Don’t Click This

Yup that’s right, another paid-for-blogging service as arrived (I say arrived, they’ve been around for a while, but they hadn’t properly launched yet). Sponsored Reviews has a fairly similar layout and style to ReveiwMe, you can set your own prices for reviews but the critea for getting a blog accepted are lower. Now I think these services are great for bloggers to earn cash, but I also reckon that bloggers shouldn’t let themselves be blinded by the fact that they can make some money from thier blog. I recently signed up with Blogsvertise (about 2 weeks ago) and could’ve earned nearly $70 already had I accepted every single review request. But I didn’t. And I think this is where a lot of people lose the plot a bit.

It is very easy to sign up for services like Blogsvertise and Pay Per Post and make a fair bit of money - maybe enough to even call an income - but if you go for every single opportunity to make money then your blog is going to lose quality and ultimately readership. At the end of the day, people visit your blog for (in most cases) your views/opinons/expertise/whatever, not to see a load of advertising.

Anyway, I guess one to make sure your blog remains unique and focused is to match every paid post you write with at least one (or more) post containing unique content, which at the end of the day is the most important aspect of any blog or website.

..I found more at http://boburnham.blogspot.com/

I don’t what’s happened but Bumpzee.com is currently down and if anyone else who has the bumpzee widget activated is finding their blog slow to load, I suggest turning it off until the site is back up as it seemed to be slowing down my blog considerably. I double checked with a couple of other blogs that have the widget installed and they seem to be having the same problem.

UPDATE: It’s back to normal now, plugin back on and working fine.

I know I haven’t posted for a while - been working hard on my websites - but here are a few things that I’m currently trying/will be trying in terms of website promotion, besides the normal link exchanges:

Forums: Great way to get traffic to your website, not just via a sig link (which I normally wait until I’ve made 10-20 posts before adding - don’t want to be banned for spamming) but also in response to other peoples requests. For example I often deep link to specific articles on my MTB site in response to peoples questions on bike forums.

Give Away Free Stuff/Competitions: Obviously, this has the potential to become quite costly but it can also bring a ton of backlinks too - for example if you’re giving away a novelty pen when someone subscribes to your feed/newsletter or whatever, you can submit the offer to freebie sites which will probably list it, then you get lots of one way links to your site.

Myspace: Bit of a grey area this, but depending on your website it can be good for targetting specific demographics eg for my student site I can find students at specific universities, add them as a friend, they check out my profile and see a link to my site. It is a good idea to create a profile of a person though as opposed to a site, more likely to get a response that way. It’s preferable to make the profile with a picture of an attractive female too, dunno why that works so well…ahem!

Stumble Upon: I’ve yet to test this out but I’ve heard it can get a lot of traffic to your site. Basically you just add your website to Stumble Upon and people, um, stumble upon it and can rate it, discuss it etc.

Blogroll: I’ve found this one to be particularly good; creating a blogroll on your website for your specific niche and then finding related blogs and adding them. Once you’ve done that, send a bit of traffic thier way and then tell them how good their blog is - usually can get a link back. I’ve actually managed to get a couple of blog posts dedicated to sites this way - bonus!

So there you have it. If anyone has any other interesting, non-conventional traffic methods, leave a comment and if they’re good I’ll add em to the list.

This cracked me up…I watched it about 7 times!

Ahhh…..back to work.

…Following on from my pearls of wisdom, one thing you should definitely do is always make sure that you’ve inserted the affiliate links on your webpages. I’ve just checked my stats for a new program I was promoting, for which I was a getting a decent amount of natural traffic from google, only to find the reason it wasn’t converting was because I had failed to put the affiliate links on the page. BOLLOCKS!

First off, I should say that I know next to nothing about SEO, I just try and follow these basic principals which I’ve picked up along the way:

-Inbound links are great (one way inbound links even better)
-Link text should always be the keywords you’re trying to rank for
-The higher the PR (of the pages) of links to your site the better
-Content should contain keywords, but not too much

Anywho, when I started out with my first site I was just happy to get links - I didn’t really pay much attention to the link text (most of the time it was simply my URL) or PR or anything of importance from an SEO perspective - mainly because I didn’t know any better. However, I did get traffic from the search engines and I did start to make money. This was because my website was useful, unique and updated. The 3 U’s. I’m not saying that’s all you need to have a succesful website, I’m just saying this is what happened to me.

Now, I’m in a position where I can apply some of the things I have learnt about SEO to my sites to improve their visibilty in the search engines and increase my traffic numbers, but in my honest opinion the 3 U’s are so much more important. Why am I writing this you might ask? Because I think that too many people worry about SEO when they should be more concerned with the content on their site.

At the end of the day if you SEO a website to the number one spot on Google, only to have crappy content, I doubt people are going to hang around. But if you concentrate on writing some quality content and slowly creep up the rankings, maybe you’ll find people will hang around and they’re much more likely to return.

As I said at the begining of my post I’m definitely not an expert and I’m not trying to tell people what to do, I’m just providing an insight into my own experiences. I’ve found that providing you have the 3 U’s, the ‘build it in and they will come’ theory still applies. Obviously, this doesn’t mean a shopping directory, but you get my drift. Content is king after all…

This is absolutely brilliant! I’ve just woken up and I was browsing the A4U Forum when I came across a link to this audio clip of a radio show from South Africa (I think!) who call up an Asda supermarket in the UK and ask them to make a customer service announcement…

I was reading Tyler’s post the other day about people overpricing domain names and it reminded me of some the ‘premium’ domains that I came across when I first started making websites which were insanely expensive for reasons I just didn’t understand. A few examples:

33166.com - $5,000
7A7.com - $14,000
DDelivery.com - $2,600

The last one is my favourite - apparantley if you stick a letter in front of a word that is already considered a premium domain it becomes one too! Anyway, I guess a lot of people are drawn to domaining because it ‘appears’ like easy money (much like a lot of people who decide to get into affiliate marketing) and they see genuine premium domains selling for millions of dollars. I’ve also come across some pretty interesting domain appraisal tools like this one which valued my blog at nearly $4,000 (if only!), tools which seem to be taken a bit too seriously by a bit too many people!

Ok, I cheated a little bit with my rule about not paying for traffic for my MTB site. I was reading about AdEngage the other day and decided to try it out as I had $8 in a paypal account and it was hardly worth cashing it out. So, I bought 2 text links on two sites, just for a week, for $1 each. And I’m glad I did. By the end of the first day I had already made my back my $2 investment! I’ve recieved nearly 150 clicks from my text links in a couple of days - by the end my weeks advert I’ll have paid less than half a cent for each click if that continues!

Unfortunately though, the money earned will more than likely all be from adsense as I’m running affiliate links for a UK bike shop and as the traffic was from US sites it’s unlikely I’ll make any sales from them. This is actually one of the reasons I started up Text Ads Directory to find UK only websites to advertise on.