Don’t Click This

I can’t remember how I came across this blog the other day, but it instantly went into my favs list. Robb is also the author of Dollar Exposure, another blog that I frequently visit, although I had no idea they were the same person! Anyway, Robb’s come up with an interesting concept which he calls ‘Blog It Forward’, you can read his full post on it here. Basically, the idea is that you write a short review of 3 people’s blogs and simply ask them to ‘Blog It Forward’ to three more people (and you never know, someone might write a review of your blog). So I really like this idea and here are my 3 blog reviews, hopefully in turn they’ll blog about 3 more people!

David Lithman

David’s blogging style is the best kind in my opinion. His updates are always interesting and I think it’s good to mix personal updates in with business and I know that some people think that you should stick on topic blah blah blah but I always find it interesting to learn a little bit about the person too. I have a very short concentration span and lots and lots of lengthy posts about one topic doesn’t sit well with me. Anyway this is one of the blogs I usually check every day and is well worth a read.

Kieron Donoghue

This was the blog that got me really interested in affiliate marketing in the first place. Kieron is one of the big players in the UK affiliate marketing scene and his blog is a really good insight into the industry and has some really good tips too. It’s really interesting reading some of the older posts from 2005, which show just how quickly things are changing (and much has already changed) in affiliate marketing. It does sometimes go a while without being updated but it’s still a great read.

Nothing Ventured

Nothing Ventured is run by Tom C, who has recently started Trust My Garage. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I really like his writing style. His views and experiences with adsense and affiliate marketing are always very interesting and insightful as well as his general business commentary. It’s one of the few blogs that I find really thought provoking. Plus, his blogroll has a load of really interesting blogs which I wasn’t aware of before.

I don’t know what the hell has been going on over at 34sp.com (my host) but I’ve had some serious issues accessing my websites, especially this blog - it’s been up and down dozens of times today; sometimes it’s just slow, sometimes I get the old wordpress database error and sometimes it just wont show at all. It took me about half an hour to actually publish the YouTube post earlier, which really pissed me off! Everything seems to be back to normal now (touch wood) and hopefully this is the end of all the shenanigans!

Just a quick post, I’ve now got my first subscribers, which is cool. The Feedburner widget is currently showing 4 so thank you to whoever you are! Also, I’ve come across several blogs displaying this tool which values your blog. Mine is currently at $3,951.78 - Not bad for a week and half!

A while back I also came across this valuation tool which values websites domains, the tool used to come up with some interesting results; Youtube.com was apparantly worth under $1,000 and myspace.com was so bad that the owner should have paid someone to take it from them! I think they’ve improved their algo now though!

So my first week of blogging and I think I’m off to a pretty good start, I’ve had 427 visits and 826 pageviews - not bad for a first week. My Technorati rank started at over 2,500,000 and is now at 740,154, which is quite an improvement. I think I was quite lucky though as the link from John Chow Dot Com helped a lot! Anyway, below are a couple of great sites that have also helped get my blog noticed.

Buzzbums.com
A blog directory that automatically displays the latest blog posts on the front page, which is great as it means someone is almost definitely going to visit. This has sent me a fair amount of traffic and some of the other blogs on there are very interesting reads.

BUMPzee.com
Only found this one a few days ago and it’s already proving to be a great way to promote my blog. My post about BUMPzee has been bumped to the front page too!

I found this site on my web wanderings yesterday; it’s a social networking site/blog directory. It currently only hosts affiliate marketing blogs, but I assume more ‘communities’ will be added soon. Basically, you add your blog and your posts are automatically submitted to the community. Members can then bump any posts of interest, so it’s essentially a Digg for (at the moment) affiliate marketing blogs (which is probably a good thing as some Digg chumps users seem to have developed a resentment towards this type of blog recently).

I think this is great. I love reading about other people’s experiences with affiliate marketing, but there are so many SEO guides and advice type blogs that it can sometimes be a mission to find the genuine, personal blogs. I know there are people who are looking for guides etc and sure, they do have some good tips and advice, but there’s just too many off ‘em!

For example, I registered my blog at Blog Top Sites but if you look in the Internet Marketing and SEO section virtually all the blogs are ‘a guide to this’ and ‘tips on that’. Enough already!! I dunno about everyone else, but I much prefer to read business or affiliate marketing blogs that have a personal perspective.

Anyway, I digress. Basically, I really like bumpzee.com and they’ve already sent me a decent amount of traffic even though I only registered yesterday. I suppose the best thing about it is that your blog posts will definitely get seen (if not read) by people browsing the site as they are automatically submitted. And if you write really interesting posts then you should get a fair few visitors to your blog, so make sure you submit your blog asap.

By the way, I got to the last sentence of this post before accidentally pressing ‘back’ which erased the whole thing. There’s now a wall shaped dent in my fist…teach me not to ’save and continue editing’…

Turns out John pinched my video (but it’s ok cos he linked to my blog) about the 140 Million Dollar Mansion and he did a post about it in which he linked to my blog as the source, which was nice of him. Anyway, this is great because I got a link from a high autority blog plus he sent just under a hundred visitors my way yesterday, which is always good!

It just goes to show how popular his blog is. Funny thing is, there have been over 120 bloggers who have written a review of John Chow Dot Com in order to get a link to their blog and all I did was post a video! In all fairness though, John’s blog is a fantastic read (although the people at Digg don’t seem to think so, but that’s another story), especially if you have time to browse through the archives there are some brilliant tips and it’s very entertaining - one of the few blogs I actually frequent every day. It wouldn’t surprise me if he ends up in the Technorati Top 100 eventually, especially with his crafty linkbaiting schemes!!

(There you go, that was sort of a review, can I have another link please John?!)

I’ve also figured out how to embed the video now too, I just had to turn off the rich text editor. I thought that you could just copy and paste in the HTML box in the editor, but apparantly not. Duh.

I’ve been mucking around with my blog today (really should be working), added this google analytics plugin which is pretty useful, as not only does it track visitors etc it also tracks outgoing clicks which is handy. It was dead easy to install as well, which is good because my tecnical ability is definitely limited - All of my sites to date have been hard coded html, and I only learn new stuff when it’s actually essential. I don’t know jack about databases etc.

Anywho I’ve got a fair few links from my old blog but if anyone is interested in having a blog link, please send me the URL, you don’t have to give a reciprocal link (wouldn’t mind though) as I’m always happy to link to blogs that I find interesting. So if you do just leave a comment with your blog url and I’ll take a look.

Inabizzle.

So it took me ages, but I finally upgraded my old blog to wordpress, although I’ve decided not to add the older posts to the archives. Anyways, since new year I’ve been working hard to get my latest website up and running and making some cash. To be perfectly honest I’ve got pretty bored with my other main website, which is a shame in one sense because it was my first site, but I really think it’s time to move on. It’s a student discount website which is currently ticking over quite nicely and making a profit, but I’ve just lost the motivation to keep updating it like I used to. And on that note, if any one is looking to buy a website in the student market, please get in touch for more details.

My new site is a mountain biking content based site, which in my opinion seems to be the way forward right now - what with google cracking down on shopping directory type sites and affiliate marketing as a whole getting a lot more competitive. It’s definitely not going to be easy for any newcomers to the industry, and I speak as a relative newbie myself. There are still a lot of unexplored niches out there though, you just have to look for them!

I’ve used a mixture of affiliate links and adsense on my new site, but I intend to add more revenue sources eventually as I don’t want to become too dependant on google - I’ve heard plenty of stories of people getting banned from adsense for no clear reason. And the sad thing is that as google pretty much dominate the market, they can get away with it!

Basically I hope to start earning some serious cash money this year and I’ve got quite a few ideas in the pipeline, so watch this space…