Good luck with the blog, let me know when it is done so I can pop over and take a gander.

You say it is hearsay about being banned for paid links? Here’s from the horses’ mouth: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/

Ashley is doing something pretty risky here in my opinion, as his own blog could also be banned if someone reports him. (Know though that I will not report him). One way he could avert this is if he made the blog ring via a javascript, that way no PR is passed and google wouldn’t have any grounds to ban anyone.

My comment about how much he makes was not meant to be snide, I don’t know why you think that. Often people express how much they earn per visitor. It is a very valuable statistic to have. My only thought there was, for a blog, he has low pageviews.

About the 2 newbies, the difference it makes is this: If the rookie makes a brilliantly successful blog, earns 5K per month with it at the end of the year, there’s no guarantee that Ashley will let that person have the domain. And a couple of links to your other blogs won’t help since those can be stripped off instantly

Ofcourse, I do not think Ashley would do that.. but one must always be careful in these things, same when you start a business with a friend, never start anything without a contract, etc..

The point of posting this here was really not to talk about my comments, but the fact that Ashley chose to hide my comments from the public eye, why exactly? To get more people to sign up? Am I really a troll? Is that how you would describe me? No? I’m passionate about things and defend my opinion, which I would expect of everyone.

Also, the fact that I have commented alot without being moderated before these specific comments were deleted, makes this all the worse. You’d think that you have some sort of relationship with the blog owner.

Man – get yourself a blog – they are free! Mine is, just sign up to wordpress or blogger. At the very least get a wordpress login so that once one of your comments have been approved, you skip through the first “spam hurdle”.

I had similar thoughts about the blogs getting G-slapped, but it is all hearsay on my behalf. Only time will tell if it brings people traffic or not, and only time will tell if they can leverage that traffic into money.

Thing is, without a blog of your own, and experience yourself, all the theory in the world means shit.

As to the inner circle being paid for…..well some things aren’t free, nor are they obliged to be offered for free.

The slightly snide comment about the amount of money Ashley makes per visitor – I don’t know dude, start a blog, convert better than he does, then talk, otherwise it all sounds like a bit of a moan really. Bottom line is, he has enough visitors to pull in 7k a month, we don’t.

wrt the blogs that Ashley wants to give out to 2 rookies, what difference does it make if you get to keep them at the end of the year – use them to launch a bunch of other initiatives. Weave the links into your posts intelligently and you get some good backlinks pretty swiftly to new blogs that you can write (and own). At the end of the year, even if he takes the blog away from you, you’ve got backlinks for africa and a bunch of other viable blogs of your own.

When you don’t have a blog yourself to state an issue, in this day and age it’s like you don’t have a voice. So thank you for adding the comment

Anyway, I also know that Ashley, as the blog owner ofcourse has the right to disregard any comments he wants to, there is no right to free speech. But when I then read the title and first line of the “Raw and uncensored” post at ashleymorgan.com , I just wanted to reply.

I had no expectations when I posted the comment here, just that I knew someone else would at least read it. Had you not approved the comment, I would not have bothered pursuing this any further. So thank you, I look forward to reading the post, whichever side you may choose. (If there are even “sides”).

I had posted my concerns about the inner circle on his announcement blog post, but none of my comments since that time have been accepted.

They were all valid comments, polite and on subject. I raise a few issues with the inner circle concept that I would have liked to see answered, and I think anyone who is interested in joining should be able to read those concerns before making his or her decision on this matter.

However, like I said, none of my comments have been accepted. I sent a few emails to Ashley, again without any response what so ever.

I always loved commenting on his blog, but this behavior is so childish.. I cannot but wonder why. Is having a different opinion on a subject grounds to banning you from commenting? Boy, what boring discussions that would make.

I also asked him to simply tell me, by email, to stop commenting if he wanted me to, and I would immediately do so. I just want a reason for this behavior, that’s all.

I didn’t want to come posting here, I sought to handle this privately, but since Ashley is completely ignoring me, I see no other way but to take this public.

Anyway, here are a few of the comments that were not approved:

On “If you are serious about making money online this may be of interest to you”:

“I thought this was a great idea, until I read that it won’t be free and comes at a substantial cost..


This is essentially charging for being on someone’s blog roll.. Or charging for pagerank (you state this as a benefit in your post) which could get you banned from google.


Furthermore, will the links be at the bottom of the site? How many clicks can one expect from your blog? (Plus, footer links may be devalued by search engines (patents))


How will we know what the site is about if all that you see is a little icon?


And if those blogs aren’t related to tech, why would I ever want to visit them again?

Ofcourse the other sites will generate traffic too, but those will almost all be small sites with little traffic. Is there a money back guarantee if this thing just doesn’t work out? I mean, your blog isn’t that big if you look at the grand scheme of things..”

– In hindsight, this sounds a little challenging, but not alot. Pretty valid questions to ask. The kicker is indeed that you can get banned from google for buying paid links, and Ashley makes no mention of it. I don’t know if he even knows this, that’s why I made the comment in the first place.

On “Golden opportunity for rookie bloggers”:

“Just to clarify to those that want to participate in this, could you tell what happens to the domain name, etc, after the first year and they don’t want to pay for the next? Do you transfer the domain name, files, etc over to them? This is not explained very well.”

– Since he’s buying the domains, he owns them. And he hosts the sites. I just wanted to know what would happen after the year was up.

On “Upstart Blogger income statement for November 2008″:

“Hmm, that’s only 2.5 pageviews per unique user. That doesn’t sound like alot to me (given also that you have an RSS feed with only excerpts). 
What’s the standard for blogs? 
And the question I always ask, but never receive an answer to: “Is this only from AN Hosting?”

However, I must say, given this amount of traffic you really monetized it well. Don’t think you can improve your earnings per visitor much more.
$0.087 per unique visitor.”

– I meant the pageviews was low, not the uniques, maybe I should have put that in there?.. And yes, I do always ask what the different methods of monetizations are that he uses, but I have never received an answer to that.

On “Watch me build a new blog live and make $1,000 in under 30 days”:

“That’s pretty bold for a new blog that is not about blogging, etc.. This means that promotiong AN Hosting on that site will likely not work. You will need other means of monetizing the traffic.”

– Well, nothing wrong with this. Ashleymorgan.com is a personal/music blog, so a hosting offer should theoretically not go well with that kind of traffic.

Let me know what you think about this issue. I’d like to see this resolved. Hopefully, upstartblogger.com can become better because of this. It is often times when we are called out on something that we tend to do something about it, hopefully improve.

Discussion is something that should be encouraged, not moderated away.

Dan – The idea is that the 30 spots get allocated before the start of the new year so that the network can roll out with as much traffic as possible. And at the moment it’s on course to do just that.

Mitch – Some of the responses I got were just as you describe, gunning for bear. These were, however, mostly via email and very aggressive. As UDB correctly says, they went straight in the bin.

Elijah and UDB – I’ve got something on the drawing board that jazz heads like you, and I hope all music fans, will be interested in. I’ll announce it on Upstart Blogger to give it a kick start, hopefully as soon as next week.