Image by compscigrad via Flickr

If that is what you thought you’d be reading about now, you are sadly mistaken. I’m using this blog to just write about whatever comes to mind currently. It’s better to not have a set format since most people can’t comprehend beyond the quick < 140 character Tweet or the one to maximum 3 line Facebook status update. In fact blogging has become more of a news service more than anything.

Witness the fact that small tech blog about ~6 years ago called TechCrunch was valued well over the price the person paid to start it. Had revenue positive before it hired it’s first writer outside of the creator/founder. Then ended up selling out to the big dogs (AOL), even though revenue was still strolling in.

Blogging is now more or less people who want to create a media empire. In fact Mike is trying to do it all over again with his new Uncrunched. Figures. But then again, maybe he just needs to write again. I’m sure it will evolve into something big once again. But if not, at least he can write what he wants, when he wants, and say whatever he feels like. That’s the beauty of blogging. When it comes down to it, the only ethics you need to follow is those that make you the person that you are. The wild west.

What does that say about the future of blogging? Well anyone can (and many have!) set up a blog. With Tumblr and WordPress being so easy, it’s a wonder why we don’t have more blogs. Well we probably have too many. Many just sit around (like this one) and gather dust.

Gathers dust until the owner of the blog (me), decides to just hammer out posts. Relevant or not, and whatever fits the fancy of the moment. All that and blogging in advance so that nothing really matches a time or date. It’s back to writing at will. Also dragging an image to the post from my Zemanta that doesn’t even make sense with this post. Cool, right?

Related articles

• Can Arrington recreate TechCrunch? Because that’s exactly what he’s planning on doing… (thenextweb.com)
• TechCrunch broke the news – AOL’s official statement: “deciding” to move on (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Facebook Developer Quits Over iPad App Release Date (news.dice.com)
• TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington launches uncrunched, his new blog (nextlevelofnews.com)
• TechCrunch Redesign Review (xemion.com)

Working inside of the startup world,  as I have for a few years now,  gives me an entirely fresh perspective on how poorly fact checked most blogs and blog posts are. If there is a hot on the top of the minute story, you can bet you’ll read ~10 articles before you read the whole truth. Sometimes all you will read are nothing more than un-fact checked, mis-informed facts to resemble some sort of truth in that writers head. Most of what is published, even some of the sites that have the gall to be related to a media company, are full of what data is available at the minute. ie: if someone else wrote it first – well it must be the truth.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While the first post starts going viral, everyone wants to jump on the wagon train. No one fact checks, no one puts in an e-mail or call to the companies they are talking about. They in fact won’t even note it in their post, which they should as in ie: “we e-mailed the company, and the company has declined a response“, at the very least. No need, they are a blogger and therefore they must retrieve part of that pageview pie.

The thing that gets me the most, is that the readers who flock to the sites to give their money to the sites in pageviews, and higher monetization of their content, believe each and every post that is published there. Once any story of the moment reaches global reach, or when the time zone in the Pacific reaches past 8am in the morning, everyone is writing or re-writing the same story and linking to the same main story. That original story by now is totally viral and over half the time, the site is down due to the overload.

Everyone is quite happy and there is a pageview spike that has the republican trickle down effect we all love to be abused by. The hilarious thing is that the truth is still never even uncovered, or in the case of the blogger or site – covered. No story wraps it up, as the next pageview spiker is on the burner and the story needs to be churned. And even funnier from the perspective of someone who has been there, are stories that are splinter stories from the main story that even the person writing it has no idea that might be the real story!

Damn the truth. Lie if it causes your pageviews to jump. It’s the blogger way, and I don’t see any changes anytime soon.

Technically Speaking, just because you read it online, doesn’t necessarily mean you read the truth. After all the items I have read online about the different startups I have worked for, it pains me to say this (it doesn’t, but sounded good to say that) – I’m so glad I don’t rely on my blogging, pageviews, and the general white lie to get ahead. I guess I was never cut out to be a page view cut throat blogger, but it does give me a good laugh to read what some people call journalism.

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• A Post For New, Or Striving Bloggers (riehlworldview.com)
• How Do Bloggers Make Money? What Every Non-blogger Should Know (wisebread.com)
• 4 Ways I Compose Posts to Drive Millions of Pageviews to Blogs Through Digg (problogger.net)
• Bloggers That Censor Opposing Comments (lockergnome.com)
• Dealing with Compulsive Liars (socyberty.com)

Don’t know how recent this data is, and it probably doesn’t really matter as at one time this was the top 30 money making blogs:

30 Blog’s That Make A Lot Of Money Online

Rank	Website	Owner	Monthly Earnings	Main Income
1	Techcrunch	Michael Arrington	$200,000	Advertising Banners
2	Mashable	Pete Cashmore	$180,000	Advertising Banners
3	Timothy Sykes	Timothy Sykes	$150,000	Affiliate Sales
4	Perez Hilton	Mario Lavandeira	$140,000	Advertising Banners
5	Gothamist	Jake Dobkin	$80,000	Pay Per Click
6	Venture Beat	Matt Marshall	$62,000	Pay Per Click
7	Slash Gear	Ewdison Then	$60,000	Pay Per Click
8	Life Hacker	Nick Denton	$60,000	Advertising Banners
9	Smashing Magazine	Vitaly Friedman	$58,500	Advertising Banners
10	Tuts Plus	Collis Taeed	$110,000	Membership Area
11	Dooce	Heather B. Armstrong	$50,000	Pay Per Click
12	Steve Pavlina	Steve Pavlina	$45,000	Pay Per Click
13	TPM	Josh Marshall	$45,000	Pay Per Click
14	Car Advice	Alborz Fallah	$42,000	Advertising Banners
15	Problogger	Darren Rowse	$40,000	Advertising Banners
16	JohnChow	John Chow	$35,000	Affiliate Sales
17	Kotaku	Nick Denton	$32,000	Advertising Banners
18	Shoemoney	Jeremy Schoemaker	$30,000	Private Advertising
19	Coolest Gadgets	Allan Carlton	$30,000	Advertising Banners
20	Joystiq	AOL	$18,000	CPM Advertising
21	PC Mech	David Risley	$16,000	Affiliate Sales
22	Freelance Switch	Collis Ta’eed	$13,000	Membership Area
23	Abduzeedo	Fabio Sasso	$11,000	Advertising Banners
24	Sizlopedia	Saad Hamid	$9,000	Pay Per Click
25	Retire at 21	Michael Dunlop	$5,000	Affiliate Sales
26	Noupe	Noupe	$4,930	Advertising Banners
27	Uber Affiliate	Paul Bourque	$4,500	Second Tear Affiliates
28	Click For Nick	Nick Skeba	$3,900	Pay Per Click
29	Tyler Cruz	Tyler Cruz	$3,200	Advertising Banners
30	Just Creative Design	Jacob Cass	$3,000	Services

* * * * *

The Longer You’re Not Taking Action, The More Money Your Losing

I have helped tens of thousands of people start to make money online from blogging. The biggest issue I see across all my students is consistency and procrastination, if you want to make it in any business you got to actually start and then keep at it. Although I have had several websites that have made me a lot of money over night, this is not always the case, in fact quite the opposite with some blogs, so remember don’t give up to soon.

The first thing you need to do after visiting this page is to sign up for my FREE 7 day eCourse to making money online, this basically teaches you how I created IncomeDiary and how you can do it yourself to make a full time income (and more) from your own blog. Next I recommend you check out some of the eBooks I recommend, educating yourself is so important, even now that I am somewhat a success, I keep re-educating myself, every single day. You might want to start with Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank eBook or Yaro Starks Blog Mastermind membership website.

How They Make Money From Blogging

Their is over a dozen methods these top blogger’s are using to monetize their blog, different techniques for each niche. Some niche’s are easier to promote products to, some have high paying keywords and some are easy to drive millions of visitors easy month! Bellow is a run down on some of the techniques used.

Advertising Banners By far the most popular advertising method so far in 2009. A great new service called BuySellAds take care of finding you advertisers and takes care of all the process for a small 25% which is well worth it!
CPM Advertising This method is really popular for the website’s that receive a huge amount of traffic, advertisers pay you for impressions rather than sales or clicks! Check out Adtegrity for CPM Advertising.
Affiliate Sales Selling on commission depending on your niche can be a huge earner and is by far my biggest earner. You promote great products and then get great commissions. Affiliate networks include CJ.com and Clickbank.
Pay Per Click By far the easiest way to earn money from you website is getting paid per click you send to website’s. With programs such as Google Adsense and Netklix it’s so easy to add their code and start earning today.

Technically Speaking, there was a lot more, so you should read more …

I decided to do a fun little experiment of sorts over the weekend. I wanted to see if a tumblr site could actually get traffic. Wondering if people actually would read other people’s opinions on snippets of news stories. Now many of you have tumblr sites, and if you do, you probably are wondering if it’s worth clipping some news you saw and leaving your 2 cents.

Here are some results I thought I’d share from statistics that I am pulling straight from MyBlogLog. Now while your results could vary, I think by looking at the stats below, Tumblr can be a traffic driver or rather your tumbl could very well be read by many.

Yes, there was a perfect tie for the #2 spot of read posts yesterday. It seemed that people were equally enthralled Microsoft screwing over their fired employees (TechCrunch post), and MySpace China. Think that one was due to Rupert’s daughter’s picture? Not sure, but the offclick’s indicated that even though it was tech dominating the read, somehow the other bay area house snuck in there at the #3 offclick site.

One of the more interesting things I found was articles that I thought (I guess I shouldn’t think!) would be interesting to people, were not. Such human interest stories as the Iraq Veteran getting a gift pulled due to a marijuana conviction in 2005, even though that was re-tweeted by someone – it never seemed to gain much traction as a read story. In fact, you could almost considered it a buried story.

The sad thing is that this is a real person’s true story of having something taken away that he fully deserves, at least in my opinion – all veterans of the Iraq conflict deserve anything America can give back to them. No matter what past violations they may have committed. Sadly enough, the stories that ranked over this one were only interesting for a minute such as the Food Network star that F-Bombed in front of the King and Queen of Spain, that $700k house in SF from the day before – this must be quite a deal or something – and even George W’s visit to a hardware store where he was offered a greeter job.

Two more stories that started to surge and just went flat were the guy that was working 50 jobs in 50 states all in one year’s time, and the 11 year old kid that killed his step mother with a kiddie shotgun. Both of those stories were surging, and somehow at the end of the day, just fell out of contention for the top spots. Very strange how a story can start to take off, and just die.

Technically Speaking, I guess I do not know what people like to read about, or can only guess what might be popular or interesting. So far today – a story about saying good-bye to former employers I found in the LA Times is #1, while the #3 read story is providing the #2 offclick. Interestingly enough it’s a search site(Kosmix) I wrote about here.