Money

Anyone else notice that Alexa rankings shifted around BIG TIME?

I did. And you know what? I think the new algorithm they are using does a much better job of capturing actual traffic volume across niches.

Whereas in the past Alexa has been heavily weighted towards Tech and Internet niches (making many sites in these niches look more popular than they really are), I think the new algorithm actually allows for comparative analysis across niches.

That’s a major breakthrough and one more reason I’ll keep on keeping my eye on the Alexa graph for my sites as evidence of progress.

You might have seen on my blog I give away a free ebook. A few people have asked me lately why I continue to give away free information when I could be selling it.

The fact is without free information nobody would know me to buy paid information.

We have to separate out the ideas of free content versus paid content and instead think of our free content as sampling for the paid stuff. Give people a taste to get them juiced up for the full thing. Also remember that your free blog articles allow you to cast out a wide search engine net to trawl back juicy new visitors.

When you give something of value away you do run the risk of being taken advantage of, of devaluing yourself, etc, but they key thing to know is you are taking the risk out of the exchange in the hope the prospect will be impressed and delighted enough to take the next step.

The secret is to not give everything away, hold something back. Give away the concepts but retain the step by step process. Give the sizzle but keep back the sausage 🙂

Let me paint the picture for you. You spent the last 8 hours perfecting a killer linkbait. You’re proud of your work. You think it’s going to do well on Digg, it collects some votes…

…a few hours later, you receive an email from someone claiming that he’ll get your account deleted and your article removed from Digg if you don’t pay him $1000.

Well, not having $1000 to spend, and not believing for a second that this is for real, you ignore it…

…and then bang, your story’s gone, your account has been deleted.

Welcome to the brave new world of Digg blackmail. Where sophisticated online users earn a living by abusing the Digg abuse reporting system. It’ a reality. I’d heard about it, but I’ve now seen it happen…and you should prepare for it to happen to you too.

So, you want to try your hand at Digg blackmail?

Here’s how you do it.

Step one, monitor the lower portion of the right hand column of this URL:
http://digg.com/all/upcoming

Step two, for each story, visit the link, and then find a contact e-mail.

Step three, construct and send the message from an account that won’t give away your identity: “Hi. I notice that you have an article that’s doing well at Digg. I have the ability to get your article removed from Digg and would like you to pay me X dollars to help your article make the front page, rather than get it removed. Please let me know if you’re interested.”

Step four, if the person responds within [define your limit, e.g. 1 hour], then good. If not, then A) Put your bury brigade network into action and B) Contact Digg at the following email address: [email protected] with a message like the following: “Hi. The people behind this article are using email spam to get dugg. I received a copy of this spam, which you can see below:”

Why it works

Digg blackmail works because Digg’s abuse team has it’s finger on the trigger. It’s sort of like the modern prison system, or Guantanamo Bay… penalize as many candidate abusers as possible, and even if you’re accuracy rate is below 10%, you’re still improving the quality of the product (in one case Digg, in the other case society).

Whether you agree with Digg’s abuse policies or not does not matter. What matters is that people are now making money through Digg blackmail. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and I’ll be interested to see what Digg does about it.

I want to thank Performancing because you have really given me valuable resources. I like reading other blogger’s posts and learning about what’s going on with them. I like their tips on what to do, or what not to do when looking for jobs, I really enjoy the content. And I come here whenever I am down on a my luck, and sure enough things start to turn around for me.

I’ve been shopping around now for a few weeks for really great blogging jobs, but I guess I have to start small and build my profile up. I’ve gotten a few smaller paying gigs, so there is hope. I still blog a lot for free at Performancing, my own blogs, and Piggybankpie.

So for now I am plugging away at ehow, and a few sites as a ghostwriter…still waiting for that big blogger job. Or even a medium one. I am hoping to do this full-time someday soon.

Performancing has helped me hook up with a few potential leads, but nothing turned out. One site was too hard as I didn’t know the content (MLM business). The other one seemed interested but kind of left me hanging.

I want to know how many people have had success and whether it is possible to blog in the long run. I read one blog that was worried about writer’s block. I have so many ideas, I don’t know how someone could get writer’s block. If anything that person is extremely lucky to have said all they had to say and than run out of things…I can only dream.

So for now I am still waiting for that special job offer, blogging away. Hopefully soon it won’t be for free.

Thanks again performancing, for being my resource.

Yesterday I talked about competence and excellence – it’s a theme you’ll be hearing a lot in the next dozen or so articles from me. The basic idea is that “good enough” is never satisfactory – to be successful and to keep moving forward, you have to give it your best shot every single time.

Sometimes you might find it difficult to show up with your “A” game – however, if something is difficult it isn’t an excuse for not making it happen. If you find it difficult it just means that you either need to find a shortcut (work smarter) or dig deep and push through (work harder).

Today I want to talk about something related to competence – risk-taking.

Part of the philosophy of giving a project your 100% every day is that you are always pushing for improvements. At one time or the other, this push will require you to take risks, and it is at this point in time that you will feel the most resistance, when you will find it most difficult to ‘bring your A-game’ to the table.

Risk-taking is an integral fact of business and blogging. Every day we’re faced with choices that require us to leave the comfort of the familiar and venture into the unknown.

Should you hire a new writer? Is this new ad network worth your time? Will you take time out today to build links to your blog instead of writing your daily 5 articles? Is it a good idea to purchase advertising on that site or would it be smarter to keep the money and reinvest into a new design?

When faced with choices, our minds do something very interesting. You will intuitively know what the right decision is (as long as your priorities for your blog are straight), but whether you will be emotionally inclined towards it will depend on how ‘familiar’ it is. With choices that result in taking the unknown path (i.e. taking a risk), chances are that you will come up with rationalisations to avoid taking that step.

Real-world example – I have a friend who runs a very successful construction business. It takes him 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, plus another 6 hours on Sunday. That’s 78 hours per week of work, and this guy is running himself into the ground while building his business up. On one hand he’s happy with his success, but on the other hand it’s clear that he’d like to grow but cannot scale the business. Why Not? Because he hasn’t found a way to replicate himself.

This is a situation many bloggers are familiar with. After a certain point it becomes impossible for a blog to grow unless the owner leverages money for other peoples’ time instead of working on it 24 hours a day. Whether it is hiring a designer or a programmer or just to bring in new writers, it’s a risk the blogger has to take and as a result there’s a natural resistance to it.

This fear of the unknown (for that’s what it is – fear) limits you as a blogger. To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus (who was talking about leaders), the desire to play safe stands against every great blogger and blog. There will come a time when you will hit a plateau in your blog – and if you want to move past it, you will have to overcome your fear of the unknown, take risks and push forward to the next level.

Risk Taking 101

Some people look at guys like Tim Ferriss and Matt Furey and wonder how some people can accomplish so much in their lives – it seems inhuman until you realise that these people have an extraordinary willingness to take risks and explore the unknown. This drive doesn’t always pay off, but in most cases you end up being better off than before.

Today’s takeaway: Look at your blog and your blogging efforts and pinpoint the risks that you’ve been avoiding for the last few weeks or even months. Pick one of these risks, discuss the options with your friends and family (or people who know your business) and if it’s the right thing, do it.

And then repeat this once a day (or once a week if you’re doing ‘projects’) with your blog. You don’t have to turn into blind risk-taker, but by constantly pushing your limits and what you do with your blog you’ll not only grow your blog but you’ll also discover new opportunities in blogging and business that were never available to you before.

In case you haven’t noticed, the latest Toolbar PR rollout has been abnormal and slow. In the grand scheme of things, Toolbar PR is close to meaningless (Argument From Absurdity: it tells us that Performancing is more important than the DrudgeReport).

Yet as things go, hundreds of thousands of bloggers and website owners are attached to the hip of this stale, useless tool. Why?

Simplistically, the story goes like this.

Google literally came out of nowhere (a garage) to dominate the search space. The reason? They filtered search results not just by on-page text but by off-site “voting” in the form of links.

PageRank is the term that Google invented to describe their “importance” metric. While their filtering systems have changed dramatically since their emergence into search dominance, PageRank is a simple icon of Google’s successful formula.

Despite the fact that Toolbar PageRank is often 3-9 months stale, and despite the fact that Google now intelligently buffers the importance of raw links based on a number of smart factors, Toolbar PageRank is still the king of the hill…the center of gravity for thousands of web publishers and seo artists.

Because of this, a massive virtual economy has built up around PageRank in the last half-decade. Some web publishers make upwards of 5 (and for all I know, even six) figures per month simply by selling this awkwardly valuable commodity.

Rightly so, Google sees the buying and selling of PageRank as a negative manipulation of their once innocent metric. In reaction, Google has implemented a number of temporal buffers to deter the text link ad market. So far, they have not been successful.

But as rumors build that Google is either completely dropping or radically altering the way they tabulate, update and display PageRank, lots of people are scrambling to adjust their web publishing business models. Whether its site consolidation, ad diversification, or complex SEO subtleties like anchor text variation, deep-linking or post-level link buying, it is clear that Google has succeeded in stirring a whole slew of people from their slumber. And that should be expected. We are, after all, talking about people’s livelihoods.

Having set the stage, I now want to address the two issues I raise in the title of this article.

1. Does persistence always pay off?
2. Preparing for the busting of a fairly silly virtual economy built around a meaningless metric

The answer to these questions isn’t as simple as yes and no. After all, persistence does not pay off if you’re trying to dig a tunnel from California to China. But what about persistence in web publishing and monetization? Does persistence always pay in this domain? Yes and no. Yes if you’re open to adaptation and strategical re-evaluation. Yes if you focus on the fundamentals and forget the fads. Yes, if you focus on building long-term equity. In other words, persistence pays if you’re smart and you know what you are doing.

But persistence does not pay over the long haul if your long-term plan is not fundamentally sound. If you build your entire web publishing business around a lot of ephemeral PageRank, you are doomed. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to PageRank. You should, but only as one among many indicators of a site’s quality. The point is that instead of PageRank, you should be looking to build Authority. And Authority is built by becoming part of strong, quality niche neighborhoods. This is a fundamental fact about SEO and linkbuilding that will never change. Even if the TLA market collapses.

This brings me towards an answer to the second issue. How do you prepare yourself for the collapse of an economy that’s not built on strong fundamentals? Well, the answer is to start focusing on fundamentals. Quality. Branding. Niche Marketing. Niche Networking. Web publishers who focus on these 4 fundamentals will be building a solid foundation for the future. Those who continue to go down the PR only route, might be successful in the short-term, but are destined for longer term failure…

…Unless…

Here’s a tip for those of you, like me, who enjoy a nice chunky TLA check each month. Take the money you make from TLA each month, and instead of padding the personal bank account, or perpetuating your addiction to PageRank by buying more links, start focusing on the four fundamentals: quality, branding, marketing and networking which all work together to build long-term equity and an attractive target for diverse advertising sources.