What is a backlink and why is it important to the money blogger?

A backlink is a link on somebody’s blog to somebody else’s blog. Since counting backlinks is one of the many ways through which bots estimate the quality or popularity of a blog, understanding the art of backlinking is essential to the successful blogger. Here are some tips:

Backlinks are originally meant to point a reader to logouts that are even more interesting than the one you so painstakingly composed. All very noble of course, but the aspiring money blogger is ultimately more interested in the benefits of back linking than in the needs of a visitor. A money blogger’s goal is to have the visitor exit the blog through an ad but of that can not be achieved, then let it be through a backlink that is designed in such a way that it generates more traffic than it loses.

All bloggers are interested in how their blogs are perceived on line. A link from someone else’s blog will be shown in all kinds of reports, and a blogger who is so novel as to burst out in hallelujah’s at discovering that he’s linked to, will follow the link back to you. If he then discovers that his link sits in a paragraph full of praise, he might favor you back with a link of his own. The key here is to find a new but good blogger, who appears to be serious and qualified enough to bring his blog to a success. A link to your blog from a super blog weighs much more than 10 links from a bunch of nobodies.

The obvious hidden message here is that when you link to an article fro the New York Times, nobody over there will come to you, and you will only lose visitors. So yes, link to CNN, the Huffington Post or the Discovery Channel if you seek to educate the masses. But link to a first year student of journalism or a blog that automatically shows the backlinks if you want to earn money.
 

Is your Boss a Dick? Then read these Essential Anatomical Tips for the Work Place

Probably the most frustrating part of having a dick-boss is that dicks were designed to hang below, not over you. But now that you find yourself under the management of a dick, you may want to consider the following:

1)
If you are about to leave your sixtieth job because your present boss is a dick, just as the previous fifty-nine were, then chances are excellent that you are a bigger dick than all of them. Much better than leaving, again, would be going up to your boss and saying, “I’m afraid I’m a bit of a dick, but I’m trying not to be. What can I do to improve?”

2)
Sometimes people become bosses because they are natural leaders. But often it’s because folks have flaccidly convinced themselves that the only way to get some respect is to have the power to fire people. The best way to handle this is to find a perfect balance between kissing his ass and letting him know that you won’t stoop down.
You will observe that colleagues who are predisposed to become dick-bosses themselves will gather around the dick-boss in a kind of kiss-ass chorus. It takes quite a bit of effort to withstand such an atomic formation, and usually the quality of your work has nothing to do with the appreciation you’re getting. Should you want to have a stab at replacing your dick-boss, make sure you get noticed by the higher management without the dick-boss knowing about it. When a dick-boss realizes that you’re better than him, he will not report you as excellent, but will rather try to have you fired. All dicks are self-oriented.

3)
If you have a dick for a boss you also have a job. Since being jobless is far more frustrating than any dick might ever be, you should count your blessings and stop whining. According to some estimates, all bosses are dicks; it takes a special kind of person to want to rule or subdue other people, but there are also plenty of folks whose leadership is ultimately beneficial for everyone. If you should have a dick for a boss, try to figure out how you might benefit from his treatment. But, most importantly, very carefully remember how you now feel, so that you may keep yourself from ever becoming like that.

4)
Never forget that it takes strength to be courteous and accommodating. Most people get cranky at the end of a difficult day but some of us get up that way. Being a dick equals being weak. Weak people get nervous from strong, meaning nice, people. Ergo, if your boss is a dick, don’t be nice. Dicks have a natural tendency to become bigger when confronted with niceness.

5)
If you want your dick-boss off your back, take careful note that someone who’s a dick will most often target someone who’s a pussy.

Blogging for Money: Google ads, Googlebot and luring those elusive visitors.

Blogging for money is a lot of fun but making enough money to live off it is as achievable as living off acting or music. Yes, it’s possible and people do it but getting there is as difficult as getting to Eldorado. Here are some tips:

Maintain a single theme on your blog. Obviously, the blog you’re reading now is fantastically violating that rule, and that is why you see ads about Filipina girls looking for rich men. Ads without a specific target group get dumped on blogs without a specific theme. Dump-ads like that bring in very little cash. If you want more expensive ads, focus your blog on a theme that high-rolling advertisers dig (like banking, tourism or the new Volkswagen Nifto).

If you want to know which advertisers pay lots of money for their campaigns, take a walk around town and look at billboards, or switch on the TV and take notes during commercials. Companies that advertise on street-side billboards and television are surely also advertising on line. Themes that have close to nill revenue are themes like philosophy, social injustice and evangelism. Organizations that usually go around asking for money, won’t be giving it away through advertisement on line. If you love to write evangelistic and also would like to make some money, then split these endeavors up. Make money on a blog on the automobile industry and spread the gospel on a blog on evangelism.

New in the history of publishing, bloggers have two distinct audiences to woo: a human audience and the machine audience. And both are to be wooed with care and precision. Machines like Googlebot determine what your blog is about, and tie your blog to advertisers. If your blog is about money making, then Googlebot (or rather Googlebot’s nefarious cousins Mediapartners and Adsbot) will look for Google Adsense advertisers who have indicated to want to publish their ads on blogs about money making.

That means that you may write excellently to human eyes, but produce nothing but nonsense for a machine. The rule is simple: machines don’t read but count words, and look at the position of words relative to other words. This article is not only about blogs and blogging (and the machine goes ‘mark,’ ‘mark’; hey this article is about blogging) but more specifically about making money with blogs (aha, says the machine, again an instance of the word ‘money’ in close vicinity of the word blog).

But a smart use of keywords alone is not enough to lead the bucks to your wallet. Machines also try to estimate how the other audience, the human audience, likes your blog. That they do by looking at how many other publications link to yours. The more links to your blog the machine finds anywhere on line, the more popular your blog must be, and thus the better its quality is. It’s good to have a large amount of visitors, but it’s evenly important to have a large amount of backlinks. The more you have of either, the higher your blog will be in search listings, the more your blog gets clicked on, the more visitors you’ll get, and the more backlinks you’ll gather. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg deal, but there are ways to help the egg. Or the chicken. Or the egg:

Obviously, you’ll tell everybody you know that you’re writing a fabulous blog that they simply must check out, but don’t fall in the trap of asking your friends and family to click on your ads. The machines are very clever at distinguishing organic traffic (honest) from inorganic traffic (dishonest), and your blog will be booted off to cyber Hades.

But what you can do is partake in forums and every time you post something, you also leave a link to your blog. Backlinks are backlinks and it doesn’t matter to the machines who’s putting them out. You can also combine your blog with a YouTube account. YouTube allows you to add URL’s to your submissions and channel and profile, which ads up to yet more backlinks. The working day of a commercial blogger should consist of 70% writing, and 30% promoting, or rather: partaking. Nobody likes remarks on their forums such as Hey, read my blog! But a careful response to a topic that shows that you’ve read the discussion, signed with a link to your blog, will surely draw a few readers off the forum and onto your articles.

If you are a prolific writer, try to avoid posting twenty daily posts on the same blog. A modest following is beneficial to your commercial enterprise, but nobody wants their blog-readers cluttered with only your wisdoms, which will lead to them deleting you. Smarter is to start a few separate blogs. That way you can write about more themes (one theme per blog) and you can also link from one blog to the other(s), which again count as backlinks.

Choose the titles of your blog articles carefully. Make sure they convey the content of your article (for your human audience) but also the keywords (for your machine audience). If you want to blog for money it’s crucially important that you attract new audience. It’s of course wonderfully gratifying to have a steady following, but steady followers are less likely to click on your ads. Adsense advertisers pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of times that their ad is shown on your blog. Ten thousand faithful followers will gobble up the budget for ten thousand ad views, but of ten thousand new visitors there are bound to be a few that were looking for something else when they clicked on your blog in their search results. With a little luck, your blog is not what they were looking for but the website behind your ad is. Those are the folks that click on your ads and make you the money. This sadly means that the most successful commercial blogs are often the worst in providing the information you hoped to find when you saw the title of their article. But then, those crappy not-saying-anything blogs don’t get a lot of backlinks, and all the other bloggers that are serious about writing will end up higher than they in search results.

The aim of the money-blogger is therefore an almost Buddhist middle of the road approach. Literary quality should be reserved for books and nerdy magazines, but the money-bloggger must show quality enough to be amusing but not so much that keywords hardly get mentioned.

And speaking of tens of thousands of visitors: one click on a Google ad may make you any amount between 1 cent and a few dollars/euro’s. I’m actually suspecting that some ads will make you only a fraction of a cent, and once I threw a party for neighbors, friends and family because I had earned four euro with one single click (because no, this blog is not my only Internet publication… :) I also own http://arie-travels.blogspot.com/ and http://www.abarim-publications.com/ and a few others).

It’s also been my observation that only one in a few hundred visitors will click on an ad. This obviously also depends entirely on the quality of your ads. I’ve had mornings when 300 visitors clicked 13 ads, while on other days I paced around nervously because 2000 visitors hadn’t seen warrant in clicking a single one. But what I’m saying is that it may take a few million visitors per month to make enough money to please your landlord and feed your kids. In other words: don’t sell the bike shop, Orville.

Another pitfall worth mentioning is: don’t get hung up on your statistics. It may take a year before your blog gets noticed by a large human audience, or pushed up the ladder by the machines. But when this happens, you better have a big library of articles to take along for the ride. Success in blogging usually happens with one or two hit-articles. It may be an article that’s been sitting on line for six months that all of a sudden gets noticed by a blogging big shot, who backlinks to it and who shoots you to blogging star dom. It’s highly unlikely that this will happen when there are only three articles on your blog. When you write for joy, the humans will come. When you write with skill, the machines will come.

Happy blogging!

Check out my Travel Blog

Like literary travel blogs? Then check out my new blog:

Arie's Travels.

Have fun!

10 Great Truths

Truth, like infinity, comes in different sizes. But in my short life I’ve gathered ten great truths that guide me through the slings and arrows of everyday's most quiet disaster. Here they are. Benefit from them:

1) Certainty is a futile virtue.

2) It’s never too late to go back to bed.

3) When you see a cow fly by, there’s probably nothing wrong with the cow.

4) People believe the weirdest things.

5) Some systems of belief are not based on scientific rigor, may seem fantastically psychotic but are in essence just a lot of fun.

6) Everybody has a story.

7) The love of a man for his woman is not in the woman but in the man.

8) The presence is the only real point on the temporal axis.

9) It’s probably not that bad.

10) The world turns because of forces that are greater than any of us.

Facebook and Twitter account password for grabs in WiFi networks

Just on the news: a harrowing warning to all users of WiFi networks.

A freely downloadable and easy to use program called Firesheep, allows felonious hacks to copy the inlog data of someone else on that network. Facebook and Twitter accounts are up for grabs and identities get stolen like there’s no tomorrow.

Eric Butler, who developed the program, submitted that his program would be a success only if it doesn’t work anymore. Until then: networkers beware! The program has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.

Confessions of a Lurid Logophile

Logophilia is a serious affliction, although its passions are easily satisfied. Words, after all, are ubiquitous.

Hence the logophile slithers in stealth through towns leaving townsfolk heedless of his urge to slurp their word straight from their street signs and bill boards. He’s got to! He’s a rain-coated, portal dwelling, window glaring logophile! Any message. Any language. Gimme, gimme!

Why there are people who love words straight up, without them being applied in a sentence, nobody knows. Saying you’re a logophile is like saying that you love musical notes, or bricks, or little squeezed out paint tubes, while ‘normal’ people like symphonies, architecture and paintings. But I am one, and I’m coming out. No more hiding. I’m going to tell the world why I love words.

To me words are little animals with their own little body and soul. Even when they’re not in some natural habitat such as a sentence or a dictionary, they are alive and have personality. Some words are as common as sparrows or grass, but other words are rare and when I see them I study the whole paragraph to see where they live and what they’re up to.

I positively thrills me to see a word that I haven’t seen before. Of many words I remember where I heard or read them first. Some words I’ve only read and never heard pronounced and I wonder how to say them. Some words are funny every time I see them. Take the word ‘buses’ for instance. To me that looks like the plural of ‘buse,’ and whenever I see it, I have to chant it: buse, buse, buse.

Some words are little sculptures with their own tiny structure. Words like ‘bob’ or ‘pip’ for instance, are delightful palindromic sprinkles that work excellently in sentences that are supposed to be funny. A word like ‘trinket,’ is a cute butterfly with i-wings. It works wonderfully in sentences that are meant to be staccato, for whatever reason. Words with z’s are zip-words. K-words are abrupt and sometimes a bit harsh on the pallet. W-words are soft and fuzzy. S-words should be avoided when it rains.

Some words are a lot of fun simply because they’re impossibly long, and you have to practice saying them before you can dazzle someone with them. I love the words rambunctious, facetious and bodacious for that reason, although the –ous part marks a special word-genre that usually indicates that the speaker doesn’t know what to say next and is only saying that word to buy some time.

Some words are fun because they’re constructed specifically for that reason. A word like discombobulated, for instance, is a made-up word without any clear etymology. But it’s fun to say, although you can only say it about once a year, or else you’re silly. I wonder where it came from, though. I’m guessing that it is rooted in an event in which someone purloined an item that rightfully belonged to a communications officer named Robert.

As odd as it may seem, some folks (including me) see colors in words. It’s a condition called synesthesia (a.k.a synaesthesia) and it’s a delight. To me, words that feature a royal helping of the letter ‘a’ seem red and warm. Double ‘e’- and ‘i’-words are cooler and bluish and sometimes yellow and pale. Z-words are grey. Words that start with a ‘q’ evoke in me the same kind of feeling as do those little wobbly caramel puddings. Any ‘x’ gives me the taste of chocolate chips on vanilla ice cream. Subsequent diphthongs, especially French ones, will top them off with a shot of cherry goo.

And because items are named different in different languages, my personality and world-perception changes when I switch between languages. To me, relationships in English are much more romantic than relationships in Dutch. But relationships in Dutch are much more practical. In fact, when I’m out engineering (I’m a maritime engineer) I speak either perfect Dutch, or English involuntarily with an accent like a log. But when I’m out composing poetry or high prose or otherwise pretending I’m some kind of academic, I speak English fluently with hardly a hint of Nether-Germanic contamination.

For some reason I always get furiously indignant at some point during a conversation in German. Excursions in any of the Slavic languages lead invariably to slurred redundancies. I’ve never had a Hebrew relationship, but once I tried to explain myself in Latin and got promptly send to the principle.

Discombobulative barbarians!

New Blog!

Abarim Publications has its own blog now. The blog that you're on now will feature only articles that don't fit on any of my other blogs...
For Scripture Theory, go to:
http://bibletheory.blogspot.com/

Gerrit Aalten finds the Ark of Noah!

Moved to: http://bibletheory.blogspot.com/2010/10/gerrit-aalten-finds-ark-of-noah.html

What is the number 666, and should we be worried?

Moved to: http://bibletheory.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-is-number-666-and-should-we-be.html

Some Really Shocking Things I’ve Learned From Looking at People’s Blogger Profiles

Google’s famous blog-service Blogger lets you reveal all about yourself on your profile page. You get to list your interests, favorite books, music and movies. And the fun of all this is that you can click on any of your interests to see who else has the same one. Here’s an exiting survey of how seriously common I am.

An army of 25,000 bloggers are, like me, interested in “science” but only 3,500 in “Bible.” I thought I’d be marvelously eccentric, but 5,000 likeminded bloggers favor Ghost World, a whopping 7,100 bloggers co-favor the movie Pi (one guy also likes “kicking puppies”) and an avalanche of 10,000 bloggers like Steel Magnolias (almost all females, some very pretty).

On the other hand, a measly 552 marked A Love Song for Bobby Long (I really don’t get that. What a film!). Only 59 remember Bar Fly, but 7,900 love Brazil! The amazing documentary Why We Fight is favored by a pleasing 301 bloggers, one is a fast-posting self-proclaimed drunkolexic called The Hangover Helper.

A disappointing 55,600 bloggers list the Bible among their favorite books.

There are 151 people in the world who are interested in “peace and quiet,” only three who like “rarity” (two guys, one lady, who is also the only one in the world who’s interested in “ample bosoms”). And while I’m at it: I’m one of eight people who have “Position Of The Day” in their fav-book list. And six of them are women! What’s up with that?

According to Technorati, the most popular not-mainstream-media blog belongs to a Chinese actress named Xu Jinglei. Somebody ought to buy her a bigger server because after two days I’ve given up trying to get in. The most popular blog at large is that of the Huffington Post. And isn’t that cute. I remember when they started. They were actively looking for supporting bloggers, as I recall. Do’h!

World-wide there are about as many blogs as there are people living in the US. About two-thirds of these blogs are considered inactive, but one may wonder how long you’d have to slack to get that predicate.

Math readers don’t seem to blog much. Only seven favor Mathematical Mysteries, a mere three like Fermat’s Last Theorem, but a comforting 39 like The Man Who Knew Infinity.

There are only 51 bloggers that list La Proulx’s Close Range. After Brokeback Mountain you’d figure more people would like it. There are only 59 bloggers that like Gulag! Outrage! And this makes me want to go quietly back to bed: there are only 3 fellow lovers of The Amazing Adventures Of Cavelier And Clay. Oh, wait, that’S Kavalier with a K. Ah, there are 821 blogger who know how to spell Kavalier. But I guess most readers of Pulitzer Prize winning literature don’t blog.

I’m the only one who favors Brown, Driver and Briggs, who is a Maritime Engineer, who’s interested in “struggling but serious writers,” “women named Anna” and “grace in all simplicity” (that’s a Shakespeare quote). I am also the only one who lists “Lieve Jongens” under favored books. That’s peculiar because it’s a famous book and the author died a few years ago (and there are 79,300 bloggers listed in the Netherlands).

Only one other person lists the very famous Dutch novel “Ik had een wapenbroeder.”

I would also be very interested in (the results of) a research project that looks at which kinds of literature and movies are favored by people who blog and what they write about. Wouldn’t that change the way we advertise our books? But they’re probably already doing that. I haven’t come up with an original idea since the urinal-incident of 1973.

And I would also like Google to create a feature that lists how much your profile and someone else’s are alike (check out Chainsaw Killer’s blog; he’s 98% like you!). That could easily spawn a Google-dating service!

Rejoice with me, my friends: > 100,000 page views per month!

Moved to: http://bibletheory.blogspot.com/2010/10/rejoice-with-me-my-friends-100000-page.html

What happens when you click “share to Facebook”?

I love little buttons everywhere but I never use them when I don’t exactly know what they’ll do. Maybe it’s a precaution I developed from working in engine rooms for two decades. You wouldn’t want to press a mislabeled self-destruct button, after all.

Still, I’m too curious to know what the “share to Facebook” button will do. Will it hurl my entire article onto my wall, or will it list a discrete first line and a snazzy invite to ‘read more…’?

There’s no other way than to try out. Here goes…

M. Night Shyamalan’s Happening: The Apocalyptic Genre and the Bible

Moved to: http://bibletheory.blogspot.com/search/label/Night%20Shyamalan

Regret

Actually, there’s one Triond article that I briskly deleted from their crypts that’s nothing short of brilliant! So I’m posting it here, even though it’s a movie review of two years old. At least it won’t go down the tubes. Maybe someone somewhere will accidentally stumble upon this blog and enjoy it…

Clean!

There! I did it! I finally deleted all my Triond articles and photos! I suddenly feel so clean…