The Monday Question: Advertise!

Blogging is a very enjoyable activity which still gives me a lot of joy since I started doing it. I love the interaction with others, discussing movies, giving advice or helping others out. It’s the main reason I keep doing doing it.

Over the years I regularly have had requests about placing ads on my blog and I usually declined them, because I felt they didn’t add much or were things which I didn’t feel were a match to what I write about. But recently I decided to say yes for once, just to experience that side of blogging, one I hadn’t thought about at all. It was a non obtrusive one on an older article, so the impact of it wouldn’t be too big. I must admit that I was surprised by the ease of it all and the money I earned with it was used to move my site to a self hosted server.

It did make me think about monetizing a blog. Is it a good or a bad thing? What would I do and what wouldn’t I? There are so many possibilities, from becoming an affiliate of a big site like Amazon to placing non intrusive links to a specific site or having a company create a guest post for you. So I thought I’d ask you the question:

What are your feelings on adding advertisements to your blog?

The Monday Question: Blogroll!

Recently one of the bloggers I follow decided to stop writing his weekly link post. The reason he did so was because he noticed there weren’t that many people actually clicking on the articles he was suggesting. He also mentioned another fixture of the blogging community: The blogroll. He did away with that as well for the same reason.

This made me check out the stats on my own blogroll and he had a point. Although it’s a nice thing to have to see which blogs someone likes, people are not really reading and clicking on them. It made me decide to do away with the blogroll as well as I hadn’t maintained it (the links on it were partly outdated anyway) and looking at the statistics I noticed it wasn’t a page which was visited much. So what would I suggest if you are looking for other interesting blogs to read? I suggest to click on to the sites of the other commenters (as I have awesome readers!) or check out the various movie site spotlights I’ve done in the past.

So this week’s question:

Do you have a blogroll and do you think they are useful?

The Monday Question: Improve!

Another Monday, another question. This time it’s not really about the movies, but the way we as bloggers talk about it on our blogs. I’ve been doing this for over two years and still enjoy it a lot. I love seeing new comments and discovering new blogs. When it comes to my own blog I’m always looking for ways to improve it and I’m never completely statisfied, always trying to think of new content and other things I could make better.

This week’s question:
If you had all the time in the world, what would you change to your blog to improve it? Continue reading

Blogging tips: Statistics

how to start a blog, writing a blog

Whether or not you’ll admit it, every blogger occasionally heads over to the statistics page of their blog to see the total views it has received or how many visits you’ve had the day before. It can be enjoyable to see those numbers, but they can also be a source to improving your blog, which might result in even more page views. Do you know which articles get the most visits or what people have searched on to find your blog? In this installment of blogging tips let’s take a look at the various statistics which WordPress provides and how you can use these to your advantage. Continue reading

Blogging tips to increase traffic and comments

how to increase blog traffic comment tips
There are a lot of people who start blogging who think that “if you build it they will come” (like in the movie Field of Dreams). So you start writing about whichever subject you like and start looking at your statistics and….nothing (or not much), which can be very frustrating. Why aren’t people reading what you are writing? Why don’t they leave comments? The reality is that there are a lot of blogs out there and getting noticed or getting people to follow you takes time and effort. Since I’ve been blogging for a while I thought it would be a good idea to write down some useful tips to increase the number of people who want to read what you write. Continue reading

The Moviesite Spotlight: Today I watched a movie


Welcome to a new edition of the Moviesite Spotlight. For those who wonder what this is:

Every week I read a lot of great movie related blogs and I thought it was time to give the ones I visit regularly a chance to shine in the spotlight, by interviewing its writers.

This week’s interview is with Today I watched a movie. Now this is one with a very unique scoring system which I think is refreshing. Continue reading