The time at Emmaus Preston was rather limited and even though I was happy not to have to deal with that board anymore, it has taken me around a year to reorganise and refocus.
Refocus and return to the colours of my roots: Racing White Daring Molenbeek, the first club I played football for.

I am no person who stands still for a long time or will whine about how miserable life is, but as the years slowly accumulated I certainly needed some time.

I don’t do end of year reviews either nor do I pay much attention to the symbolic importance of dates, years but I am happy to notice that there seems to be an upturn to life and I am slowly but surely starting to think again. Think about the future. Or as someone went ahead and changed my former life quote, ‘Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it‘:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Of course all this doesn’t mean anything and I still have certain things to sort out.
I merely needed an excuse to announce the change in design, justify the colour change and state the obvious:

I’m back, bitches.

Last weekend while chatting with friend Thord D. Hedengren I joked about one of the things I learned over the last 4 years, dealing with pro bloggers. The bloggers who will write tutorials how to get traffic, how to promote your blog and similar crap. Of course I could not not twitter my joke:

What I learned from ‘pro bloggers’: Gimme a topic & within 3hrs I’m an authority all while BEING drunk!
Lots of work for me to become ‘pro’!

The sad thing about that rather hilarious tweet is that it is based on real experience, the truth in the sector. There are forums where you can order 400-500 word entries for around $6 on ANY TOPIC. Many of these entries land on rather well trafficked sites. I know people who will write on any topic and depending on the fee they will become an authority, ie. read one or two Wikipedia entries and also follow on average three of the outgoing links below the Wikipedia entries.

Today Dutch blogger Ernst-Jan Pfauth posted a good read on what bloggers should do: think more like journalists and write what you have to write. Not what you think your readers want to read.

Newsflash: in the endless discussions about the future of journalism, most people are asking the wrong question: ,,What does the reader want?” What follows are assumptions about the behavior of the new news consumer. ,,He doesn’t want to pay for news”, ,,He’s only going to read from epaper”, etc etc.

Well, two things:

• Assumption is the mother of all f*ckups
• The reader has NO clue what he wants

Ernst-Jan started as blogger and landed a job at nrc.next, a Dutch newspaper. He also interned at IPS Inter Press Services.

The best thing about his Stop Wondering What Readers Want, It Leads to Mediocrity for bloggers is the closing paragraph:

You’re not into journalism but just want blog tips? Sure enough. You can use the above story as an advice to ignore all ‘how to grow blog traffic’-articles. They’re based on mediocrity. Just think how you can get your message across.

Quality will generate traffic. If you don’t write interesting and compelling content you need to improve your SEO, have your voting brigade ready and try to get your entry pushed out on every bookmarking site, preferably by at least 15 to 20 contacts to give it an initial push.

Lesson learned: Write interesting stuff and do not bother with tricks.

“I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.”

Andrew D. Rosen asked an interesting question today over at the Blog Herald: how much do you earn per post?

Many people nowadays wonder how to make money from blogs, some still think we can get rich doing nothing, sitting at home naked.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

In my position at Splashpress Media I can tell you that there are huge differences in pay across the board and different networks have different payment structures. Often the fee is based on several different factors:

• Location of the blogger: someone who lives in the UK obviously has higher living costs than a Vietnamese citizen. Both have the same number of hours in a day to craft entries;
• Experience and ‘Rockstar level’ of the blogger: experienced bloggers and so-called A-listers tend to ask more for an entry because usually they have a following, a group of loyal readers who will also subscribe to their entries. Blog rockstars tend to get more trackbacks and comments than beginning, aspiring bloggers;
• Controversy and linkbait experience: Nowadays an often forgotten quality of bloggers is their ‘controversy’ strategy and capability to link bait. Blogging became popular because it was a personal and opinionated style of writing. Bloggers were online columnists. A controversial blogger will get many comments and generate traffic;
• Number of entries: Some bloggers only look for some gigs monthly. Often they are specialized in writing ‘feature entries’. These take a lot longer than your average blog post;
• Social media popularity: Many professional bloggers have a high popularity on the social bookmarking sites. An entry submitted by them will easily get more votes and hence generate lots of traffic;
• Credit crunch

Different networks apply different structures

At Splashpress Media we apply a flat fee per post based on many of the above mentioned factors.
Duncan Riley’s Inquisitr recently started looking in to a traffic-based payment system. Nick Denton’s Gawker network pays out a traffic based fee, with a small monthly fix. Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch‘s network pays the bloggers a flat monthly fee.

Due to the differences it is very hard to put a number on the earnings of a blogger. Lately many beginning bloggers are paid only USD 2.50 – USD 3.00 per entry. There are several reasons for this: credit crunch being one, the international open application market being the second reason. In a market with many Asian candidates ‘Western’ people always face more and more competition and often have to lower their rates to the actual average. Reading and reporting about blogger jobs on a regular level, I can confirm that being paid USD 0.05/word has become a great and only very seldom reached level. The reality is much closer to USD 0.01/word on your average blog.

Valuable advice for applicants

We receive daily applications from both beginning and professional bloggers. Some are downright hilarious and read like this:

I am a very good writer I have good knowledge .You can write
very good blogs and want to work with you.

Hilarious as this submission may be, generally perfect English is not the most important criterium to get a gig. Obviously an (open) application like this one will immediately be filed in drawer 13, not only because of the English was below par but because there isn’t enough of information for us to decide. What do you need to mention in your application email?

• Full name and contact details: Under certain condition we will allow people to post under a pseudo, but usually we require complete details;
• Link to your OWN blog: Even in these times I can think of many bloggers/applicants who do not have an own blog. This is important as it allows us to discover everything you didn’t want us to know about you;
• Samples of your work: Link some of previous work in the email. Do NOT submit any attachments as we love to see the work published online and check out reactions on your work;
• Financial expectations: To avoid any further confusion, disappointment submit immediately what your financial expectations are. This is especially important when you filed an open application. If you reply to a public ad without financial specifications, also mention your expectations. This saves everyone time and because we just checked out your previous work, you might be more lucky than you expect;
• Other specialities: Mention what your other specialities are, especially if you are strong in web development, server administration or even SEM or Adsense optimization
• LINK to your CV: Feel free to submit your CV but LINK to your CV and do NOT add it as an attachment. Many companies have a no-attachment email policy and to be honest, I do not need your Resume as a local file. Your resume belongs on your personal site or on your Linkedin profile;
• Convince us, go out of your way to land a writing gig: Let’s be honest, we are dealing with a credit crunch and the online commercial situation needs pink glasses to be called colourful. If you like a site and want to convince the editors of your skills, feel free to offer 2 or 3 free entries. By now we will already have formed an opinion about whether to hire you or not. In case of doubt these entries can help you, if we would have hired you even without those, they will only serve you ass a bonus because we will think that you are motivated and absolutely want to post on site X.

Disclosure: These are general guidelines and might or might not always be applied by every site editor/owner. The main rule, especially when applying to an open position is to RTFM.
Other than above mentioned numbers, I will not be drawn in to list any number we pay to our bloggers as every situation is handled individually and differently.

New Chief Editor and other changes at Splashpress Media

As of today Jayvee is the new Chief Editor of Splashpress Media and I am now officially Head Muppet Head of Marketing for the biggest indie blog network.

From the announcement introducing Jayvee:

If you’ve read The Tipping Point and believe Malcolm Gladwell’s three classification of marketers as mavens, connectors, salesmen or a combination thereof, Jayvee falls under the second type as a firm believer in the quality of relationships you build your community upon. He’s been a community organizer in his previous job that had nothing to do with the Internet, and it seems to be fate that brings him into more community building endeavors, apparently more on the Internet.

It is no secret that of the three categories of marketers, I certainly belong to the Muppet category and will thus also focus part of my attention on creating content for some of our bigger sites: Forever Geek, 901am, XFEP, Blogger Talks and the good ol’ Manchester United Blog.

I will also be spearheading the release and marketing of Splashpress Media’s first Premium Theme Rogue Theme.

Update about Forever Geek

Some months ago, when I announced my return to Splashpress Media, I mentioned possible plans for Forever Geek. I have to say that I did not continue the approach of creating more noise, publishing more entries, instead we have focused on making FG more niche again and less of a gadget blog. Over the next weeks we will now start pushing FG to the social media sites and promote the site more and more. More about the new approach to follow in the near future.

Myspace is popular as a platform but should not never your main presence. Take on board the following advice, use following platforms and for less than £100/year you have a great and modern online presence.

Set up an own website.

URL starts at $9.89/year at namecheap.com
Cheap and adequate webspace can be found for around £50/year: this should offer you around 5GB storage space and several GBs of traffic every month (some webhosters even give 1TB traffic monthly but I tend to not recommend those bigger providers because they like to fail on a regular basis).

Use a platform such as WordPress for your site software. This is free and entirely customizable and is used as fully fledged site software/CMS on several cases. There are thousands of plugins for WP, even free shop platforms allowing you to sell your tracks and merchandize. It should not be too hard to find online mavens who will design your site and keep it updated (give them free entrance to your gigs etc), even I maintain sites of friends for free.

Last but not least… BLOG!

Add your music to Last.fm, Spotify and Pandora

Music owners can submit their music to these platforms for free and receive royalties for every time their tracks are played.
If you are a subscriber on last.fm you can easily create playlists of your albums release and embed these on your site, thus allowing your visitors to listen to your tunes without having to pay the bandwidth host if you suddenly became the latest #1 in the country. Being a subscriber costs £1.50/month. Otherwise embed a spotify playlist.

Get a Flickr account

Stop your whining, this will cost you $25/year if done and used properly. The free account will only show your last 200 pictures and will not allow flickr users to download the high-res pictures. Upload pictures of all your gigs in high-res (at least 5MP) to your Flickr and also release your official press photos via Flickr. Allow Flickr users to download your pictures in hi-res.

Get the plugin for WordPress to display the last x pictures on your website, transforming your website in a ‘hub’.

Use social media.

Do not only focus on myspace to promote your music and facebook for the events. Also use services such as upcoming, eventbrite (perfect to sell tickets for your gigs), twitter (shut up it’s a powerful tool if used properly). Set up a zazzle store if you want to offer merchandize but haven’t reached enough of popularity (or earned enough of money) yet to order your own t-shirts in batch.

Do not forget to use Twitter as a tool to promote yourself, your gigs and your merchandise. You can easily embed your latest tweets in your website with the Twitter Tools by Alex King if your site is WordPress based.

Also create a Facebook page. Since the Facebook design update some weeks ago pages play a more prominent role. Page updates will now appear in the newsfeed of all fans, highly improving the interaction with your fans.

Prominently link to your social media/other online profiles on your website.

I can hear you ask already ‘If I have to link out to profiles on other sites, why bother with my own website?‘.

Do you want to be indie or do you want to allow the biggest sites, Myspace (owned by Mr. Murdoch) and Facebook (valued at $15bn) to earn from your product by framing your product in with the ugliest ads you’ll ever see?

The main focus of the lecture was the importance of blogging for computer scientists for their future career. I briefly touched the history of the modern internet and blogging, mentioned the difficulty of making money with blogs online before pointing out the importance of a blog for programmers, developers and designers.
I decided not to release the podcast but publish a slightly more in-depth entry instead

Short History of the Internet and Blogging

Blogging started almost as soon as the ‘modern internet’ was created and people started to web log what they discovered online, mainly as an aid for other surfers to find interesting sites. In these times there was no Google, Yahoo (Directory), DMOZ Project, Technorati or Eaton Portal yet helping us to discover what was great, funny and/or interesting. We entirely relied on what others discovered.
The history of blogging is a very discussed topic but a brief version can be found at The Blog Herald.

When in 1996 the MSM started to discover the World Wide Web and online magazines such as Slate were created, the WWW still was a small world where most people knew each other. It was a thriving and helpful community.

The World Wide Web was an invigorating, compelling and, frankly, amazing place in 1996. Innovations were fast, furious and quickly adopted. Clever people did clever things and pretty much everyone noticed, because “everyone” was a rather small and curious community. [...] The Internet of 1996 was certainly nothing like today’s experience. But to suggest there wasn’t much to do is to ignore everything that was being done.

As online magazines started to grow and channels such as BBC Online emerged more and more, the online publishing sector was pioneered in these years. Together with the evolution of open source CMS it became easier and easier to publish online.

The Web As A Publishing Ground for Amateurs

With the growing popularity of CMS platforms such as *Nukes and Mambo in the early years of the 21st Century, many students and other geeks started to publish on a regular basis, often more than 5 times/day, on their favourite topic. Online communities became really big and many a freetime author, citizen journalist, started to earn a buck from their website. Several communities were multi-authored and the software platforms were huge, resource hungry and often heavily SEO’d. This was the period when I started to publish on a semi-professional basis myself and ran one of the bigger German Windows communities. We fought an eternal battle for page views and usually were hours, sometimes even days, earlier with tech news than the established news sites. The financial factor of running a popular online community was highly rewarding. The technical site of running a website and trying to stay on top of SERPs was a rather difficult battle and many webmasters become online mavens, learning much about server optimization, SEO and waded for the first time through code, modding their platform constantly.

Blog Software Emerges

It was around this period that the first blogging software applications started to be written and released, with Movable Type. WordPress, today’s most popular blogging platform, was first released in May 2003 as a fork of the not longer maintained b2\cafelog and would soon become more popular than the MT after Mena Trott announced changes in the MT licensing structure. Blogging software, itself also a CMS platform, could be defined as a ‘stripped down’ version of the popular PostNuke, Mambo/Joomla platforms and became popular because of the ease of use. You only needs to compare the simplicity of the admin backend of WordPress to the backend of the still popular Joomla! to understand why platforms such as WP and Movable Type became popular.

Different Types of Blogs

There are three kind of blogs which I will discus and also have a look at their future and importance now.

Personal diarrhea diary

There is not much further explanation needed about these blogs, we all know the ‘OMG my cat just had a poop!’ blog and love to hate them. There is little future in these blogs, in the words of the wise and snarky Paul Boutin:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Multi-authored blogs, AKA Online Magazines

Some of the most popular blogs such as TechCrunch, Gawker and Engadget are multi-authored and rather lucrative online sites. Personally I do not tend to consider these sites ‘blogs’ but rather the perfect example of the web being recursive: they are professional online magazines. Often these blogs have been created by one person, who tried to be a journalist with a carte blanche for snark. Citizen journalism. For many of these sites the main mottos are publish often, publish fast and We’ll fact check later.

These blogs often are mentioned as New Media and A-Listers have fought for several years to receive the same credits as more traditional, MSM, journalists.
Now the MSM have accepted and endorsed blogs, it makes little sense to start a new Web2.0, tech , games, car, movie, whatever blog and hope to become rich. The combination of both classic media endorsing blogs and classic media using similar SEO strategies as bloggers will result in a renewed fight for page views, especially in these financially bad times online. Unless you have PR you can bleed and you can push traffic to a new site you have no chance to rank well in the SERPs. Quality does not matter if no one reads.
The jury still is out on the Long Tail and whether you invest in the Long Tail. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail recently even came under criticism from his own editors.

Your Blog as Your Online Brand

Your blog can also be used as an extended online curriculum. Your blog is your online presence, a hub to your other online profiles. Your own online column.

Why It Is Important to Grow and Maintain Your Online Presence

Times have changed and Computer Science continues to grow in popularity. 20 Years ago there were only few computer specialists and those who were literate in this science could easily get a job. Nowadays everyone thinks they can program, code, design and manage networks/systems and the value of a CV has largely been reduced to some more sheets on the stack of applicants. Your blog can help you stand out from the masses!

In times when companies such as Google screen applications you want to have an extra to your CV. This extra should be your blog, your central hub.
Your blog will link out to other online presences expressing your interest in computer science and related topics, such as your:

• Social Bookmarking profile (fe. Delicious or iterasi)
• Your ‘coding archive’: if you use platforms such as Github you have to link to these.
• Your LinkedIn profile
• Your photo sharing profile/Flickr. More than you can imagine the pictures you take, publish are an expression of your interests.

Programming is much more than knowing a certain language, programming is a way of thinking and your blog offers you the possibility to show off your knowledge. Every time you make an interesting edit to public code, use pastie or have discovered a bit of slick and clean code, you should write about it and explain the reason behind your edit. Your blog offers you the opportunity to show that you can think as a programmer, understand code and are bleeding edge, interested in learning always new things and improve your code.
Many software engineers employed by the major online and IT companies share code, return to the community and if your writing and thinking is great they will discover your entries and start following you. This might even result in companies offering you a position. In our modern age even several open source applications have received venture capital and they also hire people. Your blog is where you can prove how good you are. Much more than by doing a practicum at a company, a company which much not allow you to share your code.

Tought Palace by Jens Alfke is a perfect example of how to use your blog both personally and professionally. In the period after Jens had left Apple and before he accepted the position at Google, he blogged regularly about an idea and for and the thought pattern behind an iPhone application he planned to create, Cloudy. Other great examples of blogs landing people lectures and consulting jobs in their specific areas are Merlin Mann, from 43folders fame, and Chris Garrett a famous British social media consultant. Other examples include Swedish Campground by Caius Durling, Brightbox developer, Veerle Duoh‘s blog, designer extraordinaire and Expression Engine evangelist, 456Bereastreet by Roger Johansson, accessibility guru par excellence, and the blog of MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny.

There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

…Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.

Actually there is money to be made from blogs, no matter how crazy it may sound, but two domains are not profitable. Blogging about blogging and snark. In the first category there are some exceptions to be found, but the latter is a money burning hole.

The problem with snark is that no company wants to be affiliated with this topic and that’s it. Nothing more needs to be said about that topic. Snark is out, snark is unprofitable and snark only works when anonymous. Snark belongs in the fun department, not in the professional one.

To be entirely honest, I never really liked the blogs as a platform option.

So there certainly is some irony in the fact that I will not only edit Forever Geek from now on, but also run BloggerTalks.

BloggerTalks certainly will be an interesting ride as I hope to present some interviews with people from less known corners of the blogosphere, but also have the desire to interview some blogging celebrities or celebrities who network actively online but do not blog. Besides, I hope at times to have contrasting opinions on the future of blogging.

Possible future plans for Forever Geek hit closer home for me as it certainly is a consideration to overhaul the site and maybe even not use WordPress in the future. The plan right now is to present Forever Geek more as a magazine than as a blog and although WordPress offers lots of great configuration possibilities, it will be a challenge to reboot the site, especially with several thousands of articles in the archives.
Right now the site is a mix of geekiness which could (almost) be generated by adding several feeds of major blog and covers a several popular topics such as hardware, gaming and entertainment, some sort of Lifehacker, Joystiq and Gizmodo cocktail. This obviously is a very healthy mix of topics, especially when spiced up with some celebrity geekiness such as is the case at Forever Geek, but the broad cover area can also cause problems when trying to grow a platform.

In times of low CPM the easiest trick to grow a site, blog in to a magazine is to increase the amount of entries… and noise. Together with a growing number of entries the risk of losing regulars grows as they might not enjoy the number of entries in their favoured topic anymore or just lose interest because their feedreader becomes too noisy.

And that will be my challenge for Forever Geek: take the site to a new level, with more content, but without alienating the actual regulars. There are several options to do this but an in-depth analysis of both content and options over the next months will help us make a decision and then see if the site can be further developed in to a community.

In the now almost 2 years that Splashpress Media has been active as a major online publisher in the about blogging area, the network has come a long way. At times the ride has been rather bumpy, but I am sure that Mark Saunders and his team have the potential to continue to grow their brand and portfolio, not to forget their influence in the blogosphere.

And what better can one do than try to help, be part of a potentially great network?
No matter what might have been.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Charles R. Swindoll, evangelical christian priest.

To resume: I am joining the team at Bloggingpro and will report on blogging software/platforms, plugins, tweaks and themes.

I got sacked. Sacked with growing results, sometimes rather impressive results, other moments less immense but still acceptable results.
Sacked because I was sick and the germs lasted longer than I had hoped. Sacked because in that period I dropped of the planet and hardly ever had energy to blog, all while still having a full time job.

A non-blogging blog editor.

I must note, that although they want another editor, I didn’t really try to stay on board, nor did I take the option

In terms of our future relationship, I still really want to work with you and am very grateful for all you have done for me and XXX. I am prepared to meet your min. requirement of $XXXX per month and still want you to head up the advertising/sales. Plus you can write wherever you want for $XX-$XX per post. And I’m open to joining with you on a new project.

Anyone knows that little fucker pride?
That silly bugger which makes you say ‘I’m out’ when it got hurt? Hurt because at one blog the growth was almost 100% feed subscribers in only 10 weeks?

Thing is I got sacked degraded and my pride prevented me from accepting the offer, continuing the future relationship and setting up the new project together. Or selling ads to stick on tons of blogs.