State of Blogging
 

I know I've got a big ass rant inside just waiting to find the words but thought I'd go ahead and post this now while my thoughts are settling into some coherant thoughts (ok, so my thoughts never get coherant). I ran across this software the other day and I almost don't want to even post the link cause it might give some people idea's but, The Blog Solution, I guess others need to see what the hell I'm talking about.

Anyway, this kind of took the wind out of my sails. Hasn't anything been learned from past mistakes. Just what is needed, a program that can create 1000's of peices of shit in under 5 minutes. I've also ran across a autosubmitter for blog directories.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble and get incoherant so, time to pause. But I'd really like to know others thoughts.

I think part of the "problem" is that people jump in without realizing it's WORK to keep even just one blog up. Then you have those who truly believe in quantity over quality, and the surfers WILL get leery and jaded and a bit cynical...

but isn't that the story with everything in adult?

I think I'll just mind my 3 little blogs and keep doing what I do and the surfers will find me one way or another, if not through links/directories then through the SEs :)

There's auto software to create almost anything out there and auto software to submit it, so I guess it had to come to the blogging world sooner or later.

this is the third or fourth autoblogging bs program I've seen.

they either dont work or the spam blogs get glossed over.

the cardinal rule about blogs is this;
anyone can create a bullshit spam blog that people will look at.

hell they can even link to it from previous sites they have and get it some PR and get the engines to notice some of it.

But, will they get 'real' hard link exchanges? Not if people are smart.

Will they build readership, like I have, or the walrus has? Will people comment on their blogs and read it daily? no.

Let them autocreate themselves into a ten million page hell, those of us who create real blogs with real content that people WANT to view... we'll profit in the end.

Fleshbot wouldnt be fleshbot if it was autocreated and they make anything these fuckwits are doing with autocreators look like childsplay... which of course it is.

Aye, and there's the rub "...if people are smart..." I am glad to see a lot of directory owners starting to refuse to list splogs. It must get damn boring to see the same sponsor text spiel (usually only 1-2 sentences long, with a sentence fragment tacked on for good measure) and the same promo thumbs over and over...you know it's bad when *I* can look at a splog and know exactly which site tour page the 2 sentences that make up a post are from.

and they really don't give a rat's ass about having a loyal regular readership either...they just want chumps to pull out the CCs as they leave. Always going for the quick buck, and shooting themselves in the foot in the long run...

But hey, Walrus is so much better at doing a rant than I am...and buddy, don't let it take the wind out of your sails...you can always try to be politically correct again LOL Even if it doesn't cheer you up, it will make me laugh!

I could give 2 shits about what they do to their foot, its that shit like this spatters onto my feet as well. I'd hate to see some of the more mainstream traffic sources dry up just because they get tired of shit coming out of the adult blog world.

With sponsors starting to provide hosted blogs, hosted blog feeds and other feeds, it's good for us, the directory owners and the aggregators but it also makes it pretty easy to develop good "looking" splogs that, on initial appearance, appear pretty legit.

It just pisses me the fuck off that we (a blogging community) are just beginning to realize that the fucking lessons learned in the early days of TGP's and freesites really do still apply and all the rules that seem so fucking silly are there for absolutely all the right reasons.|banghead| Oh and it's pissing me the fuck off having this freehost asswipe coming around spamming his bull-shit. It's idiots like him that make me even fucking think about this shit.

LOL, but honestly, even if The Walrus didn't make a dime off The Walrus Blog he'd still be doing it. He needs that venue to release all the pent up frustrations from simply being a |pokefun| genius in his day to day life.

Right, they use the sawed-off 12 gauge approach when they should be using the .50 cal sniper rifle approach LOL But as long as people make money off the quantity splog approach, it will still be around.

To me, along the same lines, how many people have so taken advatage of blogs. When I first started my blogs I have the trackbacks and comments open, in concept they are great features to help your blog grow. Very saddly I had to turn everything off very quickly. I was getting spammed big time with big time bs trackbacks and and comments, and I know they were coming from programs similar to what Walrus posted. It pisses me off to no end how just a few people can ruin a good thing for the majority. I dont want to tell you what I would like to do to these people that spam trackbacks and comments.

I agree, I dont see how these people will get many good links, or good related links. Unless they have a huge network and I dont think many have the resources to do it right. They are just wrecking it for the ones that really blog...:(

ronnie

I've hacked in a word filter but never actually turned comments off. Besides some of the Walrus's best shit is actually in the comment section as responses to spammers. After I've deleted their links, of course.

Now if they'd just turn the gun around....

I agree completely that comments and trackbacks for that matter, can really add to a blog. Probably the reason it pisses me off so much. If it was a few spams, I could handle that, but I was getting hundreds, it was insane. I know what they are doing, they grab the links and put it in their software and churn out crap after crap.

ronnie

The reason I had to hack in the word filter is one asshole must have had his spam machine on auto-pilot, I was getting 45 comments a minute. I've got probably a dozen words in the filter and it reduced my spam to something manageble.

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check out my blog, I think it has some guards for spam, or add-ons. I really hated to close off the comments, was starting to get some good ones. Even get e-mails from surfers, kinda cool, and more so when they believe the "story"..:)

ronnie

Not many of you know this, but before I started work on http://www.deletedbrain.com/ I was running a fake TGP called StrippedGalleries and to push traffic towards it I had nice little blog called bunky's beauties. It pushed some traffic to the TGP, but most of my sales were being generated by my blog!


That got me thinking of redoing StrippedGalleries into something different. I wanted to meld my TGP and the blog into one. It took awhile but I finally got there. I am slowly getting back into the habit of making my own "life" entries as I did on bunky's beauties. I have added that feed to DeletedBrain to give and return traffic between the two sites.

It is important to have more than just some pics followed by a paragraph of text with a few links... I cannot stress that enough.

One thing that I have never really had a problem with was spammers. Even with my old bunky's beauties blog Ihhad a few incidents wher some bot popped a bit of crap, but that was it. I consider myself damn fortunate. But I have also never had a "following" like other bloggers do... rarely does anybody ever post a comment on my blog... that bites ass.

Anyway, while I am back here, I want you guys to have a look at http://www.strippedgalleries.net/ and give me your honest opinion. Do you think it looks like a Splog? That's what I am wondering at this point... and maybe that is why I am not getting the comments that others do.

thanks

bunky

Splog software isn't really a very different idea from automated sites makes, automated submission tools, or just about any other "auto" thingie to spew pages. The difference in the blog world is that it destroys or somehow violates a sort of trust that exists between reader and blogger. Even on the most commercial of blog sites, there is some sort of "I know a person wrote this" feeling that makes the blog more or less real.

splogs and cross linked bullshit are just that, and while they will likely score well with SEs for a while, they are the reasons why, in the end, filters will be written and innocent people will get punished in Google's SERPs.

It truly sucks.

Alex

so what you are saying is that no matter what we do, the SE's, (especially google), will screw the honest guys over.

Google has been doing it since the start.

In their quest to provide the best and most relevant pages, Google uses very complicated formulas to figure out who links to who, what is hot, what is not, etc. Basically, a shared voting system.

Now, in order to keep it all good, they use special formulas to try to figure out when someone has their finger on the scale, so to speak, by using unnatural linking methods or is otherwise spamming to get higher rankings. When this happens, they write a filter of some sort, and redo the SERPs (commonly refered to as an update).

The problem is that each of these filters not only catches out the bad guys, but often catches out honest sites or somewhat optimized sites because your linking pattern or layout or content or something twigged one of their filters. Think of it as being the innocent victim caught in the cross fire between googlebot and black hat SEO guys.

In the rush to squeeze out splogs and bullshit, I am sure that tons of honest and real blogs get blown off all the time.

It's life, google style.

Alex

ah but that's google. If a person were to work a good hardlink strategy and provide comments on other blogs, that in itself is the nature of blogging and it is "google-proofed" so to speak.

I think I need to work on providing better comments on other people blogs... need to set aside some time to do that.

bunky

To me it's creating interest, giving surfers something to come back for. I am sure no expert or exceptional writer, far from it. But one of my more my popular blogs, the one that recieves the most comments and surfer e-mail is one that is about a fictional charactor. Written in first person with daily life stories, sexual related of course, and believable, or at least close I think.

I think blog surfers tend to be more readers rather that just porn surfers looking for a quick jerk. Or blogs filter out between the two. And we all know to keep surfers coming back we need to give them something new or something to think about. From tgp's posting tons of pictures to draw surfers back to blogs that provide interesting text, creating a story or mini stories, drawing the read/surfer in. Look at reality tv, they use big drama, making it near impossible for viewers not to come back, they HAVE to see what happens next.

Course this creates a problem, it takes time to come up with interesting charactors, interesting stories, creating the "draw them in", or making them want to come back. Least it is for me..:)

So many bloggers post similar to tgps, new free porn each day, I know I am guilty of that, but what kind of traffic does that attract? The same tgp type surfers that want the free porn. I believe a good blog filters out those people to get more of the type that is looking for more than just getting off. Then again, it's so much easier and faster to post a pic or a link to a fhg with a quick paragraph, I've done it many times.

Course this is just my two cents..:)

ronnie

One thing I noticed on your blog, and this might just be me, but I found it hard to read and kind of something I did'nt want to read, did not seem good on the eyes, if that makes sense. I think because you have dark text on dark background and all the text is bold. Blogs are suppose to be read, so need to make them easy to read. Least thats my take..:)

ronnie

Bunky, to answer your question, no I wouldn't consider strippedgalleries a splog (but its close) but I also see it as pretty plain and similar to tons of other blogs out there.

splog at it's best is just a nonsense page packed full of links and unreadable text, generated mostly to trick bots into giving decent serps. 99% of them are automated bullshit pages built once and forgotten forever.

What most of use are building is what I would think of as a clog - commercial log. As I mentioned elsewhere, we are trying to gain readers and bookmarkers and therefore traffic to sponsors, and just like a link list or TGP, we provide access to content or galleries or whatever in return for people being so nice as to come and visit us. Our intentions are entirely commercial, and we attempt to make sales.

We do this by talking to people in a human voice of sorts (usually a fake character we have created) that is the one posting. We add a little humor, sometime some links that are not very relevant but are kinda hot, and we attempt to be somewhat entertaining and on point.

strippedgalleries.net is a little hard on the eyes, I agree with ronnie that black text on a dark greyish background doesn't encourage me to read, especially because the pictures and white surrounds are so bright. I personally would darken the background down just a little more and make the text lighter and more readable, which would likely encourage people to read it more. I might also be tempted to put the entire page into a 750 wide table to make it look a little tighter and more interesting, because on my big screen it just seems to run away from me.

As for spam, there are any number of "human test" tools out there that can help you keep out the worst of the spammers, comments are a useful thing to a point (until you become a spammer) but that is all good.

Alex

"clog" oh I love THAT term, Alex!! ROFLMAO it is so appropriate in so many different ways.

One of the things I am noticing about the difference between adult and mainstream blogs is a lack of "community" in adult that mainstream bloggers have. The mainstream ones, especially the "for fun" blogs, tend to visit eachother, link to each other, comment and have actual conversations in the comments, and even have something called "blog carnivals" to help each other out. We in adult don't do hardly any of this...too busy I guess. It may be to our detriment.

Thoughts?

anasporn, the adult community as a rule is set up on the "trade hard links" or "join my top list" or other exchanges that are very direct and to an extent very unnatural. We are also all very competitive, and we don't often cross link one to another in any other method except those two link paths above (and the variation on top lists such as blind links, thumb redirects, etc). We very rarely talk with each other in public in natural terms, everything is hype to sell.

Many bloggers (including myself) are very hesitant to even allow comments. That is a very clear indication that we don't want to talk with people, just talk at them.

Non commercial community blogs get away with it because these people have no other goal than to make their hit counter spin and get nice comments from their friends. There is no profit motive to make people want to keep traffic to themselves, no fear of exposing their readers to other blogs. We fear each other getting the sale so we tend to not be very much into sharing.

With WP 2.0, I am starting to open comments on some of my sites to see what happens. I am doing more cross posting and "link to blog" stuff that seems to set up a comment cross linking which I think would help. I use my personal "what I am doing and how I feel blog" as a source for many of these links, as it is entirely natural for me to link to stuff I am working on.

I am not sure what to do beyond that without it becoming very unnatural.

Alex

Ok good points.

Funny how when a person can look at their own blog and it looks great and easy to read. I have seen plenty of blogs using a three column format and their text is so damn small it freeekin' hurts to read.

But I can now see what you are saying about the bold text and whatnot. If I take the bold off and make the text white instead of black, it should be more readable. If not then I will have to re work the colour scheme... which isn't a big deal.

This little toole is handy for generating colour schemes http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

anyway thanks for the input... Off I go to tinker around with the css.

bunky

For sure this side of the net is all money and reason we dont give out a link without getting something back.

ronnie

And it may also be why we will never turn the blog numbers the mainstream side of the house has...unless you have 100 or 1,000 of your own blogs interlinked into a network, you'll never have the amount of link exchange. But when you get that big...how can you keep them updated and keep them from all sounding the same?

hell of a good point. In that tut i was reading the fellow claimed that he had a generic post and he would edit it to some degree. Even so, it would still look and sound the same.

It is easier to get 50 surfers to 100 diff sites than 5000 to only one. Even so it's still difficult to work with just a few sites when you can only do this part time.

bunky

Which brings you back to the old quality vs quantity thing. If I can convert at 1:200 while the other guy is converting 1:1000, then I only need 1,000 visitors a day to make the same amount of $$$.

Which means in your limited amount of time, your spending your time working your traffic instead of working to update your network of blogs.

Don't misunderstand, I do think "serial" blogging can make you money but, I'm not convinced, that in the long run it will make you any more money than building quality blogs.

walrus, you hit the nail on the head. I have seen the numbers from some of these mainstream blogs, and man, they ain't making shit.

http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/...-pro-for-sale/

These are the numbers for blogging pro - alexa rank around 26k, but only turning $200 revenue a month. That is really, really painful thing to see and shows that they are not turning their traffic into revenue in the slightest. It is not a good situation.

An adult site ranking 26k in alexa would be turning some fairly decent money.

Merely trading around traffic and being nice doesn't make you very much money at all. $200 a month to run a site ranked that high is beer money.

Alex

...hell all I am making at this point is beer money. But then again, it's better than nothing. I know that given the time and patience I will be able to make a go of this full time.

OK while I am here would you guys care to look at http://www.strippedgalleries.net/ again as I have changed the colours and text. I would have liked to have been able to set the template so it doesn't run away on bigger screens, but that will have to come in time. (editing stuff isn't my forte, but hey I am willing to learn.)

bunky

Bunky, you are making beer money but you are making it with only a comparative few visitors... they are making beer money with almost 5k visits per day... yowsa!

I tried to check your site, but the connection is timing out here for some reason.

Alex

k done tinking around with the width... I found out what to edit in the css table... it was set for 100% , now it's at 95%

timing out... bummer. it seems to do that whenever I am editing it.

in the past two months my sites DB and SG have earned me approx $750.00. It's a pretty healthy beer fund I guess.

bunky

I've got a ton of mainstream blog RSS feeds hitting my machine every few minutes, but it's tough to find one adult blog even worth bookmarking. I wonder why?

Alot of webmasters seems to make no distinction between a TGP and a blog. Hey, post a few pics, wrap it with some bullshit spider food and throw a sponsor link in there and I should make a few sales right? Yeay maybe, but that's not a blog.

I also don't believe mainstream bloggers make all that much money, and that would be truely sad if they were desperately blogging to put food on the table; but I'm sure guys like Matt Cutts have other sources of revenue besides their blog :D

I link to other people's sites without a thought on my mainstream blog. With adult blogs, it's "oh, I can't link to this guy I'm gonna create a traffic leak" or "oh, I'll link to you even if I think your site looks like garbage because I want to rank higher in Google." If I find a paysite I dig, I'll think "hey, I want to link to this paysite, where the hell can I find their ref code?"

But this type of shit goes on in the mainstream too, which is one reason guys like John Scott is giving away 10,000 bucks to encourage bloggers to link to non A-List blogs once in a while.

As for strippedgalleries Bunky, I would ditch the dark text. Colors aren't everything, but they get in your way if you can't read what's on the page. Also, I read a few pages of your blog, and it looks to me like you're either talking about a long day at work or posting an ad. If you're going to cover multiple topics, I'd create multiple categories. Last thing -- on one page you're got interracial, masturbation, ebony, and toy content. I would narrow it down a little more.

thanks for the input Halfdeck. Actually I kinda need to keep the text dark. Some parts of the admin section of the site doesn't seem to be affected by what I do with the css table. White text is damn near impossible to read on a light gray background.

That page that you are talking about has a few galleries that fall into those categories... I think that's the only one like that, maybe not.

Soap Box is where I spout off about my life (some of it is BS), and Naked Porn News is where I post latest news on sites and who has been featured. Sometimes I combine a post with both categories. Today I didn't. http://www.strippedgalleries.net/node/165

I have been getting some excellent advice from you guys, thanks for all the help!

bunky

Halfdeck...it seems that Mr John Scott has started a tempest in a teapot on the mainstream side....>evil grin<...wonder what his reaction would be if WE joined in???

Hi Bunky2u,
I think your blog colors look OK, but you should think about using CSS to float your images so the text runs down the side, rather than underneath the images. Will give your Blog a better appearance.

Just my thoughts... Jaron

Not true for me. I linked to Anas panties blog from my main article during superbowl week, of course I'm a steelers fan and they were steelers panties. I link to lukeford.com on occassion when Fayner writes something noteworthy to me.

I'd link to others, but I don't have the time in the day to work two jobs, and maintain my sanity let alone read all the text heavy blogs out there that I know I'd enjoy reading (Walrus' and Boogies to name the two that come to my mind first).

I avoided posting in this thread because when I started blogging, I really made it personal and as time went on I moved away from personal exposition and I'd bet that now some would view my site as sploggy, and I didn't wanted to be labelled as such.

Am I a splog, am I a clog, I don't know. Personally I like to think I lie somewhere in between trying to make money off of my postings and enjoying what I am doing, and sure somedays I just don't feel like posting but feel like I have to anyways, and I come up with something generic. Should I have to fear criticism from my peers because I posted some hack-kneed sales jargon to push one of my favorite sponsors? I guess my hope is my peers will understand me enough not to criticize.

Anyway, there's one depraved Preacher's 2 cents. :D

Preach, I've found my bookmarks jump whenever I post something personal (like a panties shopping trip) and had some great bookmarking during the playoffs, ESPECIALLY with the Steelers panties LOL. Now I am looking for some Cubbies panties for baseball season ;)

Yes, it does take me longer to write my posts, and yes I am making a blog that is "sales-oriented" with a totally different feel to it. It will probably end up being entertaining to some who will bookmark, but I don't intend to put as much time into it as I do my 3 main blogs. Hopefully it will function as a feeder.

Have I stepped over to the dark side of blogging? LOL Naw...go check out my latest post on Ana's Porn Blog and you'll see I'm still being personal and chatty with my readers. If you like what you read, link to it! I follow links back to the blogs they come from and read, and if I find something I like I link to it, sometimes without even telling the blog owner. DO I worry it might be a traffic leak? Not one bit...I know from my server stats my readers return regularly.

I always link to other sites with mypornlinks.com/wordpress/, (damn, I wish I didn't make a wordpress directory when I set it up), because the whole premise of it was to post stuff I found interesting, hence mypornlinks. I used to use it as a link site but a former partner tired of updating it and we changed it. Now that I run it again and blogs came along it makes a great blog domain. I've decided to try to improve my other blogs.