ISULONG SEOPH

Two years ago, I was going to give up on making money online. I was new with blogging then and adsense was my only source of revenue online. Luckily, for me, a fellow blogger who’s into search engine marketing affirmed that money can be made online. That’s when I started looking for ways to monetize my personal blog.

I’ve tried every possible ways to earn. Affiliate marketing, CPM banners and a whole lot of other schemes that was unsuccessful at that time. Until I stumbled upon Linkworth. Linkworth is a text link advertising marketplace where people buy and sell links. At that time, Linkworth was relatively new. There were fewer advertisers but I sold my first text link within a month after joining. I’ve added a couple more after that and I never looked back.

I’ve joined other text link advertising sites but my Linkworth links are by far the biggest earner.

PHP Link Directory, the software I use for my directory project has updated their free version to 2.1.2. I will be updating my copy after I find a good upgrade howto on their site.

Who wouldn’t want to be a super affiliate? These people earn so much money on their own time. But beware, so many newcomers to affiliate marketing are getting scammed by the so called gurus. So where can you find which affiliate technique/strategy to follow? I’ve been reading the Super Affiliate Marketing blog lately and it’s the only affiliate marketing I’ve read so far that makes sense.

Are you planning to buy the guru ebooks? Before you do that, check out the Super Affiliate Marketing blog first because he might already have the links to free downloads of some popular guru ebooks. For free.

With their relentless growth in popularity, blogs are the next big thing for search. I find more useful and relevant information in blogs than article sites. So the battle now is who’s going to dominate in blog indexers like Google Blogsearch?

Problogger.net has an article on how Google Blogsearch rank blogs. Things to remember: Feed subscription count, social media tagging and blogrolls.

I would love to explain each one but it’s better if you read it directly from the source.

I don’t know if it’s my host or the script itself is the problem but the Pagerank updater for PHPLD is broken. None of the sites submitted has a pagerank. Although, it’s not necessary, it’s way cooler to see which sites listed have good ranks.

If time permits, I might fix the issue myself or just write a whole new script for it. In my previous project, I integrated a script that fetches toolbar pagerank. And by the looks of it, they were based on the same public domain script I found in a forum.

OT: My directory project is slowly getting new listings daily. It may take a little more time before monetization of the directory is considered. First on the list: get a decent pagerank. To be able to do that, get some reciprocal links or promote the directory in other directory. Another stumbling block for monetization (not only for the directory but for other sites) is that I’m in a country that can’t receive paypal. Yeah, it sucks.

Ask anybody who calls themselves SEO whether reciprocal linking is good or bad and you’ll get almost instantaneously a “it’s bad” response. Yes, reciprocal linking is considered bad. I’m not talking one or two reciprocal links. It’s somewhere around tens to hundreds of links.

Try getting 100 reciprocal links and search engines will flag you as link farming. But what about those big network blogs. Say, B5 Media or Gawker Media. Visit one of their member blog and take a look at their sidebar. Count how many links to their other member sites/blog are there. Is that link farming?

They’re all interlinking with each other. They’re reciprocal links. Now wonder, it’s easy for them to get to PR 7. But should they be penalized? Of course. Are they? I don’t know. Now, if they can get away with it with their uber popular blogs, maybe we can too. Hmmm. I would like to experiment on this one.

I have a couple of sites listed in DMOZ. I was ecstatic when I learned one of my site was approved for listing in DMOZ. Two other sites follow, thereafter. Even my personal site is listed in DMOZ even though I didn’t remember submitting it for listing in the popular engine.

Does DMOZ still has that X-factor that made it hugely popular and most sought-after web directory? Google has recently took away Pagerank from their homepage. I’m not sure if it’s the same story with their inside pages. Not that pagerank is all that important. Google could still be giving them special treatment sans the pagerank but it’s the pagerank that sells them most, followed by exclusivity.

To satisfy my curiosity on how link/web directories work, I created one. Mix Directory my free human-edited link directory. It’s not very clear to me, however, if link directories are still being considered by search engines, but being a SEO practitioner (a little), this is all part of an experiment.

I don’t expect a lot of listing in Mix Directory since it only has a pagerank of zero at the moment. I have already sent some link love to it from some of my sites. It’ll have a bit of that green “google dust ” next pagerank update.

There’s only one problem I have with it now. My categories are so disorganized. I’ll be looking for a pre-made category list later and make myself comfortable with my directory program’s admin interface.