I guess this is a little late, but better late than never. It has been a chore trying to keep up lately and yes, I do actually have enough material for two weeks worth of posts from BWE. But a lot of these will be about new products and some will be based on sloppy but very complete notes I took at the sessions.

This was the first panel I attended at Blog World Expo and the speakers included John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Shoemaker. Shoemoney was a little late and Jim Kukral had all of us in attendance tweet him that he sucked. Everyone laughed and some did. Hey, when do you get a chance to tell a top blogger he sucks.

About Adsense

It was a consensus. Adsense is webmaster welfare. Just about any other way of monetizing your site will make you more money. There was a time when you could make money with Google ads. It is not now.

When John Chow noticed the money he was making from Adsense drop, he offered up the slots that had Adsense to private advertisers for more than Adsense was giving him. And every slot was quickly filled and eventually he was making a lot more from private individuals than he ever could from Adsense.

About Ads

Another consensus is that for most blogs, any type of CPM ads don’t work. CPM ads are stone age technology and those that learn this are ahead of the game.

And for those of you who are impatient, here’s a lesson. Zac Johnson had no ads on his site for 10 months and now makes $6000 a month on referrals and ads on his site. He also mentioned that the one of the biggest mistakes he sees bloggers make is wasting the space in their header. Any area above the fold in your website is prime real estate and should be used accordingly

Darren Rowse said that you should monetize from day one and get your readers used to it.

Brian Clark said he makes $100,000 a month without any ads. He sells at Teaching Sells and DIYthemes and thats how he makes his money.

About Branding and Using Your Name

Brian Clark also said that he created CopyBlogger to be an independent brand that he could walk away from. But it backfired and his name is almost inseperable from the brand. John Chow said if he could start over, he would not have used his name as his brand.

They also mentioned “social proof”. Don’t show your subscriber count until you are proud to show it. If you show that you only have 10 subscribers, you will have a hard time getting subscribers. It is much better just to hide that until you have enough subscribers that it actually helps you get more.

Use Email

Everyone on the panel stressed the importance of email. Not very many people that will visit your site will even know what an RSS feed is, let alone use a feed reader. So you must make sure you have a way they can subscribe to your blog with their email address. Feedburner offers this and Aweber offers even better features.

I learned that the most profitable internet properties don’t look visibly monetized. In other words, you don’t have to make your blog look like the side of a city bus to make money.

About Affiliate Marketing

John Chow said that his #1 money maker was direct advertising but in time, he knows that affiliate marketing commissions will bypass that. He said that most people who use affiliate marketing do so wrongly. They use PPC to get one sale from one person and never contact that person again. He said you need to build a realtionship.

Brain Clark said that one way to build a relationship is to get them to sign up for a newsletter or a series of reports. He also said that using banners to promote affiliate products will not do much for you but it will give the products owner free branding. Not a win-win situation.

And Darren Rowse added that the best way to promote an affiliate product is to hit it from multiple angles. Instead of writing one post for a products, write four or more. Write one. Interview the author of the product for one. Create a video using the product for one. If you think about it, you can come up with lots of ways to promote a product.

And Zac Johnson said not to be fearful of the affiliate network. Ask for help when you need it. That’s what the affiliate manager is there for. And when you make money, they do.

It Is Work

Blogging is not a piece of cake. Darren Rowse spends 12 hours a day blogging. If you decided to blog because you thought it was easy money, you are wrong. It takes just as much work as any other job, but it’s yours. And that’s the difference.

What They Didn’t Know

I have said that I learned just as much from the questions asked as the answers given. And here is how. I was in the room with the top money making bloggers in the world. If something stumped them, that is definitely an area investigate. Two questions did:

• Mobile Blogging
• Contextual Affiliate Programs

These are both areas I have been investigating and with no answer, I know I am going in the right direction.

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Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

• Get Mentioned
• Make Your Post More Visually Appealing
• Link to Related Posts
• Choose Good Tags for Your Posts
• Link to Bloggers in Your Niche
• Make a Little Money

It is hard enough to write at times and then you have to do all of the above also. Well, maybe not all of the above, but at least some of it. Unless, of course, you want to be your blog’s only subscriber.

And right now, as I am writing this, this is being done for me. Well, not the “Get Mentioned” part, but that button at the bottom of this post may help with that.

The rest is covered, almost like a personal assistant for your blog. I have been using Zemanta for a while and they had been mentioning customizable features for a while. Well, they released the new version during Blog World Expo and I tried it out the first day.

Now you can add your friends from Facebook, MyBlogLog, and Twitter, you can use your own pictures from Flickr, and add up to 130 of your own feed sources.

For more details, check out the Zemanta demo or read more about Zemanta at Bloghology. And if you want to see my ideas on using Zemanta for a niche blog, go to my other blog.

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It Was Fun

Image by eristoddle via Flickr

I have to say I really enjoyed Blog World Expo, not just for all the swag that almost had me buying a new bag to fit it all in, but that was nice. Not just for everything new I learned. But for the reality it gave to something I do that still had an unreality to it.

Maybe kids growing up today count the internet as part of their reality and I partially do. But it is, still the internet. It is hard to sometimes realize that you are interacting with real people when you write a post, comment or join in a conversation on a forum or social network when all you see is an avatar.

Being at the Expo gave me a new feeling of reality to all of this. Now I know some of the faces behind the avatars and signatures.

The Lessons Learned

For the most part I stayed on the monetization track. Today I went off on a tangent to listen to Tim Street talk about video and then back to the monetization track. And yesterday, I chose to watch the World Premiere of His Highness Hollywood rather than another panel.

I believe a lot in cross-pollination. You can spend most of the time you have on the main track you plan on taking, but you need to branch off every now and then to pull from areas that you haven’t dealt with that much. It brings in new ideas, stretches the brain and sometimes has a rebound effect of bouncing you back into your normal rut with a new energy.

One great thing BWE could do is provide a DVD set of all the panels. There were a few time slots that I wish I could have attended 2, 3, even 4 of the panels that were running simultaneously.

But to tell you the truth I am not sure if I would ever get to watching them. I have had a couple of dvds sitting at home that I have been meaning to watch for about 8 months now. To me, reading is faster, because I can speed read the parts I already know and I can move around in non-sequential order, but that is just the way I learn.

Content To Reality

I sat here tonight thinking how I would put all of the new things I learned and new products I found into a post. And I just don’t think I can. I think I have enough content for a couple of weeks, at least. So that might be just what I do.

Yes, it would be great to write about BWE while it is happening, and writing about it two weeks from now will be so “two weeks ago”, but it is what I will do. Because I bounced a few ideas off of people I met and heard their own. And it has me itching to write about it. I also have about 20 pages of notes.

I have also come away with a couple of new ideas that I can’t wait to toss out in a post and then start playing around with. One involves a dragon I have been chasing for months now.

I am a nervous guy in public for the most part and it was good to see some speakers having the same issues on stage. In fact, it was those speakers I respected and looked up to the most. Because I knew that they hadn’t totally conquered their fear yet, but they were still up there giving it all they could.

I am out of here tomorrow on a reverse time travel flight that in the reality of time zones will take 7 hours. I can’t wait to see my family again. I thought the peace and quiet of this empty hotel room would give me a lot of time to get work done, but maybe I need the noise of kids in the background at least once and a while to remind why I am doing this.

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Image by eristoddle via Flickr

The First Day

Okay, I think I am much more put together today. I meant to get a nap in all day yesterday after checking out the 4 block radius around my room. I put some pictures up in Flickr. It seems that there are as many cranes here as there are casinos.

I didn’t manage to take the nap until 5:30 in the evening. And I basically slept through until 4:30am today. But I am ready to go now. Sleep deprivation has a way of making a person edgy, unorganized, and a little bit moody. Not a good state.

Before I did get a nap, I managed to walk down and get my pass to the expo. And the convention center is huge. I think some of the small towns in my home state would fit inside the building.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to walk through the whole thing to get to the South Hall, which is where the Expo is. After about 20 minutes of that and walking through an Expo of the latest and greatest in mining equipment, I found out you have to leave the building and walk outside to the South Hall. But today I know exactly where to go.

I also picked up a bunch of free magazines. Freebies are cool. Not just the current version of Blogger & Podcaster Magazine, but a few back issues as well. And speaking of magazines,

Bloghology

The print magazine didn’t make it. It was a rush deal and we pushed the first issue to try to get it to the printers in time. It was just not enough this time. But you can still check out the digital issue. This was a great disappointment, but you can’t win everything. We are still going to make this the best magazine on blogging out there and one of the only.

The cover story is an interview with Yaro Starak, who also wrote a great post about the magazine. So visit his site and check his post on Bloghology out.

Today’s Plan

Today’s plan is to get as much out of this first day at Blog World Expo as I can. The schedule is a little bit confusing and it’s seems that there are so many speakers that some are speaking at the same time and you have to make a decision as to what you want to learn. I am still not quite sure what I have access to yet.

So I am going to jump in and play it by ear.

I also plan on getting a pass to the monorail and just riding it like a bum around for a few hours if I get a chance after BWE. I still have some gifts to get.

The kids will settle for the regular touristy things. But the wife is going to need something special after spending the weekend alone with the monsters. We have only spent one day apart for four years. Not that I will find or afford something special, but I will try my hardest.

News

Friendfeed has changed their look.

Twitter has changed their look.

Zemanta is starting to kick ass giving you the ability to add your own Flickr photos and feeds to your suggestion pool. It is something I have been waiting for. You can also filter your results if you don’t think Zemanta is getting quite right.

It is now 8:30 and I have to get a move on. See everyone there.

Well, not really there. I am in a hotel room, a purple and pick one with the jet engine type air conditioner. But it works. Damn sure lot of constuction going on around here.

It had been a hectic week leading up to this weekend:

My parents had some issue I had to help them with.
A brown recluse spider climbed across my son’s bed Wednesday, forcing me to bomb the house the next day.
The day before that, a tire blew out on the car.
I had to leave with my wife home with a sick kid while she is still getting over being sick.

Not that I am bitching or that these things are not the things that everyone deals with. But they all happened to hit on the week I was going out of town. That is, after having weeks with no major issues.

Murphy’s law. It’s why I pack and prepare a week before because I wanted time at the end to deal with the wildcard issues and they definitely hit this time. But they normally do on occasions like this.

I also bought a webcam to talk to the family while away and made my first video of myself which basically says what I just typed, except in a more jumbled, convoluted way. I need practice.

The plan for tonight is try to make it to the party at the Mirage. I have already shelled out over $110 for two taxi rides today. Done with that until I need to be at the airport. If I have to walk, Google says it’s about 35 minutes. Not bad. Plus a lot of chance for pictures which my wife made me promise I would post.

And the comments, tweets and the like, I have been trying to keep caught up. Just hasn’t worked for the last few busy days. But I promise I will get to them today. If the damn cheapo wireless connection here doesn’t keep booting me.

Off to find a place to eat and go see if I can get a badge at least today from BWE or however that works, to get to the party tonight.

Well, here’s the video, which I haven’t edited because I still can’t stand myself on video. All in due time: