The Technorati Favourite's Train

Everyday Weekender has told me about the Technorati Favourites Train. (I'm spelling it the English way no matter what you say :D).

It is an extension of the Technorati Favourite Exchange started by Maki at DoshDosh. I’m guessing it’s going to have a similar effect as the Z list only this time our Favourite ranking will increase as well!

Join now, get in early and watch your rankings Skyrocket!.

An easy way to copy the list is to go View - View Source and then Edit - Find and type in 'Start Copying Here' and then copy it from there.

***Start Copying Here:***

Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction paragraph about what how you found the list and include a link to the blog that referred you to the list.

2) COPY the Rules and ENTIRE List below and post it to your blog. To avoid duplicate content and increase the amount of keywords your site can accessible for, go ahead and change the titles of the blog. Just don’t change the links of the blog.

3) Take “My New Faves” and move them into the “The Original Faves” list.

4) Add 3 Blogs that you’ve just added to your Technorati Favorites to the “My New Faves” section. Remember to also add the “Fave Me” link next to your new blogs (i.e. http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://www.yourfavesdomain.com)

5) Add Everyone on this list to your Technorati Favorites List by clicking on “Fave the Site.” Those who want good kharma will fave you back. If not, you will for sure get the benefits of faves from the bloggers who continue this list after you.


My New Faves

The Rojak Blog - Fave the Site
derrich.com - Fave the Site
GarryConn.com - Fave the Site
Kumiko's Cash Quest - Fave the Site
Dotmyspot - Fave the Site
making money online with a 13-year old - Fave the Site

The Original Faves

Successful Online Money Making ! - Fave the Site

Affiliate Programs - Fave the Site

Net Business Blog - Fave the Site

Career Ramblings - Fave the Site

Ramblings from the Marginalized - Fave the Site

Everyday Weekender - Fave the Site

Bobs [ReformatThis] - Fave the Site

Armen’s Blog - Fave the Site

Gary Lee - Fave the Site

Dosh Dosh - Fave the Site

Nate Whitehill - Fave the Site

Ms. Danielle - Fave the Site

Jeff Kee - Fave the Site

Scribble on the Wall - Fave the Site

Jimi Morrisons Head - Fave the Site

Jon Lee - Fave the Site

Samanathon - Fave the Site

Eat Drink & Be Merry - Fave the Site

The Man of Silver - Fave the Site

Hannes Johnson - Fave the Site

My Dandelion Patch - Fave the Site

Nathan Drach - Fave the Site

SiteLogic - Fave the Site

Julies Journal - Fave the Site

Stephen Fung - Fave the Site

Ed Lau - Fave the Site

QMusings - Fave the Site

***End Copying Here***

Target for February already hit!

You may remember that back in my'Looking up the Skirt of January as she goes past' post I aimed to "Get into the Technorati top 100,000". At the time I was ranked about 170,000. Well as of today I am ranked 77,227! This is an increase of nearly 100,000 in a week or so! You can imagine I am very happy about this.

Things are starting to look up 'at last'. I have been working on this blog for about 6 weeks now and it seems that I have finally recruited a worthy AGLOCO referral who is actually getting some referrals him/herself. On Bestcashrewards I am tantalizingly close to attaining the number of referrals required for payment. Their site is currently under repairs so forgive me if that link doesn’t work properly.

Mylot is plodding away as usual. I rarely post on there any more but my referrals are earning me a little each day. I haven’t made any new referrals on Text Link Ads but I am still pleased with them because they sent me my first ever check from 'the internet' for $25 for a referral I made in January.

So the moral of the story is just to stick at it!

How Much Is My Blog Worth?

My blog is worth $13,548.96.
How much is your blog worth?

According to Business-oppourtunities my blog is worth over $13,000! It uses "Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal." Basically the number of blogs that link here determines my value. This is unfortunately not 100% accurate, but if anyone wants to buy this blog off me for £13K I will consider your offer.

Infact, I want $14K, due to the affects of inflation and the weakness of the USD.....

8 Simple Rules for...Successful Blogging!

They are in order of importance, 1 being the most important.

1. - - --Create good content to act as what everyone has been calling 'linkbait'. This can be done a number of ways:

a) By saying something controversial. This can only be 'used' a few times as it gets old after a while. This is a way of grabbing the attention you deserve and is especially effective if it is the Title of the post. Of course the main content must stand up to the expectations that the controversial title brings.

b) Say something Useful. Your readers are human beings and they want to experience pleasure, be it through reading an entertaining/controversial article, or by learning a valuable lesson. You can think of learning is an investment in future pleasure. I.E. preparation. If your content is so useful that they cannot stop themselves using it then you have succeeded. They may reciprocate with an encouraging comment, a digg/vote or maybe even a link back if they refer to your article.

c) Say something inspiring and LEAD BY EXAMPLE. People don't want to hear that they are 'never going to make it'. People like to hear success stores and they need role models. I have mentioned John Chow as mine and Darren Rowse. This does not mean lie to people about your earnings, but you need to be genuinely ambitious and believe in yourself.

As a rule of thumb, be specific, original, get the grit and use keywords in your articles to make Google smile on you.

I often find it useful to think about content this way:

Thousands of people are going to read what your write (over time). Imagine reading out your article aloud to all of them (if you are shy then use the old trick of imagining them being naked). Would you be proud of what you said? Would they applaud you? Of course you would write in a slightly different style if reading aloud, but otherwise that analogy is sound.

What good content achieves:
- A sense of pride in your blog.
- Keeps readers coming back
- Acts as 'linkbait' to generate inbound links
- Is good for SEO (from the keywords and the linkbacks
- Trust from your readers.

I.E. Good content creates traffic.

2. Submit your site to the major Search engines, such as Google, MSN, DMOZ. They are free but can take some time to list your site so submit it early on. (Especially DMOZ which can take FOR EVER!). The benefits of this are obvious, Google organic searches provides over half of this blogs traffic. Organic Google is also more likely to click on ads unlike Digg traffic which is ‘trained’ not to.

3. Exchange links with sites relevant to your niche and that have more inbound links than your own. This is especially important in the early stages, just to get your blog of the ground. It helps SEO, traffic and all that, because each inbound link is viewed as a 'vote of confidence' in the eyes of the search engines.

4. Submit your blog to ranking systems such as Technorati and Spicypage.

Benefits:
- Useful for your own knowledge about the number of inbound links your blog has.
- Useful for advertising your blog, I.e. gives you the ability to state your blogs rank.
- Great for networking. I used the Technorati searches to find blogs in my own niche which were also slightly more popular. Then I had a look at those blogs, learnt from them myself and requested a link exchange. Spicypage is a great place to do much the same thing, only it is much smaller. Note: Social Networking sites like Mylot can be used in a similar way to make contacts online and promote your blog.

5. Monetise your blog with Ads. These could be with Google AdSense ads orText Link Ads among others. People often make the mistake of doing this first in the desperate hope of getting a couple of clicks. This is pointless. Unless you have a decent amount of quality content your blog will appear to be a sleazy MFA site (made for AdSense) which will have a negative effect on traffic.

6. Join a few trustworthy affiliate programs such as AGLOCO and Bestcashrewards. These will earn you extra income and they give you something else to blog about, although you shouldn’t write about your affiliate programs too often.

7. Submit your better posts to article directories like Digg, and Go Articles and isnare. Don't forget to leave information about yourself and a link to your blog where allowed. Digg is a little different; it is focuses on news about technology, politics, business and gaming so there is not point in going through your old posts and submitting a news post that you write a year ago to digg.

8. Submit your site to niche/smaller directories. This brings traffic directly from the directory as well as giving a helping hand in SEO for the major search engines.

That was an abnormally long post for me. If you made it this far I succeeded!

Looking up the skirt of January as she goes past

January has seen a boom in both my knowledge and for this blog. It is now just over a month old and has over 60 'decent' posts, which isn't bad for its first month. Its traffic has steadily grown although is still far from what I'd like. I used to struggle to get 100 visitors per day but now if I make just 1 post a day this blog gets at least 120 visitors. Money wise, my AdSense earnings have significantly increased since I repositioned them to be in their current positions, although much more traffic is needed to make a decent amount. I have made lots of online contacts and personally I have learnt a huge amount, which I have tried to pass on to you.

Aims for February:

- Provide a blog that people actually find useful and isn't just me displaying my knowledge.

- Increase traffic to 300 visitors a day if I make one post per day.

- Get into the Technorati top 100,000 (at the moment I’m ranked about 170,00).

- Get Dugg once (achieving this would basically mean I achieve my other aims)

- Get 100 people in my AGLOCO network (at the moment I have 25)

- Get to Level 7 on Bestcashrewards (at the moment I am on Level 3)

- Get listed in DMOZ the free directory/Alexa, (I submitted many moons ago but its still not listed; this isn't an aim I actually have any influence over). This will allow me to get a Google Pagerank at the next update and which means I will be able to display Textlink ads.

I believe every one is achievable. It will take a lot of work but will set me in good stead for the rest of the year.

Technorati WTF?

Before you exclaim aloud 'how rude!' you should know that WTF stands for 'Where's the Fire?'. Technorati have began a service much like Digg. They have described it as a "a big social experiment to see if people will work together to help create something great and useful, and will use the voting system to push up the best explanations to the top. " If it works this will be great for bloggers with good content (as they will receive some targeted traffic especially if they get on the front page) and for people browsing the archives for information. Providing people vote honestly the articles will be ordered fairly, rewarding the hard working bloggers and punishing the spammers.

I for one believe it will be a success. I have already posted a few of articles from this blog on it. I do have one nagging issue with it and that is that It was surprisingly easy to submit articles. You are given a lot of freedom (perhaps too much) even to the extent of choosing to start your own category just for your post. On other similar sites this has been frustratingly difficult because you need to 'apply' for a new category. On WTF however you can just type one in and BAM its a new category. Whether this is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen. I am not especially worried about spammers but about honest mistakes being make. For example, if you submit your article and label its category 'football' it will end up in a different category to an article categorised as 'soccer'. There are lots of other circumstances where a category could be slightly different and end up dividing content. I am unaware of how Technorati are going to prevent this. Perhaps they are only allowing new categories to be created like this because it is still in very early stages and will remove this ability once the 'directory' is more developed.

Check out WTF

How to Drive Traffic to your Blog

I have previously explained about ways of profiting from your blog and about affiliate programmes like bestcashrewards and AGLOCO. It is all well and good to be a member of such programmes, but how are you going to promote them without have a constant stream of traffic to your site?

Well, a major contributing factor is Search engine Optimisation (SEO). Traditionally this has been done by link exchanges, because each link is viewed as a 'vote' in the all-seeing eyes of the search engines. However this is all changing. The search engines are using more and more complex algorithms to help separate out the wheat from the chaff.

This does NOT mean link exchanges dead. You simply have to more picky when making them. There is little/NO value in having a link from a unknown, unrelated site. It will bring you no traffic because it doesn’t get any itself, and it is worthless in the eyes of the search engine because it is unrelated and is considered almost a sort of spam. This is BAD news for your site.

The solution is to attain links from RELEVANT AUTHORITY SITES. This means sites that are popular, get large amounts of traffic (you can find this out by using and Technorati, the biggest blog ranking site on the net). And as you know by know, they must have RELEVANT CONTENT.

This need for relevant content is why in some lines of Internet business, link exchanges are dead. If you think it through, if you are trying to sell a product, you are just putting links to your competitor’s sites right there for your customers to run off to. So DON'T use link exchanges if you are selling something!

For those of you who are not selling something, you can get link exchanges from authority sites by e.g. offering to write a review of their site containing links to their site and putting it on yours. For an example of this see my review of JohnChow.com

For more advice on making money online STAY TUNED!

Successful Blogging For Money

Whether you are getting 100s, 1000s or 10,000s hits on your blog per day, you are GARENTEED to make more money if you DIVERSIFY.

What is Diversification?

It is when you generated MULTIPLE sources of income. This does not have to mean e.g. selling a physical product AND having adverts, it simply means don't put all your 'eggs in one basket'. This means you must not ONLY rely on adsense as your source of imcome. There ARE other ways to get ads on your blog out there. On of them is:

Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads have a far more stable level of income and can be displayed on the same page as adsence. The only 'down side' is your site needs fairly high levels of traffic, and good site content. In the wider schemes of things this is actually a good thing, because it motivates bloggers to fill their blog will original content and actually make them worth reading.


I have given you an alternate source of income from ads, now for another source of income altogether.

To generate income from this method you do NOT need any product to sell.

This method is known as AFFILAITE MARKETING. As everyone knows, there are scams out there so you must judge carefully. There are some affiliate programmes that have become so popular, OTHER people have taken the risk for you. One of these programmes is AGLOCO. You only have to read a few of my previous posts to understand the potential of this programme.

However this is only one affiliate programme and seeing as the lesson of the day is to DIVERSIFY, I will let you know about 1 more. This one is called bestcashrewards. I have a post about this in my archives. You can either go take a look at that, or click here to take a look.

And there it is. People ask me; 'why do you do all that stuff online?'. I used to have no choice that to say 'because I can' in a dramatic manner, now I can say, 'because I make lots of money'. And YOU can too!