This is an interview with Jason Menayan, the Director of Marketing at HubPages.

Q: For our readers that are unfamiliar with HubPages, why don’t you give them a brief description.

HubPages is a social content community where authors write about what they know and love, with over 900,000 topical articles (what we call “Hubs”) published by over 170,000 authors. The breadth of topics, vibrancy of our content base, and constant weeding out of substandard content ensures that great-quality content enjoys quick provisional ranking by the search engines, and a steady stream of revenue-generating traffic for years after publication. Our authors earn via Google AdSense and other advertising-/commission-based vehicles, with many earning hundreds of dollars a month on what they’ve already published, and more than a handful that are earning thousands every month. We’re the 57th largest site in terms of US traffic (according to Quantcast) and get more than 28 million visitors monthly. read more

SeededBuzz is a site that promises to help bloggers promote themselves.

Blog posts are promoted using what are called Seeds, which are summaries of a blog post that has been written on a topic that you think other bloggers may want to also write about. The idea is other bloggers read these Seeds, get inspired and write about the same topic, and link to the Seed owners post in doing so.

The blogger that has then written about the Seed can then submit their post on the same page as the Seed that inspired them, under what is called Buzz. The idea is both Seeds and Buzz attract visitors and link.

As a way of discovering new topics to write about this looks like a great idea. Seeds that have attracted Buzz and valuable backlinks should also find that their search engine rankings get a welcome boost. Quality links are never easy to come by.

Other community features I like include the ability to receive and offer Guest Posts, and the tagging of Seeds that inspired you for a later date. read more

One of the main issues professional bloggers face is the dilemma how to monetize their sites. There are plenty of different ad networks available and they all promise the golden pot at the foot of the rainbow. As part of a promotional campaign, I had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Noonan from RevResponse (1). I must honestly admit that the answers were not only satisfying but also stimulated me to look deeper at the offering of RevResponse. More even, I am embedding RevResponse on one of the main sites I manage.

Read the interview with Karen and give RevResponse a try if you are looking for a different way to earn money with your blog, this could be the dark horse you were looking for.

Hello Karen, thanks for your time. First of all, could you in short introduce RevResponse to our readers?

RevResponse.com is a performance based B2B specific affiliate network which gives related website publishers an exciting new way to generate revenue while providing their users with free content of real and tangible value. Simply put, web publishers and/or bloggers join RevResponse, we give them access to a library of hundreds of free business and technology related magazines, ebooks, downloads, webinars, etc. Then, RevResponse partners promote the offers in that library to their audience via blog post, newsletter inclusion, ad space, text link, etc. Lastly, we pay the partners when their users request the free resources.

What makes us different from typical ad networks that display links of questionable interest to readers, or affiliate networks that pay only when users part with their hard-earned money, RevResponse pays website publishers to present free content that’s of genuine value to site visitors.

One of the first things visitors to the RevResponse site notice is the $1.50-$2.50/lead. These numbers seem rather high, how is the conversion generally and also, it seems that some of these leads seem higher than leads from eg. Amazon. Where’s the catch? read more

Here, Thord interviews Tom Rusling at Text Link Ads.

Let’s start with you. Who are you and what do you do at Text Link Ads?

I am the Senior SEO Strategist. In that role, I offer resources to Text Link Ads clients that are looking to add a layer of strategy and/or on-page site optimization to their link building campaigns. TLA is by design a self serve network: clients can enter our system and find a huge array of links to choose from. However, often clients are looking for guidance around things like:

• Which keywords should I be targeting?
• How many links should I be buying?
• How fast should I be purchasing links, and how much should I vary my anchor text?

And of course, many clients feel like the links they have acquired with us are not working effectively for them. Often my most important role is to help clients identify technical problems on their site which are impeding the benefit of their link building. Such examples could be incorrect use of redirects, duplicate content issues in all its many vast and wonderful forms, lack of page targeting and keyword dilution, etc. They always come into the conversation blaming the links, but invariably the client and I are able to analyze the problem and identify the source of the problem is something on-page.

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We caught up with Lucien Burm, founder of Kimengi, which has created an interesting new tool for bloggers called feedforward (see demo). Here’s the interview.

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1. How do you explain what feedforward and Kimengi do to people who have never heard of them before?

The first thing I say is that we create a more lateral web, but most of times I need to explain two things first: recommendations and widgets.

Everyone knows about recommendations that webshops provide, such as ‘people bought this, also bought…’. So at first I explain to people that this is the functionality we provide. Then I talk about our widget as a very smart website within a website that can create the same kind of recommendations on your blog/title and even better. It is better because all widgets on all participating sites can work together creating cross-site recommendations. And then, the recommendations are not only based on what other people liked, we look into context too. read more

The Committee to Protect Bloggers is an important blog that focuses on bloggers in peril across the world. They broke the story on the Iranian blogger who died in prison some time ago, and they have been doing their very best to keep a watchful eye on the state of the blogosphere in parts of the world where blogging is actually dangerous.

That’s why it was such a shame when Curt Hopkins announced its closure, and such a good thing when Andrew Ford Lyons picked up the reins again. So let’s here what he has to say about Committee to Protect Bloggers and the future. read more

John Evans’ blog network Syntagma Media always stood out a bit from the blog networks of the early days. First it was because of the hacked Kubrick blog template with the rainbow headers (which I remedied in one of my first design gigs in the blogosphere), and then because of Evans leaving the term blog behind, rebranding as a network of sites, web magazines, and other ideas aimed to make them more accessible and easy to understand.

Earlier this week Syntagma Media launched its most recent venture, the first in a series of “hyper-local” websites. So how do you go from blog network to local websites? That’s what this interview is about. read more

This is the second part of my interview with James Farmer, of Incsub and Edublogs.org fame. Read the first part here before getting down and dirty with this one, please.

Blogs.mu lets anyone host their own WordPress MU powered site. What’s the idea behind the service? Who should use it?

That people should be able to run a WPMU based blog network without having to find their way around a server.

Anyone who wants a WPMU site but can’t bring themselves to brave the install process!

Although we do offer some very simple and easy guides opn how to use and install WordPress MU at wpmu.org – heck, if I could do it back in the day I reckon most people could do it now.

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James Farmer is one of the big names in the WordPress MU sphere. He’s one of the guys behind the WordPress MU focused agency Incsub, and also the founder of the poster site of poster sites for the blog hosting platform: Edublogs.org. Sure, I guess wordpress.com is both bigger and probably better technically than Edublogs.org, but this is the mother of all WordPress MU installs, the one that proved that this software can be used for real. If anyone doubted that, that is.

So what are his thoughts on the platform, all the new projects that Incsub has rolled out, and so on? I certainly got them in this mammoth interview, split into two parts. This is Part 1.

First of all, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, Incsub?

Incsub is about my 4th professional incarnation, before that I was an editor at theage.com.au, lecturer at deakin.edu.au and teacher at stacks of different places.

Essentially, while I was in the lecturer mode, I started Edublogs.org to fill a need that I had – providing blogs for people – and it grew (really quick) so people started asking me about making similar sites for them.

Luckily I had also got to know Andrew Billits via the WPMU community by that time, he’s a damn great WPMU coder, and hence Incsub was born.

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Earlier this week the news that Sam Sethi is suing TechCrunch hit, and as was expected Michael Arrington posted the legal documents, just as he has done before. The responses to the law firm’s letter to TechCrunch and Arrington have also been reposted, so if you want to dig into what has been said thus far, this is the only place I know of. The TechCrunch stance is obvious, of course:

Needless to say, we think these claims have no merit, otherwise we would not have written the posts in the first place, or would have retracted.

I did an email interview with Sethi, after he got in touch with me and wanted me to correct or retract the news story (which I didn’t do, obviously). I figured an interview would be the best way to get Sethi’s side of the story. read more