My interviewee list is starting to build up nicely now.
For those who don’t know who Tyler Cruz is, he’s a prolific A-list blogger in this niche (MMO niche).
Tyler answered these questions via video, which was nice!
Thanks again to Tyler for your time. Was the best interview for this blog so far.
Tyler didn’t answer my last question though 
Always is the case that whenever I’m trying to be productive online / on my computer by doing stuff like trying to; Finish up an old website, add new content, write a post, design a banner… whatever; That I can’t help but immediately get distracted. A lot!
This is a bit frustrating because I tend to start something, complete an iota of it, minimize it for a second then find myself in the same place 4 hours later. It’s a cycle habit that I really need to break.
I’ve got about 8 posts in draft at the moment. Most half finished or just started, this is because I start writing then someone will start a conversation on MSN or I’ll just veer off into a world of disaullisioned, pointless inactivity.
Below I’ve listed the source of 90% of my main distractions when trying to work. Or more presicely, the top 5 distraction sources that result in inactivity on my part. I’ve given each one a distraction rating out of 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest.
MSN Messenger
Everybody knows MSN and any type of instant messenger / AIM is very distracting. Unless you’re a complete sociopath.
I don’t chat on MSN that much but if I’m doing work, somebody who starts a conversation almost, provides me with an excuse to not do what I’m focusing on. And for some weird reason even though I rarely talk about anything worth talking about on MSN, I can’t seem to bring myself to sign out!
But, MSN does just get tedious after a little while, I can quite happily just ignore someone whilst doing something very important. I might just stop MSN from starting up when my computer boots up though so that I don’t even think about it and get on with things.
Distraction rating – 4/10.
Google News
Pretty much the only real resource for news you need. Google nicely condense any news worth mentioning into categories and usually only publish interesting news. Unless of course you want real industry specific news, whereby there are better resources for certain topics.
I find Google News a strange distraction though; Even after I’ve read all the news I want to read, I can’t seem to be bothered to avert my eyes from the page, contiously scrolling up and down, reading the same articles, jumping different categories. It’s quite distracting.
Again though, like MSN, there is a limit to it’s distractiveness, after a while you will bore yourself stupid and should be able to stay off the news pages for a while.
Distraction rating – 6/10.
Wikipedia
Now, I’m not being funny, but I can literally waste hours reading various Wikipedia articles. I’m not an avid reader, I like to read interesting articles now and then but I don’t lose my time in blogs or books. But my God, Wikipeida is like a fisherman with a rod, I’m the fish!
I can start reading an article about someone interesting just for the sake of it. Such as… Richard Dawkins for example and then just get sucked in for ages jumping from article to article via links in that 1 article.
I have to commend the creator of Wikipedia, it’s a brilliant idea. Purely brilliant. And when you actually think of the idea itself, like; If somebody told me they were going to make an online encyclopedia which anyone could edit and that it would end up as a serious reputable source of information… I’d think they were an idiot.
On the outset, it just doesn’t sound like it can work since you’d naturally assume that given the amount of ill-informed people, bigots and just plain stupid people in the world, anyone could just sneak in irrelvent, mythical or otherwise silly nonsense into credible articles.
This isn’t the case however. I’m always amazed at how accurate Wikipedia is, it’s truly one of the most useful sites on the Internet. Upon mentioning Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist), Even he said he was shocked at how accurate the articles on evolutionary biology are.
I think the Wikipedia owner(s) have done incredibly well and resisted temptation of advertising yet still managed to make some well deserved cash from donations.
Distraction rating – 8/10.
YouTube
One of the most popular, if not THE most popular (after Google) sites on the Internet. And for good reason.
YouTube was the first real pioneer in online video distribution. It wasn’t the first to actually do it, as many think, but it was the first to fully socially embrace video upload on a mass scale and produce; Essentially, one big gigantic TV.
You now of course have plenty of social video sites such as; DailyMotion, Revver and of course the massively popular BBC iPlayer to name a few. But YouTube is still king.
Like Wikipedia and all good sites intended to keep your attention for longer than 10 minutes, YouTube is very well layed out. Constantly improving and keeping visitors for longer with that one absolutely essential method of ‘spider webbing’ content.
This isn’t an official term as far as I’m aware although I’m sure likeminded people have used this metaphor; Basically I just mean linking site content to site content, creating a spider web like effect.
I can be watching a video on YouTube and a certain keyword in the title, description or tags will trigger a different set of videos further down in the related videos, to which I’ll click one of and then a keyword there will trigger another set and so on. It can be quite hard to pull yourself away sometimes.
By the way, I’m not talking about regular YouTuber’s videos. I really couldn’t care less what a person who I don’t know or have any interest in happen to do with their day or what they fed their dog.
Essentially, I’m talking about… copyright videos to be honest. TV Shows, interviews with interesting people… It can all get quite addictive. I think I watched 3 1 hour interviews in a row with Quentin Tarantino before.
YouTube can be obsessively distrative if you’re trying to work but don’t quite know what to do next.
Distraction rating – 9/10.
Google Video
I’ve listed Google Video higher than YouTube on the distraction scale not because it’s more popular, as it isn’t, or that it does a better job at ‘spider webbing’ content: It doesn’t. But more to the point of the length of the videos.
YouTube still has a limit, you can only upload videos up to 10 minutes in length. Google Video doesn’t limit this, there’s plenty of videos on there well over an hour long.
Because of this I find it even harder to pull myself away because there’s more interesting videos. And of course because YouTube is owned by Google now, Google Video also incoperates YouTube listed videos as part of results as well as the ones actually hosted on Google Video.
Distraction rating of 10 out of 10!
This is the third and final part of my How to Run a Good Competition post series.
So far I’ve covered the planning and excution of a good competition. Now let’s discuss the aftermath so to speak.
What is a competition aftermath?
To me, the aftermath of a competition is the most crucial part other than the execution. If you don’t handle the aftermath correctly then you stand to lose basically everyone who subscribed just for the competition.
There are a lot of people who will subscribe purely for the chance to win a prize, some who will because they like your blog / content as well and some who do it based on a bit of both factors.
Problem is, a lot of the time, the people who just subscribe purely for the chance to win a prize often only glance your blog to check for competition updates and pay no attention to content.
This is where good execution comes in too. Because these people will be checking all the time to see if they’ve won, this is your chance to win them over, so make sure your content is on top form during the competition as well.
How to handle a competition aftermath
I’ve only held a few competitions on this blog, I think… 3. All 3 have yeilded some nice results and subscriber increases and I’ve managed to keep… I’d say… 80ish % of all subscribers from competitions. Which I don’t think is too bad as a lot of bloggers tend to lose about 60% of all who subscribe for competition purposes.
Anyway, it’s not rocket science to know what to do to keep those subscibers. Just post, a lot. But you need to be on the top of your game, think out unique posts then differenciate you from the norm to keep the not yet loyal subscibers; Loyal.
Other than this, link to the winner’s sites if they have one. They will appreciate the backlink and are much more likely to stick around as I’m sure that Incoming link in their WP-Admin Dashboard will remind them of you.
That’s pretty much it. Not much else to say on this final side subject.
So, that concludes this post series. How to Run a Good Competition.
As I start to make more posts into series as this blog goes on, I’ll put links up to the individual series to make for nice, accessable, easy read content.
A lot of people who obsessively read mock impersonator John Cow (for which I am not one to be honest) Are aware that Mr Cow recently put the blog up for sale. If I remember rightly he was asking in the region of $50k.
I think ‘Bob’ (blog owner’s real name… I think) Needed the money as he mentioned he’s moving to Australia so needed some quick funding. The site was listed on Sitepoint and put up on DP. Bob gave us the impression that it didn’t sell in a short follow up post about the sale; Saying numerous buyers had not followed through.
A little while after and I’m strangely suspicious given the sort of ‘new nature’ of the posts. Everything sort of seems normal and there has been no official announcement saying the blog has been sold (as far as I’m aware) But posts seem to be a little different.
I do glance through Cow’s posts on occasion as they can often be interesting / witty but lately I’m left with a strange feeling of unfamiliarity. Is it just me or does the recognizable writing style for which Cow was affiliated with seem to be… slightly missing.
As well as an odd feeling concerning a lack of the usual literary magic, there also seems to be more posts about advertising, more reviews, a few 125 ads available (unusual for Cow) and the blog seems to have lost a bit of the usual ‘fun’.
There are also slightly new structures to posts, with similar picture insertion cuttings, and the writing seems to be much more formal. I’m slightly inclined to the possibility that a new owner may be present, attempting to keep up the norm with rigorous cow puns every now n’ then.
Some times new owners of blogs with a definitive owner can be victims of odd, vigorous comment / blogesphere abuse. Can’t think of any off hand but I think there has been a few cases.
Anyone else conform to the notion that maybe Mr Cow has sneakily left our presence, allowing the new owner to take place discreetly?
John / Bob / New owner, if you read this, let us know!
I’m writing this post due to a recent incident on PayPal which I feel was unfair towards me; The seller.
I recently sold a laptop for £500 ($1,000) to someone online, that person sent me the payment via PayPal and then came and picked up the laptop by hand (locally).
Oblivious to thinking this guy might be a scammer, I didn’t think anything of that as he had already sent me the payment so what did it matter.
Anyway, a few days later I saw a dispute on my PayPal account. This wasn’t raised by the ‘buyer’ supposedly but by PayPal themselves. They obviously have some automated systems to detect fraud etc. Now, the dispute was that they thought the payment itself aka the money may have been stolen; Sent from a stolen credit card on a hacked account to be exact.
Understandably PayPal want proof from the seller to prove the item was sent / handed over. Given that I didn’t sell this via eBay or postage this was impossible for me. What proof could I provide that I handed somebody over a laptop… I think this is a little bias from PayPal. To only accept postage tracking as proof is a bit unfair as there are some things that you cannot provide tracking for. For example; Digital items, I have sold digital items in the past and obviously because this is done online, you cannot provide tracking because you haven’t posted anything. Also pickups as in this case.
I can obviously see it from PayPal’s perspective in that they only cover people who sell with recorded delivery of items and do not cover sellers who do pickups or digital items… so they say although I don’t remember reading that. Anyway, even if that is right, I think their system is flawed. Anybody could just buy something off eBay – go pick it up locally and then raise a claim saying they didn’t get the item. And PayPal saying they will investigate is pointless as the ‘buyer’ will always win in that case because it’s impossible for the seller who sold by hand to provide tracking information.
I think they should really take everything into account. For a start, I have been a PayPal member for well over 2 years so surely hundreds of successful transactions back and forth with no complaints should count for something? That itself proves I am legitimate. So if they believe whoever sent me this payment stole that money; Why not go after him? If they can’t find him, that’s their problem, how was I to know this guy stole the money he sent me via their service.
Despite everything, I lost the case (inevitably) and the unfortunate thing is I had already spent the £500 by the time I saw the dispute. So as a resolution PayPal have reversed the payment and given that I have already handed over the laptop to a buyer which is long gone and spent the £500, I’m £500 in debt thanks to someone elses crime and PayPal’s incompetency.
Why should I be punished because somebody else stole money. A scammer with no track record gets a free laptop and no action against him and I get £500 into debt… that’s justice (NOT). That’s like somebody getting mugged on the street; The mugger getting rewarded and the victim getting charged.
I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about SEO; What it is and how hard it is.
Personally I just see it as following rules and never like to admit people as experts on it as it’s always changing and I don’t think it’s hard enough a field to have experts in.
I’ve always done fine in search engines and have never needed to get an ‘expert’ to use their special powers to do it for me. It’s literally as simple as following instructions. As long as you keep up with what’s good and what’s not, it’s all good.
Some basic SEO pointers from a non-SEO-expert:
Moral of the story is, don’t pay anyone to do your SEO. It’s not worth it. A lot of so called ‘experts’ charge ridiculous amounts per hour to do easy work, stuff you could do yourself with minimal effort.
There are some legitimately good SEO people out there such as Aaron Wall – creator of the SEO Book. He genuinely knows a lot about SEO and I believe he genuinely likes to promote the development of it and help the knowledge of it grow amongst webmasters. I own his SEO Book and it’s definitely the best stuff I’ve read on the subject. That being said, there wasn’t too much in there that I didn’t know or wouldn’t deem easily findable for free. But, it’s still a very nice SEO guide and collection of links and helpful tips. I recommend reading it just for the knowledge expansion.
I know this title is a little provoking as there are a lot of people who base their careers on this subject and me saying ‘It’s easy’ does sound a little disrespectful. I don’t mean it to be perceived quite like that though, I just mean; It’s really not as hard as you may think and with a little research and effort, you can be a self-proclaimed expert on it much easier than you could be…. an affiliate expert.
Here I’ve compiled a list of what I think are probably the best 20 blogs in the Make Money Online niche. A very saturated, flooded and sleazy niche at times. But also a very helpful, insightful and interesting niche at times too.
This list isn’t in any paticular oder of consequence, #1 doesn’t mean ‘the best’ it’s just a top 20.
1. ProBlogger
2. Shoemoney
3. John Cow
4. Zac Johnson
7. Tyler Cruz
8. Seth Godin
9. Dosh Dosh
10. The Net Fool
11. John Chow
12. Blogging Tips
13. Self Made Minds
14. Retire at 21
15. 45n5
16. Ian Fernando
17. Slyvisions
19. Internet Babel
20. Daily Blog Tips
With all the Make Money Online blogs being produced every single day, you’re spoilt for choice. But there are only so many that I think are really worth dedicating your time to reading. Of course reading anything will expand and widen your horizon to a degree, but these 20 I believe are the best mix of marketing technique, SEO, SEM, Affiliate Marketing and general Internet Marekting blogs out there.
PS. Sorry for the lack of posting lately. Have been quite busy and also only like to post when I feel like I’ve got something saying that’s worth reading as apposed to forcing posts out for the sake of it. I do have some posts lined up though that should make up for the recent lack of content.
Putting an accurate price tag on your blog isn’t always easy but it is easy to get it wrong unless you know the basic principles on which to value a blog.
Different bloggers put different weight of worth of different factors which can determine what a blog is worth.
In general, we tend to over value our own blogs due to the fact that they’re our own. But just because we as the authors place so much value in what we believe is so amazing, doesn’t mean everyone else will or that it’s worth what we think it is.
Here I’ve written up what I believe to be the most logical, reasonable and easiest ways to come to a realistic financial value of your blog.
RSS Subscribers
To me, RSS subscribers of a blog is probably the single biggest factor in determining potential value. Even above revenue. How many RSS subscribers a blog has on a daily average indicates how many people like the content of the blog so much as to want to keep coming back.
There are, as many people know, ways to manipulate or deceive people into thinking the RSS number is higher. You can buy subscribers, you can grab an image of an RSS chicklet of a blog with 2,000 subscribers and place it on your own and at a glance the majority of people wouldn’t question it.
These techniques can help improve actual subscribers as people never like to be first, so if they think lots of other people have subscribed before them, they assume the content must be good on a regular basis and good enough for them to come back. So will usually subscribe as well. I however, would prefer to be completely genuine and honest with myself and actually see how people naturally subscribe without display of false statistics.
I don’t think enough bloggers put enough value on RSS subscribers when they go to value or sell their blog. As a blogger, your readers are your biggest asset and without them, even with traffic but no continuous readers. You don’t have a blog. You have a static resource. Which is fine, but the real value in a blog to me is the return factor. If people don’t even want to come back and get free content on a regular basis, assuming you give it, how much can your blog realistically be worth.
Monthly Revenue
A basic rule of thumb evaluation factor for basically all sites, not just blogs. Personally I don’t think the monthly revenue is AS important as the subscriber amount of a blog because monetization can be improved if the traffic is there, but if people aren’t even coming back… there’s a lot more work to be done.
Some people selling their blogs like to take the highest revenue figure they’ve achieved in revenue and put that as the monthly revenue. I think this is a little bit misleading as it gives the impression that’s regular. For monthly revenue you should be giving what the blog makes on average, every month. As in, it will make at least X amount. The easiest way to get an average is to take the highest and lowest earnings you’ve ever made in a month, then find the middle-ground.
If you do go to sell your blog, make sure you don’t lie about revenue as the buyer will eventually find out. Which won’t comeback to serve you well. Just be honest and give proof. People love screenshots, stats or any further form of proof that you can provide to absolutely clarify everything you are claiming. Makes the sale easier on both sides.
Quality Content
I think the amount of regular, unique, quality content is sometimes overlooked as a genuinely important evaluation factor. A blog’s content is a blog’s foundation. If your blog doesn’t consist of great content, why would anybody want to come back.
There are a lot of marketers who pay for content. Some simply buy a load of domains, build a huge network of sites or blogs, slap a few AdSense units up, a basic design and then pay other people to write heap loads of articles which they spread out. Then, overtime the sites build age, rank and small monthly incomes from AdSense.
Now this blog for example has 213 posts, this being the 213th. And I would say about… 190 of those are PURE content. I mean, you can count anything as content, any text on a page, anything on a page. Is content. But I use the word content in a more defined meaning to mean hard-written. And the vast majority of the posts on this blog are hard-written, took me quite a while to conjure up and usually cover, I think, some valid points.
That being said, how much do you think it would cost to pay somebody to write 190 + hard-written, quality articles? Quite a lot I’d bet, even at Indian prices.
I definitely think the amount of quality content on a blog should come into play when placing a value on it.
Site and Blog Evaluators
There are a lot of evaluation tools out there that will give you a rough market value of your; domain, site or blog. And there is a difference. There are some evaluators that are purely meant to evaluate your blog. Some which are meant to purely evaluate the domain itself.
But, all of these evaluation tools pretty much work using the same principles. They all check; age of site, incoming links, general mention, search engine rankings / inclusions. Then you have other things which some check and some don’t, such as your site’s Alexa rank. Which to be honest I don’t value at all. I find Alexa’s rank to be about as useful as… Alexa’s rank.
I’m not going to do a big comparison between each evaluator as I think that’s a bit pointless. Instead I’ve just pointed out one at each end of the stick. One which I would recommend you completely ignore and one which I recommend you pay good attention to:
Useless = Business Opportunities
Right, now, I assume this wasn’t built to be a competitor in the evaluation field but more of a general in-site tool people can quite handily link to for fun. But this may as well not exist lol.
My blog is worth $69,438.42.
How much is your blog worth?
According to that tool, this blog is worth $69k. Well, I don’t even need to express any sort of logic to expand on why that is completely ludicrous. $69k! LOL!
Useful = DNScoop
This is about the best generic evaluation tool I’ve found yet. DNScoop pretty much gets it as close as you can get. It checks your site’s age, all your incoming links, your PR, your Alexa rank, general mention and then combines everything to come up with a sensible market value.
According to DNScoop: Internetbabel.com is worth $2k. Sounds more like it.
Things That Really Don’t Mean THAT Much
I’m just going to briefly cover what I consider to be overrated indicators to a site’s worth. Notice I put the second ‘that’ in capital letters as these things do obviously help but I think too many people buying and selling put all their trust in these things.
1. Google PR – I used to care about PR, until I realized that it really doesn’t matter. Why is a high PR important or valuable in any way shape or form? Ok, so Google respects your site more, they list you more, they place you higher in the SERPs. So what, I get so little traffic to ANY of my sites from Google that it really doesn’t matter to me.
Google, not so long ago shafted this blog from PR 2 to PR 0 for, I assume – a PayPerPost post I made. I can understand why Google do what they do and I love Google and their business ethic. I just really do not care about PageRank. There’s so many fun ways to get traffic, so many viral ways that will get you huge traffic if you just apply yourself in comparison to scraps of Google’s traffic from months of trying to improve your PR. Let Google view your site how they want but don’t let them influence you.
This is why I think, when you sell or buy a site, you should really only take notice of PR peripherally. If I was buying a blog and saw the PR was 0 after 10 months. I wouldn’t suddenly think “WHAT, NO PR! WHOAH, NO GO!” Because that blog could of just been bitch slapped by Google too, doesn’t mean it’s not quality. You have to look at the whole picture.
2. Alexa Rank – The reason I don’t think a blog’s Alexa rank is very important in terms of value is because of Alexa’s infamously bad inaccuracy. It’s hard to be accurate with anything on the web and trying to be a dominant ranker of every site alive is beyond comprehension so you have to admire their valiant effort. But still, I’ve just lost more and more faith in Alexa as time has gone on.
With the recent update things appear to have gotten worse not better.
Anyway, I think Alexa is useful in that it gives a VERY generic and VERY loose view of what sites are where on the web. You can place some small faith in an Alexa rank when buying a blog no doubt but don’t rely on it. I view Alexa as another peripheral statistic. You don’t really need it but it sort of helps when trying to get your head around what to pay or what to sell for.
In Closing
To finish, here’s a quick checklist of things I would recommend doing to find the real value of your blog:
The best way and easiest way of course is to simply try and sell your blog. Whack it up on SitePoint or a popular forum and see what people would pay for it up front. That’s the real value 
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