NetBusinessBlogWork from Home, Business Opportunities, Websites for Sale - Run an Online Business

There seems to be a new trend among theme designers/developers that involves selling text links to third parties within a theme made for distribution. For those of you who are unaware, theme distribution is a fantastic way to get yourself and your website known. This basically entails creating a theme (for WordPress, vBulletin, IPB, etc), adding a text link back to your site somewhere on the theme, and distributing it for free. I’ve used this method to get thousands of easy, free backlinks in no time at all. It’s great for exposure and even better for business if you’re the one who made the theme.

I have been seeing recently, however, people beginning to exploit this easy link-building method by selling out link spots on these themes to third parties (here, here, here, here, here, and here for example). All of those examples took me about 3 minutes to collect. I noticed this trend developing a few months back but quite honestly never thought it would catch on. I honestly didn’t think people would really do this on a large scale - I thought more of them. This is poor practice on so many levels. I barely know where to start.

Why Buying Links in a Free Theme is Dumb

Lets begin with the people actually spending money on these links. They’re all SEO types, of course, doing everything they can to generate easy links without actually working to get real ones. They don’t make the theme, they don’t code the theme. They pay $10-30 for one link in a cluster of other sponsored links on a theme expecting to get thousands of backlinks pouring in. It’s the perfect plan, right?

Wrong, dummy. First off the click traffic will be little to none (for the most part). Many of the people buying these links are your typical gambling, pharma, etc - shady niche pushers. The ones promoting legitimate sites still often are totally unrelated to the theme’s platform or web design in general. We’re not talking about a baseball site releasing a baseball template to promote themselves, that would make sense. We’re talking about a baseball site buying a link on a pretty pink theme with bunnies and poodles all over it. The direct traffic, if there is any, won’t convert at all.

So we get to the SEO benefits! That’s the real reason for investing in text links right? After all, where else can you get thousands of backlinks for the teeny tiny price of $10-30? Nowhere, that’s where … right? It’s the perfect plan, right?

Wrong. For starters, most of the themes being released and whored out to link mongers are the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. Even if some people do download and actually use these themes I doubt there will be a large enough number of them to justify throwing money into a link on it. Secondly, most people downloading free themes don’t mind leaving the link at the bottom to the designer and distributer. After all, they put in the man hours creating this beautiful template so that the downloader could enjoy it. How many of these people do you think will actually leave a cluster of spammy links at the bottom of their template? The people buying the links don’t own the rights to the theme, they just paid a few pennies to get their spam site plastered on it. There is no obligation (unless specifically indicated) to keep that link there. And trust me, with as much experience as I’ve had with people removing my perfectly legitimate links, I guarantee you the vast majority will be deleting the hell out of these spam link clusters before they use the theme.

Why Selling Text Links in Your Free Themes is Wrong

As developer or designer who releases a free theme is doing a service to the community, and of course to themselves. The downloader knows that work goes into making these things and more often than not have no problem with allowing a link to the designer’s site even alongside a “made possible by:” link or something of that sort. They almost all know going in that they will be giving some link love to the designer. Most of them don’t expect, however, to have their blog become a spam billboard when they install a theme. Not all bloggers or website owners are entirely savvy, and many of them may not even check the footer of their theme. There is a trust among theme downloaders that when they get a theme they can upload it without worries of glitches, bugs (for the most part), and amazingly inappropriate spam. By whoring out text links on your themes you are violating this trust whether you are aware of it or not.

As a developer or designer you should also be aware of what factor these links play on SERPs. Not every blogger may now the implications of Google’s “bad neighborhoods”. As a tech savvy person you have a responsibility to these people, who are looking for nothing more than a pretty template to make their blawgs kewler, to not mess up their search engine rankings. How pissed would you be if you started dropping rank one day only to realize that new theme you installed had 20 spam links clustered at the bottom? You’d be pretty pissed.

Moral Responsibility

When talking about morals in online business I usually get a ton of rolling eyes in my direction. Hell, I look the other way with a lot of black/gray hat techniques. I guess I have a “put it to the man” mentality in that if I see someone trying to game Google, I don’t mind all that much. That doesn’t mean I approve of it, I just usually don’t care enough to say anything. These spam links clustered in free themes, however, affect actual people. Spam links violate their trust and actually have a good chance of affecting their search engine rankings. As a designer or developer you have a moral responsibility, in my opinion, to not include anything inappropriate in the themes you’re distributing. To me you may as well be hiding a surprise Zango install in your theme. You’re exploiting people to make a buck. It’s lame. So stop it.

Rant over.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]

Alright fellas it’s that time again - time for another blogging case study with the greatest and sexiest rock and roll blog in the history of the world: Rock Surge.

Last week was a lot of fun with my first Digg frontpage for Rock Surge going over pretty well. I learned some lessons about how Digg users act differently in the Music category than in the Technology category (which was what I had always used previously). It seems that almost all of the comments were positive and much more friendly in the Music category, probably because the people trolling that section are more like real people rather than anti-social techies - no offense.

A good week after the Digg effect and the blog is now getting about 2-300 daily uniques which is a great start in my opinion. I also have a couple dozen feed subscribers now which should act as a solid base to expand and develop the blog. The big news this week, however, is with the Indie Bible.

Indie Bible Newsletter

I applied Rock Surge for the Indie Bible and was accepted a couple of weeks ago. The Indie Bible is basically a resource book for bands to find music promoters, radio stations, and reviewers willing to take their music and give it exposure. The April newsletter for the Indie Bible was just released and Rock Surge is #2 on the listings. Not only has this sent some good targeted traffic to the blog, but it has also exposed the blog to a ton of indipendant bands wanting me to review their music. In total I’ve gotten 55 emails and have had 6 CD’s shipped to me. I’m being pretty selective of who I tell to send me CD’s since I don’t want to get an album and then not have time to review it - it loses the band money, and I really don’t want to hurt any upcoming musicians.

This is great because not only does it give me a ton of new eyeballs to the blog I have loads of fresh content to churn out over the next couple of weeks. The Indie Bible definitely gets a thumbs up from me.

Money Spent

I haven’t given an update on how much I have spent on this blog since I started, so I figure it’s time to do a little reflection:

$300 - Blog Design & Development (was actually free for me, but not everyone is a web developer)
$8 - Domain name
$30 - Web hosting (2 months)
$10 - NIN: Year Zero (I would have bought this anyway, but since I reviewed it on the site I count it as an expense)
$15 - Arctic Monkeys: Favourite Worst Album (same reason as above)

Wow so I’m already two months into this thing and I haven’t even spent $400 yet. I do have some plans that will require a bit of investment coming up soon, so don’t let that figure fool you. I plan to make full use of my $500/mo allowance, just maybe not spread out as much as I originally thought.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

A post over at Mark’s 45n5 blog sparked up thought on an old topic for me: would you keep making the same websites if they did not earn you a penny? Mike’s answer was pretty straightforward:

Yes I would keep making websites/videos/etc, but no I wouldn’t keep the ones I currently have.

Fair enough. Mine is a bit more complicated. I enjoy what I do online and that if I have my way I will be able to continue doing this for a very long time. But does that mean that if there was absolutely no money involved in my websites that I would still create more or at least continue managing the ones I already own? After some deliberation, I’d have to say that no, I would not run any websites aside from my personal blog (which is barely updated anyway) if there was no income involved.

So now that I have my answer to that question I start to think whether or not I actually enjoy what I do. How can I really claim to enjoy creating websites, managing them, and blogging if I openly admit that if there were no monetary incentive that I would abandon them?

Obviously the answer is that there is a significant difference between what one considers enjoyable as a hobby and what one considers enjoyable as work. Managing websites is a lot of fun for me, but at the end of the day it is still work. It’s enjoyable work, especially compared to being in a cramped cubicle or digging in a trench somewhere. But in the greater scheme of things I would much rather be out on the lake fishing than writing a blog post for one of my sites anyday (no offense guys).

There are a ton of people out there who enjoy their work so much that it *is* their main hobby. These people probably would continue to build websites whether or not they profited from them. That’s just not for me I suppose.

What do you guys think? Would you still make websites if they didn’t earn you a dime (or if there was no potential to earn money from it in the future)?

Popularity: 4% [?]

Popularity: 4% [?]

A lot of you probably remember a post I did a little while ago called Keep an Eye on BUMPzee! In it I said how I believe that given its current growth in development and functionality it will far surpass MyBlogLog before you know it. No sooner do I get the words out of my mouth that BUMPzee adds another wave of upgrades!

They have completely overhauled the profile page addressing the main reservation I had with BUMPzee up to this point: it was too damn de-centralized. It was hard to keep track of my blogs, other blogs, communities, posts, etc etc. To me it really seemed like BUMPzee was a swirl of a ton of great ideas that just hadn’t all been solidified yet. Now I think it’s fairly safe to say that they have been brought together firmly, and although I’m sure there are tons of upgrades to come, I can safely say that BUMPzee is now better than MyBlogLog will ever be.

There is now a consistent flow between members, their blogs, their communities, and all of the other blogs, communities, and members that they are connected with. In addition, they have added much better individual blog pages - see Net Business Blog’s profile page. You now get to see which entries are most read. The new profile pages also do a better job organizing your visitor cloud (a feature I’ve always liked):

If you haven’t checked out BUMPzee, you really need to. Stop wasting your time with MyBlogLog. It’s rotting. BUMPzee is blooming.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

There seems to be one hell of an upward trend this year of blogs on blogging, many of which attempting to follow in the footsteps of Darren or John - but Daily Blog Tips is not your ordinary blog on blogging. There is a distinct difference between this one and the bulk of the others. It’s good.

Daily Blog Tips is written by Daniel, a man who knows what he’s talking about.

There are more than 50 million blogs worldwide. Every day 180,000 new blogs are created… that is 2 blogs every second.

Most of those blogs, however, get abandoned after an initial period of enthusiasm. Even skilled writers get discouraged when they realize that people are not reading their stuff. Content is surely king, but great content might just get lost on the Internet if not supported by promotion, search engine optimization and the like. With that problem in mind I decided to create Daily Blog Tips, a place where you will find simple yet effective tips to improve your blog.

Some of you may remember Daily Blog Tips from a couple months ago when Daniel launched his Blogger Faceoff series by pitting Darren Rowse against Shoemoney. The next week he put me up against John Chow (who won that again, John?). This has become a great feature of his blog and really, in my opinion, set him apart from the crowd.

On top of the Bloggers Faceoff series Daniel also has a ton of high quality content to keep his readers busy. The blog is updated daily (hence the name) with great advice for new and advanced bloggers. Daniel also has a pretty nice resources page that you should definitely check out. If you get a chance head on over to Daily Blog Tips and take a look around.

Sponsored by: Daily Blog Tips

Popularity: 8% [?]

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’m pretty happy with this week with my case study. It seems that the blog is finally starting to fill out with good content. It doesn’t look like a work in progress anymore. It looks like an established blog. You know what that means? Time to promote.

They say to always start with what you know, so naturally my first plan of action to get Rock Surge on the map is Digg. I had a lot of success using Digg to promote NBB back in January and February. Now I’m sure I would have been able to collect as many readers for NBB as I have without Digg, but I’m positive using Digg shaved at least 6 months off of this blog’s growing time. But anyway, this is about the new blog, right?

Yesterday evening I got a random idea for a post that I thought would perform well on Digg. It took me about 10 minutes to write. The goal of the post was to entertain the hell out of the visitor within 5 seconds. I think I succeeded, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. The post was “A Tribute to the Keytar“. After I got it up (late last night) I asked about 10-15 friends who were online at the time to give it some Digg love and before I went to sleep it was sitting at the top of the Most Popular Upcoming Stories for the Entertainment > Music category. By about 2:00 PM EST today it hit the frontpage.

A couple of things I noticed were significantly different from my Digg experience this time and the last. First off the Entertainment > Music category has a lot less active Diggers than the Technology category (understandably so given the audience). What I didn’t understand to begin with was what sort of impact this would have on how hard it would be to get a story frontpaged. Usually when I am able to get 15 people to Digg my story it gets picked up by Diggers and goes frontpage within a couple of hours. With the Music category it took much longer and had a lot less natural Diggs. On the other hand, it also went frontpage with only 30 Diggs, and the previous frontpaged story in the same category was made popular 17 hours earlier. This means that the fact that it is easier to frontpage in this category plus the longer exposure at the top of the frontpage makes it worthwhile despite the shortage of active Diggers.

Don’t get me wrong, as I look at my MBL stats right now I’ve had 10,000 Diggers hit the site. That’s not too shabby.

The was a little snag, however. Seconds after the story hit frontpage the server crashed. You may have noticed some downtime earlier on NBB - they’re on the same server. This server also hosts Career Ramblings which was sitting in the top 3 on Netscape at the same time. Nate (the owner of the server) did his best to keep the server from burning up. He restarted it several times but it was crashing seconds after each time. Unfortunately I’m sure I ended up losing a ton of potential readers - lucky for me, however, the story never got buried off the frontpage. Anyways, Nate told me he invested in some extra RAM which should prevent that from happening again.

As for the results, well you’ll have to wait for the next case study update!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Michael has posted an interview with me over at his blog. It was a pretty fun interview, so if any of you get a chance (and would like to help out my ego a bit) head on over and give it a read.

Bootmoney is the industry’s newest guru. This quality of information you won’t find anywhere else. Trust me.

Tyler has failed for the third time in a row to work a 40 hour week. I giggled. But hey if I was making full-time income off of the internet while doing little to no work I wouldn’t give a damn what anybody else said. I giggle at Tyler, but he’s still cool for winning at life.

The AGLOCO viewbar has been delayed again. AGLOCO, you had my full attention, but now I’m growing bored of you. I doubt I’ll even install the viewbar when it comes out; I’ve lost the interest. Good job creating so much buzz for a dud product though AGLOCO.

My first real Diggish article for Rock Surge has made it to the top of the “Most Popular” upcoming stories on Digg and will hopefully be getting frontpaged today (fingers crossed).

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

The extra income that Kontera, Adsense, and AdBrite have been generating over the last few months has been nice pocket money, but after using all of these services for quite a while I’ve decided that they just take far too much away from the user experience here. After all, aren’t the readers the most important part of a blog? Starting today you won’t be seeing anymore Kontera, AdBrite, or Adsense (although past posts with Adsense included will remain) on this blog.

I’ve made it no secret that the newest arena of online earning to me is definitely blogging, so this blog really is an experiment. This isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last time that I shift around advertising here in order to find the perfect balance between user experience and income.

I have already learned that with blogging more than any other type of website you can’t just throw every form of revenue generator on the page and watch the numbers go up. On a blog you have to maintain a relationship between yourself and your readers. This relationship is affected by the number and intrusiveness of the ads on your site. In the age of feed readers you wouldn’t think that this would make all that much of a difference, but it really does.

Anyways I just thought I’d take a break to let you guys know what was going on around here.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

So I know everybody who visits my blog is most likely a reader of John Chow dot com as well and have been following his blogging experiment over the past few months. I have seen so many mini John Chow sites pop up over the last few months it’s insane - not that there’s anything wrong with seeing that something works and trying to emulate it. There is, however, a distinct difference between copying one or two ideas of a successful individual and re-creating every single one of them stride for stride.

What I’m referring to specifically here is the whole “make money online” keyword thing. I won’t link to any specific blogs because all of them seem to be good in nature, and I don’t want to seem like a jerk. But almost all of them follow the characteristics of 1) a blog about blogging 2) a journal of how their blog about blogging will lead them to financial freedom. Like I said, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with this, it just irks me a little bit to see so many people copying what John is doing either not knowing or ignoring the fact that their chance at success is little to none.

So you want to do like John and create a blog that teaches others how to “make money online” - that’s fine. I admit the final push that led me to start this blog was seeing John’s success. The problem I have is when people start duplicating what people like John do word for word without stopping to think why or actually weighing the pros and cons. Yes I took a page from the John Chow playbook and started doing reader blog reviews. There’s nothing wrong with taking an idea that works and implementing it. But if all you are doing is re-creating someone else’s success stride for stride, word for word, you’re destined to fail. In this case I’m talking about the people trying to do the same as John by ranking in the SERPs for “make money online”.

Let me ask you guys a question, what is the probability that any of these new “Make Money Online with John Doe” websites will successfully rank for the keyword phrase “make money online”? Slim to none. John was able to do it fairly easily by leveraging his tens of thousands of readers to skyrocket him to the top of the SERPs for “make money online” (although its relevancy has been questioned by some, but that’s for another post). This in turn led a ton of his readers to target the same keyword phrase. Why can’t they recreate John’s success with this particular keyword phrase?

1) The bulk of John’s readers (at least the ones who come to his blog for advice and not just entertainment) don’t have tens of thousands of readers to leverage.
2) When John started to optimize for “make money online” it was a moderately well-searched keyword, but there was still a managable amount of competition. Now that John has posted this SEO experiment there are so many people trying to rank for this phrase it’s crazy.
3) Most of these people have just seen how easy it was for John to rank for this phrase by just putting up a little incentive for his readers to linkbomb him. Most of them don’t know that for the non-celebrity SEO is much more difficult and much more expensive.

Can some of these people actually rank well for “make money online”? I’m sure they can. But be realistic. Unless your blog is getting a few thousand uniques per day at least then there’s no way you’ll rank for a competitive term (especially this one as the competition has skyrocketed now) without investing a hell of a lot of time and money. Anyone can rank for any phrase, but it costs.

I’m really not trying to rain on anyone’s parade here because I think it’s great that so many people are trying to break into the internet as a money-making medium. But you have to take lessons such as the “make money online” experiment and apply them to your own ventures. Just because John linkbombed his way to the top of the SERPs for one keyword doesn’t mean you have to try to do the same. Take his method and apply it to a different keyword. Revolutionary, right? You’ll see much better results. And who knows, you might actually learn to make a living online.

Use Aaron’s Keyword Suggestion Tool to get you started.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Two guys I’ve known for a while, Jon and David, have joined together to form a band site the likes of which have never been seen, and they called themselves Tenacious D 6pins Forums.

6pins is a forum geared at professional web developers looking to improve their craft and share their knowledge.

We are geared toward the development side of the web. This means the majority of threads won’t be things like “How do you like my clan design?!”, and threads along those lines. We want users to share and help each other on the journey through the web.

I’m going to try to leave my opinions on the design out of this thread (it’s all “web 2.0″ish but I’m sort of a 1.0 design-minded guy) and just focus on the quality content and memberbase. I’ve known most of the guys posting on this forum for a long while, and they are all very knowledgable about what they’re doing. Whether it’s Jon sharing great examples of guerilla marketing or Digit discussing how to create an active forum community you will most likely find something here worth reading.

The forum has been “live” for a few weeks now but it has gone public just over the last couple of days. Already the forum has over 100 members and almost 1,000 posts. Not too shabby. And with the kind of content being shared over there I only see it growing.

So if you get a chance head on over to 6pins and take a look around. I’m registered as “feros” (which is my usual forum name) and will probably be posting fairly regularly.

Sponsored by: 6pins Forums

Popularity: 11% [?]

Popularity: 11% [?]