Postcards from the Funny Farm

This post is another (I hope the last) rant about Google so feel free to jump ship before you go one. I don’t usually like to whine about stuff, I like to change things or shut up generally. After this post I plan to pretty much shut up about Google PageRank but I will respond to comments of course ;)

I’ve been setting goals for my blog and recording them here since December of 2007. It has been gratifying in almost every respect but I still am not where I’d like to be in other ranking systems such as Google and Technorati. Instead of getting frustrated or trying to game the system, I’ve decided to make my own ranking system based on the things that I value in my blog. I’m calling it the CAN. system My hope is that you, the regular reader, and anyone else who wants to will follow my progress and learn that serious writers can make legitimate money on their blogs without PageRank. My goal since December of 2006 has been to create, innovate, and intergrate quality content. I haven’t lost this goal, I’ve simply defined it more clearly and added “money” as a goal element. This blog does NOT deserve to have a zero PageRank.

Google seems to be highly puritanical when it comes to paid-links on a blog. It’s actually worse than “highly puritanical ” it’s near obscenely puritanical … it makes no rational sense. Who are they serving really? Do you care if a helpful blog post was paid or not? I know I don’t.

I have examined Google’s criteria for PageRank and frankly, I don’t think they even know what they are doing with it. Nonetheless, we have to suck it up as bloggers. It’s the industry guideline that advertisers and publishers use when hiring and taking blogs seriously. Thank goodness many influential bloggers are starting to come out against Google. IZEA is leading an effort against PageRank “.... As for me, watch for my first CAN. update in August. You can see my goals for July here. Maybe it will give you something you’ll find engaging to read by your espresso machines.

One thing, I will give away right now as I close: To make my logo and button for the CAN, Rank System was to use a tutorial for Photoshop. If you’d like to try something similar, it’s a lot of fun. The Google logo itself contains a font that costs $99. But this tutorial shows you how to make it with Ti.... It is cool. There are also tutorials there for companies like Hooters and O’Reilly … a lot more fun stuff. Enjoy and remember in whatever it is you blog about you CAN.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google PageRank on the internet lately. Many people have had their “currency” (I say that tongue in cheek but that IS what it is for those who seek advertisers favor for a living) taken from a 5 or 6 sometimes (or more) to a 0 overnight. I wrote about how my page rank was set from 4 to 0 and it was a real bummer let me tell you. I was angry.

Then some time passed. I was once the wild horse on this subject that Google has finally broken. I want my pagerank back if I can swing it.

I decided that it is possible Google is trying to do something right (I didn’t say probable). I can’t question their motives. So I started searching the web for examples of bloggers who had restored their Page Rank and the stuff I found wasn’t too promising. The first 3 that came up in a Google search with the search terms: “How I Got my PageRank back,” had some good advice, but when I by chance checked their pageranks, they were ALL STILL ZERO! My experience was that there were two waves in Google smackdown: 1) An initial and then a restoration of many and then a more resolute “spank” as IZEA calls it. (see button up top.)

Then I found a promising one. You can read it here. It’s where I got all the ideas I have engaged to try and get my page rank back. First, I went through and for every sponsored post link and/or commercial paid link, I added this inside: rel=”nofollow”

It took me a long time because I had two pages of PayPerPost links and quite a few PayU2Blog links I had to put rel=”nofollow” in. the rel=”nofollow” keeps the search engines from crawling links you add it to. This process took me 4 days to complete. I can’t imagine how hard this would be for someone who made their living at sponsored posts. You’d almost be better off just starting new. As for me, I’ve only done them for several months.

Next, as indicated in the article, I requested reconsideration from Google. (see below) Now I just wait. Google says it “may take a while.”

Hello. This is my second request for reconsideration to have my Page Rank restored. I believe the reason it was removed was because I did not identify paid links with a rel=”nofollow” tag. I took some out altogether and then requested reconsideration but I didn’t understand how to insert the rel=”nofollow” until recently.

I have spent the better part of 4 days going through all my posts and adding rel=”nofollow” to any commercial or paid links. I feel 100% confident that my site is worthy of page rank and that it will not follow paid or commercial links ever again in the future. I also know that now it does not have any paid links that are not kept from the search engine crawler by rel=”nofollow”

I average 80 visitors a day and I value the Google Pagr Rank system in letting readers know my content is trustworthy. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

To close I just want it to go on record with my readers that I still think Google is purposely sabotaging people who use paid links. I find their way in this to be at best anal-retentive and at worst crooked but I can’t deny the power pagerank has over advertisers. I am hopeful it will change but for now, I’m takin’ what their givin’ … well, you know the rest. To Google I say this: “My hands are held up high.”

So I’ve started this series and I will keep you posted what I have done and what result there is good or bad. I hope it helps out those in my shoes: Content-filled bloggers that are being penalized by Google for making money with their work.

How did I do in June of 2008?

Didn’t quite meet my goals in traffic and money, but publishing was a slam dunk. I think Social Media will save me in July.
Traffic
Goal: Traffic: 3,000 uniques
Actual: 2,554 uniques

I spent time playing and exploring ways “outside the box” to blog and you see the consequences here. At the same time, I feel my exploration was worth it. You’ll notice I now have all my top referring social media sites linked in my layout. I am investing more in them: ie; Chawlk, Blog Catalog, etc. We’ll see how that works for July’s numbers. I invite you to join my community at MyBlogLog and some of the other sites through the links at the top and in the sidebar. Networking is cool because the increased traffic works both ways!

Publishing
Goal: 3
Actual: 4

• Create Through Necessity a guest blog at Katelynjane’s Notebook.
• The Upside of Recession: Consciousness published at Blogcritics Magazine.
• Love Homework a guest blog at It Might be Love
• Playing through Diffucult Times a guest blog at Be Playful (Scheduled for an early July publishing)

Money
Goal: 200 bucks.
Actual: 115 bucks.

Due to not having PR, IZEA doesn’t give me the options I used to have as a PR4. This is very ironic since doing paid posts is likely why my PR was taken away, but I am not complaining. I feel like PR is going to change it’s ranking algorithm eventually and I intend to keep writing for hire when it makes sense. I’ll never publish what I consider a boring post. You have my word on that. And hey … 115 bucks is a lot of money! Incidentally, I just thought I’d throw in here that despite the recession, if you live in the area, the Boston jobs are flourishing. Thought I’d send the site out if anyone needs it.

Goals for July 2008 are:
Traffic: 2700 uniques
Publishing: 3
Money: 200 bucks

Final thought:

This month you will see me a lot in social media. I intend to use that more to try and meet my July goal of 2700 uniques. I think it is an untapped resource here at the Farm. I will report the results of this strategy next month. Maybe I’ll see you at the social media sites?

Thanks for following this series! Watch how I do in July 2008. -Damien

In this post I discuss how valuable Twiter and you may have heard of Twitter is you are not already using it. It is an enigma to me still trying to understand it’s huge popularity. It IS popular though so that alone becomes the impetus to join. As you Twitter, you theoretically can gain reader for your site or blog. I might as well change those terms into your “online ego.” Twitter will feed it for sure. That little blue “t” ca do a lot for your online ego. Whether it’s going to build your traffic? Well, the jury is still out on that one.

Twitter is a simple time-line of messages that users assemble from all over the globe intermittently as they feel the inspiration to do so. It reminds me a lot of the way PHPbb forums used to be. I would post in the morning what I was doing that day and when I got home I would check for questions or responses and I would reply. Twitter gives the reply function but it doesn’t alert the writer that her/his Twitter message has been replied to. To be, this is a huge drawback since the only way to find replies is to go back and back and back into the message since your twitter post to find the reply. Many times after all that, you find no one replied.

So what is it good for? Twitter is good for connecting friends who are online. It is also good for posting sites your run across to recommend, like a tumblelog. You can get traffic this way, but for me it hasn’t brought much. The best part of Twittering for me has been seeing what my friends are doing and getting ideas for content from that. I haven’t had much referral traffic for Twitter.

My friend Chris Gray really likes Twitter and he has this to say about it:

1. Online diary — I like to send updates on various milestones that I would have never otherwise written down. For example, I can go back and now recall the date and time my wife and I took our youngest son to get his first haircut or when he took his first steps. It’s also fun to look back at various other moments, goals, frustration points, and see where I’m at right this moment. I use it as a kind of gauge (if that makes any sense).
2. I also use it as a quick way to communicate with my friends (since I have twitter hooked up to my cell phone I can send them tweets wherever I am). I also use Twadget (Vista sidebar gadget) to post/keep up with tweets.
3. Finally, I occasionally use Twitter to advertise new blog posts (while I haven’t had the chance to do this for some time now- since my posts have been sparse

Thanks to Chris for that helpful info!

My conclusion? Twitter is a luxury/fun item that you should play with to keep up with friends as well as make new ones but I don’t see it as a way to improve traffic.

The other service I want to look at in this article is IZEA. Now, IZEA is a larger company that produces several smaller ones. The most well known one is PayPerPost. This is a service you apply to and, once acceoted, may choose from a list of “Opps” from paying advertisers for varying amounts of money (usually at my level I see opps from 7-45 dollars). Izea also has a new PayPerPost social marketing site called “Social Spark.” It is currently in a invite-only beta phase but i have been told that very soon it will launch publicly. There isn’t much to review with regards to traffic but from what I can tell, this will become both a monster way to find paying ad sponsors, but also a way to network and increase your traffic. The one drawback I see is the fact that some people will perceive this as a competition and not linkback etc. I hope that is not the case and that IZEA creates incentives for referrals and links to other members. If that proves impossible with this business model, I hope they will seek out ways to make members friendly with each others and helpful toward one another.

So, those are the two social networking sites I wanted to write about tonight. I’m getting more and more into this online social marketing stuff. So much so that I have already purchased some patch panels for the computer room in our new home. But whatever I recommend and however much hardware you have in your home, you have to see what really works best for your needs. Use these services as much as you can before you take my review as gospel truth. For some, these may work better than for others. Enjoy.

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I made more money in March than I have made blogging to-date. In this post I show how. So, without any further ado, lets get to my March 2008 goals and results.

In February’s post, I broke down my March goals into three categories. This worked so well that I will be doing the same for April. You may recall the three categories are:

1. Traffic Goals,
2. My Web Publishing Goals, and
3. Monetization Goals.

First, let’s look at last month’s stats:

March 2008

1. Traffic Goals:
   3,532 Visits: Goal exceeded! (was 3500)
   114 Visit/Day avg.: Goal of 100 visits/day exceeded!
2. My Web Publishing Goals:
   Just to reiterate: One of my main goals with my blog is to establish more of a name and an online presence through multiple online locations. These also help with backlinks, Google PageRank and Technorati authority. I went on a publishing field-day to put it mildly! I hope to do even more next month.
   
3. Monetization Goals:
   Feeling a little jaded after Google smacked my page rank from a PR4 to a PR2 because I used IZEA, I decided to set my PayPerPost goal low in March at $30. I exceeded that goal with an income of $65 from PayPerPost in March. Also, I was able to make $20 from Loud Launch and an incredible first month of $70 with PayU2Blog. The PayPal payment just went into my bank account an hour ago. Can you say Sarah and I go to Chili’s for lunch today??? ;) Oh, one more money item: I gained 2 125×125 paying advertisers this month. It is a pleasure having them and I plan to do all I can to keep them happy.

Okay, now it is time to list my future goals for April:

1. Traffic:
   3750 Visits.
   175 Visits/Day (I know it is almost doubling last month’s goal, but I am networking through 9Rules and BlogCatalog much more as well as some sources I’m choosing to wait to mention in case they don’t work).
2. My Web Publishing Goals (10 published articles in April): Publish on …
   BlogCritics (2)
   Associated Content (1)
   FuelmyBlog (2)
   GuestBlogging as the coveted offers come in. I would anticipate a minimum of 5 offers, but we’ll see. If I don’t get that many, I may approach YOU! ;)
3. Monetization Goals: I’m making a goal to make $100 minmum on PayPerPost and PayU2Blog. We’ll see what the ads bring in as well but I am not setting an ads goal at this time.

Think I can pull it off? I am confident I can. You might consider subscribing to my feed so you don’t miss an update! This month should be an exciting month of meeting these new goals. Oh, and if you are interested in getting traffic from this blog, I would like to do a guestblog or interview for you on your blog. Let’s talk! Thanks for reading Postcards from the Funny Farm.

This blogger is very excited about his RealRank badge (see right sidebar top). As I have written in the past, RealRank is based on concrete data that makes it easier to make an improvement plan and to know truly how you rank as a blogger. You will not hear about PageRank here much anymore, even if Google decides to generously “bestow” it upon me again. You can get your RealRank badge by clicking on mine. Remember that in some ways Google rules the world but in many other ways, life goes on outside its motherly skirt. RealRank and Izea is one of those places. I also have an animated Mickey Mouse link to Disney.com on my site. You’ll have to wait until a future post to find out what that’s about ;) Most my die-hard readers know that Walt Disney is one of my heroes, so it really isn’t too hard to figure out. Don’t think about it too much now, you’ll get a headache.

Now go out and get your RealRank!

What do you think of a ranking system to rival PageRank?

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?

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...