In looking at all the blog contests going around these days, I’ve gotten really excited about the idea, and am planning a contest for About Blogging.
I’m interested to know what you think about blog contests!
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I wish I could tell you this title, “My Journey With The Naked Celebrity” means I’m having an affair with Brad Pitt, but no, I’ve started a new blog. Yes, I may be perilously close to having to face my blog addiction, but until then, I thought I’d tell you about it.
This blog, called The Naked Celebrity , is my first attempt at a blog that is designed primarily as a money-generator. I do find the topic interesting and the writing for it fun. What I mean by “made it as a money-generator” is that when I set it up, I decided to do so with monetizing in mind.
Becky, over at Preblogging, has some great tips for to follow before setting up your blog, including choosing your blogging niche .
I would also recommend that before you get started on creating a blog (that isn’t a personal blog) that you check out this article on problogger about choosing your niche . Despite having the same topics, the articles have a vastly different focus.
So when I decided to get started, I took the following steps:
1. Choose the niche.
After investigating what people are searching for using Google Trends and Google Adwords (which shows the popularity and competitiveness of terms that show up on Adsense and how much advertisers will pay for these terms), I decided to go with something in the celebrity vein.
“But, Jayne… you can’t stand celebrities.” That’s right, and so I realised that this could work in my favor. If you’ve been to my humor blog Bitter Women, you know that I love a good rant. So instead of just presenting the news like a thousand other blogs and websites do, I would put my own slant on it, and give it my own voice.
Ranting about how idiotic celebrities are would just never get old for me. 
In order to create something different, I created a set of characters named Auntie Maude, Cousin Rose, and Uncle Horace who give their own opinions and funny observations about the silly gossip stories that abound.
2. Choose the Title
I chose “The Naked Celebrity” because putting those two words together turns it into search engine gold, but also because I liked the double-meaning.
3. Choose the design
I am so happy with the wordpress theme I chose, called The Morning After. It gives it a magazine feel, which I hope looks professional and slick. I felt that if I was going for the “gossip mag” feel, I didn’t want it to look too “homey” and it even veers away slightly from the traditional blog look. It IS slightly complex, as there are a lot of images to upload in various places for each article, but readers want pictures and eye-candy, so an image-rich layout is great, and I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out.
I’ve also picked this layout because the advertising fits well within it, and doesn’t look sloppy.
So now all that’s left is the final bit…
4. Fill it up with some content so it doesn’t look too bare.
Right now I only have a few articles up, so I need to add about a dozen more within a few days to fill out that celebrity name “category” list on the left.
Since this is my first attempt at a real monetised blog that is set up with SEO in mind, and working for search users, it’s something different for me, so I’m letting you in on my process, so you can learn along with me. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
*Note: I can report that some things seem to already be going well, even after just two days! I’ve already started getting click-throughs from Technorati on the celeb names. Why is a few clicks a big deal? None of my other blogs get any traffic from technorati at all! LOL
Sometimes it’s embarrassing how much I overlook the simplest things! But when ME Strauss over at Successful Bloggers suggested actually, you know, saying thank you to people who had Stumbled your pages, I was dumbstruck with how dumb I’d been in not thinking of that!
One of the people I’d thanked at SU wrote to me recently to ask me how to know who had stumbled what pages. If your stats program from your host doesn’t provide detailed links on StumbleUpon, you might be at a loss. Both awstats (my host’s) and Google Analytics show how many links from SU came through, but not which specific stumble they had come from.
Then I came across the biggest reason to keep my account active at MyBlogLog.com. They don’t send a lot of traffic my way, but their stats DO show such details.
Another way is to simply go to the article of yours that you want to view the Stumbles for, and click the bubble at the top of your browser page.
If the article has never been stumbled, it will tell you, and give you a chance to add it and review it yourself. I personally avoid doing this too often, and only will add my own articles if it’s something I’m REALLY proud of.
However, if it’s already been Stumbled, hitting this bubble will allow you to see any and all stumbles and reviews it’s gotten. If you don’t type in a review, I don’t believe it will record that you hit the ‘review’ button. If you hit the thumbs up button FIRST, however, it WILL record that you came to leave a review. (If someone knows differently than this, please correct me, but this has been my impression.)
Then all you have to do is click the icons of the people who left you reviews and thumbs up, and you can drop them a note in their profile.
Now… I have a whole list of people to run and thank! And if you Stumble this article, thank you too!
Last weekend, everyone who was blogging about blogging was blogging about Blogrush, begging their readers to sign up through them. Why? Because Blogrush is a new “traffic-generating” widget for bloggers that relies on the users to try to sign up other users, in a sort of Multi-Level Marketing setup. The way it seems to work is that you earn “credits” by the impressions your own site generates, plus the sites of anyone you get to sign up under you, down through 10 tiers of users.
My own feeling about this is that only the ‘A-list sites ‘ who already have a lot of people visiting will benefit from BlogRush’s pyramid structure. I’ve already seen a lot of people complaining that, as smaller blogs, they aren’t getting the traffic they expected (read:none), whereas some of the big boys are saying they’ve earned tons of credits, but the system is so new BlogRush can’t yet process all those hundreds of thousands of impressions they’ve been promised.
And also, once people get used to seeing the BlogRush widget on every site they go to, they’ll tune it out. They all look alike, and I’ve already stopped noticing them, after just a few days. This can happen just as easily with Google Adsense and other ads, but at least with Adsense you can customize it to either blend it with your site, or make it stand out, whereas the BlogRush widget is identical on every site.
I personally don’t think it’s going to live up to the hype. When the smaller blogs see that they aren’t getting any traffic, they’ll remove the cumbersome, ugly widget. When the A-listers that they signed up with aren’t reaping benefits from their signees anymore, how is this better than BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog? In fact it isn’t, and I can tell you that I only get a very small percentage of my traffic from either of those two sources.
The moral of the story here is not that BlogRush is evil. In fact, I’m sure they’ll get the early bugs sorted out and perhaps add some functionality that their users will value and enjoy.
The moral of the story is that we, as bloggers, need to curb the impulse to jump on bandwagons. Be a free-thinker and use your best judgement. Then if you still want to write a blog post promoting the exact same service that 1289083103802 other bloggers are posting about on that very same day, feel free.
One of the latest trends for bloggers is to offer prizes to those who enter contests, and usually they make some kind of requirement such as you must subscribe to their RSS feed, blog about their contest, or leave comments, or sometimes even add them to your blogroll. Sometimes it’s worth it, and sometimes not, but I love contests, and so I’ve decided to make a list of some of the good ones I’ve seen lately. If you are running a contest on your blog and would like it added here, I’ll add a link.
Having a blog contest can be a fantastic way to generate some buzz about your blog and at the same time raise your technorati score through increased linkage. If you’re like me and can’t afford to give away fantastic prizes just yet, consider entering some of these, as many offer cash and free advertising!
Don’t forget! If you know of some others worth entering, or are running one of your own, please comment or email me (address in the header) and I’ll add it to this post!
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