Category: Online Marketing

After per per post for the blogger industry, here is another way of earning money through digg. They will pay you $.5 per digg (and they also get $.5) as the the advertiser gives $1 per digg. The service is available at http://www.usersubmitter.com/. Isn’t it fair? Yes it is, when richer people can buy government seats then why not a digg :).

At many instances people have asked me this query, “Is Google giving wikipedia some priority in search?”. No, I do not think so (but they can do it easily, look at the coop custom search, it has a manual priority setting too). Search for any keyword, even the commercial keywords and you will find some wikipedia results. At instances you might find even more than one result for wikipedia under a search.

Wiki is ruling the search engine esp Google because of following reasons :-

1. Incoming links: People love linking to wikipedia. I have not seen any other site which is so link attractive. Wikipedia attracts link. Bloggers love linking to wikipedia for any term. Wikipedia also acts as a dictionary, where people link to explain the work.
2. Overall Site value: Total Pages indexed (10,600,000 in Google, 49,710,962 in yahoo) + Total backlinks (32,121,814 sitewide links in yahoo, which is close to Yahoo’s backlinks).
3. Link distribution: Wikipedia gets links to almost all pages and thus it has a good link distribution as well.
4. Relevant Anchor text: Most of the links comes with relevant anchor text for the pages.
5. OnPage factors: OnPage factors are strong too (Yahoo still loves this factor).

In short it is very highly SEOptimized.

Web 2.0 is more about platform than applications. Does honey (application or platform) attract flies (users) in social networking? My opinion is no (almost 90% of the time). I was never attracted to a social networking platform because of its taste (quality or USPs) but was pulled by my friends. In social networking sites, flies attract flies and honey factor is just not that significant. I was pulled to orkut by friends, I was pulled to linkedin (otherwise I do not like this network at all, it is too complex for me) in similar fashion. Ask yourself why did you join a social networking site and you will get an answer.

I had talked about a similar issue with respect to companies in a lecture (ppt will be made available soon). I explained that why “A pessimistic company (group of pessimistic company) will attract and breed pessimistic employees”. There are other articles that say, “Smart people will go wherever other smart people are”. So concentrate more on tools to attract flies than making honey sweeter.

My account had some $120 and wanted to encash it during Christmas. I requested for my pin but my wait ended up with another wait. Then I contacted the adsense team with some one way emailing. I decided to take all the adsense off from the blog. Now after some wait and re-request I finally have got the PIN. So I put the adsense back to my blog. Starting with some tips.

There are various tips and tricks available for adsense optimization. If time permits I will write more about it. Recently Google has added a new policy for images near adsense.

“We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.” Read more

In an article about startup Aggregate Knowledge, Matt Marshall writes, “Amazon says 35 percent of product sales result from recommendations.”

Why I count on recommendations?
Recommendation is the best way to check quality. “Do you recommend my Blog to your friends?” is the best quality check for my blog. I do not think there is anything better possible. Looks much simpler than 10 page Survey sheets but much effective.

Count on recommendations and offer integrated platforms to make use of it.

I have finally composed a guide on technorati tags. I see that many of the good blogs are not using technorati tags for support. Click here for “One guide on technorati – Tags and blog promotion” (four page article).

There is a new market coming up for bloggers (a web 2.0 generated Job). Not exactly a new market but still a young one. Yes, I am talking about “earning through blog posts”. We all are aware of Payperpost.com (what a good domain to have!) and www.blogsvertise.com. Reviewme is the new born baby in this market but certainly with a web 2.0 growth rate.

Why is Pay per post a sweet poison for bloggers
You can expect more and more players entering the market. Is it good for blogosphere? In my opinion this is just a sweet poison for the bloggers (and blogosphere in general). Sweet as it can pay you as high as $250 per post (according to reviewme.com), poison as this can change the perception towards bloggers. I will cover two aspects of it :-

1. A pain for matt cutts and his team: Search engine consider each link to be a recommendation (a vote) and may value a Blog over other sites due to some factors (Some say that Blog === “Better listing in Google” :)). If you are paid to write then it is more or less like buying links which according to Google is not a good practice without a no-follow tag (Google rule book ref Articles 6a and 9b). You can add a nofollow but I am not sure whether this is in accord with their policy. It is a pain as Matt also knows that it won’t be an easy task to catch the paid ones. I am less worried about Google and Matt as they work on a “smoke and mirror” policies. Google will have a problem in catching you if you are selective about the posts (also try and keep paid vs genuine post ratio low).
2. “Maven” badge for sale: People perceive a blogger as a maven and want them to write as independently as possible. Money business will influence some leading to influential positive posts (You can’t deny it, I agree that only some will write it).
   
   (One apple spoils the bunch)

   The word will soon spread like a fire that bloggers can’t be trusted as they can be paid to write reviews. So every post can be suspected. Will you be happy to hear that all news by cnn is genuine except few which are paid? Even if some are paid ones it is not visible at the surface. CNN is still not perceived as a maven but as a business. Mavens (Bloggers) have more responsibility towards the society and should not destroy the trust factor.

What is the way out?
On the other hand as a blogger I am attracted towards it as it can help me earn extra. If my blog is getting traffic due to its value (Value of blog = value of blog x quality time spent in research for the post) then I should be able to earn through it (something better than adsense). There is a way out by letting the visitor distinguish the paid ones. Existing way of advertisements are Banner ads or text ads. This can be revamped for the new Web 2.0 supported blogosphere, “advertising through blog post”. Advertisement posts or paid posts can be marked with some additional colors to help visitors distinguish. It can be done in simpler ways:-

1. Use color markers
2. ICON markers
3. Simplest and the best -> Different category label: Simplest way is to label all the post as “paid reviews” (Let Google, Yahoo and MSN come together to suggest a category label). This can be done for any blog (wordpress or others).