Update: Money 4 blogs site is down.

I havn't able to access the Money 4 blogs site since Saturday.

Since many blog sites got their page ranks during this week, is the site brought down by the sudden increase in traffic?

Related articles: Money 4 blogs

Google Page Rank: 3

I check my blog today, and found out my blog has a page rank of 3.

This is a mild disappointment, and I am seriously thinking about the future of this blog.

One of the mistake I made is that I didn't submit this site to enough blog directories. I start doing it in the recent month, but obviously my effort is too little and too late.

Result of My Evil Experiment

Last time, I come up with a evil scheme to direct Komiku's reader to my blog. The result is not impressive. I got about 10 new vistors who is searching for "Technorati top". They all click the Technorati favorite's button. I guess they thought I make it to the top 5,000 in Technorati.

I try to be the next John Chow, but end up becoming Dr. Evil -- the guy who has all the evil ideas but not able to finish it.

I learn this trick from King Gary's blog. On last Wedensday when Sanjaya got voted out, Gary was the first blogger in the entire blogosphere who blog about it. For a brief moment, Gary's post is on top of Google Blog Search for "American Idol Sanjaya". This brought his blog flood of traffic and also got dugged.

Gary is working at b5media. The company who is co-found by Darren Rowse.

OMG! I just cracked the top 5,000 Technorati

"People obsess over getting a high blog rank in Technorati. OMG I just cracked the top 5, 000! It’s like soooooooooooo, your point is? How much ass kissing did you actually have to do to crack the top 5,000? And how much more ass kissing is required to bust the top 1,000? And how extremely much more ass kissing does a person have to do to crack the top 100"

-- from "Just Crap"

Are you just finish reading Kumiko's post, Here's Why People Obsess Over Technorati, and is looking for the blog who post the original message?

This is to illustrate a common trick a lot of bloggers are using. Kumiko didn't have a link to the original post (for obvious reason). So, I bet a lot of her readers are searching for the original post in Google BlogSearch now. If you are one of them and you end up reading this post, you know the trick works :)

Kumiko's blog has a group of followers, but is not a top 1,000 blogs yet. If you can apply the same strategy to some of the high traffic blogs, your blog will get lots of traffic soon.

By the way, the "Johnny Boy" in the original post is John Chow, not me.... ha ha!

Is this link Baiting?

What American Idol has in common with Digg.com

Originally, I planned to wrote a new post on Wedensday, but I was distracted by the American Idol. When I found out Sanjaya was in the bottom three, I immediately got in front of my TV. When Ryan Seacrest announced that Sanjaya will be sending home, I was a bit shocked. Sanjaya is one of the weekest singer in the competition, but after watching him beating out other more talented contestants week after week, I thought he will stay for at least another week, but I was wrong.

American Idol is a singing competition where it let voters to select the best singer. Digg.com is a user driven social content website that let members to digg the articles they like. Although they have very differnt goals, I found out that there are a lot of similarities between them:

Similarity #1: Popularity contest
On the surface, American Idol is a singing contest, but in reality, it is a popularity contest. Sanjaya is not the first contestant who makes it to top 10 but widely regarded as one of the weakest singer.

Digg.com has a front page that shows the most digged news, but you will never confuse digg's front page with New York Times or Washington Posts. Usually, the article that get to digg's front page are unusal photos, odd news or news about popular gadgets. Digg's front page shows you the most popular articles, not necessary the articles with the best content.

Similarity #2: Vote Manipulation
Both American Idol and Digg.com has a voting sytem, and there are people who try to manipulate it.

There is a site called, votefortheworst.com that urge voters to vote for the weakest singer in the competition. Howard Stern also launches a campaign to ask its listener to vote for Sanjaya.

For digg, there is a site called, User/Submitter, that let users to pay people to digg your site.

Similarity #3: Taste preferences
American Idol accepts all music genres, but the show seems to prefer R&B singers. Other than Carrie Underwood, singers of other music genres seldom make it very far in the competition.

News that got to digg's front page have many common traits. Usually, they are related to technology, science or environment. Article that contains unusual photographs can also get to Digg's front page too. As a Christian myself, I also noticed that most articles on digg's front page are atheist. You never see any religious articles in digg's front page.

Similarity #4: The Teenagers influences
Sanjaya has many teenage fans. This is one of the reason why he is able to stay in the competition for such a long time.

To teenagers, Digg is a very cool way to get news. The teenagers has a very strong influence in digg.

Who will be the Sanjaya of the Blogosphere?

Top 10 Web 2.0 deals

With Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.2 billions on April 13, 2007, it looks like it is 1999 again! Before we speculate on what company will be brought next, let's review some of the biggest web 2.0 deals so far.

1.
Buyer: Google
Price: $3.2 billions
Acquisition date: April 13, 2007 (link)
Comment: Part of the reason for the high price is because Google has to outbid Microsoft..........

2.
Buyer: EBay
Price: $2.6 billions
Acquisition date: September 12, 2005 (link)
Comment: I love this deal. Ebay offers 1 full year of free service after the acquisition........

3.
Buyer: Google
Price: $1.65 billions
Acquisition date: October 9, 2006 (link)
Comment: The number 1 site for copyright violated material on the web

4.
Buyer: News Corp.
Price: $580 millions
Acquisition date: July 18, 2005 (link)
Comment: Man, the deal looks cheap now!

5.
Buyer: CNets
Price: $71 millions
Acquisition date: July 14, 2004 (link)
Comment: This is where I put my photos for my friend to share!

6.
Buyer: Sony
Price: $64 millions
Acquisition date: August 22, 2006 (link)
Comment: I have never heard of this company until I wrote this article!

7.
Buyer: Yahoo
Price: $30 - $35 millions (rumor)
Acquisition date: March 20, 2005 (link)
Comment: The favorite place where bloggers put their photos.

8.
Buyer: Yahoo
Price: $30 - $35 millions (rumor)
Acquisition date: December 9, 2005 (link)
Comment: Now you know why I put del.icio.us bookmark button at the bottom!

9.
Buyer: AOL
Price: $25 millions
Acquisition date: October 6, 2005 (link)
Comment: Ha Ha! Aren't you proud to be a blogger? Weblogs Inc is a blog company. Weblogs is owned by Jason Calacanis who is widely regarded as the first blogger to earn a million dollars from Adsense.

10.
Buyer: Yahoo
Price: $10 millions
Acquisition date: January 8, 2007 (link)
Comment: Launched in May, 2006 and being brought in January 8, 2007. Making $10 millions in six months......

Which company will be next? Do you think it will be digg? or Technorati? or FaceBook?



Source of this article: No Bubble 2.0 yet

New Mission Statement

If you are a frequent visitor to this blog, you will notice that the site's description has changed. The new description for this blog is, "A blog about Web 2.0, affiliate marketing, adsense, SEO, blogging tips and everything else related to making money online".

I changed the description of this blog does not mean that the main objective of this blog has shifted, but to more precisely describes the articles in this blog. Just like the new descriptions, most of the articles in this blog are about Web 2.0 (MyBlogLog, Ning.com), affiliate marketing (CafePress), adsense (adsense), blogging tips (Blogging tips, and Blogging tools), and everything else related to making money online (Money Makers).

Hope you like my new mission statement for this blog.

Guess AhBoon.net April's traffic

AhBoon.net is running a traffic guessing contest, and AhBoon is leaving a comment on my site to invite me to join. The winner for the contest will get $40, and $70 for the person who can get the exact number.

This blog is about making money on the web, and I will not let go any money making opportunity.

My guess is: 345,257 page views.

Money 4 blogs

Money 4 blogs is another site for bloggers to make money with their blogs. The concept is simple enough. Money 4 blogs will pay you to place a small link to one of its financial company in your blog, and Money 4 blogs will pay you via PayPal. The amount you got is determined by your page rank, popularity and age.

To apply, you simply go to their site and fill out an application form. They will notify you if you got accepted. From their homepage, it states that only sites of at least 3 months old, written in English, updated regularly with original content, and have no explicit content will be accepted. It didn't mention anything about page rank, but since you need to submit your page rank in the application, it is reasonable to assume that you need a decent page rank to get accepted.

There are lots of review on this site in the blogosphere. Among them, I have seen one review from Mike's Money Mission and one from The Million Dollars Experiment heads down under.




Check your page rank in here.

ReviewMe

As I promised earlier this week, I will review several sites where your paid rate is determined by your google page rank. Today, I will talk about ReviewMe.

ReviewMe is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to review their products. It is similar to Blogvertise, but Blogvertise charges a flate rate. ReviewMe lets bloggers to set its own price, but it has an internal ranking system that rank your blog based on Google page ranks, technorati and Alexa's ranking.

The highest paid review I have seen so far is ShoeMoney's review on HarpzOn.com, which ShoeMoney charges $2,500 for this review. However, according to Baron VC, ReviewMe has a cap rate of $750.

ReviewMe's main competitor is PayPerPost, but unlike PayPerPost, in ReviewMe, the blogger must disclose the post is a paid review, and there is no requirement to write a positive review. ReviewMe is backed by TextLinkAds. (Correction: PayPerPost requires Blogger to disclose that they are being paid for the posts too. Please follow this link to PayPerPost for "Requirments of Note").

I havn't signed up for ReviewMe because my site don't have a page rank yet. I will sign up for ReviewMe once I got a page rank.

Again, you can check your Google Page Rank in here.

TextLinkAds

As many bloggers are anxiously awaiting for Google to update its page rank, let me review several advertising sites that accepts only top quality publisher's site in this week.

TextLinkAds is a site that pays publishers on a flat monthly rate per each link sold, which is very different from contextual advertising options such as Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher network. When you sign up as publisher for TextLinkAds, TextLinkAds will use its own algorithm to determine if you would be qualified. The algoritham is based on your site's
page rank, Alexa's ranking and number of pages being indexed by search engine.

Once you are accepted, you can decide on how many link spots you are offering. After that, TextLinkAds will do all the jobs for you. TextLinkAds will even decide how much you charge your advertisers based on its own internal algorithm. When an advertiser decides to buy your link, the ad will automatically show up in your designated spot.

Since TextLinkAds is not contextual advertising, they can be used with Google Adsense without violating Adsense policy.

The biggest drawback is that TextLinkAds will charge 50% of the amount you received.

TextLinkAds has several large publishers, including the Real Estate Jounal -- Wall Street's Journal guide to property.

If you are a new blogger and wonder why so many blogs are talking about "page rank" in the recent weeks, this is one of the reason why. There are many advertising sites, like TextLinkAds which uses Google page rank to determine how much your site can charge its advertisers. Google updates page rank periodically, and it should updates page rank in the next few weeks.

If you want to know your page rank, check here.

Extreme Makeover

If this is not the first time you visit this blog, you will notice that the entire layout of the blog has changed.

I have made the following changes today:

• Move the Google skyscraper ads to the middle, while moving the main post area to the left.
• Change the background color of the blog to "#ededed" and add a navigation bar to the top. I also add a photo to my header. This changes gives my blog a "John Chow" look.
• Enlarge the feeder logo to help promote my rss feed.
• Add a Popular Posts section for my past posts
• Change the digg logo in the footer

Additional Changes that I plan to add:

• Add a Recent Comments section
• Build a top commentators widget if possible
• Add more affiliate sites to my Make Money Program section
• Change the choice in the navigation bar
• Add Google Search to the header

Please feel free to comment about this new layout!

The World's first blogger!

Johnny's Weekly blogmarks (Week of March 26)

	Google's New PPA Program Opens up New Opportunities for Bloggers This is a post describes Google's new Pay Per action advertising program, and how it differs from the old CPA ads
	10 Lessons Frank Miller’s 300 can teach you about Successful Online Business Using the movie, 300, this post shows you how you can be successful in your online business.
	10 Things Your Blogger Won't Tell you This post tells you the truth about the blogs you read.