Web Site Design and Development

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about writing? How did these design elements get here?

I like the second one better. It looks better if you click it to see it full size.

My wife likes the current look and feel better than that one, though. There’s something about the whole black and white that must be a guy thing.

Readers, what do you think?

If you’re interested in places where you can submit your articles, check out the guest post I wrote this week, Freelance Faceoff:  EZineArticles Versus Associated Content.   Thank you to Jesse Hines at Vigorous Writing for asking me to send that over and for his kind words about the article.

I’ve been doing an article for EZineArtices every few days.  I mention in the Vigorous Writing article, it’s working out quite well.  Here’s my EZineArticles Author Page.  Based on one of the mistakes I made, I can offer you the following tip so you can avoid doing the same thing.  If you’re going to publish an article somewhere else, be careful if you go back into the EZineArticles editor once your article has been saved and approved.  There’s an auto-save feature on the editor.  If you’re not careful, you can do what I did, which is accidentally mark an already-approved article as "changed" and thereby send it through the approval process again.

I made that mistake in the context of trying out another article submission site this week:  Article City.  ArticleCity.com looked really great at first glance, and there were many articles there that had been widely re-circulated.  I tried submitting an article there, however, and after a few days it seems pretty likely that nobody’s home.  It’s not so unusual that my submission hasn’t received a response yet, but at the same time the site hasn’t changed at all in the past few days.  The same article on "Measuring Lubricant Quality" has been on the top of page one during this time, so it doesn’t appear they’ve been approving anyone else’s new articles, either.

Related Articles:

Forthcoming Guest Post on Article Submissions

This has been a busy week.  I was very gratified to get Dave Smith to come by and take part in our new series, What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy, and Dave was a big enough draw that subscriptions went up quite a bit after his article.  I’ve started making inquiries of some exciting new authors.  If you have people you’d like to see, drop me a comment.

Over on Sacramento-Home.com, I had to play fix-the-code-that-Metrolist-broke after our local MLS changed its database structure.  I’ve been able to put together quite a few interesting web site features using a combination of MLS exports, a MySQL database, and some PHP programming.  The neat thing about such work is that you can offer your users some really custom content and search options, and I’ve found this goes over really well.  In spite of all the hype about blogging, home shoppers aren’t looking for a pundit — they’re looking for a house.  The down side is that every year or so you need to spend a day or two fixing code, but for the benefit, it’s certainly worth the time.

Everyone is hanging around on Twitter this week.  A few weeks ago everyone was hanging out on FaceBook.  As social networks go, you have to like Twitter, because once you’ve set up TwitterFeed to blab at your friends for you, you don’t actually have to spend any time blabbing at them yourself.  Well, there I go being a Luddite again.  If you want to try your hand at using Twitter to promote your blog, check out Chris Brogan’s guest post on ProBlogger.  That’s much better.  I’ll have to do resource post on Chris over at Inklit — he’s got some great stuff going on over there.

New Social Network alert.   Come play over at FriendFeed.

As an Internet writer, I love hearing about the death of print.  All your newspapers and magazines are going to fold any minute, and then everyone will be online all the time looking for rising young pundits like me.  Well, "pundits like me", anyway.  The main thing is that we won’t have to deal with those inconvenient literary agents and editors whose poor jobs Andrew Keen is so concerned about.   Then we can just hoist up our content and claim our AdSense Money.  I want my MTV.

My Favorite Death of Print Picture

Here is my favorite picture showing how print is dying, a chart of the stock for McClatchy Company over the last few years.  McClatchy is the company that owns several newspapers including my home town paper.

This chart shows print dying on schedule.  If you read what some of the McClatchy papers have to say about their troubled fortunes, however, they’re more likely to put most of the blame on the declining ad revenue caused by the troubled real estate market.

I think they’re just blowing smoke.  Print is dying, I tell you.  Didn’t they hear the rumor?

Other Numbers Tell A Different Tale

I don’t know if print is dying fast enough for my taste, however.  Every time I go to Borders, I find three two-sided shelves, fully loaded with print magazines.  You’d think they’d be down to two shelves or something if print were really in its death throes, but so far they’re still hanging on quite nicely.  There must be at least two dozen magazines dedicated to women’s abdomens alone.  Fortunately they only cover the top 1/10th of 1% of women’s abdomens, too, or they could fill up the entire store.

As if all these magazines weren’t problem enough for the death of print rumor, along comes the web site of the MPA, or Magazine Publishers of America.   This site publishes all sorts of magazine circulation statistics, for both single issue sales and subscriptions.  For example, here are the 2006 subscription figures for the top 100 ABC magazines.  Let’s see how fast print is dying.  The two top magazines are AARP magazines at about 22 million subscribers each.  Of course, AARP circulation has a captive audience of AARP members, so this number is artificially high.  Let’s check out the number three magazine, Reader’s Digest.  About 9.7 million people subscribe to that.   (I guess it really DOES pay to increase your word power). 

Now let’s see how the blogs are doing.  Technorati’s top blog as of today is Engadget, with no subscription numbers available.  Fair enough.  Tech Crunch, the number two blog, boasts some 734,000 subscribers.

As you can see, the number three ABC magazine has twelve times as many subscribers as the number two blog.  Of course, the real readership in each case is harder to measure.  How many of those Readers Digests are sitting in a dentist’s office somewhere?   We don’t know.  Based on my own subscriber and traffic numbers, I would expect TechCrunch’s daily visitor count to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million to 6 million, so Reader’s Digest still wins has a pretty handy lead based on circulation numbers alone.

I’ll leave the rest of the discussion / spin for the comments.

I hope you enjoyed this essay content, and invite you to subscribe for more.  I need big subscription numbers for when I release my blog to Kindle.  Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t Amazon.com the company that was selling us all Segue’s a few years back?  Whatever happened to those…

If you were lured to this post by the title, you shouldn’t feel bad. I didn’t really write this title to trick you, though I did write it to make a point. I’m actually going to show you how to do it by the end of the article, too, so I don’t think it’s fair to accuse me of trickery.

I’m going to assume you don’t already have a web site, and you’re starting from scratch. Six figure retirement means our goal is simply to get to $100,000 in AdSense income per year. This shouldn’t be hard. Just this morning, I stumbled on this article with the unambitious little title, Becoming the Next Advertising Millionaire.

This is going to be so easy. The “next” advertising millionaire. Wow, there must be thousands of them!

I’m Just Like You

I like to think that I’m too intelligent to fall for the siren song of Internet riches, but I’m not. I want to be an Internet advertising rock star just as much as the next guy.

As a result, lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with AdSense and other ad networks. This is how I happened to stumble on the “Becoming the Next Advertising Millionaire” article. I found it during a search for “interstitial ads”. I visited one of my main blogs today, and found that suddenly there was another web site there, and it was making Firefox crash. As it turns out, an interstitial ad is an ad where a whole new web site comes up instead of yours, with a link or two that says “Sponsored by <Your Website Name>”. An ad network I was trying out, AdBrite, leaves these “full page ads” on by default, though you can turn it off. When I searched for “AdBrite” and the company that was there in place of my site, I learned about “interstitial ads”.

Now you know about them, too. Wow, you’re going to be so filthy rich.

Back to Our Six Figure Goal

In my case I didn’t start on the road to AdSense wealth from scratch. I have about 3,400 pages of web content under my belt, so I get to play around.

One site of mine has 610 pages of blog, and about another 400 pages or so on top of that. We’re going to use the blog number of 610 pages since that’s where I’m running AdSense. Over the past ten days AdSense reports 2,461 page impressions, and I’m making $2.38 per 1,000 impressions. My average for all my sites is $2.80 per 1,000 impressions, so we’ll use that for now.

Having 2,461 impressions in 10 days means I’m serving up 246.1 impressions per day. There are 610 pages on the blog overall, so that means that each page gets displayed 610 / 246.1 times per day. Dividing, each page gets displayed 2.48 times per day.

We’re going to be rich in no time. Stay with me.

We get $2.80 per 1,000 page views. A page of content gets displayed 2.48 times per day. Our goal is to reach $100,000 per year.

OK, $100,000 per year divided by the $2.80 we get per thousand page views means we need to have 35,714 x 1,000 page views per year to make $100,000. That works out to 35,714,000 page views per year.

In order to make this work, let’s assume you can write four pages per day, five days per week, on average, and you’re going to start when you’re twenty-one years old. Fifty-two weeks in a year times twenty posts per week is 1,040 pages per year. Each page gets viewed 2.48 times per day, so that means you can generate 2,579.2 page views in a year. Our goal to get to $100,000 in yearly AdSense income is 35,714,000 page views, so let’s see how old we’ll be when we retire. 35,714,000 divided by 2,579.2 is 13,847, so starting out when you’re twenty-one, you’ll be in a position to earn your six figure AdSense retirement when you’re only 13,868 years old.

If I were you I’d start typing.

The past few years have witnessed an explosion in the number of sites promising Freelancers they can make money writing online.  Even in small niches, competition abounds.  The number of sites competing to match authors of paid reviews with paying sponsors has risen to three (that I know of — there may be more).   Every day another freelance writing job board pokes through the Internet like a dandelion on an already ruined lawn, with Copyblogger’s new job board being a famous recent example. 

<bad_attitude_guy>

You, too, can get $10 for each 500 word article you submit.  Unless you write a lot faster than me, that works out to about $11.67. per hour for contract work.  Did you ever start a blog and then say to yourself, why didn’t I pick something profitable, like a blog about working at McDonalds?

</bad_attitude_guy>

With all the interest in transforming online writing from a hobby into a profit center, it’s not surprising that article submission boards have risen in popularity.  Bob Younce recently surveyed five such sites and still had nine left over.

I’ve been asked to do a guest article comparing two such sites, Associated Content and EZineArticles.  It should be out in a day or two.  I will let you know.

It may be time for bad_attitude_guy to go find a mentor or two.