Approval ratings are down

(or where I tell you why your comment did not get approved)

C’mon – really who the hell posts obvious comment spam on such a low volume shitty blog like this? You know who you are, and I’m not approving that shit. Add something useful without trying to blag in a few backlinks to your made for adsense site. I got nothing against trying to earn a crust online. I’ve got a few sites that I’ve set up to try and earn a little from adsense…..but I don’t go round trying to get backlinks like a wanker…….Leave a comment, by all means, but including spurious links inside the comment rather than just getting the more “honest” backlink from the link on your name is just being an asshole.   Heck, I would even have approved it if you put your preffered anchor text as your name and left something vaguely sensible.  Besides anything else, you must know that comments are nofollow by default….

So why? Why do you masquerade with your seemingly appropriate on-topic comment which will only gain you nothing in the long run? Don’t do it. Just don’t do it.

Meh, don’t know why I’m writing this, you probably aren’t a repeat customer anyway.

grrrrr!

Anchor text is the most important thing

(or where I tell you how to get more hits for keywords by using it in your anchor text)

It’s no secret that I think organic search results are the way to go for making money online.  The social web is great, and fun, but I don’t think social traffic converts well.  I mean, you guys are reading this right?  Most of you browse here from other blogs that I’ve left a comment on.  How many of you feel like throwing me a little affiliate bone and buying some cool web hosting?  yeah…..none of you?  Hmmm that’s my point entirely.  See now if I ranked really well for the search phrase “where can I buy cool web hosting”, then I bet I would make a lot more money, even if my traffic halved.  Why?  Because people browsing this page would already want to buy something.  They would be looking for a product.  You lot are just looking.  Buncha of tire kickers, the lot of you (but I still love you all, please leave a nice comment….I will bribe you if I have to….what do you want? ).

Yeah, so how to get all important organic search traffic?  Backlinks.  That’s the way you get up in the ranks of the old backrub search engine….erm I mean google.  You know, I offered a link to someone a while ago, asked them what anchor text they wanted.  Their reply was “I don’t care what anchor text you use”.  Really?  I mean really?  you don’t care?  You should care!  you should care a lot!!!  What if I link to you with the phrase “cunty the sardine”?  You going be happy with that?  Is that what you want the big G to associate your site with?  Really?  That’s an anchor text you want?  Man, sometimes I wonder…….tell you what, someone offers me a backlink with my choice of anchor text, I thank them profusely and consider carefully what I want to rank for.  That’s what I do.

With that in mind, it’s always interesting to see what organic search phrases you are ranking for.  Take them, analyse them a little and decide which ones you want to rank better for.  I mean, might as well capitalise on traffic right?  So, what have people searched on to get to me?  Well, some phrase are just bizzare.  I mean someone actually found me with the phrase pavlov vodka. lol…..have to chuckle at that one. Another reader hit me from using wealthiest adsense. Wow. That one I wouldn’t mind more of. That one and a few related searches could bring in a tidy profit if handled correctly. How about wordpress theme. Woooooosh……that could bring a rush of traffic. Might not be profitable given the vast expanse of free wordpress themes out there, but still. My favourite so far: the best and worst way to make money online. That’s the money baby! Give me that one. Then I paste up a thin affiliate site with a bunch of reviews of some cool products….give a few “editors picks” and hey presto.  That would really turn this puppy into a cash blog.

Pay attention to you anchor text. If someone offers you a choice…..grab it with both hands!

Who do you have to insult to get a little traffic around here?

(no really, insults get results apparently)

So, who among us can forget Avon Blake.  The little upstart crashed into the blogging world in September, promising to give away a free version of Thesis theme that was coded by Chris Pearson.  Well, actually what Avon promised to do was rip the code, make a few tweaks and release the theme.  He was greeted with both hostility and admiration in the blogsphere, and given a few good links from posts on UpstartBlogger (that’s a PR 7 at the moment from what I can tell, so pretty good quality links).  He got tons of traffic, promised an iphone givaway….and then, after a few more posts went silent.  We are still waiting for his invasion.  A lot of people commented on his first blog post, telling him not to steal code, giving him instant notoriety.

Oh code, people are so possessive over their code, but code wants to be free.  Personally, I think anyone who codes and says they haven’t “borrowed” (and by that I mean stolen) bits of code from others is lying.  If you’ve ever coded a “hello world” or a “bubble sort”, you have stolen some one else’s code.  Plain and simple.  I like the idea of free software, it is the only way we progress……this quote in particular

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

Which I have grabbed from the GNU homepage.

Oh crap, off topic again, so Avon came a-calling and seems to have left.  Well, for all I know he started his 9 other blogs and is making a killing off them. (as an aside, de might have left his theme too late though, I notice Revolution has gone open source)  Maybe he is making money online blogging…..spurred on by Upstartblogger who encouraged him to start up his blog in the first place.   Now and then his blog changes a bit, so I guess he still has it on the backburner.  Recently he got a slap on the wrist from the lawyers at Random House because he promissed to give away a copy of the four hour work week.  Lol…….The irony of this just makes me laugh.  Maybe his invasion will come.  Maybe not.  Maybe he has realised that the make money online niche is over-saturated.  Everyone who wants to make money online seems to start a blog about it.    Avon was going to smash the established order.  He was a punk.  A rebel.  I looked forward to him slamming the A-listers, calling them out, establishing a new order, telling it like it is.  I’m waiting.   I have him to thank though, because he was the straw that broke the camel’s back and got me to start this puppy up.

Now a new upstart (and again linked up from the ultimate upstart of upstarts, UpstartBlogger), Hannah.  Great domain name – HannahSolo.  She grabbed her traffic by insulting Darren Rowse, commenting on his blog and telling him, essentially, that he is full of shit.  Telling him he was running a scam.  Well, she didn’t get the same response Avon got judging from the comments on her blog, but still, she has grabbed a slice of traffic.  I hope this one keeps going.  I hope she keeps blogging.  I hope we haven’t been swindled yet again with a lot of bluster and then no follow through.  I think Hannah should drop by every A-lister and tell them to get stuffed……and write about it, and get a following and then promote a product   Oh the irony that would entail.

I wonder if the new way to mdake  a name for yourself in the blogsphere – or in this little niche of the sphere is to insult people to get an initial run of traffic.  or maybe it’s just a style, born out of people who read upstartblogger…..or maybe Ashley Morgan is getting together a little army of young bloggers to take the power from the established bling bloggers.  Or maybe Avon and Hannah are related to Ashley.  Or maybe they are Ashley lol…..who knows.  If this were hollywood, Avon and Hannah would blog, against the odds of the A-listers trying to silence them, dodging site hackings, insulting all and sundry, eventually they would become aware of each other, fall desperately in love and marry at the wordpress headquarters, with Ashley Morgan riffing in the background with some Miles Davis influenced version of “Here comes the bride”…….   if there’s a tear in your eye, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

edit….oh I’m too late….the linking has begun.  Hannah has found Avon.

Maybe it is just youthful exuberance, maybe this is how kids can make money these days.  I don’t know.

Maybe I should insult someone to get me some traffic.  Who should it be?  Who is worthy of my insults?  Which pro-blogger needs to be randomly critisised and told they are full of shit?  All of them you say?  Fair point.

Write right

(or my take on article marketing)

Meh, most mmo blogs aren’t really giving stuff away anymore are they?  I mean internet marketers out there are simply turning a profit from rebranding the same old tired shit again and again and again and creating false demand based on fear alone.  It’s getting about as bland as Article marketing isn’t it?  But it does get you some backlinks and it does get you some more exposure.  And even if you get sandboxed, you can still pull in some daily traffic from your articles alone…….like what has happened to my site on Georgina Baillie…..coded, up, running, article submitted, indexed in a flash and sandboxed two days later….. lol  meh, someone’s gotta get a little link love from that whole festering arse-up of a publicity stunt.  And it might as well be me.  I’m not in this one for the money, cause I have no idea how to monetise a celeb site, even one that has the added allure of kink in it.  But it will give me another farm blog to play with and link from.  See what I mean?  Why is nobody talking about farm blogs?  Why I ask you?

Anyhoo…..article marketing is a bit of a pain in the arse.  It gets soooooo dull: browse, login, cut, paste, submit, browse, login, cut, paste, submit, browse, login, cut, paste, submit.  You know how it goes, because you’ve done it haven’t you?  Of course you have.  The underbelly of internet marketing practically forces you to use ezinearticles or goarticles or a host of other directories.  And the thing is, they get tons of content.  So much so, that I’m thinking I need my own article directory.  Shit.  Did I just give away an idea.  I mean talk about a bucket load of content for free.  Damn it.  Not since I gave away the best free internet marketing experiment of all time has such an idea been put forth.

Anyhoo, I got bored with submitting articles, so I thought I would take some time off my rabid link building of the past week to do 2 things:

1) Start coding up a wordpress theme.  Always wanted to do this so I thought I would give it a go.  Seems like fun, and it falls into a master plan I have for mid next year.

2) Write an article submitter.  Shit, I don’t want to pay someone else for a glorified browser with a few automated bits.  How hard can it be to code up one of these puppies?  Not very as it happens.  I’m writing a small and very basic submitter in c# at the moment, and I am genuinely surprised at how easy it is.  Maybe when I’m done, I’ll release it   and charge for it or alternatively, just inject links to my sites ever 50th article or so.  Woulth that be immoral? But hey, think about it, you purchase an article submitter to whack out your hand crafted puppy to however many gazzilion article directories.  Do you ever check that the article got submitted properly?  Do you ever validate the links?  Do you ever think that maybe the guys who coded that little beast might inject their own links randomly?  No?  you bunch are very trusting aren’t you?  (As an aside, and at the same time, /* begin slightly shady section */ I looked into Markov chains a bit, but it looked too bloody booooooooooring to code one up so I think I’ll just hack something together from other bits and bobs floating around there.  There must be a Markov chain wordpress plugin somewhere with a cron job to automate the process, but I haven’t bothered to look for it /* end slightly shady section */.  And again I ask, why is nobody talking about farm blogs? hmmm?).

By the time I’m finished writing it, though I expect article marketing will be so passe that no-one will be doing it any more.

oh well.