I like to be engaged.

These are two of the main things I am looking for when I read blogs in the Internet.

There are millions of blogs on the Internet, literally.  A large number of those, though, are sort of on autopilot – posts show up, but beyond that, there really is nothing much more.

To me, a blog should be interactive.  You post an article.  If you have a big enough reader base, some of your readers will respond by posting a comment with their thoughts and opinions on the subject that you wrote about.  Should that be the end of things?  In my opinion, no, it should not.  As a blogger, you really should respond to those who took time to read your article and make a comment.  Engage the person, turn it into a conversation instead of just a one off comment.  When you do this, what happens is that your blog becomes more than just a one-way information channel.  It becomes a community.  It becomes more interesting.  People come back to see what has been said, and join in.

Blogging means engaging your readers!

Let’s face it, if you took the time to put up a blog, and to write articles there from time to time, you want people to read it.  I mean, why write it all down if nobody is going to even visit or read what you write.  Right?  So, if you want to become more widely read, to be more interesting, you really should engage your readers!  Engaging your readers is what can take you up to the next level and bring more and more people to read what you have to say.

Sometimes I find a new blog that interests me.  I find an article or two that I can really identify with, and I leave a comment there.  After a few hours, I come back and see if the writer responded to what I had to say.  Nothing.  I come back the next day, still nothing.  If there is nothing there after a few days, I forget about it and move on.  It is likely that I won’t be visiting the blog again.  That is unfortunate.  I lost a potential source of information and interaction, and the writer lost a potential new reader.  In addition, by engaging with me, the writer could have picked up on new ideas for future writings on his site.

If you love blogging, interact with those who love you!

Recently, I found a blog from a writer who was from Manila.  He wrote about how he had moved to Davao City (where I live) many years ago, and had come to love the City.  It was my first time to visit his site, and I left a comment.  Within the same day, he replied to me.  He said he knew me through word of mouth, and he was so happy that I had visited his site.  He wanted to meet me.  I replied to him, and said that we should meet up for a cup of coffee.  That was a cuople of weeks ago, and so far he has not responded to me.  Well, he said he wanted to get together, and I responded in the positive.  Does he really want to get together?  I suppose not, because he didn’t even take the initiative to respond and set something up.  Oh well…

I find that these kinds of encounters when you are basically ignored by the writer to be frustrating.  If you don’t care to engage with your readers, why have a blog at all?  I mean, at the minimum, just turn off the comments, because you obviously are not even reading them anyway.

If you want to take your blog up a level, create interest, and build a community, you really should engage your readers.  Try it- you will find that it makes a world of difference!

This might sound too good to be true, but believe me, it is absolutely true, and I am going to show you how you can do it.  One of the first steps is that you really need to stop treating your online activities as a hobby, and treat it as a business.  When you start devoting the time to your online activities like you would do it were a business, that is when you are going to start gaining popularity, and when you gain popularity, that is when you can leverage that popularity to make more money.

How?  It’s not really that hard, to be honest.

My Live in the Philippines Web Magazine

My most popular website is a site called “Live in the Philippines, the Web Magazine for Expats in the Philippines, and those who want to join them.”  The nickname that I call that site is “LiP,” which you will see references to later in this article.  I started this website as a blog back in 2006.  I was not too serious about it at first, only just posted articles about once per month or so.  After 6 months or so, I decided to make it the place where I spent a lot of my online efforts.  After just a few months, the site started building a following, and I asked my wife to join me as a second author on the site.  I felt that sharing her opinion would give a nice counter-balance to what I was saying.  While it was a little hard to get my wife, Feyma, to write regularly, with some constant pushing, I got some regular articles out of her.  A month or so later, I saw that this was working pretty nicely, and I invited a few others to join as authors.  The site began expanding in orders of magnitude, and soon I had a whole stable of writers.

A month or so ago, a friend of mine wrote me an e-mail and asked a question about that site.  Here is what he said:

BTW, not that I’m starting a multi-writers blog, but was there a way to transfer the scheme with ad blocks for individual authors on their created pages, or have you changed that scheme.

Since you don’t know the context of our earlier conversation, let me explain what he was asking.  He wanted to know how I shared the money that the site earned with other writers.

The rest of this article will consist of the response that I sent to my friend, slightly edited to make more sense for readers who were not in on the earlier conversation.

OK… your question about multi-author blogs and revenue sharing…

This is very complicated, and my answer is only my experience.  There are lots of ways to go about this.  None are perfect, for sure, some are better than others.

Let’s look at a few ways to do it:

1.  If you have one blog with multi-authors, it is not easy to assign ad blocks by author.  I know of no way to do it.  There probably are ways, I just don’t know of any.

2.  There are several plugins out there (sorry, I don’t know the names, as I don’t use any, but I do know they exist).  These plugins will assign AdSense earnings to each author depending on what factors you consider.  I believe you can set up something like “if John gets 10% of the pageviews, give him 10% of the ad impressions” or something.  No, they will not be impressions only on his articles, but rather 10% of the ad views on the site.  This may or may not be fair, depending on how you look at it.

3.  You could just split up the earnings based on the number of writers.  You could use one adsense account and then, let’s say you have 10 writers… you keep 20% of the ad earnings for yourself (as the publisher) and give everybody else 8% each.  This would all be manual.

In short, it’s up to you to decide how you do it, and how much everybody gets.

In the beginning of making LiP a multi-author site, I used WP-MU (WordPress Multi-User) to set up basically a different blog for each author.  For those who had AdSense accounts, I put their own AdSense on their own site.  For the AdSense rules of 3 ads per page… they got 2 of the ads, and I got one, for letting them participate.

Later, I decided not to give the writers any AdSense money at all.  I find that is the best solution, personally.

Here is the thing…  most of the good writers are not doing it for the money.  They do it for a couple other reasons:

1. Make themselves more well known, which in turn allows them to make more money on their own sites.
2. A lot of the guys do it for the love of the writing only.

What I do, though, is that every person who writes gets to put his blog on the Blogroll, and also, if he has a business that lends itself to the site, he gets an ad on the site for his business.
If you ever decide to set up any kind of multi-author blog, let me tell you… it is a lot of work!  It’s really nothing like having a blog of your own.  You are less of a writer and more of a publisher.  Editing is a huge job.  Chasing people down to find out why they are not writing articles on schedule is a huge job.  I enjoy it a lot, but there are also some hassles.  Also, I believe that having a multi-author blog is a way to build a site that you (not YOU… anybody) could never build up by himself, or would be very difficult to do.  I don’t think that LiP could ever achieve the level that it has achieved if it were just me, or me and Feyma.  It’s rewarding, but it’s work too!

So, as you can see, because of the fact that I had gained a large audience from this site (and others that helped build my profile), a lot of people wanted to write on my site.  They were even willing to do it for free to help them gain some name recognition with my audience.  How they used that recognition then determined if some of my online following would also adopt them and pull people to their sites.

The thing is, if they wrote good articles on my site, readers would most certainly go and check out their sites.  On their site, they can certainly make money from my readers who followed them there.

So, while I pay the writer nothing, I have leveraged my popularity to get them to join me and write for me, and they can still earn money themselves by drawing readers to their site, and increasing the popularity of their own site.

So, as you can see, you can indeed leverage your own popularity to attract others to write content on your website!

I blame WordPress.

“Why WordPress,” you say?

Well, I blame WordPress because it has become like a treadmill that never stops.  First of all, you have a never ending parade of updates to the software.  As soon as you update to a new version and get all the kinks worked out, it seems like there is a new, critical security update that you have to do immediately!  If you don’t update on time, it’s like running around in public naked – you just don’t do that!

Here’s what happened today.  I had a couple of improvements that I wanted to make on one of my sites.  When I went to that site, I noticed that the Plugin panel on WordPress was telling me that two plugins were out of date.  Oops!  I better update those right away.  So, I went and downloaded the new releases on these plugins, and installed them.  What the….   I just checked my blog and the whole top half of my screen went black!  Hmm… turns out that one of the plugins didn’t work!  So, I reverted back to the old version, it worked fine.  That second upgrade that I did didn’t work either.  So, I eliminated that one.  I have dozens of blogs, so all of this piddling around took me half the day (or more).

The thing is, I am feeling like with WordPress, it is getting to the point that there are so many Admin tasks that need to be completed, that I rarely have time to produce the quality content that I want to share with my readers!  If I had one blog, maybe two it would not be a big deal, but I have more than that.  It is making me wonder what I should do.  Abandon some of my sites?  Find a new software to run on?

I have been playing with the idea of moving to Drupal.  Today I took the step of installing Drupal on one of my inactive domains, and playing with it.  It only took a few minutes when I realized that if I changed platforms, that meant that I had to re-learn the whole system again!  I had to create a lot of new templates.  Hmm… I have sites with thousands of posts on them, which means that I had to import all those posts into a new platform.  Importing thousands of posts usually doesn’t go as smoothly as it should.

Hmm… I don’t think I want to change platforms.  I also don’t think that WordPress is the right platform any longer.  Updating plugins and platform software doesn’t bring in any money.  However, if you don’t do the updates, your site will end up getting owned by somebody else who hacks in.  Either way, you haven’t written content that keeps your readers coming back.

For me, the call comes down to what direction to go in order to make the most money.  Problem is… right now I can’t figure out which direction will achieve that goal.

What do you think?

I am wondering, though, do you think that WordPress is still the way to go for a website or blog?  I have been thinking about this for several months now.  I have a couple of reasons for the question:

1. WordPress is the most popular blogging client.  No doubt.  That, though, can have positive and negative sides.  First, since it is so popular, it is the default target for people with malicious intentions.  For example, if somebody wants to hack a website, figuring out a vulnerability in WordPress is the best way to go.  With just one vulnerability, he can hack millions of sites, if he chooses to do so.
2. Because WordPress is a hacking target, that means that there are constant updates coming down the tunnel.  It seems like WordPress is getting new versions on at least a monthly basis these days.  For somebody like me, who has a ton of sites, this means that doing all the upgrades can be a time consuming job.

Because of these factors, I have been considering that perhaps it is time to move to another platform.  Yes, I do believe that WordPress is the best out there, but the considerations above make me wonder if it is the right way to go.

What do you think?  Another blog platform?  Maybe a CMS (Content Management System) site?

Let me know what you are using, I’d like to take a look and see what others have going!