Don’t Click This

I’ve noticed a lot of people doing ’speedlinking’ recently and decided I should give it a go. Here are a few posts worth a mention from other blogs:

Mark at 45n5 has made an…‘interesting’ post about Cost Per News criticising the ’sexy banners’ on Wickedfire; calling them hypocrites for showing the banners on the Cost Per News site….um, ok. The post has certainly sparked some interesting discussion!

HarpzOn.com - Not a specific post in mind as their all pretty good to be honest! I’m just impressed with the consistent quality of his posts right from the start, some great tips and information to be found!

Matt at Net Business Blog has made an interesting post about how “Technorati is a joke” and he does have a pretty good argument - Technorati need to do something about the whole pining sutuation.

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?!

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.

I came across this domain name extension site via StumbleUpon (I think), it’s basically a list of all the different possible domain name extensions and where you can go to register them. I thought this would be particularly useful if you’re looking to create a website brand (eg del.ico.us, bla.st etc) and I expect there are probably still plenty of single keywords available in this format, although some of them say ‘xx’ but it’s actually .com.xx. Still, I thought it was worth posting about!

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 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!

For anyone who placed a card on bla.st, Tim has just left a comment on my previous post about bla.st:

- If you are unhappy with how your short term bla.st card performed, contact me I’ll be happy to re-list your card as a long-term card, to the same total value, for free.

So there you have it! Anyone who wishes to have their advert relisted should contact Tim.

If you ask most people, especially newcomers to internet marketing, which contextual ad service they use on their website, it’s fair to assume that most people will say Google Adsense. In reality, it is probably the easiest way to make money from a website - nothing is required of the site visitor other than a click, from which you can make anything from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars.

There are other services out there, such as Yahoo (USA only), Adbrite and DClickAds which offer contextual advertising services but there’s no question that Google dominates the market. And therein lies the problem. It is too easy to become dependant on Google for revenue, which can be disaterous if your account gets suspended (- something that seems to be happening a lot) with little or no chance of a reversal. Live by the Google, Die by the Google. I personally don’t rely on the money that is currently in my adsense account and try to mix my revenue sources as much as possible, in fact most of the income from my sites comes from affiliate links.

Although Google does dominate the market at present, that isn’t to say you can’t make money from networks such as Adbrite and DClickAds, and the best way to find out what works best is by experimenting. For example, David runs Yahoo on one of his websites and he tried out the Adbrite interstitial ad service one day, only to discover that his daily revenue shot up. Basically, there are tons of networks out there: Text Link Ads, Adbrite, DClickAds, Advolcano and many more which can all potentially provide an additional revenue source, so you don’t need to rely on Adsense for income. John Chow has a great list of advertising networks which can be found here.

Honda have today launched their new site, myearthdream.com. They have designed a new livery for their 2007 F1 car, which is essentially a picture of the earth, in order to raise awareness of enviromental issues. The car has no other coporate logos on it other than the insignia required for F1 cars. The idea behind the website itself is to encourage people to make a pledge to change an aspect of their lifestyle in order to help the environment and in return have their name inscribed both onto the ‘digital car’ that appears on the website and the real F1 car!

Well…this is certainly an interesting idea and, as so many things these days, seems to be inspired by the original MDHP. I expect there’ll be a lot of press coverage about this and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of response this generates. It is interesting that they are promoting ‘awareness for environmental issues’ on an F1 racing car - not exactly the greenest of machines!!

MSN Traffic

After checking on MSN yesterday I noticed that my MTB site had got to the number one spot for the sites main keywords. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really produced that much of an increase in traffic to my site, but to be honest that’s to be expected with MSN. Still, it’s a good sign that the site is progressing and traffic overall is still going up slowly but surely. I’ve also been mucking about with my adsense placements to try and find the best CTR, which is still pretty shitty at the moment - it made me something like 11 cents yesterday. But I’m still determined to grow this site completely without any paid traffic!

Bla.st

Just a quick follow up from my post about bla.st; Chris has now reported that the $10 he spent to stay on the top spot of bla.st for two days resulted in 2284 views but only 27 clicks - a CTR of just 0.9%. It speaks for itself really…