Devil Works

A while back I posted how I was removing my RSS subscription from Problogger as I no longer felt I was getting value for my my readership time.

Every few months I’ll drop in on his site too see what he’s up to. When I dropped in on the problogger site today I saw one of the posts that Darren had written  himself discussing his May Income breakdown.

I did a little bit of basic financial analysis and have estimated that his income for May was approximately $62,500

Here’s how I did my math.

Darren posted that 2% of his income comes from the job boards.

Currently there are 25 Jobs posted on the board and the advertised price for this is $50 and the listings last 30 days

So based on 25 jobs posted a month at $50 a listing, this makes 2% of his income equal $1250

Logically this extrapolates out to $62,500 as 100% of his income for the month of May 2010.

I wonder how this compares with John Chow and Shoemoney? They don’t talk figures these days either.

On the bright side for Darren is that if May is an average month then his annual income is looking to be around the three quarters of a million dollars, but I’m tipping it might just be a bit higher……

Disclaimer: These figures are just my hypothesis. I don’t know exactly how many jobs Darren listed for the month of May, nor do I know how much the percentages for his income were rounded.

Being a little bit lazy I just Googled a domain name of mine as I wasn’t sure if I had a wordpress blog on it or if I’d moved it onto Adsense for domains.

My site showed up half way down the results page with a wordpress looking URL “?p=7″ so I thought I still had it running wordpress, but I clicked through to the page and there was Google Adsense for domains.

Now going off my own vague memories it’s at least six months since I moved my parked domains to Google, but they are still indexing the old content. Nice!

I get the whole point of the phrase “Pro Blogger” is about being a professional blogger and a couple of years back I really liked Darren’s work, He was making a full time living blogging part time, while he wound up some other commitments. He had blogs about things and monetised those blogs and shared his knowledge with fellow bloggers. Nice Guy.

But my marketing brain is now seeing another marketing brain and it seems he’s more about making hay while the sun shines than educating other bloggers about making money.

I have no doubt the $1.95 a month forum will do very well for Darren, but not so sure about the subscribers. Hopefully most of them won’t miss the $1.95 a month, and I’m sure the Pro Blogger will deserve to keep his title when he’s raking in the dough from several thousand subscribers.

But I’ve seen enough.

Let me start by saying I am a Namecheap customer and I like them enough that I plan to move a lot of my domains away from GoDaddy, However Namecheap have started an affiliate program and the payouts aren’t very exciting.

Dnxpert is lauding Namecheap’s release of an affiliate program but I’m not sure they’ve read the fine print.

When you look at the details and then compare it to what google will pay per click, for domain name related traffic, you have to ask yourself if the affiliate program is worth the effort.

I’ve just moved 10 blogs between servers and unfortunately this is the only one that I’ve failed to restore to it’s original condition.

<boring tech bit>I’ve got the database dump saved, so perhaps one day when I have some fiddling time I’ll work out how to upload it into phpMyAdmin without it getting an invalid archive error. </boring tech bit>

But until then I’ll be blogging from scratch.