How To Make Money | The Definitive Don’ts

Seeking Revenge

Remember when you got your lunch box stolen in first grade? Probably not – but you probably remember what you did to the jerk who stole it. That’s right, you gave him a nice blow to the chest. What did that solve? Absolutely nothing – just as it would online.

The Stakes Are Now Greater

As humans, we are inclined to seek revenge when someone inflicts some sort of harm upon us. However, this inclination typically lands us into further trouble. Let’s go back to the example with the stolen lunchbox. After you socked the prick who stole your lunchbox, you probably landed yourself in the principal’s office – alongside your parents. This is a nightmare in the eyes of any elementary schooler.

Now let’s return to present-day. Somebody clickbombs your site, and you find it fit to fight fire with fire. You discover who the perpetrator is, find his site, and proceed to clickbomb it. Google bans both of you from the Adsense program. Adsense accounts for 60% of your income. I bet going to the principal’s office doesn’t sound that bad anymore.

You Don’t Know Who You’re Dealing With

What’s so ideal about stirring up trouble online? The anonymity on the internet. If you know what you’re doing, you can make it incredibly difficult for somebody to find you. This is a great reason to refrain from seeking revenge in an online environment – you don’t know who the hell you’re dealing with.

The person you’re trying to seek vengeance on could have far more resources than you could ever dream of. If the person managed to sling-shot one of your income streams, they may be capable of severing all of them. So why bother trying to counter-attack? You don’t want to end up homeless, do you?

Report It And Move On

Like it or not, when somebody screws with you online, you’re going to have to eventually move on. Nobody’s going to take your place while you play bounty-hunter. You need to report the incident to the appropriate party and move on. Sure you could try to hunt the person down, but we all know that time means money online.

In Conclusion

To conclude this post, I want to urge you to keep your desires for revenge from getting the best of you. A few minutes of emotional gratification are not worth losing your online income over.

Image: Uncleboatshoes

revenge income report stakes vengeance

My Goals In 2008

First of all, I would like to wish everyone a very safe and happy new year!

With 2008 finally here, I wanted to put a list together of some of my goals for this blog. Now, I could have kept this list to myself, but what good would that do? When you set goals you need to tell others about them. Otherwise, failure will only mean disappointing yourself, which isn’t anywhere near as bad as disappointing others.

Establishing More Income Streams

Since its launch, this blog’s monetization potential has been limited to only contextual ads provided by Google Adsense. Now that the blog has a nice amount of quality posts, I feel more comfortable diversifying its income streams. Among other things, I hope to incorporate some ad space to allow for private ad sales and to start accepting paid reviews.

Increasing My RSS Subscriber Base

A hefty RSS subscriber base is a must for every blog. As such, I hope to increase the number of subscribers I currently have in the coming months. How do I plan to achieve such a feat? By improving the quality of my posts and hopefully hosting some contests. Is anybody interested in winning in Ferarri? (Just kidding)

Increasing The Blog’s Reach

As you would expect, I hope to significantly increase my traffic for 2008. You all know what that means – more quality posts, keyword research, and link building; While I’m not too excited about the latter two, it’s something that needs to get done.

Changing The Look And Feel Of Things

The final item on my list of to-dos is a blog redesign. Even though I do enjoy its current look, I find rather basic and in need of change. Whether I will buy a template or design a custom one I’m unsure. Knowing my design abilities, It will most likely be the former.

2008 new+year goals monetization traffic

Faking Your RSS Subscriber Count & Traffic Stats

One day or another you’re going to have to face it – your blog is most likely not a problogger.com . I’m not saying that your future is completely void of blogging stardom, but only your effort and dedication will tell whether you will reach those heights. Unfortunately, some people try to look past these ever so present facts. As you would guess, only bad things could arise out of such irrational thinking.

Let’s Fake My RSS Count

A blog’s RSS count is a very good indicator of how successful a blog really is. RSS count is really straight-forward – the higher the count, the higher the chances are that a particular blog is successful. Since the number of RSS subscribers a blog has can be used to paint an accurate picture of the success of a blog, some “smart” minds have devised a way to make their blog appear more authoritive than it actually is.

The method these devious minds employ to deceive their visitors is as follows – they place a fake RSS chicklet on their blog. Since most people use Feedbuner to manage their feeds, this is actually quite simple. The chicklet which Feedburner provides is basically a widget which tells your blog’s visitors how many RSS subscribers you have. These crooks use a chicklet which belongs to another blog on their site and thus inflate their RSS count.

Faking Traffic? Why Not?

Traffic has always been a solid indicator of the success of a site or blog. Naturally, people have also tried to find ways to lie about the volume of traffic their site receives. The methods which are employed to achieve such a feat usually entail creating doctored screenshots of website analytics programs. As stupid as this sounds, some bloggers and webmasters find this very effective.

Why You Shouldn’t Be Doing This

As the number of deceitful tactics have grown, so have the smarts shared among bloggers and other web surfers. This has been anything but a good thing for those looking to cheat their way through the system. What was easy yesterday is no longer so simple today. Things like faking your RSS count and traffic stats are easy to detect in this day and age. A simple visit to the Feedburner or Alexa website can easily discredit any and all of your deceitful activities.

Do yourself a favor and always act in good faith. If you don’t try to trick your visitors, you will most always benefit.

Image: Torchondo

RSS traffic fake visitors feedburner

Starting The New Year Without Looking Back

With 2008 closer than ever, many bloggers are beginning to reflect back on 2007 to place things in perspective. While this certainly seems like a daunting task, the rewards can be endless. So put down that Sharper Image catalog and let’s get to it! The clock is ticking!

Memory Lane Here I Come

To start the new year off with a clean slate, it’s paramount that you look back on the good and bad of 2007. Look at the things that worked for you and brought loads of cash your way, but also at the things which just ate up your time. Don’t shove your failures aside – you’ll find that they’ll come back to haunt you if you do. If you can, get all these things on a list. We’ll be looking at them shortly.

When you’re compiling a list of your successes and failures during 2007, don’t omit something just because it seems to be a “minor detail”. A small omission could mean thousands of dollars in revenue. Be meticulous and jot down every last detail.

Putting The List To Work

Now that you’ve got your fancy list in front of you, it’s time that we take a good look at it. Let’s start with the failures – the not-so-esteemed occurrences in life. Take each of your failures one by one and try to determine why they ended up being failures. Let’s say that you bought an existing site this year and it didn’t monetize well.

I’d ask myself whether I tried to employ different monetization methods on the site or whether I diversified my traffic sources. If I would find that I didn’t do either, I’d jot that down on a piece of paper. Come any future site purchase, I would be sure to do both of these things before deeming the purchase a failure. Go through the list and tackle each failure using the same strategy. You can compile a nice list of things you should do to avoid any future failures.

Once you’re done looking back on your failures, it’s time that we focus on your accomplishments. In the same manner which you looked at your failures, take each accomplishment one by one and ask yourself how you could have made it an even bigger success. As you might have guessed, this calls for an example.

Let’s say that you wrote up a review about a product and subsequently received a massive amount of traffic. With that traffic came a nice number of Adsense clicks. How could such a situation be made even better? My guess is by adding an affiliate link for the product somewhere in that review. Those hundred or so bucks you made from Adsense could have easily been thousands.

What About The “Minor Details”?

I mentioned earlier that you should be very meticulous when looking back even on very minute accomplishments. You’re about to find out why.

Pretend that you setup a small niche site 4 months ago just for the heck of it. You spent zero on advertising and invested about an hour of work into it. Say by the end of this year it has earned you a total of $50 from Adsense and Kontera. Some of you might say who cares, right? Wrong.

Imagine you invested some more time into content development and marketing. You could easily add a few extra zeros to those $50. Here lies the reason why very accomplishments can be extremely valuable. If you have several, you could draw yourself a roadmap of things you could do in 2008.

In Conclusion

To close up this post, I want to once again emphasize how important it is that you look back upon 2007. Taking a trip down memory lane could mean a happier you in the future. Put some time aside today and start reflecting.

Image: Ben Bishop

new year list failures reflection 2008

Merry Christmas!

I would like to wish everybody a very safe and merry Christmas! Those of us who aren’t trying to buy Christmas presents in the last minute are probably gearing up for a huge feast. A word of warning: don’t indulge too much. The last thing you want is to wake up tomorrow morning with a ham hangover.

Another quick reminder to ensure that everyone has a good holiday: let’s not drink and drive. I know it’s common sense but people do it regardless. Unless you want to ride a bike home, keep tabs on how much alcohol you consume.

To wrap up this post, I’d like to show everyone a screenshot of Google Trends which I took earlier today. You know what they say, pictures speak a thousand words. Looks like people don’t want to cook this holiday season, or buy gifts when they’re supposed to:

Merry Christmas from Malignition.com!

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