bobjones.nl » Tips & Tricks

How to get a job as a blogger: the do’s and don’ts

Bob — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:28:05 +0000

This seemed like a suitable topic to write about, since I’ve just gone through the process of hiring a full time blogger for one of my other sites. The best place to either find a blogging job, or to find blogging talent, is the Problogger Job Board. There are more ways to find writers, but a lot of the responses I’ve received from the PB job ad were quite good. Unlike some forums, where people will do anything for a quick buck. When it comes to getting solid content for your blog, you need a solid blogger. Don’t cut corners, you’ll make the money you had to spent to advertise back in no time with a quality writer on your staff.

After all the replies I got for the job, I have a lot of comparison material, and I’ll give you several examples of how to – and how to not apply for an advertised writing position.

If you want to have a good shot of landing the blogging gig you’re about to apply for, please make sure you’ve covered these points.

The Don’ts.

At least act like you know what you’re getting yourself into.

1. The most important aspect would probably be; Make sure that you’ve familiarised yourself with the blog that is seeking to hire a blogger. Often a link is included in the job application, but at times you have to be slightly more creative, and find the site, based on the email address domain, or do some quick research on Google. – Several of the candidates that were applying seemed to have absolutely no clue as to what blog they were applying for. Either that, or they just chose to ignore the blog topic, and sent in extremely random sample material. If I want to hire someone to blog about TV shows, how is a school paper on gardening going to get me excited about you?

Can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

2. So the entire blog you are applying for is written in English. The entire ad for the job was written in English. What on earth are you doing, emailing me a complete application letter in Spanish? Besides me no speaky that muchos Spanish, why would you think that your Spanish articles will get published on my English blog? Please make sure you’ve written down point 1, then come back and try again. Hasta la Vista baby!

Minimalistic anyone?

3. I’ve worked hard on my blog to get it where it is today. I’ve put the hours in, I’ve spent money on advertising the job application. So do you really think that an email containing one single link to your blog is going to get me impressed with your high standard of work? Do you think I would feel good spending more money on someone that not only seems extremely lazy, but is also showing no interest in my blog whatsoever? BZZZZ! Think again.

can I haz spellcheckz?

4. Ok, so I can see that it’s not Spanish, but are you sure that your application letter was written in English? I’m not too thrilled to think of my new blogger to be writing articles as if they were typing on their cellphone. “I wuld luv 2 b a writer 4 u. Plz chk my appl. and get bck 2 me asap”. No thanks. Sure, I might not be the greatest writer myself, but for someone whom I am going to have to pay, I at least expect you to present me with a usable end-product.

We don’t do Pulitzer.

5. The email in which you’re applying for the TV blogger job could very well make the New York Times Editor in Chief offer you a job. University this, author of bestseller that…I think you might be slightly overqualified for this job. I don’t think that the people that visit my blog are expecting to read Time magazine articles. Thanks for applying, but I can’t see you connecting with my target audience. But don’t worry, I’m sure you can do much better with all those credentials under your belt.

And there’s my main don’ts you need to consider. I’ve cut the article in half, so come back tomorrow to find out what the Do’s are to get you hired as a blogger.

Derek Salyers, I hope you have as much fun with the $30 you stole from me, as I had writing this article about you.

Bob — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:58:45 +0000

Its been a while since I’ve felt the urge to write a post like this. Derek ‘douchebag’ Salyers from ClickConsultants.com however managed to get me in the mood, after I got fucked by him, AND had to pay him for it – twice.

On the 5th of November, I came across Derek’s (spam) marketing forum, after reading a couple of, what seemed to be solid, recommendations regarding his ClickConsultants forum. I read the promises that are made (mirror) on the site, and I decided to take the leap – I sign up for the $29.99 per month membership forums.

Unfortunately you can’t see anything on the forum, until you are a paid member.

Great, so the first thing I notice is that there has hardly been any more posting since April 2009. I’m looking for the ‘free monthly landing pages’, which are promised by Derek, but to no avail – These also stopped coming in since April.

Ok, so I get a little annoyed and figure I’d sent Derek a private message on his forum. Surely he’ll have time to reply. It’s not like he’s been busy on there since April or so…

Guess what? No reply. I kinda forget about the whole thing, since I’m a rather busy person (at times!). So surprise, surprise – I get a notification that I have sent Derek another $29.99 via PayPal. Subscriptions tend to do that I guess. So I did what I should have done the first time after I discovered how utterly empty Derek’s promises and forums are. I wrote him a quick email via the contact form.

Ok, so basically I’m letting Derek know that I fell for it the first time around. Fair play, keep the $29.99. However, since I’m obviously entitled to a refund because Derek is not keeping his promises (I’d say ‘blatantly lying’, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt), and the product he is selling isn’t all which he makes it out to be. Now I think that’s a pretty sweet deal for Derek. Making nearly $30 for nothing.

But Derek wants more.

Like the private message I had sent him a month before, this email also never got a reply. Guess Derek doesn’t want to talk to me. Actually, I’m quite certain of it, since he did not even bother having his say when I just opened up a PayPal dispute.

So all in all, Derek has made $60 off myself, and never had to get off his ass for it. All he’s done is click the ‘refuse refund’ button on PayPal.

Obviously Derek does not give a fuck about his customers, ergo, his business. My suggestion for anyone that was tempted to follow in my footsteps and sign up with Derek to learn about online business, is to turn around and run.

Unless you’re not satisfied with all the FREE PORN ORAL SEX, EMMA WATSON and BRITTNEY SPEARS UPSKIRTS, and even FOOD PORN on his forum…I’m sure Derek would be more than happy to fuck you over himself.

Take care of yourself, and each-other.

Bob

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Top 10 Common Mistakes Bloggers Make

Bob — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:14:07 +0000

If you’re a blogger and reading this top ten common blogging mistakes list, you’ll recognize the obvious traps that can make or break your success as a blogger. Here we go:

1. Not completing tasks you’ve set for yourself (e.g not finishing blog posts).

How to make criticism work for you

Bob — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:36:40 +0000

So, out of the blue, this guy contacts me, saying he would help me out getting one of my sites in better shape. My initial reaction? WTF. Are you trying to tell me that my site isn’t good the way it is now? Are you saying I did a shit job at it? Its making me over $3000 per month on semi auto-pilot. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

Aaah, but then I started thinking. If someone is offering you a helping hand, you shouldn’t think that way. Instead, you should think of the fact that they are looking at your site from a different angle. They have a fresh set of eyes, and they don’t expect the same from your site as you do.

~~Customer~~ Visitor is king.

So, going forward, one of the suggestions he made was that I should transfer a lot of the static stuff, like images, plugins, and CSS to an external service (Amazon cloudfront). Basically I had been toying with the idea for some time now, since my server kept getting hammered by huge (1.4 million pageviews!) amounts of traffic (It’s quite a popular video site I’m talking about), and I really didn’t want to fork out yet another $100 for a new upgrade. I have already gone through 4 upgrades in the last 4 months. Currently the server is running on a 2.4Ghz Quadcore CPU, 8GB RAM and a 100Mbps line. Even with the WP-super-cache plugin, the server was still slowing down to the point where I was losing visitors.

So now Amazon is hosting all of the site’s heavy files, and basically all the server is running is PHP, Apache, and MySQL. In theory this should take a huge strain off the server, and my visitors will experience faster loading times.

Don’t get offended and start attacking right off the bat when someone criticizes you or your product – it is much better to hear them out and take any suggestions they have on-board. In the end it all comes down to giving people what they want if you want to make money online. Basically you’re getting free feedback which allows you to improve and become better.

*If you want to know a little more about Cloud Front, Paul Stamatiou has written a review and how-to about it.

Why RSS really is only good for two things.

Why RSS really is only good for two things.

Bob — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:08:06 +0000

A friend of mine just asked me how many RSS subscribers I had on this blog. Instead of answering him right away, I told him I couldn’t care less, and why he shouldn’t either…

An RSS feed is a great tool to help you spread your content online. You can have your latest posts linked all over the place since there are tons of sites that allow you to add your feed address. (Someone already went to the trouble to compile a list for you – Blog Directories & RSS Feed Directories).

So that was the first good thing about RSS.

Reading RSS feeds through an RSS-reader saves me so much time. I wake up, log in, scan post titles, and select a few posts to read. All in all I don’t spend more than 30 minutes a day on this. So much better than having to go to each and every blog that is in my bookmarks.

That was the second great thing about RSS

So here’s why I don’t care about how many RSS readers my blog has:

People that read a blog in their RSS readers don’t actually read my stuff half of the time. They scan and skip.

People that read a blog in their RSS readers don’t see any ads I have on my site. Advertisers don’t get enough ROI and stop advertising.

People that read a blog in their RSS readers hardly ever feel the need to engage in the comments. They read your post and move on. WFC about commentators, right?

People that read a blog in their RSS reader do not contribute to your pageview statistics, making it harder for you to sell space to advertisers at a good price.

Some people canwill steal and copy your content. They are called scrapers, and we all hate them. They don’t care.

So, having said that, there is one huge advantage having a large number of subscribers – Social Proof. It will definitely give you an established and authoritative image. If new visitors see that you’ve got the attention of thousands of other people, chances are that they will come back again. This is excellent, until they too start reading you in a RSS reader.

Yes, you could argue with me and tell me that an RSS subscriber is great if they read you through an email subscription instead of a reader. I agree, but list building is an entirely different topic.

To end this post on a more positive note; Don’t worry too much about all of this. I found this graph on mashable.com (Google Images actually). It looks like there aren’t a lot of ‘normal‘* people that use RSS. Most RSS users are Internet savvy people. Most likely yourselves, affiliate marketers, designers, programmers and developers.

*Disclaimer – By normal people I mean Joe the plumber. People that will actually buy your stuff. Trying to sell something to an affiliate marketer is like…well like selling something to an affiliate marketer! Oh, and I would just like to say hi to my 16 RSS subscribers. Hi guys!

Hiding Affiliate Links? You’re Doing It Wrong.

Bob — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:36:44 +0000

Here’s a joke for you. Affiliate marketer X is browsing the Internet and finds a product review on your site. X loves it and wants to go and buy it. You, being the cunning affiliate marketer that you are, have very cleverly disguised you affiliate link, so that there is no other way for X but to click on your link to find the affiliate product page. Of course, X too is a cunning affiliate marketer, and figures that he’d rather get a nice discount on the product by copy and pasting his own affiliate link, instead of bringing referral money into your pocket. That’s right, X can easily do this and in the end, the joke’s on you!

Be not what you seem to be.

Lets go over this scenario, and this time we’ll take it a little slower, so we can see where we can prevent the affiliate link hijacking.

You have signed up with an affiliate network, and are actively promoting their products. Every one of these networks provides you with your very own affiliate link. These can come in various shapes and sizes, but the general idea is that they stick a little more link after the main URL. (example – http://diythemes.com/?a_aid=mmm) As easy this is for you to copy and paste, as easy it is for X to copy, edit the part after the main URL, paste, and profit.

You affiliate link has just been hi-jacked, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Was this naughty? Yes. Does anyone besides you care? No.

Ok, so you’ve done a bit of research, and you’ve figured out how to ‘trick’ people, by cleverly disguising your affiliate link. The most common methods used today are:

Option 1. You’re so lazy that you figure a URL redirect service will fix your problem. You hit up tinyurl.com or bit.ly, create a nice short URL, and use this. Too bad we can all smell this affiliate link from a mile away.

Option 2. You create a php, or html, redirect file. Your affiliate link now looks like this: http://www.yourblog.com/go/affiliateproduct.php or http://www.yourblog.com/affiliateproductname/. Clever! I bet nobody has you figured out yet! Oh wait, they click the link, find the real URL, either open up a different browser, clear cookies, or just create their own affiliate link to overwrite your cookie, and that’s that. You just missed out on another sale, and X got a discount.

Option 3. Ok, so you’re a bit smarter by now, and you know how to work your .htaccess file and you insert a rewrite rule. You’re so leet! Too bad X will still do the same thing to you like he did in option 2. You’re just not making any sales are you?

Right, I think those three will apply to the majority of you guys. Raise your hand and leave a comment if you do it differently.

Now, here’s how I like to do it.

Let’s take DIYthemes as an example again. Those guys sell the Thesis Wordpress theme, developed by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark. It is by far one of the most popular WP themes out there, and because of it’s fantastic quality, a lot of people will buy this. Lucky for us affiliate marketers – They do an affiliate program.

I bought the theme and am using it on my personal blog. I love it, its awesome, and it just works. So when I saw the affiliate program, I was more than happy to promote Thesis, knowing that 99.9% of the buyers would be satisfied with the theme (I believe that you should never promote a product you don’t like, or believe in). Now because I have been through options 1-3 myself, I knew there had to be a different way of doing this. There are certain wordpress plugins that help you cloak your affiliate links, but they usually cost a fair bit, and they essentially still do the same as options 1-3.

If I want to promote a good affiliate product, I go looking for a suitable domain. Something that has the product name in it, and whatever keywords you think would help. All I do then is create an index.php file for the root folder, and add this little bit of code:

All this does is bring up the original affiliate product website in a frame. The beauty of this method is -
A: You can be sure that the affiliate product owner has put in a lot of effort in order to optimize their page for sales. They will make the sale for you.
B: In the browser address bar, the domain you bought will show up. There won’t be any added bits and pieces after the link, it just shows up as an absolute URL.

Because it looks like there is no affiliate link whatsoever, your odds of actually getting the sale have just increased drastically. Obviously X could still figure out this is an affiliate link by looking at the page source, but since there’s nothing to flag him, he won’t even think about checking it.

Who else likes to KISS?

Bob — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 06:46:59 +0000

Working at a customers office today, re-imaging a few new machines, I got the idea for this post. Basically a 2 hour job got stretched out to 6 hours, all because the companies procedure was not very straightforward – At all.

Some of you geeks might know how simple it can be to image a computer. You use a boot-up disc to connect to a server and deploy a certain image, or you might just have a ghost image on a usb drive. Whatever, it can all be done in less than 30 minutes, provided you have the right setup.

Now, the way the IT department has setup their re-imaging process, has become very complicated, all because they have added so many additional steps. Instead of the one boot disc and image, they have written all sorts of scripts that tie in with Windows AD (Active Directory), and create all sorts of user specific settings. Each machine needs their own personal boot disc created. The documentation to complete the process is over 65 pages long!

Right, I won’t bore you with any technical details, but I’ll tell you how this got me writing this post.

KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid

If you can do something quicker, without losing quality – Do it!

This goes for your blog posts too. If you have been writing and editing that one post for hours now – You’re doing it wrong. Remember that you are your own worst critic. Even though you will re-write and re-read your post endless times – your readers will read your post, only once!

Trust me, they will have so many emails and blog posts to read today, in a limited amount of time – no extra attention will be given to your post. They might leave a comment, and then they’re off. All in all, they’ve probably spent a maximum of five minutes on your blog.

To get to the point, keep your posts to the point. Short and sweet. Don’t be scared to hit the publish button. We can’t always write masterpieces (unless your name is Brian Clark) If you have more to say, why not create a series of articles? Rule of thumb; Keep your posts between 300-1000 words, and you keep most of us happy.

*Disclaimer - Wasn’t too sure about publishing this – but I figured I’d better practice what I preach!

The hottest topics on the planet – live.

Bob — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:38:18 +0000

If you’re completely out of things to write about, yet you feel that you need to keep your visitors happy with something – Have a go at the Alexa hoturls. These are the web’s hottest links for today, updated every 5 minutes.

My top ten favorite hoturls, in no particular order:

10: Squirrel accidentally poses for camera – achieves Internets fame.
9. 4,000-tonne cargo ship mysteriously vanishes.
8. The Best Buy $10 LCD TV fiasco – I lolled @greedypeople that are talking of a class-action law suit because Best Buy didn’t honor the (obviously) faulty price.
7. 51 naked brides – Not as sexy as you might be thinking right now!
6. Newfound planet being a loner.
5. Twitter – Surprise surprise.
4. 10 Most Outrageous Factory Options Ever – For all you car lubbers.
3. The Lacuna Seca racetrack – In Google Maps, with streetview.
2. Affiliate Jump Ustream – A room full of marketers, talking marketing. Looks like a pitch.
1. The 30 day challenge – more affiliate stuff. Seems like the Internets is full of marketers!

Now, by the time you read this post, most of these will probably be gone. Like I said, Alexa is updating these stats every 5 minutes. Oh, and here’s a tip – When you find a blog in there, see if you can leave a comment. It should bring you some nice traffic.

Is your blog leaking money?

Bob — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:10:17 +0000

So, you’re one of those people that makes money online with a blog, right? You’re informing the world on how to build a better blog, get more readers, and earn more money. So what is all that adsense crap doing on your blog!

Here’s one of those things that I don’t understand (anymore). Obviously bloggers that blog about blogging for money are in it for the money (That sentence should get the SEO keyword tactics out of the way for the rest of this post). All they write about day in – day out, is about optimizing a blog to generate income. They like to diversify income streams, by adding several advertising networks on their site.

So this is the part where I get confused. I totally get it, you’re in it for the money, and you will go to extremes to earn some. But by having so many cheap exit-points (an average Adsense click doesn’t do more than 5 cents these days I believe) on your site, you are significantly decreasing the odds of your visitors clicking on the big prize for you. If I were you guys, and I wanted to make money with my blog, I would make sure that I was promoting just one major affiliate product, and perhaps do secondary product promotions in single posts every now and again.

Research (and common sense) shows that there are three ways a visitor will leave your site.

1. They close their browser.
2. They use the backbutton.
3. They click on a link on your site.

Now wouldn’t you rather have one third of all your visitors click on an affiliate link, where the average payout will be over five-hundered times higher then that Adsense or Adbrite click?

It all started with a leak

I suggest that you have a long, hard look at your blog, and get rid of all the ads that are essentially leaking money from your site.

Seven ways to lose more readers

Bob — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:19:34 +0000

So you take anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours to write that killer blog post. This ones going to change the world, and you’re more than happy to share it with us. But oh noes! Did you think about the following?

Make sure you spent 5 more minutes, which is all it takes to go through the comments and reply. Seriously, nothing annoys me more than leaving a ‘proper’ comment on someones blog, and then get completely ignored. Why am I here again? KTHXBAI!

Provide full RSS feeds. Sure, partial feeds are great to suck in more visitors and get your stats up, but I hate having to click and scroll and then click some more to get to the rest of that post. Forget about it, I’ve had enough of your blog. KTHXBAI!

YAWN! There’s sooo much text here…it looks like a big wall of text…no line breaks or sexy/funny/cool/artsy photos to look at. I am getting sleepy…KTHXBAI!

Now that’s a great post. It was great the first time I read it somewhere, and the second time somewhere else. Even the third time over at that guy’s blog. But I’ve read it enough – I’m not going to read it here as well. KTHXBAI!

Good to hear you’ve enjoyed your breakfast. And your lunch. And those snacks. And that dinner…Ever heard of Twitter or Posterous? Works pretty well for stuff like this. I was hungry for useful information. Now I’m just hungry. KTHXBAI!

Thanks for pretending to be an expert, I took your social media advice and now my site is banned from Digg. KTHXBAI!

Man, that last post of yours is so 2006. KTHXBAI!

And there you have it kids. Seven reason why I will stop reading your blog. Thanks for stopping by.

KTHXBAI!

*Update – Ma.tt has published a great post that ties in with the same idea.