ITV has sold off Friends Reunited. For a huge loss. Apparently something like a £100 million loss. Bizzarre-o-world. But then, they did pay over the odds for the site in the first place. I mean who buys a website for 120 million quid?

Anyway, it’s gone to some genealogy based website down under. No idea why they think 25 million is a good price to pay for a dinosaur of a website, but there you go. Close that bastard down and syphon all the users over to twitter rocket I say.

(or where I examine my search engine terms)
Well, I thought it was funny anyway. Am I a scam? What on earth would the underdog be scamming you out of anyway? I don’t sell anything here….simply throw some thoughts out on why I used to have some pagerank and now don’t. Anyway, top of my list is the old Moon Movie Sam Rockwell search term. Still hasn’t opened in the UK. Next month apparently. Then I just have to schedule some babysitting somehow and sneak off to watch it

Anway, now that my blog is back from purgatory, at least google is indexing it properly again, so I can get a little traffic my way. Not that it matters much, like an underdog chasing a bus, I wouldn’t know what to do with it once I’ve caught it. Pish posh.

Today’s music of choice is Tycho which to me sounds a bit like nostalgia. The track of choice is called “Past is Prologue”. While I’m listening to this, I’ll be watching Hannah Solo’s blog. Partly because I’m curious, partly because I don’t really believe she is a real person. But hey, for all you know, neither am I, I could just be a big scam of an underdog.

(or where I tell you how not to make money online by developing your own wordpress theme)

So, I’ve been developing a wordpress theme for fun and profit. Well, fun mostly. Because I’m not going to try and sell it or anything. Just give it away. I mean why not – there’s so much free stuff on the net these days that I have taken advantage of, that it seems only fair.

But anyway, in honour of my development work, I thought I would change up the wordpress theme here at the old underdogblog. Gone is the gloom. You are now witness to a new white minimal theme. Not one I developed mind….you can’t upload your own theme on a wordpress.com hosted site. Well, you probably can if you pay them, but then you might as well become self hosted….and since this is my exploration of how to make money online for free, I’m not quite ready for that yet. See in this respect, blogger completely owns wordpress. On the free blogger platform, you can do anything you want. Change up the theme completely if you feel like it. Mess with the colours and stylesheet. Everything. For free. But that’s google for you. They get your data, you get free shit

So anyway, here’s an image pre-makeover….

Chaos theme on the underdog blog

Journalist 1.9 theme on underdog blog

Thing I’ve learned while messing about with creating my own theme is that wordpress is a great time sink. At the end of the day, you spend a lot of time tweaking your design to get it pleasing to the eye. Time you could have spent getting more content up or creating more niche blogs or getting yourself some backlinks……I mean it’s not like there aren’t tons and tons of free themes out there already. You could probably earn money taking online surveys in the time it takes you to create a wordpress theme…even if I’m not a big fan of the get paid to initiatives (perhaps and understatement since I have previously proclaimed them to be the worst way to make money online). Of course, giving away a theme is a great way to get backlinks, as long as people start downloading and using your theme. And there’s the rub. Kind of a catch 22 – you need traffic to get people to download your theme to get traffic to your website . Aaaah there’s that trademark cynicism. Yesss, you thought I had lost it didn’t you?

Anyhoo….just so you know, spring cleaning and all that – the best way to spend your time when you should be making money online.

(or where I consider how to ask)

So, I don’t know about you guys, but I got an email yesterday asking me to write some articles for a “new” site called dev grow.  I’m not linking it up, because.  Well I’m just not.  I suspect a fair number of you also got the email because I would be surprised if these guys found me through a search engine given that my blog is so new and all.  So I rekon at least some of Upstart Blogger, Clog Money, The At Home Couple and Avon Blake got a similar email.  A form email toboot.  There’s no “Hey, I’ve read your site and particularly like the blog you posted on blaa blaa blaa, would you consider expanding on the topic bla bla bla”.  Nope, they obviously hit me up, strolled over to my woefully inadequate about the underdog blogger page, grabbed my email and left.  So I snoop around a bit.  Seems devgrow used to be a web 2.0 social application that didn’t make it.  May as well re-launch eh?  It’s a nice enough domain name.  So what are they flogging?  They want me to write them an article related to designing, developing and growing a website…..they get free content, I get a free backlink.  Sounds like article marketing to me.  Just in a blog format rather than an article directory.  I checked the code and so far the backlink isn’t a nofollow (I’m such a suspicious asshole aren’t I?).  Now I’m going to go all primadona and rant a bit.  I think they would have done better to leave some pertinent comments on one of my blog posts to pique my interest…..I haven’t seen any comments on anyone else’s blog either so I don’t think these guys are too much into caring and sharing here….more of a sneak night time hit and run, fire and forget tactic.  The way they’ve approached it is “come and leave stuff on our blog and contribute to our community, but we aren’t gonna extend the courtesy of joining in the debate on your blog”……which is a bit of a wanker way of going about it.  Unless of course you are already well established with huge pagerank.  I mean, let’s not kid,  if a prominent blogger with good pagerank invited article submission, with or without hitting up my comments, I would be all over it.  I would work with them to make sure it met the tone of their blog, and that the content was relevant.  But these guys?  I should feel privileged to write for them with a big fat pagerank of 0?  That’s the same as my pagerank.  Pfffft!

So it’s a nice looking site.  I sniff around a bit more.  Read the site.  Nothing groundbreaking, but what the heck, I’ve got nothing against the content that is up there already.  But the underdog smells some shit.  Monetisation.  Of course they are going to monetise the site.  It’s all set up.  There’s a little link inviting you to advertise on the blog.  You can contact them for rates.  Not even pretending to have a courtship with their readers before milking the mooolah.  So I shoot them back an email asking for a bit more info.  Like if they plan revenue sharing with the authors (ok, a bit cheeky, but what the heck), what advertising they plan to allow and how they plan to promote the site.  Fair questions I think for a new site.  I mean you want to know what kind of bedfellows you are lying down with right?  I think a day’s grace is enough to respond to an email expressing interest in the site, you know to take into account time differences and such.  But nothing.  No response.  At least they could make an effort and pretend they like me before they fuck me.  So I’m going out on a limb here and calling bullshit.

One thing for sure, I figure dev grow got themselves a nice spike in traffic.