Rants | Passive Income Online: Lis Sowerbutts

You are here: Home » Rants

Pick Myself Up, Dust Myself Off, Start All Over Again

Written by Lis on May 3, 2012 · 23 Comments

Thank you. The last email I sent out to the list was rather long, and had bad words in it. Frankly, I was not sure how it would go down. Given the choice I’d rather have put it on the blog, but there are some conversations I’m not prepared to have “out in the open” any more. If you want to know WTF I’m talking about – sign up for the list (under this post). Its the only truly G-monster proof place I have to chat. (No I don’t believe that Facebook pages are secure either, whatever their privacy settings). What I got was a ton of replies – some from people I’m pretty sure have never actually commented here. Thank you. Its nice to hear that I am sometimes useful. A few days after I wrote my last post my premier travel site got damaged by the rampaging bird aka Google’s Penguin update – maybe. Its weird – its going up and down in the SERPS like front page, not in the top 100, and repeat. Not just for one search term – for ALL of them! There used to be a sandbox when Google wouldn’t rank a site for [...] Read more »

Google Bullshit aka Penguin Debacle on the 24 April 2012

Written by Lis on April 28, 2012 · 15 Comments

Due to the fun of time zones mostly when its the 24th April in the US its the 25th April in New Zealand. In New Zealand and Australia the 25th April is ANZAC day. ANZAC Day is the day Australasians respect our war dead – so I personally think its pretty fucking ironic that’s also the day that Google decided to DISrespect the right of small business to exist on the Internet. By the 26th there were an awful lot casualties including askthebuilder.com – apparently being the poster child for the Adsense team and providing huge amounts of unique and original content is no guarantee that Google might rank you in the search engines. So much for the content is King argument. The winners, fairly universally, appear to be large corporations as domain authority and, quite possibly, large Adwords budgets, trump everything else. Full disclosure: my niche sites got slaughtered. As in every ranking gone from the top 100. My larger sites are generally OK with some oddities like losing the ranking for “passive income” for this one. However I do not think this is a result of the deindexing of Build My Rank, I saw the drop of a few pages [...] Read more »

Sorry – Its Been A While

Written by Lis on March 19, 2012 · 13 Comments

Bad, bad blogger. What can I say – as soon as I get some traction going on this site – I don’t update it for 6 weeks, and don’t even manage to get an income report out for my email list! I guess this is why I need to have too many blogs – so I can ignore them on a rotational basis! Why am I ignoring this one? Well, really, because I have nothing new to say. Mum did say, if you’ve got nothing nice to say, say nothing! Nothings much changed. Wizzley is doing OK, but not spectacularly. It would probably do better if I’d manged to get more than under 80 articles up there though! And yes that is my entire output for the year pretty much. Far from surging ahead my income is stalling and slowly declining (thanks HubPages). I will need to pull money out for the flexiloan to pay tax next month – upsetting that. I feel like I am flying blind without Market Samurai. Traffic Travis – is the best of a poor set of choices for monitoring sites. It does OK, its a bit slow, and you will probably need to [...] Read more »

Empower Network Scam or Legit?

Written by Lis on January 3, 2012 · 21 Comments

I was introduced to the Empower Network by an acquaintance at a rare blogging meetup in my home town. I have said that I’ve sworn off scams – but this one came looking for me – its not just a scam, its a pyramid scheme – so illegal in most decent countries (including New Zealand). I’ve written my review on the blog they so kindly set-up for me for my $25/month. I’m curious to see if it will rank for the appropriate terms before I get terminated! Anyways here’s my review on the Empower Network Scam Looks like they noticed it! Lets take them one at a time : Wow a blogging system how cool is that? Very not cool – its just a WordPress install on their domain – you aren’t developing your own blog – you are providing content – for them. That’s why the original review got removed – because they could. Interesting aside – when I put the original review on my very own blog on their system – I thought it would outrank this review in the search results, it never did. In other words their own domain called “EmpowerNetwork.com” couldn’t rank for a term like “empower network scam”. [...] Read more »

NZ Electoral Law is an Ass – I Will Comment Today!

Written by Lis on November 25, 2011 · 9 Comments

Yeah this is my first and probably last political post on this blog! Yeah I don’t mean the politics of A-List and Z-List bloggers I mean genuine NZ politics. Yeah NZ is having an election and from middnight to 7pm on 26 November 2011 – I am supposed not to: to publish any statement intended or likely to influence any elector’s candidate, party or referendum vote. So WTF you might say? Yeah me too. This is a particularly stupid piece of legislation which was last updated in 1993 which was put in place to stop candidates and parties trying to influence voters on the day of voting. All very reasonable you might say. But now they’ve extended it to social media. And it covers everyone – well all NZers anyways – like who the else would care about NZ politics after all! According to The Aucklander- The current New Zealand Electoral Act (which prohibits any form of campaigning on polling day) means that if you type, text, televise or tweet your support for a party or person, on any public online platform (be it a blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any of the other thousands of social media platforms available), [...] Read more »

An Apology – I Need To Come Clean – A Z-List Blogger Is Born

Written by Lis on November 8, 2011 · 39 Comments

This stupid MMO blog is a curious thing. It started as my online learning journal/personal diary thing. But its become something a lot more than that. You see, while publicly, calling out the A-List bloggers – I have somehow become one: a C-lister anyways, woops no, now a Z-List Blogger! I am making money from you guys, that’s the truth of it. Its not what I set out to do – but over the years – its just kinda happened – and an incident over the weekend really highlighted it to me. I’m sorry – that’s my dirty little secret, it would have been obvious to some of you for some time, but not to others and its always made me feel apologetic and uncomfortable. I have probably been reading way to much personal devlopement stuff recently – but I’m not happy with my record here – so I’m putting that record straight. It Started With A Cashflow Crises My cash flow was ugly in October, and not looking much better for November – HubPages is not playing nicely, and come the new year will be screwing me out of significant Amazon earnings. Late on Friday night I did the Oct [...] Read more »

Travel Bloggers Selling Links and Making Money – Should You To?

Written by Lis on October 29, 2011 · 10 Comments

For fucks sake – I am over this whole -”Google hates me”, “I must please Google”, “is this OK with Google” shite going down in certain circles. Google is a company. Google is a search engine that using a superbly complex algorithm. Google doesn’t give a shite about you – because you are not Google’s customer. I think a lot of people need to get over this unhealthy relationship with Google. Because as it is now Google appears to be winning the war – which war? The propaganda war. You know spreading mis-information and fear – the oldest propaganda trick in the book. And its working. Take for example the bullshite about buying and selling links. Google hates it. Of course Google hates it – links are what their search engine algorithms are still (mainly) based on. The reality is though, its pretty darn difficult for Google to know when a link is – well just a link – and when a link is a paid endorsement. So often times you can get away with lots of paid links. But even more importantly: If you are not ranking in the search rankings anyway why the hell wouldn’t you sell links – it [...] Read more »

Bullying Online is NOT OK – Even for “Adults”

Written by Lis on September 8, 2011 · 65 Comments

Tropical Beaches - the only one's worth swimming on!

If you’re bored with the making an income online – you are bored with life in my opinion. Normally I stay out of the day to day online dramas – but hell – what the heck – so here’s my thought of the day. Don’t Let the Bullies Win Today a blogger (and I’ll get to that term later) – wrote to me and said he’d removed a post, that I’d commented on. The post was written celebrating that he had resigned from a job that was “sucking the life out of him” – it rang a very loud bell with me – so I commented. Then he deleted the post – because the company that he hadn’t named was threatening to withhold his final pay (and his name isn’t on the site either). Now he probably shouldn’t have posted until he had the final check cashed, but either way the company was bullshiting – and he fell for it – it happens a lot online. Bullies win, because people think they need permission. I hope he puts the post back up once he has his final pay banked. I don’t like bullies, I’ve mentioned that before. Its one of [...] Read more »

Postrunner Review: The “Quality” Debate

Written by Lis on April 1, 2011 · 14 Comments

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

UPDATE: April 2012 – Postrunner V2 Review If your response to my title was WTF is Postrunner – then check out my earlier post. If you are a member of The Keyword Academy you will know that Postrunner is system used with TKA in order to create keyword anchored links for your sites. I’ve compared to BuildMyRank to Postrunner – and Mark is now trying to differentiate Postrunner from BuildMyRank and similar schemes. His argument is that Postrunner needs to evolve: needs “better quality” sites in Postrunner. the reason more “quality” sites aren’t in Postrunner is because of the “quality” of the articles being sent to them. his proposed solution is an author scoring system which will reward the writers (or buyers) of superior articles. The Argument About “Quality” Articles As soon as the thread started in the forum the predictable grammar Nazi’s (Nazis’? Nazis’s ??) were out in force. Too many trailing commas – FAIL. Use of nonstandard spellings FAIL. To be fair to Mark, in the seminar he specifically mentioned that he wasn’t concerned about grammar and spelling problems, he was more worried about the articles being relevant and having a point. Its all looking like this will be [...] Read more »

Site Build It Review – Griz and Ken Evoy Best Friends?

Written by Lis on January 6, 2011 · 43 Comments

I have been pretty much off grid doing the holiday (vacation) thingy. But I am beyond angry so I need to blog about it – if you don’t like bad language – back button now! A few days ago Grizz made an interesting post about how he became one of the good guys in the Make Money Online niche – and why he walked away from it. Go ahead and have a read – a genuine apology – even though many of us considered it completely unnecessary – after all I’ve never paid Griz a cent and he’s partly responsible for the decent online income that I make these days. To be honest his original post freaked me out a bit – maybe I was delusional that my little mini-sites with lots of links would make me money. But Google keeps sending money to my account – the evidence told me that his original methods work just fine – for me anyway. Griz’s business has changed – he appears to have found a way to combine golf with making loads of cash – good on him – but no amount of money is worth learning golf as far as I [...] Read more »

Passive Income and What People Think

Written by Lis on December 31, 2010 · 23 Comments

Prague Castle, St Vitius, Praha in the Snow, Czeck Republic

Making an online passive income from Internet Marketing is the strangest thing. When I had a job as a geologist few people understood what I did – but no one doubted that I was well-paid for it, when I worked in IT even fewer people understood my job, but they took for granted that I made money. Now I do something really simple – I put up websites, based on topics people search for, I use SEO techniques to rank my sites and I make passive income. And even now that I make enough passive income to go travelling for 2 months they don’t understand how I make money. That’s OK – I’m used to that. What kinda of amazes me is that – they don’t believe that I make money either! Now frankly I don’t give a shite whether they believe me or not- my partner believes me – he sees me pay the bills, my bank manager is happy, my accountant is advising me to make provision for tax – but the other people – they seem to think I’m delusional. If you are starting out this game – here’s some advice. Don’t expect anyone to be supportive [...] Read more »