Can’t Get Rich

It looks like John Cow has released a new product to the masses: Googletime. An interesting product, but not one worth investing in (at least in my opinion). If you haven’t read about it, or don’t understand what it is, Googletime is essentially an automatic website creator. You supply a topic, your Adsense publisher ID, and a few other pieces of information, and Googletime creates you a few pages that look, for all intents and purposes, real. Really, all it’s doing is scraping content from news sites and plugging it into a template, something that is incredibly easy to duplicate without paying $30 for a license.

A little misleading

Let’s take a look at a quote from the Cow’s post:

All you need to do is build a site, slap some Google code onto it and you’ll start earning a few bucks per day.

Actually, no, you won’t. Want an example? One of my new video blogs received almost 300 hits yesterday after being stumbled. How much did I make from my Adsense blocks? $0.02. Two cents from 300 visitors. So, by that logic, a few bucks per day = a few dozen or so clicks per day. A dozen or so clicks per day usually requires several hundred, if not thousand, visitors per day, due to the phenomena known as ‘banner-blindness’. How are you going to get that many hits per day with a brand new site? You have three options:

1. Paying for traffic
2. Organic traffic
3. Social bookmarking traffic

Number one will get you banned from the Adsense network. Google is pretty touchy about made-for-Adsense sites, so there goes that option. As for number two, well, that takes weeks, if not longer. After looking at some of his example sites, I’m not convinced that you would ever get any traffic from organic search results. Sites built around generic topics like ‘glassware’ and ‘dogs’ will never reach the front page, and will therefore never receive enough traffic to make more than a nickel per day. Number three is too random to count on.

Suddenly, reaching that $2/day he mentions doesn’t sound so easy.

Still interested?

If, for some reason, you still want to create a bunch of autoblogs, it’s really not that hard. Here’s one I made just for the sake of this article. How long did it take? About 10 minutes. All you need to do is:

1. Set up Wordpress.
2. Pick a decent theme to use and modify it to include your Adsense and tracking code.
3. Create a subdomain and host it there.
4. Find an autoblog plugin like wp-o-matic or wp-autoblog and install it.
5. Find a few sites to scrape and plug them in to your autoblog plugin.
6. Turn everything on.

There, you have a perfectly mediocre autoblog that won’t make you any money, just like Googletime.

Hats off to the Cow

The majority of us won’t make any money with autoblogs, but the Cow already has. According to him, he’s already made more than $1,000 through the sale of Googletime. That means over 30 people now have very pretty, stylish, identical autoblogs. Congratulations to them.

It may sound like I’m bashing Googletime, but really, I’m not. It’s a perfectly good piece of software that does exactly what it says it will, and it seems to do it well. No, I’m bashing the people who use it. More precisely, I’m bashing the people who don’t understand it, and expect to make a lot of money with it.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about all of this. If anybody out there uses Googletime, or knows somebody who does, and has reached that $2/day goal that the Cow said was possible, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll be the first to admit when I’m wrong.

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Ethan wrote in to request a ReviewU review of his site, Poetry 2.0. Poetry’s not really my thing, but after seeing the URL (poeticmoney.com), I was interested enough to take a look. Could a poetry-themed blog make money online? I know that one of my readers has a fairly well-monetized photography blog, so I was curious to see if the written arts could make money as well. Imagine my surprise when I found out he’s not monetizing his blog at all.

Poetic Money

You’d think with a URL like ‘poeticmoney.com’, the site owner would be monetizing his blog. Also, one of my rules regarding ReviewU reviews is that you have to be trying to make money with your site. Well, I’m going to make an exception in this case. Why? Look at the top of his site. See the fake Google ad? Click on it and read the article it takes you to.

You see that? See?

This. This is what I like. This is what I’ve been trying to preach since I started this site. The owner had apparently tried to monetize this fledgling blog at some point with Google ads and Kontera links. After realizing that he wasn’t making much money, he didn’t scrap the blog, he removed the ads.

“I think other bloggers out there should think about doing the same. If you have a relatively new blog, don’t slap some adsense code into it. Nobody likes seeing ads, and unless you have a fairly large amount of traffic, you’re not going to make very much from them.”

I think I’m going to cry. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve read in weeks. His site may be about poetry, but these three simple sentences moved me. I dedicate this haiku in his honor:

Content and not ads
Look, I am almost speechless
Holy f***ing s***

Yeah, I’m not much of a poet, but you get the idea.

The site itself

Ok, I’m doing praising his decision to remove the ads. The site itself, as you might have guessed, is about poetry. After reading a few pages back into his archives, I’ve noticed that he has as many, if not more, posts dedicated to blogging as he has dedicated to poetry. I would recommend focusing more on the core subject of the blog, and limit the off-topic posts to less than 1/5 of your total posts. Sure, it’s great to know how to use Entrecard and Stumbleupon effectively, but I’d rather read about poetry on a poetry site.

The layout

Nothing special here. I like the color scheme, I hate the gigantic RSS button, and I still don’t see the point of having the Feedburner widget up if you’ve got less than 50 readers.

Monetizing

I already mentioned that he has no ads on his site, in favor of actual content. He does, however, give you the option of commissioning him to write poems for you. It’s nice to see actual services offered on a website instead of advertising. You can also buy ad space from him, but that’s not so bad. Direct ad sales are much better than Adsense blocks.

Overall

This site seems like a pretty nice niche blog. Decent content, good layout, and a good sense of priorities (content > ads). Any poetry affectionados should head over and take a look.

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Ahh, I hate being unsure about things. That’s why I’m going to try something new: A niche video blog.

I was reading around on Wickefire the other day when I came across a thread about Google Adsense. The guy who started the thread was talking about how he had made a video blog, slapped some Adsense code on it, and forgot about it. A few weeks later he found that it was making him around $0.50 per day. He tweaked a few things and now it’s making $2 per day. That’s pretty good for a code and forget blog.

Now I feel like trying the same thing. I don’t want to spend any money on it, so I’m sticking it on a subdomain of one of my other domains, and I’m going to have to update it manually (he had his running on an auto-updating script which costs $$$). I figure I’ll update it once or twice a day for a few weeks and see what happens. As for the theme, I’ve picked a video niche that everybody on digg seems to love, taser videos. Don’t laugh, I know the site is bland. I’ll tweak it later.

Also, don’t ask me about my opinions on tasers. This blog is politically-neutral.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how that does. I’m not going to pay for any advertising, so I’m hoping it’ll get a lot of organic traffic. My goal for it is $1 in Adsense revenue per day. $1 per day isn’t enough to live on, but it’ll prove to me that niche video blogs are worth something. If I can meet that goal, well, there’s strength in numbers: I’ll roll out another 49 sites and be happy with $50 a day.

A few things you should know

If you want to try making your own video blog, here are a few tips:

• You’ll want to use the easytube Wordpress plugin. Wordpress tends to break your page layout if you embed a video and then go back to the visual tab. Easytube fixes that little problem.
• Since you’re going for SEO, I’d recommend using Optimal Title and Google Sitemap Generator.
• Make sure you have permission to use the videos you’ve picked. I grab mine from youtube and liveleak.
• Don’t drop $10 on a domain. Stick it on a subdomain and purchase a domain later if the site is making you money. You can always stick a redirect on the old subdomain.
• Use a Wordpress theme that is appropriate for your niche. I googled ‘wordpress electric theme’ for the one currently in use on the taser site.
• Use pingoat to ping your new blog every few days.

I’ll let you guys know if my little experiment works.

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Happy new year everybody. Might as well kick off the new year with something that’s become very popular on this site, a ReviewU review. Andreas from Xavier Media wrote in two weeks ago to request a review, so it’s about time that I got around to it.

If you’re a regular reader, you should know by now that most of my ReviewU reviews are full of hatred and rage, but sadly enough, I can only find one thing wrong with this blog (he’s still using the Blogrush widget). Xavier Media is a good example of what a blog should look like, so I’d recommend checking it out.

The content

Xavier Media’s blog seems to be filled with things you should know if you want to establish an online presence. Topics include mistakes to avoid if you’re blogging for your business, coding, web trends, and other net-related things. I especially like his article on using TLDs to create domain hacks. Interesting stuff.

The layout

I usually hate the layouts and themes of the blogs I’m asked to review, but this one is pretty close to perfect. The navigation menus are on the left, the ads are on the right, and the content is in the middle. The color scheme is very effective and pleasing to the eyes. The few ads on the site don’t obstruct the content in any way. Again, the only negative thing I have to say is about the Blogrush widget, which in addition to being useless, looks slightly out of place on the right sidebar (due to its width).

The $$$

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like ads in the header. Well, I’ve been forced to change my stance. While it’s true that Adsense blocks in headers are ugly, Xavier Media’s header includes an ad that blends in well with the theme of the site. Not only that, but it’s highly visible and works very well overall.

As for the other ads, they seem to be advertisements for the other aspects of his website. This is the first blog that I’ve reviewed that is advertising his own services, and it looks pretty clean and professional, so I have nothing negative to say about it.

A short review

I feel kind of bad for the shortness of this review, but I really have nothing bad to say about this blog. Usually, after ripping a site to shreds, I offer tips on how the blog author can improve his site. The only thing I can say to Andreas is this: Keep it up.

And get rid of that Blogrush widget.

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You may think that you don’t have enough time for blogging. You may also think that Linux is a viable platform for gaming. Well, in both cases, you’re wrong. Time should never hold you back from creating and maintaining a blog. “But Geoff”, you ask, “Where will I find time to write/research/network?” It’s really not that hard, so listen up.

Writing

Pick a time every day to write a post for the next day. I usually write my posts sometime in the evening after dinner, work, and gaming. This usually means that I’m writing around 1 AM, but that’s what works for me. If you’re not a night owl, find a time in your schedule where you can devote at least half an hour to pure writing. Nothing else should be going on during this half hour. Topic research should already be done, your email client should be closed, and your next game of Halo can wait. Sit down, write the entry, and then set it to publish the next day.

Research

You should always be researching new topics. Keep your eyes and ears open for anything in your environment that might inspire you. You might notice a magazine while shopping. You might overhear something in the library. Inspiration can strike anywhere.

If you require the Internet to do research, do what I do and get it done at work (if you can get away with it). This will free up time that could otherwise be used productively for friends, family, or Nintendo Wii.

Networking

RSS is vital for networking. Subscribe to the big blogs and keep your eyes open for when they write new entries. If you’re the first one to comment, and your comment is actually thought provoking, you’ll probably get a few hits to your site. Comment frequently on other blogs, just don’t spam useless trash.

Another good idea is to look at who’s on your Mybloglog list. You do have the Mybloglog widget on your site, right? If not, you should. Visit your readers blogs and comment on their posts. It builds reader loyalty and you might find some interesting stuff.

Finally, if you’re active in forums relevant to your blog’s niche, put your blog’s link in your signature. If you’re an established member, let the forum know when you’ve written something fantastic (don’t abuse this). Just be sure to stay active in the forum so you don’t appear to be a spammer.

The bottom line

Time should never be a limiting factor in blogging. The timestamp feature exists for a reason, so use it! Regular updates = more readers = bigger blog = $$$ (theoretically). If you want to monetize your blog, give it the time and attention it deserves and you’ll be rewarded.

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