Doshy Link Attack! Blog Marketing, Meta-blogging and ReviewMe Advertorials

Collis from NorthXEast writes about how your choice of a blog niche affects your blog’s growth in the long run. He suggests that distinguishing your blog from others within a competitive niche is important for success.

I have been thinking of this for some time and I’ll just like to add that there’s some sort of a traffic ceiling for every niche you choose.

For example, the ceiling for Dosh Dosh’s niche is much lower than the celebrity or tech niche, which will always have a much large potential audience.

The search volume for keywords will easily verify that. Be aware of your niche’s traffic ceiling before you begin as it will keep your blog’s growth in perspective.

Perhaps the most important blogging decision you can ever make is in choosing what to blog about. Your niche or topic area plays a huge role in defining everything that comes after, including how successful your blog is. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to simply wander into a niche without even thinking about what the consequences down the road might be.

Ankesh Kothari explores how you should schedule your blogging time and suggest that you need to focus on four things in order to become a terrific blogger. I agree with his heavy emphasis on blog promotional efforts and I’ve written before that marketing should be most important when you’re starting a new blog.

Do note that when you’ve become more established, you need to focus more on networking with your peers because you’ve already established a perceived authority or reputation, which will help you to achieve your networking aims.

Famous bloggers like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.com have been known to work 16 hour days without taking a single day off. But do you really have to work that long and hard to become successful at blogging?Not really.

Michelle from Bloggrrl has been writing some pretty interesting posts and I’ve been reading her blog lately because she has a unique voice that can sometimes be rather humorous. I have a soft spot for bloggers who are witty because writing funny can be rather difficult if you don’t have the skills (I know because I’ve tried).

Her latest article on three little blogs is a very good example of creative meta-blogging. Don’t forget to check out her popular post about the 11 mistakes your blog makes in bed.

Once upon a time there were three little blogs. They collectively decided that it was time to leave blogspot.com and move on to their very own domains. The first little blog was very lazy, and had somewhat of a “get rich quick” mentality…

Jon Symons offers 7 reasons to use domains for affiliate links and suggests that it can be an useful method to increase affiliate conversions while building up your virtual real estate. Good points but not really essential you’re already using a combination of PPC + dedicated landing pages for all your major affiliate programs.

Aged domain names have value. I like to grab something generic, so that it can be re-purposed easily. For example if YouTube had an affiliate program I would grab a domain (always a .com) like OnlineVideos.com. That way it can have value beyond what it is currently being used for.

I personally don’t think domains will improve click through rate although they might work better with web savvy audiences.

My approach to affiliate marketing on blogs has always been focused on two factors: Building trust amongst my target audience and secondly, the funneling of many longtail keywords towards a strong on-site pre-sell page that will rank on search engines. Link cloaking is useful but it isn’t that important to me.

Derek Beau is currently publishing a series of posts which document his case study on creating a profitable niche blog. He has recently written about his blog promotion goals, which lays out the weekly and daily tasks he will undertake.

Because I’m creating a low maintenance income stream, I want to focus on long term promotion efforts that don’t require much up front time and don’t require any long term commitments…What I like to do when promoting this type of blog is set up a to do list of goals so that I know what I need to accomplish every day.

This is somewhat similar to my niche blogging challenge which saw me setting up several niche blogs within the span of a week. For those of you still interested, I probably won’t be writing an update on this challenge for some reasons.

One of them is that I’ve been involved in several major online projects and they have been sucking up a great deal of my time. I haven’t had the energy to promote the blogs and while I’ve considered outsourcing content creation, I’ve decided to sell or give some of these blogs to friends. I have some reasons for doing so and I will explain them in a more detailed blog post tomorrow.

ReviewMe.com launches a paid advertorial service, which allows bloggers to make money by publishing an blog post ad written by the advertiser. Philip Lenssen suggests that these advertorials will be an annoyance for RSS subscribers.

Darren offers his first impressions of the program and suggests that it’ll disrupt the style or voice of your blog. Lucia takes the advertiser’s perspective and suggests that advertorials may offer poor ROI for advertisers, primarily because the blog’s audience is more familiar with the writing style of the blogger in question.

My opinion? I don’t like giving editorial power completely to an advertiser. I’m open to the idea of paid reviews because I can angle it to suit the specific focus of my blog and the needs of my readers. Advertorials are focused on selling a specific product or service and in my opinion, generally do not offer a balanced perspective nor do they add much value for readers

Bottomline: You will not see any ReviewMe advertorials on Dosh Dosh. It’s just not something I would consider even if I decide to heavily monetize this blog.