October Expense Report

(or where I buck the Income Report trend on make money blogs)

Well, here it is……The end of another month online and the end of another month making money on the internet for free.  I’m not going to give you the traditional Income Report, because, well because everyone does that, and I know that those of you who aren’t making any money online just get jealous reading about all the dollars flowing into our pockets.  And jealousy is bad.  Ok?  Ok.  good.  So I thought a blog expense report would be the way to go.  I think if every blogger who was making money for nothing on the internet showed an expense report, a lot less people would try getting into this industry.  Of course, I suppose that would be bad.  Cause then we couldn’t flog you our books on the new super secret method never before revealed guru’s own way of making piles and piles of cash on the old internets.  It would put a lot of people out of business.  Why?  Well, lets take a small side step and do a little basic Accounting course……

Accounting 101 with the Underdogblogger

Yep.  Accounting 101 – Net Income is not something many blogs talk about.  But net income is essentially Sales – Cost to create goods – Operating Expenses.

In the make money on the internet crowd, I normally see Income reports that are more what I would call Sales.  The cost to create the sales/goods and the operating expenses are overlooked.  And I believe if we take these into account, then you have a very different view of how much money you can make on the internet.  Now cost to create goods and operating expenses sort of blur, so we will treat them as roughly the same thing.  This can include your hosting costs (amortised per month), your domain name costs (if you’ve bought one), your electricity used running your pc, your broadband charges, even the wear and tear on your computer if you are going to get all anal about it.  Sales – well obviously this is the money you bring in.  You know those pretty screen shots every long ass sales letter has showing you the money rolling in to the old paypal account.  Those are sales.

Ok, back to my expenses report.  Now I’m going to do something unique here, I’m going to include labour charges.  Labour you say?  Yes!  labour!  Because time spent doing this could be spent doing something else.  I’m going to assume a nominal charge of £6 and hour, which is a little above minimum wage here in the UK.  that’s about 9 dollaaaaaahs 60, but fuck it, the USA used to be a colony right?  So were gonna work in pounds for a change!  And we are going to put “u” into labour, and honour no matter what the crappy spell checker says. Hah! Ok expense report:

Cost of domains: £0
Hosting: £0
Labour: £180
Other expenses: £10

I’m estimating other expenses ’cause I can’t be bothered to work it out, but I figure it covers electricity for use of my computer and depreciation of said pc, as well as broadband costs and a delicious latte made on my Saeco Superautomatica

Total expenses: £190.  You Americans can go to xe.com to get the dollar version.  You will notice that I spend no money on the domains or hosting, because I’m on a quest to make money on the internet for free. That means I use free resources to make money online.  Griz manages to do it as outlined on his make money for beginners, and I figure I fall right in there (the beginner bit).

Now, imagine if the “A” list celebrity bloggers put down and expense report.  Imagine their labour cost alone.  Because I reckon most of those guys have egos the size of small nations and won’t be seen dead valuing their time at 6 quid an hour.

Yeah.  Well there you go.  This has been another cynical non-money making blog post brought to you by your favourite Underdogblogger.  Hope you enjoyed the novelty value alone.  More importantly, behind my cynicism is a serious point.  Making money online for free will, in a rather unseemly oxymoronic display, cost you…..in time alone if nothing else.  Don’t be mislead by all those income reports.  It’s not all money for jam.

Btw, happy halloween.

Oh man, I can’t resist posting something about this whole Andrew Sachs prank call thing.  I mean c’mon Brand and Ross should be fired, not for the content of the show, but for the fact that the show wasn’t funny when it was meant to be comedy.  And how about Georgina Baillie?  aka Voluptua?  Did you say attention whore?  Shame on you…. That girl sure saw a quick way to 15 minutes of fame.

The curse of the ad blind

(or where I attempt a humorous post on the disease that can kill your adsense income – ad blindness)

Ad blindness…..the most annoying and potentially lethal disease of any casual web surfer.  These days, it isn’t at all uncommon for people to boast about being ad blind.  They flaunt it like its a good thing.  They boast that they are so hip to the subculture that is the internet, that their very subconcience simply edits out the portions of a webpage that feature any sort of adverts.  But it isn’t a good thing.  And I’m here to tell you why being ad blind isn’t a good thing.

As a beginner trying to make money with adsense sites, I would really rather people were not ad-blind.  I would prefer that they found my webpage, and looked at the adverts there and then clicked on one of them.  Really, if you think about it, this would benefit the people who are ad blind as well.  I mean the very fact that they have typed a search string into google, and found my webpage (even if google is using latent semantic indexing) means they are interested in the subject matter.

Now, I don’t mind saying, my adsense site is not bad.  All the adverts are very relevant to the niche I’m targetting and the information on my webpages is accurate, factual – it is quality original content.  Not laced with brilliant humour like this site….oh no, I’ve purposefully made the writing bland in an effort to make people look around the page for something else to do….I don’t have lots of outgoing links that could cause the ad blind to potentially stumble out of my website.  In fact the only outgoing links are adverts.

…….so I think the ad blind surfer is in fact doing him or herself a severe disservice.  For example, no matter how much they read the information on my site, they will not be able to purchase what they are looking for from me directly.  I am merely a middle man…..but if they weren’t so ad blind, they could clicky on one of my adverts and hey presto, purchase the very thing they were looking for!  Damn!

The cure is simple.  A website that has no content, only adverts, that once you browse to, your browser’s buttons become disabled (including the little x to close it) so all you can do is click an advert.  Somehow, I suspect this is against the google terms and conditions though.  So damn your ad blindness, it is nothing to be proud of!

The underdog throws you the bone of LSI

(or where I howl on about Latent Semantic Indexing)

You know what?  I’m a bit surprised.  I haven’t seen a lot of blog posts about Latent Semantic Indexing.  It’s pretty good stuff LSI.  I’m telling you.  Not quite Aldos Huxley, Doors of Perception good (as an aside I’m not suggesting any young pups go about trying to open the old perception Huxley style…..drugs are bad K? good, glad we cleared that up).  But unlike Huxley opening his mind and allowing his senses to become fully aware of everything around him that he was previously filtering out), search engines are historically very bad at filtering out unwanted or irrelevant results. LSI will act like a natural filter to your favourite search engine’s mind.  Kind of like an anti-door of perception.  or a door of anti-perception. erm.  something like that.

Basically Latent Semantic Indexing is all about associating language and terminology, creating lexemes I had a geography teacher who used to say “if you don’t know the jargon associated with a subject, you can never discuss it”.  He was a pain in the arse, but he was right, and Google knows he was right.  So LSI attempts to understand the jargon around a subject area in much the same way as a human would.  A search engine using LSI will rank a page higher if it seems to contain more of these associated words, because the search engine will assume that whoever wrote the page knows about the subject matter.

Hmmmmm, you say.  That’s gonna really fuck up keyword stuffing.  Probably.  Unless you start to understand your subject area, you are going to be screwed when it comes to ranking if latent semantic indexing becomes more important.

How will the search engines associate words you ask? Good question, young pup!  I don’t know is the answer, but a couple of methods spring to mind……the use of a lexical database.  Essentially a lexical database groups words into cognitive synonyms.  What?  Basically the words mean similar things.  So finish and complete - both words mean the same thing, though there can be subtle differences in meaning and usage….we generally “finish a meal” we don’t really “complete a meal”…in this sense finish has a subtle side meaning of consume, but at the same time it still means we have come to the end.  The other thing I suppose the search engines could do, is take currently well ranking pages on subject, analyse them and use the language in them as benchmarks for constructing an LSI database.  I hope they don’t go down this route, because it would really need a lot of clean up, simply because there are so many of “us” around who are trying to dominate the search rankings by hook or by crook.  Just because a page is number 1 at the moment, doesn’t mean it is well written, or semantically correct……it usually means it has the most number of backlinks.

Now the astute among you will be wondering what the bone is that I’m throwing.  You’ve been patient, and probably read a bunch of stuff about language that you couldn’t care about so here you go……surf over to your favourite search engine – Google, and type the following in ~weight.  Now consider the search results.  Pretty cool eh? (If you can’t figure out what is going on, don’t be afraid to ask).

I don’t know how much LSI google uses at the moment, but one thing is for sure, when latent semantic indexing becomes more and more important, we will get a big shuffle in the search results and we will all have to start becoming experts in subjects we currently know nothing about, like for example the lexemes of language.

Now that was worth the price of my blog alone.  You all owe me a drink!

The Ego of Blogging

(or where I wonder how often you can check your blog stats in one day)

Blogging really can feed your ego.  In fact, in a lot of ways, blogging is really vanity publishing taken to the nth degree.  The ego of blogging is a vicious hound that can bite you in the arse at anytime.  Be warned.  Heed the cautionary tale below and avoid bad, evil blogging ego.

So, it’s pretty familiar for webmasters to check their stats.  Weekly, Daily, Hourly, Half-Hourly.   Well, all webmasters except Clog Money – he just doesn’t care at all.  I remember reading a day in the life of a prominent blogger (who I don’t think much of to be honest so I won’t name him), whose day went something like

Wake up, check blog stats using fancy schmancy laptop (include affiliate link to said fancy shmancy laptop)

Eat breakfast, check blog stats using computer in kitchen or a special wired up bowl of cornflakes, reading the stats in a matrix style display but with cornflakes scrolling around in the milk instead of a scrolling ASCII green screen* (include affiliate link to cornflakes, or milk I can’t remember)

Take shower, check blog stats in the shower using a fancy shmancy waterproof mobile device that he picked up at the latest blog expo (include affiliate link to said device)

Dry off, check blog stats on bathroom mirror which scrolled matrix style only using condensed water drops from the steam from his shower instead of green scrolling ASCII infiltrated green screen terminal  (’cause like he is so technological that even his bathroom is hooked up to the interwebs)**  ***

Stroll, scuttle or scamper to bedroom (with or without towel wrapped around waist), check stats in hallway using voice activated hallway computer (affiliate link up towel).

Get dressed, check blog stats using bedroom pc (affiliate link to linen, jeans, shirt, trainers, and deodorant).

Go to desk, check blog stats.

Pick up pen, check blog stats (affiliate link up pen).

Compulsively Refresh blog stats like a junkie on meth until lunch.

Take wife out to lunch at fancy restaurant, check blog stats over lunch using non-waterproof mobile phone (include affiliate link to said mobile phone), completely ignoring wife, and lunch, except to take photo and affiliate link up organic steak burger.

Drive home, checking blog stats using car’s on-board stat checking device (affiliate link to car, on-board device and gas station)

Fuck’s sake……At this point I got the message and stopped reading the post…..and by and large the blog, for several reasons…..none of which I will go into.  I don’t think the dude really needed a computer at all….all he needed was a little device that showed him a graph every minute or two that had an upward trend in comparison to the graph he saw a minute or two earlier.  This made me realise a few things – checking your blog’s statistics can be visciously addictive, and can severly hamper productivity.  The other thing it made me realise is that running a blog is very much tied into our egos.

It is enormously self-satisfying to watch our page views climb through the day….analyse the hell out of how many uniques we had, how many RSS subscribers signed up, how many people left comments on our blog….ahhhh feels good…..people notice me……people think I am important…….I must be important……..I feel better about myself now….etc etc etc.  As humans, we suffer what some traditions would call a “monkey mind”……we cannot focus on one thing for any substantial period of time.  The internet is the perfect antidote for this because we can hit the refresh button and have a new screen jump at us, keeping us entertained, feeding our addiction to self, to ego, to the illusion of the importance of what is essentially impermanent.

Checking our stats just feeds our ego.  We feel better about ourselves if people read our blog, we feel better about ourselves if we get lots of comments, we feel better about ourselves if other people blog about us.  The ego of blogging is very powerful.  But we have to keep reminding ourselves that this is not important.  Okay lets take a step back.  It is not that community is not important, and it isn’t that communicating with people is not important….it is that ego is not important.  Doing something to feed your ego will ultimately never satisfy you, it will not fill whatever void is there, only mask it.  You will want more and more and more and more and never be full.  Though at some point in this cycle, you will probably be full of shit

Checking stats should serve one purpose in any marketing endevour – to tell you what is and isn’t working.  To allow you to hone your page, your SEO, your writing, your website to better make it do what you want.  If you are just into blogging for the social side – you just want friends, then forget the stats – comment on other people’s blog, send them an email, and make some friends.  If you are online to make money, then checking your stats ever five minutes like a 5 year old with too many e-numbers in their diet will only take away time that could be spent on more important things.  Check your stats, by all means, analyse them – but remember that stats are only usefull to plot a trend over time.  One day’s worth of stats is useless, a month’s worth of stats can show you a trend, help you plan and better your site.  One day is an anomaly.  A spike could just be the digg effect, in which case, it probably isn’t all that usefull as data.

Now, where was I – oh yes ego.  Um one thought on this, though you have no reason to take me seriously. A few people have been blogging about the law of attraction and thinking positive and all that – something I might expand on some other time, but subjugating negative thought will never work in the long run.  You cannot attempt to squash what you fear into a little corner of you psyche and expect it never to rear its ugly head.  The only way is to face down what is behind the negative, what is behind the fear, find the root, make peace with it, understand it as part of you, understand how it affects you and how you can flow from the extreme reactions to a point of equilibrium, fully conscious of what just happened to you.

*okay this isn’t really true – you can’t get the internet through a bowl of cornflakes.  But you should be able to!  Kellogs I want royalties on that idea!

**forgot to add (include affiliate link to said bathroom mirror)

***okay, you can’t get the internet through your bathroom mirror either.  But you should be able to.  Ikea – royalties please…. k? thnks! bye.