State Of The Blogosphere 2010 Is Out

As you might remember, every year Technorati releases a report called “State of The Blogosphere.” The 2010 edition is out already if you want to take a look.

The first thing I noticed is that they scattered the report in as many fragments as possible. The report is divided into four days (apparently they uploaded the content on separate days during the ad:tech conference), and each day is divided into three or more pages….

It would be cool of the whole thing was presented in a more user friendly way (e.g., in a PDF or single page), but I guess they need to generate as many page views as possible….

Anyway there are some interesting numbers around. Below you’ll find a graph outlining how bloggers generate revenues:

If you want to navigate around, Day 1 tries to understand who are the bloggers around the world, Day 2 tries to understand what topics and trends are being covered, and Day 3 what technology and monetization strategies are being used.

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What Happened to DoshDosh.com?

I would guess that most of you guys have been to DoshDosh.com in the past. Maybe not recently, but certainly a couple of years ago. The Internet marketing blog was authored by a friend of mine called Maki, and it was one of the most popular around. In fact if you check the lists with the best Internet marketing blogs you probably find it mentioned.

Around 18 months ago Maki got tired of publishing content on the blog, and decided to take a break. We exchanged some emails about it, and he told me he would focus on his niche websites and on finishing his Psychology degree. Despite that the blog kept received a large amount of traffic from search engines, and given the amount of useful content already published it remained a good resource for people wanting to learn about Internet marketing.

I am guessing that even without any updates the blog was receiving some 200,000 monthly visitors and probably making $2,000 monthly from AdSense and affiliate offers (though it could be more than that). Not a bad asset to have, if you ask me.

Then a couple of weeks ago I typed DoshDosh.com on my browser to see how the site was doing, and to my surprise I found a blank page (that is why I am not linking there, as Google wouldn’t like it). I figured it could be a normal downtime, so I checked again on the following day, and it was still giving a blank page. I checked the domain name, but it was not expired. I checked the web hosting, but it seems that the the website is up, only displaying no content. It looks like someone uploaded a blank HTML page and left it there.

I tried to email Maki, but got no answer, so at this point I don’t know what is going on. I don’t think he would just erase the website, as he could easily have sold it for $100,000 or so if he didn’t want to keep it anymore. I also hope nothing happened to him, but it could be the case.

Anyway I just figured posting about it could help solve the problem, in the case someone knows him or what is going on. Do you?

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What’s An Online Entrepreneur?

As soon as I started making decent money with my websites (e.g., $5,000 monthly or so) I started calling myself an “online entrepreneur.” I would use that tag on my social media profiles, on my about page and what not.

Then around one year ago I started to think about it, and I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t really an online entrepreneur, I only pretended to be one, because the name was cool and could impress people (or so I wished…).

In reality I was (and still am) just a guy making money on the Internet with my websites. Sure I make over six figures annually and have many freelancers working with me part time, but I still don’t think that makes me an entrepreneur. In fact if you go to my Twitter account now you’ll see my bio as “Internet Geek,” which I think is a down to earth definition of what I do.
I do want to become a real entrepreneur, though, but I believe that the path to it is longer and more challenging than most of us tend to think. In my opinion an online entrepreneur is someone who has a real online business, and this involves having some office space, full time employees, a product or service you sell, and customers.

Having only some of those factors don’t qualify you as an entrepreneur. For example, I do sell products on some websites (e.g., courses and ebooks), and I do have customers, but I don’t have an office space yet and I don’t have full time employees, so I wouldn’t call myself an online entrepreneur.

This is just my opinion though, and I would like to hear what you guys think. What is an online entrepreneur in your opinion? Does having a couple of websites that make good money qualify you as one?

Update: Thanks for the kind words guys. While I also agree with most of your comments, I think one important aspect I forgot to mention is the risk factor. An entrepreneur takes risks, and if things work well he reaps the rewards. Starting a website has no risks, unless we are talking about someone who will invest a lot of money into that website. In this case yes I would call such a person an entrepreneur. If you just start a site paying $10 for the domain and $5 for the hosting plan, then I wouldn’t call you an entrepreneur, even if one day your site starts making a lot of money.

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Have You Been Commenting On Daily Blog Tips Lately?

This is a guest post by Harrison Li. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Yeah…you don’t often see one of these random posts on Daily Blog Tips do you? But ignore the fact that I’m a guest poster and take your time to read what I have to say. This is the real question you’ve got to ask yourself. Have you been commenting on DBT recently? Or should I ask, in the last three months?

You might not care about who I am, but what matters is, Daniel has worked hard to create this blog and grow his audience, and commenting is one of the best ways to say thanks and to show that you enjoy the content.

I’m talking about community here, if you would take a look at the archives right now, pick a post from one year ago, or a post 3 months after he first started Daily Blog Tips. It can be shocking to see there are even more comments on posts back then than right now.

There’s only one simple reason to all this, the result of bloggers being lazy and wanting only benefits from the sites they visit. We read, absorb new knowledge, and leave. Ever thought about commenting? And I don’t mean commenting for your own benefit again (i.e., to get traffic), but commenting to add value to the community.

I wish there was a time travel machine that could transfer the community of this blog (and many others) back to a year ago, having to enjoy those nice and fun moments networking with fellow bloggers and making new relationships (and participating in arguing with trolls). Unfortunately impossible, unless you are willing to afford the price of spending one minute after reading each post.

Of course, there are some benefits for you in reading this post other than myself expressing my thoughts on the community of DBT. Here are some tricks to keep your readers out of pure information consumption mode and putting them into the inner circle.

• Write regular opinion-generating posts, such as “Why should we blog?”.
• Create interactive polls like Daniel has, What Browser Are You Using These Days?. (take a look at the huge increase of comments compare to the other posts)
• Get a little personal with your life.
• Host blogging contests, offer freebies or giveaways.
• Use Questions & Answers, so people could ask you questions and attract readers at the same time. (like DBT had)

Those were just some ideas, I honestly don’t pay much attention to this because I don’t have a successful blog with almost 60,000 feed readers.

If you’ve been a regular reader of DBT for a quiet long amount of time, the valuable information you have freely gotten from this blog could actually be charged quite a bit of money. So did you give something back to community? Have you even used one minute of your time to spend on commenting?

Start rebuilding the Daily Blog Tips’ community, every little comment adds up.

Daniel’s Note: I appreciate the motivation behind this post, but I also think that what Harrison is talking about is a natural trend around the blogosphere. That is, blog readers were much more engaged a couple of years ago, while these days blogs and traditional websites are becoming almost the same thing, so the community aspect died a little bit. But let us know what you think in the comments below.

About the Author: Harrison Li is a 14 year old blogger who writes in-depth blogging tips at BlogLectures.com. His blog aims to teach anyone to starting a blog for money, he currently also has a goal of getting 100 feed subscribers to his new blog, help him achieve this goal by subscribing to his feed (only if you could find the icon).

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