Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Passive Income Rants

Passive Income: My Dream! I Do Believe!

I have a dream: to do what  I want when I want – and I am very, very lucky to be living it! Passive income isn’t a terribly easy goal – but  I am getting there – and I think I just turned a big corner, let me explain. Not income wise, but in the psychological, mumbo-jumbo department!

confusion

When I did my last update I had had a pretty bad month. I lost my part-time job in late January – and it had stuffed up my productivity! How so? Even with only 2 days a week work it gave my week structure. Now it was gone and I appeared to be going nowhere. I admitted my frustration in a private forum I am a member of (sorry closed to new members at the moment – I’ll let you know if it re-opens) – and got jumped on pretty hard. I thought my problem was keyword research – but it wasn’t – the problem was I hadn’t down enough work!

That is not to say I wasn’t spending all day at the beach, nope worse than that, I was distracted by forums, commenting for fun, twitter and a whole lot of other unproductive stuff! In fact an on-line friend asked me what sites I wanted to promote in a mutual-help group he was starting – and I didn’t have any I could be bothered with anymore!

I wasn’t being lazy – not logging on lazy – but I was unfocused I hadn’t figured out what I had to do to succeed – even though I did know – and have known for nearly a year – build more sites! For goodness sakes the original name of this blogs was “Journey of 100 sites!” Had I developed 100 sites – nope!

I got mad – first at my colleagues in the forum – and then at myself!  Someone called me stubborn –  I laughed out loud – its odd how someone who has never met you can pick out some major personality trait like that!

My main issue was:  people say you can’t achieve unless you believe that you will achieve – but I don’ t believe in anything I can’t touch: the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas and God being my main examples.

I’m not much into the pop psychology, “law of attraction” crap. I did however, somewhat in desperation, do a bit of a google – and came up with the concept of visualisation.   Sorry I don’t know where I got the check list from  – I wrote it on a bit of paper – and it was very useful- leave me a comment if you recognise the source! Having decided on what your goal is: in my case passive recurring income from niche sites – you need to go through the following steps:

  1. Is the result possible. Do other people do this?
  2. Is the result possible by me – do I have the skills?
  3. Do  I really want this result?
  4. Do I deserve the result?
  5. Does the goal contradict my other beliefs?
  6. Create a plan to achieve the goal
  7. Do the steps in the plan contradict my beliefs?
  8. Do you can do the steps in the plan?
  9. Do you believe you will do the steps in the plan?
  10. Believe that you will achieve the goal.

OK nothing better to do at midnight when I couldn’t sleep so I worked thru the steps.

  1. Yes I know other people who make  over $10k /month with this model.
  2. I believe I have the skills – the technical stuff is pretty easy, the writing is fine, I can outsource what I can’t do myself
  3. Oh yes!  I felt like trapped in corporate IT. Even if there wasn’t a financial crises  I wouldn’t want to go back! Its waaay too good havin control of your life.
  4. Why the fuck not? No one will get hurt in the process and I certainly own my partner over a year of him working and me not producing any income.
  5. This was infact my initial issue with Internet Marketing – but I found out a while ago that its perfectly possible to sell on-line without ripping anyone off.
  6. Plan – its in my head – its not that hard:
    1. find long-tail keyword to target
    2. find a way to monetize
    3. build site
    4. promote site to top of SERPs
    5. rinse and repeate
  7. No
  8. Yes
  9. Yes
  10. Well bugger me  I think I might believe in my goal now!

Sorry for the ramble – now I have to go and build some more sites!

EDIT – this post moved me to tears writing it – and this video totally expresses what I not have the skill to say in words:

http://youtu.be/RxPZh4AnWyk

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Categories
Online Business

Overdue February Update

Sorry guys, its been a couple of weeks since I posted on passive income online, and yes  I am a bit unhappy about the lack of progress  I have to report.

So the good stuff is I fleshed out this blog a bit:  tidied up the blank pages on the header which were getting traffic but actually had nothing on them!

Continue reading “Overdue February Update”
Categories
Back Links Blogging

Get Paid to Blog: Is it a Scam?

UPDATE Please read this more recent post: Is Today Blog a Scam

Getting paid to blog seems to be every writer’s dream and the dream of many who just want to make, what they think is a little passive income online.

$2 for 1000 views
$2 for 1000 views

To be honest making anything more than a few cents with most programs is as likely as just losing a few kilos in your sleep or just getting fit my meditation – it ain’t gonna happen people!

So sorry if you are looking to make $100/day blogging with no experience and not much effort – that money tree doesn’t exist!

That said  I do directly get paid to blog over at today.com both my blogs: Australia News and Travel Over 30s are still paid – the huge sum of $1/post (usually I’ll get to that) plus $2/1000 views. I’ve stopped directly promoting their ad on this blog though because they tightened up the criteria for payment so I figured most people wouldn’t actually get paid to blog there – let me explain.

When I joined in Nov 2008 I got paid $1 from day one and I could have 2 blogs from day one: so by the end of the first month I could earn $60 and get paid out – their minimum payout is $50.

Then they restricted the second blog to people who had a track record of 30 days with their first blog.

Then the changed the program so you didn’t get the $1/post for the first 30 days but you might be reviewed and promoted to the ppp program after 30 days,  you did however get the traffic payments.

Then come early January they denied for payment my posts which were obviously self-promotional  i.e. linked to my own hubpages, other sites I wrote for etc.  Again I still get the traffic bonus for them but I didn’t actually get paid for backlinks anymore!

At the same time they dropped a lot of people from the $1/day program – there was lots of angst about this in the forum – but this had always been a possiblity if you read their Terms of Service.

So today.com will probably not pay the average newbie blogger anything but pennies  – and they probably won’t make the $50 payout. Why do I say that – the answer is in the traffic stats and the “hot list” which tells you for each blog at today you have where you sit in relation to the top 10. This makes for some interesting reading.

My australia blog has done quite well getting traffic from those downunder worried about when/if they will get the cash the Federal government is handing out. At one point I was averaging 300 views/day – that put me at #34 out of all today blogs. Good ?

Not really the figures for the top 10 at the same time was

#10 position  602 views – ie double what position 34 was getting

#3  position 1390 views – double again

#1  position 4534 views – double again

To be honest I don’t think a blog about Australia would ever make those figures – the top 10 positions are usually dominated by entertainment, celebs and fandom type blogs.

On the other side I appear to have readers and fans for my travel blog – but I haven’t done any good getting it ranked for the search engine traffic, except for the photos – they bring me more searchers than the words 🙁 I bounce around 50-70 uniques a day and at the high end of the range sit at position 200 or so out of all today blogs. I suspect I am only just hanging onto the payment for this one!

The point is that I am in the top 200 which means thousands and thousands of blogs don’t even have 50 visitors a day – at 50 visitors you are earning 10cents/day for the traffic.  Sorry but I don’t know anywhere in the world where you are likely to have reliable Internet that will make that profitable.

Which is not to say that today.com is not worth it for me – because Google love’s the site and my blogs get indexed within hours,sometimes less. I have PR all over the place too! (Trick if you want to know what sort of authority a site has: put a google alert on some unique text in the post  – I normally use my name – and note how long it takes to show up as an alert!). So yes I don’t get paid for my obvious backlinks anyone more – but they are nice backlinks 🙂

DISCLAIMER: the links to today.com in this post are affiliate links and I will get paid $5 if you sign up and post 10 approved posts within 3 months. If you want to deny me my beer money – that’s cool -strip the affiliate code from the link – am I going to tell you how to this – no 🙂

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Categories
Online Business Paid Tools Passive Income Tools

Understanding Buying Keywords with Market Samurai

Sorry I am doing a lot of talking about software – and mostly they don’t even have affiliate programs – aren’t I a bad Internet marketer! At the end of the day though you need to the right tools to earn passive income online.

Choices - there are just too many in IM!
Choices - there are just too many in IM!

I don’t know about you but my biggest technical challenge with Internet marketing, aside from the whole “I’m a marketer” mind shift was figuring it out what a profitable keyword is. I’d say its still my major issue!

Its confusing – I start with a good idea – I create 1000’s of associated keywords with Keyword Elite and then try to figure out whether I can take on the competition in SEO Elite. Although these tools are incredibly powerful they also have a couple of disadvantages:

  1. They are slow – and quiet often my IP gets banned from Yahoo or Google for a while – so I have to stop and start again the next day;
  2. There is no obvious workflow – step-by-step procedure if you like. The software’s videos are useless and the best I’ve seen on how to actually use it are Vic’s videos on Bloggerunleashed

Market Samurai has been around since last August (?) and is still in Beta – not all the modules are available yet – but what is I am liking a lot! What do I like about Market Samurai?

A built in WorkFlow for Identifying Profitable Keywords

The way I am using Market Samurai at the moment is:

  1. Keyword analysis: you seed a phrase and it generate options
  2. Filter out the obviously unsuitable phrases and the ones that get not traffic and export the rest to a spreadsheet
  3. Analysis each remaining phrase to see what the competition is.
  4. Categorise my spreadsheet with the high priority (low competition, high profitability) and the medium (medium competition, higher profitability)

Pretty much I am using the approach described in the videos below by Market Samurai’s creators.  I’ve linked the introduction video plus the three detailed follow ups. They are quite long and detailed but I found them clear. You may want to take notes to get your head around it.  They also mention the free tools you can use to do a similar, but far more labour-intensive analysis, so its useful to see these even if you can’t afford the software.

The First Golden Rule: Target Keywords With Traffic

The Second Golden Rule: Target Profitable Keywords

The Third Golden Rule: Target Keywords With Low Competition

I am finding this a really useful approach – and in fact I’m going back through my existing sites and realising that I had made two key mistakes:

  1. Chosen keywords with no traffic
  2. Chosen keywords with no buying traffic.

Like DUH! For example I OWN the search term “internet marketing HubPages”  – I dominate the e-book scammers, for which I am very happy! However I now know they weren’t making any money – because #1 position gets about 1 searcher a day!

Pricing and Free Use Period

You can try it risk free – by downloading the fully functional software (the module that’s aren’t available aren’t available in the paid version either) you have 40 days to decide whether to pay for it.  N.B. the site says 12 day trial – but have a 40 day count down –   so beware that you may only have 12 days to make a decision – can someone leave a comment if that happens to them.

The price is $147 which will no doubt go up in the future – to a subscription model I suspect. If you like it make sure you buy it at the current price before the rest of the modules were released 🙂 Regretably there is no affiliate program yet!

I’d love to hear your comments pro/con this software or anything else that makes it easy to find that elusive buying keyword!

You might want to check out my Free On-Page SEO Series too – starting with What Are My Keywords?

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Categories
Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools

MyStarterBlog: An Alternative to WordPress?

Guys – this is a neat new tool to create websites really easily, from a cool guy Steve McGrath over at McGrath Info  Solutions.

MyStarterBlog is an easy way to create a blog without all the overhead of WordPress – no database required!

An Example of a MyStarterBlog Site: Pink is NOT Compuslory!
An Example of a MyStarterBlog Site: Pink is NOT Compuslory!

MyStarterBlog is a cool little program which allows you to upload a complete website – including content (which you have to provide of course) in one file. There is no database involved. There are a couple of advantages to this.

  1. It takes very little bandwidth or other resources from your host – it will run a lot faster than the equivalent site running WordPress or blogger.
  2. Although there is a comment facility (via email) – and most visitors will think the site is a blog (check out the example MyStarterBlog site here), its not a  blog in the sense of  spammers looking for a place to put their viagra ads in your comments!
  3. Runs out of the box with some themes pre-packaged but you can buy more themes or adapt whats available if you are prepared to hack some php.
  4. You don’t have to update your blog/theme/ widgets every time you login just to make a 5 minute post!
  5. You are less likely to get hacked because hackers target WordPress’s known security flaws – meaning that you have to keep upgrading (see 4. above!)
  6. If you ever need to move host – you just reload the site – one file – DONE! If you have ever tried moving a WordPress blog between sites you will understand that this approximately a a zillion steps less!
  7. You only have one small file to upload – around 300k, rather than the 4MB or so that most WordPress installs involve.

Will It Cost Me? Yes and No

There is a free version which has the following restrictions:

  1. Only supports one blog
  2. Links on pages are no-followed

Download it had have a play -a the end of the day – if you hate – you have spent – nothing!

If you upgrade to the registered version – currently $17 now $7 – can’t beat that price!, then you have:

  1. Unlimited blog support
  2. Ablity to import posts from text files
  3. Ability to import from existing WordPress blogs (using the XML export format)

If you like product then write a post about it on your blog within 15 days of your first purchase. Email Steve with your details and he will refund $10 to your PayPal or AlertPay account. You don’t need to do the review anymore  the software will cost you $7 – that’s not free – but its bloody close to!

And that includes free upgrades for life to!

Bottom Line: Do I Recommend MyStarterBlog

Yes I do if you have specialist blogs that you don’t update so often I think its ideal – because frankly for most blogs WordPress is waaaay over the top.

It would also be idea for a beginner blogger – you don’t have to learn about widgets/themes/upgrades etc etc

I recommend it to because you can try it before you buy  – and I like that in software.

What You Will Need to Use MyStarterBlog

You will need hosting, a domain name, an ftp program (to upload your files).  See my recommendations for these and other software here on my Software I Use page

Disclaimer

I’m going to get my $10 for this post – but you don’t have to write a postive  post to get that $10 – Steve just wants to get the buzz going on a new product, so rather than an affiliate program which bumps the price of the software up he has come up with this innovative approach. This is a limited time offer – so give it a go and if you want to get MyStarterBlog for $7 rather than $17 – do it now rather than later!

I tried to find something not to like about this product – but honestly I can’t. I am not a developer myself but I’ve worked with programmers for many years in my real world job and I know how much work goes into creating a cool little tool like this! For the price, even $17 – its a steal.

It may not work for your business so try the free version and see if you have a use before paying.

Categories
Online Business Passive Income

How to Earn Passive Income Online – My Guide

Well I thought I would take you step by step on how to earn passive income online: just send me $197 by PayPal…. Sorry just kidding!

I'd rather do this than work!
I'd rather do this than work!

I’ve updated some pages on this site to describe the key elements of my business strategy and how I intend to implement it.

Up front – I am not making a significant amount of money with this strategy right now – I do intend to be in the next year or so though.

What I do know is that other people are making money doing this – its not a secret, its not particularly difficult – though I wouldn’t say its easy.

I also would definitely say its a lot of work without in prospect of being paid for at least 6 months.

The thing is that you have to find your own way – because no one else’s business model will fit your personality and skills, but here’s mine for what’s it worth.

How to Earn Passive Income – My Plan

Software I use in my business

How I create content quickly and cheaply

How I get backlinks to my sites

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Categories
Passive Income

Passive Income Online – How Much Does It Cost To Start

Passive income – to my way of thinking is the best income to have. Why? Because I’m bloody idle that’s why!

Labradors have the right idea! Oh and because I know its possible to. My partner and I own several rental properties in New Zealand, we bought them several years ago and every month we get paid the income from them. Is it passive income – sure it is – we’ve never met our tenants, we don’t mow lawns, we don’t take calls about broken toilets at 2am – my property manager does.  Property investment can be as active or as passive as you want to make it – but you have to pay someone to do the work for you.

Property investment is not risk free either. Our rental properties are exposed to interest rate risks, tenant availability, natural disasters, property manager going bad etc etc. If we’d borrowed the amount the bank was prepared to lend us a few years ago we would be in a nasty position now.

Making passive income online, to my way of thinking is a much better thing than making passive income from property investment. Why? The risks are lower much lower. The investment required is much lower. It’s not zero though – this is what I think it takes to start making passive income online.

BTW I am not talking about working from home jobs here or freelancing – that’s not passive income – if you are unclear about the difference check out my analysis of what’s the difference between passive income and work at home jobs.

Personal Attributes

  • be teachable – that’s it really if you can take on new attitudes and learn new skills – you’ll make it. That’s it really I listed a long list of skills I’d developed working online, previously – but if you are teachable none of this will be an issue.

How Much Money Do You Need

  • if you don’t have a reliable computer you need one. You don’t need anything fancy though and my 4 year old 14″ laptop does just fine.
  • you need a fast broadband or cable internet connection. I really don’t think you can do this with dial-up though some may disagree, the time you waste on a slow connection more than justifies the cost of a faster one IMHO
  • you need enough money to support yourself for the first 12 months and enough to subsidise your expenses (assuming you want to live about the poverty line ) for the next 12 months. Or a helpful spouse/partner/SO who will do same.

That’s it so basically the right attitude and 18 months worth of living expenses. That’s a pretty low cost entry point for a business. If you can’t afford the time without cash coming in you can always start part-time while working a “real” job

But you say – what about special software? what about hosting ? what about domains? what about paying for links? what about  mentoring programs? what about e-books?

What Software Do You Need to Earn Passive Income?

The first software I  bought for this business was Dreamweaver its a very nice piece fo software and I used it to build my first site- nice software does the job – but so does WordPress and its free.

I use OpenOffice to write in and often a simple text editor called Q10 – both free.

Yes I use other tools – I use SEOElite, Keyword Elite for research and other services and tools to create links for me – but you don’t actually need any of them.

Do I need Domains and Hosting

Nope – but I would probably pay for them before I paid for software.  I buy domain names from time to time – like this one, I have a reseller hosting plan with Hostgator which I recommend.

But you don’t need any of it – you can create money making sites of free hosts such as blogger.com

But How you ask – well for that you will have to buy the e-book – but because you are my valued reader I’ll give it to you for a special price…Well I’m a beginner at this so I’m not going to tell you.

Instead I can point you over to Frank Carr’s blog and check out his post on how to earn online cash with a niche blog. His method is not original, in fact its similar to how Grizz makes money with Adsense – but it works – its not sexy, it may be differnet from what the A-listers tell you about list building – but it works. Oh and it won’t cost you any money either! And Frank doesn’t even want to collect your email address – and neither do I!

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Categories
Online Business

2009 Passive Income Goals: 1 Month Update

OK sorry to bore my 2.5 readers – but you do want to know the details of my problems with motivation didn’t you LOL Well really these posts are for me – for some reason writing my words on the great WWW makes me feel like I’m accountable to – well me really!

OK So I going to take my 2009 goals – and report on it every month – something like 99.9% (I made the figure up – you get that on the Internet) – people give up on their goals by now so I’m going to be one of the 1% who didn’t!

Goal Build More Sites

Sites built : one

Sites promoted: none

Excuses – pathetic!

Sites Ranking #1 For MY Keywords

Ranking #1 for keyword: 4

Ranking #2 and #3  for keywords: 14

OK this is the ultimate objective – and my statistics are a bit off because until a few months ago I didn’t know what where my keywords 🙂 These aren’t all sites either: some are hubpages and other third party sites. The reality is that it will take 6 months to get new sites to this point, and some will never make it, and some will rank #1 for keywords I didn’t know I was aiming for.  Some will make me money even though they are stuck at position 9 or 10.

Freelance Writing

Haven’t replaced my part-time real world job but its slowly building and I am getting different gigs from different places too.

Why do I keep getting distracted? Why am I consistently not focused on my main job – to set up passive income sites? Well I think again Monika over at Making Money Freelancing has got it right – I’m procrastinating because I fear failure – I am paralyzed because I may get it wrong!

Well its stopping and its stopping today!

For February I will be:

  • focusing on getting 4 new sites up and backinks built

That’s it – one goal – make it my focus.  I’m stopping  playing in the paddling pool and I’m diving into the deep end! Hope I don’t break my neck LOL

What's the worst that can happen...
What's the worst that can happen...

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Categories
Passive Income

Can You Make $1000/month With Adsense?

The title of this post is a quote from a question which was posed by an new writer over at hubpages – the question was naive – the questioner probably actually wanted to know how to make money online, or even how to make passive income online,  not with the specific Adsense program.

The reality is that Adsense is a tricky beast. It appears deceptively easy to earn a little money with Adsense, most people at HubPages make more from Adsense than the other options available there (eBay and Amazon particularly), $50 a month, $200, $500 even -but a $1000 is it possible?

Sure its possible to earn that sort of money -some make much, much more than that.  One of the few sources of reliable information on the internet that I’ve found is a Canadian who lives on a frozen lake who goes by the name of Grizz and writes all about how to make money online with Adsense – go on go and have a look, here’s a nice bear picture while we wait

Take Care in the Woods!
Take Care in the Woods!

You see I knew you’d come back pretty quick, or you won’t be back for weeks one way or the other 🙂

If you came back quickly you probably thought I sent you to the wrong blog eh – I mean its a blogger blog for goodness sakes!  (EDIT  not anymore – long story) Its UGLY, its hard to navigate (hint use the archives to navigate there’s no other way!). It looks boring -there is no visual interest- its not pretty. Did you notice the comments – did you notice how many comments each post has – do you notice how rarely Grizz posts? He has 2500 subscribers too. And makes a lot of money from that ugly blog – and he tells you how to make it using Adsense only. But guess what – those subscribers don’t make him money – its the search engines that do that.

Oddly I see a parallel between making $1000/month with  Adsense and ballroom dancing (that would confuse Adsense if I ran it here!).  Its easy to learn to waltz a little – anyone can learn to do it – a little.  Its easy to look good in your average social dance, and yes my partner and I do – people tell us so and ask us how we learned to dance so well.  Its quite simple – we’ve taken 1-2 hours of private lessons and practiced another few hours, every week , for the last 10 years.   Are we going to be Australian ballroom champions anytime soon – no – we’re too old, too fat, and my pain threshold is just too low. We don’t have the talent – however much we practice.

And learning to waltz is easier than learning how to make a $1000/month with Adsense – why? The waltz has a set of very,very strictly defined rules, the way to hold your partner, the timing, the position of the head, the footwork – its all defined, its all written down – there is no debate, there is only one way to dance the waltz properly.

Adsense is different, making good money from Adsense is much harder, because Google, who owns Adsense, doesn’t publish how to make money from Adsense – how to get $4 a click instead of 4c.  Google won’t explain where to place the Google ads for the best revenue, the best type of content to write, or the best types of visitors to get. Neither will I – go back to the ugly blog and find out how to make $1000 a day with Adsense from Grizz. Oh and yes its a a PR0 blog now – because Google really doesn’t want this information out in the public!

No you won’t be seeing Adsense on this blog anytime soon!

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Categories
Back Links

Using Twitter for BackLinks

Not sure what a backlink is and why you need them? Check my earlier post on why backlinks are important. Check here for an update on using twitter for backlinks.

I haven’t been convinced yet of the value of Twitter for building my passive income online business. I have however just found a twitter ap which may be about to change all that.

Photo Credit:
Photo Credit:Tees for Twits

I only started using Twitter to follow Vic @ Bloggerunleashed random live chats – he twits before a chat.  A couple of months ago I started following people I knew from other forums or whose blogs I liked. I still wasn’t that impressed.

Twitter For Breaking News

Then I started doing some trends blogging with my Australia News blog.  Then I found a use for twitter – I knew about the airplane that ditched in the Hudson about 3 minutes after it happened – it was a tweet. I saw a tweet about a $100k job to work on a Queensland Island job The first post I wrote on the subject got 200 visitors in one day.  The job applications don’t close until the end of February so I am expecting long-tail traffic on this one for some time.

So twitter stayed -as an information source – but I still didn’t like it for promotion – I just don’t get that much traffic from tweets and I and the links to them on my Twitter Profile were NOT do-follow, and I am the only one who actually like to read the url before I click it rather than just like a junky shortened url?

TwitWall is the answer to my problem with twitter – the limit of 140 characters. I find it way too limiting – and yes I hate SMS on cellphones to, call me luddite if you want 🙂

TwitWall For Backlinks

So I get to talk more on TwitWall

I get to include anchored links which are DO-FOLLOW.

I get to add photos which can be useful for a bit of traffic too.

The downside – people – who click my tweet will go to the twitwall and will need to click again to actually come to my blog – so they may not come!

At the moment I am using a combination of twitwall and normal tweets.


Categories
Back Links

Entrecard Will Kill Your Search Traffic

OK I have been doing some Web2.0 stuff over the last few weeks and have looking for  sources of backlinks which will a) work for the search engines i.e. give me a do-follow backlink and b) might even get you some focused traffic. Getting my sites to the point their earn me passive income is all about increasing my backlinks

Entrecard Sucks!
Entrecard Sucks!

I don’t know if you count Entrecard as 2.0 as really its just a fancy banner exchange which as been around forever (ie like 10 years – a LONG time on the Internet).

I never took much notice of Entrecard but people over at the Today forums were singing its praises so I signed up (free) and installed it on my Travel Over 30s blog.   And I dropped my entrecards – almost always on relevant blogs in the travel and expat sector. You can drop a maximum of 300 cards a day – with a little distraction – ie. actually reading some of the blogs this can take several hours – most of the blogs have every widge under the sun and take FOREVER to load.

And sure enough the traffic came – maybe 50% of people I dropped on dropped back within the next day or so – to be honest this was better than I had thought. I got a bit of traffic from them.

Then I stopped  dropping – and my after a day or so my Entrecard traffic went down to a handful a day. Which again was to be expected. This was not passive income – if I didn’t drop no one was going to drop back or even visit.

So Entrecard wasn’t building me an ongoing audience – it was just getting me a reciprocal “drop and run” response. So if I didn’t drop I didn’t get traffic.

Which in its self is not so bad – but it got worse, a lot worse. My Google search engine traffic disappeared. I was getting a steady flow of queries from Google to a number of different posts – I had had this traffic for around a month.

After a week or so of serious Entrecard activity -my search engine traffic had gone. Why?

Well I don’t know for sure- as you never do with search engines, but I am almost certain it is because my Entrecard traffic was low quality – it was hit and run – they came found the Entrecard widget – dropped and left.

Google rates pages for a number of reasons – but a lot of very short term visitors who click in and out – seems to get you marked down. And I think this is what has happened to my blog.

Meanwhile my other Today blog, which I never had Entrecard on has gone from strength to strength on search traffic.

So not only will your Entrecard traffic not convert to sales, Adsense clicks or even readers – it will also have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.

Entrecard is off my blog as soon as my current backlog of adveritsers are through.