Would you pay $5000 for a world class boot camp in blogging?
I was reading through the Copy Blogger (which I recommend, it is an excellent read) and I stumbled on the Elite Retreat. The was a warning about it being for serious bloggers.
They ain’t kiddin’
I was interested at first but when I got to the price my jaw dropped. $4995 is the price for the retreat. But the speakers are world class so I am more than sure it would be worth it.
Alas; it is just not meant to be. This year.
But if you are serious, and I mean, REALLY serious, check out this blog. They have 28 spots left.
While sifting through countless blog postings, I stumbled upon this posting from The Simple Dollar.
This gist of the post is he decided to remove all Google Adsense ads from his site, even thought it was making him a lot of money.
As I sane person, I needed to read further because his website ranks high on Alexa, garners lots of interest, and has a lot of clout and respect. Why would someone turn away from hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month in website revenue?
His reason? So simple it hurts.
Google doesn’t let you control who places ads on your site. He didn’t want to be associated with some of the companies that were bidding to be placed on his website. Being a financial website, most of the ads were from less-than-reputable sources, and he wants to continue to be known as a reliable source for information.
He wins the gold star for standing up to his belief and proves a good point in the process.
No matter what your reason for blogging, whether it is for profit or for information, stick to your original believe.
He stood up for his original belief.
This week I will be reviewing Prosense. Prosense was designed jointly by Maki from Dosh Dosh and Dan over at the Wrong Advices. This blog was originally on this theme until I decided I wanted something a little more professional. I still run Prosense on one of my other blogs. Prosense accomplishes what its designers intended. It is a straight forward theme with decent ad blending while allowing the maximum amount of space to be dedicated to the ads. Judging by the name, you could guess that it is specifically geared toward Google AdSense ads, which as you know, may or may not be your preferable choice of monetizing. It has nice steamlined look, and a slick RSS feed icon in the top right to encourage subscribtion. It comes in simple gray and blue color schemes, but if you have a little knowledge of coding, you could easy change the scheme to your personal preference. Prosense is free, and can be downloaded directly from Dosh Dosh or the Wrong Advices.
Personally, The theme didn’t really cut it for me on THIS blog. That is not to say it doesn’t work for certain content sites and blogs. Everytime I see a blog using Prosense now, I immediately think that the only purpose of the blog is to make money online, and nothing else. This is partially due to how popular the theme became with the ‘blog-in-a-can’ bloggers who set up 300 content blogs hoping to luck out when people accidentally click on an AdSense ad. The coding is clean enough, and if you take time to modify it to you liking, you can customize this theme to look less like a generic blog site.
I still use Prosense on one of my picture oriented blogs, mainly because it does a nice job of ad blending and providing maximum amount of surface space.
Prosense has become a product of its own success. Every half-wit and wannabe blogger can now easily set up a blog with the soul purpose of making a dollar. Prosense helped make this happen. These blogs now clutter the internet, but that really isn’t really the fault of the designers. I am sure there are many fine blogs that use modified versions of this theme, I just haven’t seen them yet.
