Blogs Of Value Isn't Spamming

I got into trouble yesterday - though I'm still smiling!

I was accused of promoting spamming because I wrote:

'Is it possible to start lots of different niche blogs, build them up with say twenty plus posts and then let them run themselves? By this I mean if you splay the blogs with strong keywords will the search engines keep picking them up indefinitely?'

That would be a form of spamming someone said. Interesting, but it doesn't mean that the blogs wouldn't be of value. No different infact than many other blogs that die a natural death.

I don't promote, well rarely, Mike's Business Articles for example, which only has a few posts, but I don't consider this a spam blog. There are articles that ocassionally interest people.

My complainent didn't like the way I said to 'splay the blogs with strong keywords.' But isn't this what the SEO experts tell us to do? Keywords are essential to getting blogs and websites picked up by the search engines. I don't mean listing rows of keywords, but to use them sensibly in titles, the first sentence and so on. It's called promoting your blog. I've written before that you mustn't overdo keywords as search engines do indeed sometimes class this as spamming.

It's all about balance.

I guess sometimes it's necessary to dot every i and cross every t.

The comment left by clip of Successful Blogging With Random Shock yesterday was interesting. He wrote:

'A couple years back I read something about a guy who had like 100 blogs all with AdSense. From what I remember they were all well written and useful to the niches they were targeting, SE optimized I guess with a couple dozen posts on each blog. He probably had great SE placement for each post on all 100 blogs. Apparently he made unreal money from it.'

That was the idea that I was trying to get over yesterday.

Wonder what others think. Are dozens of unleashed blogs spamming?

It's my Money Making Weekly Report tomorrow.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Celebrity Update: The main subject on Celebrity Insider - Photos & News today is the UK Big Brother eviction of Emily Parr for use of a racist word. Charley Uchea was in tears. On the blog there is a video of the eviction plus a couple of photos of Charley Uchea and Emily Parr. To see the video and the transcript of what Emily said click here.

Was that spam or promotion?


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If Celebrity Sex Sells Can We Make Money From It?

I suppose I knew it already, but it's a funny old world this blogosphere - or whatever you want to call it.

Take yesterday, for example, I checked some of my stats and what was the biggest link, by far, that readers of MMMM clicked on? Charley Uchea topless!

I shouldn't really be surprised because they - whoever they are - say sex sells. I'd go one step further and say that celebrity sex sells even more.

I've succumbed to this thought and am now trying an experiment with a couple of celebrity blogs to see if they will attract visitors and, more importantly, make money.

I think realism has set in and the fact is that you need something with high traffic to bring in any real cash. Sure I'm making some money, nearly $2000 to date - see last Money Making Weekly Report - but this isn't really worthwhile as far as I'm concerned.

So I'm now, therefore, dabbling in so called celebrities, which is a phenomenon that I don't really understand. Why are people like Paris Hilton in the USA and Kate Price (Jordan) in the UK celebrities? They don't actually have any talent, but it doesn't appear to matter. What they do know is how to sell themselves, and keep in the public eye. This earns them millions. Most odd.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. I started these two celebrity blogs (Celebrity Insider and In Praise Of Konnie Huq) two days ago and the interesting thing is that Google is already sending referrals - 66 (now 91 at 14.30 UK 8 June) to one of them - and I haven't done a thing to promote them. It certainly looks, on first appearances, much easier than with money making blogs.

Publishing these two other blogs isn't going to make any difference to this one. They probably won't be long term. Mike's Money Making Mission will carry on as usual.

What I'm interested in is:

Is it possible to start lots of different niche blogs, build them up with say twenty plus posts and then let them run themselves? By this I mean if you splay the blogs with strong keywords will the search engines keep picking them up indefinitely?

If this would work it should be possible to have lots of blogs, all monetised, and bringing in an income without too much effort. It's actually the keywords and tags that are more important than the posts themselves.

I'll have a bash and see what happens out of curiosity.

Good luck,
Mike.


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P.S. I've got to really carry this on a little longer - sorry! Charley Uchea isn't going to be the first housemate evicted from the UK's Big Brother. That distinction will go to either Emily or Shabnan. The bookies got that wrong. Charley Uchea is now the favourite to be the next eviction.

How To Make Money Dating!

I received a cheque / check today for £16.41 (about $32) from DIY Dating, the company behind them is Leamore Internet Limited. I thought, therefore, that today I'd enlarge a little on this money making opportunity.

The company is based in the UK but the opportunity is worldwide and payments can be made in various currencies.

As you can see from my last Money Making Weekly Report this hasn't been one of my biggest earners but, there again, I haven't promoted it very much either.

What I can say is that, to date, I have found them to be efficient and payments have been made to me on time.

So what's it all about?
Well dating, obviously. The difference between this and many others, such as the FriendFinderGroup for example, is that DIY Dating set you up with your own free website using whatever name you choose.

This way you have the worldwide database of the company to offer prospective customers. You can also choose the niche that you want - romance, adult, gay etc and tailor your website and database to match this. There is a choice of website designs.

Like most dating and contact sites your prospects can join for free and publish their profile. It's when these people upgrade, for more benefits, that you make your commission, which is set at 50%.

How Much Can You Make?
The sky is the limit. That's the glib, easy answer but as usual it depends on the amount of traffic you can generate to your DIY site.

There are various price plans that you can select for your clients. I've chosen what they call 'Plan 1'. When clients upgrade from their free membership they pay the following - remember I (you) then get 50% of this.

£09.95 - 1 Month membership.
£14.95 - 2 Months
£19.95 - 3 Months
£29.95 - 6 Months
£49.95 - 12 Months

I have shown the costs in UK Pounds but payments can also be made in US Dollars or European Euros. At the present time £1 is equal to approximately US$1.95 and 1.41 euros.

Any other ways to make money with DIY?
Yes, two ways.

Firstly you can advertise on your DIY site for partners. Anyone who signs up for this gets 10% of any upgrades they introduce - and you still make your 50%.

And secondly you can introduce affiliates - who create their own DIY sites - and you get 10% on each upgrade they generate - for life. If this was done systematically, over time, decent money could be made. I'm sure you can work out a few statistics possible.

Summary.
Dating and contacts are worldwide products and therefore suitable for all sorts of traffic. This sector is probably one of the biggest on the Internet. There is, therefore, potential to make money.

As I have said, to date DIY have paid out on time and I can't really find many negatives - perhaps their promotional ads could be improved. I don't like the flashing ad on the right, for example.

If you can get the traffic to your DIY website you can make money, a percentage of free memberships will always upgrade.

That's DIY!

Good luck,
Mike.


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P.S. Sorry, but I can't resist it! It's that Charley Uchea from the UK Big Brother program that I have been going on about at the end of posts. The thing is that Charley Uchea has now been photoraphed in the BB house swimming topless. As this sort of thing appears to interest a section of the UK public, mostly males, these photos can be seen by clicking here. I'm sure you won't, of course!

Amazon's New Money Making Features

Amazon have introduced a couple of new features today (June 4th) for affiliates - which are no doubt welcome by many. I haven't had much success with making money via Amazon to date. I've only earned £2.70 (about $5) so far and I'm not going to get rich on that! So any new aids are worthy of consideration.

Okay, the new features are:

(1) Context Links.
Context Links are for people looking for an easy way to generate money from the content they write. Bloggers, review sites, and people that have archived pages that are currently not monetized are excellent candidates for Context Links.

Context Links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products, unlocking new ad inventory and saving you the time from having to manually create links. You can add the links to your pages in minutes, and we provide a wealth of options to customize how they are displayed.

(2) Product reviews.

Product Previews are a portal into Amazon.co.uk – directly on your Web site. When users hover over a preview-enhanced link, either a text link or image link, a small window appears containing valuable content and information about the product you're advertising, including an image, new and used price, average customer review and availability.

This links therefore give visitors to your site more information about the Amazon product you merchandise without taking up space on your site. As Product Previews give your visitors the ability to add the item directly to their Amazon.co.uk shopping cart, these links help you keep visitors on your site until they are ready to buy.

So, in Amazon's own words, they are the two new features. My first thoughts aren't too enthusiastic, I'm afraid. I personally don't like blogs and websites where lots of things are underlined and boxes pop up wherever you move your cursor.

What I want to do is simply read what's in a post, without interuption. I'm perfectly capable of clicking on a link, in the normal way, if something interests me. I don't want info on things that are of no interest popping up - this just makes me niggly. Of course, that's me wearing a non money making hat.

For some, the underlined words and information boxes make extra money and, if that's the name of the game, I suppose this is okay. I don't think, however, that I'll be going down that route but, of course, you can never say never in life!

What has interested me more is the fact that it's now possible to have up to 100 Amazon aStores. This means you can tailor these to the niches of several blogs with differing subject matter.

You can see an example of my aStore here.

I may give a few more aStores a try and forget Amazon Context Links and Product Reviews. I feel this could be more productive. Only my opinion - you may well think differently.

Good luck,
Mike.

P.S. Nearly forgot again Big Brother and Charley Uchea! I watched BB last night. Oh dear, oh dear! Charley Uchea doesn't come across as very special. In fact she has difficulty stringing a few sentences together and sounds like some comedy take off. I can see why she's supposedly 8/11 on to be the first housemate evicted. It's all a bit sad actually.


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Referrals From Tagging

I'm off to a family birthday barbecue and then a party in about an hours time, so it's a quick post today. Just hope the weather improves - dull and drizzly here at the moment.

I did a couple of posts about Technorati Tags and I feel that the general opinion of readers was that they didn't really bring in many referrals. I was of the opposite view.

To my mind they can work if they are used properly. I have been messing about with them over the last couple of days to see if they would work for a brand new blog. This is the result:

You might say that 48 referrals isn't many. Everything is, of course, relative. To a new blog this is a decent first day. I've also had 79 visitors from the same worded tag to this blog:

So I consider the tags to be a useful aid.

At the moment I have a couple of ideas for new blogs in a completely different niche to this. The whole object, though, will still be to try and make money from them. The hardest bit will be trying to get the right products for a different readership.

It'll be an interesting experiment.

That's it for today.

Good luck,
Mike.

P.S. Nearly forgot a Big Brother and Charley Uchea update. It's great bait! It's a sad tale, however, today about Charley Uchea. She has been crying - ahhhh! It seems that the former lapdancer was sobbing in the bedroom after finding out that some of her food had been stolen. How could anyone be so cruel? Poor old (young) Charley - that's her with her handkerchief on the right. LOL.


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Money Making Weekly Report - Week 35

I'm now at week 35 of my Money Making Mission. The aim being to try and earn money, using only free blogs and without any capital outlay.

Not a lot to report on the last seven days, so I'll go straight into the stats. The programs marked with a * are those that have shown an increase this week.

I think the figures below are self explanatory. All sums are cumulative for the thirty-five weeks.

Money
I have removed Commission Junction from my list, though the money received has been included in my totals. I do not want to give them any more publicity. My CJ post refers.

AdSense $239.23*
Amazon UK £2.70
You Gov £29.50*
I have removed Adbrite from the list as I am no longer promoting them.
FriendFinderGroup $564.47*
Advertising Revenue £36.40 + $88.02
Convergence Inc $142.60 (over 18's only)
Sexy Ads $287.76 (over 18's only)
DIY Dating £45.60
Helium $9.70*
myLot $55.56*
PayPerPost $40.02
Cashlinkr $4.50
Daytipper $3.00

As there are two currencies (USA and UK) involved the totals amount to the equivalent of:
US$1778.71 or UK£988.17 or

Moving on now to where some of the blog's visitors came from.

Search Engine Referrals
Google helped me reach my best totals yet from search engine referrals (over 600 for the week). I must say, though, that this was helped greatly by the UK television program Big Brother and Charley Uchea, that's her photo on the right, who I first mentioned on Wednesday. This brought in a flood of visits as, remarkably, this blog was in number 2 position on the first page of Google search for the words 'Charley Uchea'. I didn't realise she had such a following!

Today the Sun reports that: 'Sex crazed Big Brother babe Charley Uchea was twice sacked from Stringfellows as a lap-dancer for being too racy with the punters.' Not really much that I can add to that! Anyway, the search engine referrals were as follows:

Google - 7743 (+612 on week)
Technorati - 265 (+5)
AOL - 170 (+20)
MSN - 112 (+4)
Yahoo - 52 (+2)
Live.com - 26 (+4)
Alta Vista - 2 (0)
Virgilio.it - 2 (0)
Metacrawler - 1 (0)
Webcrawler -1 (0)
HotBot - 1 (0)
Dogpile - 1 (0)
Sub total 8380 (+647 on week)

Google Blog Search - 422 (+11)
Search.Blogger - 192 (+1)
Total 8994 (+660)

Blog Directory Referrals
After success with search engine referrals this week it's back to earth with the Blog Directories. As I keep saying, they aren't a lot of good for getting visitors to your blog. Figures below for 2007 only, to see 2006 figures see Weekly Report 14.

Bloglines - 49 (+4 on week)
Blog Show Off - 35 (0)
My Blog Directory - 31 (0)
King Of The Blogs - 21 (0)
Blog Hub - 17 (+1)
Brit Blog - 18 (0)
Top Lists - 18 (+1)
Blog Hub - 16 (0)
World Blog Collection 12 (0)
Finding Blog - 12 (0)
Fuel My Blog 10 (0)
Bestest Blog - 5 (0)
eMarketing Blogs - 4 (+1)
World Top Blogs - 3 (0)
Blogdup - 3 (1)
Grokodile - 1 (0)

Other Directories, about 40 more - a big fat zero.

Mike's Top Ten Blog Referrers
These are the Top Ten referrals from other blogs for 2007. Rob and his Million Dollar Experiment were top for the week. My thanks, however, go to everyone who has exchanged links with me or has kindly put a link on their blog - it is appreciated very much. Please see their links in the side column under Interesting Blogs, why not click on a few, you never know what you might find.

Kumiko's Cash Quest 315 (+11 on week)
Blog AboutYour Blog 275 (+1)
The Million Dollar Experiment 251 (+22)
JCM's RPG Art 142 (+1)
The Gospel According To Rhys 151 (+13)
Rate My Blog 78 (+6)
Hipsterpad 77 (+1)
Money Money Money 77 (+3)
doshdosh 71 (+3)
Make Money At Home 67 (+2)

Miscellaneous Referrals
From all over the place. Top this week are: Technorati, myLot, Klik.Us and MyBlogLog.

I think that covers my week. I hope that by publishing this information, over the weeks to come, it may be of a help to other readers. To see any back reports please click here.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Make Yourself Contactable

With blogging it's always an advantage if visitors:

(1) Know who you are and
(2) They can make contact if necessary.

Number (1) is easy. Just publish a few details about yourself and possibly a photo. It makes it all more personal and readers can see that you are a real person and not some anonymous blur.

Now letting people contact you is a little more off putting for some. emails are fine, but you can end up with lots of spam and the like. I've previously added an email address, to this blog, but wasn't happy with some of the stuff I received so I had to remove it.

At the moment I am trying out a service from contactify. So what do they offer? This is the service in their own words:

What is Contactify?
A simple way for you to remain contactable, whilst never revealing your email address

How do I use it?
Post your contactify link (contactify.com/your-link-number) anywhere you like. Anyone who clicks on this link is taken to your personal contact form.

Where can I use it?
Anywhere you want, but its very useful for blogs, forums, message-boards, social networks, in fact anywhere where you would normally post your email address in public. So instead of posting your email address online, simply paste your full contactify link i.e http://www.contactify.com/your-link-number

So far, though early days, it is working okay for me. As senders have to feed in a security code it means there is no junk mail. They also have a widget that enables you to put the contact form on your own blog if preferred - though I'm not using this myself.

Needless to say it's a free service.

Good luck,
Mike.

P.S. The last couple of days I have been mentioning Charley Uchea and Big Brother. It seems that I picked on the most unpopular housemate! The Sun newspaper today quotes Charley Uchea as saying, "I'm trendy, I'm wild, argumentative. I'm flirtatious and I'm hot." But she an outsider to win at 40/1. I really must watch BB sometime!


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