree with the pricing model or its grounding. I think that professional bloggers offer something more than just copywriting - we offer not just journalistic expertise, but also knowledge of business, SEO, and the blogosphere in general. I don’t think this is a negative thing - I think businesses can, and should, hire professional bloggers who can help them create an online voice that represents who they are, to help them understand blogging, and to support their own staff to produce content for the blog.

I think it perfectly acceptible for a business to want to go into blogging because it is a good marketing tool. However, I wouldn’t set up a blog or start blogging without also talking about how important it is to use blogs as a communication tool and a listening tool. I think by showing companies how they can be involved with their customers and be a voice in their industry, in addition to raising their ranking, profile and sales, we can be of great benefit.

So, for the above reasons, I do quite disagree with the pricing model. If I thought myself a mere copywriter, I would not be where I am today. I think almost anybody can write copy. It just takes some creativity. But I’ve voiced before how I think that being a blogger is akin to a new type of journalism - or syndicated writing, as Tris notes.

So, to tie it all up, I’ll be doing more of this ProBlogger stuff with Tris for Qumana Services. We’ll be offering:

* Blog strategy
* Blog consultation/training/coaching/mentoring
* Blog setup and customization (using the blogging platforms Blogware, Bryght, and others)
* Professional blog writing services on virtually any topic

We can be reached at Tris (tris AT qumana DOT com) or Arieanna (arieanna AT qumana DOT com).

Technorati Tags: professional blogger

RSS = Really Simple Syndication

RSS is a way for any website, including blogs, to provide content out in a format that allows subscriptions. These subscriptions can come by email or by a news aggregator such as Bloglines.

A news aggregator or news reader, whatever you want to call it, lets you take those RSS files, often called “feeds,” and show them to you in a readable format.

RSS files are not really meant for you to see. They are meant for your computer to read. You simply choose the method most convenient for you. I don’t know of many who read it in the email format (I do know that Robert Scoble is one, however).

I personally use Bloglines. So, when I click on my Bloglines subscription button, manually add the feed, or use the lovely XML button on most weblogs to add the feed, Bloglines simply asks me where I want to put it. I choose the folder, or make a new one, to keep things organized.

So, what happens is this:

Bloglines periodically checks that RSS feed to see if the author of that blog/website has added new content (new posts or articles).

If yes, it will pull all that information over via RSS into a sequential listing of the posts, recentmost ones being at the top. Each post comes down the line separately, since each post has its own “permalink” - it’s own unique place in the Internet. This makes it easy to reference that article, since its place will never change. How cool is that?

From your perspective, when you go to Bloglines, it will bold the folder and the blog name and tell you how many new posts there are.

To read them, you simply click them.

Have any questions, let me know.

I’ve been running a little experiment using AdSense. We tend to see some improvements from moving around where the ads go, but one thing that’s always bugged me is the content of the ads. It’s not always relevant.

Relevance has a couple of points. First, relevance to your content. Second, relevance to your readers. So, if I talk about a new blog innovation here or over on Blogaholics, we’ll get all the ads to start your own blog, write content, etc.

However, experience and knowledge has shown me that a good many of my readers here, and most on Blogaholics, are sophisticated bloggers already. Or, at least, already have a blog. So, these ads are relevant to the content I am writing about, but not to my readers.

So, my solution was to watch daily for those ads and to block them using the Competitive Ad filter. Yes, this is not the purpose for the filter. And perhaps would annoy some advertisers. But, seriously, they were not getting clicks anyway.

So, the result? A large improvement in CTR. Clickthroughs way up.

It is an interesting study that I suggest you try.

Darren Barefoot and Jeremy Wright of Inside Blogging just gave a presentation to the BCAMA here in Vancouver. Ianiv & I met with Jeremy Monday night for dinner and then went to The Whip to listen to a band managed by Kris Krug called The Black Torries. Absolutely fabulous band. Looking forward to hearing their CD release when it gets done professionally.

Here’s a link to the slides. Just filled with little nuggets of advice. If you missed the presentation (as I did), it might help to go look up some of the sites referenced in the presentation.

The level of blog knowledge is evidently spreading. Jeremy noted that there were a ton of people who knew the blogging “lingo” and everything. I’m glad to hear that marketing professionals are more than just curious about blogging - that they are willing, and maybe even eager, to take the step forward.

This just came up on gapingvoid:

His answer? Make the customer integral to the process, make the customer the central player in “The Flow”.

Make your customers the marketing department.

It’s a good point - if your customers are the entire reason you exist, then why don’t they exist within your organizational chart? They are not just that end part of a chain of selling, but are clearly integral to the entire development of the product/service. They are your product development department, your marketing department, your PR department, etc. So put them on your chart!

Cross posted from Blogaholics.

I’ve noticed myself using the word “content” far too often in my “posts” and it’s suddenly occurred to me that this is not such a good thing. I didn’t write an article, just a post. I didn’t write, even. I blogged. And my writing is nothing significant, just some content. Some filler. In reflection, this is what the words sound like. To an outsider, they don’t reflect well on what we do.

First, content seems to infer that the material is something less than writing itself. That it is not an article. I have to start using the term “writing” in place of “content”

I think that “article” would also be a good replacement for “post”

I am not sure where these trends came from. Did we just get too excited with our new blogging jargon - blog, blogging, bloggers, blogosphere, content, posts, feeds, etc - did we go overboard? At what point do we take ourselves so far out into the jargon to forget what we basically are - journalists.

Let’s redefine the word journalist - a common term, one that is far more referential to what we actually do. I say we claim the words that belong to us, rather than creating words that seem to demean our efforts.

Am I right?

Cross-posted from Blogaholics.

Transparency is a key point in getting that all-important authenticity that I’ve talked about before.

If, as noted on gapingvoid, trust is the cornerstone of companies (for customers and investors alike) and transparency equals trust, how do you intend to achieve transparency?

It’s not easy. It relies on both the company policy and the example of its leaders, but also on the actions of individuals. Are you ok with being wrong? With openly talking to those who may say bad things about you? If you are, then you can achieve a transparency in your writing and your content that will shine through.

Whenever possible, if afraid of those two answers, ask yourself why. If you know that there is a problem with your product, fix it. Customers are no longer interested in ok products or even good ones. They expect you to give them a solution and a relationship - your package must deliver.

Tim Yang’s Geek Blog shos us 15 things to do with RSS:

1. Get the news as it happens from multiple news sources
2. Collect your email from all your email accounts in your RSS reader
3. Track Fedex packages
4. Get notified of bargains at Ebay
5. Get stock updates
6. Get the weather reports
7. Find out what people are saying about you, your company or your product online
8. Get music, radio programs and TV clips
9. Stay updated on someone’s schedule
10. Get cinema schedule updates
11. Read your favourite comics
12. Find out what other people surfing
13. Automatically backup your weblog posts
14. Get software updates
15. Get the latest bittorrent files

The 1st and 7th tips would be the standard ones that everyone spouts out, but I think the others point to some niche areas of companies and people who have found great ways to capitalize on the benefits of RSS. Clearly, RSS is not going away - it will mearly be integrated into our daily lives in more complex and useful ways. Especially for businesses.

One important step to getting your blog listed in the search engines is to have it submitted. Now, you could do that manually, but it’s not fun. You could also wait it out for someone to notice you somehow and link to you - thus telling the bots to go to your site and look at it.

But there are easier ways. Tris at Larix Consulting pointed me to this great site that sumbits to all the engines at once. Don’t worry if you get errors - getting most is the important thing.

Thomas Korte: Submit your Feed to multiple sites

The Fun Money Blog writes a little piece about why it’s important to have original content. They are points I agree with quite wholeheartedly.

At the beginning of my blogging, I think I was in catch up mode trying to get a grasp on blogging, who was out there, and what people were saying. I wasn’t ready to write my own stuff right away. But once I did, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment: that I had written something of some importance, that my angle was fresh, or that I had shared my ideas so that others could take them further.

Here are the pointers from the Fun Money blog about why to write original content:

1. More Fun - First of all I have to admit, writing that post was a lot more fun than simply posting on a new news item from somewhere else…

2. More Traffic - For the 24 hours after the post, traffic was about double what it usually was… [from inbound links]

3. More Gratifying - It was just more gratifying to myself to have my post noted by other people. It’s nice to know that other people think you have something important to say. It just gives you a feeling of accomplishment to be linked to when writing an original post…

If you don’t know what to write about, start by talking about what others have said in your topic area. You’ll begin to get a handle on where you have opinions, and perhaps where there are gaps in the coverage. That is where you can fit.

Another tip is to dig through other things you’ve written in the past - old presentations, essays, research vriefs and so on. Perhaps there are little nuggets in there that others can benefit from - insight that never made it to the web.

Whenever anyone talks about the success of a blog, it’s usually measured in traffic. How many unique views do you have on your blog? What are your hits? How much traffic do you get from search engines? My take is that traffic is not the only measure of blog ’success.’

Here is why I’ve come to think this way. Our primary blog, Blogaholics, does well with traffic and also has a pretty high subscription rate. However, this blog does poorly on traffic but has a fair number more subscribers. So, I could get worried about why I don’t have outstanding incomming traffic to the site. But I’m not. Search engines are not everything. We are well rated on the search engines, but the topics we cover, often about blogging (what’s known as metablogging), are covered by so many others that we just don’t achieve the click through’s one might expect (yet). Our archives are not large enough to put us higher in the listings. But the blog is doing great - we’re talked about and we’re read. And I’m quite satisfied.

I think that traffic is an overrated mode of rating. Let’s look at how popular you are with readers in general - do they like you enough to stick around for more?

So, my advice: don’t fret if you don’t get high traffic on your site. If you have high RSS traffic, and a ton of subscribers, consider your blog on its way to success.