Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Some of you might remember a while back when I started bad mouthing Text Link Ads. Ads on this blog weren’t selling while I saw links on other blogs, blogs that didn’t have as high a PR or traffic rankings as I did, selling like hot cakes!

I noticed that my blog wasn’t listed in the correct categories and that my description was never changing even though I had tried to change it many times. I also had a few other blogs listed didn’t even get into the listings. I emailed a few times to the support team and had no response worth anything. I had all but written them off.

But I stuck with them and I’m glad. Although I’ve done a few things differently around my blogs to make them more “advertiser friendly,” Text Link Ads has become a lot more responsive. They’ve drastically decreased their turn-around time for answering emails. I know email them with questions and within a day I get a response.

Also, I contacted them directly about several blogs that hadn’t been accepted yet but had good PR, traffic, and solid back-links, and I was able to get those in. This has increased my exposure on their site, and I’ve been able to really boost my earnings over there.

Thanks for improving your service TLA. It’s always good to see a company respond to complaints.

The last few months have seen steady and increasing income from my blog network. This month, I can already say, I’ve surpassed last months earnings and we’re not even half way through the month.

Adsense: $202.94
Namedrive: $96.51
TLA: $44.10
Direct Link Sales: $130.03

Total: $473.58

Hoping to keep this ball rolling and improve it even more moving it to new methods to expand and focus (do those go together) the blog network.

Here are a few more earnings from around the way…
$474.51 for the Internet Cashflow Guy
$185.75 for a new one on my list Nomar.

and once again that’s it for the blogosphere of earnings that I follow. Not too many reporting what their earnings are these days. (Or maybe I just don’t follow them much anymore.)

For those of you who love to read about what other bloggers out there are making I stumbled across a great list of a lot of prominent bloggers and what their salaries might be.

I for one try to spread the love by updating you with the most recent earnings reports that make it to my reader but this list may be the best yet.

Paula Neal Mooney’s list contains bloggers from the top all the way down to the up and coming. Should you be on the list? Well if you think you should, just drop her a line or comment, I’m sure she’d be glad to add you, especially if you have a link to your earnings.

Speaking of which, maybe I should drop her a line, I should be close to the top 40 this year!!!

“OK Great,” says my fiance. But what foods can I eat then? “Vegetables and fruits,” I reply.

After explaining about the new volumetrics “diet” that I’m trying to stick with to feel full with less calories, my fiance wanted to know about what foods she could eat and was it just going to be lettuce and apples (both of which she’s not too fond of.) Googling around I couldn’t really find a good source of what foods we could eat so I thought I would make ya’ll a list.

This list is just starting and what I’m trying to do is show there is a variety of foods out there you can eat. All below an energy density of 2. Remeber:

Energy Density = Calories / Weight in Grams per serving

OK, after the last PR update and this blog didn’t even budge off it’s PR4 I’m on the hunt for quality link exchanges from others like me. People who are jumping into this internet web money making wonderness and want to get their blog’s PR up and spread the link love.

If you’d like to exchange links with me in your blogroll, just send over a comment and I’ll be happy to exchange links with you. I’m looking mainly for similar type personal blogs but will consider just about anything.

On a happy Google PR note Blogtown Press did see most of it’s blogs reach PR4 which is great! Now I just gotta get this one back up there again……

OK, so I admit, I’ve started to rock a little bit of a tire around the mid section. Nothing big, but noticeable none-the-less.

To try and get in shape in time for my wedding (which is in Hawaii, friends coming out, and I should really look like I actually play out here rather than work on my computer all day long) I’ve decided to cut calories and increase activity. The only problem is, I get way too hungry.

I’m trying and trying, but once 9 pm rolls around, I’m starving! I snack a little, not excessively, as a I used to but I’m still not cutting out as many calories as I’ve wanted to.

That’s when someone in my office, who noticed my disgruntledness (good word) at the candy jar, handed me over this great article from Newsweek titled Filling up with Less. It’s about a little known “diet” called volumetrics.

Volumetrics is essentially watching the amount of calories you take while still remaining full (or as they call it many times in the article, satiated. You eat foods that are not necessarily lower in calories but have higher densities usually as a result from more water in the food. This is called their energy density.

Energy Density = Calories Per Serving / Grams Per Serving

You want to eat foods that have an energy density of less than 1. Foods with energy densities between 1 and 2 are OK but should be limited and over 2, forget about it.

OK, so here we go, time to start eating many more fruits and veggies and get rid of that extra ring around the belly.

For those of you not aware I have been paying several bloggers to blog for my blog network Blogtown Press over the past 5 months to see where it can take blogs. The writers have been doing great, building content, and building a readership at each blog.

Out of the 5 blogs I have writers writing for only one of those blogs has been able to sustain itself and pay for the writer. We even had a few months where that one blog went over straight pay and into percentage partner. With that said, I am sad to report that I have had to discontinue contracts for three of the blogs and keep one of the writers as a single post by post contract blogger.

I feel this is in no way a reflection on their writing but more a reflection on how well I have run Blogtown Press. From a hobby standpoint. I still make money off it, and without having those writers on those three blogs, yes I will make more. But calling myself an entrepreneur I have to realize when I’m just foolishly spending money without a plan, which this was doing. More as an experiment.

Although I still think of the content they’ve produced as an investment, that content is unique and will always be there, it wasn’t building to anything. I didn’t have a plan.

My number one problem was:
1. I was spread too thin from the beginning. None of the blogs had a cohesive tie to one another and no one blog was focused on as the pillar blog of the network. Therefore, we didn’t have a large audience to launch new blogs to and we didn’t have a reason for readers to come back.

Also:
2. I wasn’t spending nearly enough time promoting and getting links. I had writers but wasn’t spreading the word about what they were producing.

Now don’t get me wrong, traffic and revenue have both risen, but not on the blogs that I was paying people to blog on. (Except One) Just building articles, PR, and SE presence allows me to gain more advertisers and gain more readers, and thus, gain more money. But I wasn’t building a business system.

So I’ve cut back on spending and I’m regaining a focus on a new venture that has 10 times more promise, 10 times more focus, and 10 times more people involved! (You knew I was going somewhere with this, more to come in the near future, but be prepared.)

Moral of the story, cut your losses so you can refocus and build back up. Oh yeah, and don’t get defeated.

I was originally going to put this link I found on paid links in my weekend entrepreneurial links post but then did some digging and decided it needed some separate post attention!

I found an interesting article on one of my semi-regular blog stops OsWorld.biz that glared out at me with the title The Death of Paid Links. Yep you read it right and it isn’t just an eye catcher.

As I dug deeper into what sparked Oli’s post I found a few sites that discussed the topic of Google using others to combat paid links as a way to boost PR and not traffic. (How the hell are they going to do that is beyond me) But the post in question is from Matt Cutt’s blog, the leader of Google’s webspam team, where he casually brings up the fact that there’s an easy way for webmasters to report paid links.

Well that casual blog post sparked a huge uproar that has 523 comments and counting!!!

Comments range from WTF to more sane comments that are really trying to understand how the system won’t be abused and how an algorithm will be able to figure out if the link was bought strictly for boosting PR or for traffic purposes.

I for one am clueless as to how they could possibly trust a reporting system that is utilized by the very people who buy links to take over the spot from other webmasters. Won’t webmasters report links that may not even be paid for links simply to lower the ranking of the both the sites, in turn making their site the higher ranking site.

Does this list go on and on with the flaw in what is being proposed here?

I’d also like to point out the Matt several times says he is just trying to widen the dataset for testing purposes. Although he doesn’t say it isn’t being counted this may mean that they’re just trying out their cracked out idea. Also mentioned, here and responds to a lot of good points here.

The most intriguing comment of the first 150 that I got through was one by Scott Fish (I’m assuming the DP regular) who brings up the clearest thoughts on the subject here discussing how they’re going to know.

Also of interest to a lot of you out there is probably this post at weblog tools collection about sponsoring themes.

I’d like to finish with a little advice. Try and use real SEO techniques noted in this Calacanis challenge update.

What do you all think?

I recently read an article in Business 2.0 about a company that is trying to make it’s own market on the internet.. They’ve cleverly hid the fact that all their trading is web pages by modeling them after real life real estate and people. It’s called Weblo.com.

It’s really an interesting concept. They name and group all their pages by countries, states/provinces, cities/towns, streets, and even buildings. Pages are then created, “owners” add content, make money, pay tax to what those groups they fall under as well as weblo and voila, you have a virtual market contained on one site.

If you really look at the idea it’s nothing more than what people are doing over at SitePoint.com, Digital Point, or a plethora of domain name reseller places out there. Except, they organized it under one place, can monitor it (tax it), and have a concept that is unique. Some of the most searched for things are what to do in city X or what celebrity slept with whom. They just built themselves a whole new organized resellers market.

In Business 2.0 they state the company claims to make $2 million in this quarter alone, which I don’t doubt. If you head over to the site you’ll notice that most of the major cities, even the obscure ones are taken and it costs a few dollars to “own” each one.

However, the long term outlook for earnings on the sites might be a little more suspect. Unless they get a killer format and a ton of webmasters that just love creating content (like wikipedia) the pages created will be useless. Many other webmasters will be able to build sites and take most if not all of the traffic away from Weblo.

But if you look at the concept strictly from an entertainment point of view, theres a million ways the site can go and be profitable, they just have to keep the audience there. Good luck with that.

About two months ago I wrote about feeling the digg effect where I talked about the great feeling of getting your article to the front page of digg and then quickly seeing your shared server plan crash to ground.

The residual effect of getting to the top of digg is immense. Although if you feel the effect and your server crashes that is a bummer in the short term, but all the links you get will help your page rank, your site promotion, and boost your readership (so long as you keep up the writing.)
Based on what the surrounding hours were receiving, the time I was down cost me about 30K visitors for the 3 articles I had dugg to the front page. Ouch!!!

It even prompted me to switch servers and plans.

I recently came across a interesting niche hosting idea started by this guy and another called SurviveDigg.com. A great idea, especially if they can keep up with staying true to their name and get to the top of Google’s search results for hosting plan that can survive digg (that should help ).

I don’t know how many times I searched for that on Google as well as all the forums I could find. It’s a tough subject because it seems like everyone has different answers about the same hosts and the same hosting plans. (ie it’s a crapshoot)

But the idea is definitely a great niche to go after and a product that I would have thought about trying had it been launched back when I was mulling over the decision to switch hosting plans because of the digg effect.