Network News

2009 State of the Small Time Blogger Address

Posted on January 5, 2009

Well 2009 is upon us and everyone is doing their 2008 roll ups and 2009 predictions. I thought I would chime in with what I saw in 2008 and what I am expecting in 2009 and beyond. The idano Blog Network consists of around 15 blogs that spans various topics and subjects so I have a pretty good window into the overall state of the blogosphere for the small time blogger.

The first thing that I noticed through the holiday season was that sales were really down. I made about 33% of what I did last year in Amazon sales and Adsense compared to 2007. Here are a couple of contributing factors for this decline:

  1. The economy and the fact that people were just not spending as much. The items that I was selling were kind of pricey for Christmas presents and I think people went for more practical and safe presents.
  2. Stores were overstocked for the holiday season. In 2007 the items that I was selling were sold out in brick and mortar stores so that pushed people online. This year there was plenty of stock through the entire season.
  3. The market was saturated. Last year there were 2 major products in the market I was selling to. This year there were at least 10 from the main manufacture that I sold for. Also, everyone and their brother was selling the same thing, you could get them anywhere and everywhere now.

Going into 2009 I have already seen a pretty big drop in advertising revenue from December. I am trying to be realistic in the fact that this is probably going to be dropping more as the year goes on. I don’t expect it to go away completely but I am already adjusting my budgeting to not count on this money anymore. Read the rest of this entry »

The Frustration in Choosing WordPress Themes

Posted on October 8, 2008

myImage I think frustration is maybe a little strong word to use given my situation. My “frustration” stems from me trolling several sites that offer free or even very inexpensive WordPress themes. I do not really think it is fair on my part to be “frustrated” because hey, these people are giving these themes away for free (or for very cheap).

The part that does frustrate me though is that I cannot find a theme from my dan.idano.net website in the layout that I want. I would think that what I want is simple but it is just not proving to be that way. The layout that I want is simple –

  • Has Pages and Categories along the top in the header
  • Has the first post section on the blog be a “Featured Posts” section where I can control which posts show up there
  • Has recent posts under the featured posts section
  • Has a two column sidebar for ads, links, and my network feed
  • Has a footer that can have different sections for Blog info, Archives, etc
  • Have just the recent posts on the 2nd page + when paging through content
    I have the above sketch that I whipped up really quick and it looks like I am just going to have to build it myself. Oh well, maybe I can distribute it for free in order to get some free back links from it. 

Caught in the Mud of Getting Organized

Posted on May 12, 2008

stuck-in-the-mud Ugh. I have slacked off on blogging around the network for so long now that things are in such disarray that I cannot simply sit down and blog when I get inspired. There are so many updates, re-orgs, and general maintenance that now I have to do 12 things in order just to do a single post done.

Today, I finally broke down and blogged here because the other post that I wanted to do about some new headphones I bought had to be put on hold. This was due to the fact that I didn’t have a blog to appropriately post to (normally I would do it here). Oh well, these are pains of growing I guess.

On a separate note I have decided that the layout of this site is going to change somewhat. The blog that resides here is actually going to become secondary to the aggregated posts from the network. So basically the latest post and a blurb from it will be the post that you see front and center and the latest post from this blog will be in the sidebar. The idea here is that I am trying to push the content from the other sites from here so they need the spot light. The perils of running this monstrosity are secondary to what is going on out there in the real world.

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