Clinke Bidding Directory Released!

Daryl from Earn Money Blogging recently announced the launch of his new bidding directory which he has called Clinke (as in 'putting Link in cost effectiveness'). Clinke's development is recorded on the directory blog. Clinke allows you to buy and sell backlinks, which is important for SEO and improves Google Page Rank. Each backlink counts as a 'vote of confidence' for your site in the all-seeing eyes of the search engines and so they are fundamentally important.

To get his new site of to a flying start Daryl launched a blog post contest where everybody is a winner! The best post will (which he will judge) will receive $20. This seems like a pretty small first prize, but there are 5 prizes and everyone who takes part wins the 3rd,4th and 5th ones! Why not enter the contest and be guaranteed a prize!

UPDATE: Since writing this I have been added to the Clinke bidding directory and experienced first hand the special bonus which Daryl mentions on his post. If I told you what it is I would have to spam you to death (how else can you kill someone via a blog?), but rest assured it's worth entering to find out!

Whats up with Feedburner?!

I just checked my Feedburner subscription and I was greeted with the horrific sight you see above. Every site has been reduced to 0! I'm guessing there is some sort of malfunction and hopefully it will all return to normal!

Has anyone else's Feedburner RSS count suddenly been reduced to 0?

UPDATE:
It's all fixed now and back to normal. The world is safe for another day...

Online Money Making

Online money making has become a major business and a way of life, or at least an ambition for many many people. A Google search for "Online money making" reveals over 90 Million results, 722 thousand of which are blogs. I think of this massive increase in bloggers blogging about online money making as a booming industry, not unlike the industrial revolution, or the massive emigration to America, to explore the new world.

It's an exiting time to be alive and blogging, with everyone looking to get a knee up from the wealthy online money making bloggers who got in early and have grown powerful.

The great thing about online money making bloggers is that they are both competition to each other, while at the same time provide traffic to each other and sustain each other while teaching you (and me) How to Market Your Blog. We all visit each other’s blogs, being traffic in ourselves, as well as exchanging links and helping each other.

The other common practise is linking to other blog posts we like. This creates friendly competition that is very rewarding and fair for those involved. Good content simply means more links from other bloggers, which increases traffic directly as well as improves search engine rankings.

The other great thing about online money making is that it encourages creativity. This is important, not only in writing creative blog posts, but in coming up with entrepreneurial ideas. Anything is possible; people are becoming millionaires by online money making all the time. Just imagine what the blogosphere will be like in 10 years, will it still exist?

PayPerPost Love

Unles you have been living up a tree for the last several months you will know that PayPerPost is a make money blogging site which sponsors blog posts. In other words they are a middleman. This blog was accepted by PayPerPost about a month or so ago when I crossed the '3 month old' boundary'. Since then I have completed just two sponsored posts from PayPerpost; mostly because until the recent Google Page Rank update many of the opportunities were unavailable to me.

Those two posts have made me a humble $14, of which $6.50 was actually paid into my PayPal account this morning. That money (I know it's not much!) will go into my general 'Gap year fund' which comprises of personal savings and other money I have made online.

If anything, my experience from being with PayPerPost has reinforced the phrase 'don't put all your eggs in one basket'. This phrase has become a bit of a cliché in blogging, but that is for a very good reason; it is 100% true.

SEO Class

SEO Class provides SEO Training by what are apparently marketing specialists. Of course there is no qualification that defines who is a 'marketing specialist', but every SEO Class presenter has an online presence at either, WebmasterWorld Forum, Threadwatch, Search Engine Land or SERoundtable.

At the class you will learn about:

1. Content creation.
2. Organic and Paid Link Building and Management
3. Research Techniques
4. Social Marketing
5. Paid Marketing Campaigns
6. Technical Setup
7 SEO Tools (free and paid ones).

To me it looks like SEO Class will teach you a lot about SEO. However, whether most of that knowledge can be found online for free is another matter. I suspect a lot of it can be found, but the SEO learning curve (much like the blogging one) is long. The advantage of SEO class is that you can learn it all in one go.

The cost is a whopping $2999 (did I forget to mention that?). This is way over the budget for most bloggers in the online money making niche. In addition, one of the major plusses of the SEO class would be that you can get 1 on 1 help from the experts, however, without the experience of trying out their techniques it would be hard to make the most of this offer.

There are no seats currently available for the May 2007 (they must be making the sales somewhere!). SEO Class is best for young online businesses, where the webmaster has only a moderate or little amount of SEO knowledge.

Sponsored Reviews Refunded Me!

In my last post I explained about how I wrote three sponsored posts using Sponsored Reviews but two of the purchases were made using stolen credit cards and so I only received payment for one of the three posts.

Yesterday I found they had sent the other $21 they 'owed' me into my PayPal account! They also sent an e-mail outlining what they had done:

"With that being said we have gone through and credited all bloggers for the amounts they would have earned for the work they completed. Since payday was this past Saturday and you were not paid for these reviews, we have gone ahead and completed a special payment run"

I am happy to now have restored trust in them and I will keep using Sponsored Reviews, especially because it is not part of their TOS to refund me but they did it anyway. As well as issuing this "special payment run" they outlined some changes they have made to their system:

"We have restricted access for certain countries that are known for this type of fraud, as well as implemented new procedures to weed out potential problem advertisers."

It's great to see they are in touch with their users and provide an adaptable service. I like to think that perhaps my last post influenced them ;p. Whatever the reason it is for the best and thanks for the unexpected refund Sponsored Reviews! This is a step in the right direction for those of you looking for a trusted site to make money online with.

Sponsored Reviews Stole My Money!

Remember yesterday there was that batch of 3 sponsored posts? Well, now there is only one. I thought I had earned just over $24 for writing them and I should have been paid that by the end of yesterday into my PayPal account. All was not to be.

This morning (25 minutes ago - can you still feel the rage?) I received this email:

"Dear Blogger,

It has come to our attention that fraudulent purchases have been made through our system. You were approached by an advertiser to write a review for one of the following Domains:

-- 9SEM.com

-- Eyemiss.com

-- Hidrotips.com

Unfortunately, these purchases were made with stolen credit cards and we have no choice but to return the money to the credit card holder and delete the order in our system. This means that we are unable to pay you for the review that you completed, and ask that you remove it from your site(s).

We apologize for this inconvenience and for the time you spent writing the review. We assure you that we are taking measures to prevent this from happening in the future. This sort of fraud is rare and difficult to catch through standard fraud prevention schemes.

We appreciate your understanding and your continued support. Please submit a support ticket if you have any questions"

I thought perhaps there had been a mistake, but then checking my PayPal account revealed only the payment for the first review had been paid. The payment history in Sponsored Reviews told the same story.

I checked the Terms and Conditions and of course they don't have to pay me. Its quite ironic that I have an entire site devoted to uncovering internet scams and then I got scammed myself by what we all thought to be a respectable company.

Admittedly it wasn't technically Sponsored Reviews who 'stole my money' but it makes me wonder if it's worth writing more sponsored posts via them. I know there is no such thing as easy money online but the ratio is pretty bad, 2/3 of the purchases from them were by stolen credit cards! I have never heard of this happening before, has this happened to you?

Maybe I am just being punished for selling my blogging soul to the Sponsored post devil...

Blog About Your Blog... and get a free fridge!

What more could you want in life? The Blog About Your Blog Feed Contest is well underway. All you have to do is subscribe to their feed, leave a comment and when they reach 200 subscribers they will give away a 'state of the art' mini fridge. If there’s one thing that the ladies go for, it’s a man with a mini fridge.

As I write this they have 105 subscribers so they are over half way there! Note that only US residents can be sent the fridge, so no fridge for me I’m afraid (story of my life... :p).

I may usually be one to 'game the system' but with Feeds my views are a little different. I always think of feeds as a very accurate measure of the quality of a blog’s content, because unlike e.g. the Technorati favourites, subscribing to a feed has consequences and means getting posts sent to you (so people don't just subscribe on a whim). However, Blog About Your Blog does have quality content, which 'lessens the blow' and there seems to be no reason why people can't unsubscribe from the contest once the fridge has been awarded.

But Wait, What is 'Blog About Your Blog'

"We are a community blog where we feature quality bloggers with quality blogs. We ask bloggers to share their articles with us, providing links to their own blog, as well as traffic and readers."

I heard about Blog About Your Blog a while ago, but for a reason I am unsure of I never actually visited them. They have a simple and effective layout (which apparently is new) and a distinct lack of Ads which makes a refreshing change.

It was good to see a few familiar faces posting there. I would try to become an author there myself if I had the time but as you know I am looking for guest bloggers myself.

- This is a sponsored Post - (not sponsored to be positive!) -

Online Money Making - SERPS Madness!

I have woefully mentioned a number of times before (at least I think I wrote it out loud... ) that when I started this blog 4 months ago I had no SEO strategy. However, it may have been a blessing from Google, or just shear luck but yesterday I found myself on page 6 for the term 'online money making. OK, so Page 6 isn't great, but it's defiantly something to work with, and given the competitive nature of that keyword phrase I couldn’t resist a chance to get to page 1 on the Google SERPS (search engine results page) and suck up some juicy traffic.



CLICK TO ENLARGE

Above is the Sitening graph that shows my position on the Google SERPS for the phrase, 'online money making' over the last few weeks. Up until today I had been planning a little 'victory post' showing how I fought the battle and made it to Page 1 in Google.

All was not to be
For a totally unknown reason I disappeared without trace from position 67 for 'online money making'. Perhaps this has something to do with the Page Rank update? Or a simultaneous algorithm change?

All is not Lost
I am going to get the to bottom of this murder mystery Sherlock Holms style. ... All I need is a Sidekick! I will do a little 'experimentation' and perhaps a little more 'blog science'. Stay Tuned!

Have you found you have suddenly disappeared off of Google or maybe shot up the SERPS?.

Freedom From John Chow!

Before the Page Rank Update, one of the many ingenious methods I used to increase my future Google Page Rank was to be on JohnChow's top commentator list. I managed to do this using the URL of Affiliate Programs and Internet Scams. John had a PR4 but updated to a PR6.

Those of you who think of yourself as somewhat 'wise owls' will be dying to tell me that Google Page Rank is constantly being updated and that what the Toolbar shows is 'only a snapshot'. I have to admit I really don't understand why people bother saying this. The whole reason why I (and many other bloggers in this niche) were so exited about the update is because having that 'snapshot' is all it takes to convince advertisers that our site actually has that Page Rank; which in turn allows for easier and more lucrative site monetisation. It is only about your sites search engine optimization, what it displays as PR matters too.

You might say 'isn't he being a bit cheeky to the advertisers?'. I say I am defiantly not. The next update probably wont be for another solid three months and so by then I would have easily gained that Page Rank the 'white hat' way; and probably rise above and beyond the stated Page Rank, giving the advertisers even more than they bargained for. If I were some backwater vagabond who was going to give up his blog, this would not be the case, however, fortunately I am not!

If you think about it, Page Rank is just like Gold. It doesn't really have a practical use, it just looks nice, but we have developed around it in such a way that it carries great value. I.e.:

We want it, because we make more from advertisers,
Advertisers want it because they can make more from other advertisers
etc etc, It just goes on for ever.

Nevertheless, according to my Sitening Tool Google has only updated some of the 'data centres' and will be updating the rest shortly.

Trick of the day:
I am mind numbingly happy I no longer 'need' to be on John Chow's top commentator list. However, if you are looking for a devilishly cheeky way to get an easy PR6 link at the next update, you may want to consider giving it a try!

How To Get Targeted Visitors To Yours Website

First of all I would like to say hi to all the readers of Matt’s blog Successful Online Money Making. I’m Haroon author of Earning Blog and Blogging Haroon and I’m very happy that Matt is publishing my post on his Blog. It’s a post on SEO and in this post I will tell you how to get Targeted Traffic To Your Website.

In order to create a successful website you must have traffic or visitors to your site. Without traffic your perfect site is useless. Because traffic is an essential element of any successful site, many webmasters make the mistake of believing all traffic is generated equally. That’s where they make a huge mistake.

And if traffic is the King then targeted traffic is the God. Any type of traffíc is good, but there is a great distinction between ordinary traffic and targeted traffic.
So here are some ways you can take to get targeted traffic to your site:

Search Engines are Your Key To Sucess

Google is still the important one you should be worshipping online. Don't ignore the other two major demigods Yahoo! and MSN, but Google will deliver most of your traffíc. Your website stats will point this out to you daily, so you must optimize your site for Google. But if you need traffic coming quickly optimize your site for Yahoo because from my past experiences I have learnt Yahoo gives you traffic quickly. Google takes times to get to send some good amount of traffic.

Target The Right Keywords

You must target the right keywords in order to get useful traffíc to your site. You must first check the number of searches and amount of competition for your chosen keywords. You can use sites like sites like www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ and http://inventory.overture.com which will give you the Overture and Word Tracker monthly stats to help you pick the right keywords for your site. Instead of picking highly competitive keywords, take the middle road and milk the 'long tail keywords’.

Have Relevant Content

Relevant, helpful content will also be the biggest magnet for targeted traffic. Surfers are usually looking for information, give them what they want and your site will reap the rewards. Original, high quality, relevant content will draw in targeted traffíc to your site so make sure you have some good content to satisfy your visitors and the search engines. Keep everything on topic and within the scope of your site.

Use Traffíc Modules

One of the most effective ways to bring in targeted traffíc is to create traffíc modules: whole areas of your site devoted to one sub-topic. For example, if you have a general site on cars, you could develop a whole section on a car-buying guide. Another section could be on car accessories, link all these pages together into a neat traffíc cluster on your site. The search engines will love these closely grouped pages and reward you with lots of targeted traffíc. Never stop learning new ways of how to increase website traffic.

Use Social Media
Build links and contacts in all the important social media networks such as MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. These social networks are a great source of targeted traffic.
On this note I’m finishing this post and I hope to write more articles for Matt in the future.
Thanks
Haroon

Google Updates Toolbar Page Rank!

At last Google have finally updated the Page Rank shown in their Toolbar! I am very happy about this! This site got a PR4 and Affiliate Programs and Internet Scams (my other site) did too. I am especially 'proud' to see how, despite my other site being only a third the age of this one, I managed to play 'catch up' and get an equal Page Rank!

I'm sure every other blogger in the blogosphere has posted about the PR update today. It could be said that it’s a waste for me to continue the trend. I could have gone for the 'controversial post', which I would have called 'Why all the talk of the PR update? but that would have been plain stupid. It is obvious why we are all exited about the Page Rank, simply because it allows for easier and more lucrative site monetization.

Page Rank is one of the major requirements third parties like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe are after.

I will post in more detail about Page Rank in the near future. In the meantime remember I am still looking for guest bloggers.

What the Romans did for Blogging

Unless you live in what was once part of the Roman empire, you probably don't watch the TV show called 'What the Romans did for us', although you defiantly would have been influenced by the Romans in one way or another (ever heard of the butterfly effect?).

Even to the most un 'historically aware' person it is more than obvious that the Romans didn't write blogs, due to the plain and simple fact that they didn't have computers; but they did have diaries and records. The word blog, is short for 'Weblog', and for many of us a diaries is a form of log. Therefore, the Romans had one of the first blogs, they just weren’t 'online'.

I am currently studying Tacitus, a Roman historian. It is interesting to note that his motives for (b)logging is to form a record of the past and to entertain his audience, which by the way, I would say he needed to work on a little!

I do joke about how boring he is, but the truth is he does use some useful techniques that make some parts of is 'Annals of Imperial Rome' actually quite enjoyable.

Methods We Can Learn From
Getting the dirt on the individual. Like it or not, people like gossip, and mentioning names of the specific 'celebrities' you think your audience have a knowledge of is a great way to get them hooked.

Example Tacitus lets us know about how the emperor Nero tried to kill is mother Agrippina (who he committed incest with many times) by putting her in a mouldy old boat, so that she fell through the bottom. She then escaped by swimming!. While Nero clearly needed to work on his assassination methods, that little story probably didn't affect the course of history very much, but its inclusion by Tacitus made my day.

Don't spare the gory details. I have read many a blog that is full of 'okish' content. The blogger clearly knows what he/she is talking about but they leave out the figures and fail to give the details that led them to that conclusion. Tacitus includes every possible detail, making for a lengthy read, but an entertaining one.

Example Tacitus writes about how a Roman legion was being punished for rumours of a mutiny. The commander chose to have them 'decimated' like in the 'olden days'. This is when the men are all lined up and every 10th man is flogged to death. Pretty extreme? Call me sadistic, but it kept me reading.

Talk about the Scandals
This is one of the more well known blogging techniques, to get the 'scoop' on a scandalous story and milk it for all it's worth. Of course this can't be done too often or you risk losing credibility.

Example Tacitus didn't let the emperors off easy. If anything he was quite the opposite. He recorded how on one occasion Nero had a secret door built into the senate building and a Vail set up so he could hide his mother Agrippina behind it! Women were defiantly not allowed in the senate and at the time this was totally outrageous. It's even slightly funny because it shows how Nero was a 'mummas boy'... in every possible way.

The Grand finale
Hopefully I have proved that we can learn a lot from Tacitus's records of the Romans, but not that much from the Romans themselves (although Tacitus was a Roman... ). Stay tuned for more tales of interest.

I Like Big Blogs ... and I Cannot Lie!

All you other bloggers can't deny that you are not going to re-visit a blog that has less than 10 posts. You probably still wouldn't bother even if contained a few more than that. The point is that the bigger the blog the bigger the traffic. It's commonly written that past blog posts continue to get search engine traffic even after the blogger has long since met his/her grizzly end, (or at least stopped blogging); but how true is this?

Case Study - Of Myself
You may remember several weeks back when I was busy setting up and writing the content for my other site I failed to post every day on this blog, and for about two weeks it became an 'every other day' affair. Believe it or not that affected this site's traffic in a massive way.

Just before I started this brief period of posting every other day, I received a link from JohnChow.com for winning his Guess my February income contest. This boosted this sites traffic up to its all-time high, of 310 page views for that day, which went down to 256 page views the next day and gradually decreased down to a fairly constant 200 page views each day. Constant, that is, until I failed to post each day.

The reduction in traffic was overwhelming. Within a week of posting every other day traffic slumped from 200 to 40-100 pageviews per day.

But what could be the cause?
At the moment 32% of this blogs readers are returning visitors. From my experience this is a pretty high percentage and can help explain the traffic drop. If a sizeable percentage of my readers don't find this site via e.g. Google, then that means that when they/you see I haven’t posted they/you don't bother coming back for a couple of days. This is just my theory; your ideas are greatly welcomed!

If you wanted to know about the current state of traffic, my response would be that it is 'sort of middelish'. Meaning, my search engine traffic has dropped, due to loosing my page 1 in the Google SERPS for phrases like 'AGLOCO scam', which used to rake in a lot of traffic. I am not actually disappointed with this. To maintain a page 1 in Google for that phrase I would have to post about AGLOCO every few days, which I know is not what most of my readers want.

What does it all mean?
You could call it a failure of SEO planning, or a success of focused content writing. Call it what you like, the two lessons to be learnt are:

1. Posting daily has its benefits. It’s a fairly well known phrase, to 'post only when you have something to say'. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I have found that if I have the time to do more surfing the net, or finding another source of mental substrate I end up having something to say.

2. Find keywords and stick with them. This is a pretty obvious one, which I have implemented on my new site. However, with this being my first ever site; when I started it in on December 30th 2006 I had never even heard of keywords! Now if that isn't learning while earning I don't know what is!

The Ultimate Alexa Redirect Experiment: Results are in!

Last Tuesday I started The Ultimate Alexa redirect Experiment. At last the results are here! We were trying to find out if having people visit your site via the Alexa redirect (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://matt608.blogspot.com) actually increases Alexa ranking like so many blogs claim it does.

The Data:
Remember this is blog science so I'm not about to calculate the standard deviation! There are far too many sources of error, (which I will outline), for that to be of any use. At first glance it may look like there was too little data to work with, but all is not as it may seem...

At the beginning of the Experiment Successful online money making ! had an Alexa rank of:

251,591. It has now risen by 31,550 to
220,041

There were a total of just 23 clicks of the redirect I placed with on this blog as part of the experiment. Thankfully Mybloglog came to the rescue!. I used a redirect to send people from Mybloglog to here. I only use free mybloglog stats which record the last 7 days of activity, rather than the 9 days that the experiment ran for. However, the chances are that the some of the people who visited via Mybloglog clicked the redirect again here, and voted that they did so (it has no effect to click it twice), which helps even out the odds.

There were 37 clicks on the Mybloglog redirect.
There were 23 clicks on the on-site redirect
Making 50 total clicks!

Overview
- Put simply, it all 'averages out' and 50 redirect clicks is a pretty accurate figure.
- Before the experiment started this sites Alexa ranking and stopped increasing, it had formed a plateau.
- Traffic had actually decreased early on in the experiment (I failed to post daily) but I doubled back up again a few days ago.

This means that on average there was less traffic during the experiment than before when the Alexa ranking had stopped increasing. Despite this, the Alexa rank increased a noticeable amount. The traffic increased (up to the same amount as before) due to my post called What the Ancient Egyptians taught me about blogging. Alexa Viewbar users tend to be more numerous in tech sites, and so this burst of users are unlikely to be the cause of the increase in Alexa rankings.



Above is a screenshot of the Alexa 'reach' graph for this site. The big red arrow points to the increase in apparent reach since I started the experiment.

The Conclusion
Using the Alexa redirect does increase Alexa rankings! I am very pleased to announce this because using the Alexa redirect is so simple! There have been so may posts containing ‘Alexa tips’ that have no proof that they actually work; well, now we do!

What can we draw from all this?
What this does show is how easy it is to manipulate the Alexa rankings. This isn't an 'black hat' technique, Alexa have not said they disapprove of this. If anything, using the Alexa redirect is sending them more data, which they must like. If you are glad to hear this news then go ahead and make the most of it. I know I will be.

Guest Bloggers Wanted!

 

 

 

 

Before anyone asks I am not looking for guest bloggers for any of the following reasons:

1. I'm diying
2. I'm going to Jail
3. I'm finally moving to the moon

The real reason is that the cursed exams are upon me! To make up for all the blogging I have done during the year (and lack of 'real' work) these A Level exams mean a ton of revision. At the moment I maintain two blogs, this one and 'Affiliate Programs and Internet Scams'.

I am aiming to have guest bloggers posting on both sites, so I that am writing just one post per day instead of two, ideally alternating between the two sites. This will only last for a month or so until my exams have all blown over and then I will be free to blog my heart out in my gap year.

I have already asked a few of my blogger friends but at the moment they are all blogged down in their own online ventures (which I totally understand).

As you can probably guess if you want to guest blog on this site, you will be writing about blogging and making money online. My other site focuses more specifically on affiliate programs and internet scams, which is what your post(s) will need to be about.

You may include in your post:
- Links to your site in the post! Providing they are relevant and don't disrupt the flow of the article.
- 5 lines in italics at the top of the post where you can introduce yourself and include a total of 2 links!

What else will you get?
- Free links to your site. This blog is predicted a Google Page Rank of 5 at the impending update and so those links will be quite valuable. The other normal SEO benefits also come with the inbound links to your site, not to mention the bonus on ranking systems like Technorati

- You can start to create a name for yourself in this niche. You may already have a 'online money making' blog and are looking for some extra traffic and a boost; or perhaps you have a blog in a totally different niche and want to launch your site with a bang.

- Social bookmarking benefits. At, for example Digg.com, posts tend to get Dugg more often if their author didn't submit them. You could submit your post too all of the social bookmarking sites (using the Socialiser button which appears at the bottom of every post) and use your account on each site to submit them. The voters will see that the URL is different from that of the author who submitted them and so are more likely to vote for it!

- My gratitude and friendship! This may sound useless, but if you guest blog here there is no question that I will visit your blog regularly, comment on it and probably mention it in future posts. I don’t mean this will be a ‘forced affair, I have found that I naturally visit the blogs of people I regularly ‘network’ with.

- If you are just launching a new section to your blog that is relevant; your post can be about it! (This does not mean you can write an entire post about a new blogger freebie blog you are starting, hopefully you get the idea).


These are a the things I would like my guest blogger(s) to posses:
1. Good blogging and writing technique. We can't have the place falling apart when I'm busy!
2. Bloggers who have some experience the aforementioned niches. I'm not asking for experts, but theres no point in you posting about something I have already covered or that backtracks on this blogs development.
3. Enthusiastic bloggers whose passion will show through in their posts.

There is no precise 'word limit' for your posts, but 200 words is an absolute minimum, going all the way up to about 1000 if you want. If you would like to guest blog, just leave a comment to say hi, and/or e-mail me at mattjones@affiliatescamguide.com

PS. Don’t forget to take part in The Ultimate Alexa Redirect Experiment!. I will post the results of the Experiemt as soon as Alexa updates its records.

No More Kontera!

I hinted in my last post that I would be making some changes to this site. I have just removed the Kontera code from this sites template. Kontera provided the 'in-text-content links', which were the words in actual posts that were underlined in orange. This may seem like a fairly minor change, but I assure you it is a tiny one in comparison to the things to come!

Why did I remove them?
1. They hardly made any money. I made a grand total of about $7 with them and they were here for over a month.

2. They make the page slow to load! This page may have loaded super speedy for you, but for me it loaded far to slowly, even with my high-speed broadband!

3. They looked bad. No matter how you disguise them, Ads look bad.

4. They are bad for the readers’ experience. I hadn't bothered to filter out unrelated or scammy sites, so who knows what I was promoting and where I was sending people.

5. I was getting sick of the over-monetisation. I think this is something you can only understand if you have spent a certain amount of time blogging. I have reached the stage where I read a lot of blogs and I am ashamed to say that this site was (and still is) grossly over monetised compared to almost all the blogs I read. I have formed a sense of pride in what I blog and my standards are being raised all the time. No more sneaky tacky ads. Thanks Maki for giving me the nudge I needed.

Will the Adsense go too? Wait and see.

I'm not expecting the removal of Kontera advertising to have a major effect on this blog, but it is a step in the right direction. It’s funny actually, people spend a lot of time waiting with eager anticipation of the day their blog 'comes of age' for acceptance into an advertising group; but losing Kontera is a relief. I have finally dropped a heavy burden.

What the Ancient Egyptians Taught me about Blogging

Blogging down the ages

You may think there can be no way in the afterlife that there is a link between one of the oldest civilisations on earth and one of the most modern pastimes, but you would be wrong. The Ancient Egyptians blogged in Stone.

Mans desire to communicate and make a statement to the world is as old as when we evolved from homo-erectus. Bloggers, much like Pharaohs want to leave a Legacy. To do this their blog or 'Stella' must be eye catching. The Pharaohs did this by having no ads and focused on quality content. They gave the populous what they wanted and needed, which was a belief system (a mental routine). As an added bonus the Pharaoh would become deified in the process (linked with the god, AmunRe) and gain a form of immortality.

Cartouche's, (see image below/left, are the engraved pharaohs name encircled in a loop) I like to think of as the hyperlinks of the ancient world. King lists were engraved on walls of temples and much like the Technorati Favourites Train which had a viral effect. There are now 100s of copies of them recorded by numerous past civilisations not to mention the 1000s of modern copies. They wanted to be remembered and those that had their names engraved deep enough, backed up with quality content succeeded. When a new dynasty came along they would (try to) destroy the records of the past one, re-branding it by rubbing away the past cartouches and writing their own one over them. Over time the names were engraved deeper and deeper to make it harder to write over. The beautiful thing about the Internet is that you can re-brand yourself whenever you like!

Bloggers know that controversy can be a path to traffic and a reputation. Akhenaten, the heretic king is a perfect example of this. In the New Kingdom (1567-1085BC) he set up is very own city (using Wordpress ;) at El Amarna and made everyone worship the sun disk, which was known as 'the Aten', hence his name, Akhenaten. If he hadn't done this, he would have been 'just another pharaoh' and I probably wouldn't have even studied him. In being controversial, he set him self apart from the competition and even changed the nature of art itself. Blogging is an art and top bloggers have the power to change it.

There were competitions between different cult centres, e.g. the cult of Osiris at Abydos and that of Amun at Thebes. This caused the peoples 'mental routine/belief system' to change and the pharaohs (who are the bloggers in this analogy) had to account for that.

If my archaeology classes have taught me anything, it is that certain rules apply to everything. They key points here are:

1. Have a mental routine, but it needs to be adaptable so it can change when the need arrives.
2. Engrave your writing deeply by writing strong unique content.
3. Be eye catching and not plastered with tacky banner ads (as well as other ads).
4. Use the power of viral marketing, it’s for the greater good, of the clever minority....
5. If you don't like your blog, re-brand it! This may happen very soon with this site...
6. Be controversial, but not to often. Note that Akhenaten’s new city and religion were destroyed after his death and El Amarna has never been re-discovered!

Smorty: Connecting advertisers with bloggers

A couple of days ago I read about Smorty on How to Earn Money Blogging. Smorty is another 'get paid to blog' service that sponsors blog posts. Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. The usual controversy about blog advertising and bloggers selling their identity surrounds this issue. However, I am happy for blogs I read to have sponsored posts spread out amongst the other posts, as long as the quality of the normal posts remains high.

Smorty's 'slogan' that Advertisers can "Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts" helps to lessen the damage a sponsored post can potentially do to a blog. The Advertisers are not buying a positive opinion from the blogger, but simply paying them to display their opinion publicly (which they hope is a positive one). Much like PayPerPost the toughest requirement for getting your blog accepted is that it must be over 3 months old.

Smorty have a very crisp and clean site. They also boast some valuable unique features. For example beneath each offer it says how many of that offer are still available, allowing bloggers to prioritise which offer to take first. They also have a minimum payout of $6 per offer.

With the recent burst of get paid for blogging sites smorty could do well, providing they keep lots of offers that cover a wide variety of niches.

Breaking news: PayPerPost has Bought a Company!

Payperpost (a service that sponsors posts on blogs) announced that they have bought a company! Next week they will announce what that company is and what exactly it will mean for us.

For now all we can do is speculate. Buying a company clearly shows PayPerPost's growth. Being a member/fan of PayPerPost I say good for them. A lot of the veteran 'posties' say PayPerPost are deteriorating and only have offers about real estate and credit cards, however I disagree.

PayPerPost may have a smaller range of offers than in the past, but they are still one of the highest paying and most reliable sponsored posting services out there. This acquisition (whatever it may be) will hopefully enable PayPerPost to add new features to their service, which is becoming aged. It wont be long before they will lose the advantage of their reliable reputation. They are in danger of becoming just 'one of the many' sponsored posting sites, instead of the leader of the pack.

I am actually quite exited about what this new company could do for PayPerPost. Maybe there will be more offers relevant to the 'blogging and making money online' niche. It should coincide nicely with the Google Page Rank update, (when it finally happens), enabling us to all make more money!