LinkMoney.org

Archive for December, 2008

Almost every day on various message boards or Blogs you will see a common question, “How can Blogging make money?” Many people get in to Blogging because it is a convenient way to write about subjects that they know about or want to promote.  After a while once the Blog has taken on a certain character and established a direction, then it becomes a pretty normal thing to want to earn a little income for your efforts.

There is nothing wrong with that.  Do not think that if you start to advertise products on your website or Blog that you will lose readership.  That does not happen.  As a matter of fact, most people expect some sort of advertising.  You are certainly allowed to reap a little benefit for your efforts.

So once you have decided to run some ads then what to do?  Well there are various ways that you may want to try.  I say try because this business of Internet Marketing is a constant effort of testing, testing, testing.

One easy way is to insert some ad blocks of Google Adsense text ads.  You will need a Google account, then use the simple set up procedure to select the size and type of text block ads and Adsense will generate the html code that includes your advertiser account number and you copy that block of code over to a text box section on your Blog.  You will want to experiment with different size ads that will match your Blog layout and you may also select different color schemes.

Now as your Blog is published Google analyzes the information on your website and decides what the theme or subject matter is of your Blog and will automatically generate ads for products that their computer determines would be a good fit for your Blog.  Some times the fit is not appropriate and there are ways to block certain advertisers but generally speaking the ads do match what you are writing about.

These Adsense ads are Pay Per Click ads in that if someone reading your Blog sees an ad of interest and clicks on it you make a little money.  You must NEVER click on your own ads, or have any of your friends or family members click on any of your own ads.  Google wants it to be a natural thing and they do have ways of knowing who clicked, and if it was out of real interest or a case of click fraud.  Do NOT under any circumstances do this, take my word for it.  If you do click your own ads you will be banned, your funds will be seized and there is no negotiation.

Another method to answer the question of how can blogging make money, is to use Affiliate Advertising.   We will cover this in another Blog post here on LinkMoney.org.

You no doubt know the power of Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and several other Social Networking Websites online.

This writer has made many nice connections in the past year through the use of these social networking websites.  Probably my all time favorite is Twitter because it causes you to think and react in short bursts of creativity.  Sometimes just a simple little bit of humor, one liners, so to speak, are enough to bring people to your profile and then that creates traffic to your website.

When I write a post for one of my Blogs that I feel is worthy of some attention, I just post a tiny description of the post on Twitter with a link to the site and traffic builds.  The more traffic you get and if you have good content, the visitors will subscribe to either your email or rss feed and you have a potential customer.

Twitter is very easy to use, just get an account and start reading some of the tweets, and “Follow” some of the fellow posters that you are interested in and then maybe they will follow you back.  Soon you will have a hundred followers and then more keep coming.  Try to make your 140 character posts of interest or exciting and you will soon find many new friends.

I must admit that of all the social networking sites online I probably spend more time on Twitter then all the others put together.  I read in a recent report that Twitter’s subscriber rate more than doubled last year.  So if you are not a fellow tweet, then hurry on over and join the other rare birds.  They say that birds of a feather flock together.

You will want to get yourself a handle that is easily recognized and in some way will represent you at a glance.  Mine is linkmoneydotorg for obvious reasons, and my image is actually a favorite photo of my Dad when he finished digging the cellar for our house with a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.  Dad would get a kick out of knowing that his picture is scattered all over the world.

If you have a website and you want to put a cute graphical link on it, then you can go to http://www.twitterbuttons.com/ and just put in your Twitter name and select from many of the nice designs available.

One really handy site that will help you keep up on the messages that your friends are posting as well as your @replies and direct messages is to use TweetDeck.  The normal Twitter page scrolls by quickly when you have many followers and people you are following.  TweetDeck handles this problem nicely.  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

Our next post is going to tell you about a place where you can go and see a list of social networking sites and also see if your handle of choice is available on all of them at one time.

Twitter is one of the most popular of all of the social networking websites, but in the next few posts we will be explaining what some of the others are and give our opinion of what the benefits of each are.

Come follow me on Twitter @linkmoneydotorg and I will follow you back.

Please feel free to comment here on this Blog about this Twitter post.

For once this post is not about me.  Go figure.

I want to call your attention to a really cool website that hit the ground running because it was dreamed up by our friend Garry Conn.  The site is http://www.BloggingQuestions.com and it is in a regular WordPress Blog format but works quite like a forum.

Here questions are posed by the readers and answered by the readers.  No matter what you want to learn about in the fields of Blogging, Hosting, Domaining, Internet Marketing, Social Networking, and the Search Engines.   This is a great venue to use to broaden your knowledge.

When you read down through the questions it is very easy to hit the comment reply box and put in your own two cents.  The site has been up a couple of months or so and is getting major traffic already, but the more the merrier.  Check it out.  This is one big happy family and I have seen none of the usual caustic replies that you get on some forums.  There seem to be No Spammers and No Scammers.

Here are some of the recent questions:
Do You Use The Google Keyword Tool To Create Post Titles?
Do You Include External Links In Your Content?
How Often Do You Use Images In Your Posts?
What Is The Best Hosting For a Blog?
Please Vote for Your Favorite Hosting Company for Tech Support
How do I upgrade from WP 2.6 to 2.7?
What to do with your empty domains to turn them into money makers
How Do I Find A Blog Writing Job Online?
Why Do Most People Fail At Making Money Online?
How To Get Traffic From MySpace.com
How Much Traffic Does The Average Blog Get?
What is better? Domain name prefix or suffix?
Unable to Register Another Blog Account in WLW
How Do I Add My Avatar To My Blog Comments?
What do you think the Google Page Rank will be for BloggingQuestions ?
How Do I Make My Blog Search Engine Friendly?
What Is The Best SEO Blog?
What is the best Social Bookmarking Badge or Toolbar?
What’s Happening To The Blog Commenting Community?
Do you submit the pages that you comment on to social networks?

That is only a partial list.  There are lots more.

You can sign up as a user and get access to the Blog dashboard and post your own questions.  The answers come from all over and are very informative and helpful.

Hope to see soon you over at Blogging Questions

Wishing you all the best for the Holiday Season.

Thank you all for reading LinkMoney dot org.

Rich

Update ***
A Very Merry Christmas update:

I wrote this post earlier today without knowing anything at all about the following.  But they say great minds run in the same gutter channel so I must have had a premonition.  Garry is giving away some excellent prizes and if you read this quick go follow his instructions to win.

Garry Conn wrote a post on his blog titled, A Surprise Christmas Bonus With Over $1500 In Free Gifts and I thought that you would like to check it out.

The recent spate of domain thefts that has occurred and some of which was reported here on LinkMoney (dot org,) has caused me to revisit my Gmail account and analyze whether or not I want to make any changes in my email security settings or in the use of Gmail for secure information.

When you are thinking about setting up a web based email account and you start thinking about things like “google mail com” you will obviously come to the “Gmail Register” page.  I have to admit, I Love Gmail. I was an early adopter and really loved the convenience of using Gmail accounts for all of my various and sundry Internet forays.  It is very easy to set up.  Once you obtain a Gmail address it is used throughout all of the Google domains, such as Adsense, Analytics, Calendar, Search, and on and on…

In other words, you open your complete identification and every single move to the Google bots.  No problem as long as you don’t care about what information a giant all encompassing humongous network of computers, all controlled by one company, collects data on you, like forever…

I live a pretty clean legal lifestyle and don’t really have anything to hide.  But, do I really want all of this stuff out there in the cloud completely columnarized and searchable by any one that has access to the data?  I think not, but alas it is already too late for me.

That said, there are SOME things that I think might be better deleted from my Google history.  I decided to start with the situation that made me delve into this train of thought to begin with.  That is my association with GoDaddy.

In each of the recent cases of domain theft that was storied a plenty, like HERE:  I Can Steal Your Website and HERE:  Stolen Website Returned and dozens of other places, it was reported that in all cases that  the  GoDaddy account holders that had been compromised also had been using Gmail addresses.

Hmmm.  Could it be a Gmail problem?  Matt Cutts from Google said that their security division was looking into it, and a few days ago on one of the mail lists that I subscribe to there was an announcement purported to be from Google that there was no security flaw in Gmail.

Well I am going to tell you about one very scary flaw that I discovered this morning on my own machine, but first I want to continue with my first train of thought.  So I decided that just in case, maybe it would be better to tighten things up a bit.

First, I changed my Gmail password, which hadn’t been changed in over a dozen or so years, maybe longer, ever since I had an account.   Now that doesn’t sound too difficult but it is a pain in the butt for every time you login from a new source or an offsite computer, or check your account setting, or sign into Adsense or sign into Analytics, etc., you have to go through the whole procedure over and over.  No problem, small price to pay if it makes you more secure right?

Second I went to GoDaddy and changed the password of my account there. Good, felt better.  Don’t get too complacent yet.

Then I got to thinking, why not go through all of my old Gmail messages and filter all of the GoDaddy messages, then archive them somewhere, and then delete them all from my Gmail account?

Guess what?  You can’t do that.  There is no method that I have been able to find that allows you to bulk forward, or save to your hard disk, any archived messages.  I checked in my control panel, online Google help, Gmail forums and anywhere else I could think of.  As a matter of fact in one of the Gmail FAQs they specifically say that you can not do that.  Bummer.  That is not exactly a great feature Google.  Duh.

So here is what I did for the past three hours.  I created a Gmail filter for all mail that came from GoDaddy and created a command that will forward ALL FUTURE messages from GD to my https secure email address that came with my ISP hosting account.  The operative word here is “future.”   There is no way to bulk forward all of the previous messages.

Not wanting to be beat by this, I went through each and every previous message from GD and manually forwarded them to my ISP email account, and after I heard the reassuring little blunk sound from Outlook Express that a new email had been received I then manually deleted that Gmail version.

Now there were three pages of messages from GD so this took a while.  I did not bother with the customer satisfaction surveys and the junk mail that GoDaddy constantly sends out, but all of the registration information, account names, passwords, etc., all went to my secure account.  Then I deleted them from Gmail.

Now here is the flaw that I discovered when I started digging into this in the wee hours of this morning. I have many Gmail accounts.  I have a couple of main ones that I use depending upon which hat I am wearing, but then there are many that were set up when I started a new website and wanted to have differing addresses for.  Owning or administering over a hundred websites, this can become a quagmire.

Lo and behold as I was going down through the list of names of my Gmail accounts that I had set up, I saw one that I did not remember setting up, though it had a slight twinge of memory associated with it.  Here is what I discovered.  Someone that called them self Tamara Underwood with a Sierratel.com email address WAS IN MY LIST OF PERSONAL GMAIL ACCOUNTS! What the Hell!

How could that be? I started digging in to finding out more about this name and the email account shown and found out that she/he had been in my Gmail account list SINCE 2001 !  Then the vague memory that I mentioned above kicked in and I do sort of remember this name and that at the time I also had all kinds of computer grief.

At about that time my main computer and my laptop both got infected with multiple viruses that eventually caused me to give up, reformat and reload Windows, because all of the tools at hand were not able to remove the problems.  I never tied the name Tamara to this problem, but it must have been so.

Through searching on Google I found where the same person had posted crappy nonsense comments on dozens of Blogs and message boards during 2001-2002.  In each case the comment would tell the reader to contact them at that email address.  So probably I did so, even though I know better now and never answer anything like that, I might have back then, and that is no doubt how the viruses got on my machines.

But it still does not answer how the heck that person could have gotten their email address in my Gmail forward to mail list?  Do you think that they have been receiving copies of all of my emails for these many years?  That does not seem likely or my life would be in a much bigger mess than it is.  It seems more likely that they somehow might have access to my computer and use that account to send out spam messages.  But still it is scary.  How could it happen?

I would say that this is a security flaw Google. Someone else with a California ISP address being in my Gmail list should NOT be allowed.  I’m sure you could put the blame on me after so many years.  I just vaguely remember the situation, but I am ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that I NEVER knowingly inserted that email address into my own account.

So what about you readers?  Do you think this is an email security problem? Did you go to the Gmail Register page?  Check your accounts.  A little housekeeping might be in order.  Our readers would love to hear from any of you that have had similar problems with email security, or if you have any questions or comments on this specific article.  Leave a Comment.

Now I have to go through and do all of the above for each of my other five domain registrars and website hosting companies.

See you in the spring.
Rich

You all know that in SEO that there is a right way (white hat,) a wrong way (black hat,) and a sort of in-between way (grey hat,) method of obtaining a good Google rank for your keyword of choice. I am not going to tell you any specific methods of white or grey ways because they are discussed ad nauseum throughout the whole Inter-webs and beyond.

I do want to tell you about a case in point of a wrong way that I can speak from experience on, and you are welcome to make comments or ask questions regarding same.

Here is the scenario. About six months ago I purchased a dropped domain name that is an absolute killer, very common three word phrase, that is a marketers dream for a domain name. These words fall into the class of Top 10 best, Best Deals Online, etc. They are three words that always would be used with a specific target product of any type, and not likely that anyone would ever use just those three words alone, and by the way it is a dot com and no hyphens. Oh and it came with a GPR of 3/10.

I had great hopes for this domain and commenced writing articles humping various affiliate products. All was going real well, traffic was starting to build and then one late night offer was too good to resist. You know the type, “100 links from high quality websites, spaced out over a month, guaranteed quality links, only $14.00,” blah, blah, blah…

What the heck, it’s worth a shot right? Wrong.

The company in India did exactly what they said they would do and starting in about two weeks I started to get notices of various websites that would send me an email saying that my link had been accepted for their website and when ever I checked them they were indeed applied. By the end of the month the 100 guaranteed quality links were posted and I started to get tons of offers to increase my fabulous deal. No thanks. Oh yeah, some of the quality sites were X rated.

This excellent domain name still ranks number one for the three word domain name, but that is all that it does. There is absolutely no data shown in the serps for this site, just the domain name, nothing cached, no article titles, no article excerpts, nothing, zip, nada. It’s great to be in first place, but remember no one would ever use just those three words without a product or item included as well. So I reign supreme over everyone with this site, but you will never know it. The site now has a GPR 0/10.

You no doubt have heard that Google uses a sandbox to stick brand new websites in so that they don’t just pop up over night ranking for a keyword over all of their good paying customers. There is a lot of discussion from many people that are all very experienced and most all of them have differing opinions as to whether or not there is such a thing.

I did a little searching on the subject and found some older posts from a few years back where this was talked about, and a couple of them are as follows:

webmasterworld.com

The existence of a new-site “sandbox” (which delays the site being ranked well for months) has been a topic of debate among SEOs.

From a forum that I did not record the url for:

In reply to a question, Matt Cutts of Google said that there wasn’t a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.

Mark Mason told me in a recent message that there was no such thing as a sandbox, but call it what you will, this little treasure chest of a domain name is in limbo somewhere. Not one article comes up in G search anywhere.

What am I going to do about it? Not much. I will still write articles for it and not lean on any affiliate deals, just put up articles discussing marketing in general. I will still do some article submissions and link to it, but I will not ask anyone to link to this site, not ever. I will strive to put up quality content and hope that at some time in the future it will have the dark cloud lifted.

I suppose I could go back and try to have some of those 100 links removed but that is a huge pain in the ass. This one site out of over a hundred niche sites and a few primary Blogs is not going to kill me. I learned a huge lesson that I will never forget. The site cost fifteen bucks and some man hours. I’ll move on.

Was I trying to game the system, you bet. Did I know better, you bet. Did I think I would ever get caught, no way. Please take my word for it, don’t try anything like this.

In case you think, well there is no way I would get caught, just think of some of the things that we all do without even thinking. Most of the people I know in Internet Marketing are using WordPress Blogs. If you do, you no doubt use Akismet as a spam blocker right? Well every time you activate Akismet you must include your unique WordPress API key right? Do you think that Mother G does not know each and every site that you own or operate?

If you use Adsense, and most marketers do, then your Google ID is known. If you use Google Analytics, then your G-ID is known. So it doesn’t matter if you spread your websites out over several different hosting companies, there is no place to hide.

Remember, it is not nice to fool Mother Google.

My how the times have changed!

The popular Internet social/micro message blogging platform, Twitter.com, gives you 140 characters to get the job done.  This creeps some long winded (a-hem) people out, and to others it is the all saving grace.

Make your point in 140 key strokes or die.

So along comes TinyURL.com a neat service that takes any length url line that you can type into it, or copy and paste into it, and then reduces it to just a few characters, say about 10 to 14 or so.  This is a really nice feature. It is free, and there is an add-on for most browsers, and it allows you to include a link in your Twitter message that is much shorter that the original and then you can type more BS in your message box.

Now along comes a new company, XR.com.  That is their real url, XR.com.  See where we are going here?

This company XR is already a leg up on the competition because their name is shorter, XR = 2, TinyURL = 7.

XR wins the “Mine is Shorter Than Yours Contest” ! -  (I bet you never thought you would see the day…)

What it boils down to is if a shorter url encrypted line is needed, then you should try XR.com.

Thanks to JohnChow.com for this great news, and John is running a contest right now, until Christmas that is sponsored by XR and you can win SIX THOUSAND BUCKS!  American Moolah!  Casherino!

The lucky winner, (wouldn’t it be nice if it was moi?) will receive $5,000 to go to their favorite charity, (like The Salvation Army,) and $1,000 US dollars to use for themselves in any way they want to.

Now that’s what I call a contest!

Here is a link to the contest post: http://xr.com/7vz

I’m Rich

Do NOT buy any of the following list (small partial list,) of domain names that have been offered recently.

Problems.com
Mistake.com
Enroll.com
Damaged.com
Statement.com
Evaluate.com
UnClear.com
Upset.com
Shetty.com
Pleased.com
Returns.com
Suggestion.com
Suggestions.com
Replacement.com
Explanation.com
Explanations.com
Failures.com
Inquiries.com
Apologize.com
Volunteer.com
WebsiteFinder.com

(This is only a partial list of a very long list of extremely valuable domain names.)

Apparently some character who is known and has done this many times before, has struck again.  He has figured some way to hack into someones account and transfer the domains unknown to the rightful owner.

He has even had the audacity to set up a website to offer them for sale, but beware. If the deal sounds too good to be true, IT IS! Do NOT buy them.

Owners and registrars are scrambling to get them returned but it is a big pain in the you know what. The thief evidently is insulated in a foreign country that protects him.

The whole story is told in depth on the Domain Name News website with links to various sources.