Feed aggregator

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/UNE9rRMWHe0LkPOINASIrz9F7qc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/UNE9rRMWHe0LkPOINASIrz9F7qc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pThe future of Search Engine Optimization This past year I have been fortunate to rank a number of blogs on top of Google's search listings and the result has been a steady stream of income from...br/ br/ Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?a=pvYsscpJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?i=pvYsscpJ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MakeMoneyForBeginners/~4/1t82Tx6ozhw" height="1" width="1"/

The future of a href="http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/"span style="font-weight:bold;"Search Engine Optimization/span/abr /br /This past year I have been fortunate to rank a number of blogs on top of Google's search listings and the result has been a steady stream of income from Google Adsense, selling Advertising space and Lead Generation. This is passive income that is generated daily regardless of how much I post and is not dependent on social media or social marketing. My interest online is to make money with the least amount of effort required. My methods are widely used by Internet Marketers and almost completely unknown to Bloggers. In fact, the prevalence of social blogging has obfuscated what was once widely known - that search traffic is steady, it converts into sales or clicks and it can be grown almost exponentially by simply targeting more and more keywords. br /br /The advent of social marketing has produced bloggers by the millions, each one chasing a dream of large readerships in hopes of generating buckets of income. Each one almost completely ignorant of search traffic or the benefits of high placement in the serp's. The irony is that social traffic is much harder to get on a consistent basis, consists mostly of other bloggers, doesn't convert into buyers and requires a huge time commitment. Worst of all it generates no income until you are able to achieve "authority" status in your niche and are pulling in thousands of visitors a day. Even then your revenue consists almost entirely of advertising fees generated by selling space to other bloggers trying to monetize your traffic. They find out soon enough that your traffic doesn't convert either - how many of you buy or click on the ads pasted on the A-List sites? The A-List is fortunate that there is no shortage of new advertisers willing to fork over large sums in order to replace former advertisers who learned that social traffic doesn't convert. In most cases the A-List is paid to promote sign-up programs - more social media networks for the most part. An endless circle...br /br /The fact that there can only be a limited number of A-List sites or authorities in any one niche is lost to the masses who believe they have what it takes to reach the top. Everyone, it seems, believes they have the right stuff. I have seen a lot of bloggers rise quickly - develop a decent readership, some good PR and just as quickly lose interest in their blog in spite of thousands of RSS subscribers. Why? They don't make enough money to cover the time commitment required to keep the blog fresh in the readers mind. br /br /The alternative to social blogging is of course span style="font-weight:bold;"SEO/span or span style="font-weight:bold;"Search Engine Optimization/span. In truth this can and should be applied even if you choose to chase social traffic. I don't chase social traffic at all but because of my high serp rankings I find that social bloggers find me anyway. I mention this simply to point out that those of you hoping to gain fame and recognition for your work can achieve it by dominating the top rankings in the serp's and save yourself the countless hours of work needed to make a name for yourself in the social arenas.br /br /As 2008 draws to a close I have given a lot of thought to how Google will tweak its algorithm over the coming year. Without getting long winded it doesn't take a lot of imagination to assess Google's predicament; the search engine has to have a means by which to rank sites based on keyword relevancy - the easy part and it has to have a means for deciding which relevant site should rank at the top of the serp's - the hard part.br /br /How would you do it?br /br /Would you rank sites based on their RSS subscribers?br /br /Would you rank sites based on their Page Rank?br /br /Would you rank sites based on their social links and traffic?br /br /Would you rank sites based on their Alexa Rank? Their Compete rank? br /br /Would you rank sites based on the fame of the site?br /br /If you would entertain any of these ideas then your ranking system would lead to a useless search engine. All these methods are easily gamed or have no relevancy for the vast majority of niches. How would sites related to "Oil Filters" be ranked if Google used RSS subscribers as a basis for ranking?br /br /Google's predicament is that it has to have a system that works for all keywords and not just those that apply to social niches. Many a social A-Lister has preached that Google will use social media in its rankings - a belief that I find laughable. Google has been eliminating metrics that can be easily gamed - not adding them to the mix. br /br /Ultimately the only system that works well but is not perfectly fair is to rank sites based on incoming links. Yes this can be gamed as well but for the vast majority of niches this is still the best measure of a site's authority. br /br /Rather than find a new system Google has methodically tweaked its system to degrade or dismiss links of poor quality and give greater weight to links that are deemed high quality.br /br /Almost all social links - Do-follow comments, Bookmarks, Digg, Stumbleupon etc are considered low quality and while they may be registered by G they will not gain you top ranking in a competitive niche. They will work fine in an un-competitive niche but even then a single link from a quality source will outrank all your low quality links.br /br /Google's algorithm will reward you well if you follow my recommendations outlined below.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"4 Steps to Google Dominancebr //spanbr /Keyword Researchbr /br /Forget Quality Content (No such thing to a machine) - use Relevant Content.br /br /On Page Keyword Optimizationbr /br /Develop 1 way Inbound Links to your site. br /br / br /Target the most popular keywords in your niche, add relevant content, use your main keyword in your URL, Blog Title, Page and Post titles and then spend the rest of your time developing quality inbound links. br /br /I have said this many times - quality inbound links are the single most important aspect for ranking well in Google. br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"The 5 Measurements of Inbound Links/span br /br /The span style="font-weight:bold;"Quantity/span of inbound links. br /br /- This is least important but effective for low competition keywords.br /br /The span style="font-weight:bold;"Title/span keywords on the page linking to you. br /br /The span style="font-weight:bold;"Anchor Text/span used in the link pointing to you. br /br /- You will span style="font-weight:bold;"only/span rank for the terms others use in their links pointing at your site. This is crucial for gaining top ranking. br /br /The span style="font-weight:bold;"Relevance/span of the content on the page linking to you. br /br /- The site with the most keyword anchored links coming from relevant content posts/pages will outrank all others.br /br /The span style="font-weight:bold;"Quality/span of the inbound link. br /br /- The best link you can possibly get is a PR10 link using your main keyword in the anchor coming from within a post relevant to your keyword. The further from this optimum the less quality the link. A few of these quality links will easily have you outranking sites with 1000's of lesser quality links. br /br /I have not talked about Domain Age or the popular SEO blathering regarding keyword density, blog platforms, site design, posting frequency or any of the other "tips" spouted at length by all the so-called experts online. The reason is simple - it is all window dressing in the greater scheme of things and ultimately unimportant when it comes to serp domination.br /br /The simple truth is that I can rank any site on top of the serp's with the right backlinks and provided the site has legit content (but only because it may get a human review - I could do it with spam if I only had to dupe the machine). How much content or how well it is written is insignificant for ranking purposes. br /br /If you just have to chase social media then do yourself a favor - as you get yourself known ask your friends and readers to use your keywords when they link to you. Do you know how many times I have heard a social blogger tell me that social media is great because it gets them PR and backlinks. When I check they have hundreds of links using their name in the anchor. Yup - they rank really well for a term no one searches for. What a waste and yet the links could be so beneficial. As for PR - just remember this - your own PR has no bearing on your ranking. It's the PR of the sites linking to you that effects your ranking and only if they use your keywords.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Making Money Online/span is not complicated. Rank on top of the serp's for as many keywords as you can. Add Adsense. Collect money. Rinse and repeat. br /br /It really does work and I hope many of you will achieve the same success as I have over the coming year.br /br /Have a very happy and prosperous 2009br /br /Cheers,br /br /Griz

About two or three times per year I rotate through all of my advertising networks to see how they are performing.  I think it’s a good idea to test all your ad-networks every once in a while to make sure you aren’t missing out on any potential earnings - a network that performed poorly six-months ago might do much better today (not usually, but you never know).

These are my results, listed worst to best, for the year - with the last test finishing up just a day or so ago.  Note that due to the various TOS’s, I do not include any actual CTR, ePC, eCPM or earnings data:

____________________________________________________________________

BidVertiser: very low CTR and even lower earnings.  A waste of my valuable page real-estate.

Adbrite: I put the most time and effort into testing Adbrite because I have read of many other publishers that were getting good results.  But for me, it just did not work out.  I tested both text-only and banner units and after ~100,000 impressions, earned only a few dollars.  It seems that most publishers generating good earnings with Adbrite are using their “full page” ads which to me seem to be the #1 way to piss-off/drive away potential visitors.  Adbrite also has “in text” ad-units, but I did not test them.

Chitika: Chitika’s new “Premium Units” performed fairly well.  These ad-units only display to search-engine traffic and target ads based on the keywords used when searching.  This type of keyword targeting results in very relevant ad-units and very good CTR.   You can configure the Chitika Premium Units to display another ad-network such as Adsense or YPn for display to non-search engine traffic - otherwise direct/non SE traffic will not be shown any ad-units.  Chitika also has an “in text” unit which when tested earlier this year performed well.  Some publishers do not like the “in text” type ads, but I don’t have an issue with them - although I only display them to anonymous vistors, not registered members.  With Chitika you also get a dedicated account manager for support which is a big plus.

Yahoo Publisher Network: YPn was a real surprise this time around (this is why I test a few times a year!).  I have done nothing but badmouth YPn over the last several months, but now I’ll eat my words and take it all back.  This time YPn gave well-targeted ads, fair CTR, and decent ePC.   YPn also has support!  When I had a question regarding the Yahoo Publisher Network TOS, my email was replied-to in less than 24 hours, and when I had a follow-up question a YPN representative called me by telephone to avoid more email confusion.  YPn also has a toll-free phone number for questions/support..  Yahoo Publisher Network gets my “comeback of the year” award!

Kontera: If I was comparing only the last 2-months of the year, Kontera would be the clear winner.  But since i’m comparing the overall performance of the entire year, Kontera comes up a strong #2.  Kontera’s in-text ad-unit performance started out slow this year generating about 50% of what Adsense generated on a daily basis.  But beginning around September/October Kontera was earning 80%-90% of what Adsense was doing, and by December, Kontera was generating approximately 200% of what Adsense was (that is more than double Adsense on most days!).  Kontera’s other strong-point is support.  With a dedicated account manager that you can contact any time by phone or email (and actually get a response) this puts them far ahead most of the other ad-networks.  Some publishers do not like the “in text” type ads, but I don’t have an issue with them - although I only display them to anonymous visitors, not registered members.  Many publishers have also complained that Kontera slows-down their page load times.  If you experience this, be sure that you have your code loading at the very bottom/last of your page right before the /BODY tag.  I have never experienced this issue, and I check/test almost daily.

Adsense:  Still king over the entire year, but if I was comparing only the last few months, it would fall to Kontera as #2.  Excellent ad-inventory and near-perfect targeting no matter what your niche/content makes Adsense hard to beat.  Combine that with (usually) good/high ePC and Adense is still #1.  The Adsense support team does well in answering support-requests (usually in 48 hours or less), but you don’t get a dedicated account manager unless you are in the “UPS club” (a really, really big, Premium publisher).

____________________________________________________________________

Remember: Just because an advertising network performed good/bad for me does not mean you will get the same results.  Whenever anyone asks me, I recommend trying everything and sticking with what works (seems almost obvious, eh?)..  I also recommend trying different networks every several months as I do to make sure that you are using the best-performing network - you never know when you might be pleasantly surprised.

Affiliate Links: This post contains affiliate/referral links.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

Today as I was going through my daily duty of banning scraper IP’s that were systematically crawling pages or downloading my sitemap, I came across one IP that stood out. 

A quick WHOIS revealed this:
OrgName: eHarmony.com
OrgID: EHARM

NetRange: 204.16.72.0 - 204.16.75.255
CIDR: 204.16.72.0/22
OriginAS: AS23112, AS36793
NetName: EHARMONY-COM
NetHandle: NET-204-16-72-0-1
Parent: NET-204-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1.EHARMONY.COM
NameServer: NS2.EHARMONY.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2005-10-21
Updated: 2008-07-08

Why would eHarmony be downloading sitemaps from other websites?  Last time I looked eHarmoney did not have it’s own web-search, so why?

I don’t know the answer, so if you know please post a comment.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/n5CJnkcSPc3fAQbCEReN2mSzrU0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/n5CJnkcSPc3fAQbCEReN2mSzrU0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pThe following links contain articles written by my readers and friends who have been kind enough to write reviews of this blog - How to Make Money Online for Beginners. What goes around comes around...br/ br/ Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?a=RyXvo60w"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?i=RyXvo60w" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MakeMoneyForBeginners/~4/VdKKZTeNLJQ" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/WdVSAUUaybahqJ9nxNwgqd23WNc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/WdVSAUUaybahqJ9nxNwgqd23WNc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pDumb question - are you looking for backlinks? I'm posting an article below written by RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex. I have known RT for a while now and he has created a site which will enable...br/ br/ Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?a=aSiypbxi"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?i=aSiypbxi" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MakeMoneyForBeginners/~4/9U6rnH-1zUw" height="1" width="1"/

span style="font-weight: bold;"Dumb question - are you looking for backlinks?/spanbr /br /I'm posting an article below written by RT Cunningham of a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.untwistedvortex.com/"Untwisted Vortex/a. I have known RT for a while now and he has created a site which will enable users to obtain "relevant" one-way backlinks from within the community. I'm not a sales man so I'll tell you up front that it will cost you $12 a month to join. This isn't a pitch to make money though and $12 is cheap anyway - this is a pitch to see if anyone is interested. I'll let him explain the system below but I want to mention that this wont work unless we get enough people interested. One hundred would be good - a thousand even better. Is it Black Hat? Let's call it grey.br /br /RT offered me $6 a signup (you get the same deal as an affiliate) but I have removed my affiliate link from the article - I don't want you to think I'm doing this for the money - I'm doing this because I myself would like to find another "network" for building links. This could be the best yet but not unless we get enough people to join who understand the value of "relevant keyword anchored" backlinks. I would have made the system free to use but RT is wary of the amount of spammers it would attract and settled on a small fee. Most link networks run $150 per month.br /br /Btw - I say we but I am not involved as a business partner or agent of any kind - just a user and it's in my interest to convince as many of you to join up as I can. I want this to work.br /br /Many of you know RT so I don't need to hype him - he's a good guy testing out an idea that should work. Nothing is certian as we all know things like this depend on the active participation of others. We all know how that usually turns out.br /br /Is this Google safe? Nope - nothing is but this is about as hard to track down as anything I have seen. Hard because the links will all be from relevant sites - using relevant anchored keywords - and contained in a real post. These - in case I haven't mentioned it more than 100 times - are the best links that you can get. Bar none. They are also the absolute hardest for competitors and Google to spot let alone penalize. Remember that 100 or so links like these are what puts my new a href="http://makemoneyonlinegrizzly.com/"money making/a blog so high in the rankings, in a competitive niche, in less than 5 months. These kind of links are gold and as you all know are a real pain to get. The difficulty in getting them is also why Google weights them so heavily. Conversely do-follow comments are easy to get and not endorsed by the site owner and hence have little juice - if any these days.br /br /Well that's about as sales pitchy as I can get. If you have niche sites built then you need links. I hope we can all work together and help each other out.br /br /I'll hand this over to RT now...br /br /-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------br /span style="font-weight: bold;"R.T. Cunningham - /spana style="font-weight: bold;" href="https://connectcontent.com/"ConnectContent.com/abr /br /br /As Griz has mentioned many times on both of his strongmake money online/strong blogs, there are multiple ways to build backlinks. I don't want to spend any time rehashing what works because I want to emphasize a different and possibly better approach to building backlinks. Before I do that, however, I want to quickly mention what doesn't work very well.br /br /strongComment Chasing/strongbr /br /A whole lot of people spend a whole lot of time commenting on "do follow" blogs in their efforts to build backlinks. There are several problems with this tactic. If the blog owner doesn't delete your keyword anchored in the name field, chances are that your keyword still won't be related to the topic at hand. While experts may tell you that any backlink is better than no backlink, backlinks that have little relevance don't do much -- they don't carry any link authority.br /br /strongReciprocal Link Exchanges/strongbr /br /Besides carrying far less weight than one-way links, reciprocal link exchanges between relevant blogs takes up a lot of time. In my opinion, that time is far better spent on working out one-way link exchanges. One-way link exchanges are actually the same thing as reciprocal links, but without being directly linked. Party A links to one of party B's posts and party B links to one of party A's posts but from a different post.br /br /The hardest part about link exchanges of any kind is getting the links with the right, targeted anchor terms. Anchor terms that point to blog post titles, blog titles, blog author names, etc. are just about worthless most of the time.br /br /strongThe White Hat Google Game/strongbr /br /If you read what Google has to say about link exchanges, you have to write content that naturally compels readers to link to the source to be completely safe. It's a nice thought, but it doesn't work in the real world unless you're a socially popular blogger.br /br /That kind of thing defeats the purpose of targeting search visitors in the first place and doesn't make any money for you or for Google. In my personal opinion, it's a smokescreen for what they really want you to do and I'll leave it at that.br /br /strongWhat Always Works/strongbr /br /Linking from within a post to another post on another blog with targeted, relevant anchor terms will always carry the greatest amount of link authority. You can get very few links of this kind and literally watch an optimized post rise to page 1 of the Google SERPS if it doesn't have too much competition. If you get a lot of links of this kind, you'll destroy the competition.br /br /This is where span style="font-weight: bold;"ConnectContent/span comes into the picture. It's all about embedding relevant anchor terms into older posts or creating new posts around relevant anchor terms. The procedure is so simple, it's almost ridiculous. You list your desired anchor terms and where you want them to point to and other people grab that information and put it to work. The site takes care of the tracking part of it.br /br /It isn't free ($12.00/month or $120.00/year) even though I think it should be. The problem with providing a powerful tool like this for free is that the scammers and spammers would come out of the woodwork to take advantage of it while everyone else would get left behind. Not only that, but I think the generous 50% commission could really be another asset for anyone able to drive the affiliate sales.br /br /strongWould you get penalized by Google?/strongbr /br /Since I announced the public launch of ConnectContent, the most frequently asked question has been "Does it leave a footprint that Google can detect?" The short answer is "No, not if you do it the way you're supposed to do it."br /br /Ever since people were slapped by Google for doing sponsored posts (paid links), something I call "Google Paranoia" has set in. Everyone seems to be worried about getting penalized by Google for one thing or another. I think the biggest problem is that people refuse to read, or they don't understand, the Google webmaster guidelines concerning - Webmaster Help Center" a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356"target="_blank" rel="nofollow"link schemes/a.br /br /Google talks about excessive link exchanges, both reciprocal and otherwise. In other places, Google talks about relevance. The Google search engine algorithms are all designed around relevance because that's where they make their money -- by showing AdSense targeted to specific content. Their automated spam detection techniques are also based around relevance. Their algorithms, other than checking for duplicate content, are very good.br /br /ConnectContent is a link exchange in the loosest meaning of the phrase, and not much more than the web as a whole. The entire purpose of the network is to list what you want as anchor terms as opposed to people guessing what you want. There is no guarantee that your requested terms will ever get linked to and that's what sets it apart from other networks and it's why I think it wouldn't matter to Google even if they knew what links were being generated and where.br /br /Despite my beliefs, I don't want to make it easy for anyone (not necessarily Google) to see what's going on. No real names are ever used and nothing is publicly displayed outside of the network. I'm more concerned with malicious individuals (your competitors) than I am with Google. The gist of all this is that producing logical and relevant backlinks should never incur the wrath of Google.br /br /-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------br /br /Thanks RT.br /br /Nothing more to add other than I hope you will give this a shot. Follow the link if interested and thanks for reading. a style="font-weight: bold;" href="https://connectcontent.com/"ConnectContent/abr /br /br /Cheers,br /br /Griz

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/N6mQsGNXx04BxKYGhW-qX9YeR_Q/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/N6mQsGNXx04BxKYGhW-qX9YeR_Q/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pTips for Optimizing your Adsense Earnings A common mistake beginners make is adding Adsense to a brand new blog. I have talked about this before but a refresher is in order as well as an update on...br/ br/ Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?a=QH5rgi9q"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?i=QH5rgi9q" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MakeMoneyForBeginners/~4/QJb3wFQ5384" height="1" width="1"/

span style="font-weight:bold;"Tips for Optimizing your Adsense Earnings/spanbr /br /A common mistake beginners make is adding Adsense to a brand new blog. I have talked about this before but a refresher is in order as well as an update on how I monetize with Adsense.br /br /Most new blogs have no traffic at first so there is little point in having Adsense on it. Doing so can send out flags that the site is a made for Adsense blog and this is a no no with Google. You are not allowed to create a site for the sole purpose of making money with Adsense. By not adding Adsense in the beginning you appear to be a legit site and will find that you will rank faster and avoid the sandbox. (Getting a few authority links from others appears to be the best way to avoid the sandbox coupled with not monetizing a new site.)br /br /You will also avoid smart pricing your whole account. A new site needs to build up targeted search traffic first. If the traffic to your site is mostly social visitors and you run Adsense and some of the un-targeted traffic clicks your ads you will likely see poor conversions for the advertiser and G will discount your clicks and pay you pennies. At the same time all your other blogs will see their earnings discounted as well. br /br /Remember - Adsense should only be used on sites that get the majority of their traffic from the search engines. This is targeted traffic that will convert for the advertisers.br /br /So...br /br /How do you know when to start using Adsense?br /br /This is my method.br /br /Most of you know I created a new blog on Wordpress called "a href="http://makemoneyonlinegrizzly.com/make-money-online/make-money-online/"Make Money Online with Griz/a" back in July. I created the blog for a number of reasons but primarily to demonstrate my system for making money online.br /br /At present the site is ranked pages 2 and 3 for most of the "Make Money Online" terms I've targeted. An exact search in quotes for my main keyword shows the blog ranked 10th on page 1 of the serp's. This is a highly competitive niche and this shows that you can rank well even in a competitive niche in 3 to 4 months if you accumulate quality backlinks. br /br /It also demonstrates that you don't need a lot of posts either. I only have a half dozen posts on the site but they will give you a good idea of how "On Page SEO" works. Titles, headers and content are focused and target my keywords.br /br /As for "Off Page SEO" (read - backlinks) the site has a few thousand links but many are from site-wide links on other blogs and this tends to confuse the issue. A site-wide link can give you hundreds of links from a single blog. This is ok but pay attention to getting unique links. The new blog really only has about 100 unique links. By this I mean there are only about 100 sites linking to me in spite of the number of total links (pages linking).br /br /The more unique links you get the better. This should also indicate to you that you really don't need 1000's of links to do well in a niche - you just need quality links.br /br /In this case most of my links are keyword anchored which is rare and the reason the blog ranks so well so quickly in a tough niche. Because my friends have sent me links and they understand the concept of "anchored keyword links" most of the links use my keywords - hence my quick ranking for those keywords. br /br /I admit that this is not something most of you can obtain until you build up a network of like minded friends. I point it out simply to show you the power of getting targeted links to your site and urge you to ask your friends to provide you with the same kind of links rather than the "click here" variety or those using your name in the anchor. I'm basically trying to show you what works best whether you are able to get the links at this point in your progress or not. These are the type of links you should be aiming for eventually if you want to see better serp rankings.br /br /To this end I have set up a few resource pages on the new blog filled with like minded people who understand the value of anchored backlinks and I urge you to visit the people and sites listed in order to help each other. Start with "a href="http://makemoneyonlinegrizzly.com/niche-support/"Finding links for your Niche Blogs/a" and email people with similar niches or send anchored links in posts to the people on my "a href="http://makemoneyonlinegrizzly.com/friendz-of-griz/"Friendz of Griz/a" page and you may just get a nod in return. (assuming your site is relevant to theirs. Don't spam them) br /br /Now back to span style="font-weight:bold;"Adsense/span.br /br /The new blog averages about 300 unique visitors a day. Normally I would have added Adsense a while ago as 300 visitors is enough to start making a little Adsense income. The problem in this case is that 7 out of 8 visitors are coming from social sources - bookmarks, referrals from other blogs, stumbleupon etc. Only 1 in 8 are coming from the search engines. In other words the majority of the traffic is not targeted for my keywords and won't be targeted for the Adsense ads. This means that my Adsense could be smart priced pretty quick if the social traffic decides to click the ads.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Testing the water to find out how your Adsense will perform./spanbr /br /Last week I added an Adsense block to the new blog. I did not let it go live though. By this I mean that while the ads are displayed on the blog I have not "Allowed" the blog to record clicks in my Adsense account. This is done by "span style="font-weight:bold;"not/span" adding the site URL to the list of "allowed sites" in your "Adsense Setup" Tab. The end result is that I can monitor clicks without fear of being penalized by G. The ads are being clicked but not recorded.br /br /After two days I noticed that I was only getting 5 - 10 clicks per day which made me happy as it indicates that the social traffic is not clicking my ads or very little if they are. Based on this I added the site to my allowed list and monitored the results. Over the next few days I continued to see 5-10 clicks a day and noticed a CPC of 75 cents to $1 a click. So far so good. Then I started seeing the dreaded 5 cent clicks. At the same time I watched my CPC on my other sites and sure enough my earnings per click started dropping. Not good. br /br /I took the new blog off of the allowed sites list and over the course of another two days my CPC is back to normal on my other sites.br /br /This is how I find out if a new site is ready for Adsense. In this case the new blog is not yet ready and won't be until I start drawing more search traffic than social traffic. At that point I will let the ads go live again and see what happens.br /br /In the mean time I will leave the ad block on the site and start playing around with position, number of blocks, size of blocks and finding just the right "ugly" balance (how the blog looks) needed to increase click thru rates (CTR). I can do all this while waiting for more search traffic. br /br /On a side note: Several readers have already mentioned how much they hate the "puke" green background. lol. This is good - maybe - if it helps to drive people away. Some will just leave but some will "click" to leave - which is the goal behind the site. I didn't create the site for the benefit of readers - I created the site to make money. Readers are always welcome of course but like this blog they will have to put up with my Adsense tweaks.br /br /Each niche is different but this should give you an idea of how I approach optimizing a site for Adsense and more importantly how I know when to use Adsense and when to let it be. br /br /One second to last thing - I already know how this niche performs thanks to the blog you are currently reading. If you are making decent money from Adsense in your niche then create more blogs in the same niche. The guesswork has been removed. Just rinse and repeat and use the same resources you used to build the initial blog. You don't always have to keep searching for new niches. br /br /The Asia'h Contest.br /br /I had mentioned that I would split the money with the top three sites if no one could outrank my site. As it happens that won't be necessary as span style="font-weight:bold;"Dinesh/span managed to outrank me after all! br /br /click image to enlargebr /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/ST6emM1ROtI/AAAAAAAABZI/G-536WX6CkQ/s1600-h/Asia_winner.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 280px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/ST6emM1ROtI/AAAAAAAABZI/G-536WX6CkQ/s400/Asia_winner.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277830192441670354" //abr /br /Congrats Dinesh and I will send you the $500 as soon as I get your Paypal Acct. I will be emailing you shortly.br /br /Cheers,br /br /Griz

I’ve been fine-tuning my Mod_Security rules for the last several days and I think I’m just about finished.  I found all the rules at GotRoot and I noticed that the black-list rules were all static - meaning that they were probably out of date before they were even published.

According to the documentation for Mod_security2 there is support for Real Time Blacklists (RBL) but I did not have much luck finding how to configure RBL at GotRoot - and Google did not help much either.  I found a few sparse blog posts here and there - most of these RBL rules either slowed my server to a crawl or just crashed Apache.

Finally after hours of Googling and tinkering, I came up with a Mod_security2 rule that will check against an RBL:

SecRule REMOTE_ADDR "@rbl bl.spamcop.net" "chain,deny, log, id:350000,msg:'RBL: httpbl.spamcop.net',severity:'1'"

SecRule REMOTE_ADDR "!127.0.0.1"

It seems that this rule works pretty well using spamcop.net. You can replace the “httpbl.spamcop.net” with any RBL you choose, for example httpbl.abuse.ch also works, but is a bit slower (unless you’re in Switzerland I suppose) and I’ll be testing zen.spamhaus.org tomorrow. You can also multiple rules/RBLs at the same time, but expect a noticeable decrease in performance if you do.  Also be aware that this rule only works with Mod_security2, not the older (and now obsolete) mod_security 1.9.

I am brand-new to using mod_security so if you have any other tips, advice or wisdom please post them.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/70-3IA4iLggrszlWIddWJIBKQeM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/70-3IA4iLggrszlWIddWJIBKQeM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pHow I Make Money Online... over and over again I've been in Winnipeg for the past couple of weeks and in between taking care of some Lodge business I spent the best part of a day tutoring an old...br/ br/ Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?a=hTrKDTj0"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?i=hTrKDTj0" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MakeMoneyForBeginners/~4/kUPKkDkZ2rg" height="1" width="1"/

One of the reasons I’ve done so many upgrades/updates recently is to improve the performance of the server/website(s).  Now that I’ve got those out of the way I’ve had some time to do a bit of research to find some easy ways to speed things up.  Remember that I’m UnixTarded, so anything I do must be on the easy side.

Based an my reading, one of the best ways to improve the performance of not only Drupal, but any PHP script (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc) is to install a PHP accelerator/cache such as APC or eAccelerator.  There are many (manyyy) other things that can be done - but adding a PHP accelerator/cache seemed to be one of those one-time, relatively easy things that can reportedly increase (CMS) website performance by 2x - 10x.

After a little more reading it seems that APC (my first choice to try) is not compatible with the Zend extensions that I’m using, so I decided to install eAccelerator.  Installing eAccelrator via WHM/cPanel is easy, and I had it up and running in minutes, with zero issues.

After clearing my browser cache and reloading the site I noticed an immediate performance improvement, especially when doing things like creating new nodes (pages) or posting comments.  I also noticed an improvement on my Wordpress install while loading pages and posting comments.  Things that usually took 3-5 seconds were now happening in ~1 second and things that were previously taking 1 second were happening “instantly”.  I don’t have any before & after benchmarks, but I do have before & after CPU and memory usage:

• “Top” CPU usage now averages below 1% - down from 3%-5%
• RAM usage now averages 25% - down from ~50%
• Total daily CPU usage (i dont know how it’s calculated) is now ~20% for GrownUpGeek.com - before installing eAccelerator it never dropped below 60%.  It’s also lower for my other site hosted on my server.

If you run a PHP script/CMS on a VPS or dedicated server, adding a PHP op-code cache/accelerator is a great, easy way to noticeably increase the performance of your site.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

span style="font-weight:bold;"How I Make Money Online/span... over and over againbr /br /I've been in Winnipeg for the past couple of weeks and in between taking care of some Lodge business I spent the best part of a day tutoring an old friend in the art of making money online. I've known Jim for about 15 years - he's a mechanic and travels north every few months to work on various pieces of heavy equipment. He is an avid car buff and rebuilds old cars in his spare time. This led him to join several internet communities who shared his passion which then led him to start his own website which led him to learning that some people could make money with a website which led him to start searching for methods in which to do so which led to him finding a blog that explained the process. In Jim's words "I spent 3 days reading the blog before bothering to see who the writer was - I clicked the about page and fell off my chair - it was YOU!" br /br /This has happened frequently over the past year. I have tried to separate my Lodge business from my online business but more and more friends from the "real" world have been coming across this blog and while they don't know me by my online nick name (I got it years ago when I bar tended my way through University) they quickly put it together when they see the about page. Unfortunately this is something I was hoping to avoid. Let me explain.br /br /I spent most of yesterday sitting in the airport waiting on plane delays (weather related) and finally took a peak at my mountain of emails that have accumulated over the last two weeks. As usual there were a few that I wish I had read in a timely fashion. (Court, Monika, Chanya, Frank - sorry, will be getting back to you today) The rest can be categorized as follows; people asking me to review their blog, people asking me to JV with them, people asking to advertise on this blog, people writing really nice comments about how my blog has helped them and not asking for anything (thank you all), people wanting to trade links, people asking to pay me to mentor them and of course the usual spam. There are also a fair number asking me why their blog isn't ranking well on Google without supplying me with all the pertinent info.br /br /Having spent a day with Jim I learned a great deal. He reminded me of just how confusing this whole MMO biz is and gave me an appreciation of just what beginners are facing these days. I confess that I have lost touch with a beginners point of view as it has become a fairly easy game for me. Bruce who runs a a href="http://dayjobnuker.com/"work from home/a blog asked me on the a href="http://theaffiliateacademy.com/member/go.php?r=7i=l0"Affiliate Academy/a forum a few weeks ago about this very issue;br /br /Bruce's commentbr /br /blockquoteYou always make it sound simple but I am questioning what I am missing and probably others are missing as well or everyone would be succeeding like you are.br /br /I worked hard and was seeing some real nice results up until about a month and a half ago. I was a happy camper as I was solidly on page one of Google for a handful of terms and getting more and more search traffic.br /br /I've mentioned this before but now the bottom has come off and I am way down to the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th pages if at all for most of my terms. It started and has continued where I would take two steps back (in the rankings) and then one step back up. Over and over until I am where I am now. (talking about my main blog only here)br /br /I have done nothing differently to my knowledge to start this downfall and so I am wondering how someone like you (or anyone) can have such spectacular success. I have now gotten out of AMA and deleted all my articles so that no more will be published but this all started way before that.br /br /This is my big question: Is it the quality of your links? I have to think that your ability to get better links than most is a very important factor in your success. You write with the best of them but it seems that your SEO can only take you so far./blockquote br /br /Bruce's comment has stuck with me and after working with Jim I've mulled this issue over a great deal. br /br /Why does this seem so simple to me and not to others?br /br /Put the coffee pot on and I will tell you all a story.br /br /When I started online web 2.0 didn't exist. Social Media didn't exist. I started out knowing from day 1 that if you are going to make any money online you needed a steady stream of traffic and the only way to get that traffic is with Google. br /br /I have never changed my position on this. Google is still and always has been the best source of traffic online. Social media showed up and everyone jumped on it because it is easy to get traffic using social means. The problem is that social traffic is sporadic, requires hours and hours of work to maintain and in the end it doesn't convert well into money. You have all heard this from me before but in spite of this almost everyone of you still chases it and this is your downfall.br /br /I had several emails informing me of yet another list of "a href="http://www.winningtheweb.com/im-top-blogs/"target="_blank" rel="nofollow"Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs/a" that doesn't have me included on the list. My readers like to rib me about such things and I must have a hundred emails asking why I am not on the former a href="http://www.digitalproductreporter.com/make_money_online/"target="_blank" rel="nofollow"45n5 list/a. The fact is that these lists are part of the problem - many of you are trying to get on these lists and that's because at the heart of the matter you are a blogger looking for recognition from other bloggers. You want to be the next a href="http://www.problogger.net/"target="_blank" rel="nofollow"Problogger/a and spend all your time trying to get attention from other bloggers thinking this is the road to making money. Well yes it is a road but you have no idea about just how much traffic you need from the social arena before any serious advertising offers show up. br /br /Do you realize that most large advertisers won't even look at you if you aren't pulling in at least 250,000 unique visitors a month? Do you have any idea of how much traffic that is? That's 8300 visitors a day - every day. That's 350 visitors every hour or almost 6 visitors a minute - every minute of every hour of every day.br /br /You think that stumbleupon or digg or making a top 100 list or commenting on blogs is going to get 6 visitors a minute to your site month in and month out? And now the harsh part (and I don't mean to insult) you think that your site is so unique and interesting that 250 thousand people will keep coming back to read it. Okay - so you realize that maybe you aren't the most talented and interesting writer so you resort to gimmicks like starting a Top 100 list in hopes that people will spread the word and maybe even use your Badge and send you links. Or you will run a contest. Or you will give away a free ebook to pad your RSS numbers. Or you will come up with any number of tricks or treats to get people to your site. And then they are gone...br /br /Perhaps the hardest thing to realize is that you aren't talented enough to capture 250k of readers based on your writing alone. Let's face it - if you are an exceptional writer word will get out and you will eventually have thousands of followers without you having to chase them down. Think about that. If you need contests and lists to keep people coming back then maybe you aren't producing value that will do it naturally. br /br /But Griz - social media gets me links.br /br /Sure it does - for your name or blog name. All useless. Ranking in Google for your name won't get you traffic. br /br /Yes many of you finally understand the power of keyword anchored backlinks but you are trying to get them using social media.br /br /And that is your downfall. You are at heart a blogger and not an internet marketer. You want to rank on Google but wouldn't it be nice to combine that with becoming well known. br /br /I spend zero time using social media - okay, I have stumbled a few friends blogs in the past and tried everything half assed just to see what the fuss was about but always toss these networks to the side.br /br /I do one thing and one thing only - I study Google.br /br /I experiment constantly while you guys are socializing. I don't read about SEO from others - I learn it first hand. I have developed a system that while changing as G changes still proves to be the most effective way to make money online with the least work involved.br /br /The first rule I have is focus on the task at hand - making money. Toss your dreams of becoming famous out the window as it will simply sidetrack all your efforts.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Find a Niche/spanbr /br /Yes I slap up hundreds of blogs to test the waters with but I do have a general system in place in order to find the best niches.br /br /I always start with the goal of making money from Adsense. Why? Because it is the largest advertising network in the world. 5.5 billion in sales last quarter - 1.7 billion in profit. Google has a 67% share of search traffic and is by far the biggest source of traffic online. All the social media sites combined don't handle any where near the daily traffic that Google does. br /br /If you want to make money online then go with who provides the most traffic and use the largest advertiser. In this case Google just happens to be both. A no brainer.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"How I do It/spanbr /br /I look for niches that can provide me with at least 1000 visitors a day. I didn't say keyword - I said niche. br /br /I look for niches that have enough keywords to provide me with 1000 visitors a day.br /br /I want a niche that lets me build keyword rank in ascending order from least competitive to highly competitive. (I will show you what I mean below)br /br /I want a niche that is competitive.br /br /I want a niche that has lots of Adsense advertisers.br /br /I want a niche that allows me to write long rambling posts.br /br /An Examplebr /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Make Money Online/spanbr /br /Just for the hell of it let us pretend I could possibly dominate a niche dominated by such well known bloggers as span style="font-weight:bold;"Darren Rowse/span, span style="font-weight:bold;"Shoemoney/span, span style="font-weight:bold;"John Chow/span and the rest of the A-List. And just for a lark let us pretend I could do it using a free Blogger Blog that looks like crap. Why - well maybe if I did people might catch on that you don't need a fancy looking site like the experts claim and that you don't really have to spend money on hosting either. Yes - a bold claim I know. Some people might even figure out that nothing makes people click on Adsense ads better than an ugly site.br /br /So if I was to take on this task how would I do it.br /br /First off I would target a long tail keyword that contains all my shorter competitive keywords in the long tail. br /br /I would use a variation of the long tail for my URL.br /br /examplebr /br /"span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Make Money Online for Beginners/span" - my long tailbr /span style="font-weight:bold;"makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/span - my URLbr /br /or br /br /"span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Learn Knitting for Beginners/span"br /br /or br /br /"span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Make Chocolate Chip Cookies for Beginners/span"br /br /These are all examples of killer long tails. Why? Because they contain "How to" and "Beginners" in them. One term "How to" is used by people looking for information. I use "Beginners" because people will notice it in the serp's and click on your site because they are likely beginners looking for info on "span style="font-weight:bold;"How to/span" do something. And they contain my prime and secondary keywords as well. Let me show you.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Make money Online for Beginners/span - least competitive. A Long Tailbr /span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Make Money Online/span - more competitive. A secondary keyword.br /span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Make Money/span - very competitive. 50,000 searches. A secondary keyword.br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Make Money Online/span - extremely competitive. 27,000 searches. A secondary keyword.br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Make Money/span - really extremely competitive. - 200,000 searches. A secondary keyword.br /span style="font-weight:bold;"Money/span - the big Kahuna - 3.3 million searches last month. The prime keyword.br /br /This niche also allows for literally hundreds of related keywords that you can rank well for and though the traffic might not be much for any particular term they all add up.br /br /Here is a list of some of them.br /br /(Click Images to Enlarge)br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlZ9QZKAnI/AAAAAAAABYA/w3b5ry84tu0/s1600-h/top_makemoney_keywords.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 366px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlZ9QZKAnI/AAAAAAAABYA/w3b5ry84tu0/s400/top_makemoney_keywords.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276347347348619890" //abr /br /Btw - Statcounter is a huge site - millions of visitors. Notice how he monetizes his site? Notice how Technorati monetizes their site? Check out most of the big sites and ask yourself why they use Adsense to earn money? Because it pays better than anything else online...br /br /So - that's how I would plan my site. br /br /Next, while you folks start stumbling and digging and leaving comments to and fro, I get down to the task of building backlinks. Real backlinks. Backlinks that contain my keywords. Backlinks that are contained in posts on other sites. Not sidebar. Not in the do-follow comments. In the posts! And they don't just point to my home page - they vary to all my pages. And they don't just contain my main keyword or main keyword phrases - they contain terms like the list you just read on my stat counter page. They don't appear in bunches - they show up regularly, consistently and continuously. br /br /This is a long slow process and it doesn't get me on those "Top 100" lists and Darren Rowse doesn't send me any link luv but I do start getting search traffic. A little at first when I rank number 1 for my long tail.br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STle8-ClggI/AAAAAAAABYI/WlE6ep8D3FA/s1600-h/howtomakemoneyonlineforbeginners.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 204px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STle8-ClggI/AAAAAAAABYI/WlE6ep8D3FA/s400/howtomakemoneyonlineforbeginners.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276352839980253698" //abr /br /Then a little more traffic shows up as I rank well for more terms.br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlfivGigJI/AAAAAAAABYQ/8UYU6v8aH0I/s1600-h/howtomakemoneyonline.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 168px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlfivGigJI/AAAAAAAABYQ/8UYU6v8aH0I/s400/howtomakemoneyonline.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276353488805331090" //abr /br /Then a few more terms...br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlgIqDr7NI/AAAAAAAABYY/U5NgCMhGOow/s1600-h/howtomakemoney.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 172px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlgIqDr7NI/AAAAAAAABYY/U5NgCMhGOow/s400/howtomakemoney.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276354140286217426" //abr /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlgk9mZe9I/AAAAAAAABYg/SUYAQzMat0k/s1600-h/howtoearnmoneyonline.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 166px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlgk9mZe9I/AAAAAAAABYg/SUYAQzMat0k/s400/howtoearnmoneyonline.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276354626568420306" //abr /br /Then a few of the more competitive terms...br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlhMyBh5KI/AAAAAAAABYo/NzHvD4xdTIU/s1600-h/makemoneyonline.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 163px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlhMyBh5KI/AAAAAAAABYo/NzHvD4xdTIU/s400/makemoneyonline.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276355310655759522" //abr /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlhsk6f38I/AAAAAAAABYw/-FnpkRSq4ZI/s1600-h/make+money.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 216px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STlhsk6f38I/AAAAAAAABYw/-FnpkRSq4ZI/s400/make+money.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276355856892420034" //abr /br /The big Kahuna... well actually I don't rank at all for "Money". Yet... if it takes another year or two so be it - it will be worth it.br /br /Now obviously no one in their right mind would set out to take on a competitive niche like Make Money Online using a free ugly blogger blog and hope to succeed against the likes of John Chow and company... ;-) but if you actually focused on what matters (think anchored keyword backlinks) and spent your time gathering up those links then maybe you could just possibly dominate a not so competitive niche. And maybe just maybe you would look at this as a business and do what it takes to get those anchored links. And maybe just maybe you would set aside instant gratification and console yourself to making a not so bad income from Adsense a few years down the road instead of looking for money today. br /br /Then again what the hell do I know about dominating a niche - let alone a competitive one. Maybe I should try and use a wordpress blog to a href="http://makemoneyonlinegrizzly.com/"make money/a instead... come to think of it - why just use one blog to dominate a niche. There are ten spots on Google's page one listings. Imagine the traffic.br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STmCXS-ZdVI/AAAAAAAABY4/gPTCfWwIy9w/s1600-h/makemoneyonlinegriz.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 257px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STmCXS-ZdVI/AAAAAAAABY4/gPTCfWwIy9w/s400/makemoneyonlinegriz.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276391775183402322" //abr /br /Btw - this site doesn't get 250k uniques a month - it only averages 3 visitors a minute so the advertisers aren't lining up yet. Well that's not quite true - I do get a few requests as it seems the advertisers don't just look for social blogs with huge readership - they seem to find me because I rank on top of the serp's. Go figure. The thing is they don't want to pay me what I earn with Adsense so I'm not much interested. br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STmClZ08HyI/AAAAAAAABZA/Kq1L6RMiK8I/s1600-h/3_per_minute.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 247px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DahvN8dNALY/STmClZ08HyI/AAAAAAAABZA/Kq1L6RMiK8I/s400/3_per_minute.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276392017540947746" //abr /br /Now all facetiousness aside. I have gone through everything I do online in my posts over the past few years. Does it work? Yes it apparently does. I'm not famous but I do make money at this game which was the whole point in the first place. Would I rather be Darren Rowse? No. He works too hard. I don't.br /br /and that brings me back to Jim and all those who want me to tutor them.br /br /I don't want to.br /br /I used to manage a large Resort hotel and Golf Course. I had 13 Board of Directors and several hundred staff - all of whom made it their purpose in life to bother me. I made lots of money and hated every minute of it. I quit and bought a nice little Fishing Lodge in the middle of nowhere just so I could have some peace and quiet and not work for anyone else. I do what I want when I want and life is good. I started online just to while away my time and found it challenging. The internet was new (still is) and I wanted to see if I could make money on it. I succeeded beyond my expectations - well not really, I expect a lot but I have found my forte online and can duplicate it over and over.br /br /Unlike the A-List and most of you I am not interested in selling you anything and this includes my time. Tutoring people for money means I am working for them and my time becomes their time. Not interested as quite frankly folks I don't need the money and don't want the responsibility of you not succeeding. I am more than happy to tell you all what I do for free and hope that a few of you catch on and succeed at this. Those of you who treat this as a business and spend your money and time wisely can do exactly what I have done. Those of you who just want to be bloggers will have a hard time gaining money or fame from your efforts as you tend to spend most of your time copying and following people that are selling something. br /br /Learn the basics and you will find that everything else will follow. Get ranked on top of Google and you will find that not only do you make money but if your niche is a social one you will also gain readership, advertisers and hell maybe a little fame without ever having to waste time chasing it.br /br /I'm not saying anything new here but I need to say it often as I get new readers every week who find my site while... yup, searching on Google. Invariably they write me and ask how to make money online. They don't want to read two years worth of posts and think I can send them back an answer in an email. I can't. If you are new here then start reading. Those of you who have been with me a while have another question - "How do we get those quality backlinks?". I have answered this privately on a few forums not available to the public. Most of you understand what I have told you but still don't know where to look. I have subtly left a trail in my sidebar and footer sections that will lead you to where you want to go. The lower they appear in my blog the least effective they are and that's as much as I will say about this in public. They will get you started but the most effective means is to get out there and contact the sites that can help you most. It is slow and tedious but that's how I have done it. One link at a time. I can be patient and wait a year or two to reap the rewards. Can you?br /br /I hope this post doesn't come off badly as I do enjoy yakking with my readers but I have created a monster when it comes to emails and people looking for direct help. I simply can't get back to everyone - hell I can't even find the time to read all the mail never mind respond to it. In most cases your answers are already on this blog and you will have to look for them. Don't skip the comments - there is a goldmine of info in the comments and I will try and target the lesser asked questions in future posts. I feel a sense of guilt that this has become larger than I can handle and ask for your understanding if I don't get back to you. br /br /Oh in response to not making those Top 100 lists - I'm on top of the only list that matters - Google's.br /br /I suggest you get on top of Google's list as well and stop wasting time with anyone else's list.br /br /Cheersbr /br /Griz

After recently reading several horror stories about websites and blogs being hacked simply because they were running outdated versions of their CMS or Wordpress, I decided to upgrade - EVERYTHING. The server, the blog, the website - even my “back burner” website.

Up until the last few weeks I’ve always taken the “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” attitude. Partially because I’m lazy, and partially because I’m paranoid that something will break if I try to upgrade it. But after weighing the options I decided that if something was going to break I would rather break it on my schedule and not some Turkish hacker or script-kiddie’s schedule.

I started a couple of months ago by upgrading the site to the Drupal 5.x. I then upgraded a few things on the server and added some additional security related items (sorry, no details), and I also upgraded my other site to Drupal 5. Finally, today I topp’d it all off by upgrading my Wordpress. Even though virtually all of these mini-projects were learning experiences for me they all went 99% smooth - even the scariest part, re-compiling Apache on my server. Seems that all this time I’ve been living dangerously for no real reason.

So I’ve turned-over a new leaf and will now try to keep everything current - maybe not to the newest version of everything (no Drupal 6 or 7 just yet), but at least to supported versions. I’ve even started using a nifty Drupal module called Update Status which notifies me any time a Drupal module has an update available.

If you’re like me (lazy or afraid to break things) you might want to consider doing a few upgrades - especially if there are known vulnerabilities in old versions that you’re using. Remember - would you rather break something yourself, or have someone break it for you?

What about you? Do you always upgrade to the latest and greatest, to the current “stable”/supported version - or do you just sit back and hope nothing bad happens?

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/NGBZA20adOhcxmRgt4nfGyuSQjU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/NGBZA20adOhcxmRgt4nfGyuSQjU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pI'll keep this short and to the point. It has been a long time since I found another marketer who impresses me. To impress me you only have to do one thing - show me a system that actually makes...br/ br/ Please visit Make Money Online for Beginners for the rest of the post.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?a=vAjIjQ6A"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/MakeMoneyForBeginners?i=vAjIjQ6A" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MakeMoneyForBeginners/~4/xpFBvHtq9bI" height="1" width="1"/

I'll keep this short and to the point. It has been a long time since I found another marketer who impresses me. To impress me you only have to do one thing - show me a system that actually makes money and is easily duplicated. Ok two things - show me the system for free. That's not really asking much is it? The list of marketers who meet this criteria could be counted on one hand. In other words there are very few people that really make a living online using a system that can be divulged to others without it causing the system to stop working. br /br /I tell people (for free) how to make money online using SEO and Adsense.br /br /span style="font-weight:bold;"How to Flip Websites and Products for Profit/spanbr /br /Jason AKA a href="http://theuniversitykid.com/discover-how-i-made-5030-profit-off-the-product-flip/"span style="font-weight:bold;"The University Kid/span/a has a system for selling product and flipping websites that he has made available for free. Read the post linked to above and then shuffle over to his new site a href="http://www.makemoneydynamo.com/make-money/"span style="font-weight:bold;"MakeMoneyDynamo/span/a and download his free ebook which explains exactly how to make money online selling ebooks and then how to make even more money by flipping the ebook's domain. It's a clever system that can be duplicated as many times as you feel motivated to do it.br /br /In case it matters I am not being paid to promote this (it's free anyway). I simply want to offer my readers another alternative for making money online and to introduce you all to Jason who caught my attention a while back and has steadily built up a site that delivers real info and real methods for earning a living online. Keep it up Jason - you are a breath of fresh air in this niche.br /br /Btw - I am on vacation (yes - again) while waiting for the lake to finish freeze-up and haven't touched my emails for the past two weeks - sorry if you have been waiting for a reply. I am busy with some real world business matters at the moment but should be home in the next week. br /br /Cheersbr /br /Griz

Ok - longtime readers will recognize this as last year’s Blogger Smackdown - but because it was so popular and since my readership and traffic has increased since then I decided to share it again this year - you know, in case anyone missed it.

One of the questions posted over and over last year was “who are those people?”, so here are the credits:

• Starring: Jeremy Schoemaker
• Co Starring:  Darrin Rowse
• Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Slegg
• Introducing: (the original) John Cow
• And the extra on the set that would not go away: John Chow

And now for your viewing and blogging pleasure, the original 2007 Violent Blogger SmackDown:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

$21 is not a lot of money, but I know that it’s more than many webmasters earn in a week - and since this method made me $21 EXTRA and it is so simple I thought I would share.  If someone had the time to do this all day (krap, i wish I had time to do it all day!) it could quickly add-up.

So I’m working yesterday and listening to the radio/CNN/Fox News (flipping around for background noise) and I keep hearing about “the virus that attacked the Pentagon computers” - They talked about it all day - every 15 to 30 minutes.  So remembering an idea from Garry Conn that I had experimented with a few times already, I decided to give it another go.

I did a few Google searches on the virus that had gotten into the Pentagon computers and quickly saw that there was only about 10,000 - 20,000 results - and knowing that our site already has a lot of virus-related content I was confident that I could rank very well for some of those searches if I put my mind to it.

I quickly made a simple post about the virus, gave it a URL and Title Tag with the keywords I was targeting, made it a bit keyword heavy (but didn’t go overboard), and ‘bolded’ the keywords a few times.  After I created the page/post it quickly received a few comments posted by members (mostly off topic which i have since deleted) but because I’m displaying the Drupal “recent comments” and “New Forum Topics”  blocks on virtually every page, I immediately had site-wide links across thousands of pages pointing to the new post.  I also added in an extra Adsense block (& custom channel) on the page, and I created a URL channel so I could track earnings on this new page from my site-wide Adsense block that is displayed at the top of every page.

Within less than an hour traffic started to pour in.  I did a quick check and I was delighted to see that the page ranked #1 for “Agent.btz pentagon” and ranked #3 for just the name of the virus, “agent.btz” - but mine was the only result that displayed anything about the Pentagon.

All evening I sat glued to my stats and I could see every time one of the news channels mentioned the story because a new wave of traffic came in.  This morning the Adsense channels added up to just under $21.  My Kontera stats haven’t come in yet, but I’m sure there will also be an extra few $ there also.

If you already have an established site, and do some basic on-page SEO, this kind of popular content building should be pretty easy to accomplish - every day there are dozens of “big stories”.   The difficult part is finding the day’s “big” story and keeping your pages/content on-topic with the rest of your site - and not be spammy about the whole thing.

$21 a few times per day or per week, or even $10 several times a day/week can add-up pretty quickly..  Certainly worth a few minutes a day.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

In my constant search to try new things and to add to the “social” or community “feel” of the site, I decided to install a photo-gallery for Premium Members.  I looked at several options available and decided to go with “Gallery“.

Gallery seemed to have the most choices and options, it looks great, and has good integration with Drupal.   There is even a plugin to integrate Gallery with Wordpress.

The Drupal module is not one of those “upload and go” type modules - it’s really just a wrapper module for the separate Gallery script which also has to be installed, so configuring it was a real pain - and it took the better part of the weekend and several visits to the Gallery Support Forums to get the module and script installed and configured (partially why this post is so short - because i’m still tired).  The new photo gallery now seems to be working perfect and several members have already added their own image albums.

Just one more simple way to add a bit of value for Premium Members and make the site more interesting and ’social’.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

With venture capitilists telling their tech babies to stop hiring, and think about monetizing now rather than later are we heading for the next dot com bubble burst?

I was checking out one of my favourite sites today, when I came across the sad news that The Consumerist is for sale.

Web 2.0 is very different to Web 1.0, Web 1.0 was all about software, products, and solutions. Such as myspace, google, and boo.com

Web 2.0 brings us things like facebook, digg, blogs, networking.  Things that are great services because they are free but how the hell do you monetize them?  Sure Facebook is great, but do you think if Microsoft had to valuate it now they would still value it at the $15 Billion mark?

With the sale of Consumerist which I personally think was one of the big boys of the blogosphere are we seeing the bubble get ready to burst?  They are already down to a skeleton crew and I am really surprised that they need to let a site like this out of its arsenal.

Speaking of monetizing, anyone else notice digg.com really pushing the digg store?

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