Problogger, Copyblogger, Matt Cutts, Entrpeneurs Journey, SEOmoz, Daily Blog Tips, Serarch Engine Land, John Chow, Shoemoney, Search Engine Watch were the top 10 on Winning the Web.

What a load of boring shit. I’m feeling my curmudgeon leanings after wasting my time looking over those sites. Have you ever visited one? What exactly are you supposed to get from all the highbrow blather? The Problogger dude turns over most of his writing to folks writing lightweight shit like “What does treating your blog ‘Like a Business’ really mean?”. Every d-bag in this business talks about making sure you treat IM/blogging as a business. Copyblogger ponders whether SEO copywriting matters. Has anyone in IM ever disregarded SEO? He provides a piechart and fancy research stats to come to the conclusion that backlinks matter. Gasp! I had no idea. Good that they can still get mileage out of the 5 year old knowledge that backlinks matter to Google. Entrepreneur’s Journey has embraced video to tell you how to grow your blog traffic. Oh wait. It was a shill for his video series. SEOmoz publishes useless posts to keep their site fresh in the hopes you will stumble into all their pay for services and products. Smart marketing on their part if you have an interest in all their dubious SEO tools.

The only one that I had any interest in before I dozed off was Dosh Dash…and then I realized the site is hardly ever updated and has php errors, so I disgustedly logged into this piece of shit blog and started bitching.

These top blogs, except Matt Cutts love letter to Google, all apparently make crazy money. They either sell some service or product that their cult can’t stand not to have or they sell ads in their 100×100 sidebar space. They are smart marketers. People are desperate for help making money online. The lemmings are eager buyers. The circle jerk continues to feed itself.

These bloggers circle around the same watering hole when updating their blogs. Like anything has changed in 5 years. It’s the same as it ever was for blogging and niche sites. Keywords, writing and backlinks. I think it’s why folksy bloggers like Griz haven’t blogged in a year. What else is there to say? How many ways can you talk about keywords, writing and backlinks? Not many. So you get fluff pieces on keeping your blog lively. Or how to get visitors to comment on your blog. Or should you Adsense or not Adsense.

New make money bloggers amble over to the same hole for a drink. And around and around we go.

The Alpha bloggers have herded the sheep. It’s amazing how much (apparent) money and visitors these people get for their offerings. I contend there is no magic ebook to help you. No need to open the membership door. No fancy video that will tell you different. I’ve spent money on it all. I’ve been there. And I have done that. It all comes back to keywords, writing and backlinks. All activities you can do yourself or outsource. All boring as shit activities. Why do people continue to go to these sites thinking they have some magic elixir for riches? Well, I know why. I just wish people would get a clue and stop. It took me 2 years or so to get it so I feel their ensuing pain.

Top IM bloggers make a living talking about IM. They invest heavily in their website to make it appear modern and professional. They create videos and write articles using well-funded research. Some are smart guys and have the ability to dig into the guts of this shit and describe things scientifically. Doesn’t mean it is worthwhile.

It reminds me of those flashy TV ads for junk like the Perfect Pushups or something. They spend millions of dollars on the set (website). They have professional scripts drafted (content). People are interviewed and rave about the product (testimonials). They incentive you to buy it (bonuses). The personalities are cheesy pitchmen (guberus). People buy the thing and it sits in the corner after 2 weeks (memberships and software).

Then again you have folks out there simply getting on the floor (keywords), lifting their body in a plank position (writing) and pushing it up and down letting gravity kick their ass (backlinks). Nothing fancy. Do a few sets every other day and the results are the same as if you bought a goofy product to do the same damn thing.

I don’t get the whole IM thing. Why are people drawn into their cult? Why so gullible? These people are making a shitload of money from convincing people this shit is harder than it is. Making money online is hard work. But it is not difficult. At least how I see it. Correction, I submit that PPC is hard and difficult. There are a lot of variables to making money off your paid advertising. But that is not what we do typically.

Somehow these sites have convinced people there is some grand scheme that has to be applied to make money. It is all self serving BS if you ask me. But what do I know? They are successful and I’m not as much. They are successful salesmen and I am just a tool with a negative blog. But I don’t want to be like them. I’ll gladly stand outside the gates and fling rocks in like a bored 13-year old.

Lots of visitors. Social blogging. Traffic diversion. Getting rich? Not directly. But I can get a website or page indexed in about 15 minutes using one of my blogs like this. Pretty cool amount of visitors though. Folks are writing about my sites on blogs, on Twitter and in forums. Posts take about 5 minutes a day. Blah, blah, blah.

What actually interests me is the keywords. I haven’t done any keyword research for any of these type of sites. Just writing about the photo or video I post. You would be amazed (then again maybe not) at the keywords people use to get to the site. Honestly it makes me re-think the whole keyword methodology I have been taught or follow.

People make a career out of teaching keyword theory. There are sites dedicated to the pleasure of finding the perfect keyword. Software programs scoop out keywords from god knows where. And after it’s all said and done after a few months of writing posts or articles I will have more keywords than I ever thought would be used to find my site. None of them show up in keyword tools.

However, if your idea for riches is via Adsense then all those thousands of keywords is mostly shite. You’ll make very little money with them. But then again you endure a lot of pain finding those money makers too, TKA’s new membership green keyword site discovery thingy notwithstanding (No, I’m no longer a member).

But I’m not really focused on Daddy G anymore. Haven’t been for a while. I’m not thrilled with relying on so many effed up variables to make money with Adsense. There are a lot of talented folks out there doing quite well with that type of monetary model. I’m not on their team.

The keyword dance required for Adsense glory is obviously a career model. The perfect keyword is money. Both from guberus and for webmasters. I guess I don’t even try for the green keyword anymore. Too much work. Not enough reward.

So I guess the point is I try to get traffic from as many keywords as possible. The long tail I guess. But I’m not researching for the long tail, or the short tail. I like using photos and/or videos. They are on topics that a large swath of people have an interest. I write about the media. What color is the model’s shoes? Where is the photo taken? How many bones did the tool break? I tag the shit out of it. Amazing how people find the blog from the search engines. Both in general search and images. Then I link out to blogs and Ebay sites that are very niche. The keywords are money. But I pretty much know I won’t rank the blog for that keyword. My blog is in essence the search engine.

I have discovered some keywords that are quite popular that aren’t highly thought of in the search engines. I use them to make Hubpages, Squidoo lens and Tumblr blogs. I can monetize those.

As stupid as all this sounds, I am simply writing on topics that I can get visitors. The graph above of one of my blogs show I can do it. Across a handful of (social) blogs I probably get at least 20K visitors a day. I link to sites of mine (and those that aren’t to try to camouflage my deal). I link to money sites. If I get 5% clicking, that is 1K people trolling over to money sites to possibly click an affiliate offer or Adsense to further their boredom. The sites are well-written original content sites. Nothing that daddy G would get upset over.

That’s my deal. I like to try shit out. Some things fail. Some don’t. I just don’t care to follow the lemmings.

BTW – I’m looking forward to seeing what PLRPro is going to turn out with their new initiative. It looks good. I use AMA. The rest of the offerings look useful as well.

Update – Should have mentioned that the money blogs I link to have to be somewhat related to the blogs that bring in traffic. When I post something I have to be able to link out in a way that makes sense. So I may have a post/photo of a chick playing football and I’ll link out to a site that promotes football jerseys from Ebay. It’s not like I’ll have a video of a speeding boat and link to a landscaping niche site. The trick is try to figure out what might interest people enough to click or buy. As you would imagine it’s difficult to get people to buy when they came to visit for entertainment. That’s why numbers have to be huge and hope for 1% success. It’s probably no easier than trying to find the perfect keyword and build a site around it. Just a bit more fun. I won’t get rich from this “technique” but I will make a few bucks without losing my mind. I still build real niche sites with XSP as the mood strikes. Gotta keep things swirling.

So today I nuked Wordpress off the sites. I relaunched the static pages and added a few more. Now instead of blog and ping and getting backlinks, I’ll just get backlinks. With a few exceptions, authority sites will be static. Blog sites will be free and consist of quick flash posting using bookmarklets and the like.

Looking through my stats I am noticing that Google likes full domains. Those sites I have that are subdomains like Squidoo, Hubpages, Wordpress, Blogspot, etc. are suffering for the attention of their Daddy G. Mama Bing is showing the love to all my little bastards. Go figure. Just means that I have to build more since Bing only gets about 10-15% of searches.

Anyway, my best performers are XSP sites. I drink the blogging Kool-Aid and dance the blog and ping. This has to stop.  I firmly believe that if you build a blog Google expects it to be blogged. Static sites do not have that stigma. So if I have 30 articles why not simply stick them on the wall and walk away instead of having to come back and paint the rest of the room? I have too many sites that I would have to blog. Not doing that for authority sites anymore.

But like I mentioned in that shit I wrote yesterday, I will still do quick posts using bookmarklets and commenting on, and quoting, news articles and other posts. 5 minute flash posts to get a pingback, spider crawl and links to places that matter.

Basically I have to simplify. I can literally sit down at the table and overwhelm myself at the thought of all my “authority” site blogs that I should update with some original content. I don’t have that problem with static sites. And I can use blogs on other platforms for backlinks, to drive traffic and make money. So today I have 3 less Wordpress blogs that I have to blog. I expect to add more back to the rock pile.

Another thing I’m doing is building Tumblr blogs. I have a discovered a love that only Bing can provide. Posting to Tumblr could not be simpler. People are clickers so I provide them a tasty text link to an Amazon product or Crapbank offer. What do I post to Tumblr? Photos. Videos. Links. I have the bookmarklet thingy and surf around in my niche and share. Zemanta is good for sharing too.

You realize the only people that are creating “original content” are naive niche marketers. Social bloggers, you know, the ones that supposedly don’t make money, are simply re-posting and regurgitating all the content that is being posted. It’s a good gig. Look at Gateway Pundit for instance. Damn fine site. Whether you write it or not you can cobble together a good post quickly and stick in a few money making links all the while coat-tailing on the efforts of main stream. Political type blogs do it all the time. Trust me, it can be done relatively successful with a topic as non diverse and overused as acne. Understand there is a difference between copying and sharing. I promise you, visitors, and search engines for that matter, can tell the difference.

Easy now. Yes, original content is important. I create a lens with nothing but original tripe (Look it up. Gross). But my Tublr blogs are quick posts with an original keyword encrusted title and  intro along with a video or post someone else is happy to have distributed. The sum of the post is wholly original, yo.

I am trying to find a way to make money with what is already available on the web. I may buy used domains. I hate spending money so that annoys me. But it’s useful. I don’t use Blogger that much. Hell, even it’s owner treats it like a pile of doggy do. Google seems to like to stay above the Tumblr, Hubpages, Squidoo fray too. It’s only my impression. Daddy G doesn’t want to acknowledge their existence but sometimes he has to let them come over for the barbecue. On the other hand Bing and Yahoo are telling them to come over, grab a drink and get nekkid in the hot tub.

I make use of keyword stats. If a keyword looks like it is in play it gets dispersed onto Tumblr blogs and/or Squidoo lens and/or Hubpages and/or other hosts I’m not sharing. Again I am a big fan of bookmarklets and such.

I use RSS feeds to keep up with shit. Feed demon is tasty. I like to troll around and make comments. Still using Answer Analyst to figure out what questions people are asking. I’ll answer them in a post using other people’s content.

I’m a fan of Twitter. EverTweet finds me new followers every day. Most are completely worthless. Some are now re-tweeting my tweets which are tweets of new lens or posts. That is always cool.

I built a Facebook page this weekend for a niche that is working very well. Not sure what to do with it yet as I’m still experimenting. The last couple of years all I’ve heard is that Facebook is a waste of IM time. How could that be? Guess I’ll find out.

Tags. If you aren’t making full use of tags you are wasting a great opportunity. People on Squidoo, Hubpages, Wordpress, etc. sometimes stay on the network. They find you with the tags. They find me at least. The tags are even ranked on Google.

Feeds. There are some RSS directories that Google seems to like. I do submissions.

So yea, I’m not sweating building a niche website with PLR. I’m not running around trying to get many backlinks. I’m having some fun building blogs/sites that have good content with easy and free tools.

Making money? Sure. Ebay is humming along on self owned domains, Hubpages and Squidoo. Still making money with Adsense. Sites like Tumblr among (secret) others, do OK with Adsense. Affiliate offers are fun. Don’t you love getting that email saying you made a $51 sale? I do. CJ and Shareasale. I pimp it all. Some work. Most don’t. But I have enough shit slung around the wall that a few pieces are sticking.

I guess some of the nicherati think I’m wasting my time. It’s my time. I can tell you without a doubt in my narrow mind that I cannot glumly sit down and type out or re-write some shitty PLR niche article. Hell no. I prefer to go my own way and have at least a thimble full of fun. I’m glad the 8 people reading this shit think this is stupid. Anyway, IM will suck the life out of you if you let it. I’m fighting the fucker.

Interestingly they are using the same promotion as last year. The birdcage seller. How exciting. I wonder why they couldn’t find someone else just as successful for this year. Like maybe the tophat seller. Or the heated toilet seat seller. Or the Obama LEGO seller. I have to assume that no one was more successful than the birdcage dude, even after a year of people working through the course. Otherwise they would have pimped that model, right?

Perhaps it’s not as easy as the guberus want you to believe. I have my ear to the Internet pipes. No one is screaming that you just HAVE to get in NOW or you WILL miss out. It’s like all other memberships. The information is good. But it takes just as much hard work as any other Internet Marketing scheme. You won’t sell shit if you don’t do keyword research. You still have to promote your site. It’s just on top of that noise you have to deal with physical products.

Dropshipping you say? Yes, that’s fun. NB2 has a database that is chock full of crap from people that can’t wait for you to spend (waste) your time selling their shit. I can’t tell you how boring/numbing/difficult/aggravating/soul-crushing it is to wade through the database in the hopes you will find something to dropship.

Sorry I’m no fan of this model. Ask the guberus that are pimping this offer if they have any dropshipping e-commerce sites that are productive. Most do not. They make their money in trying to get you to join shit like this.

Yes for all you folks in the cult, I’m sure there are plenty of people raking in millions of dollars selling dropship trinkets. It happens. I’m just too lazy to go back into that stupid model. If you have something to sell, then sell it. You don’t need some membership to set up an e-commerce site.  Set up a blog/site and sell your whizmo through PayPal. Couldn’t be easier.

Still curious about the spam email? Give it a shot. Try it out. Get your $500+ back when you realize it sucks.

Ebay was a surprise. I made some good money listing crap. I am going to make sure I am prepared for next Christmas to really take advantage of people’s need to spend.

I signed up for GoDaddy’s auction site. I’m done starting from scratch with domains. You can buy decent aged domains with a bit of traffic or a smidgen of Pagerank, for what it’s worth, for as little as $5. I’d sooner pay an extra $20 for a domain that is already indexed than wait 6 months for Google to decide if they like my new one.

Things are getting harder in this business. It’s still simple enough: Good keyword choices, write some original shit and get backlinks. But simply playing this game may or may not make you a winner. I’ve done plenty of that and have plenty of failed sites. Plenty of money makers too. I bloviated a while back about creating a few authority sites. Focus. Blah, blah, blah.

Here is what I learned in a short while: You can’t make a site an authority site. It has to evolve into one. More specifically it is very, very difficult to start a new domain and make it an authority. Therefore you really are back blasting the web with website pellets. At least I am. You have to find the one site that works then make it something more than a niche-crap site. Until then keep posting, linking and building. Fun it isn’t?

There are people that can take one idea and make a helluva exciting money maker website. Maybe their thing is teaching the ukulele. Their site is everything you need to know about the thing. Cool. I haven’t found it for me.

I think I am also going to build Squidoo lens. I got a list email from Tiffany Dow and she was talking about her 52-week challenge. A lens a week until Christmas. I used her blueprint and spewed out a tasty looking lens on a $50 board game in about an hour and a half, backlinks included. I have a couple of hours I can spend each week to diversify. I’m pretty lazy and overlook the earnings my current lens make each month. I should have never stopped building. At worst I’ll have 52 lenses that I can use for backlinks. Maybe a couple will actually make some money.

But back to this shit being hard. I really think that if all you do is keyword research, write and get backlinks, all by yourself, you are in a huge disadvantage. As much as it it sucks you need help. The average person in this shit needs help. You have to invest in this to get a head start. To get ahead. Like aged domains. Or buying articles. Buying software to help you build sites. Or join services like Article Marketing Automation.  Find a service you trust. Whether it’s Affilorama, or Blog Success or PLRPro or any the other 4,728 IM subscription sites. You need help and support. Encouragement. New ideas. Use their system. Stick to it. I hardly did but I see why that was stupid now.

I no longer find it a bad idea to pay for a membership. Obviously it has to be useful. But these days shit is happening too fast. There is way too much competition. I’ve been a member of Affilorama and PLRPro since day one. Each have gone through or are undergoing changes but I’ve found their services useful. The tools within the membership are what keeps me competitive, ala AMA.

I reckon I’ll have some that disagree. We have been conditioned to do this for free. No one wants to pay for shit. You can start at the bottom and do fine…eventually. I’ve come from the bottom. I would never do that again. Never. I would sooner drag a lawn mower around the neighborhood after work than flog these sites across the web. That’s why I refuse to deal with new domains anymore. I don’t want to start at the bottom. And I also recognize that I’m going to have to spend some money to get the tools I need to build sites and be competitive. I know the people making money are doing it. With few exceptions, the dude making 5 figures a month is not sitting there building a blog a month while getting some backlinks from a Hubpage and Blogger blog.

The new year offers an excuse to sort of start over. Or get a fresh start. My fresh start is to do more with Amazon and Ebay. I’ve spent the last couple of years flogging niche information sites for Adsense riches. That is some tough shit. The competition is astounding. Keyword research is very important. Building and maintaining the sites are boring and exhausting. But I found that selling real shit is working nicely. Even with the relatively poor commissions from Amazon.

It’s funny that people assume that building sites for Adsense is easy. Man it’s not. It’s not that building Amazon and Ebay sites are necessarily easier, it’s just that if someone is bothering to come to your Parcheesi board game site then chances are they want to buy the damn thing. If nothing else you are going to lock in that delicious cookie. If someone clicks over to your toe acne information site they are looking to read shit. Maybe you can entice them to click an Adsense ad if your information is particularly useless. Maybe not. Takes a lot of work to get a good click through rate with Adsense.

Adsense drives me crazy. I can take a template and get 25% CTR on the ads on one site and use it on another and get less than 1%. There is no consistency for me. Not that Ebay or Amazon is any more consistent I guess. Some products I can sell. Others I cannot. But it feels less like a hassle with Amazon or Ebay. I mean, I find a bestseller, do some rudimentary keyword search and build a site. Get a couple of backlinks, write an article for AMA and announce it via Twitter to my followers. If I can find a good used domain, great. If not maybe I simply do a Squidoo lens. Either is fine. Adsense is ugly and requires a lot of testing IMO.

Don’t discount Squidoo. They are cleaning up the spam. Bing and Yahoo likes them. Google is coming back around. People stay in the Squidoo network. And you can make an eye-pleasing, easy to build, extremely targeted, free site. I’ll be happy if no one that reads this wants anything to do with Squidoo. I hope my 6 readers roll their eyes and say “I’ll take the Adsense clicks”.

And it makes me sad but people buy products from Crapbank. One simple link on a simple site or lens can net you $20. I’ll take it.

I have done less with Adsense in the last 6 months than I have in the 4 years or so. Sure those niche info-crap sites still get an Adsense click but I’m working more for Ebay than Google these days. I’m feeling pretty good about building sites for Amazon and Ebay.

When it comes to IM I’ve decided that I can’t be focused. It works for me. I have to bounce from one thing to another. I have goals and I typically stick to them but I don’t get there in a straight line. I can almost guarantee I’ll build 52 lens this year. But in about 2 weeks I’ll get bored with it and find something else to do. Then I’ll circle back around to it in a few months. If you are trying to follow me, you will be disappointed and annoyed.

I made some good money last year despite it all. I think I bought one software program all year which I still like: Answer Analyst. I bought new hosting by Hostgator. And I spent $33 a month for Keyword Academy. I spend $9 for Nichebot which is useful. I got a free years PLRPro from winning a contest, as well as being a lifetime member of Affilorama. So my expenses were few.

Long post. Just a dude doing a thing on the web making some money and blogging about the experience. Just more mental vomit really.

Twitter Tool

Found a cool tool. For those of you who dig Social Media and are trying to make money with the effort, you should check out EverTweet. Yes, I am fully aware of the majority of folks who find Social Media a waste of time. You would prefer these type of people not to visit your site. But if you are one to embrace the new media and want a chance to diversify, this is really neat. The joy is you can accumulate followers automatically based on keywords. It also tracks who follows you and removes them if they do not follow you after a certain period of time. Think of the spam opportunities. I am.

Let’s say you have a site on the ever popular “dog training”. How are you going to get visitors? Schlep around trying to get Google ranked with links and articles? Sounds fun. What if every day you had a service like EverTweet that would search out Tweets that had the words “dog”, dog training” and “poop machine”. How cool would it be if it automatically tried to set up a follow connection with those people? Up to 2,000 a day. Think maybe those people might have an interest in Tweets on that topic from you in the future? Maybe that Tweet links to a Crapbank product. Or an Amazon product. Or a new article you wrote. Or a blog post.

From the site:

Choose a keyword or phrase, select how many people to follow each day, choose when to drop lame friends, and you’re done. A week from now you will have hundreds if not thousands of new followers – and it never has to stop.

I have no idea if you will make money with it. It’s just another tool. You’ll have to figure out how best to use it to accomplish anything. Check it out for free.

Web Hosting

I spent an hour and fully dumped Lunarpages from hosting any Wordpress blogs. That is one shitty host. Had the fun of getting those blogs transferred to Hostgator. I will be using Hostgator and the free hosting I get from Affilorama from now on.

Sell Out

And finally: Guess what? I’m a sell out. I got an iPhone. We got my daughter one and it seemed pretty cool. They day after Christmas we got my bill for Sirius radio. Paying a stupid annual fee for the privilege. Looked around and discovered that I can get any music/news I want for free with Flycast, Pandora, last.fm, etc. Called Sirius and canceled. Will use the money saved for the monthly fee for iPhone data charge. We have a family rate so it wasn’t that much more. So there. I have a stupid iPhone that my youngest daughter has been glued to since we bought it. But it will be nice to have a means of getting on the web at work without having to deal with the censorship.

I’m fighting Socialism in America in my own small way. If any of you are interested in reading my shit on the subject, then I’d love to have you visit at my conservative blog: Political Lipskip. I’m sick of the imperial federal government whether it is Democrats or the GOP. They all suck. I’m simply for constitutional adherence, fiscal responsibility, limited government and personal responsibility.

This has consumed me in many forms over the last year. I’ve been to Tea Parties, to town hall meetings and the march on DC. I created a blog as another voice in our fight against tyranny. I will become even more involved in the cause in 2010. I have been awakened.

The blog is not as entertaining as this one. It’s more serious in tone. There are far smarter and interesting people that I defer to. I have an opinion and I am another conservative vessel for the flow of information. I have to do something. If only to pass the word around.

This is one reason why my interest in IM has succumbed. There are far more important issues to me than worrying about getting a click. I implore you, if you care about the direction of this country, the sovereignty of the nation, the economic health and freedom and liberty of a limited government then please get involved.

Thank you. Eye rolls have been duly noted. This won’t appeal to most. But even if a few take a look and read some links and start to think about stuff then this post will be worth it.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. – Thomas Jefferson