WordCamp Melbourne Middle

We are back.

Darren Rose from Problogger is talking. Almost 5 years blogging. Talking about making money from WordPress, or on a larger scale, blogging in general. He shows some survey stuff and shows that he has a statistic that about 8% of his audience is making 15K per month or more. He brakes people who make money like this into two groups. People who make money from blogging and people who make money from having a blog. Things like advertising, affiliate programs, merchandise, paid reviews, donations and CPM, selling adds directly. Most bloggers seem to just want to write. There are many ways to do this stuff. monetizing readers. Even people selling space on blogs to do poles and other market research stuff. For less direct methods a lot of people are also getting sales systems and empowering their skills though blog networks, Ginna Trapani from Lifehacker and her book as well as many consultants and others working to create ebooks and so on. Lastly many people are using blogs as a gateway for resumes. He asks, what do people think about this list. One audience member talks about the specialisation of consulting work, another mentions networking and growing contacts or audience contact, another member talks about valuing niche skills by generating a need context for highly valued skills that can be 'advertised' on one's blog.  Now we are moving on to methods and advice in this context. If you are going to make money you need to aligned your self with a specific niche. Make your self the specific person of value, establishing trust and expertise and authority. He also advocates running showcases on what you do and why it is important in the context of a specific context. Case studies are really valuable. Give away what you can, especially principals. Sell your self, not someone else, AdSense can be used to sell other peoples work because it links contextually. Lastly, make your self accessible. He moves on to talk about utilising better design to optimise your add value. Less is more, fewer adds can translate to higher value. Relevance and content relation is really key to value. Keeping all kinds of traffic is really important but one should keep and understanding of what most of their traffic is. Try moving adds around.

Questions:

1. Q. How could Google improve their percent accuracy and rules about AdSense? A. I have never though about this. I think there should be more communication about this from Google but I understand that it is hard for them to avoid bad SEO.
2. Q. Is visual value very important. A. Yes and no, some advertisers really care about what competition you are using but most readers do not care as much as expected.
3. Q. How do you know who is using the adds. A. We tend to put some survey information as the results to some adds. Some advertisers ask about this and ask what you reader demographic is. 
4. Q. What companies do you go to to get advertising. A. I do not look for companies it is more the other way around. I think the best thing to do is to work at what you are good at and find what suites from who comes looking. That said I put adds up early and just waited.
5. I could not hear this one
6. Q. RSS advertisement, what do you say. A. I do not really use it. I find that in general it does not work, most of my money RSS is from the larger numbers of readers and affiliate programs. 

Christene Davis is now going to talk about classification models. 

Content categorisation availability. Aggregating common information. She is talking a little bit about the displacement of a tag out come and a link to a tag content page. 

Machine Tags - Flickr introduced this idea that is like a more developed tagging context. Including info like Geo tags and other standardisation off tag information. Machine tags are a little like making a wiki out of a tag context, giving special attributes and empowering connectivity.

Folksonomy is a terrible word. She sees this as a useless made up word that does not seem to deal well with the connection between the various groups in the context of blogging. She says there are distinct branches and they seem not to be allied well. 

James has asked about mircoformats or something. He is suggesting that there may be no point at which meta is too small, and asking that there is some point where it should be overtaken. Referencing the microformat plugging for WP. She answers that this is not really an issue, essentially. 

Structured tagging paradigms are really valuable. 

Another question from the crowd. What is the difference between a category and a tag. She suggests that one is higher in the order of power but the fundamental difference is that categories is finding similarities and tags are documenting specific aspect.  People are discussing some of the aspects of the problems of permalinking for tags and categories. One audience member is suggesting that categories are like organisational systems while tags are like cross organisational information connections. Another person is allying tagging to an index and categories to chapter headings in a book. 

James tries to bring it back to a more structured presentation.

Now we are moving into a real question and answer time

Questions: 

1. Q. How aware are search engines of categories? Some are quite good, there is a bit of worked done especially looking for commonalities in the themes of pages such as a tag page. On my work I find that tag sections have higher conversions because the content specialisation is so rich.
2. Q. There is a tool that can take content and provide some appropriate tags. This uses some yahoo service. What do you think? A. There is a bit of other stuff going on there like Delicious tags of tags. 

We have finishing up this round, James is now talking about adding a WCM07 tags to any content related to this event.