What is your blog worth?

Even though selling your blog or website is something you shouldn't be thinking about at an early stage in your web presence, a lot of people go that way when they need large amounts of money instantly. People have even begun selling Squidoo lenses for a few dollars a piece depending on the ranking at Squidoo.

Financially speaking, the true worth of your blog is dependent on many different factors such as the assets you own, if you're running a dot com company, the kind of revenues you're generating, the kind of revenue growth you're looking at, blah blah blah. But to get a rough estimate fancy algorithms can calculate how much a blog or website is worth depending on the number of backlinks it has. These can be seen as evidence of popularity and are easy to spot.

Here's a great website that allows you to calculate the value of a web address depending on the number of backlinks it has: http://directory.sootle.com/website-worth/. Have fun checking out what all the big-wigs on the internet are worth!

Squidoo-ing!

So far, I have talked about how Google Analytics and Feedburner can be used to inform you of about user demographics and enhance the visitor experience. But I still haven't talked about how you're going to get visitors to your webspace. Now, there are several ways to do that - and I'll talk about each of them as time goes on - but what I'd really like to talk about today is Squidoo.

Squidoo is relatively new on the web-scene and unfortunately not too many people know about it(Thats the good part). But, it's catching on like a house on fire (Even better!). Squidoo is an online community of people who can set up single pages about anything they wish to write about. The community grows as users keep adding single pages (called lenses) about different topics they want to write about. The topics could relate to just about anything under the sun. The creator of the lenses, called a lensmaster, can make use of a variety of tools to add eBay banners, Google Maps, YouTube videos, and many other links.

The purpose of having a Squidoo lens is two-pronged. One purpose of an effective Squidoo lens is to 'Spread the Love' as I call it. Thats when people write about stuff to benefit others, with no self interest, other than some psychological comfort. The other purpose is to make money. You'll be doing both.

Here is exactly what you want to do:
Create an account on Squidoo. Then create a lens about a topic that relates to your blog. Ideally, this lens should promote your blog. Its better to point to your blog and rake in affiliate commissions through that channel rather than relying on Squidoos affiliate programs. The reason is that Squidoo keeps 45% of your earnings as its own commission. That just sucks. So, its better to bring in 100% through other channels instead.

Its really important to create a strong online presence by going through other lenses regularly and commenting on them. Don't leave rubbish comments on other lenses. Make sure that they are honest and genuine. After each comment, you could either ask the other lensmasters to check your lens out or just place a link to your lens. Your lenses aren't going to promote themselves, you'll have to do some solid work. But once you do, things will keep on rolling.

Also, make sure that you create other unrelated lenses too. They should be interesting and should be able pull in a wide audience. Having strong support lenses in your portfolio ensures that other lensmasters check out all of at least some of your lenses.

Happy Squidoo-ing!

Don't forget the Feeds!

i haven't talked spoken much about feeds in my e-book for two reasons: (1) most beginners don't know what feeds are and; (2) it can be a little tricky to explain and understand. So, i'll take it from the top.

A feed or web feed is 'a data format for providing users with frequently updated content', says Wikipedia. Put more simply, a feed is a tool for publishers to distribute or syndicate content to other people (users) on the internet, efficiently. This means that subscribers do not have to continuously log onto their favorite websites to check for updates. Instead, they can subscribe to feeds and receive updates in their email inbox, or aggregator. Aggregators can be internet based or software based.

In the blogging context, the person running the blog is the publisher and anybody who visits the blog is a potential subscriber for the blog's feeds. Blog feeds are usually complete posts or extracts from new posts which are sent out to subscribers every time there is an update.

Feeds are important because they are a great way of gaining and gauging visitor loyalty. This is partly why search engines love blogs with a high number of feed subscribers. Usually the better the blog the more subscribers it will have. Also, many people like to monetize their feeds. This is something I'm personally not in favor of. But i'll talk about that later.

Once, you have created your blog, added all the widgets, ad-zones, content etc. you should be reasonably comfortable and should definitely add the option for users to subscribe to your feeds. The best way to do this is to sign up on www.feedburner.com. Feedburner will burn your feeds for you. All you have to do is add 'chicklets' (buttons that allow members of specific aggregators to subscribe to your feed).

In some of my future posts i'll talk about how you use feedburner to your advantage and other important things for consideration as far as feeds are concerned. Also, don't get confused by atom and rss. These are two data formats for feeds. later!