While I believe that blogging in itself has become a very successful medium, I don’t believe that it really thrives in the environment that it is forced on here. The same information could be put forward more succinctly in an essay format in my opinion. This is why I don’t think that I will continue to blog, at least for now until I have something meaningful that I can write about. Whether or not it’s an episodic web novel or transcribing a journey, both I feel are much better reasons too blog.
The most difficult thing about blogging is creating the content for the user to read. If there is no content on the blog, then none of the other features of the blog matter. While I do say that this was the toughest part about blogging, because this exercise was so structured, it was easy to find the information to talk about.
After doing this blog, I see blogging as the same as I always have, it’s a great medium to get information out to the masses of people who need/want it. With the correct tagging and blogging tools, It’s a great way to target specific user groups with the information you want.
This Graph shows a sizable increase in users in the period of 2010 to 2011 with an increase of over 28million unique page views per month. As can be seen in the graph above, there has been a steady increase in page views, with a few months where growth stagnated, though never really dropped significantly.
This in comparison to myspace.com which has almost the exact opposite growth that Facebook had. This can be shown in the graph below.
While there isn’t one answer to why facebook succeeded while myspace failed, a lot of the growth of facebook can be attributed to word of mouth. People go where their friends are, people recommend to their friends the websites that they like to visit. In the Social networking world, that usually means that one website is very successful and one receives no traffic at all.
The topic of blog monetisation is one that many people have an opinion on, but few have succeeded in such an overcrowded marketplace. While luck does play into some of the success of some blogs. Being able to correctly market your audience with the correct monetisation method is the key to being able to make a successful blog.
There are several methods of monetising a blog so that it is successful. They range from showing ads on your blog to selling services. There are four major ways to monetise a blog
Cost Per Click Advertising:
While this is one of the most common ways to advertise on a blog, this can be very unreliable as you need page viewers to click on the advertising that is on the page. However, finding the right advertising is made easier by programs such as Google’s Adsense, which tailors the advertising to the content on the page. This helps (in theory) with the amount of people who will click on your ads as they will be advertisements that the user will actually care about.
Cost Per Action Advertising:
This advertising is much like Cost per Click (CPC) Advertising, however this has the added constraint that users must perform an action after clicking on the advertisement. This includes signing up for a website, or purchasing an item. While these are far less reliable than CPC advertising as it adds another level of complexity to the advertising, which makes it a far bigger risk to the blog owner. This risk however is offset by the fact that there is a much bigger return if the user does happen to perform the action. This is mainly used by amazon.
Selling Ad Space
While the other revenue streams require the user to do something (Click an Ad or Do an Action). However, this approach just requires the blog owner to give up space on their website for links. This is a good way to get a steady stream of income into the website. While this seems like a much better solution, it can lead to problems with the aesthetic of the website if the amount of links is abused.
Paid-for Content (Pay wall)
This is one of the more unpopular ways to monetise a blog, as it restricts the user from information that would otherwise be free. While this is unpopular, many websites (Primarily Newspapers) have used this methods with varying degrees of success.
The search engine world has become somewhat of an unwieldy beast in the time that the internet has grown from it’s awkward teenage years into its maturing adult years. There are many many search engines around, but people only talk about a few. Google is the one big contender in this market, but it’s not the only option. For many people, Google is a jack of all trades, master of none. In this respect, there are many search engine that uses their niche nature to their advantage. One such search engine is that of Wolfram alpha. It embraces the fact that it serves a niche market.
There is no real way to compare the two of these search engines, as they both serve two different purposes, one give thousands of results of varied information, while the other tries to provide specific information about a your chosen subject. For example. A search of New York City into Google will provide the user a wealth of information about New York and the surrounding areas, whereas the same search on WA would a multitude of information about New York as though one was looking it up in an encyclopedia.
In conclusion, there is really no way to determine which of these search engines is better, only which of them is more suited for the job that needs to be done. This is why when storing and sorting information, it is important to note what job needs to be fulfilled, and how to best sort it in a way that would be most efficient.
Sources:
Google search:
http://www.google.com.au/#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=New+York+City&pbx=1&oq=New+York+City&aq=f&aqi=g5&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=75l2316l0l2526l13l12l0l2l2l1l364l2515l2-6.3l9l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=9bc2c12fe7b1c385&biw=1920&bih=1019
Wolfram Alpha Search:
