The Digerati Life

Can you make money blogging? Apparently so, as these top bloggers can attest!

These days, when I bump into other mothers on play dates, or when I see people I haven’t seen for sometime, I get asked how and what I’ve been doing lately. I pause, then tell them that I “blog”. That of course, inspires a lengthy discussion about the subject of “blogging”; I tell them why I do it and why I’ve traded my almost 20 year old career in technology and software development for this new-fangled activity.

Blogging is one of those “cheap hobbies” that turned me into an accidental entrepreneur. It’s work that I find enjoyable, that is sufficiently challenging, that allows me to keep learning and expanding my knowledge in so many ways (and not just in the area of finance). It’s something that I can actually earn money from while affording me the ability to set my own hours and work on my own terms. What more can you ask for in a “job”?

Then again, it may not be for everyone: it can make you fat (I believe) and for some people, it’s even a health hazard! But if you’re interested in giving it a go, here are a few enthralling details about successful bloggers that I sourced from BusinessWeek. These profiles can inspire you to pursue your online aspirations:

Top Bloggers and The Money They Earn

These bloggers did not count on making big money; they sound like they all became unexpected successes in the world of content publishing. Note that these statistics and earnings were as of last year, so I suspect higher traffic and MUCH healthier revenues for these bloggers today.

BoingBoing.Net

Launched: January, 2000 Stats: 2.6 million unique visitors and 22 million page views in one month Advertising Rates: $350 for a small ad button for one week $2,000 to $3,000 for banner ads sold through the Federated Media ad network Posting Frequency: 20 to 40 times a day by 4 authors Revenue: Over $1 million per year

All I can say is WOW! Although I’m still trying to grasp what it is they write about.

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It’s our birthday.

We’re “One Year Old” This Week!

I’m very excited to say that this week marks the first blog year anniversary of this site! In reality, I started blogging on the last day of July last year with no idea what I would be doing. I simply wanted to try an intriguing application out called “Blogger” after reading people’s blogs for the last several years. I was searching for some business ideas to work on in the realm of blogging and by trying out “Blogger”, I thought I would get a better feel for the activity. But come mid-October of last year, I decided to join the personal finance bandwagon after realizing that I should actually be writing about one of my oldest passions — finance — which is a topic I enjoy studying, learning about and discussing with others. So I relaunched the blog in this new light and started to post more frequently.

So what have we achieve in a year? Here are the latest stats for this site.

Number of visitors thus far: 330,000 and counting
Number of feed readers: 1400 or so
Number of domain hosts used: 2
Number of posts: 360
Number of comments: ~3,000
Number of spam comments caught: 96,734 (yikes!)

I never thought this experiment would turn into such a long term commitment. I’d like to truly thank all the readers who’ve come by to visit, those who’ve allowed me to use their images on this site, as well as fellow bloggers and other webmasters who’ve supported this site through their link backs. I thank you for your helpful material, comments, discussions, and our online friendships too. Here’s to more years of rambling, musing, ranting and sharing.

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What do you think of personal finance blog rankings?

In February of this year, we’ve had some informal blog rankings and lists done by various finance bloggers as a way of taking the pulse of the blogosphere and discovering who else makes up the financial community space. It’s a handy way for the general reading audience to find out about the personal finance blogs out there and I’ve enjoyed going through these lists to discover quality blogs I may not have come across before. Well, from what I’ve noticed, it’s been a while since the last list and now more than 6 months later, we’ve got another informal list up, thanks to Fire Finance.

I applaud their efforts for coming up with this; I can just imagine how time-consuming it can be. Plus, this stuff always invites a lot of feedback as people wonder what considerations were given to the endeavor. If you’re a blogger and a stats fan, it can certainly be a fun thing to delve into. It may not be as fun if you’ve been left out (as I’ve been on various occasions, but it’s all cool!), which could be for many reasons such as technical issues (no domain, stat tracker not publicly displayed, etc), or arbitrary rules that list-makers come up with, or your blog may be too new to be considered.

I wouldn’t put serious stock on where blogs stand in these rankings since the traffic or statistics gathering process is a work-in-progress and isn’t perfect. But it tells me “who’s out there”. Of course, I also do such discovery by checking out pfblogs.org religiously.

At any rate, if you own a personal finance blog not in this list and feel you were missed, you can make your presence heard to the list creator. Otherwise, by joining in the pf community and making enough noise, you’ll soon find yourself in some other listing. Or you can also do as others have done and make your own! Keep up the great work and I’m sure I’ll find you in the next mondo ranking project. And if you’re a reader, I’m sure you’ll find a few favorites from these lists.

If you want to sound off on these points, you can leave me a comment!

 

Image Source: Grow A Brain

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First, DreamHost saved my blog.

I just migrated this blog over to DreamHost after I’ve had enough of its shenanigans, thanks to the instability of my own networks and servers. Serves me right for trying to go cheap and skimping on the hosting fees. Serves me right for trying to extend my control over to areas I have no significant expertise in.

Right after I did the migration, after a mere 3 hours, the power went out for over a day in the middle of a wind storm that left us more than just a bit bored and bothered. This time, the servers went out, but not our trusty blogs! At any rate, I was thrilled I spent the money to outsource the infrastructure, and that was literally not a second too soon! So thank you to all those of you who gave me your suggestions for potential web hosts. It’s working out like a charm so far!

 
Second, DreamHost gave me a Christmas present.

I’ve perused their blog and came across this gem of a post in it. Remember that shopping cart hack I talked about earlier? Apparently, there are more bugs out there where that came from just waiting to turn us into wannabe scammers who can’t resist trying out some of these novel ideas. The post is about the possible ways consumers can scam establishments and companies for measly bucks: sure, you’re curious as hell, but I’m assuming you’ll at least try to resist these tricks despite how tempting it is. The amusement I got from it more than made up for the inconveniences we suffered throughout our transient power outage.

Thanks again Mr. DreamHost.

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This story is about the bloggers’ practice of participating in blog carnivals, which are posts at other blogs that represent collections of articles of a similar theme for the purpose of highlighting informative articles for a given week and aimed in part to generate traffic, meet other bloggers and to hopefully educate and entertain. So the question that is posed here is: aren’t all blog carnival posts reviewed and edited prior to getting published?

 
Niiiice! Since I have a sense of humor, I found this post as amusing as it was informative. It’s great to be mentioned by a fellow blogger, even though it may be in a way where I feel like I’m being teased for being caught with my knickers down. In this case, Political Calculations pointed out how some of us may be caught up in the “alternate universe” of automated blog carnivals.

Uhhh, actually he’s right. And the joke’s on me.

I always thought something was strange, especially when I had earlier tried to contact the king of one man finance and money making blog carnivals — Bryan Fleming — via his Wealth Building World blog about a mistake he had in one of his posts and I was met with the stone cold chill of abject indifference. Unfortunately, there was no response and no attempt to fix the inaccuracies either. And I thought the Wealth Idea Builder was just having a bad day.

Just for the record, the members of Bryan C. Fleming’s universe of blog carnivals include:

* Festival of Investing (hosted at Investing World Today)
* Personal Growth Carnival (hosted at Bryan C. Fleming)
* Wealth Building Ideas (hosted at Wealth Building World)

 
And when I saw that strange double mention which had my submission listed twice, I knew with utmost confidence that I was helplessly caught in the palm of a non-human blog carnival.

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Oh yeah, the joys of blogging! I thought this was pretty cute. I think I’m somewhere in the second row. Still haven’t popped open the tip jar yet though ;).

However, if you’d like to learn more about e-tipping, you can find out more over here, where simple and free e-tipping methods are discussed.

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Where do my visitors come from? I check on this every so often to analyze what people are interested in reading and for the purposes of improving this weblog. I was a bit disheartened to see that I am still not receiving much traffic from the search engines. Virtually none from Yahoo or MSN and a very minimal number from Google. Funny because there’s this other blog I maintain with much less traffic but with most of it coming from the search engines. I’ve checked whether my pages are indexed and though they don’t appear so, for some key word searches, they do.

Is it because I have a new domain, which I changed twice and whose title remained static till a couple of weeks ago? Thanks to Kevin from Free The Drones, who pointed out this major gaffe, I was able to fix my page titles for more dynamic display, which will enable the pages to become search engine friendly.

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No, you haven’t lost your way and your senses are not failing you yet; you have simply walked in mid-way into an identity change that I am undergoing right now with this weblog. I decided that The Curly Tree Money Blog wasn’t a serious or dignified sounding enough weblog name and was probably too whimsical for the technical and money-oriented readers who I am trying to connect with. Therefore I’m christening this place The Digerati Life, which hopefully suits my voice and theme more appropriately.

I’m going to take the change gradually here — so please forgive any links that are out of whack which you may notice. For the most part, I am probably just going to take the simple road to a domain/URL change which may end up preserving some vestiges of Curly Tree in this site, but no problem since I’m still signing off each post as Curly anyway my former identity on here, but in order to further optimize (via SEO) this site, I am now signing off as the Silicon Valley Blogger.

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