Alqloop’s chat arab

It looks like John Cow has had to re-list his blog for sale on Sitepoint. The previous auction lead only to two different bidders that didn’t pay up when it was time to.

From the new Auction:

Re listed, do not bid BIN if you are not willing to honor the agreement. Bids are legally binding, read the FAQs.

The time to sell has come for my beloved blog. Let me try and answer the first question that comes to mind, why?

Because I am entering an extremely busy period in my personal life. Moving from Europe to Australia soon, having to find a new place to stay for a couple of months first, before the big move, I am going to be spending most of my time moving house, filling out tons of paperwork, then shipping everything over to Aus and trying to get a new house there. With all this going on, I won’t have much time to attend to my online business, so I’m probably going to take a break from the Internet for a few months.

So my loss is your gain.

It really makes me wonder how two different people could back out of the sale, and it will probably generate an unfortunate wave of trepidation over new bidders wondering the same thing.

It is really a shame that neither of the two previous bidders picked up the site, as a sale of this magnitude is always interesting to watch.

Currently, the starting bid is once again $25,000 for a blog that makes $2500 a month. It was said that the site was sold for the buy it now price of $50,000 in the last auction, and that is once again the buy it now price.

How many times will the site have to be sold before it stays sold? I watch with baited breath.

Recently, when I went to the b5media offices in Toronto, I noticed their huge affinity for the whiteboard, and it reminded me of how other bloggers and small business people I’ve been around have also been huge fans of the whiteboard, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw it on Freelance Switch’s list of guilt-free home-office purchases.

Other things on the list that I still need to pick up include:

• nice LCD monitor
• another nice LCD monitor
• an ergonomic chair

There are other great suggestions in the list, but I have a fair number of them. Unfortunately my purchases are never guilt-free.

Clay Collins recently published a post on Copyblogger that made me laugh, and so I have to share it. The post is entitled, “6 Ways That Bloggers are Like Rappers” and it compares A-list bloggers to well known rappers to show how similar the two different professions are, especially where personality characterizations are concerned.

My favourite from the article:

Similarity #5: Gang Affiliation

Personal alliances, friendships, and creative and collaborative relationships run strong between rappers. Established rappers promote their friends, cite their peers, produce beats for colleagues, make guest appearances on allies’ albums, and help their friends get record contracts. Some of the more famous alliances existed between 50 Cent, Enimen, and Dr. Dre, as well as between the Notorious B.I.G., Sean (Puffy) Combs, and Lil’ Kim.

Bloggers form similar alliances. Circles of friends swap guests posts, create blogging networks, link to and interview each other, etc., and the blogosphere can sometimes seem a little incestuous. Mess with the wrong blogger and you may get blacklisted by their network. I’d rather not go about naming crews in the blogosphere, but if you’ve been around here long enough (um… one day?) the alliances will pop out. You’ll see them.

Definitely worth a read, and while not really a profession I would like to be compared to, I enjoyed the article.

Over on Coversation Marketing, there is a nice list post that breaks down some things that we should all be doing to optimize, develop and market our blogs. What is great about the list is that it isn’t too serious, and it has its funny moments, like the first item on the list:

If you have a Flash introduction on your web site, delete it. If you don’t agree, try this: Shove your head into a bucket of water. Stay in there, not breathing, for 10 seconds longer than is comfortable. That’s what you’re doing to your customers. Delete it, please.

Definitely an interesting read, and while I don’t agree with everything on the list, it has some great ideas that can be sifted through which should help most bloggers move upwards in traffic and influence.

One of the biggest things I always tell people is to fight for their one percent of the Internet and with advertising revenue reaching twenty-one billion in 2007, that one percent is looking rather nice.

If you are feeling like you are never going to get anywhere when it comes to making money online, just remember that if you made one tenth of a percent of the revenue online, you would be bringing home twenty million dollars.

That blows me away. While you might not become a millionaire from blogging, I can say that the pie everyone is fighting for is rather large and even the smallest pieces might be a full time salary to get you to become a problogger.

Source: Associated Press

Logo Orange has a great post up with their picks for logo design trends so far in 2008. Some notable sections include waves, organic, and transparency.

It was one of those posts, despite not being a designer, that I just had to point out as design is very important to a blog, or any business, and your logo will become your branding.

Logos are the ultimate mark of distinction and everyone loves them. We see logos everyday – on the highways, on consumer goods, on the Web and in the institutions and organizations we support. Read about the different types of logo designs here and learn what principles and techniques are used to create them.

Check out the full article on Logo Orange for more details, as well as some beautiful examples.

Over on Geeks are Sexy, there is an interesting post about why bloggers hate blogging. It mostly centers around the normal things that bloggers get frustrated with like slow traffic increases, slow uptake on RSS subscription options, and revenue that doesn’t even pay for coffee.

While it is an interesting article, I do think it oversimplifies some issues, and throws out some generalizations. I do think for a blogger just starting out, this article could be a good reality check, but it would have been nice to see some positive points thrown in there as well. Just because some bloggers hate blogging, doesn’t mean that blogging itself is bad.

Here is a snippet from the article:

7- RSS Subscribers too long to increase

Every single day you are looking at your stats hoping your RSS feed will finally display the magical number: 100 subscribers. But nope, you haven’t passed the three figures yet. If on a count of 25 subscribers you remove your 5 web email accounts and 10 of your friends, you are stuck with 10 pure RSS subscribers, and this sucks. You could try opening 75 new accounts randomly on mac.com or gmail, but that would be a real pain. And you would still be talking to yourself… so emailing you might be a better idea. Increasing RSS subscribers takes time and energy, and unless you are ready to spend countless hours producing quality content, you better stop blogging once and for all.

I have to admit, I enjoyed the cartoons included with the article, so check it out for that, if nothing else.

Over on the Bootstrapper blog, there is a long, but filled with important links post that gives us bloggers some great ideas for finding new clients, and really, new readers.

As a bootstrapper, you know that clients equal business. Without them, you’d just be another one-man (or woman) shop with an office trying not to go into debt. Fighting for and retaining clients against your competition can be a struggle, just like recruiting new employees or searching for a job yourself is a frustrating battle. With this list, we want to help you take a step back from the front lines and get a little creative. Read below for more than 50 ideas on how to find new clients the smart way.

While not all the tips are useful for us, if you are going into affiliate sales, pay-per-click marketing or just selling WordPress themes, most could be very useful.

Mark over on 45n5.com has a great post about James Mandy, and his site, leopardtricks.com, a site that has gone from zero to ten thousand FeedBurner reported RSS subscribers in less than thirty days.

www.leopardtricks.com:
serves approx 5-8k uniques a day
servers approx 1Gig data a day
4% of readers are non-apple users
40+ contributers
11k+ subscribers

An amazing story, and one we should all file away with a star next to it.