As niche blogs become even more popular, the reliance on google for bloggers is at a new and different high. Much of the traffic for certain niche blogs come from search engines, mainly google. So when (and how much) does google crawl you?

SeoMeter

Add your website to SeoMeter, and start to keep track of search engine’s crawling!

SeoMeter allows you to monitor when search engine’s crawl your website or blog. Getting listed is free and the tool records in the database how often you get crawled.

You can see on our badge that our CC or crawl cycle is .9. The CC is the time between two consecutive crawls done by search engine robots. So if our crawl cycle was 1, that means we get crawled once a day.

You can also notice our rank, which I thought was pretty cool. You can check out the top 20 websites in blogging. Looks like we are in the top 5.

Why Does this Matter?

SeoMeter puts it simply and states that this

“allows webmasters to monitor their website’ crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.”

However, I’m just more fascinated on graphs and how much the trends change over time. This gives you different things to check your experiments. Maybe you start posting more or less. It could affect your search engine referrals.

What determines search engine’s crawl rate is best outlined at the SEOmeter blog. The factors include content updates, pinging, sitemap, robots.txt and server speed.

How often do you get Crawled?

As bloggers expand their base to include other blogs, affiliates and merchandise, opportunities are endless. You can make “internet entrepreneur” your official job title, you just have to work at it. Lately I have been experimenting and making money with affiliate programs, however, is that enough?

Be Your Own Affiliate

The problem with affiliate programs is that you are promoting another website. If you don’t convert that or sell anything, then, it’s essentially free advertising. I’ve given TLA over 500 hits in the past months with no real conversions. Who wins? It’s not me!

How about starting your own e-store selling YOUR products? People make millions of dollars every year hitting the e-bay scene. You can too.

Buying Wholesale

If I had some investment money I’d definitely consider this. Purchasing wholesale clothes you can get designer labels. Buying it in a huge bunch of say 5,000 pieces of clothing, you get a low base rate. That way you can afford to resell your purchases cheap.

At MerchandizeLiquidators.com for example, they offer a package of men’s clothing. The brands include Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. Price per piece works out to be about 7$, minimum 500 pieices. Your cost would end up being 3500$ if you purchased 500. Even if you just sold each peice for a dollar more you’d make 500$ profit. Many of the clothes can range from 25$ to 400$. The opportunity could be a lot more. Along with clothes, you could do toys, electronics and more.

Risk and Reward

The problem with this would be the risk you couldn’t market your own store. People want reliability when shopping online, I’ve hesitated purchasing online at stores I never heard of.

If worse comes to worse you could always unload your merchandise offline, like at an open market or swap meet.

Would you consider buying wholesale?

Blogging has been great this month, we’ve already earned a nice amount of cash, due to taking our ads privately. I hope to further monetize our blog with our same methods as well as incorporate some new things. I have given Project Wonderful a shot on our sidebar.

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 100 entrecard points.

Leave us a comment about anything you want. This week I’m particularly interested in how you monetize your blog. Is it strictly adsense? Or do you incorporate other advertising like affiliates? As always tell us what articles you’d like to see here on Blog about your Blog.

This week Comment Friday is brought to you by Sukosaki. Check out their First Blog Contest for 2008, looks like they only need a few more entries! Prize is a memory card by Panasonic.

A huge benefit of being ‘one of the A list’ is getting tipped off about launches of major websites before it happens. Obviously I’m not A-list yet, because I wasn’t tipped off (lol). With a great pre-launch, PepperJam has already gone viral by being picked up by several bigger blogs.

PepperJam Already the Best?

This PepperJam network has hit the affiliate networking scene hard. At least, the blogosphere.

All reviews have been positive as far as I’ve seen, and Zac Johnson (super affiliate money making machine) has even called it the, the Network of Networks.

Tons of Affiliates

The best thing, for me, that makes up if I want to work with an affiliate company is their variety of affiliates. You are going to want relevant affiliates that you can actually make money with. Not just tons of credit card offers and weightloss programs.

Pepperjam has just that, as well as keeping their bloggers in mind. Not only do they have big name clothes companies like BabyPhat and Phatfarm, there is also Review Me, SEOmoz.org , and TLA.

Ad Feature for Content

Google Adsense isn’t for everyone, including those who have been recently banned. Pepperjam brings you a solution for that. Pepperjam Ads!

Pepperjam ads convert your current affiliate partners into ads similar to those of Adsense and Bidvertiser. I’ve already begun running them in rotation with Adsense. This is what it looks like:

Other Benefits

A few other benefits that I like about the program is that the Pepperjam Network has its own affiliate program that pays out up to $7 per approved publisher application. I referred someone already and earned 5$. Remember this is an affiliate program so they will call you to verify your account. It’s easy and takes only a minute or two.

Pepperjam Network provides bi-weekly payments to affiliates. No more waiting 30+ days, in some cases months, for payment. I could definitely get used to payments all the time!

Pepperjam also offers a chatting system with affiliate representatives. This alone sets them apart as an affiliate system. With chatting the affiliate support is amazing. Any questions or concerns you have, if you catch them online, ask away. I got more information from Robyn over at Pepperjam via the chat system. I learned a few things and got to ask anything I wanted to.

So what are you waiting for? Join now

Mark wrote about Scratchback for us a while back, when it was starting to catch some steam. Since late November we’ve been displaying a top spots widget on our blog. Last night before going to sleep I received a nice email. It was my payment of 35.62$.

Scratchback vs Blogrush

It makes me curious when bloggers have a Blogrush widget and not a Scratchback widget. In weeks of having Blogrush I’ve seen very little traffic. With Scratchback I’ve actually received more traffic (from the scratchback directory listing) as well as earned 35$. Why not monetize a spot on your sidebar that isn’t generating any $?

Generate Traffic and “Tips”

A great and much needed feature was the creation of the scratchback directory. In the directory you can list your blog in up to 3 different categories. You can check out our listing in the directory. We listed our traffic and readership, hoping to entice tippers to spend their money here. This has already sent us several people who have purchased a Top Spot.

The directory has sent us about 50 visitors since we created our listing, a lot more traffic than I can say Blogrush ever sent us.

Our Tippers

I want to thank our tippers, several have purchased a spot more than once. We appreciate the support and hope we can send you even more traffic!

Fun little fact, our scratchback widget has been viewed over 30,000 times!

Blog about your Blog has gotten quite a few great sponsors for contests. Bidvertiser gave us 300$ in cash to give away. NeverblueAds also gave us 300$ for a contest. The difference? I received the Bidvertiser cash up front.

Why It Matters

Bidvertiser sent me the money when we agreed on the contest terms. I had to cover just a little of the paypal costs. With NeverblueAds I preferred to cut myself out so those paypal fees weren’t there. The problem with that is then I have to rely on someone else paying our contest winners.

I have been known to take a while to pick the winners, so this time I tried to do it a little faster, however it didn’t matter. When I sent NeverblueAds my winners, the email was lost in the mail and weren’t paid right away.

After getting back into contact with NeverblueAds again they swiftly made payment to the contest winners.

It wasn’t anyones fault.

Unforeseen things like this can happen, it was my responsibility to get the prizes out, especially for Christmas.

With any contest…

There is that problem of the prize not being sent. I have won several things online that I never received and so have many others.

This is definitely not going to prevent us from doing future contests, our contest layouts may be a little different however.

Blogaboutyourblog.com just turned a year old and we would love to do another big contest with sponsors and big cash. If you are interested let us know.

I first started my blog My quest to make money on the internet in September 2006, I wrote posts every day, sometimes more on the various methods for making money online.

My posts included reviews of affiliate programs, weekly progress reports, sponsored posts and blog carnivals. After 5 months I was getting 60+ visitors a day and I had made a grand total of £128 (approx. $260), almost half of that came from selling 1 link. Not a great result for 5 months worth of promoting and writing, then as quite often happens in blogging other things in my life took priority and I eventually stopped blogging altogether, that was in February 2007.

Inactive Blogging

I didn’t abandon my blog completely though, I kept an eye on what was happening, how many visitors I was getting and how my affiliate programs were doing. A few times I thought about starting the blog up again, but I just couldn’t get up the motivation to do it. Then in December 2007 I was looking at how much money I’d made in total, by this time I’d received a number of payments from Google and Friend Finder, so I added it all up.

It had been 10 months since my last post but I had made another £600 (approx. $1200), that’s almost 5 times as much as I’d made in the first 5 months. I was amazed by this, I looked at my visitor stats as well and I found that I was getting 120+ visitors a day. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that my blog is in anyway successful, 120 visitors a day is still a very small number, but considering I wasn’t even posting my number of visitors has doubled. If I had just kept the blogging up I could have been getting 200+ a day and made even more money. Looking at these results gave me the motivation to start posting again, not at the same rate as before, I just don’t have the time, but I will write the odd post now and then to keep it going. I’ve been looking for new money making opportunities for my blog, some of which I have already implemented and will write some posts about in the future.

It just goes to show how blogs can be a good source of passive income and that if you have an old inactive blog hanging around the internet, it might just be worth resurrecting it. The good thing about all this is that my interest in blogging has been renewed, enough to start a new blog as well. My latest project is Martin’s Personal Development Blog, this will be a monetized blog, but in a more subtle way than Quest, it will be all about personal development and productivity.

Resurrect those old blogs now they might make you some money.

This post was by Martin of My Quest to Make Money Online