blogs « James Avery’s blog

October 7, 2009

Thoughts on Compound Growth - Possibilities and Dangers

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Making Money Online, Social Networking — Tags: Affiliate Marketing, blog posts, Blogging, blogs, make money online, Social Networking, twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress — admin @ 12:55 am

Compound Growth of an Online Business

On Sunday, I posted about how little I was actually earning from my blogs, and how I hoped to enter a steep learning curve in order to improve this. I’ve never been shy of writing content, but the social media arena has always been something I’ve never quite got round to entering. So I decided to hold my hands up and admit to being a total newbie, and see where things go from here. I have entered the steep learning curve of twitter, blog promotion and blog optimisation, and I am looking forward to enjoying the ride. So how realistic is it to expect to follow a growth curve which keeps on going up, and how can website builders ensure that their growth is exponential, rather than just solid and linear. Or is linear growth better?

Well, I have always found the prospect of compound growth far more exciting. Prior to turning my attention to blogging and offline print maps, I maintained a 60-70% annual growth rate on Flightmapping.com. Of course, the big question when anyone makes claims of massive growth is what level they are starting from. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that 1000% growth from £10 per month is still just £100 per month. But what if that is just the start, and within a few short months, you can double that figure again several times over?

Of course, the possibilities are endless - and there is no reason why a relative beginner can’t build up a substantial and stable income through building highly relevant content-focussed blogs - providing that there is a revenue stream which can be built from them. It is no use blogging about a subject which either has very few potential readers (although believe me, on the internet, there are people out there into just about anything), or which is just not going to generate much revenue (note to self - stay away from long political rants!).

So what are the dangers?

Judging by the endless streams of spam on twitter, the first pitfall has to be to go down the ‘I made millions of dollars online and so can you’ route - almost all of these systems are built on bringing more people in below you in the pyramid, and they just aren’t actually out there to generate any kind of sustainable income, except for those who are in right at the very start. Quality content blogs take time to build up, and this is the big question. Do you have the time to spare? Can you sit back and wait for your websites to grow? Well the good news here is that you will never have to sit around twiddling your thumbs - on the internet, everything can move like lightning, so it’s totally unlike opening a retail store and waiting for the punters to come in off the street. The simple question is - can you build up your website(s) quickly enough? Well, as long as you are starting off by building your website as a secondary income generator, the answer should always be yes. Expecting to become a millionaire overnight is almost certainly going to land you in disappointment.

So even if the rate of growth slows down as you get bigger, it still pays to go for explosive growth.

Happy blogging!

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October 3, 2009

Hopefully this tells you what I’m on about

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Music, Social Networking, Trains, Transport, random — Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, blogs, cycling, Flightmapping.com, Trains — admin @ 7:21 am

Please excuse the messy theme whilst I’m upgrading the blog, but I hope that the ‘map’ above provides a better overview of my key interests than any set of text links ever can.

I’ve set out some of the key topics I expect to blog about here on the left - I supposed I should add cycling and general transport together with trains, and social networking could also be expanded to include affiliate (online) marketing, although my interest here is more as a passive way to earn extra revenue, rather than an end in itself. Having said that, I’m always available for consulting if the price is right!

For the past 7 years, I’ve been working on Flightmapping.com, which is driven by affiliate marketing revenue, but which is also managed by my brother Mark and colleague Dan, who is the best person to contact about anything affiliate related on there.

So everything else here is starting off with a clean slate - lots of new projects on the go, but I hope this diagram shows how they are linked all together. The dotted line leads to new websites which are currently in the pipeline. Oh, and how did I forget a tag for music? I guess that’s because I just like to regurgitate other people’s lines, rather than create the stuff. One day, I’ll go out and get that drumkit!

You need to find out
‘Cos no one’s gonna tell you what I’m on about
You need to find a way for what you want to say
But before tomorrow - Oasis, Supersonic.

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October 2, 2009

Another week, another blog post

Filed under: Blogging, Social Networking — Tags: blogs, Politics, Social Networking — admin @ 11:32 pm

Hmm, looking back to last Friday’s post, I know I should be posting 3 times each week. But better to post just the once than not at all. Still nothing revolutionary to say this evening, but I hope a few quick notes about what I’ve been up to can show that things are moving along slowly:

Monday - I went to a debate about Heathrow’s third runway and the future of air travel marketing, hosted by CIMTIG. Lot’s to write up about this I promise, but not sure when I will get round to it. I’ll have to say that some of my reservations about Heathrow’s 3rd runway have been mitigated, but I’m not yet fully swayed.
Tuesday & Wednesday - I’ve made further progress on the first draft of the “World Tube Map” - talking about it to a couple of people on Monday night also got an excellent response. I have something ready to print off, and I’ll probably do an upload early next week.
Thursday - not really up to much, apart from watching Question Time in the evening - two excellent contributions from the non-politicians David Starkey and Dambisa Moyo.
Today - pretty quiet too, but I am doing a bit of a twitter catch up. I have a lot to learn before I get the social networking balance right, but this should all come together by the time I have the World Tube Map ready to publish, and Flightmapping’s long awaited new site launch is finally underway.

So can I offer one decent tip for the week? Well, one thing about getting more active on twitter is that there are hundreds of people out there to learn from who will be much better than you. That’s not to say that newbies can’t carve their niche - of course, there is plenty of space for everyone, but to quote Emmerson, ‘Everyone is superior to me in that I can learn from them’. Tonight, I’ve read a couple of posts by Bob Wheeler, and his comments on why blogs are the most important tool in social media are pertinent. To quote his own blog:

In fact, if you listen you’ll hear just about every social media guru say, “If you don’t have a blog you don’t exist online”.

Of course, there’s no point in having a blog if it isn’t kept updated. So I’ve set the reminders to have something worthwhile posted up before this time next week!

Have a good weekend.

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March 31, 2009

Sorry for the downtime

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging — Tags: Adfero, Affiliate Marketing, blank screen, Blogging, blogs, City 2.0, DirectNews, Flightmapping.com, Mind Pilot, take a break, templates, Web 2.0, WordPress, WordPress blank screen of death, WordPress reinstall — admin @ 10:21 pm

I’m sorry that my blog was out of action this afternoon — this had nothing to do with any kind of legal threat from Adfero (note that voice recognition calls them added zero, I think that sums up pretty well too!), I just encountered technical glitch trying to upgrade the WordPress template.

Why is it with computing that something which works perfectly well on one site cannot then get repeated on a virtually identical site the following day? As always, the devil is in the details — it turns out that tiny little differences in the WordPress configuration file can result in the whole blog not working, and all you get to show for it is a blank screen — no error messages telling you where you have gone wrong, and nothing from WordPress themselves saying how to fix the problem.

Fortunately, I managed to pull myself away from my computer and take a break, rather than repeatedly going round and round in circles, which is so easy to do when faced with an eye explained coding problem like this. Back with a full stomach and a clear mind, the logical thing to do is to search out a few forums, but sometimes the obvious search term (WordPress reinstall) isn’t enough detail to get the answer. When I searched again for ‘ WordPress reinstall blank screen’, I came across a very useful post entitled solution to the WordPress blank screen of death, and this explained how the writer had experienced a similar problem I had, but he had wasted a whole day trying to fix it.

I realise as well that this WordPress upgrade means my blog should now appear back on the UK affiliates forum, so I guess that means I should try to make most of my posts relevant to affiliate marketing.

This is the first time that I’ve been blogging regularly since the end of 2007, a period when I went through a lot of, well let’s just call it personal turbulence — I now have a separate blog called Mind Pilot which looks at those issues. Of course, Flightmapping.com still has its own blog (Flightblogging.com), and this has really started to pick up over the last few weeks, so even though this covers topics from the point of view of the traveller rather than as a direct revenue earner (of course we add affiliate links where we can), I hope there are a lot of useful tips there for affiliates who are out and about, especially as independent minded travellers are exactly the kind of people Flightmapping has always been aimed at.

In order to try and keep this blog more on topic for affiliate marketing purposes, I’m also planning on launching a new blog shortly, which will be called Bling My City. This takes the concept of Web 2.0 to city development and asks how urban infrastructure can and should respond to the demands of the Internet age. This is where I will park most of my political rants, as I think it is fair to say that most politicians and city fathers are well behind the game when it comes to working out what citizens and consumers really want. This blog won’t be a strictly affiliate blog as such, but I hope it will make interesting reading.

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March 30, 2009

Adfero = Do Fear!

Filed under: Blogging — Tags: Adfero, blogs, DirectNews, do fear, forums, legal threats, Shaun Hofer — admin @ 10:51 pm

Well, I’ve had my supper and calmed down a bit, down some work, and gone back online.

It looks like Adfero are experts at snuffing out anyone who doesn’t like them.

This hasn’t just happened on A4U - where Sean Hofer, Adfero’s online spokesperson admits that they asked other blogs to remove posts which ‘weren’t substantiated’ - a similar thing happened on another business forum, except that in this instance, the administrator publicly said that he had got a ‘take down’ notice from Adfero.

Does it surprise me that Adfero, who’s slogan is supposed to be ‘bringer of news’ is an anagram of ‘Do Fear’? Perhaps their slogan should really be ‘bringer of sues’.

Note - I should point out that the above comments refer to Adfero Ltd, and the Adfero DirectNews product. It does not relate to Adfero Group, a Washington DC based media agency.

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Adfero DirectNews are incompetent - and if I can’t say it on A4U I’ll say it here

Filed under: Blogging, Uncategorized — Tags: Adfero, blogs, Costa Del Sol in Morocco, DirectNews, forums, Granada, legal threats, Shaun Hofer — admin @ 6:49 pm

I really don’t like companies which go round with a big wooden stick and try to clear up what others say about them on the internet. There has been a thread running on the A4U forum for quite a while about a certain Adfero - “bringer of news”. I could go on and on about the troubles I had with them, but it is feeding time, so I will keep this brief, make sure people know it is out there, and publish any more that is needed later.

The key discussion boils down to Adfero’s claim that:

“DirectNews does provide unique content – we are very aware of the dangers of providing duplicate content to a website and ensure everything we do is unique.”

In our case, this was about 50% right - when the story was unique, it was because the incompetence was on such a grand scale that no-one else could match it. I repeat again (well, as said on A4U about 3 weeks ago, but since mysteriously disappeared), according to Adfero, the Costa Del Sol was in Morocco, and Granada was a spice island walled city in the Caribbean - these are the facts of the so-called news they provided to us.

The rest of the time, the stories were often directly taken from other press releases - any news company will do this to some extent, but there should always be some editing involved, but not in the case of Adfero - again, specifically, I refer to the story they gave us about new BA flights to Algiers, which matched the BA press release we got verbatim.

Adfero then say that they got other blog posters to take down their comments because stories were “unsubstantiated” - I can certainly feel the fresh blow of their censor’s axe coming down tough on anyone who doesn’t like them.

Well, this will not do - an internet company providing news in the 21st century should be able to take a bit of negative commentary on the chin, and should not have to threaten other blogs and forums which say things they don’t like.

Adfero, when you read this tomorrow, please take note that this blog is the personal opinion of James Avery, and relates to the former contract between yourselves and Flightmapping Ltd. The opinions are my own, but if you take issue, you can email ja @ jamesavery .co.uk.

Note - I should point out that the above comments refer to Adfero Ltd, and the Adfero DirectNews product. It does not relate to Adfero Group, a Washington DC based media agency.

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March 19, 2009

You can collect loads of followers on Twitter, but is it really worth it?

Filed under: Blogging, Social Networking — Tags: blog posts, blogs, Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez, Henry Ford, how to get 2000 twitter followers in 10 days, twitter — admin @ 1:30 am

I’ll have to admit to only really getting in to Twitter over the last few days, having signed up some time late last year. I seem to be getting a few random followers who I have never met before, and have very little connection with - or at least that is, until I read their profiles. I don’t do this all the time, but sometimes my curiosity has lead me to investigate further. It is a scary world out there when you are effectively giving recommendations about people based on just a few seconds of initial profile scanning, but Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez is someone I will keep an eye on:

Why Henry Ford would love blogs - the key point being that a blog can answer one particular question, and that you can then refer to it multiple times, effectively creating an online assembly line to keep pumping out your information.
How to get 2000 twitter followers in 10 days. My first reaction to this headline was - do you really want to have that many followers? Well, of course we do, it suits our vanity, so let’s try again - do you need to have that many followers? I guess that’s down to the kind of website you run, but if you run a website which can bring you new clients, or attract advertising revenue, then I guess the answer is a straight yes. So is there a secret plan? It is all based on using scripts to find people who have similar interests to you, following them, and then assuming that they will follow you back. Statistically, 30% of them will. Twitter will only let you follow 2,000 people, so you then use another script to stop following people who haven’t followed you back, and start the progress again. My verdict? This might be a useful way of expanding your social network, but you are making very shallow connections, with an automatic expectation of getting something back immediately in return. I don’t think that is what networking is all about, and I’m also not so sure that this method would bring in that many useful contacts to turn into clients. But if you want to do it for your own vanity, the above link will at least tell you how.

I think Daniel’s post about Henry Ford is much more interesting than his post about collecting Twitter contacts, although I’ll admit that it was the latter which got my initial attention. Looking back over the Henry Ford post, he points out that a blog needs around 100 posts before it will start getting any return on its time investment, and that a serious blogger needs to have 500+ posts. Looks like I still have a long way to go then.

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