The second best advice I can give to folks who are blogging to make money from it is to always look for ways of getting targeted traffic,  which is to say people who more likely than not are in the market for what you are selling.     If your product is strongly geared to, say,  women 18–49,  traffic from men is probably not going to help you much.     (Substitute any demographic,  it’s still true.   Random traffic is of very little value if you are trying to convert them to sales.)   One of the most common mistakes those who are trying to make money with their blogs make is chasing after  random traffic rather than focusing ever more tightly on attracting only visitors who are in the market for the product being sold. Raw traffic is useless.   Carefully targeted traffic is golden.   Your traffic and your conversion rate  (the percentage of visitors who make a purchase) are what govern your income if you are blogging for money.  (If your only income is from blog advertising,  you will be lucky to earn your hosting fees unless you match really well for a huge high paying keyword like, for instance mesothelioma.    The competition for such a high paying keyword is huge and your site would have to be a hell of an information resource to match well for it.

Creating blogs to make money can be a fun hobby,  though it is actually a great deal more difficult to do than you might tend to believe.      But if you are willing to learn what to do and keep doing it,  you can with multiple blogs hope to earn something approaching a living.    But the first thing you need to remember is that it is NOT in any way whatsoever an “easy” way to do so.

My friends are people who are interesting to me,  either because of the quality of their conversation and/or because we share experiences or interests– such as in certain hobbies, professions,  lines of thought or endeavor, etc.     Then there are acquaintances whom I may share some interests with and who may some day become friends or may some day drop out of my acquaintanceship.    That’s just life.  ,A conversation with a couple of friends about Facebook advertising brought home to me not how targeted the ads on Facebook are  (duh,  I knew that) but how hit or miss that targeting is to an advertiser.   I do sometimes write tips and advice for bloggers and about using social networking to promote a blog.    But honestly,  I am so not in the market for any of the get rich quick schemes targeted at uniformed new bloggers who all paid to advertise to me on Facebook today.     I remember once being very taken by an ad for a cruise line,  advertising a luxury voyage to some exotic destination (which I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford to visit).    I clicked the ad several times and spent hours pouring over info for an exotic trip I was never really in the market for.

I’m reminded again of what Philadelphia department store magnate John Wannamaker famously said about advertising.   “…half of it is wasted.   The only trouble is we don’t know which half.”

So my apologies for neglecting you while my pseudonym has been having a good time and keeping me away from the computer  :)   One of the most difficult things to do well in writing is to change the subject and seamlessly blend three discrete topics in three discrete paragraphs into a single flowing blog post that grabs and engages your readers and shares a little bit of useful information,  a bit of good humor and perhaps causes some readers to think a new thought or two.      I’ve come to realize that the three hundered word three-fer is a rather distinct art form.      And I honestly feel guilty on a day like today,  where I will top out right around 350 words,   without having said much of anything at all other than I’ve been busy under another name.    I find it so strange when I hear all of these people talk about using only one name ever online.   And I have to think that some parts of their lives must be inescapably dull if they share every bit of it with all of their Facebook friends.

Any time there are suddenly ten or more items in my stream,  all posted by the same logo and none of them earth-shatteringly interesting to me,  my first step is always to adjust my settings,  because this is definitely not what I want in my stream.    If it was a friend who posted all of this garbage in my stream,  I change my subscription settings.   I maybe subscribe to only important updates and unsubscribe from all the different kinds of updates.    And if it’s a page that spammed my stream,  I immediately Unlike the page to prevent further spamming.    In a way I (almost) feel sorry for the hapless page owner.   They find it hard to find time to update the page at all,   then finally they go in and post ten updates and boom ten people immediately unlike their page.     Now that Facebook has fully integrated the Buffer application into the post screen for both personal and business pages on Facebook,  there is absolutely no excuse for spamming your followers.   Set your buffer to update your page not too frequently and try hard to always keep it filled up with good an relevant content.   If you are trying to draw and interact with an educated and sophisticated audience,  you absolutely can not afford to come across like a spammer.

It appears that Empire Avenue is tinkering with the algorithms for the different networks.   I notice that my Facebook score has been going up, up, up every day while my WordPress.com score goes down every day.   It seems to me that my networking on these two sites has not changed,  which is why I suspect (as several other players have recently observed) the scoring is undergoing some changes.   This may necessitate more re-writing to Walking Down The Avenue than I had anticipated,  although it is frankly too soon to know what changes might be necessitated in the book,  beyond simply mentioning them.   Also as of now I am assuming this is simply a temporary Facebook glitch that will be fixed fairly soon.   If the problem becomes wide spread and people stop using Facebook,  this could prove to be a significant social media turning point.  (Though I suspect the problem will resolve itself shortly.)

What about you?   Have you encountered the missing posts on Facebook user pages problem?  Do you expect it will be quickly resolved?     Have you noticed changes in the Empire Avenue scoring of different networks?   Has it changed the way you network?    Please leave a comment and let us know.

I also today find myself wanting to tell an acquaintance that he comes across so salesy that I these days am making almost every effort to avoid hearing from him.   Lately this guy seems to send me an instant message every day or so.    I never reply to these IM’s anymore,   and I have already unsubscribed from all of his updates.   We were introduced by someone who is a good bit further along the road from acquaintance to friend in my own personal account books and I really don’t want to un-friend  (because it would likely be noticed and might spark hurt feelings and public sentiments).     Some days,  I wish I weren’t so thoroughly Southern and would just tell the guy to leave me alone.   /sighs   I actually know that I will not ever tell off my salesy acquaintance,  or even admit to him that I find his IM’s annoying.   I know that being gracious with socially inept people is one of the duties of those who would claim to have decent manners.    And sometimes,   putting up with a boor is simply one’s duty.

While I do have an account on foursquare,  I don’t have a cell phone so I rarely use that account.   And I would never post my own foursquare check-ins to my Facebook page,  because I know that most of my Facebook audience would consider it spam,  more or less.    I pay a lot of attention to my page most of the time.   I always delete game notices,  as well as most anything that strikes me as unduly controversial or likely to be offensive.   I try very hard to share content the is both (at times) visually and verbally interesting.

I want to be clear that by and large I really love it when my Facebook friends post to my wall.   A note to say hello,  or catch up on news or just to leave a joke….all of these get an A+ from me.   Leaving a funny picture or a non-spammy link to an interesting article.   That’s great.     But your foursquare check-in???    Are you out of your freaking mind???

I feel as though I exercised great restraint.   I did not un-friend nor block the guy who posted his foursquare check-in to my Facebook page.     I did unsubscribe from almost all of his updates.    And if he ever does it again I will block the mofo already.*    I was chatting with a friend yesterday about how I was the first one to reach Empire Avenue’s block limit.    (I block users on the Avenue whom I definitely do not wish to invest in nor interact with;  for me it’s all about keeping my streams free of things that make angry and very irritated.)   My Facebook page is for me to share stuff with my friends.   And if you think spamming your foursquare check-ins to my page is acceptable,   be assured you are not now nor will you ever  be a friend of mine.

/flame      We now return you to your regular blog content.

*As popular sex columnist Dan Savage would probably advise.

In a weird way I AM working on the new mission book today.  Although what I am actually doing is not writing the book but talking to a friend about how she uses missions.   She’s giving me some fantastic insights and great information that I will certainly rely on in writing the book.  Part of me is certain this is just good old fashioned procrastination,  yet another part of me is even more certain that the book has not jelled in my mind yet and that I still need to talk more and learn more before I can write it.      And I still think I will be able to make my July 1st deadline.

I know that later this week I absolutely must break open a manuscript and start writing.   And that makes me just a tiny bit nervous.   Though I am in some ways very much looking forward to having written again,  I don’t much want to write.   (And yes,  I know how utterly crazy that sounds.)   Honestly,   I feel a bit guilty about cranking out yet another blog posts about writer’s angst.  So to give this post just a bit of another focus,   I invite you to comment with any questions or observations you have about Empire Avenue missions.    Missions can be great for achieving a number of different objectives.   And the more eaves you can devote to missions the more things you can get your social media contacts to do.    I also will try to make clear some of the many things that missions don’t work well for,   in hopes of saving players’ time and eaves from being spent on strategies that have little or no chance of success.

So how about it?    Do you have any questions about Empire Avenue missions?    Have you picked up any eaves by participating in missions?    Have you offered any missions?   How did they go?    Please leave a comment with your answers to any or all of these questions.   And be sure to look for Libdrone’s Guide To Empire Avenue missions coming this summer.

As it happens,  I myself have a great deal of faith and do believe that God puts his fingers on the scales of randomness every now and then to help me out a bit.    Yet I find the very randomness of life to be a big part of life’s appeal.   As a web publisher I have learned that you never, ever know which posts are going to take off.    Sometimes a short little something that you dash off in 20 borrowed minutes will get Stumbled and shared and become one of your all time most popular posts.   And other times a pillar post that you spent hours and hours slaving over will just quite, quite fail to get noticed at all.    That’s just the way it works.    There are of course things you can do to influence most any outcome.   (One of the first things new bloggers learn is that if they don’t promote their posts,  no one reads their posts;   those who don’t grasp this basic lesson fairly quickly usually burn out and quit blogging quite early on,  contributing to the extraordinary number of ghost sites on most every platform you can blog on.)

I found myself thinking today that most everything is a choice and most everything has a price.   Any choice you make consequentially gives you various options and there are an almost infinite number of solutions to the various sets of problems we call life that can be workable.    I’m coming to think that it is incredibly naive for anyone to think that they have an answer or a set of answers that would work well for everyone else.    Solving it for yourself is as much or more than most of us can do.   Trying to solve it for everyone else is hubris or folly.