So I don’t really read TechCrunch that often, however I got on twitter today and noticed that some of the old Weblogs Inc. blogs were going to be cut. So I followed the link and read the story, along with the comments from AOL bloggers.

Basically, the comments were about how blog networks are done and the bloggers are way over paid. Blog networks are done?! That’s shitty since I am trying to build one right now….

Anyways, the reason I wrote this post was because I do think “some” of the bloggers are over paid. I am NOT talking about the tech blogs, as those guys pump out tons of content and get blown away with emails and tips all day long. Being a tech blogger really is a full time job. What I am talking about is how AOL fucked themselves over, by making it seem like an article is worth $100 (So I read that is how much they pay, I might be wrong and if I am this post is pointless).

By no means is content worth that much, ever. I am not going to say that everyone should outsource their content writing to India or something, as I do admit I have bought some $5 articles on DigitalPoint before. Although half of the articles I bought that were written by non U.S. writers didn’t make any sense, a simple proof read and some verb changes cleaned them up nicely and made them into some super nice articles.

I think that blog networks have brought this upon themselves. Offering someone that much money to write in article is crazy, in my opinion. Blogging is relatively new, (compared to other ways we used to read news…like newspapers) and who were the ones to put a price on what an article is worth? The bigger blog networks who got tons of funding and investing only to blow it by over-paying their bloggers.

What I am trying to say is, those companies brought it upon themselves. You don’t need a college education to be a blogger. You don’t need a degree in journalism to be a blogger. All you need is to be passionate about a topic and enjoy writing about it. Wasn’t that the point of blogging before it went all commercial?

Popularity: 15% [?]

So like many others, I regged some .me’s, and then got the email saying I didn’t get the domain I wanted. A few I tried for that I really wanted were hire.me, ani.me(I don’t know anything about anime, just wanted to try and flip it if I got it) and ping.me. Didn’t get any of those, but got a few others. One of those is upp.me, and right now it is fully functional, so go check it out and submit all your links!

 Yes, it is a social bookmarking site. Yes, I know I will never get bigger than digg, but the thing is I don’t want to. Since I started building up a ton of blogs, I needed someplace to put all my links….so upp.me was created.

The concept behind the domain is “up” “me” (duh right?). Basically, instead of digging, you are upping. Hopefully it is remember-able, my seo efforts pay off, and it turns into a site in which people want to visit.

Just fyi, I added in a webmaster catagory.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Since I got started building blogs I now realize how much the design of the blog matters if you want readers to come back.  If you do not have a decent design, forget about getting any traffic!

Master wordpress designer Adii (I interviewedhim some time ago) has launched/re-branded his premium wordpress themes into WooThemes.com. WooThemes is compiled of a  team of some crazy good designers, and their most recent work really shows!

I couldn’t wait for Adii’s new themes to come out, and when I saw what he had released I was pretty excited. The two themes that were just released really made a few projects I was working on alot easier.

What I like best about this new program he has launched is the subscription package. You can pay $150 and get a single user license to all of his previous Premium News Themes, along with all new themes that come out over the three month period in which you subscribed.

The only gripe I have about the program is I think the themes are a little too in-expensive. Sure I like saving money, however a Mercedes costs what it does for a reason. That reason being that it is THE best, and if you want it you are going to have to pay for it. I feel that Adii and his crew make the best premium wordpress themes out there, so making them this cheap is nice however in my opinion hurts the premium wordpress theme market.

Either way, these themes are the best if you are not a programmer or don’t really know what you are doing. The backend for these themes is awesome, and makes adding things like Google analytics code, feedburner id, Flickr id and so on super easy and convenient.

Good luck to Adii and his team of designers with this new project. I can’t wait to see what else they come out with!

Popularity: 22% [?]

It seems now everyone is talking about Advaliant! And for good reason. They are quickly becoming one of the top affiliate networks in the affiliate marketing world.

What makes them so amazing? Besides their great AM’s? Besides their NET 10 payments from the start? Besides their top converting exclusives? Well they have some pretty cool contests…

Pretty cool right? Geoff usually makes updates on the contests via his blog, www.geofferson.com. However, to win the bike, you are going to have to pump out some serious volume! The winner of June’s contest did over 7000 leads for Ultra Green  Tea!

Good luck everyone, and happy 4th!

Popularity: 26% [?]

So I havent posted anything in awhile so I thought I would talk some about my trials at starting a blog network. It is alot harder than I ever thought!

Writing 25 unique articles daily, with little return is not only frustrating…but really boring. I have hired a few writers to fill in when I am swamped, however I really do want to build the content myself. Sounds strange, but that is how I am doing it.

Right now, I am a little embarrassed to post the domains as their design is terrible. My initial plan was to have a crappy design and simply build all the content I could in the first month. This was a stupid plan, so I am getting a nice design put up this week on for each of my five blogs in my small blog network.

Link building is also really really boring. When I had landing pages for PPC, I would build links for them one at a time, although still boring it was alot easier. Five sites at a time…(still not that many sites)….sucks bad.

Anyways, I am not really complaining just venting I guess. I want this to succeed and eventually be able to get some niche blogs, and a central blog. I listened to a podcast and in it was an ex-writer for TechCrunch. He talked about how he thinks blog networks are soon done and one central blog covering many topics is going to be the new thing. I don’t 100% agree, however I am going to build a central blog that covers multiple topics.

Just by writing for five blogs, link building, stumbling, digging….really makes me respect these people who run huge blog networks. I know they are not one man ops. like mine, but still it amazes me.

P.S. Happy mothers day to all the moms!

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Popularity: 77% [?]

I’m not into PPC marketing right this instant, as I took a break from it/quit to attempt to start a blog network. Either way, I still know how to do it and never really gave out too many tips about it, so here we go. This is my process from start to “finish” using no paid tools.

The first thing I do once I have found a campaign I want to run is view the source code of the merchants landing page and see with meta tags they have in it. Obviously those keywords are what you should use to build a list. I wouldn’t say use those exact keywords because usually they are pretty broad and could kill you in Adwords. Once I have those keywords I do some simply plugging into Yahoo as that is where I usually start all my campaigns. I take note of the competition and review the current ads. Make sure to pay attention to how they are written, if they are all very similar you are going to want to make yours much more unique. For example, I read this on Wicked Fire, if you are promoting a weight loss offer and everyone’s ad says “Lose weight fast Free trial just pay shipping”, you could say something like “Stop being a fat loser and get in shape. Start shedding those pounds fast”, a bit too long but you get the picture?

So now that I have reviewed the competition and I like what I see it is time to email MyOwnDemon for a landing page. He makes really nice landing pages! The thing I like about him is that he is usually booked and wont be able to finish my page for like a week which gives me ample time to test my offers on Yahoo direct linking. Yes, I do direct link my offers on Yahoo for awhile until I get my landing page done. May seem really weird to some people, but that’s just how I do it. I may even leave my offer direct linked on Yahoo if it is converting well and conversions don’t change when using a landing page. Crazy I know.

You have to track your stuff. Something I never did in my early days in AM, and really wish I would have. However, back then there was no Tracking202, or Prosper202. Now there is so take advantage of this amazing free software!

Everything is setup in T202, and I start testing my keywords on Yahoo. Pretty simple really, just sit back look at my ads and see which keywords are converting. Writing new ads, deleting the ones with a low CTR, pretty basic. Lets say a few days go buy and I have a small amount of keyword data to build off. Hopefully my landing page is done and I am ready to start with Adwords. (don’t forget a heatmap)

Adwords is a bitch and I just think Google enjoys pissing people off. I hate Adwords but it is a must use if you are going to be a PPC marketer. What to do first? Simple, upload your keyword data into Adwords, only the keywords that converted on Yahoo!. Thanks to T202 everything is there in an excel spreadsheet. One thing to remember with Adwords is when you first launch your campaign obviously you have to CTR, only keyword quality score. So in a sense Google shoots your ad a little higher in order to establish a CTR. You must closely watch your ads and find out which ones have the higher CTR and make sure those are the ones that are running. (If not, the next day you are going to be screwed and getting hardly any traffic.) Hopefully this is where things start going good, and you have some consistent conversions across both Yahoo and Google. If not, look at your competition, write some new ads, expand your keyword research. It is really amazing to see some of the misspelled keywords that have converted. Bid on misspellings, they count too!

Scaling your campaign is really hard, and I’m not really that good at it either. Recently I had a campaign where I tried everything to scale it and nothing worked, it really pissed me off! But my recommendation would be to check out Facebook and other social media advertising. Possibly even SocialMedia.com, Matt Marcin just did a great write-up about this service, so make sure to check out that article before you try them. Enhance.com is pretty low quality traffic, but the guys over there are really nice and helpful and you can get tons of cheap traffic from them.

Create a subdomain off the domain of your landing page and create a blog. Order/write tons of articles, basically saying the same thing over and over just in different ways and with different form. Main focus….this product is amazing, it is the best product, and I love this product. Submit to every social bookmarking site possible, could add a few more sales/leads a week to your campaign.

 So, I hope these ideas helped someone. This is exactly how I create a campaign. Would love some feedback from the mega dudes as to what I should add. I probably forgot to add a few things though….

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Popularity: 85% [?]

I have been writing alot for my blogs recently and have noticed one thing, people love to pick out every little thing about my articles and bitch about it.

I’m not sure why, my articles are pretty well written, if I used a source for the information I always provide a link, as well as the images. I don’t see why people spend this much time just bitching.

Maybe it is because I am not looking at my articles in a purpose serving sense. I see my sites as $ and nothing more, probably not a good way to look at things. My sites are not jam packed with ads, only two ads per blog right now. That’s it!

So I am wondering, do you think this is a good thing that people are actually taking the time out to write lengthy comments explaining why they disagree? OR is this really really bad?

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Popularity: 91% [?]

So if you have been reading my blog lately, you know that I have changed my online money making focus to blogging and building content sites. Although I only have 6 blogs to write for, it is still pretty hard to come up with my own unique content. On top of that, logging in to each blog and trying to remember all the passwords was insane! So, I went out and bought Contribute CS3, some great editing software. Instead of logging in to each blog I set up all the blogs I am writing for in the Contribute program. It making throwing up posts about 500 times faster and is some really cool software I didn’t even know existed.

 It is kind of expensive for what it does in my opinion, about $180. However, without this software I was going to go nuts with all the passwords to remember!

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Popularity: 87% [?]

Over the past few weeks, I have been researching so much about blogging and it really made me realize how many blogs there are, and how many blogs there are with pretty decent readership/following that I have never heard of. One thing however in common with all these blogs is that their designs are really cool, and usually 100% custom.

So the month of May is the first month I will be building content on my blog network. During the first month, basically all I am going to do is blog all day everyday and build as much content myself as I can. The advertising budget for each blog is so small, it is not even worth mentioning. Social media traffic, although not the best quality, is still traffic and that is where my main focus is going to be.

Back to the title of this post, can a blog become popular with a free theme? I am going to find out. (I am not going to pay out the ass for a custom theme for each blog in its first month!) Now, my idea of popular is probably very different than yours. All I want for the first month is a small amount of readers and a decent amount of traffic. Can this be done? I’ll find out!

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Popularity: 88% [?]

I’ve decided to no longer do PPC marketing. Affiliate marketing is a really great fun industry to get into, and I wish I could handle the failure involved.

Popularity: 94% [?]