Written on May 17th, 2005 at 12:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Conversations with an Adsense Click Fraudster
Tim Yang posts an interesting conversation that he’s been having with an Indian Adsense Click Fraudster who contacted him to see if he’d be interested in making a quick buck via an army of fraudulent clickers in India. Here’s the first of numerous emails Tim was sent:
‘Hello,
I got your email address from your site by Google search, while being interested in Adsense. At present you have 12 Adsense advertisements on your site. I have an offer for you. Which is that I am capable of giving you 1000+ different traffic to your site per day - and all of them would click on all the Adsense advertisements. For all these clicks you would be able to earn a good amount per day. My offer is that I would give you that 1000+ different traffic to your site in exchange of 50% of earnings of their total clicks. If you are interested, please let me know.
Thanking you, Sanjay Das.’
It is interesting that those running these schemes are becoming more organized and brazen in their schemes. This is the third instance I’ve heard of of this type of approach being made to bloggers. The concern is that genuine adsense publishers will suffer as a result.
Written on May 17th, 2005 at 11:05 am by Darren Rowse
Introducing Blogsavvy
Fellow Melbourne bloggers James Farmer from Incorporated Subversion has just launched a blog that has gone straight to the News Aggregator named Blogsavvy.
James writes about Blogsavvy:
‘Blogsavvy is part a creature of me wanting to write about blogging a lot more, part result of my belief that blogs are here to stay and are capable of making an enormous positive difference in a range of spheres and part me thinking that this might be what I really want to do!
It’s going to be a blog about blogging, about blogging for Education, Business, Communities, a Cause and even for Money.’
His latest post on Alternative blogging business models is a good example of the type of writing James will be doing at BlogSavvy.
Written on May 17th, 2005 at 08:05 am by Darren Rowse
New Google update
For those of you who watch such things - it seems that Google have just started a backlink update.
Written on May 17th, 2005 at 02:05 am by Darren Rowse
Do your Blogging Goals Match Your Current Blogging Practices?
Jeremy has an interesting post over at Ensight where he looks at a recent ‘downturn’ in blogging after some of the recent controversy over character blogs.
To be honest I’ve kept out of the debate and really don’t see it as a particularly useful one (maybe I’m missing the point but I find it a bit of a bore) HOWEVER while I was reading Jeremy’s blog I was drawn to the following four questions that he has for bloggers to ask themselves:
1. Why did I get into blogging?
2. Am I still blogging for the same reason as when I started?
3. What do I want blogging to become?
4. Are my current attitudes and actions the kinds of things likely to bring about my goal for blogging?
These are some questions I’m going to ponder over the next few days - particularly the last two.
I guess at the crux of it Jeremy is asking people for their blogging goals and then challenging them to ask if their current strategy is taking them closer or further away from these goals?
Warning - Tangent Ahead….
I was recently talking to a guy (in his late 40s) and the topic got around to parenting. He told me the story of finding out that his wife was pregnant with their first child. After the initial excitement wore off he and his wife were hit by the enormity of having a child - particularly the responsibility that it was. They starting thinking about the type of children that they’d like to have and over the next few days they set some goals for their kids. Not tight or controlling goals about their children’s gender, looks, future occupations or anything - but goals about the type of characteristics or values that they’d like their kids to grow up with.
They compiled an interesting list of characteristics. At this point they then decided to take a look at the way that they were living their lives at present - the way they related to each other, the way they spent their time and money, the way they communicated, the way they made decisions etc.
The conclusion that they came to was that their goals and their current reality were incompatible. If they were to raise the type of kids that they wanted to have they needed to change the way they currently lived their lives.
Ok - back to blogging…..
Sorry for the tangent - but there is something about Jeremy’s four questions that triggered the memory of this conversation with my friend.
You see I have many wonderful opportunities to talk with bloggers. One of the questions I often ask is about their blogging goals - where do they want to go with their blogging? The goals are often amazing. They are big, bold, inspiring and sometimes a little lofty. There are goals of fame, fortune, influence, making a difference, sustaining a lifestyle, meeting wonderful people - goals of all shapes and sizes.
The problem for most Entrepreneurial Bloggers is not usually about goals not being big enough - rather the issues are usually that their current blogging practices are not working towards these goals being a reality.
• Someone yesterday told me he had a goal of 10,000 visitors per day on his blog - only problem was that his blog only had 13 posts on it and he was updating it only twice per week.
• Another person told me about their goal of being a full time blogger - only problem was that they had been blogging on a topic that just wasn’t performing (over a year of blogging) and were not willing to diversify and start a second blog on a new topic.
• Last week a friend told me that they wanted to join the ranks of A-List bloggers and be known for the quality of his blogging - only problem was that he was engaging in spamming and other dubious behaviors to get his blog rank up.
My advice is simple - dream big, but be willing to adjust your behavior to reach it.
What are your Blogging Goals? What are you doing to make them a reality?
Written on May 16th, 2005 at 08:05 pm by Darren Rowse
BlogLogic.net Lives
Paul has decided to keep his BlogLogic Network going after taking on the advice of a number of readers. He’s also going to start a text link campaign across his network in order to help raise more income.
Good news Paul - blog on mate.
Written on May 16th, 2005 at 11:05 am by Darren Rowse
Bloggers Under Attack from German Spammers?
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one getting hundreds of German spam emails at the moment. Steve thinks there might be a blog link to the issue - or maybe its just that bloggers are talking about it more than others because they have the vehicle (their blogs) to do so.
Update: The Australian picks up the story.
Also I’ve noticed quite a few of the emails I’ve been getting are ‘message failed’ emails and that my email address has been used as a reply address for hundreds of emails.
Written on May 16th, 2005 at 09:05 am by Darren Rowse
MSN Search Updating
I’m noticing significant shifts in MSN search results today on most of my blogs. They must have just done some sort of update. I can’t see any discussion of this in forums however so it could be just on my domains.
Since its inception the results were artificially high (for example I ranked number 1 for some very popular search terms on some brand new blogs) - so I was expecting an adjustment - today it came.
Whilst its sad to lose a little traffic (it never sent a huge amount) because of it I’m also happy because it shows MSN are becoming more accurate with their rankings - my blogs didn’t deserve the position that they had this early in their life.
Written on May 16th, 2005 at 08:05 am by Darren Rowse
Why not to use Google Web Accelerator with WordPress
The Word Press forums have an interesting thread running with a warning NOT to use Google’s new Web Accelerator with Word Press.
In it they link to an article over at O’Reilly Radar which is a little frightening:
‘Some users of 37 Signals’s new Backpack web application started noticing yesterday that their backpacks had been rifled through and a page here and there had simply disappeared. A little digging found Google’s new Web Accelerator to be the culprit.
Writes Jason Fried:
The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway….’
Thanks to Tom Hanna for the heads up on this one.
Written on May 16th, 2005 at 04:05 am by Darren Rowse
Filtering Adsense Ads
Arieanna has an interesting experiment going where she is filtering Adsense Ads in the hope of increasing CTR. She writes:
‘Relevance has a couple of points. First, relevance to your content. Second, relevance to your readers. So, if I talk about a new blog innovation here or over on Blogaholics, we’ll get all the ads to start your own blog, write content, etc.
However, experience and knowledge has shown me that a good many of my readers here, and most on Blogaholics, are sophisticated bloggers already. Or, at least, already have a blog. So, these ads are relevant to the content I am writing about, but not to my readers.
So, my solution was to watch daily for those ads and to block them using the Competitive Ad filter. Yes, this is not the purpose for the filter. And perhaps would annoy some advertisers. But, seriously, they were not getting clicks anyway.’
This is a good experiment and one well worth trying - Arieanna is finding that it works well and her CTR is on the up and up.
However before we all start blocking ads left right and centre be aware that this will not work on every blog. One of the reasons for this is that Google Adsense ads can be geo targeted. The ads I see on your blog from here in Australia are probably quite different from the ones others see in the USA or Europe. So filtering ads might help for those of your readers sharing your location, but might not help too much on a global level.
It’s still something worth trying - just keep in mind the geo targeting and realise that Google serves the best paying ads to your site - so even if you increase CTR you might also notice a slight decrease in your earnings on a per click level. You might also find that if you block too many ads that Google runs out of ads to serve completely - so monitor it and track the result - and then come tell me what you find!
Written on May 15th, 2005 at 01:05 pm by Darren Rowse
How Much Would you Sell your Blog For?
Yesterday I reported that Bloglogic was up for sale - today I’m wondering how one would determine the worth or asking price of a blog (or network of them).
How much would you sell your blog for? How would you determine it’s selling price?
A few months ago I was offered $13,000 for Digital Photography Blog - I almost laughed when I got the email. If someone had offered me that much a year or so back I’d have jumped at it - but now I know it’ll make me that in a month or two just from its Adsense earnings. But it did make me wonder what I’d be willing to sell it for.
Last September I wrote about how I suspected Blog Farming (fattening blogs up for sale) would become more common - in December I wrote a post on some criteria for deciding ‘how much to sell your blog for’ but to be honest I’m still unsure how I’d do it if someone made a serious offer. Any thoughts on how you’d tackle setting a fair price for your blog?
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