Options for adding Advertising to a Blog

02/28/2014 4 Comments

Recently I was saying I want to do some redesign and cleanup on Comparative Geeks. A major reason why is that we are considering doing this sort of work is because we are thinking about taking our now year-old blog and making it more our own. Registering a real, paid domain. Adding advertising to make a little money from the blog – maybe enough to cover the domain cost? Or how about all the various media that we consume to talk about on the blog?

So I am going to consider some of the things we are going through in our consideration process, for moving towards making a little money with the blog. There are other, major considerations – such as, blogging consistently, and having content, and readers, and commenters. Building a community, and delivering consistently. I’d like to think we at least have the solid start to this. I talked about a lot of what we’ve done with community building recently as well.

So I have done some research, and it’s told me that I likely don’t have good answers for you. So instead, I have links and my thoughts, on adding advertising to a blog.

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Building a Blogging Community Through Social Media – With Examples

02/15/2014 6 Comments

Let’s face it, as much fun as it is to write, and to blog, and to think about the fact that your ideas are public, published, out there… you want readers too. Readers who enjoy what you write, or interact with what you write, or share what you write… or even better, all of the above.

Through the social aspects of blogging, how it works, and realizing we should do for other bloggers what we want done for us… the best followers you will have on a blog are likely going to be other bloggers. With a WordPress blog, for instance, it’s people with WordPress accounts who can “like” your post… who can follow your blog with a click of a button, and then read your posts in their WordPress reader. WordPress – like other blogging communities, like Tumblr – does a great job of letting you connect and share with other bloggers.

So last week I blogged about how I am considering some changes on Comparative Geeks and while informational and data changes like I proposed and discussed can do a bit to network better with other WordPress blogs, there are more channels out there we need to hit as well, and which have different sorts of purposes and users. Though also of course a lot of overlap! But let me look through the Social Media avenues we are using, or considering, to look at some folks I see doing this well, and how we might use it in the future.

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Blogging and Controlled Vocabulary

02/07/2014 1 Comment

So I am considering a blog redesign over on Comparative Geeks. I did a redesign on this blog, and changed the home page to be more like a website than a blog front-page. In the end, I think that makes this more like my portfolio or personal site than just a personal blog, or a re-purposed blog from school. Which to be fair, it was. So I went through each individual post, added the “more” function to most, moved my categories into tags, and added new categories.

Which was a lot of work, but it did what I wanted, which is changed the look and feel of this site. To be fair, I don’t think anyone actually uses it as I have it set up – I think mainly people read individual posts as shared from the WordPress reader or social media, but hey. Not like I’m putting up a ton of content here.

…Unlike Comparative Geeks. Where there are now over a year’s worth of 6-posts-a-week. And I’m thinking about similar sorts of changes, at least on the individual post levels: moving some categories to tags, and cleaning up the categories. We currently have 32 categories, and a number of them are things that more likely function as tags on other blogs – and that’s how people browsing through blogs might find us! What you define as these tags also carry over to other social media sites, especially, I have found, Tumblr.

So let me explore a few of the challenges I see in store for Comparative Geeks, dealing with the tags and categories in particular – more to come on some of my other plans for Comparative Geeks! Read on for some good blogging food for thought.

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One Year Anniversary of Comparative Geeks – The Sunday (Tuesday) Reblog

01/21/2014 Leave a comment

I posted this yesterday over on Comparative Geeks. Today would be the to-the-day anniversary for us starting our weekly schedule of posting. I ask below for more ideas for posts, for input from my community – and I would happily accept input here as well! Let me know what you would like to read from my blog!

Last year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Holly and I started a blog. We had been toying with a few different ideas, thinking of what niches we saw and conversations lacking. And we thought a lot about how we talked about things, and what we wanted to say. And Comparative Geeks was born from that – the thought that we would talk about Geeky things, and not alone or by themselves, but in comparison to each other, or to other aspects of life.

I’d like to think that we’ve accomplished that, and written a blog at least a little different from what else is out there. For instance, we’re not a news blog – there are other blogs out there doing a much better job of giving you day-of updates on what’s going on in the world of geek. We tend to speculate a bit more instead. Nor are we a review site – there are other blogs out there doing episode-by-episode show reviews, issue-by-issue comic reviews, and more detailed sorts of movie reviews.

Instead, we’ve taken our comparative approach – things like our LitFlix, which compare the book or comic to the movie based on this source material. Or like our Science Fiction and Religion posts, which consider a topic often touched in science fiction but which is treated in interesting ways whenever it shows up. And we have now, for a year, successfully kept up with our publishing plan – six posts a week, three each. Granted, not always on the days we plan on, but we got you some content!

And that leads to what has been great about this blog: you. The readers. While we had enough to say that we likely would and could have kept going on our own, you make it all the more worth it. While we may not reply to comments in a timely fashion, know that each one makes us happy. When you take the time to read our posts, thoughtfully consider them, and add to the conversation? That’s where this is worth it.

So that’s what I wanted to do for a one-year anniversary post: ask for input from you, the readers, on what you would like us to write about in the days, weeks, and months to come. Help us make another great year for Comparative Geeks!

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10 Great Things From Blogging This Year

12/31/2013 Leave a comment

It was nearly a year ago that my wife and I planned and began to build our blog, still going strong today. We’ve kept with 6 posts a week, 3 each, with the occasional guest post. We’ve used a variety of post types, like I learned about in my class on blogging – though perhaps not as many as we could.

We do a great deal of reviews, talking through the things in our life we’re experiencing – mostly the geeky things. But then, what might one expect from a blog called Comparative Geeks?

From a blogging perspective, we’ve seen some great results, though there’s more that could happen. We are happy with where we are at, not planning on this as a form of income, or necessarily caring about being a big thing. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not nice to get noticed, seen, read, shared, and the community-forming we’ve seen this year has been great. So let me walk you through ten great moments for Comparative Geeks this year!

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