If you are in The Blogging Game and not just doing it for fun, you heard about Google's recent extortion. They slapped PayPerPost and all its members with severe Page Rank penalties for participating in the program (that's alotta Ps, ain't it? it's called alliteration and all the long-A sounds coupled with it is called onomotopeia - now you know... STAR). A lot of people, myself included, who had PRs of 3-4 suddenly found themselves with a big, fat goose-egg because Google got upset that we were using an advertising program other than AdSense.
As most all of us have AdSense accounts, we all know AdSense doesn't pay dick; Google's greed is quickly becoming the stuff of legend, but that's only part of the reason so many are angry with them. After all, all companies want to turn a profit, but that doesn't give them the right to resort to Mafia tactics in order to do it.
So what does this mean for you and BloggerParty, in general? Well, as many of us are from BlogFeast (which recently threw in the towel) and we went there from WritingUp (which is long since deceased), I wanted to offer some steps we can take to ensure BP doesn't go the way of those sites...
Now I have no idea how BP is doing financially, but as a webmaster myself, I know that if you can't turn a profit off your site, you strive to make sure it at least breaks even - that is, pays for itself so you don't end up reaching into your own pocket to pay for hosting and domain registration costs - and if it doesn't, you really have to make a serious decision as to whether or not it's worth it to you personally to continue paying for it. At an approximate cost of $200+ a year, it isn't a matter of whether you are running a "business" or a "hobby," it's a matter of whether or not you want to eat!
So I was searching through my blog here the other day for a link to a post I'd made a long time ago when I noticed how many sponsored posts were here. Seeing as how almost all of the sponsored post programs disallowed community blogsites like BloggerParty a long time ago, nearly all of these were from a year ago or more.
Now, how sponsored posts work is very simple: you receive a set amount of money in exchange for posting about a website, product, or service on your blog. You are not being paid to review the product; you are being paid to include the link(s) to their site(s). It's simple advertising and the higher your PR, the more advertisers will pay you.
How Google PR works is (basically): the more incoming links you have to your site, the higher your Page Rank; the more people linking to you makes Google think you have more authority. Conversely, the more outbound links you have, the lower your PR. This means that if I link to a site and it doesn't link back to me, that site's PR goes up slightly, while mine goes down slightly. This is just a very basic look at a part of Google PR because Google keeps all that stuff very hush-hush - they're a mob, you understand, and a lot of what they do is highly illegal (they're a monopoly, for example), so they do their best to cause as few waves as possible.
So what I'm saying is that, the more one-way, outgoing links BP has, the lower its PR. The lower its PR, the harder it is to find it on Google, which results in fewer visitors, which results in less revenue for the cats what run the joint. This means they could feasibly fold at any time, leaving all of us out in the cold again, like the Gypsies we are.
The best way to do what we can to alleviate this possibility is to go back through our blogs and delete all our sponsored posts that are more than 6 months or so old. After all, most of these guys only paid like $5.00 for a placement and if they've been up for 6 months, that's less than $1.00 a month for an incoming link; they got their money's worth!
This will help BP's PR rise - or at least stay the same - which, in turn, will make them rank higher in Google searches, which will allow them to charge more for advertising! Simple-pimple.
Other than that, do not use Google for searching. Ask.com provides far more relevant results and offers a lot more robust features. Yahoo! has very in-depth searches, but you have to really learn how to use it in order to get the most out of it. Since Google's smart-assed blackmailing of the Web, most of their searches return the very same article across dozens of sites and a bunch of spam - which has always been true to some extent, but I personally found at least 70% of recent searches to be repetitious or outright spam. Twice in the last month, Google's searches have been found to lead to infected sites; they were the target of what many analysts are calling "the single, largest spam attack of all time" recently and your machine may very well be infected with spyware due to following a Google link!
A little blog maintenance on our part might be just the thing needed to keep BP relevant enough that it starts generating more hits and making more money. Especially since LiveJournal was recently purchased by a Russian firm and Google bought Blogger... and FeedBurner... and YouTube... and the rest of the Internet.
And vote for me!
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