Archive for January 16th, 2008

Say Anything — Managing Your Blog Vacations

Published by Dock on January 16, 2008 in Blog Writing. 4 Comments

Occasionally, there comes a time when you simply can’t write your blog. Sooner or later, the blog comes to an end, or goes a long hiatus. There are certainly any number of reasons you can’t get a post off (temporarily or permanently) and that’s certainly understandable.

It could be a family emergency, a machine failure, a long, well-deserved vacation, a lack of interest in the current topic, a dearth of information about your current topic, you switched domains, you simply can’t find the time - or you just plain don’t wanna do it anymore!

Any of the above reasons are fine, and don’t require a bit of justification. I’m sure there are plenty more I couldn’t come up with - point being, the reason doesn’t matter.

There’s a small problem though. You probably have a readership - and almost certainly have an RSS feed.

My suggestion is that if you know that your writing will become slow (or stop) then please - take the time to write a post (however short) that simply says something to that effect. It could be as simple as “Hi folks - sorry about the lack of posts - I don’t expect to be posting much in the near future” or as complex as you care to make it. You might explain the circumstances, or redirect people to your new shiny blog on a different topic (or subdomain) but in any case - say something. You don’t have to make any promises to write more, and you don’t need to make it up to anyone. Just say something.

Say anything.

This is far more helpful than you might think. It will certainly be of benefit to me, your readers will appreciate knowing what’s going on, and honestly you’ll probably feel a little bit better knowing that you took a sliver of time to keep everyone in the know - even if it’s one last time. Also, should you take blogging back up in the future, you may find that your act of courtesy ticks the wheel of internet karma to your advantage a bit, as you’ll be remembered more favorably by previous readers.

Thanks!

New Kinds of Blog Ads in ‘08

Published by Tim on January 16, 2008 in Promoting Your Blog. 1 Comment

Kelly Spors of The Wall Street Journal is pegging 2008 as the year you just might start making money off your blog:

As more people see potential in earning money off the Internet, there is a quickly expanding array of advertising services and tools for bloggers that go well beyond the standard pay-per-click text ads or display ads.

Many of the most widely used programs are adding features to allow users to customize the appearance and placement of ads on their sites. Some also are introducing newer money-making mediums such as audio and video ads.

Of course, there’s no telling whether these new ad types will work. (One she mentions — an audio ad that automatically plays every time someone visits your blog — sounds a leeeetle bit annoying…). And it’s easy to dream about making a living off your blog only to realize that your traffic will only produce a few bucks.

Nevertheless, the more truly contextual and useful advertising gets, and the easier it becomes to integrate into multimedia, the more bloggers themselves will be able to get paid for all the blood, sweat, and tears.