I just can't take this blogging business seriously.It's all a bit laughable when so many gauge the success of a blog on stats and rankings that are frankly ludicrous.
Okay, perhaps not ludicrous, but lets put it another way. Why should big organisations be able to have a detrimental effect on honest bloggers?
The simple answer is, of course, because they are big and powerful.
I'm talking about things like PageRank, Alexa, Technorati and commercial websites such as Commission Junction and AdSense. They can all do virtually whatever they want and 'say' whatever they want about a blog (or website). This wouldn't happen in any other form of business without recourse or repercussions.
For many PageRank is all important. It has a value for prospective advertisers - though I'm not fully sure why. Surely what really matters is the number of visitors to a blog and the number of clicks/sales this produces.
Anyway, as with many other money blogs, my own PR has been slapped down.
In naive days, when I thought PR important, I worked at getting a PR5 and achieved this. Then, as most of us know, the PageRank secret algorithm was messed about with and I was relegated to a PR3, and then last week to a PR0! Today, however, it's back to a PR3.
My sin was doing a few sponsored posts.
Lets look at Alexa. Advertisers and the like attach some importance to the figures they produce. Again, goodness knows why, because the stats they produce are estimates - and very bad ones at that.
As I've said before on my main celebrity blog I've had up to 11,000 unique visitors a day. Alexa seem to say I only get between 100-200. I think I would call Alexa stats ludicrous in this instance.
As for Technorati, for ages they black listed this blog and a search on their website would show 'no such blog'. Again some think that Technorati ranking is important. I emailed them several times without response. In fairness I have now, at last, managed to get this blog reinstated though the 'authority' has dropped considerably.
So there we have three instances where organisations, for a want of a better word, can have a detrimental effect on a blog - that has done absolutely nothing dishonest or underhand.
As for Commission Junction they closed my account, owing me money, supposedly something to do with fictitious clicks - which is nonsense. The thing that made it worse was that the money I had earned was for sales and not clicks anyway. Needless to say my emails were unanswered.
And no doubt we've all heard of cases where bloggers have been 'terminated' from AdSense. Fortunately this hasn't happened to me.
Okay, you may think that I'm on a bit of a downer writing this post - but I'm not! I'm actually feeling very upbeat.
None of it means a jot.
The message I want to get across is that if you blog there may be disappointments, things that annoy you but it's still a great 'business', 'hobby' or whatever to be involved in.
Despite PageRank etc. etc. I'm now making more money than ever - which was my reason for starting blogging. It doesn't matter what problems arise they can be overcome - just don't let them get to you.
The potential with blogging is amazing. I told you a while back that I had 40,000+ visitors to one of my blogs in one day, when I hit on some good content for a post. This strikes home what can be done and achieved. It's almost mind blowing to have contact with that many readers in one day. Just think: the clicks, the response, the commission ...
My advise, for what it's worth, is: Focus on the right content and getting visitors to your blog - because nothing else really matters.
Good luck,
Mike.
