Whereas in the past generations, schools helped prime their students for the real world, within recent decades schools have started worring about their students’ emotions and self esteem.  While someone’s self esteem is important, the schools need to primarily prepare students for the real world.

What is the real world doing or not doing for their students?

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It’s Google’s Fault!!  *wag of the finger*

I say that it’s not the bloggers’ fault they don’t click on Adsense ads, not directly.  No, I lay the fault directly at Google’s feet.

As everyone who has used or uses Google’s Adsense program to make money online through their website or blog knows, the Adsense ToS says you cannot click on your own ads, nor direct others to click on those ads.  With stories and rumors of Google banner webmasters from Adsense over direct or perceived improper clicks, webmasters who have an online business to look after go to extreme lengths to avoid clicking on their own ad links.  The paranoia on the Internet has gotten to the point where the ignoring of Adsense ads on ANY website is now in effect.

Don’t Write for Search Engines, Write for Search Engine Users

A blog I found through Blogging Zoom about how to make money online gives an excellent article on why the author writes long articles.  He writes long articles for one major reason, to stuff keywords for Google search traffic.  That search traffic brings non-blog related traffic, traffic that is looking for information, traffic that will click on adsense links if the ad relates to what they’re looking for.  His reasoning is sound and anyone who uses Adsense to help bring some ad revenue to their online business should read it.

Google, Search Engine, Adsense, Search Engine Traffic

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I use BlogRush on Desty Online as well as my new project.  Desty Online was officially approved for BlogRush; I added the BlogRush code to my new project after the manual reviews.  Due to it’s nature, I doubt that my new project will be approved (it’s commercial).  I still get traffic on both sites from BlogRush.

Look at my theme for Desty Online.  At the top of the page, you’ll see what I consider my most recent featured article; this is the most recent article that I believe new visitors will find of interest.  When I write newer articles, the newer articles are displayed on BlogRush, where I would rather control what article is sent across BlogRush.  If BlogRush would create a plugin to allowing coding or tags to mark what recent articles would appear in the BlogRush widgets, that would be the best improvement to BlogRush.

BlogRush, Traffic, Online Marketing

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I kept reading other how to make money online blogs, and it slowly became obvious that while some of these people knew how to make money online, they didn’t know anything about how to treat their money making enterprises as a business. One writer bragged about how his online earnings paid for a week’s vacation in New York City; sadly, he could have been doing so much more had he reinvested his income into his blog and possibly other online opportunities.

I started writing about how to run an online business using practices I learned in my offline businesses. Desty Online is really an online journal about my ventures into online businesses and online marketing. Desty Online itself is my 2nd online business. I’ve written quite abit about business practices such as creating a business plan, practical use of business income, and I recently started a detailed approach to my 1st online business, an eBay sales venture.

I started a 3rd online business a month or so ago; yesterday I determined that I while I knew a great deal about the niche, I really didn’t have the passion to write about it. So yesterday I rethought my plan, and did a complete change in my business. Instead of a blog the would rely on advertising opportunities, I would focus on an affiliate and sales based site using a blog as the medium. I’m really excited about the possibilities.

As to a direct answer to Michael’s question if blogging helps my business, I don’t know yet. Up until now, my online business has been blogging. Let me answer you in 1 year when hopefully I’ll have a good base for my new site.

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For the most part, our RSS subscribers count is close to doubling our average visitor numbers.  The bad news is that we’re still not very visible.  However bad that news is, the good news is oh SO much better…

Since our RSS numbers are higher than our visitors, that means those people who visit like what they read and subscribe to our feed!

And that, my friends, is the over all goal of our marketing strategy :)  Now if we can just get more visitors in here…

I was reading this weekend that, for the most part, blog readers don’t understand what RSS is and how to take advantage of it.  Here’s a video that describes what RSS really is and how to use it.

Source

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I’ll all for free stuff, but be honest, what does these contest entry articles do for your readers?  The only worth I can find is they communicate the existence of the contest so they too can enter if they so wish.

I used to do this.  Just got back about 2 months or so and you’ll see several contest entry articles.  I really could have used the LCD monitor…

So, why talk about it?  I was going through my RSS subscriptions and found an article titled, “I Want to Win a Wii!”  I felt embarrassed.  Maybe it’s just me, but it felt pretty sad.  I can’t say too much though, because I’ve done it too.

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Just a warning, this post does ramble abit, but trust me, read along and you’ll see I tie it all together at the end

Sometimes, while working on articles that take more time than I have on some days, I worry about not writing a quick post.  I worry because right now, Desty Online’s traffic and RSS subscribers are at an all time high.  We’re riding a wave of momentum and I just want that wave to keep building and building.  Of course, nothing lasts forever.  Some readers will get bored and unsubscribe.  It’s oh so temping to just sit down in front of the computer and type out a quick post.

Then I sit back and think long term.

What type of rep do I want Desty Online to have?  Do I want to be thought of as a blog that has articles everyday, most of them good, but some are just filler?  Or, and this is the one I want, do I want the rep where there might be a day without an article, but when that next day pops up and that article hits the Net, it was well worth the wait!

For those new readers, I do have a day job as a transportation dispatcher for a small company who’s a tier 1 logistics provider for the automobile makers in the United States.  I focus on dealing with Toyota, but I do have 4 routes per day for General Motors.  As such I am right in the middle of the UAW strike.  I have to keep these 4 guys busy with actual work where they can support their families, make that work be actual profitable work for my company, and still be in a position to support GM should the strike end.  Translation, I worry all day long about the next day and what could happen.

It leads to a rather stressful day to say the least.  Normally through the day I’m able to jot down some ideas, write a few paragraphs for articles, etc during breaks.  Today all I wanted to do was sit back and relax while I could.  Got home, played with the boys, talked with my wife about how I hadn’t written anything all day and hadn’t even thought of anything to write about.  I’m in the middle of my series on how to make money online from your dorm room (thought I’d forgotten about that hadn’t you!) but those articles are rather labor intensive and I don’t want to just slap them together.

So after the boys are in bed, I log in to check comments.  I still have a great comment from Alan on my EarnByLoaning review; my head isn’t into investments right now, and since his comment was so excellent, it deserves my full attention.  Anyway, after checking for new comments, I always check the anti-spam filter to see if anything got caught that shouldn’t.  Out of 11 potential spam comments, 1 comment was a gem.  It was made on my post about reestablishing my DoFollow plugin.  SEO Expert had a simple comment / question:

it shoked me . why you make it dofollow

It made me think.  Why did I turn my DoFollow plugin off back in early August?  My original reason was to help boost any possible PR increase by stemming the flow of “link juice” from my blog.  What made me come back and turn the plugin back on was my original reason for starting it in the first place.  PR  is cool; it helps determine your “rankings” in online money making opportunities such as Text-Link-Ads, PayPerPost, and others.  PR wasn’t my original aim for Desty Online; my original goal was to document my journey online in building a business, along with discussing business and investing in general.  This requires an audience, not for ego or acceptance, but to have a dialogue, a conversation if you will. 

DoFollow is known for having people search for your blog, just to write a comment to get some of that “link juice.”  My hope was, since I’m rather strick on my comment moderation, that people would actually have to read the articles to get their comments live.  In reading the articles, if I did my job right, they would like the articles, and come back for more articles, hopefully subscribing to my RSS feed.  My idea with turning on DoFollow was to turn opportunistic spammers into readers, and to reward commentators.

Is that a good enough reason?  Don’t know, but it works for me!

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• Too long between posts — I subscribed to your blog because I liked your articles, either individually or collectively.  Posting 2-3 times per week if fine with me.  Posting once every 2-3 months means you’re taking up space.
• Too many posts per day — Love your articles!  If you would, PLEASE cut down to no more than 3 at most per day.  It seems like all you do is write.  That’s all well and good, but every time I load my reader, I have 5-6 articles waiting from you.  Just before I removed you, I had 56 articles from you that I hadn’t read, and that’s just from 4 days of not reading your feed.
• Every post is filled with affiliate links — I think your writing is super.  Cut back on the affiliate links.  Almost 75% of your links in every article are either affiliate links or paid text links.  I wouldn’t have a problem with that normally, but you pepper every post with 25-30 links!  I know, I counted, and that’s the average.

By themselves, any of the above offenses could be tolerated.  The problem comes when these issues combine with each other. 

 Let me give you an example of one particular feed:

I loved the articles, but noticed that they came out only once every 2-3 months.  That’s fine with me, good articles are worth waiting for.  After 3 articles, I noticed that all of the articles were generally the same article, just written differently.  Also, almost every link in the articles went to someone wanting to sell you something.  It was almost as if they rewrote articles ever so often to boost sales.

I’m purging my RSS feeds.  Just so you know, from last Thursday till today, I have 351 articles not read.  That tells me that either you write too much, or I really don’t care to read what you write in the first place.

If there’s something you’d like me to know about my articles, please leave a comment.  If there’s a specific type of article you’d like me to expound on, please comment or contact me via email.

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Low and behold, on PayPerPost, they were paying $50 to write about roller-coasters.  I’m a roller-coaster nut, but Desty Online isn’t about roller-coasters, so I didn’t think much about it.  After scanning the list, nothing on my radar, but something made me come back to the roller-coaster gig.  I don’t know what it was, the roller-coaster subject, or the fact that they were paying $50 for the article (almost enough for my 1st paid review I’m eyeing), but I clicked to check it out.  Turns out that it wasn’t about roller-coasters at all, but PayPerPost paying for articles about a change in their business plan and/or structure.

The article was huge, a blog entry on their blog I guess.  After scanning it, I liked what I saw, so I figured that I would reserve a spot.  It was about PayPostPost’s business, and not only did it fit in with my subject area, but I was getting interested in the article itself.  Sadly, all of the spots had been reserved, so no write up for me.

As I was drifting off to sleep, I started to think about the various articles that I had ideas for, or started to write but never got posted.

• The Million Dollar Man Article — If you remember back in the 80’s, the World Wrestling Federation had a wrestler called the Million Dollar Man.  His big thing was that everyone had their price, and he’d pay it to get what he wanted.  He’d have people come up and do silly or humiliating tasks for his amusement, and pay them.  “Everyone has a price for the Million Dollar Man!”  After thinking about it, I think that everyone does have a price, somewhere; it’s all a matter of what they want you to do and how much are they going to pay.  I heard a joke back in the 90’s about how Ross Perot went to Kathy Ireland and offered her $20 million dollars if she’d sleep with him.  “Sure,” she replied.  “Ok, how about only $20 to sleep with me,” Ross negotiated.  “I’m insulted!” Kathy stormed, “what type of girl do you think I am??”  Ross smiled, “We’ve already established what type of girl you are, now we’re just haggling over the price.”  I stepped back from writing the article because alot of people are in denial about being for sale.  My price you ask,  $775,000; mind you it depends on what the task is.
• Google = The New Dark Lord of the Sith? — A few years ago, heck, they still might think this, but Vice President Dick Cheney was compared to the Sith from the hugely popular Star Wars films.  With Google constantly changing standards and requirements for the hoops blogs have to jump through to get indexed, stay indexed, and comply with SEO, I had a thought.  This was back during the Project: I, Blogger series and I thought an article discussing Google and their ever changing standards would be a great addition.  As I sat down to write it, my business side chipped in that pointed out that no one was putting a gun to bloggers’ heads to force them to comply with Google.  With my main argument out the door, the rest of the article fell apart.
• Technorati Tag Line — In the earlier days of Desty Online, in trying to find my voice, I would skim through Technorati and scan the popular tag lines and subjects.  I don’t remember the subject, but I do remember that I wrote the entire article because the subject was popular.  While proofing the article, I couldn’t stand it.  Ever since high school, my standard when writing was that to have an excellent paper (article, post, whatever really), it had to be entertaining.  While not exactly funny or anything like that, it had to have a good flow and not make you stop reading in the middle because you couldn’t stand it.  I don’t know if all my articles follow that standard today, but I knew that popularity driven article was horrible and I couldn’t read it all the way through.  I sat on it for a few hours, reading and rereading it, trying to fix it, but no luck.  I trashed it.

Do you have any articles that you almost wrote but never got off the ground?

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I asked a buddy of mine to check out my site and he got the exact same thing.  There’s been only one change to the site in recent days: AdBrite.  I switched the lower home page banner from AdSense to AdBrite.  I had requested family friendly ads, but was getting “hot college girls on video.”  Now, I love hot college girls as much as the next guy, but that’s not what I want advertised on my site about online business.  Now, on top of that, getting the interrupt ads, I’ve gotten a bad taste from AdBrite, so not only has the banner switched back to AdSense, but I’ve also pulled the AdBrite referral from the sidebar.

Am I over reacting?  What’s your take on it?

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