Thursday, December 9, 2010

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.
 

Sunday, December 5, 2010

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!