Netizen

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

One of the things I have done during the final weeks of 2009 is to make a serious attempt at blogging as a secondary career in 2010.

There are three components: content, traffic, and monetization. Unless you have great content, there is no reason for people to come to your blog. You can have great content, but unless you get your word out there, you are not going to get traffic. You can have top notch content, and thousands of visitors per day, but unless you actively take steps to monetize, you are not going to make any money from your blog.

There are five layers to monetization.

Google AdSense. This will make you little to no money starting out.
Blog post ads. Text link ads. Try Sponsored Reviews, Blogsvertise, LinkWorth, and InfoLinks.
Affiliate Marketing. Try Amazon Affiliate.
Using Aweber software to collect emails to sell eBooks and online courses to.
Corporate blog. Say if your blog is an instrument that helps you raise money for your tech startup.

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Image representing AWeber Communications as de...

The list is a spectrum. Item 1 makes you the least money, item 5 the most. And there is a gradation in between. In 2009 I did a lot of 1 and 2, mostly 2. And I had been gearing to focus more on 3 in 2010. I had mentally picked Amazon as the affiliate program to focus on. My reasoning was the same as why I picked Blogger as my blogging platform years ago. 10 years from now Google will still be there. I guess Amazon will be there 10 years from now. And they sell millions of items. I might try out other affiliate programs later on, but Amazon liked a good one to start with.

Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

And so I was thinking I was going to start embedding links to Amazon products in my blog posts. That kind of embedding is the best way to do affiliate marketing in the first place. That was the impression I had from reading around the blogs of the pros. And then Sunday afternoon I discover after logging into the Amazon website that Amazon had integrated with Blogger and now embedding links to Amazon products in your blog posts was almost as easy as using Zemanta to jazz up your posts. Perfect timing. Just when I was waking up to affiliate marketing for my blog, Amazon and Google gang up to do this for me. This makes life so much easier for me going into 2010. Thank you Amazon. Thank you Blogger.

Accidental Post To Google's Blogger Buzz

December 16, 2009: Amazon Associates And Google Blogger Now Integrated

Bloggers highlight the relevant text and the Amazon Product Finder will search Amazon’s millions of products and recommend the ones that are most closely associated with the text ....... Bloggers can then insert a link or image to that product which includes their Associates ID, enabling them to earn up to 15% in referral fees from Amazon....... Bloggers will also be able to show dynamic content in their blog sidebar using a new set of integrated Sidebar gadgets, such as gadgets for MP3 clips from the Amazon DRM-free music store, an Amazon Deals gadget, and an Amazon Search box.

Well, I have had the Amazon search box at my blog for months now. You could do that long before this integration happened.

How have you been monetizing your blog? Please share in the comments section below.

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Monday, January 04, 2010

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

Image via Wikipedia

I just accepted a Facebook friend request from Anu Shukla. I am guessing the friend request is a direct result of a long comment I left on TechCrunch earlier in the day: Zynga Investor Calls Scamville Debate Irrelevant And Unfair.

Fred Wilson is one of the pillars of the New York tech community, and he has been a brilliant investor for over a decade. I have lost count of how many times I came across a truly exciting company only to find out later that was one of Fred’s portfolio companies. If he were not a big investor, and only a blogger, he would still be considered a brilliant visionary.

As for Zynga, both Fred Wilson and Marc Andreessen are investors. I’d give an arm and a leg to belong in the same club as Marc Andreessen. Wouldn’t you?

I have not read all 22 of your “Scamville” posts. And I don’t pretend to have followed all the nuances of your argument.

And TechCrunch is my favorite blog by far. I read it more than I read any other news outlet of any kind, period. So I have respect for its founder and mascot.

You seem to suggest something murky might have been going on, but now, thanks to your work, much of that has been corrected. If that is the case, this story has had a happy ending.

As for Farmville the game, I can vouch for it personally. I have been an avid player for weeks. I never spent a single dime on it. And I am about to buy a million dollar villa there.

I had an email exchange with Mark Pincus only a few days back. I suggested he add a Farmers’ Market to Farmville. He said that was a good idea.

I am glad all three of you are around. What can I say?

By the way, I read those comments by Fred in the original at his blog before I saw them here. Good to know you and I sometimes end up at the same blog in some of the same comments sections.

My first email to Anu was standard. I have more than 130 lingering friend requests from people I don't know. My privacy settings on Facebook are lax. They are set to everyone. So you don't need to be my friend to be able to visit my full Facebook page. But if I don't know you, I am not accepting friend requests.

Hello Anu. Thanks for the friend request. I am open to online only friendships. But we are going to have to exchange a few emails, get to know each other, and become friends first. :-)

My second email to her a few minutes later:

Hey. Wait a minute. After I sent you the email, I googled up your name because it sounded kind of familiar. You are t-h-a-t Anu Shukla. Arrington dragged you into a controversy a few months back. I remember reading in real time.

LinkedIn

VentureBeat Interview

I am honored you should send a friend request my way. I am accepting it right away.

I am guessing this friend request came from a looong comment I left on TechCrunch earlier in the day. I am going to leave more such long comments in future! :-)

Hello friend.

And so that is that, I got myself a new friend.

Twitter For The Masses

Image via CrunchBase

2009 was Twitter's year, no doubt. But towards the end of 2009 Twitter's growth had plateaued. What could Twitter do to reach the masses and end up with hundreds of millions of people using the service? Simplify, simplify, simplify. Right now it is so easy to get lost in the service when you are a new user. You first start out by not believing something worthwhile can be said in 140 characters. That is too brief. You may be do not desire to share with the world what you had for lunch. You might not know who to follow. The people you personally know are not necessarily the people with the most interesting tweets. What's a tweet anyway?

Twitter has to evolve as a service. A stangnant basic service that is hoping to only scale will not cut it. Twitter at once will have to become feature rich and simpler. The biggest bottleneck to Twitter's growth has been how primitive the search function at the site is. I can't even get it to deliver to me tweets I posted several months ago. And all those tweets reside on Twitter's servers.

SAN FRANCISCO - MARCH 10: Twitter co-founder ...

Twitter necessarily has to grow and eat into its ecosystem. That is how Windows grew. New, exciting, independent software programs found themselves eaten up in the next version of Windows. The Sun engulfed the nearby planets and grew.

Before they introduced the lists feature, Twitter had become unmanageable for me. The retweet feature I like, but I can see why it has generated much controversy. One big reason is the old way you could edit the tweet before retweeting it. To that I say, you can still choose to do it the old way.

Image via Wikipedia

But I have to keep coming back to search. Bing and Google are not doing it. When I first went to Bing's Twitter page weeks ago, I saw the mistake they were making. They were basically using Twitter to collect votes for the hottest news articles for that day. That is only one of many uses of Twitter. And I think Google News does a much better job of bringing me the news for the day. And it is not true Google is doing real time search now. Just because you display a few tweets on the topic I just conducted a search on does not quite cut it.

My Twitter account has to be the starting point for my Twitter experience. And one thing could add to that experience more than any other: the ability to search all tweets that might have ever been posted. I should not have to use Delicio.us. I should be able to store all links of interest to me right there on Twitter, and I used to do that. Then Twitter stopped delivering.

Just like PageRank is not going to be enough for Google, just like Google is going to have to make sense of webpages in their own right to see how much value they have, Twitter search is going to be able to read tweets, and make sense of a large number of tweets with the same keywords to give me a feel for what the masses are thinking and feeling. Right now I don't have that. Show me on one screen what the masses are saying in a million tweets. Where is that search and display function?

But real time is not just for now. Real time archives are also valuable. Tell me how Obama supporters felt about Obama in the summer of 2008. Collect all the tweets on the topic and make sense of them all for me.

Money talks, and Twitter does not have enough of it to truly get ambitious as a basic feature of the web experience. I still think Twitter should go for an IPO so it will have a billion dollars to become what email would be if it were designed today. Maybe it will not be Wave, it will be Twitter. It still can be.

Twitter has had a scalability problem because it has not had 300 million dollars to pour into its infrastructure. Twitter has to be always on if it can be part of the basic infrastructure of our web experience.

Image via Wikipedia

If email were invented today, it would not have a subject line. I would not need your email address to be able to send you an email. The email would always be short. I should be able to read a million such emails in less than a minute. A celebrity should not feel overwhelmed by all the emails she gets because the search feature is so good. Because Twitter makes sense of a million tweets on the same topic in as much time as Google takes to deliver search results. Well, Twitter does not, not now.

And Twitter DM is a joke. You have so little control over it. I get so much spam, I stopped reading DMs months ago.

The Twitter trending topics list is so feature poor, it is not even funny. I should be able to do time travel with that list. I should be able to do topics, and sub topics, and sub sub topics with that list. I should be able to have a trending topics list based only on my followers. The trending topics list needs to be a full blown creature.

Twitter today is not all it can be. If Twitter is going to end up with a billion users, it is not going to be the Twitter that we know today.

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Pages

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Marriage From Hell: AOL, Time Warner

Orgasm

Blogger + Amazon = Wonderful Things

Monday, January 04, 2010

I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

Twitter For The Masses