Technology Reports

I wrote a bit about how I managed to monetise a blog a little while ago. I came across another site that has actually put together a bit of a review of paid blogging programs I thought that the review was pretty good and talks about 9 different programs.

With 9 programs to choose from, anyone with an active PR3 Blog should be able to make a tidy sum each month. Even though most people tend to ignore the PR of a website - it seems that most programs put a fair bit of emphasis on it - so if you don’t have at least a PR3, then it is time to get to work and start building links to your blog.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little about Auction Ads - I had only been using it for a few days at the time. I checked, and it has now been 1 month since I put up some Auction Ads on a couple of my sites and I am pretty pleased.

For a Recap - see my initial post on the subject.

Well, after exactly 1 month AA has earnt me around $100. I am displaying Ads across 3 sites and have had 481,000 ad impressions, with 4,693 clicks on them that has made me the money.

I very carefully chose the pages/sites where I implemented the ads and have been fairly impressed with the results. I have had a look over my other revenue streams for these sites and they have not sufferred at all and have remained steady.

A look at my AA stats show that for the first 2 weeks I made next to nothing - but that is in part to how this all works. This is one of the easiest affiliate programs to join and it is very, very easy to set up and get it working on your site. A look at my stats indicates that you need a reasonable amount of traffic for it to be worthwhile.

I have done no tweaking after the initial first few days as to the type of ads that are displayed so there is probably a lot more that I could do in order to better target the Ads to my sites.

If your site has at least 1000 visits/day then Auction Ads is certainly worth checking out and trying for a month or 2.

I was just looking thru the server logs on one of my personal blogs and found out that one of my posts had been stolen!

My first thought was the B*stards, quickly followed by what to do to get the offending content removed.

As a regular to several webmaster forums, I did a few searches and came up with a few resources as to what to do. I searched the forums, and from everything I found I put together a series of points to follow on how to pursue the matter:

• Make screenshots of the offending website
• View the website source and save it to a text file
• do a whois on the offending domain name
• look up the domain name to determine where they are hosted
• do a traceroute to find out what datacentre they are hosted at

At this stage, we have simply done nothing more than gather information, and this is only the start. In order to request the offending content is removed you need to start writing some letters. The order of requests should be as follows.

• The website owner
• The Webhost who is hosting the website
• The datacentre where the site is hosted
• Search Engines
• Advertising agencies of any advertiser on the offending pages

You need to be professional at all stages of your contact and clearly state what you want and when you want the action to be taken. An Example email might include:

• your full contact details - name, postal address, phone number, email address
• Details of the site/page where your content is being displayed
• Details of your site that the content was stolen from
• The requested action - such as removing the offending content from their site
• The time in which they have to take the action

Now, I would use a set of timelines for action and if the requested action is not taken within that time, then you simply move down the list and contact the next person. If you can find the website owner (quite often this is not possible), then give them no more than 72 hours to remove it.

You will need to add some additional information to your email if you get no response from the site owner or if you cannot identify the site owner.

• a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright or intellectual property owner, its agent, or the law
• a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your Notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual property owner’s behalf.

Next, the host, give them the same 72 hours to remove the offending content. You will usually have a very high degree of success at this point and very rarely will you need to contact the Datacentre. Hint: you might want to initially contact the host and ask how you can report a copyright violation - this will make sure that you present everything that they want the first time, meaning that the site will likely be removed quite quickly.

Now, you will probably also want to contact any search engine that has indexed the site with your copyright content on it and request that they remove it from their index. It is a little bit tricky here, as you need to collect a little bit more info - such as where in their index the content is. I requested that the offending content be removed within 28 days.

Finally, you will definately want to look at the offending website and see if they have any obvious advertisers on the site. I do not like the idea that someone who stole my content would be making any money off using my content. Gather the contact information for the advertisers and send them a similar letter advising them of the situation.

The biggest tip I can give is to keep a level head, keep a full paper trail of everyone you contacted and be professional at all times. It only takes a few hours to collect the required info and start sending email messages.

Resources:

Digitalpoint Legal Issues forum ( do an advanced search for “DMCA take down” in that forum for the last 30 days to start with)
Another Site that deals with Stolen Content - some excellent information here
An example of a webhost’s complaint steps. * Note - find the same info for whomever hosts the stolen content.
Google DMCA information
Yahoo Copyright Information

In part I we looked at at setting up our blog and doing some initial promotion.

Now that the blog was ready, the next thing to do was to look for various ways of finding people to purchase a post on the Blog. My first place was to advertise on various webmaster forums to promote my services. I spent some time reading the advertising sections and settled on a price to charge for the posts.

The intial price I set was fairly low as the blog was new and I also needed to get a reputation for doing a quality post about sites, and ensure that the post was valuable to the purchaser. The response was positive all the way as I worked quite hard to ensure I only accepted sites that I felt I could write something good about.

Over a 5-6 week period I continually did reviews that built up the content of my site and eventually after around 7 weeks, I had made my first $100 from the site. Now a $100 doesn’t sound like much, but lets examine it a little. My domain cost me about $10 to register and hosting costs around $60 for a year. So, with $100 income, all my out of pocket expenses had been covered. Sure, I had spent a fair bit of time and effort to set up the blog, write the posts and promote my services at this point. I had nowhere near made any real money yet, but from experience, any new website generally takes around 6 months to turn a real profit (after expenses).

My blog was proving to be rasonably succesful at this point from the perspective of making me some money, so I further set out to improve the popularity and ultimately the value of my blog. I signed up to technorati and set up my blog to ping every time I wrote a new post. I was getting so many requests for posts and only wanted to do at most a couple of posts per day, so the logical thing to do was to increase the price a little bit.

With a small price increase, I saw a small drop-off in requests, but still had enough posts to keep me going. At this time, I also set out to look for other places to promote my services and signed up to PPP (payperpost), Blogsvertise and reviewme. I was rejected from 2 out of the 3 sites because I didn’t meet their minimum requirements!

Well, after bing rejected, I read up on the requirements and set about getting accepted. For PPP, I just needed to wait a bit longer - they rejected me because my blog was not 90 days old, I met all other requirements. Reviewme didn’t say why I was rejected, so I simply forgot about them.

I kept up doing what I was doing and advertised my services and kept writing posts and kept earing money. Once my site was 90 days old, I re-submitted to PPP and I was accepted. About this time, I also set up ads on my site as well - not that I was expecting to make much from it, but everything helps!

What I was hoping for was to get a decent Google PR on my site so that I could charge more per post. I was unlucky, and missed out on getting a toolbar PR during an update. So, with no PR, I knew that I needed to continue to work on further promoting my site and continue to write posts for a slightly lower income.

At this time, I set about getting further links for my site and submitted it to some directories. The promotion obviously paid off as my site finally got a toolbar PR of 5. An added benefit was that all new posts were being indexed by the 3 major search engines and were quite often in the index within 1-2 days of me making a post.

Now, with a PR of 5 and a way to show people that a review on my blog and the links in the review would be of real value, I was able to increase the asking price of my posts. I also went back and re-submitted my site to reviewme and this time it was accepted.

In around 9 months, I had built a blog, made regular posts most of which were paid for, or in exchange for quality incoming links, been accepted by 3 sites to do paid posts and made around $750! I had several potential places to look for post opportunites from the sites I signed up to and also by posting on various webmaster forums.

A bit of hard work in building and promoting, some ongoing marketing has resulted in a blog that will earn me upwards of $1000 within a year. While I will not be able to retire (or even quit my day job) on $1k a year, it all adds up with the other online Income that I am making.

A side benefit I get from my blog is that I get to see a lot of sites that I would probably never have seen. Every site offers me some learning as well - I can always find something that I like and something that I hate from each site, which means I have more Ideas on how to build and improve my other sites.

A blog, or even a blog network is certainly one way of increasing your online income, but it will need to be quality so that you attract the right clients.