AdesBlog.com

People have been waiting for the PageRank update for so long already. Last update was in April 2006, this makes it the longest delay in PR update history. There are also talks on blogosphere and forums that Google might be thinking to abondon PageRank system altogether.

Why would Google abondon its PageRank?

The possible answers for this would be: One: To stop the manipulation of their PageRank algorithm. Currently people are manipulating their algorithm to get higher PR, mainly this is done through buying text-links, link exchanges, paid reviews..etc. To most websites, higher PR means higher advertisement prices.

Two: To improve the SER (Search Engine Results). Due to the manipulation of PageRank algorithm and extensive text-link buying and selling among websites on the net. Google claims that their SER are being indirectly manipulated too. Because when someone purchases a link from high ranking site, Googlebot spiders it and gives more importance to that link. And as a result of this, places this particular website higher in search engine results page.

To prevent this from happening, Google has been forcing people to use rel=”nofollow” on their paid text links. In simple words, Google said: “if we detect that you are selling text-links on your site or blog, we are going to punish you…” But majority of the people didn’t listen and resorted to hiding the paid text links under different headings. This made the usability of the websites and the search engine results even worse. Because now, when you see a site, you wouldn’t know if the text links were advertisements or just a recommended links. So Google somehow affected its own algorithm adversely, when it started to force them to declare their paid links.

Signs of PageRank update?

There are some signs of Google PR update though, but it might just be PageRank revoking only. Google sometimes does PR revoking independently of PR update. Latest victim of PR revoking is JonhChow dot com. He lost his PR6, and now has a PR5. But being the *evil* that he is, he already started counter strategy to combat this. And that is - to increase his RSS subscribers instead.

Number of RSS subscribers is already being included in the quoting of the advertisement prices. So the more the RSS subscribers, the more money you can charge for your ads. Mhhh… good thinking John!

AdesBlog’s future

So far future pagerank predictions for AdesBlog has been stable PR7. Inshallah it will stay the same. I got my PR7 on October 3, 2006. Tomorrow it will be exactly one year since I got my PageRank 7, first anniversary ;) It’s been great to have a PR7 blog. During which I tried to share its benefits with my readers.

I get so many questions about my PR7. How did you get it? What is the secret? Tell me and I won’t tell anybody…etc. Even JohnChow asked me to guest blog about it in his blog, but I humbly declined. Because there was nothing special about it. First of all there is no secret. Secondly if it stays the same - PR7, after the major PR update, then I will post about it as a separate post. I will reveal the so called “secrets” at that time ;) So stay tuned!

Conclusion

Did you notice any PR updates on your sites? If so, has it been positive or negative? When do you think PR update will occur? Do you think Google will abandon its PageRank system? What is your opinion on these pressing issues of blogoshpere? I am sure many readers would be interested to know your thoughts.

Also consider AdesBlog’s advertisement opportunities if you want to increase your chances of getting higher PR ;)

Source for the screenshot above: click here

Talking about the catchy titles… doesn’t 200% sound catchy enough? Now that I have your attention, let me promote some affiliate program instead. ;) Just kidding, the fact is, my earnings did increase by more than 200%, hear me out.

MyBlogLog is a great service to see your daily traffic summary. It displays three crucial information:

1. Where did people come from? (Displays 10 highest traffic-source to your blog)
2. What pages they viewed? (Displays 10 most viewed pages of your blog)
3. What links they clicked? (Displays 10 most clicked links for the day)

These information is displayed every day, and the stats are available for the past 7 days. By regularly looking at them, you will notice that there is a trend in your stats. That is - some pages appear every day among the most viewed top 10 pages. In my case, 7 out of 10 are the same pages that appear as the most viewed pages every day.

What does that mean?

That means, MyBlogLog is begging you to make some changes to those pages. It’s asking you to optimize them for AdSense (or any other publisher program that you use). It’s saying “these pages have the highest traffic, but you are not making use of it”.

How to make use of these pages?

I don’t really use AdSense that much on this blog, most of the time it’s just one image ad (200×200) at the right column. But after I noticed these stats, I had to include few ad-units on those popular pages. And the result? Earnings increased by more than 200%. See the screenshot below:

I know the figures are not much, that’s because I am not really monetizing this blog with AdSense. But earning more than $10/day from 10 blog posts is definitely better than earning $2.94/day from the whole blog.

What pages are they?

One of them is this post “Earning 70K by 17 years of age, whateverlife.com“, it’s getting around 200 views every day. Most of the traffic comes from Google when people search for whateverlife. My page comes on No.3 spot at the moment.

Previously this page didn’t have any AdSense ads. There was only one Google image ad, on the right column. If you look now, it has 2 ad-units inside the content, and 1 link-ad unit at the end of the content. Also whateverlife’s url has been changed to normal text, and that increased clicks on the ads.

By the way, inserting link-ad at the end of the post, did increase the earnings by 100%. So the lesson here is, mix and match. And test, test and test!

Why MyBlogLog?

Simply because I check MyBlogLog community very often, and while I am at it, I can quickly scan my stats.

Yes, there are many other very sophisticated tracking tools that I use, but I simply do not check them everyday. Maybe once or twice a month only. And that makes it difficult to detect most viewed pages, and most clicked links for day, as well as for the last 7 days.

Most Popular Posts ≠Most Viewed Posts for the day

Please note that, most viewed pages are different from most popular posts. Most popular posts are not necessarily the pages that are getting the highest pageviews at the moment. They might have the highest total pageviews (since you started your blog), but in order to find the highest viewed pages for today and yesterday, you should use MyBlogLog or check your other stats tool daily.

But obviously, you should monetize your most popular posts too. No doubt about it. What I want to point out here is that, daily most popular pages might change from week to week. Since you will be posting different topics every day. Therefore, it’s important to know and detect these pages. And while they are popular, you should seize the opportunity and monetize them!

P.S If you haven’t subscribed to my RSS, you really should! subscribe here.

Today was the last post for the blog Nice4Rice.com. After only six months in operation, it came to an end today.

Nick, the Founder of Nice4Rice says the main reason for closing the blog was:

1. It was difficult to come up with new ideas for posts
2. The blog didn’t generate income

In his own words:

I would only write something once or twice a week, but it would usually take me hours to make each post, and I’d be thinking about what to write for days. In fact, compared to niche websites, it’s so much harder to monetize a blog - at least in my experience.

Creativity Problem

Coming up with new ideas for the posts has been cited one of the top problems for many bloggers. Criticality of the problem will depend on the level of your passion about the topic that you are blogging. If you are blogging about something that you love, then it will be easier for you to come up with new ideas every time.

Experience and expertise in your own field helps too. If you are an expert in one field, you can always fall back on your vast knowledge and easily come up with a new topic.

I had written a post called “What to expect when you are full time blogger” earlier, while the topic talks about full time blogging, points 2 and 3 in the post applies to Nice4Rice case.

Is the end of Nice4Rice a new beginning for you?

I wish Nick had tried to find ways to keep the project alive. There were successful takeovers before, one of which is netbusinessblog.com, sold by Matt Coddington to Adrian Cooke for $13,000. Now the blog still thrives, since the takeover it has also acquired some 250 new RSS subscribers.

So if there is anybody who has zest for giving rice, maybe you could buy Nice4Rice.com? The new mascot would look something like this ;) (look right). Of course with your face.

I had supported Nice4Rice project from the beginning and had given Nick free PR7 backlink from this blog under “Firends & Blogroll” section. Now that the project is over, I will probably remove it.

If you are a regular blogger and if you have blogged for a year or more, chances are great that you must have faced or thought about this problem already. And that is, how to solve “burried-posts” problem? Different people have tried to address this issue differently, in this post I will list some of the widely used solutions for this problem. I will also include the solutions that I have implemented myself.

If you are a new blogger, then you should consider this issue in your long term plan. And you have to choose which solutions you will be using for your blog. Because when you have too many posts, it will be a lot more difficult to implement new strategies.

Solutions for Burried Posts

1. More Categories

When you have more categories on your blog, users will be able to read a topic of interest as specific as possible. And that will save time for the user from reading unrelated or unnecassary posts. I am using this strategy on my blog, currently I have over 40 categories. I personally think more categories is the most important solution that should be used regardless.

2. Related Posts

Another solution is “related posts links” that appear on every post of your blog. This can be done by WP Plugins, I am using this plugin (I was informed that the link is not working at the moment, hope he will restore it soon) for my blog. This plugin allows you to search and select the related posts for your any given post manually, this plugin gives you greater control than the automatic plugins. Because here, you decide what posts to show, and that results in more accurate “related posts”.

Automatic plugins work the other way around, they will select the related posts automatically and display them on the fly, without your intervention. You just activate the plugin and relax. One advantage of automatic plugins is, they are dynamic. That means all the new posts will be automatically indexed and included in the related links. This cannot be done in manual plugins, you have to update the “related links” every time you post something related.

You should decide what suits your need best.

3. Most Read/Popular Posts

There are plugins that can keep track of the visitors to each page and show the most 10 popular posts (you can set to anything, not just 10) and display them as a separate page or right on the homepage.

However this Popular Posts solution has a drawback. Since most of the time it’s determined by the visits to the particular post, it might give an undesired result. For example a post that has only one link to some site might get dugg! and since it will have the most number of visits, it will show up on your Most Popular posts page.

Surely you would want users to read your other interesting articles than an empty post with just a link to other site?

4. Interesting Archives

This one is my own invention that I have implemented on this blog. Basically I have handpicked some of the posts that I think will be interesting to my readers, and hard-coded them into the blog’s theme. They appear on the footer of the blog.

I am also thinking to make them random, that way I will be able to display more posts.

5. Creating eBook from the old posts

Some people like JohnChow have created an eBook from their old posts. I think it’s a great idea. This would be possible for bloggers who are blogging about particular topic most of the time. Since JC is talking about Making Money Online, he could create a Make Money Online eBook. So if you have your own niche, then you can start thinking about your new eBook.

6. Creating Tag Clouds

Creating Tag Clouds on your blog can be a great idea for blog navigation. It can also help the new reader to quickly visualize what topics do you talk the most, and what’s your expertise. If your tag called “Ramblings” is so big compared to… let’s say “Make Money” then probably you will end up loosing the new readers ;)

7. Most Commented Posts

Most Commented Posts plugins can help you to promote your most popular posts in different way. They display the Top10 most commented/discussed posts of your blog.

Again there is a downside for this, for example if an argument breaks out between the readers and they end up comment-fight each other in the comments section of the post, that post will show up on your homepage. And this post might not be the most useful post for your readers.

How about you?

My question to you reader-bloggers is, how have you addressed this issue? What kind of solution you have implemented so far? I think it would be useful to all of us to know more solutions for this issue, especially to the ones who have just started blogging.

Updated: This post has been updated from the readers suggestions. Thanks to Travis and Spud.

Being a full-time blogger is a great thing, but it comes with its own responsibilities and challenges. I would like to point them out in this post. Maybe it will be useful to those who are thinking of going full-time.

Challenges of being a full-time blogger

1. You have to be consistent

Being consistent is a challenge of its own. When you are a full-time blogger, and if you are serious about it, then sun or rain, work or holiday, you should deliver same number of posts every day - consistently. How frequently you should post is a different topic, but whatever is your own post frequency, you should stick to that and keep it coming.

Most blogs post 1-3 posts a day, some blogs post one post in 2-3 days. You should remember that you can’t post too many posts a day, because that’s the first reason why readers unsubscribe from your blog RSS. If you post too less then your blog’s traffic will be on the slower side. So keeping to one post a day is a safe choice for many blogs.

2. You have to be persistent

Some people get excited when they start earning some money from their blogs and quit their jobs, and go for full-time blogging. However full-time blogging won’t guarantee that you will be earning same amount of money or more, you have to be prepared for down times as well.

When these unfortunate times arrive, you have to keep going, you have to be persistent in what you do even if it does not show results. Sometimes the solution for these times (down times) is persistence. Many people give up these times, you shouldn’t!

3. You have to be creative everyday

It’s not an easy task to keep blogging everyday, you have to be creative in coming up with new topics that will be interesting to your readers. Blogging about what you love or blogging about what you are expert in will be a good help here. Just like hobbyists, when it’s something that you love doing, you can go for years doing the same thing, that is - writing interesting posts about particular topic.

4. Be ready for colleague-less life

I have heard stories that some people even became depressed after quiting their job, because they got used to office life so much, and that they were now lonely (with only blog to stare at). To combat this, some people even rented office rooms to get that feeling of “going to work” everyday.

Personally I didn’t experience such things, maybe that’s because I never really liked going to office. Even before I became full-time blogger, there were times when I had quit my work for up to 1 year and survive on my internet business earnings. And during these times I became so attached to this work-at-home life, being your own boss and not going to work. After that I tried to join a company again and only lasted there for a year. That was the turning point for me, so I went full-time blogger! Since then life has never been better.

So these are the challenges that I could think of from my own experience. If you have anything to add please do so in the comments. I hope it will be useful for part-time bloggers to consider these points when they decide to quit their jobs.

I receive at least a dozen email from people asking for link exchange, some requesting a link from this blog and some from my other websites. Most of these emails end up in trash, there are few reasons for that. I would like to discuss some of them in this post.

Mistakes in sending a link exchange email
Not all the emails end up in trash because they were written not correctly. Some sites are rejected based on their content, some based on their category (these are usually non-IT sites), some based on their usefulness, and yet some because they are not professionally designed. But there are times when I just delete the email based on the way it was written. I will discuss these emails below and give some tips on how to write them correctly.

1. Using Ready Email Templates, a BIG no no!

If you are really interested in the link exchange that you are requesting, for God’s sake write it in your own words. Don’t go and use some email template that describes the basics of link exchange and the “great” advantages that I will get, after exchanging links with you.

Everybody who has enough experience running a website knows the advantages of link exchange, especially the ones who has run successful websites. So you don’t have to explain them the basics. Instead write an email in your own words, describing why you want to exchange links with him/her.

Usually these kind of emails, go directly to my trash. I have setup a “filter” that catches emails that have used certain ready templates.

2. Not related sites
If my website is about Web Design, please do not send me link exchange request for Construction Company! It won’t work. If you want to request for a paid advertisement, it might work, but for a link exchange it won’t. So sending such emails will just waste your time, and bring no result. Therefore before sending the email, get to know the site and its content.

3. Don’t bury the URL
Most of the sites will give you a backlink in a deep layer of their website, nobody will ever see or click on your link. This kind of offer, won’t get you any results. If you want to exchange links, give them offer that is irresistible. Give a placement that is clearly visible, if possible on the homepage under “Friends” or “Partners” section.

4. More stats is always welcome
Providing basic info like Website Name, URL and Description is necessary. But if you want to add more stats about your website, like Alexa Ranks, Google PR, RSS Subscriptions, Technorati Rank..etc it will be an advantage. As for Alexa Rank, increasing graph will be a plus.

5. Be personal, get to know the webmaster
Instead of writing “Dear Webmaster, I liked your website…” try to get to know the person behind the website, and use his/her name in the email “Dear Ades, I have been reading your blog…” sounds better and more personal. It’s always good to address the person by his name, so try to get to know his name before you send email. It will increase your chances of getting a link exchange.

Suggestion for new sites
If your site/blog is new and have low PR, don’t hesitate to contact and request for a link exchange from established sites/blogs. For me, exchanging traffic does matter but sometimes I like to help out new projects that have good potential. Like www.nice4rice.com and www.contestblogger.com, both have got a long-term link placement on my blog, just for their quality content and great idea respectively. So if you think you have a great blog, then start sending your link exchange requests.