Page Rank and Moneymaking Stub

Continuing my cleanout of w.bloggar, here is an unfinished post inspired by my discovery of a particularly good page rank checking site and relating to my addition of a PayPal tip jar to the blog.  I am sure I had a bit more to say, but at least it has some substance to it as far as it got:

I stumbled across a page rank checker that lets you check up to 100 URLs at a time.  It’s been a while since I checked any of mine, so I did and found that Accidental Verbosity, Blogblivion and, impressivly, Bizosphere.com, which is the new Carnival of the Capitalists headquarters, all rank 5.  This is actually down from when AV was a 6 some of the times when I checked it, but it’s respectable enough.

At a rank of 4 we have my first blog, my second blog, XTremeBlog, XTreme Computing (which I thought was higher, but despite being ten years old this year hasn’t been that active), and Geek Practitioners Blog.

At a mere 3 we have the root domain elhide.com and the new business domain, which frankly has no reason even to rank that high yet, but nice that it’s had a head start.

Married Guy Cook doesn’t register a page rank at all yet, which makes the Google traffic it’s getting already even cooler.

The best one is bizosphere, after someone excoriated me for moving the CotC home page to a new domain with - gasp! - no page rank.  I knew it would build one fast enough; I just wasn’t expecting it to be this fast.  I wanted to make a clean break in keeping with the more stringent entry and hosting requirements, and I was migrating from it being “sponsored” by the old business to the new business, in the form of which one provides the hosting.  I just haven’t noted the link yet, seeing how the new business site is just a tad incomplete.

So what does all this matter?  Google rules, when it comes to search traffic.  If you’re looking to attract advertising, especially in the form of mere links, page rank can matter as much or more than traffic.

Through last year, we were in fact generating relatively significant revenue from link ads on various blogs, current and retired.  That went away, and the particular demand for that seems to have reshaped itself, at least with respect to the type of businesses in question.  I’d like some of that back.  Heck, I was hoping to add to what we already had.  Losing it was a bit of a surprise.

Blogging is a hobby I’d do anyway, even if nobody had ever conceived of ways to make it pay anything.  However, since it can generate revenue, I am all for taking advantage of that, within reason.

Selling links can get you awfully close to the sleazier, spammier side of the internet, though it doesn’t automatically have to do that.

Google text ads are profitable only with enough traffic and/or sites across which they appear.  They represent a “better than nothing” option for most of us.

Larger ads depend more on traffic, and the model I expected to arise has not yet.  Blogads bit off more than they could chew and instead of growing became a clique you must get vouched into by a member.  Their ads tend to be more targeted.

When Pajamas Media was conceived and I discussed joining them in the relatively early days of the concept, the concept had more to do with collective saturation ad sales trickling down to even the smaller blogs, and less to do with being a news and blog portal featuring only selected larger blogs and outsourcing what advertising was associated with the venture.

Our idea was to have a more robust ad serving mechanism that Blogads ever seemed to have, and to distribute saturation ads, not merely targeted ads.  By saturation ads I mean things like Coca-Cola, Ford, Pepsi, Nissan… the mass market, “remember my brand” type of stuff.  The web, and blogs, are fragmented, so it’s harder to get massive saturation so there’s just no escaping awareness of your brand or message.  Those eyeballs still matter, though, and it was where we saw things going.

It was shocking that Pajamas turned out not to be about that, and explicitly backed away from the highly diffuse advertising concept.  Perhaps it really was harder than I might have thought to do technically, or to manage (I could see needing automated tools), or to sell to saturation-oriented advertisers.

Anyway, one way people make money from blogging is to have tip jars.  We never did that, and in fact I never had PayPal, until this past week.  That was a confluence of needing to create a PayPal acount for other reasons, including to have it available to accept payments for the new business, being especially low on cash, being sad not to have the ad revenue, thinking about the little ways we can make more money, and doing work on the sidebar at the time anyway.  The trouble with tip jars is that they function best with high traffic and/or a specific crisis of the sort that evokes sympathetic donations.  Even so, they are there, just in case

Posted by on 06/15 at 09:05 AM

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