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Happy Friday.

I don’t usually go for confessional blogs myself, so I usually try not to write like mine is one. You know the genre. They usually have a tagline that starts with “Just”, to qualify their author’s efforts. “Just my thoughts on the war”, for example, or “Just the ramblings of a chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan”.

However, sometimes I live up to my own standards so poorly that I would make a great Republican. So this is just a happy Friday post, depending on the kindness of strangers, living behind the music store. It is just a confessional post, with the following confessions:

• I love how easy it is to self publish online, because it means there are lots of opportunities.
• I hate how easy it is to self publish online, because it means that every chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan is in competition with me.
• I also hate how easy it is to publish online because I can get confused about which of my projects are important. Given the terrible, self-imposed imperative to become awesomely popular and the number of chain smoking pregnant teenagers I’m competing with, I feel like I have to come up with a definitive domain / topic / killer app within the next few days or I’ll die penniless, with my young nemeses selling my clothes for cigarette money.

Now you know why I hate confessional blogs.

In the interest of replacing this funk with some creative work, I’m going to shift gears now and work on one of those projects. If you see any teens catching up with me, for God’s sake, won’t you please let them know how bad smoking is for the baby?

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?

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…

Those of you who know me from my real estate brokerage may also know Purva Brown, who contributes to my real estate blog. Purva also hosts a fine real estate blog of her own, The Sacramento Real Estate Gal. Purva joined my real estate company last year. She originally thought she was taking on a mentor when it comes to search engine optimization and Internet marketing, but as it turned out, Purva’s helped me to expand my writing horizons at least as much as I ever helped her.

Purva and I are currently hammering out an agreement to collaborate on several projects. Our first is putting up an online store to help us market and sell e-books and PLR content. If all goes well we should be launching our first product together, Purva’s ebook for real estate investors, before the end of March.

As a real estate investor herself, Purva and her husband, James, went through their share of landlord horror stories. Landlord Land Mines is the book Purva wished they’d had when had when they were getting started. Landlord Land Mines is written both from her own experience and from the experience of many other landlords who she interviewed for the book.

Forget the theory and the spreadsheets — Landlord Land Mines puts together decades of collective experience and stories from real investors, who teach you what you need to know and what you need to avoid.

Subscribe here to learn more about Landlord Land Mines when it becomes available. Avoid the land mines — because blowing your leg off can ruin your whole day!

Well, you can sure give it a try!

I’ve been having great fun working on my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days promotion on my new Inklit Writing Blog.

A lot of people have stopped by and have helped me out tremendously as I work on the program.  Wasilla Realtor®, Marty Van Diest came by and lit a fire under me that I know needed lighting, to allow email subscribers as well as RSS subscribers.

In a matter not so much related to getting 101 new subscribers in 30 days as it is to overall gratitude, Authentic Real Estate Engagement expert, Dustin Luther, stopped by a couple of weeks ago to help me out on another issue that I needed some help with.  I appreciated his visit and the support.  You should check out Dustin’s blog if you’re a real estate agent / broker interested in taking full advantage of Web 2.0.

Win a Six Month Ad on a New Blog

I realize you’d rather have a six month ad on Problogger, but I didn’t write that one!  Those of you who like contests and who don’t mind taking a bit of a risk (your time only, not your gold) on a brand new venture may want to try pitching in to see if you can win a 6-month or 2-year ad at InkLit.com. 

Here are the Rules for the Ad Contest.

Santa Clarita Real Estate Blogger, Linda Slocum, went above and beyond the call first by being the only commenter on this cleverly re-titled post.

Following up on this, she promoted the contest for me on FaceBook.  I’m hoping to do well there.  People with their face in a book are a natural for a writing blog!

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and it allows you to subscribe to blogs and news sites you like so you’ll be able to read them whenever they get updated, without having to go check the site to see if there’s anything new.  You do this using an RSS reader, which can either be a web site type reader or software that you install on your computer. 

When people say "subscribing", they simply means adding a site to a reader.  Often you can just enter the address of the blog itself into the reader, and it will figure out where the "RSS feed" is.  An RSS feed is just a web page in special format that an RSS reader can read.  Most blogs have a subscribe link like the one on my blog, and that link is taking you to the RSS feed itself. 

On this blog that link looks like this:

If you click on this link, you’ll have the option of subscribing in a reader if you already have an RSS reader account set up somewhere.  But what if you don’t?   Well, let’s try one on, shall we?   It won’t take long.

Introduction to Google Reader

Let’s keep it simple and look at one popular RSS reader, Google’s Reader, which is at http://www.google.com/reader.  If you have a Google account (Gmail email address), you should have access to this already.  If you don’t, click the big blue create an account button and get your free Google account, then when you login you should go straight to the reader.  (If not, use the link above again).

When you enter Google Reader for the first time there’s a short video you can watch if you want, then you’ll want to start adding subscriptions.  You should see an "Add Subscription" link on the left hand side of the screen.  (Tip:  if you don’t see it, look for a gray arrow on the left that will make the left hand navigation window visible). 

The button should look like this:

Click the "Add subscription" link and you’ll see a place where you can add the web address for the blog or feed you want to add.  (Remember, behind the scenes you’re always adding an "RSS feed", but most blogs are set up so that if you just add a page or the home page from the blog, it’ll work.)  So just copy the web address of the blog you want to add here. 

To add this blog, for example, enter http://www.inklit.com/blog/ and then hit the add button:

You’re almost there.  You won’t necessarily see anything yet, but if you look at the upper left hand corner of the page, you’ll see a link called "Home" right below the  Google Reader Icon:

Click that home link and you’ll see that the recent articles for the blog you just added now show up.  It’ll look something like this. 

Why Should I Go To All This Trouble Just To Read This Blog?

Well, if my blog is the only blog you read, you shouldn’t go to all this trouble.  You should just come here and read it.  Oh, and by the way, thank you, thank you, thank you for your rapt attention.  I really appreciate it!. 

No, as compelling as I am (ahem), the chances are you read lots of different blogs and news sites that are updated regularly, and when you read such sites, you want a way to be able to just go to one place and see what’s new.  Readers like Google Reader let you go to a single place and read all the news you want to read, and nothing you don’t, without having to manually visit each blog to find out what’s new about the topics of interest to you.

Now What?

Now that you’ve got your reader set up, your world gets a lot easier.  If we visit another web site and click on the subscribe here link, we can add that site as well.  Let’s say you’re over at CatalystBlogger, for example, and you click on Jennifer’s "Subscribe Here" link.  You’ll end up at her feed.  You’ll see a bunch of buttons on the right hand side, and if you click the Google button you can add her right into Google Reader easily.  Next time you add a feed, you may find a single link that says "Subscribe with Google", since FeedBurner (the site where many of these RSS feeds live) will remember that you like to use Google Reader.

So now go find your favorite blogs and enjoy reading them!  And if you haven’t done so in the tutorial above already, thank you for adding the feed for Inklit.com to your reader.