My new renter

If you look at the right side of my blog, you can see a little section that marked as, "New York Nitty-Gritty". This is the new renter of this blog. I sign up for the "Rent My Blog" program in BlogExplosion, and this photoblog owner decides to rent my blog space.

BlogExplosion is one of the many traffic exchange program in the web. The basic concept is simple. You surf other member's blog to get credit such that you can give credit for other members to surf your blog.

I used to be very keen on BlogExplosion when I first start blogging. However, I soon found out that the traffic I got from it are not very useful. Vistors from BlogExplosion usually stay for a very short time, and they will not click any ad! Furthermore, many people on the web claims that traffic exchange program violates the Google Adsense terms of agreement. Thus, I seldom use the traffic exchange program from BlogExplosion any more.

However, I found some of the services provided by BlogExplosion, like "Rent My Blog", has a lot of potential. At the time of writing, BlogExplosion only let members to rent blog space for credit, but in the future, BlogExplosion can let members to rent out blog space for cash. This could be a new revenue source for bloggers. Google Adsense is by far the most popular advertising avenue for bloggers, but since it is paid by click, the income generated by Adsense is not consistent. A "Rent My Blog" type of service can give blogger a consistent stream of income.

More thoughts on BlogExplosion:

• There aren't many bloggers using the "Rent My Blog" service. I consider this as the biggest drawback.
• There are some web sites that let bloggers to sell text link, but they usually requires a high Google page rank.
• If I start a "Blog rental" service, would anyone be interested?

Just another article about SlashMySearch

If you go to Google Blog Search and type "SlashMySearch", you will find 30 articles on this topic today. SlashMySearch is a paid to search web site that pay users to search the internet.

I have read 5 of the 30 articles, all of them only tell you that "SlashMySearch" is about "paid to search". If you think SlashMySearch invents the idea of "paid to search", think again! In 2005, there is a company called, "Netbux", that pays members to search on the Internet. Netbux does not have a sustainable business model, and it is out of business in a short time. The site no longer exists. If you type http://www.netbux.org on your browser, it will show you an online lottery site.

SlashMySearch is a search engine that "not only offers an improved searching experience for the web with thumbnails and advanced security features, it offers an eBay Typo search that automatically generates common misspellings helping buyers find "hidden treasures" or listings on eBay saving them a lot of money". The web site is created by Michael Gabrill and Tri Do from the Orange County.

Saving money on eBay by finding misspelled items is a proven strategy. You can even find books on this topic. SlashMySearch is trying to sell this service using mulitple level marketing. MLM will help build up traffic in a short time, but if SlashMySearch wants to be successful, it has to increase its revenue sources. This may not be what SlashMySearch's founders have in mind though, they may be more interested to be a takeover target.

For people who wants to make a few bucks on the web, SlashMySearch is not a bad choice, especially since it is paying people after earning $50, not $100.

AGLOCO

A famous blogger, John Chow, has recently joined MyBlogLog. His community has instantly become a hot community in MyBlogLog. I have followed John Chow's blog in the past, and has read that he has more than 4,000 members in his AGLOCO network. This makes me want to write about AGLOCO, even though I have not used the service yet.

AGLOCO stands for A GLOobal COmmunity that prides itself as being “owned by its Members”. As a member, you run a Viewbar on your computer, which will show you ads while you browse. You will earn a certain amount of money through browsing, but the quickest way to make money using AGLOCO is through referral.

If you think you have heard this before, you are right. During the dot-com bubble era, there was a company called, "AllAdvantage" that paid users for surfing the net. AllAdvantage was forced to closed its door in 2001, due to sharp decreased in advertising revenue after the dot-com bubble bursts. It had paid out over $120 million during its short life.

I was an AllAdvantage member before, but I havn't tried AGLOCO yet. I never make enough money in AllAdvantage to get a paycheck, because I was lazy. The business environment is different now. Google and Yahoo has proved that an internet company can thrive with advertising money alone, and AGLOCO is definitely not as free spending as AllAdvantage. It will be interesting to see where AGLOCO is a year from now.

Please feel free to share your experience with AGLOCO with me in the comment section.

This week.....

This week is an exciting week for this blog. First, we started to get more traffic from Google. Before this week, almost 70% of the referrals are from myBlogLog, but now, about 50% of traffic are coming from Google. Both "Amazon Mechanical Turk" and "MySiteProfile" posts were well received, and got bookmarked by readers to del.ic.ious and Diggs.com.

My blog also got reviewed by the Rumiator on January 31, 2007.

For the coming week, I will review more money making resource sites, and add a widget to categorize my previous posts.

Thanks everyone for visiting this blog!