1. Invite Comments - I notice that when I specifically invite comments that people leave them in higher numbers than when I don’t. To some degree this confuses me as most of my readers know that they can leave comments on any post - but I guess inviting a comment triggers a response to some extent. Also keep in mind that new readers that are unfamiliar with blogging don’t always know about comments or how to use them - invitations to participate in well laid out and easy to use comments systems are good for helping them participate.

2. Ask Questions - Including specific questions in posts definitely helps get higher numbers of comments. I find that when I include questions in my headings that it is a particularly effective way of getting a response from readers as you set a question in their mind from the first moments of your post.

3. Be Open Ended - If you say everything there is to say on a topic you’re less likely to get others adding their opinions because you’ll have covered what they might have added. While you don’t want to purposely leave too many things unsaid there is an art to writing open ended posts that leaves room for your readers to be experts also.

4. Interact with comments left - If you’re not willing to use your own comments section why would your readers? If someone leaves a comment interact with them. This gets harder as your blog grows but it’s particularly important in the early days of your blog as it shows your readers that their comments are valued, it creates a culture of interactivity and gives the impression to other readers that your comments section is an active place that you as the blogger value. As the activity in your comments section grows you may find you need to be slightly less active in it as readers will start to take over on answering questions and creating community - however don’t completely ignore your comment threads.

5. Set Boundaries - I noticed that shortly after I set the rules for my comments section (with a comments policy) that my comment numbers jumped up a little. I’m not sure if it was just a coincidence or whether readers responded to knowing what was and wasn’t acceptable. It’s just a theory but I think a well managed and moderated comments section that is free of spam and that deals with well with people stepping out of line is an attractive thing to readers. I personally don’t mind people expressing different opinions to one another in comments but when I sense things are getting a little out of hand and too personal I often step in to attempt to bring some order to the situation (I rarely delete non spam comments). I find that people have responded to this and that comment threads generally stay constructive as a result.

6. Be humble- I find that readers respond very well to posts that show your own weaknesses, failings and the gaps in your own knowledge rather than those posts where you come across as knowing everything there is to know on a topic. People are attracted to humility and are more likely to respond to it than a post written in a tone of someone who might harshly respond to their comments.

7. Be gracious - Related to humility is grace. There are times where you as the blogger will get something wrong in your posts. It might be spelling or grammar, it could be the crux of your argument or some other aspect of your blogging. When a someone leaves a comment that shows your failing it’s very easy to respond harshly in a defensive manner. We’ve all seen the flaming that can ensue. While it’s not easy - a graceful approach to comments where you admit where you are wrong and others is right can bring out the lurkers and make them feel a little safer in leaving comments.

8. Be controversial? - I put a question mark after this one because it doesn’t always work (and I personally avoid it as much as I can these days) - but there’s nothing like controversy to get people commenting on your blog. Of course with controversy comes other consequences - one of which is the risk of putting off less vocal members of your readership.

9. ‘Reward’ Comments - There are many ways of acknowledging and ‘rewarding’ good comments that range from simply including a ‘good comment’ remark through to highlighting them in other posts that you write. Drawing attention to your readers who use comments well affirms them but also draws attention of other readers to good use of your comments section.

10. Make it Easy to Comment - I leave a lot of comments on a lot of blogs each week - but there is one situation where I rarely leave a comment - even if the post deserves it - blogs that require me to login before making a comment. Maybe I’m lazy (actually there’s no maybe about it) or maybe there’s something inside me that worries about giving out my personal details - but when I see a comments section that requires registration I almost always (95% or more of the time) leave the blog without leaving the comment that I want to make. While I totally understand the temptation to require registration for comments (combatting spam in most cases) something inside me resists participating in such comments sections. Registration is a hurdle you put in front of your readers that some will be willing to leap but that others will balk at (the same is often said about other comments section requirements that go beyond the basics). Keep your comments section as simple and as easy to use as possible.

Original post: ProBlogger

Paid Internships: November 2008

• 5,456 page impressions
• 315 clicks
• $10.21 eCPM (amount each page impression is worth)
• $55.68 revenue

AdSense for October: Down to $582.70 from $700.21

After hitting an all-time high in October, the economy finally caught up with AdSense, at least on my sites.   My revenue dropped quite a bit.  Granted, the traffic on Internweb dipped too; not as many students searching for internships in the late fall.  It will pick up in late winter.

ValueClick for October: Down to $9.83 from $15.02

Again, down a lot from October. ValueClick’s most successful ads for me are interstitials, full-page ads that appear after a link is clicked.  Interstitial have a “click to continue” link to get to the content the user originally clicked on.   In November 1,596 of them were displayed, and were clicked on 117 times for a nice CTR of 7.33%.  By comparison, the standard 468×60 banner was displayed 13,552 times and only got 16 clicks — .22% CTR — which is horrible.  I guess that means interstitial, while annoying, do work…

AdBrite for October: Up to $.27 from $.19

Note, that is CENTS not dollars.  I am barely displaying any AdBrite ads at all (690 ad views).  In December I changed that, adding a similar AdBrite ad just below my AdSense 160×600 skyscraper on Internweb.com.  We will see how it goes.

Burst for October: Down to $.15 from $4.21

Worthless revenue on few clicks on few ad impressions.  I will need to revamp site designs to be able to fit in more Burst ads, but they don’t really deserve it.

Amazon for October: Up to $5.74 from $5.22

You’d think selling DVDs and books related to a movie on a site that is movie-related would work.  Well, it doesn’t.

The grand total for November 2008 is $ 598.69, which is the first drop in monthly revenue I have had in 2008.

First up, a quick update on Paid Internships, the autoblogging site I set up a few months back that is populated by an RSS feed from Internweb.com. This site is on an upward trend as you can see from the numbers below:

Paid Internships: October 2008

• 4,229 page impressions
• 255 clicks
• $11.98 eCPM (amount each page impression is worth)
• $50.66 revenue

Now onto the individual advertising networks I am using across my blogs and sites:

AdSense for October: $700.21

AdSense continues to really kick ass for me, setting an all-time high for revenue, a 30% increase over last month. The horizontal AdSense link ads are truly the best option for click performance.

ValueClick for October: $15.02
Pretty weak, but given that I only display their ads on a few interior pages on Internweb.com, what can I expect?

AdBrite for October: $.19
I am going to have to drop AdBrite, it seems. One nice feature they have is that you can set a minimum price threshold and if it isn’t met, you can paste in different ad code to be shown instead. In my case the code is AdSense and it is always being displayed over AdBrite.

Burst for October: $4.21

Amazon for October: $ 5.22

The grand total for October 2008 is: $724.85.

I launched the site using Wordpress, put on some AdSense, and was off an running.  A site like this is perfect for social networking bookmark sites, so I promoted some of the funnier pictures on digg, stumbleupon, reddit and technorati.  One video I put up of a cat jumping was my first success, gaining 33 diggs, the most diggs I have ever gotten on a story I submitted.  It’s not much, but it’s better than the usual 1-5 diggs I get.   As a result, my traffic went up and hovered around 100 views a day.

Fast forward to last Friday, December 12th, when I got really lucky.   FHM (For Him Magazine), put out a web feature on the “100 Greatest Websites Ever”, and failpix was listed as #66!  Traffic on the site has gone up a lot (see graph below).

While it’s still not huge traffic by any stretch of the imagination, I am taking steps to make it last.  I try to put up around 3-10 new fail pictures/videos each night, and made several improvements to keep the traffic going.

RSS feeds - I put prominent subscribe via RSS and email links in the upper right corner of the sidebar.  Subscribers will keep coming back as they are notified when I add new images/videos.

Category Page plugin - I added this Wordpress plugin to be able to have SEO friendly links as navigation and to group popular pictures together.

Removed counts from categories and ratings - In Wordpress, when visitors rate pictures, the number of votes is usually shown, as well as the number of posts in each category.  Since my blog is pretty new, I think it is more beneficial to hide those numbers until they are impressive.   Ten votes for a picture is NOT impressive, but 110 is.

Added AdBrite ads in the sidebar - While I have had very little luck using AdBrite on Internweb.com, I figured I had the real estate on the failpix sidebar to spare.   This is something to watch.

Spaced out the AdSense ads - I was using my favorite and (best-performing) unit, the AdSense Link unit in my header AdSlot.  I believe I had it to close to the title of the blog because after I spaced it out a big, my click-thrus improved.  I also used to have 468×60 AdSense banner ads under the first three posts on a page.  After 5,200 views and no clicks, I got rid of them.  My focus is now on a 200×200 AdSense button ad in the right sidebar just underneath the RSS links.  It has higher visibility and won’t get lost among the posts.

I’m having a blast with this failpix so far!

My first successful venture was co-founding Vantagenet in 1997. I had JAWSmovie.com up and running and I wanted to add a forum to the site. My business partner and I wrote some forum software and decided to offer it to any webmaster that wanted it for free. We hosted the forums on our servers, and were supported by small banner ads on our pages. Vantagenet exploded after I had the idea to start offering free web polls in 1998, as Freepolls.com. We were listed in the Media Metrix top 500 sites (in terms of unique visitors) and had over 100,000 user accounts when we attracted the attention of About.com (then called The Mining Company) in the spring of 1999. We had huge traffic, but since we were a small company (two people) without any sales staff, we were not getting the best CPM rates for our traffic. About.com had 600+ niche websites and wanted to add our tools to those sites, and monetize our traffic at the much higher CPM rates they were getting at the time. Their first offer to acquire us was a typical lowball offer so we flat out rejected it.

They were shocked — they expected a counter offer. We were making great money and had no overhead and loved what we were doing. About.com persisted so we hired a law firm and professional negotiator to help broker the deal. As the first acquisition of About.com, we ended up getting a nice cash and stock deal with some great stock options (at the time). The stock later became nearly worthless after About.com was acquired by Primedia right before the internet bubble burst. The options did become completely worthless because the stock price dropped below the strike price and never recovered.

The Freepolls.com Boat in 1999, with co-founders and two employees

Our time with About.com was a blast. We opened a small satellite office in St. Paul, MN (About.com was based in Manhattan), hired some programmers, and bought a boat and slapped the Freepolls.com logo on it. About.com was flush with capital after their successful IPO in July 1999. They moved to a lavish new office in NYC and blew wads of cash on weekly parties. We traveled to New York quite often and I gained valuable experience in how to manage a business. We partnered with large sites such as the Wall Street Journal and JC Penny and expanded Vantagenet’s offerings to include many different web tools, such as guestbooks, surveys, ratings tools and more. We started another hugely successful site for About, called RankPeople.com, that allowed users to rate pictures on a scale of one to ten.

Vantagenet co-founders in Manhattan circa 2000. I am on the right.

All in all, before the internet crash, the deal for Vantagenet really paid off for About.com. They were able to monetize our traffic at a rate 20 times higher than what we were getting, and our traffic helped them move up in rankings of the top web properties. Before the Primedia acquisition, the rumor was that Yahoo! was going acquire About, but it unfortunately never happened. Instead, all of our BOUT stock converted to Primedia stock and the price dropped like a rock. About.com gave us a nice severance package when they decided to shut down our St. Paul office in October 2001. Freepolls.com remained after we left, but it was moved over to About’s Utah-based company Freeservers, which they later sold to United Online.

Freepolls.com is still up and running and the traffic is decent, but they haven’t changed it in years. Freeservers let RankPeople.com die long ago.

It’s really too bad how it all ended. I still wish we had Freepolls.com, as our main competitor from the time, Bravenet, is still going strong. Instead of selling their entire company, the guys from Bravenet just decided to sell a stake in their company, got some VC money and retained ownership. Why didn’t we think of that?