Blogging Way of Life

Hubpages is a multi user writer platform where you can create hubs (similar to blog posts) and publish. The first question you will ask is “Why should I publish my articles in Hubpages instead of my own blog?”

There are numerous answers to that. You can (and should) use Hubpages if you are an amateur writer or a blogger running your own blog. There are other platforms similar to Hubpageslike Squidoo and Helium. I don’t like the money system used in Squidoo (At the end of the article I explain how Hubpages arranges the money) and Helium isn’t as popular as Hubpages. You can see on the Alexa graph that Hubpages has an increasing visitor trend.

I have chosen Hubpages because I am blogging about blogging and there are many other subjects I would like to write about. I discovered Hubpages at that point. You can check on my sidebar the Hubs I have published which are all on different subject. I can’t start a blog on each topic I will only write for once, in Hubpages you have the freedom to write on any topic and the Hub gets categorized for the related topic.

The out-most feature of Hubpages is reaching a large community. I have my own blog BloggerDollar and I know the effort spent to gain an audience. In Hubpages you don’t have to spend an effort to drive traffic. Hubpages is already high-ranked by Google and you get the privilege to write on a high traffic site. If you look at my stats you can see that my visitor count is going up and I’m doing that without any effort. As you can see from my traffic sources most of my traffic is from organic search engine traffic.

The Hubpages uses a royalty system which differs from other systems. You submit your own Google Adsense, Amazon and Ebay ID’s and your own ads are shown %50 of time. You can trace your own statistics by submitting your Google Analytics code so you can track your account. This is a huge difference from other platforms because you get your money from Google or Amazon or Ebay which is the most reliable method. You can also make money by using the referral system. (If one hubber signs-up through your account you get %10 of ad displays for his page but he/she still gets %50 so you get the extra amount from the Hubpages) If you are interested in writing you can sign-up.

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Do you still remember the name Agloco? They tried to gain success using the same old story, “Get rich by doing nothing”. I am turning my spider senses on if someone proposes me getting rich by doing nothing. In my opinion Agloco was another pyramid scheme and I didn’t think of signing up before I see a cheque signed by them. I don’t know how an expert like John Chow got into this (money tastes sweet) but I think that he lost his hopes also. John Chow’s Agloco Page have been updated at the beginning and mid of each month until July and no more updates since then. I don’t think that even he has the toolbar installed but he was relying on 21.000 referrals in his network.

 You have to study some human behaviours before getting in a project at this scale. Agloco managed to get huge number of users following their announcement. (1.000.000 sign ups as last statistics) The idea of earning money from referrals attends people. While each individual signs up and make other people sign up as referrals, those new users will also see that the way of earning money depends on earnings from referrals so they look out for referrals too, but there comes a time when the community is saturated and no more users are signing up as referrals. No more chains added. What happens next? The last ring of chain breaks-up because they aren’t making any money actually and the links get broken from bottom to top. What you get actually is the reverse chain reaction. Agloco could prevent that by distributing cash immediately and keeping the chains connected but they are promising income in a very far away future. You can’t expect people to be patient in such a system.

Everybody knows that systems based on pyramid schemes don’t last long. It only makes the links at the top rich. I guess that John Chow knew that and he tried his luck. If Agloco ever pays out money, John Chow will be the one getting it.

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I am a supporter of Google Adsense for bringing quality to the online ad services and they have set the standards higher for advertisers and publishers. I am using adsense units because of the confidence and believing in their good intention to provide a good experience for both advertisers and publishers. I can understand their tendency to look out for advertisers because they are the source of money. The latest news already created some buzz for publishers even before officially announced.

According to Problogger’s news Google will announce shortly the new ad click system which disables the clicks to background and texts, making clicks only available through title and url. According to Problogger Google is explaining this situation by telling :

“We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers…..This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the user’s overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.”

I have no objection to increasing targeted clicks but doing this by disabling click-able areas doesn’t seem okay with me. Google will also cancel some targeted clicks by the way. I tried to figure out the effects by making an experiment myself. I looked at some ads in various pages and I realized that I was trying to click the ads through backgrounds mostly. That’s because Google Ads has been a brand itself and our eyes are perceiving whole ad unit as a block. You can argue that people would find a way to click ads somehow but this is ads we are speaking of and people won’t be so persistent to click ads.

There’s an opinion that advertisers are going to increase the rates and the changes won’t effect publishers but I think that it will create bad results in short term and will push publishers to look out for new sources.

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Do you use drafts for developing your posts or is it just a tool for you to save your work just in a case of computer malfunction ??
Most writers sit down, write a post till the end, read the post (many of them even don’t) and publish.  I guess this is killing bloggers creativity in a way. When we start writing and focus on one subject we can’t get our head up and look from a different angle. I think working with drafts is great for this reason. Instead of publishing a post and editing every time a new idea pops up, it’s better to save a draft and let some time pass and look at the subject from a new point. Our post will worth more like a wine waiting in the vault. (You don’t have to wait 22 years to get the taste of 1985 Bordeaux, Don’t worry:) Actually it’s natural process of writing; to take down notes, develop ideas and make a final writing but most of bloggers are amateur writers and just typing down as they feel.

I got this draft about importance of drafts (which is actually published now) and today I saw a fellow blogger (I don’t want to give names) with a Title :”Earn more with adsense” and the content was : “I will tell you ways of earning more with adsense by placing ads in different positions”.  There was one brief comment from a reader : “So Will you tell??”.

It’s shameful for a blogger to share such raw ideas. Get yourself a notebook (moleskine is a great draft book) or use drafts in your blog as a notebook.

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There is a blogging expo going on for two days in Las Vegas. If you are a blogger living in Las Vegas or nearby I hope you stopped by to pay a visit. I haven’t earned enough money to buy myself a Las Vegas ticket so I am watching the news online. There are lot of big guys showing up in the event and if you have been there you had the chance to see the most money making bloggers together.  (John Chow and Shoemoney)

If you didn’t have the chance to visit at least take a look at :

BlogWorldExpo

JohnChow

geeknewscentral

b5media-blogworldexpo

Technorati

Some info on blogging from BlogWorldExpo :

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• Getting Up Every Morning

There are some days when you wake up and don’t ever want to leave the bed, sit all day watch cartoons. Especially when there is a storm outside and you are feeling like you are chained to your warm bed. Too bad you aren’t at school anymore and you gotta hit the storm. Every frakking day. (Our thanks to Battlestar Galactica for this lovely word:) There is a new social organization in Denmark which describes themselves as “Morning Haters” and called B-Society which push companies to allow B-society to start work after10-11 a.m. I hope they help all the worlds B-society.

• Time

The time passes by quickly. You turn the speed up by going to the same job everyday and living the same day over and over. You start to lose your sense of time and when you look back you see years left behind. A quote from Rumble Fish (to make you more depressed):

“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see when you’re young, you’re a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years, a couple of years there… it doesn’t matter. You know. The older you get you say, “Jesus, how much I got? I got thirty-five summers left.” Think about it. Thirty-five summers. .”

• Boss

If you have a psycho boss you know what I mean. Employees sitting around in fear waiting for the “YOU’RE FIRED” talk. This is actually about the character of the boss. If he/she has a huge ego waiting to burst with the authority of being a boss prepare for torture. There are some people who actually become a boss at the same while remaining a joyful person. (The statistics show that people who has a big ego and always in the pursuit of proving themselves are more likely to become bosses. This statistic belongs to me:)

• Seeing Same People Every Day

There are some days that I am even bored of myself. The odds of having some colleagues that can transform into the most annoying creatures in time is really high. As days pass every gesture and detail of a person will grow bigger and bigger in your eyes. Thinking of many years to come prepare yourself to pain and agony.

• Feeling Trapped

This is modern slavery. Whatever you do you have to keep working working and working. The time you are given to spare your self is just greasing the gears and getting you ready to work for more. It is the feeling of being trapped like a rat in a cage; that really gets you down.

• Forward Mails

If you are working in a big company with lots of employees then you will receive a mail with subject: Fw: LOVELYYYY CATS every day. I have a cat myself and I love cats but I don’t love people forwarding cat photos everyday and waiting for sympathy.

• Traffic

This one is valid if you are living in a crowded city with bad public transport. Normally it takes 45 minutes from work to home. In weekdays it takes 2 hours approximately. 2-3 hours a day in the traffic can turn you in to a monster.

Okay don’t get so depressed. Don’t stop dreaming. When your dreams are gone too you have nothing left to depend on. So Dream on.. Keep on Blogging.

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You know all the buzz going about Google Pagerank penalty for text link ad users. There is still too much discussion going about why and how but marketing people stopped discussing and provided a solution which is approved by Google Judges.

 ScratchBack is a new widget developed by text-link-ads to provide a solution for the Pagerank related problems. The problem with text link ads was Google started to see that as a fraud which provides people high pagerank links for money. ScratchBack solves this problem by creating this javascript widget which provides nofollow links. Which means that Google spiders won’t follow those links and it’s not a danger to pagerank system. ScratchBack says that they got approval from Google for this new system.

Google created such a fear for text links that ScratchBack use the term “tip” instead of “ads”. The system works as follows:

You place the widget on your blog and people can place their links for ad purposes or just for tipping the blogger. You choose the cost for links which starts from a minimum of 1$ and going up. (1$ can be considered as a tip) When a person tips you the link moves to the top position in your link list and goes one step down each time new ad is displayed. (You can disable this feature and enable a limited time display)

The system is in beta phase now and I hope they improve designs and provide a custom design option for selecting color patterns and let you give a title to the list.

The system seems like good to give it a try. You can try by giving me a tip (or scratch my back:) for just 1 $ or just follow the link “Get Your Own Top List”.

Edit: I’ve sent my own design to scratchback team and trying to change design but could’t find an easy way to do so I am removing the widget until they provide an easy color selection tool like adsense products.

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