After seeing a variety of advertising on numerous blogs, I have to conclude that ads don't really make a lot of money for the average blogger. I'm not talking about the really popular bloggers or those who get extremely targeted traffic from search engines, but about you and me. Why can't we make a lot of money with ads (of any kind) on blogs?
Have you guys ever wondered why a lot of bloggers seem to blog about blogging? I have… a lot. But the answer is pretty simple. It's a question of popularity. You see, I have visited a lot of social bookmarking and networking communities and it seems that only certain topics keep getting more and more popular, no matter who writes about them. With no offense to communities like Digg and BloggingZoom, it appears to me that the majority of topics that become popular are the ones that either talk about technology, celebrity gossip, politics or (in the case of BloggingZoom) making money online through blogging. In fact, I think about 80-90% of the topics submitted to BZ fall into the category of blogging about blogging. It's about finding the lowest common denominator in this instance and that is blogging.
(This is a guest author article.)
Have you ever thought that your blog might suddenly have become too structured?
Have you ever felt that you have lost spontaneity in blogging? Have you created too many "compartments" to fit your content into and then felt restricted by that?
I think it happens to a lot of us over a period of time. I have tried my best to avoid over-categorization on my blog, but it happens almost subconsciously and it can become a mental trap. So rather than writing spontaneously, you end up writing content to fit into what you think already defines your blog.
Sure, a lot of people think that being focussed is a good thing. It is, but at the cost of creativity and originality. Too much focus on one particular topic has never appealed to me (well, I never cared about making money online, so sue me. :P ). A personal blog should have personality as well as spontaneity. Sometimes I think bloggers end up turning over-categorizing their content and creating regular features which they feel compelled to stick to even if they have nothing more to say on those topics.
And most of all, I think sticking to a rigid blogging schedule is the best way to become uninspired and dull. If you have nothing to share with your readers, don't share nothing. :razz:
(This is a guest author article.)
How many times have you seen that message on message boards/blogs and felt ever-so-slightly irritated? I must confess that I have felt the same.
You see, I generally comment on many blogs at a given time. I go around looking for interesting articles on my RSS/Atom reader and then comment.
Sometimes I miss out an article or two and then wonder why. So the reason I like comments to appear immediately is to remember that I have indeed commented on them. When a comment stays unapproved for a longer period of time, I am not sure whether I commented or not and then I'm forced to resubmit my feedback. At other times, I just don't bother.
The best reason I can give you for an unmoderated commenting system is the process of discussion itself. So even when one reader leaves a feedback in your absence, somebody else can respond to that, rather than waiting for you to make the comment appear. Have you ever thought about how many potential comments you might miss out because of this delay? The psychology of blog commenting is such that comments feed on more comments while articles with 0 comments usually don't generate any comments after a period of time.
There are better methods of spam prevention than manual comment moderation. If you are using a blogging platform like WordPress where you have full spam prevention control, please use those advanced techniques which are usually available through simple plugins. Don't rely on the manual method of comment spam elimination. It doesn't help your blog generate additional discussion since it facilitates reader interaction only through you.
Next time you find yourself involved in an online flame war (over anything at all) and you want to know who's the troll (you know, the really annoying guy who's fueling the flames) here are the signs to look for:
(This is a guest author article.)
I've read so much about Google lately and most of it has been emotional outbursts, arguments which don't state the facts of the issue and tend to confuse a lot more than enlightening the reader about what it really is. Here I'll try to clear the air by expressing the facts of the issue as I see it and try and offer a dispassionate analysis of the implications.
The background of PageRank
What exactly is Google PageRank and what is it not? Here's what Google themselves say about it:
From http://www.google.com/technology/ :
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
In a nutshell, it is a proprietary technology used by Google to assign ranks to individual web pages in order to sort search results. The ranking is for individual web pages and not for entire websites and it is on a scale of 0 to 10 (10 is the highest rank). Please note the highlights in the quote above. That's the heart of this issue.
What PageRank means to webmasters
Since search results for certain terms are very competitive (meaning that they are commonly used by Internet surfers) it becomes important for web pages to be listed in the first or second page of the results which can go to hundreds of pages. Being in the top two or three means a lot. And for these competitive terms, PageRank assumes significance because of the sheer number of results. For non-competitive search terms with far fewer results (like just one or two) PR becomes almost irrelevant. However, it also means that fewer people will find your pages through Google using those rarer search terms.
The bottom line is: the higher your individual web pages are ranked the more likelihood that you will get traffic from Google through searches for common terms.
What does increased Search engine traffic do for bloggers?
The value of heavy search engine traffic as an end in itself is debatable for bloggers who don't need income from advertising. However, of late, the trend of "paid blogging" has caught on and this has allowed people to use the PageRank (for their main/home page – websites don't get ranked as a whole, remember!) to sell links to advertisers who in turn use this as a means to get greater visibility in search engines themselves. According to Google themselves, remember, the PR of any web page is partially determined by the PR of the web pages linking to it. So the higher your PR, the chances are that the sites you link to will also get a decent PR due to your link.
Advertisers are therefore likely to advertise and pay more to webmasters whose pages rank higher than those whose pages rank lower and who have less number of pages indexed on Google.
What a higher presence in Google search results does for these advertisers themselves is, again, a matter of debate, but for many businesses greater visibility on the Internet seems to be quite important and they're willing to pay for it.
What Google has said
The crux of the issue is this: Google doesn't want people to "sell" their PageRanks. Simply put, they don't want you to link out on the promise of getting the advertisers a higher presence in search engine results. Thus, they are penalizing individual bloggers who continue to sell links on their websites to advertisers on the promise of PageRank by reducing their web pages' PageRanks and in some cases even setting it to 0 (lowest).
What the options are
Google's rationale
Their official stance is that they don't want their search results to get "poisoned" (manipulated) by people who sell/buy links from websites with highly ranked pages. Thus they feel perfectly justified in penalizing or threatening to penalize webmasters on their search engine ranking (and hence lower visibility and traffic from Google searches) for indulging in selling links by using their PageRank.
In reality they might also be protecting their AdSense and AdWords advertising programme by forcing webmasters to remove/render ineffective all other forms of text-link advertising. In that sense, this is seen as anti-competitive and has outraged bloggers.
Bloggers' stance and rationale
PageRank is currently a publicly available statistic and can easily be found out by anybody. The actual method of determining PageRank might be proprietary but the end result is not. So there is nothing legally or morally wrong with using "PageRank" as a means to promote your website to potential advertisers and there is nothing wrong in benefiting from being linked to from higher ranked web pages if you're willing to pay for it. Suddenly, bloggers are discovering that what used to be the means (The PageRank) to an end (higher income from advertising) is now threatened.
By targeting select groups of bloggers, moreover, Google is acting in a high-handed manner by utilizing their corporate might and their strong presence as the biggest search engine on the Internet to force webmasters to accept their diktats. This is rightly perceived as double-standards (as Google is in the Text-Link advertising business) and bullying tactics by a lot of people.
That is what the whole issue is about. Hope that explains it thoroughly!
My take on the bloggers' dilemma
Many bloggers seem confused as to what to do. Google PageRank has suddenly become an end in itself. My question is, what is the use of a higher PageRank and increased traffic from search engines unless you really benefit from it in a concrete sense. Sure, getting a lot of visitors is an exciting prospect, but in the ultimate analysis what have you gained by it except a fleeting popularity and increased burden on your web server? Is the loss of income justified? Will Google compensate you for your loss of business as a result of your forced compliance to their terms and conditions which goes against your interests? And on the other hand, will advertisers continue doing business with you when they suddenly find that your search engine ranking is zilch and that your traffic from search engines has reduced to a minimum or that you can no longer sell links which really benefit them?
It's a catch-22 situation for many people and rightly a lot of webmasters feel hard done by with such terms and conditions from Google.
In my opinion, there are only a few scenarios available:
My take on Google's own problems
My feeling is that Google have expanded so quickly on the Internet and swallowed up so many free services over the years that they simply have no way of sustaining these businesses without getting back substantially in terms of advertising. I also believe that Google AdSense/AdWords hasn't exactly been a runaway success because few people actually bother to click those ads and help in generating income for Google and AdSense publishers. Such has been the Pay-Per-Click advertising model that its effectiveness has been greatly reduced after the initial novelty wore out. In addition, they have severe competition from other text-link advertising services who actually offer better income than the stream of pennies that Google are willing to pay.
Finally, in spite of the money they must be making currently, they have huge commitments in terms of salaries to pay to their employees, infrastructure to maintain, offices to run and so on. Because of their rapid expansion on the Internet which is (in my view) unsustainable and the high popularity of their services (which remain free of cost and must be putting a huge burden on their servers) they feel that they can get away with imposing restrictions on Internet users and webmasters alike.
However, by showing such desperation to eliminate their competitors, they have now exposed themselves to severe criticism and shown their own weaknesses.
Conclusion
There is an irreconcilable clash of interest between Google on the one hand and advertisers who want to benefit by buying text-link advertising on websites on the other. There can be no compromise on this issue. Using rel="nofollow" in this form of link advertising is as good as rendering the advertising model useless and Google know this well. Advertisers are also unlikely to accept this as they are the ones who've paid for the link and morally, they have a right to ask webmasters why their money should go to them for ineffective linking. Equally webmasters have a right to ask advertisers whether they will continue advertising at the same rate even if the PageRanks drops as a result of taking the risk of exposing the links on their websites in violation of Google's ToS. All in all, a messy scenario. :?
On the whole, so long as the web is dominated by individual mega-corporations like Google, we're likely to see such scenarios increase.
(This is a guest author article.)
Let me make it clear at once that this article is aimed more at my well-meaning friends in the blogging world who had this wrong notion that google adsense is actually a good way to earn money online with your website. If you're one of those google fans who think they can do no wrong, you can actually stop reading this now. Much of what I am going to say will be to your distaste.
First let me begin by saying that google adsense is actually a good way to LOSE money. Sounds screwy? Let's examine the situation as it exists today and see what "benefits" you get out of hosting google ads on your website.
End result? You might not lose anything by putting up adsense on your blog or website, but if you are a small-to-medium site website with moderate traffic, it'll take you ages to earn at a few pennies per click enough to make it worthwhile. The return on investment is actually negative if you consider monetary inflation and interest rates. Finally, because google refuses to allow you to diclose or discuss anything adsense related you are left with no option to negotiate a contract with them. But by hosting adsense ads on your valuable cyber-real estate, you are giving google more advertising revenue and their clients more exposure with their ads. What you get is an undisclosed portion of google's earnings. How can anybody have any idea what percentage of the cut google takes?
And what would really hurt you is your credibility if people see advertising on your website and think that you're making millions off it. Sometimes people tend to feel that any form of advertising on websites is bad and google isn't an exception to the general rule. How can you be sure that they don't see an advertisement for product X, Y or Z which you have actually criticized in your articles? Wouldn't seeing that ad on the very page where you criticize it reduce the credibility of your opinion? How many people will be convinced that you had nothing to do with the links in your ads?
When google stop making their ads clicks-based and pay their content publishers up-front, I'll reconsider adsense. Until then, I will consider it an excellent way to lose money. Better to have no advertising than google advertising.
(This is a guest author article.)
There an increasingly disturbing trend I notice among a certain section of the blogging population of the internet and that is the excessive concern over google pageranks, technorati ratings, Alexa stats and so on. There are two reasons why I feel worried about this trend.
Firstly why is every second or third blog I see about "online marketing", "internet marketing", "monetization" or "SEO tips"? I blame this on the media. A bunch of newbies suddenly discovered a tool called blogging on the internet which they found that they could get into without much effort. They slap on a bunch of advertising links, sponsorships, paid content and so on and feel that they have a safe revenue stream. Most of these newbies have some things in common:
If you feel you fall into the above category, ask yourself why you feel targetted instead of asking me whether I pointed you out.
I partly blame this crowd for the increasing concern about pageranks, SEO, technorati and so on. After all, these tools are important in some ways, but their importance has been exaggerated beyond all limits. The bottom line about blogging is about people and that's where the focus should be. If they'd been spending half the time that they were optimizing their content for search engines or looking for other ways to improve their "revenue stream", in reaching out to other bloggers socially (by linking out or commenting on their blogs) or generally being nice to their friends, they could have achieved so much. Instead of which, these people keep up an arrogant face and shun the "unimportant" people as a whole while continuing to blindly follow the SEO trends and fads. Their main aim has been to be kind to mere web robots (scripts) rather than interacting with the primary audience: people. Reciprocity is a great thing! But once you get it into your head that you're an important guy or girl, then you've automatically isolated yourself from your audience. Even if you are in it for the money, you need to think of a business model that doesn't primarily rely on web search engines crawling your site.
I don't have much respect for online celebrities or popular bloggers. It's not a case of sour grapes. I simply cannot find anything to emulate in these people except the fact that they're famous for being famous within a certain limited circle. They want you to follow their trends but they are primarily concerned about marketing and making money and making money by telling others how to make money. Yes, there are some bloggers who are popular for reasons other than blogging, but I'm talking about this "frog in the well" crowd who cannot think much beyond "monetization". Making money isn't bad or wrong. But being obsessed about it will just ruin your sleep.
All I hope is that people (especially new bloggers) soon realize that the true value of blogging and social networking goes beyond numbers and software. It's about quality of interaction with real people and genuine friends and that's what makes the internet a truly social place… not google or technorati (or any other search engine/social networking site).
Sorry if I offended anybody with this piece. I couldn't think of a less harsh way to make my point though.
(This is a guest author article.)
Strange sounding title, isn't it? There are so many "freebies" floating around on the internet right now: web-based e-mail, blog/website hosting services, photo and image sharing communities, video portals, social networking sites, "free" traffic generating tools/widgets and tempting ways to make money without spending anything.
Free services don't run on air and water. They run on powerful servers that need to be constantly upgraded to keep up with the users who sign up because it's "free." And servers, hardware and infrastructure cost money. Only the big companies can absorb the initial investment to make up for it later. And trust me, they do find ways to make up for it later, otherwise they cannot stay in business.
And so when you get something free, you actually pay for it indirectly. Either with advertisements or content which can be used to generate advertisements. By becoming an active user of social networking websites, you provide data (valuable data) to these services which find it extremely useful not for spamming you, but for producing more stats in order to show their advertisers. When hundreds of thousands of users provide them with this data, imagine what they can do. Even their collection of e-mail addresses would be huge! So what about all the other personal data you put on these sites? What about all those millions of personal messages and e-mails stored on these mega corporations' servers? Can you imagine the gold mine of information they're sitting on? All of it might not be useful to them; indeed a huge fraction of it might be junk – but did you consider how much of valuable data resides on google and yahoo servers?
I think what they've successfully done is market the internet as an active, interactive social place rather than just a benign information storehouse which it used to be earlier. The transformation has come about and has been beneficial to the public, but it's not without its costs. A large majority of internet users have no idea of the basics of privacy and security. Take a look at how many people put up (high-resolution) photos of themselves on public websites. I've seen a lot of them even leave behind contact information like telephone or mobile numbers. The fact is, the internet is a very, very public place.
So the next time you feel the urge to join yet another "free" service and share your data with them, consider that it's not really free. You're giving up a lot of valuable (potentially profitable) information to them in the process.
(This is a guest author article.)
I hope RT won't mind me announcing this major change on Hari's Corner but I thought some of you might miss my feed reader RSS/Atom updates. Don't worry, that's the only change as all other permalinks are preserved.
This is a result of my very own converter script which I wrote in a couple of days of furious coding and I'm happy with the way results have come out. I am going to publish it and share it with the b2evolution community so please do try it out if you have the time (and the inclination).
This import script converts WP 2.3 (I didn't test with lower versions) and converts it to b2evolution 2.0 alpha. The script is completely stand-alone PHP and just works on the two databases (the WP one and the b2evolution one to import into). It doesn't use any WordPress or b2evolution functionality and works purely on MySQL commands to do the work. Hopefully the importer script will be released in a short while to the public.
In the meantime just update your feed readers for my blog everybody. :)
RSS Feeds: