AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

It’s been two weeks now since I earned any money on PayPerPost. Up until the Google-slap at the end of November PPP was the best of the sponsored post sites. Even after my PageRank was reduced to zero I was still able to make money on it, albeit at a reduced rate. When I joined PPP at the start of November it immediately became my number one means of making money online with an average of $60 per week for my first three weeks. Since then and the PageRank reduction the earnings dropped but overall it still added up to a total of $316.00.

For me the good times ended on January 3 this year. That was the last time I earned any money from the site. The problem is that the PageRank on the blogs that I use for sponsored posts has been reduced to zero while at the same time the vast, vast majority of advertisers who use PPP still have PageRank as a requirement to qualify for one of their opportunities. Meanwhile Google presumably continues to play its global game of tag and sends more and more blogs into the PR Zero sin bin.

It appears to me that the problem is that the pool of job opportunities with no PR requirement is unchanged whereas the amount of PR Zero fish is increasing. This means that the available job opportunities are filled up quickly. I have found for the last two weeks every time I log in to check on the opportunities that I have been looking at the same, solitary one; a 200 word post about bad credit mortgages which I refuse to do.  (Incidentially, this must be a boom time for those blogs who haven’t had their PageRank effected and are finding less and less competition for the PR job opportunities.)

I hope this is a temporary blip until PPPs RealRank becomes more accepted among advertisers. It may be a temporary blip but it could also be fatal. We’ll have to wait and see. I might have to rethink my plans about making a living from blogging in the meantime!

Incidentially PayU2Blog is now advising its bloggers not to link to external disclosure policy generating sites. It doesn’t give an explanation for this advice but it’s easy to assume that Google is using linkage to such sites as evidence that a blog is writing sponsored posts. Such a link might be enough to send a blog off for a manual review. While PayU2Blog doesn’t require its bloggers to disclose their sponsored posts its advice for those who do have such a policy is to write their own and host it on their own site rather than to link to an external site.

Spurred on by the latest attack of the Googlebot, PayPerPost has accelerated the launch of RealRank. This is PayPerPosts new in-house blog ranking system which is designed to give an alternative to PageRank and Alexa.

If you already have Google Analytics or Statcounter code or similar installed on your site you’ll find this is similar. By installing PayPerPosts Tools code on your site you allow them to track your blogs statistics. They then use these statistics to give you a ranking which is independent of PageRank or Alexa. The ranking is similar to Alexa, ie the lower your score, the better.

PayPerPost is a very lucrative earner and so I think it’s worth my while to allow them this access to my stats.

Your RealRank is an indication of how you measure up against other blogs within the PayPerPost system, which would be what advertisers would be interested in. It is still in the roll-out stages yet so the rankings are fluctuating quite a bit.

After I installed the code a few days ago my RealRank stood at around 3,000. It has since gone from that to 1995 and then to 1500. Thanks to my viral post getting re-infected last night it now stands at 100, although I expect that to drop back very quickly.

The reason it can fluctuate so much at the moment is that many Posties have still to install the code. When they do the RealRank will become more stable, more competitive and, God forbid, more accurate than Alexa or PageRank!

In the long-run what RealRank means is that the quality blogs who attract the most visitors will get the better paying jobs. It is only fair after all.

PageRanks latest adjustment seems to have been directed against bloggers who write sponsored posts.

I was away from my computer for a few days. When I returned to check my stats yesterday and saw that my PageRank on this blog had been reduced to zero I was a little surprised.

I got my first indication that this was a more widespread thing from reading an e-mail from John Chows site; I was one who signed up in the recent competition!

Considering that some people have seen their site knocked by PR5 all the way down to zero my fall from PR2 down to zero doesn’t seem so bad.

The PayPerPost blog has advice for posties:

“If you have been hit by Google unfortunately there is little we can do. We know that Google PR does not reflect your actual traffic and it is sad that Google chooses to over look that to protect their own bottom line. We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks ‘bob’) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.”

Personally, I’m not prepared to remove references to sponsored post sites on this blog to get the PageRank restored. I’m not prepared to do this because I have found them to be so profitable! I now have a weekly internet income of $100 per week through a combination of PayPerPost, Sponsored Reviews and Smorty.

Because my PageRank was only a PR2 anyway the effect of it’s loss on my ability to make money online through sponsored posts is very slight.

In any case PayPerPost are about to introduce a new system which will go some way towards making PageRank irrelevant for posties. Ted Murphy also revealed on the PayPerPost blog that they are accelerating the release of their new RealRank system which they intend to use as a replacement for PageRank to rate blogs.

My PageRank’s Gone And Left Me

I put the phrase free page peel script (1,910,000 entries) into Google Suggest and aboutblogging.info came out number 1. This is thanks to my post about the peel away ads on Wednesday.

I then searched for you comment, I follow (172,000,000 entries) and came out number 5.

Then I searched for u comment, I follow (21,200,000) and I actually had to go to page two of the search results. I was number 11.

Not bad for the little guy with the new blog about how to make money blogging!

Download free peel away ads script

I got a warning from Google today for using traffic exchange programmes. This is from my little experiment with traffic exchange programmes last week.

Here is the e-mail I got from Google today, which I believe is just a standard form letter they send out when they detect visits via a traffic exchange site:

“Hello Sean **********,

“It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.

“Please bear in mind that if we continue to detect invalid clicks or impressions from these services on your ads, we may disable your account to protect our advertisers. In addition, we may adjust your future payments for any days during which invalid clicks occurred in order to properly credit advertisers for any invalid activity.

“We understand that you may wish to receive specific information regarding the invalid activity we observed on your account. However, due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account.

“As a reminder, any method of generating invalid clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited by our Terms and Conditions and program policies:

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

““For your reference, you can find tips and guidelines for keeping your account in good standing by visiting our

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921&hl=en_US

“The Google AdSense Team”

My initial reactions to this are:

- I have already given up on traffic exchange programmes because the ‘visitors’ don’t stay long enough on my site to read the headline of my first post, let alone click on my ads! Maybe Google pay me something for impressions. If they do, it’s not worth talking about.

- I have already removed Adsense advertising because I was getting no clicks from it on my personal blog. My use of a traffic exchanger or not didn’t change the fact that I was earning nothing from the ads anyway!

- This e-mail tells me that Google are making a fortune from Adsense – they send out e-mails like this to protect their reputation with their advertisers — and they expect us to tremble in our shoes as they threaten to remove a pittance from us.

- Every time something new comes out – Blogrush or Widgetbucks being two recent ones – someone asks, is this compatible with Adsense? How many Adsense millionaires are there anyway? Most people only earn pocket money from it. If my boss at my real job spoke to me like this I’d throw a stapler at him, and he pays me real money!

Ok, I know they have a point. But still, how many cents did my little experiment with traffic exchange cost them anyway? I’m sure these e-mails are sent out automatically but I think they should have a setting at a little less than zero tolerance.