Don’t Click This

There are a fair few blogs about blogging for money around at the moment and I was thinking the other day; are they actually a true representation of your average profitable blog? I think the answer is no. Point in case: Mike’s Money Making Mission - certainly an interesting and informative blog to say the least, he has been “trying to see if I can make money on the Internet using only free blogs and with no capital outlay.” and thus far has actually made a fair bit of money, £688.78 to be precise.

The thing is though, his blog is about making money with a blog, which is actually why he is making money. Confused? Let me try to explain. His main blog topic is effectively a case study of making money with a blog, but he is using the same blog for this. So essentially, it is more than likely that the majority of his traffic is from people interested in making money with their own blogs. Therefore, his blog is not an accurate representation of an average blog and any money made cannot really be relied upon as an indication of the money making potential of the average blog.

Now, just to clarify, I’m not saying that an average blog cannot make the same amount of, or even more money than Mike’s blog, I’m merely saying that blogs of this nature are easily misinterpreted as a representation of the general market, when in fact most average blogs are not ones with this subject matter.

Did that make sense?!

If you go back through my blog archives, you’ll find no links to any of my main websites. You may find this strange, but I do have a good reason. It is true that having a blog is a great way to get extra visitors to your website and I do actually run a separate blog in conjunction with one of my sites for this reason, but I never link to it from this blog.

My reason for this is Google Adsense, which I run as well as affiliate programs as my main source of income. You see, there are some really ‘clever’ wankers people who go around clicking on Adsense ads in an attempt to get that person banned from Adsense and unfortunately, it often works. This is made worse by the fact that from what I’ve seen it’s practically impossible to get back in once you’ve been given the boot. Both Chris and James have both recently been banned from Adsense for ‘invalid clicks’.

You may be thinking that I’m just being paranoid and wasting a perfectly good traffic source but it won’t take you long to find other examples of people being banned for invalid clicks and I know for a fact that a lot of these people linked to their own sites from their own blogs. John Chow recently made a post about someone clicking on his adsense ads over 1000 times (that person must lead a really fulfilling life), but lucky for John he’s a highly valued Google publisher and they know he wouldn’t be artificially generating clicks.

At the end of the day, you are always going to get haters and new web publishers are easy targets for them. Linking from your blog may seem like a great way to get traffic to your sites and an extra link but you may want to think twice if you’re running Adsense on those particular sites. Obviously, if you generate thousands of dollars a month for Google then you probably have a dedicated contact to resolve any situations like this but for most of us, that is unfortunately not the case.

This is my first review with SponsoredReviews.com, but as I said before I want to be very careful about which products or services I review so as not to alienate any of my readers. This review is about Bloggst, which according to their website is an “online community and resource center created exclusively for bloggers”. At first glance, it looks like a forum. On further investigation, you’ll see that it actually is a forum! Anyway, Bloggst is looking to become an authority resource for bloggers to discover and discuss better ways to blog.

At this point, you could be thinking ‘Yeh, but there’s already tons of blogs about blogging that have loads of information like this’ and you’d be right, but there is definitely still something to be said for a forum over a blog. For one thing, forums are still much better for discussion than blogs. For example a forum topic is a collective discussion including various ideas from different people, whereas a blog post is generally a specific idea, which is then commented on. Plus, you’ll be much more likely to get a decent response to a particular question on a forum then you are at a blog.

Bloggst is still a pretty new website and they are currently running a promotion whereby you can get a link to your blog on the front page by writing an article about them, although I don’t know if this counts if you’re writing a sponsored review! Although they do already have a few decent articles, they have a long way to go if they want to become an authority site. That said, they definitely have the right idea and I’m sure that as more members sign up it will become a goldmine of information for new and seasoned bloggers alike.

The Bo Burnham video that I posted a couple of days ago is bringing me some insane traffic - the kids pretty popular at the moment! The term “Bo Burnham” has been getting over 100 searches a day and yours truly is at the top spot. If only I could stumble across such a high search/low competition product. Damn! Anywho, for all the people looking, here are the Bo Burnham Videos.

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 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 came across Blogarate the other day, which is a cool widget that lets readers give your blog posts a star rating out of 5. It isn’t just a rating system though, it also sends blog posts back to the Blogarate website, along with the post star rating, and displays it Digg style.

Obivously, it’s advantage over sites like Digg is that you’re actually giving a post or article a rating, which could be good or bad, as opposed to just voting for decent posts, which is much more useful for the author.

Although this is a pretty good widget, I think it’s more suited to business or news type blogs than personal blogs. I reckon it would be especially good for content or article sites/blogs that are using wordpress as a cms, as it’s a good way to get feedback on your content from your users and probably get some extra traffic from the Blogarate site too.

Over the past month I’ve noticed at least a dozen blogs that I frequent, add various widgets; the most popular one being the My Blog Log recent readers widget. Bumpzee has also released a similar widget, along with a digg type plugin for posts (but I can’t seem to get these to work at the moment). It seems that widgets are clearly the way to ‘pimp your blog’ and to be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if Technorati release a recent readers widget pretty soon as well!

Anyways, I was thinking about how you could take advantage of this recent widget craze from a business perspective (not in any kind of spammy way, mind). It seems to me that now is a really good time to have a blog in conjunction with or as part of your website as it’s an excellent potential source of traffic. All these communites that are popping up all over the place make it easier to get your website noticed. Just by submitting your blog or site to My Blog Log can get you at least a few new visitors.

But think about this, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, nine times out of ten you’ll go and check out their site too. The same often applies to widgets (maybe not so much on high traffic blogs as recent readers change pretty quickly) when someone sees a new recent reader they’ll often have a look to see who it is (I know I do).

So essentially you could generate traffic and get some exposure simply by logging into My Blog Log (then you’re avatar shows up) and then browsing other blogs and sites with the widgets on them. Obviously, it’s not like readers click on the recent readers widget that much (I don’t think) but still, the author might and it’s free, so what have you got to lose?

Right. Finally got the internet connection sorted so I’m back!

I have been busy working though, I got a load of stuff done for my student site and the new design is nearly ready to go live now. Also, my MTB site has been ticking over, it’s getting around 20 uniques a day now which I know isn’t much but it’s steadily going up. To date it’s made me $1.77 which isn’t great but it’s something. I need to do some more linking for it and write some more articles as I’ve been focusing more on my student site.

Anywho, back to work…

I’ve had some serious issues with my ISP this week, I guess the main one would be that I haven’t been able to get on line at all! Luckily, I’ve been able to do a lot of work offline and upload it when I get the chance at a mates house.

Anyway, I’m waiting for them to sort the whole thing out, but in the mean time I’m now working in Starbucks using their hotspot thingy which is pretty expensive! Hopefully it’ll be sorted by next week and everything will be back to normal…