slamboard

I was just checking out one of many online businesses that claim to operate on Christian principles. I am skeptical but respectful of this practice. Basically, I consider it a branding decision and the degree to which it is ethical is entirely dependent on how well they follow through with that promise. Actual churches don’t always measure up, so it is highly probable that many ‘Christian’ businesses register fairly high on the hypocrisy meter.

This particular Christian business seemed okay and what caught my eye was that they felt it was necessary to have a front page disclaimer related to advertising. The most prominent advertising was coming from Google.

Many webmasters and bloggers put contextual ads on their sites and take a buyer beware approach. These ads are so ubiquitous that we tend to feel zero responsibility for their content. Maybe we are wrong.

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.

There has been and continues to be what can only be described as hysteria in the blogosphere lately. I have suffered some disappointments along with many other people, but I have tried to remain calm. I have tried to have some perspective.

Many of the things that people have been doing over the past few months in hopes of maintaining and/or improving their own page rank have backfired. I purposely avoided a few of these on this blog. I joined the Do Follow movement with my personal blog, but not with Slamboard. I took part in weekly memes with my personal blog but not with this blog. I joined blogrolls with my personal blog, but not with Slamboard.

The Google pagerank for Slamboard went up to a number that made me happy for several days and then dropped back down. I still had a net gain of 1. My personal blog dropped by 1.

I think that I am going to continue writing and managing my blog in much the same way that I always have and hoping that I move up the rankings through attrition.

I just had one of those moments, where I decide that it is time to write a post even though I don’t really feel inspired or motivated.

The first topic that came to mind was the ethics of monetized blogging. I typed those three words into Google and I was a bit disappointed to find that this blog was the top hit. It seems like this is a topic that is not being widely discussed in an open and frank way.

The number two hit was from thepaperbull.com. The author of that blog had an issue with the what he perceived as unethical behavior by John Chow. I don’t know if John implemented his plan to charge a subscription for removing the no follow tag from links in his comment section or not. In my mind this seems like a poorly thought out way to get money from your readers. I removed the no follow tags from my personal blog when the practice was being promoted as a good neighbor kind of gesture. I have not implemented ‘do follow’ on Slamboard.

Farther down the page is DoshDosh. Her post was a review of a presentation by a famous Adsense success story guy. Adsense revenue is the money that site owners make when readers click the ads by Google. These ads are meant to be contextual. Google uses keywords present on your blog to decide whose ad to place on your page. The subject of ethics comes into play with this because site owners do not have any editorial control over these ads. The author of DoshDosh felt that she would be a hypocrite if, for example, she was writing a post criticizing MLM schemes and her post triggered a contextual ad for an MLM scheme. The gist of the post is that she wants editorial control and is putting that ahead of the small revenue offered by adsense. This post is about six months old and it now features Adsense ads.

…running Adsense on sites with little content (proxies, parked domains etc.) or weakly branded sites with a very general and wide range of topics means a lesser risk of going against your site’s mission statement or content focus.

I find that here is a real class distinction among bloggers. The people who build a reputation and a following with a personality and/or content that is somehow engaging to a vast number of people have the luxury of selling out in relatively unnoticeable ways and earning thousands of dollars. Other people are adding their stories to the millions and they take advantage of any monetizing scheme that works and quite a few that don’t. Labeling any particular practice in the blogosphere as unethical is typically a judgment call, because there is no code of ethics that is widely recognized (please correct me if I am wrong).

There is a weird feeling that I get whenever I get a glimpse of just how much I DON’T know about internet marketing and SEO. Reading a Technology Blog is generally stressful for me.

The blog over at DatabanqMedia.com has an interesting post about the pitfalls of orphaned pages. Until a few minutes ago, I had never heard of orphaned pages. Now I am worried that I probably have them. An orphan page is one that has no inbound links as a result of some restructuring of your site.

David Bayer is President of DataBanq Media and in this post he uses several diagrams and analogies to explain how orphaned pages can affect your Google rank.

I discovered ContestBlogger.com recently and I have been back just about every day. This is a site that gives added exposure to ongoing contests in the blogosphere.

I go there for two reasons. The first is to keep my eye out for contests that I would like to enter. The second reason is to find out what works and what doesn’t work as far as contests go. Bloggers who want to earn advertising revenue with their blogs need to work hard and/or smart in order to build traffic and incoming links. Holding a contest has the potential to improve traffic and links.

I have held three contests since I became a blogger. My success has ranged between nil and reasonable. I have won a contest or two as well. Some contests provide incoming links and relevant commentary as part of their prize. My friend Skeet has a mystery picture contest every Tuesday. The weekly prize is a post from her blog about the site of your choice with links. All weekly winners go into a monthly draw for a $10 certificate from Amazon or Starbucks. Since the contest involves making guesses in her comment section, the traffic benefit must be pretty significant as people go back to the post again and again to see if a correct guess has been submitted. I won this contest twice this year and I have taken a break from participating, but I still look every week.

If you have a contest on your blog, you can submit it to ContestBlogger.com for free. If you want it to really take off, you can pay $20 to have it FEATURED on the site. Features contests get a snazzy graphic thing, a sidebar link for the entire contest duration and a bigger, better mention in the blog. If I ever come up with a contest idea that is both unique and good, I may go for this.

Ironically, the first movie to have EXPLOSIVE word of mouth buzz on the Internet did poorly at the box office. Snakes on a Plane was a hugely successful web phenomenon, but people were already tired of it when it hit the theaters. The buzz that just happened was way too soon. I made a my own parody called Snakes on a Plate back then. It was hosted on Bolt.com, which just went out of business.

These days buzz campaigns are more strategic and are timed very carefully. Promoters of Rob Zombie’s Halloween had a campaign running with PayPerPost recently. This movie is breaking the Labor Day weekend box office record in the USA, grossing over $10 Million on it’s first day. There was actually a lot of discussion surrounding this movie and the promotional campaign. This was partly due to its graphic and extreme violence. The discussion in public forums and in blog comments was the result of the advertising campaign and it amounts to free publicity.

I can’t see how it is possible to measure the return on investment of a buzz campaign for a blockbuster like this. One value added aspect to paying for exposure on blogs is that blog posts will for the most part stay up long after the movie posters and television commercials are gone.

The comedy SuperBad had a well executed campaign on YouTube, an advantage of this is that they can feature clips that are for ‘mature’ audiences. Promoters paid for a blog campaign that was designed to augment the YouTube campaign. This movie stayed at number 1 for two weeks solid.

Small releases that appeal to a more targeted demographic have had similar promotional campaigns. I intend to keep an eye on movies like Eye of the Dolphin to see if bloggers really can send people to the theaters. If you loved Whalerider, you might enjoy Eye of the Dolphin as well.

If you like to see the numbers for movies, just look at The-Numbers.com

When I was a little kid living out in the country and listening to the Am radio in my father’s dumptruck, I thought that bar patrons were cramming Billy Joel’s jar with actual bread. Since that time, I have become well acquainted with the conventions of giving gratuities to people who provide service.

I took part in a discussion recently about the idea of a virtual tip jar for bloggers. I know that lots of people take donations via PayPal or other services. The difference with a virtual tip jar would be that, ideally, everyone who availed themselves of the service provided by the blogger would buy into a social convention of donating a minute amount of funds. PayPal donations are perceived as just that… a donation…some benevoloent act. When we tip restaurant staff, we generally don’t consider it that way, it is simply expected and appreciated.

Gratuities gained the name tips when a sign was placed on a jar in a British coffee house that read To Insure Prompt Service. If a blogger were to use monies from his virtual tip jar to pay for a dedicated server and also to quit his day job, that slogan might be appropriate.

Critics of blog monetizing models like PayPerPost have always liked to assert that nobody clicks on the links in sponsored blog posts. I know for a fact that this is not true.

Yesterday, Ted Murphy, the founder of PayPerPost was bragging about the CTR average that PayPerPost sponsored posts receive. The number is surprisingly high at 10.545%.

I have recently placed this blog on the PayPerPost Direct program. Any interested advertisers can click on the text link in my sidebar and begin a negotiation with me. PayPerPost acts essentially as an escrow service in this arrangement. Give me something cool to write about, please

I should mention the names of the vocal PayPerPost critics, so any interested readers can see what they have to say. Jason Calancanis and Mike Arrington are names you may or may not have heard before.

In the Kimkins controversy storm that has swirled these past few weeks around the net’s most popular low carb blogger, Jimmy Moore, I had started to wonder whether my admiration of the man had been misplaced. Turns out, absolutely not!

Many people have called Jimmy stubborn, misguided, a hothead, and much worse — but it takes a real man of integrity to shoulder the responsibility that Jimmy did on Friday with his no-holds-barred apology to the low carb community and renunciation of his affiliation with Kimmer/Heidi Diaz of Kimkins.com. My respect for Jimmy Moore has deepened profoundly.

Jimmy appears to be in the process of removing every last Kimkins affiliate link and positive blog post he has made about Kimkins. This represents a big financial hit for him. However, the low carb community is rallying around him and I can only hope that this lost income will be cushioned by the increased support.

Heidi Diaz is publicly “supporting” Jimmy’s decision right now; reading between the lines, though, she implies that he made the decision for business reasons, and I really don’t think that’s the story. I would advise Jimmy to prepare for the possibility that Heidi will turn on him now, but I’m sure he’s seen and read enough at this point to know that already.

Bravo, Jimmy Moore!

UPDATE: Looks like at least one other former Kimkins affiliate has decided to sever ties.