Getting ‘Scammed’ Got Us Mentioned on John Chow Dot Com
All it took was someone stealing our feedcount.
It may be silly, but it’s been a long time goal of mine to be mentioned on John Chow. One of the best ways to get popular is to be affiliated with popular blogs.
Blogging Dosh has faced quite a bit of controversy lately, started to when they “borrowed” our RSS feed count. Cashquests was the one to catch him, I had know idea.
What’s the Problem?
It really isn’t a big deal until you think about how having a higher feed count can benefit you. The way it benefited Blogging Dosh was that he was able to sell reviews for more. To me at least, a review is worth a lot more with a rss feed readership of 200+ than 50.
Blogging Dosh still claims to have a count of over 200, but it has been proven that it’s only 66 readers.
Blogging Dosh’s Newest Scam
The drama that got us mentioned on JC in the first place was that Blogging Dosh owner, Anthony Feint, ran another scam. Of course there are two sides to every story. It is possible he didn’t know, but he definitely is getting slammed hard by readers, bloggers, and Deal Dot Com and the owner of the graphics package in question.
DealDotCom featured a graphics package at 10$ (regular value 17$). Blogging Dosh went to go sell the same package for 7$ on another site of his, then called Deal Dot Com a scam etc. This lead to other websites like Cashquests to post about it. After realizing Anthony was the one running the scam, Cashquests have since removed and apologized about the post.
The problem with him selling it at 7$ is that it violates the resell agreement that Anthony claims not to know about. A reseller isn’t allowed to resell the package at less than 17$. DealDotCom was given the permission to sell it cheaper, Anthony was not.
What Does This Mean?
Besides it being a lot of drama it has hurt Anthony’s reputation as a blogger and a merchant. Some people think the lesson is don’t get caught. Isn’t John Chow the one behind evil blogging in the first place? One can question how evil… someone should be. I think the lesson is be careful about what you say. What it had been me who thought I could sell the product for 7$? A lot of the drama could of been avoided if handled right.
September 2007 Stats and Earnings
In August we earned 308.53$. September has been somewhat shaky, but I think the totals can be close. Remember I count it as money earned in the month, not money paid.
Traffic
According to statcounter, our traffic levels has remained about the same. We receive 16,000 page views, and 10,722 unique visitors this month.
RSS Feed
I’ve been very pleased with our RSS feed numbers growing. September 1st reports we had 274 subscribers. Our biggest day throughout the month (Sept 20th) reported 354 rss feed subscribers. Next month I hope we are looking at a figure more like 500!
Popular Articles
Our most popular articles for this month include:
- Secret Private Voting Networks
- 10 Quick Blogging Tips
- Two Free Font Utilities You Should Check Out
- Promoting Your Website on Adspheres
- One Opportunity You Shouldn’t Miss
- Bloggers are the Biggest Copy Cats
Earnings
Now what we’ve all been waiting for is the earnings total.
Google Adsense 10.48
Text Link Ads Referral 25.00
Pay Per Post 16.00
Sponsored Reviews 35.75
Private Ads 120
Direct Reviews 100
That brings our months total to $307.23. That’s a dollar less than last month. I’d really like to see more earnings on this blog, there is potential.
Advertising
Blogroll We are offering two more spots on our blogroll for only 10$ per month!
Feed You can also advertise at the bottom of the site feed for only 6$ per month. With our number rapidly increasing this is definitely a steal.
Banners To have a 125×125 banner for one month it is only 35$. We will be displaying only 4 banners. There is only 2 available for sale at the moment.
If you are interested in advertising with us please use the contact form.
WordPress 2.3 is out, will you upgrade?
With the new version of WordPress being released this past Monday, this week might be your first chance to upgrade. Here are a few tips to help you with the process. First off, if you are one of those bloggers who procrastinates doing site maintenance, this is a very easy process and will take between 5-30 minutes depending on FTP speed. Second, don’t forget to backup your wp-content folder, because if you lose that, you lose all your uploaded pictures, themes, plug-ins, basically the flare of your blog!
WordPress has a codex document that spells out how to upgrade if you do not know how. I highly recommend backing up your database as they suggest, also why not install a automated backup plugin at the same time to save yourself in case your site ever crashes?
The most obvious reason to upgrade WordPress is that your admin interface will get a couple nifty new tools such as Google incoming links, and the ability to sort posts more efficiently. Scheduling posts is much easier in 2.3 and any blogger who hasn’t used them should be sure to in 2.3. It is really amazing at the rate you can manage your posts with 2.3! You also have the ability to tag, which is a key element of Web 2.0! Oh, and Matt don’t forget to upgrade Blog About Your Blog as I see while writing this post that you are still using 2.2. I will try to help you if you have any questions about upgrading, just drop and give me a comment.
This post was written by Ryan of Krispy Blogs.
Paying Our Blog About Your Blog Authors
To offer incentive for our BAYB authors, I decided I would give away cash to our active authors. The idea is simple, the more popular the articles you write, the more “active” you are. A lot of the articles by our authors this month were popular on stumbleupon.
Mark was easily the leading author this week contributing 6 articles, his most popular being Two Free Font Utilities You Should Check Out. He will be receiving 20$ from me into his paypal.
Our second author Cristian, who wrote One Opportunity You Shouldn’t Miss came in “second place”. His article generated over 600 hits mostly from stumbleupon. It was his first article he has written for us. He will receive 10$.
Our third author Tammy Duplessie wrote an interesting article on Blogger’s Next Blog. She just edged out the author contributors for third place and 5$ cash on paypal. It was also her first article for us.
If you are an author who won $$ please contact me with your paypal information.
Next month we will be doing the same thing, so you can win money too. Look’s like Ed is in the lead so far this month with his article about Jiglu.
Jiglu – Tagging heaven
In this Web 2.0 world we live in, tagging is one of the mainstays of networking your material. If you start as you mean to go on and get into the habit of listing relevant keywords or tags at the end of every post, you should be able to maximise the usefulness of the humble tag without too much discomfort.
However, tagging is still not totally mainstream, and some of us who want to move on from Web 1.1 and adopt the tag fad are faced with severe updating hassles. For instance, a while back there was a major update to my blogging software and tagging became a standard feature. Better late than never, I thought, but when faced with the reality of tagging 1200 posts, the new feature looked more like a new penance than a thing of beauty.
For once my procrastination was rewarded and I recently came across an automatic tagging service. Thank you London for Jiglu. If you look in the left sidebar of my oh so humorous web site you will see a Jiglu box with auto-generated tags. Click on them and see what happens. Cool hey. All the tagging work done for me, and even divided into topics, people and events.
If you register for free, paste their code into your template and wait a couple of days, the Jiglu robots will do the rest. What do you think?
Right, now where do I put tags in this antiquated WordPress software.
Comment Friday Link Love
The end of a pretty hectic week, only to start up again with the first of the month upon us. For Comment Friday I asked for opinions on our layout and if displaying recent posts and recent comments on the sidebar matters. I will be doing a follow up post about it when I get the chance, pretty interesting responses.
One of the things mentioned by RoDaniel, Homemom and Brooke was that our sidebar runs past the page. It has to do with the CSS I think? I haven’t been able to figure out the problem, if anyone knows how, please contact me we’ve had this problem since we rolled out this design months ago.
Thanks to everyone who wished Matthew a happy birthday. He is the heir to the BlogaboutyourBlog.com empire so start sucking up to him now. He is still accepting presents by the way. Thanks to Susan Mellott about the kind words regarding me and BAYB.
Since it’s almost Monday I will give our current blog of the week another week on the sidebar. I hope the link love above was enough to hold some of you over until next friday.
Tomorrow we will be announcing our months income as well as the Blog about your Blog authors who made money.
Sell Your Cell for Cash
I’ve had a cell phone since junior high and I’m 21 now. Within that period plenty of my cell phones became old, outdated, and obsolete. Using Cell For Cash you can easily sell your outdated phones.I spent some time looking at cellforcash.com checking how much they would actually pay me for my old phones. Since I’ve had quite a few Nokia cell phones I started there first. They don’t offer a lot of money for them, but it’s better than nothing (5-15$ range for ones I’ve owned). If it’s older than 2 years old you may not be able to sell it, but you can recycle your cell phone for free.
The process to sell your cell phone is simple. Select the cell phone you wish to sell, submit a form, and a free postage paid box will be sent to you. Once you send in the phone you can receive the $.
Win a Wii… Or Not
I chose to review this website, not just for the unique idea of it, but I also thought it would be fun to promote their Wii contest. However I was pretty disappointed to find out there wasn’t a way to register. If you are trying to win a wii there is no entry form on that page. You can see a winners list, so they’ve given away prizes before. Good luck trying to enter…
Comment Friday for September 28th
Friday already, I think I will take the time each friday to mention whats going on with me personally. I’ve been really overwhelmed and stressed, mostly about money. I should be getting into that later next week. My son is turning two tomorrow (Saturday) so the stress runs through that as well. With so much to do, and blogging my main source of income I haven’t been able to devote enough time to it. Now onto Comment Friday!
If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commenter that really stands out, and I will be giving out a free link to that person. In addition to that that, I will be giving them a free blogroll spot.
I have been really experimenting with ad placement on this site and It’s All Free Online. Along with putting up new ads, I’ve also removed the “Recent Comments” and “Recent Posts”. Have you noticed? If so what do you think? If you don’t regularly visit the blog, do those two things on the sidebar really matter to you?
I will be choosing a winner for the contest soon, I have all the entries together (40 entries!), I just have to film myself drawing the winner. Don’t forget we still have a free promo code for the newest thing in website promotion, Adspheres.