I just had a hit from Google where my Whisky Rating blog was ranked #2 on page 1 for a search of “whisky” on Google.uk. And this without special SOE tweaking, just by offering good content on a regular basis. I have the Meta SEO plugin for Wordpress installed, though. Gotta love Wordpress!
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The nice thing about submitting your site to MyLinkState to sell text links is that all for your posts, pages, categories and tags the Google pagerank is displayed.
I made an interesting observation: My Whisky Rating Blog has just received PR 3. I was astonished to find out that some of my categories were PR 2 and some were PR 0. They all have no external backlinks! But I noticed that the PR 2 categories are more likely to be targets from search engine traffic.
I can draw only one conclusion from this: In their pagerank formula, Google weighs in the the amount of klicks on search pages, regardless of thir SERPs. Perhaps also the bounce rate is another factor. Here is an example for two distillery categories:
Just a few clicks made the difference as it seems. Or does anybody have another explanation for this phenomenon?
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Selling text links has become a bit of a two sided coin for bloggers. In the good old days you could earn a steady income from them regardless of your traffic provided you had a decent enough pagerank. But now Google will punish sites selling text links without “nofollow” attribute by reducing their pagerank in order to make selling links less attractive.
But now, a German advertising broker called MyLinkState has invented a system that can beat this unpleasant practice. They recently introduced a proprietary ranking system that is based upon how well a page ranks in Google search results for their database of 300,000 keywords. They call it MLS Rank and advertisers are presented with the choice of booking a text link based on the pagerank or the MLS rank. Just as Google does with their pagerank, they use a logarithmic scale to make the ranks comparable. Booking a MLS rank x link costs the same as a pagerank x link.
Another nice feature for us publishers is that all pages, categories and tags of a blog are spidered and will be offered separatly to the advertisers. So links are booked on a per page basis. With a maximum of three links per page, it is theoretically possible to gernerate quite a bit of income this way.
The site is open to international customers, you can choose German or English as a language for your site and advertising. So far I have only sold links on my German blogs, but I also just registered my whisky blog which is written in English. I will keep you updated how the bookings for this site will evolve, as I am sure this will be of interest for international bloggers.
MyLinkState uses a point system for buying and selling links. 1000 points are worth EUR 0.60 or $0.87 at the current exchange rate. Earnings are paid out via Paypal if you have accumulated more than EUR 50.
Approximate earnings per link per month (from my own experience):
I don’t know if the points kepp doubling with higher ranks, so I won’t promise anything here.
This new ranking system has only recently been introduced, and so far most of my bookings were by pagerank. But today I sold two 9000 point links on PR 0 pages because they had a MLS rank of 4! This is what prompted me to write this article.
Everybody who knows a little bit about SEO will notice that with this proprietary ranking system you don’t have to care anymore about being punished by Google for selling text links, provided your pages rank well enough in Google searches.
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I just had my first small success in optimizing affiliate promotion. On my Whisky Rating site I have a prominently placed affiliate ad linked to one of the major whisky online stores, served by Affiliate Window. Although it receives a fair amount of clicks, so far I have not made a single penny yet by sales through this ad.
Earlier this week I had an idea. So far I have rated around 80 different whiskies on my site. Some of them are rather obscure and/or out of stock, but many are readily available. Why not help people who look for information about whisky by adding a direct link to the product in the online store? So I wrote an e-mail to the whisky store, asking for permission to use their product pictures for the whiskies they have in stock after mentioning my plan to add direct affiliate links to their prodcuct pages. Side note: Never, ever copy or link other people’s product pictures without permission or you can get into serious trouble! Luckily they agreed, but after all why shouldn’t they? It opens up a chance for them to get new costumers.
It took me two hours to add the pictures and the links for roughly 50 whiskies. Et voilà: Just two days later I had my first affiliate sale through one of the new links! If it works once, it can also work twice or more. So when there is enough targeted traffic to your site, there is a real chance that strategically placed deeplinks can generate income.
In the affiliate statisics, these links are marked as text links. But to the best of my knowledge, the practice of placing the links in images will not be affected by Google’s “bought text link” penalty because in the code it looks just like an ordinary banner ad.
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Many hobby bloggers are unaware of what is under the hood in search engines. They happily type away their articles, maybe decorated by some Adsense blocks and wait for visitors to read and click the ads. At the end of the day they look at their stats and wonder why almost nobody popped in.
Even if you are not keen on high advertising revenues; when you have a blog you want to have someone to read your articles. After all, there undoubtedly is a certain amount of exhibitionism involved in blogging. So you better take measures that your blog is not just another little critter in that giant ant colony that is usually called Blogosphere.
Making yourself more prominent on the net is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Basically, this means tweaking your blog in such a way that you rank higher in the result lists of search engines. If done properly, not only search engnie traffic will increase, but also traffic from other sources.
SEO can be broken down into two main elements:
Search engines let people search for keywords. So you have to make sure that you use keywords that are relevant to your blog as often as possible in your writing.
The better you play the keyword play, the higher you will rank in the search engines.
Another important factor in how well you are liked by search engines is the number of backlinks you have, this means sites linking to your blog.
Building up a link network takes time, as you can only control part of the process. Here are just a few things you can do:
The more sites link to you, the higher you will rank in search results. And you will also benefit from people clicking on the links you have left. Perhaps other bloggers will add you to their blogroll, if they like what you write.
This was by no means intended to be an in-depth introduction to SEO, just a quick overview for beginners to get familiar with the term. Fancy things like PageRank or TrustRank were deliberately skipped to keep it as simple as possible.
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Blogging is fun. This is why we do it. Literally millions of blogs have sprung up in the last years; this wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a serious fun factor involved. But there are also quite few bloggers out there who earn a decent amount of money with their blog, some of them even blog for a living.
At some stage of their blogging experience, most bloggers will have asked themselves the question if they should put up advertising on their blog to generate a few extra bucks. In a way, the decision for or against advertising is quite fundamental. There are good reasons to use advertising as well as there are reasons to oppose it. To make up your mind, please consider these pros ans cons:
I made up my mind and decided to place advertising on my blogs, but I try not to overdo it in order to avoid putting off my readers.
Putting up advertising is an important decision and should not be taken too lightly. Every blogger should think thoroughly about this vital issue.
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Apart from sparetimeblogger.com, I am running four blogs in well-defined niches. I don’t deny the fact that generating some extra income by advertising was one intention to start them. But most importantly, these blogs cover topics that I really do care about, and they offer worthwhile and original content to those interested in the niche.
In a way, this is my home on the internet. I have been selling collector’s stamps on eBay under the account name “olikli” for 10 years now, and it was a logical move to register the corresponding domain. It started as an old-fashioned homepage designed with Microsoft Frontpage. After having been somewhat neglected for several years, I decided to turn it into a blog earlier this year, after I had discovered that meanwhile it had silently acquired a pagerank of 3.
This site now acts as a showcase for my items offered on eBay, along with some additional content. The pagerank of 3 allows me to sell a few text links that so far earn enough to pay for my web hosting bills.
This was my first blogging attempt, a blog in German about food, drink and anything related. I started in March 2008 with longer breaks. So far, the site has acheived a pagerank of 2, earning a few Euros with text links. I have joined some affiliate programs, but revenues are still neglectible. But to be honest, I didn’t really try very hard to drive traffic to the site.
I love whisky, that’s why I started to include whisky tasting notes on mampfologie.de. But I soon recognized that the whisky content would drown everything else on the blog. So I came up with the idea to “outsource” the whisky content into a dedicated blog. My concept was to create a place where all users could leave their whisky ratings and tasting notes to help others in making their buying decision. The site has been running for a few months now, and has no pagerank yet. Traffic is quite ok to start with (about 2000 Google Analytics pageviews per month), but user participation is not very vivid yet.
Somewhat more than a week ago I started a new project with a German blog about all the stupid and funny things I come across in my daily life. Let’s see how this will work out.
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Yes I know, I’m not exactly the first one to start a blog about blogging. But perhaps you are interested in the adventures of a small part time blogger just having dived into the shark pond.
I am a professional stamp dealer from Germany, selling almost exclusively on eBay. In my spare time I have started several blogs about things I am passionate about: food, whisky and fun. The intention of sparteimeblogger.com is to monitor the success of monetizing these blogs and to write about anything that is needed to build up a successful blog.
As I am just starting to seriously take on the blogging adventure, this blog doesn’t want to be a “How to make money fast with blogging” scam but more a learning-by-doing experience that is hopefully helpful to other aspiring bloggers out there.
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