I came across Fleck browsing referral reports for Blog Reviews. I got a dozen of clicks from Fleck in one day and went to check it out. Although Fleck has nothing to do with blogging directly, I decided to say a word about the service, because I found its concept really cool.

Fleck is a service for collaborative annotation of web pages. Simply speaking it allows to add notes to the website pages, and then share them with other people.

Here is an extract from TechCrunch.com word about Fleck:

The service is clearly in its infancy but could be just what some people are looking for. The basic idea is that one person can place notes on top of a web page and other people can view, change and add to those notes at any time. It’s got standard features like movable notes and bullet points, page histories and the ability to email a unique URL to an annotated page. The URLs are Fleck URLs, not the URL of the page you are annotating. The system is remarkably easy to use and relatively easy on the eyes.

Check out sample page of Blog Reviews with my notes with my notes on it.

For now Fleck is developing pretty slowly, so you can actually have your blog listed on the front page for several days. It will not drive tons of traffic of course, but might give you some additional exposure, which won’t hurt at all.

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I like interviews. I like to do interviews, read interviews and be interviewed. I figured it will be worth while to do some interviews with accomplished probloggers. It is a great way to learn something new, discover great ideas, and start thinking outside the box. I really hope you like it.

I am starting the series with a little chat with Chris Garrett, professional blogger and online media consultant who helps people make the most out of the web.

Chris, could you please tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a blogging and Internet marketing consultant based in the UK. I help businesses and bloggers become more famous, focused and profitable. While I have been working in the Internet field since 1994, and blogged since 1998, in 2005 I launched my own company and started blogging full-time.

How and why did you start blogging?
Well it wasn’t called blogging when I started. My website reading habits revealed a number of websites that I visited daily had started writing daily journals or articles and I thought it would be fun for me to do the same thing. A lot was going on in my life at that point, had just got married, was trying for a baby, just changed job, moved house, the idea was to write a diary.

Why did you decide to do blogging full-time?
I had been working for other people at various marketing, advertising and new media agencies and decided that being an independent consultant and blogger was what I really wanted to do. Other people separate my blogging and marketing consultancy but in my mind they are facets of the same thing. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve started blogging just about 2 weeks ago. Today I decided to set the goal for the next 6 months to earn at least 1000 USD purely by blogging. It should be enough to cover some expenses for my family (wife and 18 months old daughter), and give me confidence that blogging does worth my time. How am I going to do reach this goal? No idea.

Currently I have three English blogs:

• Blog Reviews — the one you are reading right now.
• Apple Blog — blog about Apple Inc., and its i- and mac- products, about Apple’s fans and so on.
• Meaning of Names — experimental blog about meaning of names, popular baby names and other things related to names. It is a niche site. I came up with the idea while using Wordtracker.com to find some competitive keywords for my projects. It happened that some of the phrases related to names are pretty popular and yet not very much used by other websites. We’ll see how the experiment goes.

Also I have two blogs in Russian (yes, I am Russian):

• Apple Blog — same content as on the English one, just more Russia oriented.
• CMS World — this is not exactly a blog, but more a directory of CMS (Content Management Systems) where you can compare different CMS side-by-side.

I have plans to open more blogs and sites, but I am inclined to wait a little bit, and let the ones I already have grow, and gain some ground. It is so easy to come up with the things to blog on, once you get started.

I count on Google Adsense as the main source of income. So far I got only about 20 USD from AdSense from all my blogs, which is a little disappointing. Perhaps, I will try some other affiliate programs as time goes by and my traffic increases. Traffic is my greatest concern these days.

Any ideas, recommendation or questions are more than welcomed! Stay in tune for updates.

Nowadays it is not as easy to find great blogs as it seems. There are millions of blogs out there, but many are just not worth any attention. Browsing Networthless blog I found a link to this really unique photo blog, Shorpy.com. Here how the authors describes their photo blog:

Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century.

If you have some 100-year-old photos you can submit them to the collection as well.

Idea is great! Implementation is very good too. Even glossy RSS buttons and ads of digital cameras do no harm. This photo blog is definitely very special!

I do not like the whole idea of network marketing, because once someone gets into it his friends turn into prospect clients, and he builds a relationship with others not because one is interested in them, but because he wants others to buy something from him.

It seems like something similar is going on in the blogosphere these days. Read the rest of this entry »

Many bloggers use Google Blogger service to create blogs. It is fast, easy-to-use and free. But I wonder if Blogger can be used to create a long-term, possibly money earning blog. To find this out I am starting a series of polls, that should shed light on this matter. All results will be publicly available.

I’ll really appreciate a link to this poll from your blogs.

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Please, feel free to comment on your answer.

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You may have heard of John Chow’s Make Money Online blog. If not, first thing you probably thought of after reading its name is “oh, another blog about making money online”… Well John’s blog indeed has some great posts about making money online, but there is a whole bunch of other things too. John is blogging about technology, cars… fine dining, things all men like. Whats so special about these topics? There must be something, otherwise John would not have over 4000 RSS subscribers. Read the rest of this entry »