Is there money in blogs?

[Ms Naughty]

Blogging is definitely time consuming. I probably spend about an hour a day on my blogs - researching, writing, maintaining. I guess I could be making a free site in that time.

It is worth it because it suits a strategy. Through blogging I've set myself up as an expert by reporting on news about women and porn, with an occasional plug for products added. Today that's paid off because I got a nice plug for several of my sites on Fleshbot and Scanner. Nice traffic, nice hardlinks.

With the current concern over the devaluing of reciprocal links, a blog is a great way to get those much-needed one way links. But the trick is that you have to earn them, and that does take time. An advertising-rich splog won't get them, unless it's somehow really amusing.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by grandmascrotum

With the current concern over the devaluing of reciprocal links, a blog is a great way to get those much-needed one way links. But the trick is that you have to earn them, and that does take time. An advertising-rich splog won't get them, unless it's somehow really amusing.

We could try doing a trackbacking club kind of thing, to increase the links coming to each other.

Boogie suggested that a while back. I had no idea of how one even did a trackback then, ha ha.

[Jim]

Originally Posted by Bill

We could try doing a trackbacking club kind of thing, to increase the links coming to each other.

Boogie suggested that a while back. I had no idea of how one even did a trackback then, ha ha.

How would that work Bill?

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Jim

How would that work Bill?

Well, the theory is pretty straightforward. We write posts that include permalinks to individual post pages on each others blogs.

Blogs with two many links to the index, and too few to interior pages, fit a pattern that will get them knockedback as spam (which is because they are spam ;-} ).

How to organize it is the problem - I think Boogie never felt there was the right group of bloggers around to make it work. But there are a few more bloggers now. Maybe we could figure it out.

The "trackbacking club" concept is that basically we 'buy in' by saying we'll make, say, three trackbacks to each others blogs in a month. So if there are 5 people, in a month we have to include trackbacks to other blogs about 15 times a month (that sounds too much, maybe make it two or one a month).

But, the whole subject deserves it's own thread. Maybe we can start one sometime soon.

[Halfdeck]

How would that work Bill?

It's not gonna work.

Cheap trackback links have very little weight SEO wise and if you get aggressive then the network becomes exposed. You need a link from a trusted site to rank high - I asked 3 bloggers link to a post of mine - one link from a TBPR 6 blog but it didn't have much impact. I asked a well-known SEO to link to me from the domain root of a few of his old, trusted sites and that boosted my ranking from 9th to 3rd.

A group of splogs linking to each other is not gonna outrank tens of thousands of recip links pointing to LLs. Why? Because you can only trump quantity with quality - so unless you're ready to publish 10,000 posts and trackback every one of them its not gonna happen. Now, you can build up link popularity that way, but higher PR just by itself won't translate into higher rankings. Plus if you have only a dozen bloggers swapping links the entire network will be flagged as spam or links devalued for excessive reciprocal linking, especially if you're blogging shit no one wants to link to in the first place. If you do it with a real blog, you're just going to piss off RSS subscribers. If you avoid that by linking less aggressively, you minimize your ROI.

[Bill]

It sure won't grab any top positions for good keywords.

But splogs and 99.4% of adult blogs ain't gonna do that anyway, and anybody who thinks they will is gonna be dissapointed.

Splogging and adult blogging isn't an "I'm gonna get TONS of great google traffic." strategy in the first place.

It's a long tail strategy, a low cost way to generate pages, each with a very small possibility of catching a surfer.

If you've already decided to create a few splogs, you should know this.

There are millions of "real" crappy blogs that never get a trackback, so it won't take a humongous effort to do enough trackbacking to lift an adult splog into the realm of shitty unimportant blogs that might get a longtail position.

Then, every adult blogger should have their "best" blogs, with the most original writing and flavor - and their own strategy for getting traffic to those "best" blogs. Those have an even better chance of getting longtail traffic, and could benefit from a few trackbacks too.

If your point is, there's no point in making splogs, you're right, there is no point, and everybody should stop.

If your point is, once you've made a splog, you should do nothing, stare vacantly into space, and dream about making a mainstream bizop blog and selling ad space on it, then go ahead, do it.

I imagine you already understand what's going to happen to a shitty little se domain with all the incomings pointing to the index alone.

[Halfdeck]

If your point is

My point is trackbacks are not gonna help you unless you do it en masse - and if you do do it en masse those links will be devalued. A bigger point is that at the end of the day, bending over backwards to please Google isn't going to win a blogger any brownie points. Build a blog for surfers - Google traffic is just cream on top. Lastly, if you want to build traffic off thousands of long tails publishing stuff no one is ever gonna bother reading, why not just buy a spam script? Even spending 30 minutes on chasing a low traffic long tail just for the sake of traffic to me is way too much work.

The real strength of a blog is what Karen said - getting organic links from sites like Fleshbot - sex blogs is probably the only "sector" in adult that's freely linking - and those are the type of links that will boost your rankings.

[SaucyPanties]

Originally Posted by Bill

We could try doing a trackbacking club kind of thing, to increase the links coming to each other.

Boogie suggested that a while back. I had no idea of how one even did a trackback then, ha ha.

I have done this with a couple of people. A 300 word plus article including links to the other persons blog in questions but again, you really need to do it as an ABC link unless that is what you are suggesting? Five blog owners, each writes two articles about two of the other owners in the groups site?

I like the idea of Useless Warrior and Walrus, you just give them a front index page link and then submit articles which they link to. When and if Google start mixing it up again I feel sure that blogs with more links to their 'articles' will weigh heavier.

[Halfdeck]

I don't blog all that often except on my mainstream blog. I got a post doing $100-$200 per pay period, but besides that I'm not seeing much in terms of consistent sales. I hear there are some high-profile mainstream bloggers making ~$15K/mo by selling ad-spots, to get to that I'd probably need a few thousand subscribers and learn how to write... I might see a good ROI if I paid someone else to blog, but right now the main reason I blog is just to get my thoughts out there. If my objective was to increase revenue, writing a blog post would be last on my list.

This guy (ok his blog is mainstream, but so what?), on the other hand, started monetizing his blog in Sep 2006 making $352.94/mo. In Jan 2007 he made $3440.66. Having 3895 subscribers (according to feedburner) doesn't hurt either. 3K/mo isn't a ton of money, but its probably more than enough to pay for the mortgage.

http://www.johnchow.com/making-money...-january-2007/