About Pro-Blogger.com and Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse is the founder of www.Problogger.net. He is a full time Blogger making a living from the new and dynamic medium from blogs like Digital Photography School.

Back in 2002 he stumbled upon an article about ‘Blogging’. He didn’t know it at that time but that moment changed his life. Since then he has become a full time blogger and have blogged on over 20 blogs and co-founded the b5media blog network.

Problogger.com has more then 41000 readers through RSS subscription. Daren managed to get his blog in the first rank from ten millions blogs. Daren Rowse is world’s richest blogger (though he is not listed in Forbes). Daren shows him self as a Web Publisher in some of the Networking sites like linkedin. His Profile states:-

Current:

• Co-Founder and VP Training at b5media.com
• Co-founder at Sixfigureblogging.com
• Owner at LivingRoom Blog Network (Sole Proprietorship)
  

Daren is all over the Blogspere and makes income from every next thing. He makes money easily then a Golf players. Daren bought his domain with proglobber.net and he also bought poblogger.com from eBay when the site was on for selling. Though has kept his default url as problogger.net and not problogger.com.

There is a post on Xwep.com about Mistakes in Design: Problogger.net which states the drawback of his blog interface. Make sure you go through the article as it is very nicely kept. Thought I am keeping his conclusion on this site.

“Conclusions

So what was achieved with this new layout, and the new design? Each section has a small title explaining what’s in it, but has less focus than the section itself. If this was the intention, it was well-achieved, but in terms of usability, it’s better to know what you’re looking at before you start reading it.

In three column designs, people instantly assume that the largest column is the most relevant one. Since this is the case, then that means that this design emphasizes more on the past articles than on the recent ones. If it were up to me, I would flip the left and middle column’s content around.

By sending the categories, the small picture and story, and the resource links to the bottom, the site becomes less friendly to newcomers, but easier for returning visitors to access the latest information, rather than having to see the information they had already seen in their first visit once again. This is both a positive, and negative, aspect of the new design.

In terms of whitespace, some sections are incredibly well divided in terms of space and content, like the right column and the footer. Unfortunately, the areas with the most content suffer a lot from this problem. The most important part of a blog is it’s content, period. And in terms of content, Problogger.net is very well served, but, with this new design, the links to the most recent, or featured, content are the least attractive parts of the site to look at.

In conclusion, the site is a bit easier to navigate than the previous one. Returning visitors will be able to quickly read the titles and catch up on unread articles, but newcomers will probably feel intimidated by the amount of information that is crammed up in the same place. It’s not a design that you can’t get used to, but it is a design that takes a while of getting used to, and for new visitors, and even returning ones, that is bad.”

I also find one of the good articles on about.com which is written by Wendy Boswell. In the article I was able to find his mission about the site.

What is ProBlogger’s mission?

ProBlogger is about helping bloggers to earn money from their blogs. I have learned a lot over the past three years about blogging and making money online and ProBlogger.net is a place where I talk about the lessons learned and how not to make the same mistakes I did in the early years.

What are some tips for newbies who would like to blog as a full-time gig?

• Don’t expect overnight success. Blogging has great earning capacity – but it takes a lot of time and energy and a long term vision.
• Pick a niche topic to blog about. General multi-topic blogs are difficult to earn a living from. Pick a smaller niche topic and become THE “go-to” blogger on the topic.
• Experiment with different ad and affiliate options. Adsense doesn’t work on every blog topic but that doesn’t mean you can’t earn an income online. In addition to trying new ad systems try new positions and designs for your ads also – and track your results so that you can tweak your blog for optimal results.
• Work on SEO (search engine optimization) – I’ve found traffic from search engines can be better better paying than regular readers. Ideally you want a good mix of both loyal readers and SE traffic.
• Diversify. Don’t put all your eggs in one blogging basket. Start multiple blogs on a variety of topics and domains, add a variety of income streams to your blogs (consider an e-book perhaps?) and have a back up plan of non-blogging work in case something terrible like disappearing from the SE’s happens.
  

Problogger.net Statistics.

Google Page Rank – 6

Alexa Rank – 3,217

Backlinks from Google – 23,200

Backlinks from Yahoo – 619,000

Backlinks from MSN – 0

Results from AltaVista – 132,000

Results from All the Web – 130,000