Postcards from the Funny Farm

If you’re like me, you love the mall and its food court. There are 10-15 choices on what to eat every time you go there. “What the heck do I get?” is the question I always ask myself: Kun Pao Chicken? Pizza at SBarro? McDonalds? A sub? With the shining neon signs and the wonderful aromas all mixed around me, I have really hard time making a choice.

Blogging is often the same way for me.

With so many items begging for my attention, what should I write on? I have literally sat for 20-30 minutes before in front of my laptop screen before unable to decide what was worth writing about. So how do I handle this? Simple … I limit my choices. I have gone through after 400 posts and analyzed the tags and categories I assigned the most. Then, I’ve made those into my categories and resolved to blog within those most popular, and obviously the ones I like to write the most, posts. Then, for myself not for my readers, I developed and wrote down 4 kinds of posts that I write on this blog. They are:

1. Journal entries,
2. PayPerPost (or blogging for hire),
3. Howto and Reviews, and
4. short “Tumblelog” styled posts or “asides.

Now, I don’t get as overwhelmed. I ask myself if I have done too much of one or the other and it makes it easy for me to limit my choices in what to write on. This frees me up to focus completely on blogging quality posts. If you watch kids learning and playing you will see the same thing in both instances: they are focused on one thing at a time. Note the picture of my daughter learning and playing below. But we aren’t kids anymore. We can’t blog it all. As bloggers we must be disciplined and choose to have only one item in front of us at a time. All other things are a distraction to good blogging.

How do you discipline yourself to write good blog posts?

The expression: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” seems especially appropriate for Google here at the beginning of 2008. I am no seo or blogging mmol genius but I do know a few things about logic and ethics and setting PayPerPost writers’ pagerank to zero is a choice lacking in both.

Under the guise of weeding out vacuous content from searches, they claim all blogs that have PayPerPost articles on them are less helpful than those who don’t and thus set their PageRank to zero. This is an example of a company thinking they will reinvent natural law to suit them because they can, not because they should. It’s going to bite them, the internet did not evolve to this point to be defined by one company.

I recall when I first got into using Google, it seemed like such a cool enterprise. The page was white with no ads and it had applications that were all utility, no fluff (ie; analytics, gmail …). Now, they have decided they know based on one criteria if a blog is helpful to the internet, this is ignorance at its height and I hope Google stops this practice. My how Google’s “feel” has changed for me.

As for me? I will continue to be a postie because it’s something I am good at and it’s something I profit from. That’s why Walt Disney, Rod Serling, Ray Kroc, Richard Carlso... did what they did. Last week I lost my PageRank of 4/10 when it was set to zero. I had a feeling this might happen when I read the news about what Google was doing to posties. But has my readership changed? It has gone up. Has my content changed? It has gotten better. The way I see it is this: Google figured the blogosphere would appreciate it if they targeted posties, and for the most part, they are probably right (check out Duncan Riley’s tone on Tech Crunch). But that doesn’t mean that weeding out all blogs with PayPerPosts on them will increase the value of a search. In fact, in many cases, it will keep good information out of a search. Is the only information we want on the internet that which is written without compensation? You might as well stop watching TV as far back as I Love Lucy.

To quote Michael Stipe: “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.” Emphasize: I feel fine.

I predict Izea (PayPerPost’s rebranding) and SocialSpark will revolutionize rankings in 3-6 months. You can come and tell me I was wrong if they don’t, but as for now I am making sure I focus 100% on my idea of what a good ranking is:

1. Monthly Traffic Goals
2. Inbound links
3. Comment counts, and
4. Quality content (paid or unpaid)

If I can succeed in these areas (which I can and do already) then I’ll take my PR0 with pride and look to other ranking systems like Izea’s RealRank to determine how I’m doing. To my fans/readers: fear not, I am neither down nor out. I will get better through moving away from Google’s PageRank system, not worse. Whether you like PayPerPost or not, I hope you see how throwing every blog out that uses it is harmful to the blogosphere.

Now, to close, I have a question and I promise not to pigeonhole you or throw YOU out if I don’t like your answer:

What do you think about Google setting blogs to zero for participating in PayPerPost?

It was a fairly slow month but I learned a lot. I think February will be a lot better. Just the same, I am being realistic with my goals.Postcards from the Funny Farm
Weblog Analytics January 2008

1,877 Visits: Goal achieved.
61 Visits/Day: avg. Goal missed by 19 :(

Feb Goals:

2,000 Visits
70 Visits/Day avg.

Top Referring Sites (Thank you!)

Social Networks:
1. bumpzee.com
2. stumbleupon.com
3. Wordpress.org
4. blogcatalog.com
5. 9rules.com

Peer/Other:
1. liveslessordinary.wordpress.com
2. lorelle.wordpress.com
3. livetardy.com

Web Publishing:
1. blogcritics.org

Monetization Stats for January 2008

Ads:
Adsense $1.64
Other $0

Pay to Blog:
PayPerPost $50
LoudLaunch $20

Total earnings for January: $71.64

Monetization Goals for February 2008:

Ads:
Adsense $5
Other $5

Pay to Blog:
PayPerPost $30
LoudLaunch $20
Smorty $ 5

Total Feb earnings goal: $65

How are you making money on your blog?

Google Vilifies PayPerPost and PayPerPost Fights Back

By now you may have heard about what Google did in attempt to destroy a small startup company, PayPerPost. The story goes like this:

Google invented PageRank. They set the secret criteria websites are assigned a rank from that called “Page Rank.”

When PayPerPost came on the scene, they paid bloggers to write posts on given topics. As with any open platform on the web, some abused it and wrote short meaningless posts that met the criteria of the job but were basiclly just filler posts with no new content. Having said that, there is still the large potenial for PayPerPost posts to be even more effective sources of info on the web (which I THINK Google would see as a good thing.) That’s why I was was shocked to find out that Google becaise a couple months ago stripping every blog with PayPerPosts on it to a zero page rank.

Now the big irony: To get the decent paying jobs on PayPerPost, you mch have a high Page Rank. Google not only sent all blog with PayPerPost to the bottom of the snake-pool but they alsocut off the life dollars of “posties,” as they are called who were once making $500/month writing quality articles.

Google is protecting its interests just like Microsoft tried to do by making Netscape incompatible with its software. Google is going to find that spam sites and services are much more prevalent that PayPerPost writers. Many I have spoken to are fed up with worry what Adolf-Google will find immoral so they are doing PayPerPost when it sounds interesting. I’m in this camp. If I get a great idea from PPP idea, I am going to write and link it . If Google think that make my writing spam, they can sit on their thumb and spin. I predict: Google will change or start falling in the next 5 years. They will not be the best company with tactics like these.

It’s the new Page Rank! RealRank.  The company is IZEA and it makes a lot more sense as a ranking system than Page Rank does. I recommend you head over and get your blog claimed … I predict this will transform rank as we know it. IZEARanks.com :: Top 100 Blogs, Blog Ranking, Real...

If my previous article on Google’s draconian action against small companies and bloggers struck a chord with you, definitely read on …

All required links in SocialSpark sponsored posts will carry the no-follow tag (or something more appropriate) because… well, I guess the most advanced search algorithms in the world need our help.

-Ted Murphey: CEO of IZEA, Founder of PayPerPost, and now Social...

I’ve been reading story after story about how Google has eliminated the PageRank ranking for thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of bloggers who have posted for PayPerPost.

At first, I felt worried: “would I lose mine next?” Mine may not be much, but its a 4/10 and it took me many months to work up to that. Then I felt guilty, like I was a spammer or something. After that I felt really pissed off. My wife and I have both worked really hard on our recent posts for PayPerPost and we selected the opportunities because we felt there was something to say about them. Meanwhile, I get trackbacks from junk blogs who have completely plagiarized posts of mine and their Google PageRank is higher than mine. I think villainizing PayPerPost folks, posties as they are called, is the equvalent of what Microsoft tried to do leaving capabilities out in hopes of squashing Netscape … unAmerican,

My Message To Google:

If you really want to eliminate useless blogs in a search, eliminating pagerank for PayPerPost writers is NOT a solution. I’m debating going back to using Yahoo as my search engine, taking adsense ads off my site, and using Sitemeter as my analytics choice. You can’t protect your interest by sabotaging your competition. Something better than PageRank is bound to come soon and I hope you relent this crazy and unfair practice soon before that happens.

Many people are starting to see the writing on the wall that Google is not as “open” and “user centered” as it would have us all believe. As for my work on PayPerPost, you can bet I am sticking with this new company. I’m always for the underdog in a good fight. If my page rank disappears, I wont worry about it. As long as you, the readers, keep reading … that’s what I’ll be ranking myself by.

This blog’s stats for the Month Ending December 31, 2007Traffic
Total Visits: 1,173
Average Daily Hits: 38
Average Daily RSS: 36

Ranking
Google Page Rank: 4
Technorati Authority: 92

Money
Commission Junction: $ 0
Adsense: $ 1.03
Pay Per Post: $70.00

Dollar Total: $71.03
__

Goals for January, 2007:

Traffic

1. 1500 total hits.
2. Post one or more relevant, seo friendly posts per day.
3. Daily average of 80 hits

Money

1. Continue to learn and use Adsense and PayPerPost.
2. Write a post for Smorty.
3. Break $100 in earnings for January 2008.

This is the first post in a monthly series I am calling: “Blog Traffic, Rank, and Money.” I invite you to watch the progress of my blog. I also hope you can take something from the data to help boost your traffic, ranking, and money. As far as December goes, all I want to say is this: The only way to go is up ;) As things rise, I vow to share what worked and, as Derek Semmler has pointed out to me, sometimes what didn’t!

I invite you to subscribe and keep up with the updates!

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