Is your Blog half empty or half full?

Are you blogging and nothing is happening?

Let’s face it, having a blog doesn’t always mean you going to get the audience that you expect. I might not be the perfect example for blogging but it is what everyone is wanting to have a blog. Getting past the noise alone can be a very hard process. You never know who will read your blog or who will comment. That alone could make or break your blog writing ability. I don’t mean that it would actually break your blog or anything of that nature, but I am talking about who comes to your blog and why.   This is the reason why some bloggers blog and others journal, each to its own.    Some like to just write down their thoughts and others are looking for the lifetime of knowledge.

Blogging isn’t really about money!

Some bloggers want to make money and others like me want to build a community.    It’s not that your blog is half empty but you should consider your blog as being half full.  Your probably trying to figure out what you need to blog about but you really should be searching for what you want to blog about and not thinking about the money.  Although I would be amiss if I didn’t at least want to make money blogging.   My goal however is to do something that I love and that is to write.   I might not have a lot of writing skills but I will learn and adapt.   Adaptation is the key to a good blog at least in my case.  Knowing that is one part of a bigger picture some would say.

Finding the Time to blog!

This is another facts of life, for some it is easy to find time to blog and for others well just say they need to blog at all hours of the night.    It is actually just personal preferences when to blog, but just because you blog doesn’t mean you are going to make a dent in who will come.   It however does mean that you can work hard and expect to make money.  So here are some points that I am going to work on:

  • Work with other bloggers — Having seen how this can help me, I will be collaborating with other bloggers to become a better blog.
  • Work on my blog — I’m am going to rededicate myself to making this a better blog.
  • Making money —  Hey I didn’t say I wouldn’t want to make money but that is something that is going to be secondary to creating a better blog.
  • Helping others — If you need help creating your own blog or setting up your blog then you can contact me and hire me to help you in creating a good blog.

Paul Sylvester

Dark Side of Adsense

As many of you know, I’ve wrote a blog postabout Adsense for Begginers.  I wrote this to try to make people see that Adsense isn’t all that bad.  I wanted to expand on this and talk about the Dark Side of Adsense.

AdSense is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering (also owned by Google)

[Via Wikipedia]

Now we know that Google uses what we like to call a Per Click payment plan, that is to say on occasion you get paid for ratio of page views.  It can be 0.05$ or more, I don’t know how they figure it out but I do know there is more to this than what you see behind the Adsense.

[ad#ad2-right]I went on a journey to find out about Adsense and I stumbled across this post about Adsense Fraud.  I wanted to add to this by talking about why people are would do this even more.

I might not know a lot, but I do know that with the Recession still going on and people are trying to find ways around making money.  Some people have went to the Darkside of the money making idea.

Now we know that Adsense calculates your Pageviews with you click ratio or your Rate of Return.  I know Google has a very good Algorithm to use with figuring out what ads to place for each site.  You see I’ve recently gotten a lot of traffic to my site and all of the sudden my Ads I have on my site are more colorful.

I know Google might not admit it but I suspect they have several levels of tiers for ads.  I would only assume that if  a site has more pageviews, it would mean there is a more cost to put ads on the site.  Now we all know that Ad Space is valuable because the Ad helps drive traffic to the sites that  user or users are interested in.

Why people would want to go to the Darkside of Adsense is no mystery.  It all involves Money, We’ve heard it before and we will always hears this online.  Someone is making a fortune off of advertising a month.  It will be a big sum of money some have even boosted about it, 500$, 1000$. or more.

Making money is always going to be a long term goal, and anyone who you ask will say they worked for that money.  You can never really make money without working, it’s something that everyone has to learn.  You earn it every time you cut the grass or every time you go into work.  It takes three things:

  1. Time — is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining time in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars
  2. Work — is a measure of the work done by human beings. It is conventionally contrasted with such other factors of production as land and capital. There are theories which have created a concept called human capital (referring to the skills that workers possess, not necessarily their actual work), although there are also counter posing macro-economic system theories that think human capital is a contradiction in terms
  3. Support —  is a social affinity in which one person stands with another person, closely understanding his or her feelings.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]It takes Time, yes I do mean this.  You can’t build a big website over night.  It takes several different things to make your website good.  The design is one, the name is another, and lastly it’s your personality that determines the way people will react when they come upon your site.  I’ve learn that the hard way,  when I first started blogging, I never got any major page views.  Then I went into working on my blog.

When I say work, I mean work.  You need to find where your best at and exploit it.  I don’t mean exploit it illegally but I do mean use it to bring out your website.  Like mine, I have been working hard at research finding website others would very rarely come across.    I also want to be able to teach people about blogging and instruct them in the proper way to blog.  I have made mistakes in my time and I can bet I will make mistakes in the future, so I always say that is always going to be a works in progress.

The final thing is Support, if you don’t have support from your returning readers you will never be able to advance in pageviews.  I mean that if your readers don’t recommend this to other people then no one will find out what your really like.  It all depends on the readers, they are who you are writing to and trying to make a connection.

I know I went on a Tanjent and I made this a rather long post, but I hope this helps you understand about Adsense and blogging.  These two actually have a great deal in common.  They both need those  Three steps to succeed.   It all depends on how much you want you accomplish.

Is Google the ultimate news source?

As you know We had a big problem Monday Night and All day Tuesday. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you would of noticed either a 503 or lag. It was due to an article that I released late Monday night about the PIFTS.EXE and the so call conspiracy.

At the time, I was wondering and quite disturbed about what Norton Symantec was doing to the forums. So I blogged about this and wouldn’t you know my site was Held Hostage by Google. I kid you not, I had so many people come to my site in under an hour it wasn’t even funny.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]So I sit here, asking a really good question is Google the News? I don’t know exactly when but according to Wikipedia Google was formed in 1998. The Google Motto is Don’t Be Evil, and I guess it makes them look like a news source. When did they get past the news site? I would hazard a guess that it was in late 2004 they started when they when Google gave people the first chance to own the stock on August 19, 2004, when Google became a publicly held company.

I got hit hard by Slashdot, Reddit.com, and Google.  In truthfulness, It was more of searches and people coming from Google than anywhere else. I would say Google was the 90% and and Slashdot and Redidit was 8% and the rest was from other websites for this one article. Now don’t get me wrong the 2% of people was my normal amount of people for the day. So you can imagine how many people actually came to my site over this fiasco.

I call this a fiasco because basically it was one that really made me worry about the server going down. People seemed to try to find out about this program and some of them didn’t even do any more research than to come to my site? Although I do know a little, I have always considered myself to be a BLUE COLLAR Tech Blogger. So you can just call me “The Blue Collar Tech Blogger” when it comes to things like this. I will never proclaim I know everything and I am still learning every day I blog I learn something new.

So this leaves me with a question on how did Blogs become the news also?  Did we step into the roll of news?  I know there are many blogs out there that are telling the news and are almost as if they are the news.  Is that where this has become Web 2.0?  I throw these questions out to see what type of comment.  I just thought this was a good topic for today to talk about.

5 Steps in Finding the right Affiliates!

So you want to make Money with your blog but don’t know how? I thought I would share with you what I’ve learned in the past few months to earn enough money to pay for the space and web address. I’ll go through each step talking about steps:

First you will need to explore all the great Affiliate programs like OpenX, TMIWireless, AdsenseConverseon, and Commision Junction.   There is of course even more out on the Internet, but these are ones that I like and have given me some insight as to Commission and Affiliate marketing.  I have been using TMIWIRELESS and Converseon more and more.  I still have Adsense but you have to get a balance on Advertising and what people are wanting.

Find the right fit for you blog and talk about the products you like the most.  I like TmiWireless because you give out free phones and still get money in return and Converseon for recommending Cell Phones. You should figure out what does better, and always keep looking. There are more than a few out that will work for you better. If you know one that I should look into let me know.

[ad#ad2-right]Remind readers about the affiliate programs so others can find them and blog about them.  It can also help with people coming to your site because the will encourage other people to check out what you’ve written and your recommendations.  You should come up with ways to promote your affiliates and encourage users to click on them and buy stuff from them.   This has brought in money by having them searched and indexed by Google.  You should find a niche that you have very little competition in, that way you get most of the traffic in for your self.

Create a Sneeze page, although this sounds rude, it is really a page talking about having helpful topics around your products or have them for people to find even more information about your affiliates.  Just like I have a Malware Resource, and Cricket Resource, also Cricket Reviews.  These will make it much easier for people to find what they are looking for and make it more enjoyable for the reader.  It also encourages people to come back and stay a while.

Although this is overlooked it is sometimes necessary to remind your readers about affiliates and talk about a product in detail by asking them to comment on a articles and encourage them to link to you.  This will bring in even more people to look at your blog and your reviews to get your page views higher and get more people to click your affiliate links.

I’ve not followed these steps very well in the beginning of starting my blog but I have learned a lot since then.  I’ve also learned that you need to update your blog on a weekly or even daily to basis to keep readers to come back.  You should always keep searching for even better affiliates to make your blog better.  You can also start advertising your blog by yourself without the middle but that is of yet I’ve not done enough on.  I will in the future when I get more experience under my belt.  I hope this has helped you in some way.

WordPress 2.7 is available.

Having installed the latest update, I must say this new dashboard is quite good.  I love the new dashboard.  So lets take a quick look at what you can do:

wordpress27-dashClick Image to View it in full screen!!

After I installed it, this is what it was like.   I then decided to change it around to show you what it looks like now.  You have the option of changing the right row and also the windows to where you want.  Like this:

wordpress27-dash1Click Image to view it full screen.

As you can see you can change so much stuff on the dashboard it is like having your own very wordpress operating system on your system.   You can customize what you want where you want.   I like this new look.   I’d thought I show you the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard and show just how nice this looks.   I want to hear everyone  thoughts on this new dashboard do you like it or hate it?

[ad#ad2-right]My Opinion is this is so nice and easy for the blogger and people who use the Podpress, it makes it even easier and quicker.  Oh and you can now use Google Gears to speed up the dashboard so you don’t have to wait for the page to load.   You can also use it offline and post it online when you get a signal.  That is  my understanding of Google Gears although I’ve not tested that part out.  I am almost sure you could do that with WordPress.