Which of the three services do you like (you can like all three) and for what purposes are you using them?

Do you buy into what this article stated – Google+ is Awesome. Facebook Maimed, Twitter Mortally Wounded | Singularity Hub

Vote here or just leave a comment with your thoughts if you like all 3 services equally or have no real preference at this time:

Technically Speaking, how many think that the “awesome” Facebook announcement was lame? (leave a comment also if you want to answer that one!)

Related articles

• Google should just buy Twitter already. At any price. (agrawals.org)
• Google Realtime Search (wir-sprechen-online.com)
• What’s the Deal with Google+? (directcontact.ca)
• Google’s Clinton Says Google + Great Success Already (seroundtable.com)
• Google Plus for Business (insideview.ie)

Use Google Translate if you can’t read Kanji

今日は明日されていない現実には日本では以上です。つまり、私はそれが既に存在を超えている5月27日に生まれた国です。 Google翻訳のおかげで、私は私の母国の言語でこの記事を書くことができます。私はそこにされていないけれども私はあなたの出身地隠そうとする方法を私が住んでいる彼らは’フードから実際にいるとき、私はシカゴに彼らの故郷を呼び出すこと知っている何人かの人々のように関係なく、推測〜5歳の頃から今私は否定できないメープルウッドミズーリ州と呼ばれる-私は5月27日に横須賀、日本で生まれた。

私は多くの知る限りではそのことについて日、今の子どもたちの多くは、時間のビデオカメラ、写真などのtechologyの進歩のための鮮明な記憶を持っていること、そしてもちろんFacebookに登録して、/ Ustreamのに戻って、歴史的な視点のイベントのライブストリーミングの日-私の生みの母親は、そのような利点を持っていた。実際に戻って当時では、それはおそらく非常に非結婚恥ずかしいと子供を抱えていた。したがって、私はかなりすぐに養子に与えられた。

したがって、私はどちらかの側に私の本当の家族の何を知っている。私は、彼はおそらく軍人だった知っているが、私の父は、私の出生証明書に入れていませんでした。私は彼女に位置することがないが、私の母の名前は、証明書を利用しています。私は彼女が見つけることを望んでいないと確信しています。私は彼女は、私が一年をとってきて、もう一度、彼女は生きているかもしれないと仮定する。

私はGoogle翻訳の助けを借りて、漢字で書くことができるというヘルプを超えて私の故郷に接続されていることかもしれませんが、私はそれは私の誕生のお母さんにありがとうを言う方法だと思う。同様に列挙されて二度とていた私の誕生父、限り。

私はあなたの両方に何を伝えることができますか？さてあなたはおそらく、常に”人に正確に自分の本当の親だった”知りたがっている5人の孫がいる。それは私が答えることができることは決してないだろうものです。私は、彼らがそれについて考えることにしようとどのくらいの空白、またはギャップを自分自身の歴史の中でどんな人生の空虚さを残すことと思います。あなたの孫のすべては、一部の日本人が知ることに誇りを持っています。さらに私は人生の中で持っているより。

私がそれを受け入れているよりも実際には私は私の実際の遺産を否定してきました。私はこのバックの段落に、これらを先行するになると思います。私は養父母（アメリカ）私の新しい国を採用していることがある意味、多かれ少なかれ私は過去に生まれた国を去った。

技術的に素晴らしい休日の週末を持っている、といえば。私の誕生日を持つことの利点のひとつは、月27日にされて、私は通常の休日やその周囲に右のいずれかにそれを持って取得するという事実です。 ：）

Related articles

• Google Wallet: What to Expect at Google’s NFC Event (pcworld.com)
• Google Profiles: Is Easy Aggregation An Invasion Of Privacy? (blogs.forbes.com)
• Is Google’s Best Guess good enough? (webdesignfromscratch.com)
• New Google Tool To Find Trend Correlations (tech.slashdot.org)
• Yahoo Mail integrates Facebook, Twitter in overhaul; can it compete with Gmail? (zdnet.com)

My post earlier this week about Spokeo opened up a door again with someone I had connected with a few years back. That person would be the founder of Spokeo, Harrison Tang. He and I had a nice email exchange this past week post this Spokeo post I wrote. Go give it a read if you missed it.

One thing I would like to make clear before continuing: I did ask his permission to quote him from his email. Harrison, as like I have been, have been the victim of people who think they can just post any email online; damn the privacy of a one to one exchange. But that is the day and age we live in. Still the same, since I have had that done to me before, I always ask permission. It’s just the right thing to do!

One of the main things that he stated was in this day and age of valuations of companies going through the roof, you really don’t need millions of dollars to make something from nothing. Another successful serial entrepreneur, who I just linked, I know loves to say that as his calling card. Here now are some quotes from Harrison.

As you’ve noticed already, Spokeo.com has changed quite a bit.  The
team, however, is still the same small team that you knew since 2006
(we do have more than 15 people now though, as opposed to 6).  We
haven’t taken any VC funding, and no, we do not have an outsourcing
staff in India.  Everything is designed and built in USA.  A lot of
people are surprised by how such a small team can operate a site like
Spokeo.com.  Well … the truth is that you don’t need millions to
start a company anymore.

Surprised anyone? The truth is that you don’t need millions to start a company anymore. I suppose in defense of companies taking on the millions these days, it’s for scale once you get past that startup mode. The funny thing is, is that Spokeo has been around plugging away since 2006 when I first came to know of them.

We’ve done more than one “pivoting” (I guess that’s the buzz word for
startups nowadays) not because we like to pivot, but rather because we
need to pivot in order to survive.  Building a technology does not
always translate to building a business.  As we’ve learned from the
hard way, people do not pay for social network aggregators even though
it’s a cool concept and a very hard technology to build.

That is surely something to think about. Building a social aggregator is cool – but guess what – no one really will pay you to do it! For anyone contemplating on building the next Facebook/Twitter aggregation engine, you might want to think about that further before you execute it!

Why did they pivot and do the change from social aggregator to a more in demand product? It’s the users. It’s always about the users of your product.

It takes visions and creativity to create something different, but it
requires execution and discipline to turn that thing into a business.
Without vision, we could not have build something as innovative as
Spokeo’s underlying technology.  That said, without practical
execution, we would still be building a social network aggregator that
only technical people use, as opposed to tailoring our technology for
the larger target audience.  At the end of the day, we changed
Spokeo’s direction because our users wanted us to change, and they
voted for the new direction with their own wallets.

This goes back to the days I was playing actively in bands. One thing I always tried to relay to people is that not everyone will like you. But in the same token, you have to sometimes swallow what you want to do for the better of the whole. In other words, building the social aggregator was fun, but it was also not a true business that would succeed or gain any traction.

What about all the criticism that Spokeo was receiving in regards to the whole privacy issue, etc.

We are receptive of all criticisms
(constructive or not), and we try our best to address them one-by-one.
This explains why we’ve been constantly updating our website and
technology, making it more accurate and friendlier.

Going back to an earlier comment about one of my former companies, who Harrison even was nice enough to remember, what about the competition? Does it mean you shouldn’t do it?

There are hundreds of online directories out there (we are actually
not the biggest one), but since most of them don’t work that well,
Spokeo is the first people search engine that most people have ever
seen. Because Spokeo offers a lot better user experience than
traditional directories, we leapfrogged past the early adopter crowd
relatively quickly. We don’t have much time to fine-tune our product
and business model with the early adopters before going mainstream, so
we’ve had couple stumbles here and there. That said, if you’ve been
following the evolution of Spokeo.com, you can see that we’ve been
making constant progress in addressing all the issues.

Oh and to be clear, I don’t think I was doing anything crazy back in the day, but maybe we were. It’s nice to hear how some people see you from the outside.

Image via CrunchBase

The last time we talked you were doing crazy stuff at Lookery. Sounds
like you are even busier nowadays and doing well :)

One of the things that I realized back in the Lookery days was that most of the people in that company were engineers. Or very tech oriented people and very startup veteran. To illustrate what I mean, the one item that sticks out is the last thing Harrison said in our email exchange.

Anyway, we are engineers here, not marketers and philosophers, so we
know our most convincing argument is our product itself. With
millions of searches every single day, people are finding Spokeo
useful. This encourages us to keep innovating and making Spokeo
better for everyone.

With regards to that statement. It sort of bodes well for people like me as well as other people type of people. Every startup needs someone besides the engineers to scale well. While the product does matter, if you can’t win over the people, eventually you’ll be the startup with no one using that fantastic product. Just like back in the band days, while your material might be excellent, if you can’t put butts in the seats to listen, you’ll be playing for bartenders and barmaids only.

Technically Speaking, Harrison had a lot of great stuff to share, and I’m glad he gave permission for me to share it with everyone reading this. And one last item – Harrison is an Apple fanboy or maybe just a Steve Jobs fanboy! :)

We are fans of Steve Jobs here at Spokeo, and we will keep simplifying
Spokeo until every grandma on the planet knows how to use it.

Related articles

• Spokeo and personal data aggregators: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Show (boingboing.net)
• Spokeo (indigoundecided.wordpress.com)
• Spokeo: Not your grandma’s phonebook! (chicagonow.com)
• Spokeo may know more about you than you realize (boingboing.net)
• Spokeo.com: This will freak out the privacy advocates (thoughtgadgets.com)

Just in case you forgot, here is Spokeo to remind us that the web isn’t private. In fact it’s so un-private, what is the point of talking about online privacy in the first place? First people get down on one site after another about privacy, when at the end of the day, it’s not private. Never meant to be private. You want privacy? Don’t go online, stay away, and buy land in Montana or something. Oh, and quit blaming Facebook for all your privacy woes.

The more interesting story here is that about ~4 years ago when I had a small conversation with the original Spokeo founder Harrison Tang, Spokeo was just another harmless social network aggregation site. In that short amount of time, Spokeo like any good resilient startup has shifted it’s business model 360 from where it started.  I totally applaud the efforts there. But in the same token, I question the validity of the current social aggregation startups out there. Do we really know that they won’t flip the 180 or 360 and change into a privacy aggregation money making machine for their founders? What really are their intentions is what we should be asking.

Now if you followed the above link, you see that Harrison also added a position at People Search back in ’07 timeframe. And now his Spokeo is doing the same thing. What do I smell? Money. In the same token, isn’t CrunchBase doing essentially a similar model of data storage and revelation by what they do?

Now much has already been written about this, but for basics, go here to this article about Spokeo Privacy and how to take your name out of their database. If you don’t have the time to read all that, here is a snippet on how to do this:

The good news is you can get yourself off of there.

1. Go to Spokeo and type in your name.
2. Copy the URL when it brings up your information.
3. Go to the bottom of the page and click on “privacy”
4. Paste the URL in the box provided
5. Include your email address (it gives you further instructions via email)
6. Enter the code
7. Go to your email and click on the link they provide to you
8. Confirm the directory listing has been deleted
9. Go back to Spokeo and put in your name to be sure it was deleted and they can’t find you

Hope this helps!

Technically Speaking, when you are online and you do informational transactions online, you do not have privacy. Privacy is an illusion sold and bought for the price of the banner ads that bother you so much. Privacy is only something that happens offline, but the minute you connect, you can bet it’s no longer private.

Related articles

• Spokeo may know more about you than you realize (boingboing.net)
• How your visits to sites are tracked (thehindu.com)
• How your visits to sites are tracked? (thehindu.com)
• Spooky Spokeo (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)
• Caught on Google Streetview (mckeay.net)

Didn’t know there was a FAQ written about making money online, but apparently someone wrote one:

These are the frequently asked questions (FAQs) on how to make money online. Making money online is also known as working at home. This is suited for beginners or newbies who want to learn how to make money online, and even for veterans who failed to make big money on the net. This could make a big difference into your life.

How do people make money online?

There are many ways people making money online. Many are blogging and maintaining web site and sell their products and services. Some are selling other people’s stuff. Some are selling web site or blog space for advertising. Some people are just playing online games, reading emails, filling up surveys and even by socializing.

What is the best way to start making money online?

The best way to start making money online, for me, is to have your own blog or web site by sharing your expertise, knowledge, experiences, and ideas to help other people solve their problems or make them happy in some way. With your own blog or site, you may sell whatever products or services you have. You may also sell other people’s products and services for commission. You may also offer your web page as ad space. Having your own blog or site, you can control almost everything. And another great thing, you will learn a lot of things. From here, we will talk about making money by making a blog or site, without having your own products or services to sell.

How much is the minimum and maximum income online?

Well, the minimum is zero or nothing but the maximum income is unlimited or open-ended. The highest possible income online depends on your determination, desire, and actions. Your maximum income could reach more than $10,000 per month.

Do I need to learn computer programming to start making money online?

You don’t need to learn computer programming. But it will be helpful if you learn the basics of HTML programming. With HTML knowledge, you may enhance or modify the design of your blog or web site as you desire. Good layout may increase your web site revenue.

Do I need to invest money to make money online?

If you already have an internet connection, then you may not spend additional money. You can have your own blog for free using WordPress or Blogger. But, you can only have your own subdomain name under the domain name “wordpress.com” or “blogspot.com”. To have your own domain name, you have to register your own domain name and lease a web space. Approximately, this will cost you $10 for domain name and $60 for hosting annually.

How long does it take to start making money online?

It depends on how fast you setup your blog or site and how quick you put original and interesting content in it. Also, how well-optimized your content for search engines and for humans as well. Original and interesting content attracts both visitors and search engines and will create a buzz in the internet world. Search engine optimization will make it easy for search engines to index your blog or site and will be happy to show it to its users. The more the search engines show your blog or site to its users, the more traffic it will have. The more traffic it gets, the more chances it will make money from your sales promotions and/or advertising programs such Google ads.

Now, if you stop asking questions and start making your blog or site, you will make money online earlier. Just kidding. Actually, the more knowledge you have, the more effective you can start making money online. It is really better to clear all your questions during planning a web or blog design.

How do I start to effectively make money online?

First, list down all a not-so-broad topics that you know and you love to learn. From the list, select the topic you love best and would love to share to other online users. That would be the topic for your blog or site.

Second, learn search engine optimization to give you an idea on how to optimize your would-be articles or content. You may start with the quality guidelines of Google.

Third, plan the flow of information or content of your would-be blog or site. It is recommended that you start from main topic to sub-topics and then articles regarding the sub-topics. It is also recommended that each page focuses in one topic.

Fourth, choose the path of having your own blog or site for free or with paid domain name and web hosting. Choose web design layout from free templates in free blog sites, especially WordPress and Blogger. In paid hosting, you normally have free templates and format in C Panel Fantastico.

Fifth, apply for Google Adsense and other affiliate programs and deploy its codes within your pages that will not annoy your readers. Your first objective, must be to help your online readers understand the information you are sharing to them. Making money online must be your secondary goal only. Visitors will normally help you make money if your blog or site helps them in some way.

Technically Speaking, you should read more …

You will want to read about these 5 out of date SEO strategies:

A long time ago it was easy to achieve a great search engine results position (SERP) with questionable, if not scandalous, SEO tactics. However, over the last decade, search engines have become much smarter spawning algorithms such as Google’s PageRank system and many popular SEO practices have been marked useless. But searching through SEO blogs and forums, you will find many of the outdated strategies are still being hailed as useful techniques. I have put together a list of five SEO strategies that no longer work and offer their useful counterpart.

Meta Tag Optimizing

Meta tags used to reign supreme when it came to search engine optimization and held the key to great results with searches. That boat has sailed. The meta keywords tag was strongly believed to offering valuable information regarding topics and terms used throughout a site. However, malicious site owners abused this tag by flooding it with misleading terms irrelevant to their content.

Useful Counterpart

Google has official stated that they no longer pay any attention to the meta tags for keywords. If you wish to build your pages and posts to rank for more keywords, use category and tagging systems to better label and organize your content. Tagging your content is one of the most effective ways to enhance the overall “searchability” of your site. Carefully structuring your site using categories helps your visitors find exactly what they are looking for and search engines are the same way. You should be able to reach anywhere on your from within three clicks.

Keyword Stuffing

I just told you how the meta keywords tag has been hacked out of the picture in terms of SEO and suggested tagging as the optimum alternative for ranking using keywords. Keyword stuffing is second on the list of dead strategies. A site was ranked by how frequent keywords appeared in a page’s content. Stuffing keywords into a post no longer works and can have a drastically negative effect on your overall ranking.

Useful Counterpart

Write your content the way it is meant to be read, by humans. Too many keywords used so closely together can seem unnatural and difficult to read or understand. Choose wisely where you use them by making sure your keywords are in prominent regions of your web page, like headers, titles, and descriptive text. Be sure to order your header tags (h1 – h6) in the proper order with your keywords and phrases.

Link Exchanges

No need to run around deleting your outbound or inbound links. We are here to improve the web, not unbind it. Exchanging links has always been a great way to funnel traffic into your site from external relevant websites and like other SEO strategies, it has been spoiled by the bad apples. Link exchanging schemes developed and tried to influence how search engines measured the value of site linking.

Useful Counterpart

If you are looking for a solution to build inbound links that point to your website or blog, try offering valuable content or testimonials in exchange for a link back to your site. This adds value to the external website when you give them a testimonial raving about their product or service. You can also offer to guest author on their blog by writing valuable relevant content that will interest their visitors. In return, you will be given a back link to your site.

Search Engine Submission

Have you submitted your site to Google to be crawled? I have. And I have since realized that it was a complete waste of my time. I am still amazed with how many people , including web developers and bloggers, still submit their websites and RSS feeds to search engines to be crawled. Stop it.

Useful Counterpart

Technically Speaking, there is more to read…

These are good tips – 7 Things to do From the First Day of Blogging:

This is a guest post by Karan who blogs at Karnlabs. If you like to write for Shoutmeloud, do read: Shoutmeloud revenue sharing program.

Here I have listed 7 things which a new blogger must do in order to lead his blog to success. Follow them and see your blog flourishing:

Blogging tips for new blogger

Create Sitemaps and submit them to Search engines.

This is the easiest way to get indexed and get your blog crawled by search engines.

This is the most basic step towards Search engine optimization and must be done whenever you setup a new site. If you are using wordpress then you can use this plugin which automatically creates a sitemap and submit it to search engines.

• Google XML sitemap: WordPress essential plugin
• How to submit blog sitemap to Bing

Engage with other bloggers on social networks

Participating in discussions with other bloggers on social networks like facebook and twitter is a great way to build up relationships with other bloggers of your niche and build up your own blogger’s network.

• How to form a community around your blog?
• 8 Important tools to make your blog rockstar

Offer different ways to subscribe

It is really difficult for your first time visitors to remember your name and revisit your blog. Hence, you should provide subscription services like Email subscriptions and RSS subscriptions. This will help you build readers and greater exposure for your content.

• Add to any WordPress Feed subscription plugin
• Email Subscription offer: A must have for all the bloggers
• Feed Subscription reminder plugin for WordPress
• How to add stylish feed subscription widget at sidebar

Plan out and works as per the schedule.

It is a must for all bloggers to have a Date-sheet or a schedule to plan out days for posting, blog commenting, researching, reading other blogs.  You can also pre-decide thetopics of your posts for each day and work towards it. This is a great way to ensure consistency in posting and link building.

Schedule your blog post to never run out of blog post

Technically Speaking, was that 7? Go read more …

One more from this blog that is loaded with some good info like the 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website:

Here are 5 ways I’ve used to launch a website and get the first users to my site.

1. Target Your Niche On StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon has a tech savvy base of people who are looking for cool websites just like yours.  When they are bored, they check Stumbleupon to see what cool new stuff has just been launched.

What’s great is that you can target the exact group who might be interested in your site.  For example, with BuyersVote.com I knew people into consumer info and possibly bargains would like the site, and I was able to target those groups.

Pros: Only $0.05 per visitor (way less than Adwords).  Can target people with relevant interests.  Can see a feedback report afterwards with what percent of people liked/disliked it.

Cons: Stumbleupon users are pretty click happy and are just trying to prevent boredom, so they tend to have a high bounce rate.  But then again, aren’t most web users?  This is a good test to see if your homepage is grabbing people’s attention.

2. Tell people your competition sucks

If you’re making a cheaper/better/faster alternative to an existing product, why not tell people that your competitor sucks?  Use their name right in the headline.  These ads tend to have a high click through rate, and your ideal early adopter is someone who is currently using the competition and is fed up.

Facebook ads work well for this, and their ad targeting is outstanding, but it can work elsewhere also like in Adwords or blog posts.  You may recall I launched FeedmailPro.com because I was fed up with Aweber and thought they sucked.

Pros: Works best when going against an established competitor.  Usually gets a high click through rate.

Cons: Sometimes you’ll run into problems using a trademark in your ad headline and Facebook or whoever will take it down.  But if it happens no biggie, you just take it down or reword it.  Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

3. Try to rank for long tail keywords

Traffic from organic search results is free, and 98% of people don’t click the ads when doing a Google search – they use the organic search results.  So obviously, ranking in search engines is great.  The problem is it’s very difficult for a brand new website.

The solution?  Target long tail keywords first – keywords which are more specific, have more words, are more obscure, etc.  One good way to make a long tail keyword is to add a city name or regional keyword on the end.

For UniversityTutor.com this is exactly what I did.  I had a couple dozen subjects (algebra, chemistry, Spanish, etc) and a bunch of cities (Austin, Boston, San Jose, etc) with tutors signed up.  So I combined the subject and the city name (and added ‘tutor’ in the middle) to auto-generate a bunch of long tail keywords, such as “calculus tutor Austin, TX”.  Then I auto-generated pages on the site that targeted those.  Within a few weeks I was getting 500 visitors per day (for free) from organic search results.

Even a brand new site can rank for long tail keywords with just on-page SEO.  If you can start getting traffic for long tail results, then you have early adopters who will eventually give you links, and you’ll eventually rank for more competitive keywords too (although this takes a while).  Oh yeah, and don’t forget to create a sitemap after you do this so Google actually finds the new pages.

Pros: Free!  Brings lots of traffic.

Cons: You need at least SOME good content on the pages for this to work.  It can be user-generated if your users are submitting content (this is best), otherwise you’ll have to generate it yourself.

Technically Speaking, this is a great blog to bookmark and read more …

Found this video on how to make your wordpress blog search engine friendly this post here:

Technically Speaking, even though it’s a video, there is some more good info to read more …

Found this interesting post right here:

Last week I logged into Google Webmaster Tools and noticed something different; the keyword report now showed how many impressions, clicks, and your average position in Google search results worldwide.

Cross section this information with data in Google Analytics, and it’s a goldmine. I’ll show you!

First you need to choose something on your site you’d like to improve. A key source of revenue for WhyDoWork.com are our work at home job listings. Improving traffic to this area of the site will result in more revenue (more traffic = more money).

With that in mind, I logged into Google Analytics and looked at the top referring keyword to the jobs page this week. It turns out a lot of traffic to that specific was coming from search engines for the keyword “data entry jobs”. Here’s a screenshot:

Technically Speaking, read more …

Found this post on making money online right here:

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

* blog publishing software
* HTML/CSS
* blog comments (and comment spam)
* RSS/syndication
* feed aggregators
* pings
* trackbacks
* full vs. partial feeds
* blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
* search engines
* search engine optimization (SEO)
* page rank
* social bookmarking
* tagging
* contextual advertising
* affiliate programs
* traffic statistics
* email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

Technically Speaking, that is only about 1/4 of what he had to say, to learn more – read more …

Some really good scheduling and blogging tips here:

Humans are fascinating creatures!

They can easily spend thousands of dollars in buying expensive gadgets or beautiful cars even if they struggle with paying their bills at the end of the month. Being this kind of person is not coherent with a successful blogger persona.

Intelligent people understand that they should not go beyond what they can afford.

First Things First

You cannot build a house without first gathering the needed materials. If you try to do that, you will end up losing time, resources and money. Instead, you need to have a long term plan before doing anything and taking the right decisions is the most important part of it. As a blogger, it is essential that you take an approach on accomplishing the things that matter for the current stage of your blog’s growth. For instance, there would be no real point in worrying about monetizing your blog if you have not acquired a traffic base first. This just serves as a way to lose focus and time over what really matters.

A Clever Blogger Schedules

There is something that all successful bloggers have in common. They know what needs to be done, they feel it. Wasting time is not what they would ever do. On the contrary, they invest their time properly and make the most out of it. In short, they schedule. Don’t think that they create a real step by step procedure on what will happen 3 days from now. However, they have a plan on what SHOULD happen in 30 days, they set up milestones, watch how they evolve, evaluate and correct them. I thought that giving you an example of an effective schedule would be a nice idea. Using it as is now is not really the point. What you need to do is go in your own pace, but be consistent and stick to the plan. Let’s start scheduling, shall we ?

Days 1-15 : Go Live, Write Your First 10 posts

The first thing that you need to do, is of course start working on your blog. It is always a good idea to create the basis of your blog by writing about 10 posts. Try to include topics that you feel confident about, the ones that you would think they have the potential to go viral. After all, your first goal is to start blogging. In order to do that, you need to create your first content.

Days 16-31: Put Your Blog Aside For a While, Guest Post And Network

Now, you may groan a little about that. I am sorry, but this is what you have to do now. You have just created some nice posts in your blog, but nobody knows about you. Would it make sense to keep on writing more content for your blog, just to look at it while it rains outside ? Beginners think that they should just keep on creating more and more content and people will eventually find their blog. It does not work like this though. You have to spread the word about your blog.

A great way to do this is guest post for other blogs. Write posts, but write them for other influential blogs of your niche. This way, people that are interested in your niche will get to know that you exist. Better yet, if your guest post presented some valuable information to them, they will visit your blog. Your networking with the market that you target has just started. Further expand with socializing in blogs, forums and social media.

Days 32-63: Iterate Between Writing For Your Blog And Other Blogs

A successful blogger is a passionate writer. He wants to please the crowd. Even if that means that he does that by means of writing for other blogs. Now that you have already written content for other blogs, balance things a bit. For every 3 posts that you write for your blog, write 1 guest post for another blog. Decide whether you want to write multiple or single posts for a blog. Writing multiple posts serves for better interacting with a blog’s community, while writing a single post for each blog, gets you more backlinks that increase your search engine results over time.

Days 64-95: Establish a Visitor Base, Make Everything REALLY Easy

Technically Speaking, always, always read more …

And even more Google Goodness on AdSense:

Google’s AdSense Program has been an excellent source for many to earn money online. AdSense for search may not be new to you, and if you are using it, you should know that you can also improve your earnings by providing users with a customized search box which allows you to filter results for specific domains only.

As an example, if a user searches for the term SEO when using my customized search function, it will only show relevant results on selected domains that I have specified. Apart from the results, ads will also be displayed and as a result can increase my AdSense conversions. See below:

So What’s New With AdSense for Search?

AdSense For Search Ads

Prior to this new release, the only way you could show AdSense for search ads was to use Google’s script. If you had your own non-Google customized search box, your search results will not show any ads. Now, all you need to do is to add a few lines of JavaScript to your pages, and start monetizing your search results too. You can choose the size, shape and location of each ad block, and you can even adjust the style of the ads to better fit the look and feel of your site. Here is a screenshot of a website that uses the new AdSense for search ads:

As with everything Google, this new monetization method is not readily available to everyone and you will need to “convince” Goolgle’s team that you qualify. If you are interested, you can give it a shot by filling in the form provided solely for this purpose. You will be asked to provide your name, email, Pub Id (for existing AdSense users), URL where you pretend to use it, number of pageviews and finally the “killer” question, how do you want to use this product on your website. If your answer is right, then you might be lucky and get approved. Be patient though as according to Google the volume of request for this product is extremely high at this moment.

AdSense For Ajax

Technically Speaking, you should always read more …

This is a good list, too bad this blog doesn’t do enough traffic to use these top cpm ad networks:

If you pay attention to the types of traffic you are getting in your website or blog, you should be able to tell if most of them are organic traffics from search engines, or direct referrals. Organics traffics from search engines convert good to CPC, but visitors who visit your site on regular basis (the direct ones) will hardly clicks on these CPC ads. To convert this type of traffics to revenue, using CPM ads are one good solution.

CPM (Cost Per thousand Impressions), generally on publishers’ point of views are how much one can earn when an ad gets 1000 impressions on the website. Some ad networks pay $3/CPM, some $4, but the average is about that. If you have 700 regular unique visitors generates about 1000 impressions a day on your site, these people are not likely to click on CPC ads, so I’d say CPM ads are probably a better way out. Here’s few of the top paying CPM ad networks that I’ve come to know, used or heard before. If you have more, I’d be happy to add them in.

Technically Speaking, maybe I will go with a small series of these type of cpm ad network reviews.

This was part 9 in this great series:

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags

Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords

Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Part 11: Everything You Need To Know About SEO Copywriting
Part 12: Everything You Need To Know About Page Content
Part 13: Everything You Need To Know About Links
Part 14: Everything You Need To Know About Link Anatomy

Part 15: Everything You Need To Know About Linking

Technically Speaking, you don’t need to start on part 9, but it’s a good read.

Not even a phrase until just now – Dumping Ground-Onomics. This means, I have a bunch of good stories that I won’t have time to write about today. Beyond a short blurb below, which has been called a Round Up in some circles, even by me. I figured it was time for a new term, and Dumping Ground-Onomics is that new term. Do you like it? Yes I could dump all of this on my tumblr blog, but figured that would be tumblr overkill.

Jive – Is going after the social business software market hardcore with their latest announcement today. Should be interesting how they fair in the corporate marketplace. The most interesting thing about this company is that they are not some new kids, but have been around since 2001.

drop.io – is rocking it right now with their real time conference room. Streaming is where it is at. The above chat/conference is really nice, and agree that streaming seems to be the key here along with real-time speed.

OneRiot – is the old medium resurrected. Looks like a good video search service.

Users will now be able to search through videos from more than 30 video hosts, and just as it handles Web queries, the engine will put recently “buzzing” videos on top. This means the results of any given search term will change on an almost daily basis depending on what’s trending, or as OneRiot calls it “raging.”

Guardian – They realized that newspapers are dying quickly. They also realized in the old saying of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em“. Nice to see a good newspaper keep it alive the best they can. More about their open platform can be found here.

A few more interesting items that you should know about – Paymo and Hi5 working together, music site for indie music called thesixtyone, and lastly music’s darker side – EMI or rather the old world order doing what it does best – suing the new world order and innovation.

While this serves as a “wrap up/round up” for this Tuesday, I did however post two blogs over on siliconANGLE this morning – the first one – Free Ride Era is Ending – and – this one here – Monkey in your old High School Cliq. We need more writers/bloggers like the blog that was written yesterday – Content Distribution is Changing Again – by Nova Spivack.

Technically Speaking, if you are a blogger, social media person, or someone that likes to write about what I just put here on the dumping ground-onomics post – you need to come over to the siliconANGLE and register to be a regular contributor!