Don’t Click This

My god it’s been ages since I posted on here, just in case anybody is still reading I plan to be making some big changes to this blog over the next few weeks and giving it a new lease of life!

Watch this space…

Well, it’s been a while since I posted on here, to be honest I was finding it hard to come with new stuff to write about everyday on top of all my other business commitments, but I definitely don’t regret starting this blog. While I’ve been ‘away’ Google did a PR update which I’m sure a lot of you know about, and this blog is now a PR4. Subsequently, I’ve suddenly had a load of requests for links and reviews and I thought it was about time I cashed in on it as I’m really using the blog for much else right now! So if you would like to purchase a review or text link from this blog which is now PR4, and has links from such high profile blogs such as JohnChow.Com, send an email to ian @ this website address.

Cheers!

I’ve been working on an offline business idea with a friend, I haven’t actually had a lot of time for my websites, but I’ll be updating stuff soon!

SEO is confusing. It can take hours of hard work and seem like you’re getting no-where, until google final indexes your website. And even then, you may have to wait patiently for your site to slowly creep up the rankings to a decent position. On the flip side of that, you could create a website and be in the top spot almost instantly!

One of the things to bear in mind when researching keywords or checking positions on google or whatever is that it isn’t just the number of results you should consider, but also the number of results that have the specific keywords in the title. For example, I currently have a website that ranks at the number 1 spot for a specific keyphrase, out of a possible 49,000,000 results. The website is pretty new and only has a couple of backlinks. One of the reasons it’s at number one is because there are few results (only 233 out of the 49,000,000) with the keyphrase in the title, but my site was one of them. Granted, it doesn’t get that many searches but it illustrates a point.

Obviously, this alone isn’t what decides your rank and you need to consider links, page rank etc but it can be a pretty useful indication. The way to check on google for results with the keywords in the title is allintitle: keyword(s).

I stole this idea from Mitchell’s 7 Songs That Get Me Motivated post and thought I’d post my top 10 favourite motivational tunes!

1. Fort Minor - Remember The Name (available for free download)
2. American Hi Fi - The Art Of Losing
3. Rage Against The Machine - Guerilla Radio
4. Groove Armada - I See You Baby
5. Andrew W.K. - Party Hard
6. Twista - Sunshine
7. Eminem - Lose Yourself
8. Gomez - Get Myself Arrested (no idea what the video is from!)
9. Boston - More Than A Feeling
10. Ludacris - Act A Fool

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?!

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.

I do this far too much. I start a project, get really excited about it, dedicate days to creating a website and then forget all about it or get distracted by something else! I’ve got a fair few sites from various failed…unfinished projects that I should really do something with…ah well. I guess this just proves that having some sort of structured plan is always a good idea, something I definitely learned the hard way! Anyway, I have started to plan my websites a lot more efficiently now though, and I’ve found that I’m a lot more productive when I write down exactly what I need to do on any given day the night before, because if I don’t I tend to spend a lot of my ‘working’ day browsing blogs and forums…

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.