On a conservative basis, I’d say that monetization from my blogging alone amounts to somewhere in the mid to higher 4 figure range per month.

Which is a pittance compared to some of the “Super Bloggers” out there.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how much the top bloggers make, especially in the light of Business Week’s “Bloggers Bring In The Big Bucks” story.

Although I know Darren Rowse and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker and visit Mario Lavandeira’s PerezHilton and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable, the names on the list were alien to me.

It’s a testament that blogging is an open field and you pick your niche and can do well with it.

But if you’re clued in to the power of blogging, you’d realize that the payoff from blogging comes outside of blogging.

If you listened in to the episode of the Net Income radio show where Shoemoney had Matt Mullenweg, part of the team which developed the WordPress blogging platform, the real money comes as a result of having blogged, rather than because of blogging.

If you missed that episode of Net Income, you can check it out:

As an example, Darren Rowse is a founder of the B5Media blog network, which receive venture funding earlier this year and Shoemoney’s income also comes from promoting CPA offers and developing AuctionAds with partner-in-crime Dave Dellanave AKA Dillsmack. AuctionAds was recently acquired by Media Whiz for an undisclosed sum.

Personally, blogging is a platform to network and form joint ventures, it’s given me the opportunity to “meet up” with several influential super affiliates and information marketers and importantly, clients. Meeting up at events in a face-to-face context is just a way of cementing the relationship.

If you want to exploit blogging to its fullest potential, you need to look at it as more than just a website to pimp adsense or affiliate offers, it’s value as a branding platform is infinitely greater.

I’ve always enjoyed the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, and his works are still enjoyed nearly a century later. It’s likely they’ll continue to be enjoyed for generations to come. All accomplished with a paintbrush and paint.

Similarly, a blog is just that, a tool, just like Monet’s humble paintbrush.

In the hands of an individual with extraordinary vision, you can do much more than what you thought was possible.

David Dalka mentions that during SOBCon upcoming changes to the popular social networking site include:

• A rebranding (to reflect it’s acquistion by Yahoo!)
• Some MyBlogLog 2.0 upgrades – site redesign and a Web2.0-ish widget upgrade
• Anti-social spam features like avatar moderation and masking type features

Since Google rules the roost at the moment on the search engine front, there’s plenty of opportunity for Yahoo! and Microsoft to capture mindshare and market share on the non-search engine traffic fronts.

There’s opportunity to look at the hubs of highly targeted traffic clustered around social sites and forums.

So far we haven’t heard not many high profile forums being acquired have been reported in the mass media, even though transaction values for these deals can range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

Selective media focus? Perhaps. But as social traffic and social media continue to gain prominence, Yahoo! initiatives to rebrand and reinvent itself will be crucial.

It could be an interesting inflexion point for Yahoo!

Witness:

Whether you choose to see Yahoo! Auctions as ‘retiring’ or closing, it is indicative that Yahoo! is:

• Exiting the auction space, bowing down to eBay
• Channelling its resources into it’s Yahoo! Shopping channel

What US internet marketers may not realize that at least in Singapore, there are as many or possibly transactions done on Yahoo! Auctions Singapore compared to eBay Singapore.

How does that affect your business model if you’re using auctions as a distribution channel?

Either way, it doesn’t pay for the Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft behemoths to lay their eggs in every basket. As you heard and will continue to hear, the mantra is “focus, focus, focus” even if you’re a multi-billion dollar company.

Taking aim at an area of speciality, whether natural search, social traffic or another web 2.0 channel would be the way to go.

See: Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins SOBCon blog links

To date MyBlogLog clocks in at about 50,000 users, fairly impressive considering the fact that it launched in Mar 2005. And with the recent acquisition by Yahoo! it looks set to grow from strength-to-strength (Especially with a 2% daily growth rate).

From my personal observation, MyBlogLog users tend to be fairly active, especially since the service combines the best features of blogging and social community sites.

As Scott observes, the MyBlogLog widget (typically displayed in the right sidebar of most blogs) certainly proved to be its secret weapon.With blogs already being very social-oriented, the widget only helped accelerate the pace of the service’s “virality”.

It’ll be interesting to see where MyBlogLog fits into Yahoo! strategy.

Niching themselves in the blog community space certainly makes sense for MyBlogLog, especially against a behemoth like Google.

Though Google owns Blogger and runs it’s Blog Search service, it doesn’t have a strong suite of blogging-specific analytics or value-added suite yet.

Here’s where Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live search services can stake out and lay their stakes on new areas.

With Google already claiming mindshare for text and graphic-related search, the other search engines can focus on other areas like Yahoo! Podcasts and Microsoft’s Miss Dewey search engine.

For more details:

• Lee’s interview with Scott Rafer

While not as extreme as banning blog comments altogether, it can severely reduce the number of comments you receive in your posts.

Let’s face it, we already deal with a multitude of usernames and passwords, and blogs are designed to be an easy communication platform to set up, publish to and for readers to access.

By adding additional layers of registration, and requiring users to login each time they’d like to comment, you’re increasing the frustration level for your users, even if they are able to remember their passwords 99% of the time.

If spam comments are an issue, use a spam-administration plugins like akismet or spam karma.
Enable comment moderation if you have to.

Sure I get more than my fair share of junk comments.

I also get comments (some from well meaning folk) which have no value and which would destroy that 5 to 10 seconds of your time if you read it. So I delete those.

It takes some time, but I’m not about to shortchange you by blanket approving every single comment that comes in.

If the blogger isn’t out to protect his or her readers interest, who is?

They say in the service industry, “the customer comes first”.

As a blogger, my mantra has always been, “the reader comes first”.

Reward your readers, and they will reward you with their loyalty.

• SEO/SEM

TropicalSEO gives you the lowdown on linkbuilding services and a couple of recommendations. Is TrustRank the new PageRank? Read his post and see.

Check out:
–> The Very Best Link Baiting Services

• Blogging

Hit a plateau in your blogging efforts?

Yaro Starak has analyzed ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s path to blogdom and provide some insight that blogging can be a pathway to greater things.

Check out:
–> The Advantages Top Bloggers Have That You Don’t

• Affiliate Marketing

Super Affiliate Ros Gardner bumps her adsense earnings up 5 times and shows the changes she made to achieve that. And yes, you get to see the social proof too.
Check out:
–> Adsense Earnings Up by 512% in December

• Social Traffic

Michael Gray AKA Graywolf’s embarked on a campaign to hit the top 50 communities on MyBlogLog. Will it bring more traffic? Not according to Stefan Juhl.

Bring Michael one step closer to his goal by joining the GrayWolf community.
While you’re there, you might want to join my Andrew Wee MBL profile if you haven’t done so already.

Check out the original post at:
–> MyBlogLog Shameless Whore

w.bloggar is a desktop-based blog editor which supports an impressive list of blogging platforms including the following:

Blog Services

• Blogger
• MSN Spaces
• TypePad
• BigBlogTool
• Blogalia
• TheBlog
• Blog-City
• EraBlog.NET
• Upsaid
• UBlog
• SquareSpace
• BlogWare
• DearDiary.Net

Blog Tools

• MovableType
• Nucleus
• b2
• WordPress
• b2 evolution
• Blog:CMS
• .Text
• BlogWorks XML
• Drupal
• LiveJournal
• pMachine
• Xoops
• E-Xoops
• PostNuke
• blojsom
• Roller Weblogger
• Domino
• YACS
• Xaraya

There’s a definite attraction to having a desktop-based blog editor (especially in the light of the Taiwan earthquake).

Even if you will eventually need to paste the post content into your blog’s administration panel because of other plugins you need to activate, w.bloggar gives you the flexibility to pre-write blog posts and paste them.

Understandably, you could write the raw HTML in a text file. Although I feel this detracts from the blogging process.

I think my buddy Ryan, who’s fooling around with the performancing plugin and experimenting over at “This Is A Test” will find this useful.

Check out Marcelo Cabrals w.bloggar at:

–> http://wbloggar.com/