Devil Works

I’ve decided to do a semi irregular post full of links and things I’ve found interesting on my daily troll of money making blogs. This is for a couple of reasons. Number one is that I waste a lot of time reading so posting about it will make it feel more productive. Number two is that I read so many posts that I struggle to find the good ones to go back to, so this should help.

Shoemoney has said phooey to industry stats showing use of Microsoft’s search engine offering has increased. He’s blaming the integration of search features into the 40 million copies of Vista that has been sold. I’d have to agree, I’ve been directed to the MSN site so many times since I got my new laptop……. but I’ve learned how to stop most of it

Aimee from Foximus tagged me with an 8 facts chain mail/posting thingo. I don’t go in for these sort of things, but I thought I should thank her for thinking of me Now I will probably have bad luck for the next 30 years. I can tough it out !

I really can’t complain about Askimet, since I’ve installed it on my blog it hasn’t let a single spam comment through on any of my blogs. Though checking a couple of them today there was a couple of comments caught in moderation that Askimet didn’t immediately label as spam.

So how did they get through ?

The clever individual used a Google translation link instead of linking directly to the site.

For example  instead of linking to

http://offensive-site.com

the link pointed to

http://translate.google.com/translate?u= http://offensive-site.com

I’m sure Askimet will get onto this one quickly and I can happily sing it’s praises again for ever and a day.

I’ve been doing the paid review gigs for a few weeks now and I must say that the following review that I accepted through Reviewme.com is the strangest yet.

I’ve been asked to review the CSV files page at CSVreader.com. Normally I could talk my way out of paper bag underwater but I’ve been staring at the page for an hour thinking of what people would find interesting about this page.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad page and it’s loaded with information about CSV files.

If you’ve read this far and you haven’t done any programming or dealt with financial data then your probably wondering what CSV files are. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values and according to the CSV files page:

files are commonly used to transport large amounts of tabular data between either companies or applications that are not directly connected. The files are easily editable using common spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel.

To be honest the main reason I have any familiarity with CSV files is that Adsense allows me to download my stat’s in CSV format. It’s a handy function which let’s me feed it into a spreadsheet and sort it in any way I can think of.

So if you are dealing with CSV files and want more information on how the file format works and what it’s limitations are then the CSV files page is well worth a look. It’s clean and uncluttered and doesn’t even have any advertising.

For those that haven’t picked it up yet this has been a sponsored post for Reviewme.com

I’m posting this for no other reason than to see if my blogs value increases over time. From what I’ve read it’s completely based on your Tecnorati ranking and as such isn’t much of a reflection of it’s actual value.

 

My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

It will be interesting to look back in 6-12 months and see what’s changed…… and for the record it’s not for sale at this price.

I checked a couple of my other sites and my credit card related one was rated at $1,129.08, it’s not for sale at this price, It makes me $100 a month even if I don’t post on it and has done so for the last 12 months.

My recipe blog is currently values at $564.54. Again it’s not for sale, I have a great 6 letter dotcom domain for it and with a bit of development it will be worth a lot more in the long run.

Funnily enough my ringtone blog was valued at the same price, I’m thinking that $564.54 is the starting price for any blog.

One of my biggest problems is that I’m constantly changing my plans. If you read back through this blog I’ve presented some ideas that I’ve never actually got off the ground.

If you read back to the retirement project that was a grand plan of 100 blogs earning $80 a month from text link ads. Although I think the theory is good. This has died for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s too hard for one person to maintain 100 different blogs. The second that is I was having trouble getting any decent PR or traffic to them, hence no link sales.

So my current plan is to maintain 4 blogs including this one. Three of them will get regular (weekly/daily) attention, the other one is what I’d call a side project that I’ll put some time into when I get a chance. My aim is to have the four well enough ranked that I make a few bucks from text link ads and a few more bucks from paid reviews. I think I’m doing okay with the paid reviews for now, I’ve avoided quite a few that are completely irrelevant to the blogs I have, even though the cash would be nice.

The other two projects I have on the go are an online workers resource, and a massive recipe site. This needs a lot of programming which I’m not in the right frame of mind to do right now but with the plans I have I can’t see it not working. At the moment I have about 40 recipes on it and it generates a paltry $2.50 a month. I’m calling it a proof of concept, I have access to approximately 170,000 recipes and if I manage to get the same sort of traffic to each of those pages then I’m looking at around $10k a month….. not so paltry now.

I know I’m not giving too much away but that’s the name of the game. I made a mistake a long time ago that cost me a lot of money. I had worked out how to get my sites onto the first page of AOL search. I started to share that knowledge with close friends whose sites weren’t competing with mine. That was all good, I didn’t have enough hours in the day to own AOL, but the close friends would tell their close friends and sooner or later everyone knew and the gig was up.

I’m a lot more careful now about who I tell what !

Something I have to spend a lot more time on is traffic generation, I’m really slack at it, these days I write something and hope the search engines find it. I know it’s not the best way to go but when I already spend a large part of my day job in front of a computer, It limits my motivation after hours. I really prefer the creative part of it as it doesn’t seem like such a chore.

Don’t forget my Alternative Alexa Train Idea, I haven’t been completely slack on building traffic.

Sitepoint is reporting Google is doing it’s visible page rank update again and unfortunately I’ve left my run a little too late with no changes happening on any of my sites.

All is not lost though. Google is constantly updating it’s page rank so even though this site might be reporting a PR of 1, It may actually be higher based on the new backlinks I’ve gathered in the last month or so. Therefore my rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) aren’t being effected just because my visible page rank is so low. Unfortunatley this is the situation across all my sites.

My main frustration from not improving my page rank comes from advertisers reliance on it as a measure of a sites status. Most of the review and text link brokers use it as a measure of how much a link or paid post is worth, so it looks like I’ll be in the doldrums for another quarter.

If you think your Page Rank might be updating then Dig Page Rank will show your PR as it’s been reported by the different Google Data Centers. If there are different numbers being reported from the data centres then it’s likely your visible page rank is about to change.

For a few more SE stats on your site, take a look at Checkpagerank.net.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t believe in the statistical accuracy of Alexa. However there are quite a few advertisers that do, so it’s well worth improving your ranking if you can.

I’ve been doing some reading this morning on what people are calling an Alexa train. I’ve googled “Alexa train results” and I can only find one person that’s bothered to report a positive result to it.

From what I can see, for this to work it’s got to rely on people clicking the links in train.

I’ve come up with another idea I’d like to try.

1. You will need to be using the Firefox Browser
2. You will need to install the Search Status Plug in. According to the privacy policy this reports your site visits to Alexa.
3. Create a new folder in your bookmarks, call it Alexa train or something similar.
4. Bookmark some of your sites and exchange bookmarks with some of your friends. How many you do is up to you, just keep in mind that the more you have the longer it will take to load.
5. Once a day, maybe when you are about to go make a coffee, Open a new Firefox browser, right click on your Alexa train folder and select “open in all tabs”.
6. This will load all the sites in a different tab, leave the window open until all the sites load then close your browser.

This in theory should show as a visit by Alexa. The downside of this method is that it relies on people to remember to visit there Alexa train bookmarks and it’s an honesty system so there is no guarantee that the person that’s put forward a site will visit anyone elses.
Now all I need is some people to test it. If you’d like to take part  leave a comment below and I’ll send you an email as sites get added to the list.

Shoemoney has posted today about a potential security bug in Wordpress.

If you have a standard Wordpress install and go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins then you will see a directory listing of the files in the directory and not an actual web page.

I haven’t heard of any exploits occurring because of this but it doesn’t take much to fix.

Just create a blank file in notepad or something similar, save it as index.php and upload it to your /wp-content/plugins directory.

Now I just have to go and update my other four Wordpress sites

After my Vista problems last week I still have one major issue that I haven’t been able to fix.

Windows will no longer update itself. Every time I try to check for new updates I get a message saying “Windows could not search for new updates”. With an error code 80073712.

I’ve searched all over the internet, Microsoft’s advice is to delete a registry entry using the cmd prompt. I tried to do that but the registry entry they specified doesn’t exist and there is no further information on what to do to fix this.

All the other info I found on the error is people like me posting on usenet and forums looking for a way to fix the problem.

I wasn’t going to complain about it here, but I just got a pop up from the tool bar saying windows updates are available, when I went to get them the I get the same error.

So I’m looking more forward to the day where almost everything I do is through some sort of web interface and I don’t have to rely on Microsoft to stay online.

I logged into my Adsense stats today to check on things and I noticed I’d received a message from the Adsense internal message system. The subject was “July 2007 optimisation report” I thought wow, Google are paying attention to my sites and are going to offer me some pearls of wisdom to increase my income.

And here it is………………….. hold your breath, it’s genius at work…………..

Placing more than one ad unit on a page often generates more revenue.

Thanks Google, I would never have thought of that on my own!