Don’t get me wrong - I love the auto plugin updates. Love ‘em to pieces. But what they did to the write page and manage posts page… it defies logic. It can only be explained by a shift in focus from people who blog on computers to teenagers in Geography class blogging on their iPhones. I wish Wordpress and the teenybops the best of luck together. I’m not switching platforms for now, but only because one day I intend to have sites that need a paid blogging platform, at which point I’ll switch platforms.

So… there is a way to sort posts by author in the new, stupid Wordpress without using the PJW plugin (which works flawlessly, but annoys me by showing up as a plugin that needs updated, but the update takes you to the Contact Form plugin, so if you forget and update, you have to reinstall the whole plugin - plus, I like to use as few plugins as possible). The way to sort posts by author is not, as it was in 2.3.3, to go into the Manage Posts page and use the “authors” drop down. That would be too intuitive. (I’m guessing Wordpress thinks teenybops would be turned off by the idea of group blogs because they’re completely self-centered?)

No, the way to do it in Teenybop Wordpress is:

Go into the Users tab. See your authors’ names? See the number on the far right for how many posts they’ve written? That number is a link! Click the link! And then you’re back at the manage posts page, only with just that author’s posts.

WordPress is brought to you by the Society for What The Hell Is That, the International Tear Your Hair Out League, and the Association of They Did Not Just Do That Oh Yes They Did.

A couple of months ago, I switched domains for Project B-2 Bomber. At first, the traffic stayed high, then it dropped from 20-25k  per month down to about 13k. Reason: Google had kept the PR on the main page, but dumped all the internal PR. They went from sending me 10k hits a month to around 3k.

Here’s the thing. The site’s never been better. The amount of commenters are the same. The inbounds are growing by leaps and bounds. You know who I lost when Google stopped sending as much traffic as it used to? The wrong people.

B-2 constantly gets searches that contain the right words, but the wrong concepts. I’m not going to reveal the topic of the site, but to give a parallel example: Google bots can’t tell Republicans making fun of a Democrat policy from Democrats cheering about their policy. It can’t detect irony. B-2 has a lot of discussion that’s ironic and/or about stuff its visitors object to, and that’s the context Google can’t filter out. It sends me people who are very irate to read what we’re saying, which is not at all what they were after. It’s not doing them anymore good than it’s doing my site.

But who can tell the difference is the crazy amount of bloggers that keep linking every month. New bloggers, all the time. That site gets thousands of people from Blogger and Wordpress and LiveJournal subdomains, because one person will link to us and hundreds will follow that link.

That’s the traffic we want. I know sooner or later Google will reinstate PR and that traffic will come back, and that’s fine. I’m just realizing… I may find I miss this quiet time of getting nothing but quality traffic. No angry emails or confused comments. Just people who want to be there. And there are more coming every day.

• BlogHer. My earnings with them fluctuates by about $50 a month or more according to how many ads they have and how well they’re paying. That was most of the drop.
• People dropped ads. Income from ad space that I sell directly (including featured links on directories) dropped sharply this month, though I did attract a new advertiser through Show Your Ad Here. This didn’t surprise me or frustrate me because I saw it coming. People and businesses are tightening their belts - ads are one place they can afford to make a cut.

I still have big plans in the works which I’m confident are going to turn things around and bring me to big new numbers on the earnings scale. At the moment, one of them is delayed because all the participants (including me) are swamped with other work, and the other is delayed because we’re really trying to get it right and launch it in a big way. You can either launch something fast and tinker for 6 months to get the formula, or you can plan for 6 months and launch it with the formula in place. That’s what we’re trying to do. I think it’ll be well worth the wait.

• It takes a while to get going. Give it at least a month before giving up on it.
• It attracts more “real bloggers” than internet marketing types. You’re more likely to get ads for someone’s online novel or “going green” site than a spammy weight loss site.
• If you have the right site, it can really work for you.

I’m using it on Project B-2 Bomber, which is notoriously hard (for me, anyway) to monetize. It’s only made a couple of bucks so far, but a friend who started using it a couple of weeks before me assured me that at first you only get bids for the minimum amount you set, but after a few weeks people start competing more. Sure enough, this morning saw the bidding start to get competitive. All this despite the fact I’ve rejected a ton of ads for not being very good matches for B-2 (I’m more about protecting the brand on B-2 than making money now, because I have long term plans for that site).

It’s definitely a pretty decent little earner by any standard. What I really like about it, though, is the quality of the ads, and the control you have over them. You can cancel an ad even after it’s started running, and you can send the bidder a note about it anytime - which means finally you can tell a bidder who keeps sending you suggestive banners that you’d be happy to run his ad on your children’s books site if he can provide an ad that doesn’t feature a half-naked girl pole dancing. And since you can choose any size for the banners or text links you sell (all of which are java scripted), you don’t have to give up anymore screen real estate than you feel like.

I haven’t been posting as regularly as I like on Project Mai Tai because moving to a new apartment consumed my life for a few weeks there. But it got a huge, helpful inbound that’s given it a fantastic boost in traffic. This is super awesome, because that’s one of the sites I really hope to make it big with someday.

And Project B-2 Bomber is finally feeling the sting from changing domain names (.info to .com). At first, all my PR transferred and all my traffic kept coming so I thought, “Wow, cool!” Then suddenly the traffic got sliced in about half, and I slowly realized as I watched the numbers come in what had happened: Google zeroed PR everywhere but on the front page, and is sending maybe a quarter the traffic it used to. That was frustrating, but I knew it would be okay - I might have a penalty coming from the .info (if there really is such a thing, as has been speculated recently), this might be a normal hiccup in moving a domain name, etc. The bottom line was, everything is still as it was when Google loved me; they’ll be back.

Then I found out something very interesting.

I got an inbound from someone who sent me several hundred new readers over a few days. This bounced my traffic up by about a fifth of what I’d lost. This confirms that my site has a good variety of inbounds and isn’t really dependent on any one search engine or source of traffic.

It’s so nice to be able to look at a major Google letdown and think, “Eh. They’ll be back. Meanwhile - oh, look at all the other who showed up! Hi, guys!” and forget all about them.

Now the site is suddenly losing its TLA advertisers. And none of its little reprint friends - which do have some PR - are raking in the money either. It may sound strange, but I’m finding this a relief. Because it’s such a temptation to build more of those sites so I have at least some money coming in while I wait for my other sites to take off - the sites I actually think have a future. If these sites aren’t doing so well anymore, the temptation is gone.

I still have to say this, though: we were all idiots to let Google push us around. That whole paid link thing was nothing but an attack on TLA, a competitor who was kicking ass. But we knew that - many of us talked about it. Where we were idiots was in letting that affect how we ran our sites. It’s very clear to me that my sites that got toasted were handpicked by a competitor - I could tell that by the sites they missed which were selling text links, never stopped selling them, and never lost a point of PR. So not only was the whole thing about Google trying to squash a competitor while pretending they had a more “do no evil” motive than that - it was also about us trying to squash each other.

And I’ll go on record right now saying I turned in one site for paid links. Not a site that had anything to do with affiliate marketing, but just this really nasty site full of trolls who attacked another site of mine. Did Google take even a nibble out of their PR7? Oh, lord, no. Interesting, isn’t it?

If I had the whole thing to do over again, I wouldn’t have blinked at Google’s game of chicken. They cannot purge sites from the index for having paid links, because that is the step that would put them over the line and in violation of US monopoly laws. They can reduce visible PR because PR was invented to sell AsWords and if folks are using it to sell other ad products, that’s folks’ problem. But if they exclude you from their directory for doing business with a competitor… that’s not okay by law, and one of Google’s competitors - probably Microsoft, who’s been on the wrong side of monopoly laws itself before - would secretly fund a “grass roots campaign” by a bunch of alleged nobodies and take it all the way to the DoJ.

(For anyone wondering, “Hey, I thought she had a rule against talking about Google!” - I should be more specific about that rule. I refuse to speculate about Google’s latest shenanigans like 90% of the other blogs in this niche do every time Google sneezes. That’s just free PR for them - they feed it to you, and you spit the links right up for them. I won’t do that. But I will occasionally talk generally about Google and how they affect my sites, and what I’ve learned about working for, around or against them. Because that’s something we all have to deal with. The shenanigans are best ignored.

• Project B-2 Bomber had record traffic, which meant really good earnings from BlogHer
• I sold more followable text link ads through Text Link Ads because two months ago I decided several of my sites were worth tanking in Google if they would bring in a little more cash.

To get my earnings to their goal, I could do a couple of different things:

• Build more of the sites I don’t mind tanking in Google, promote them via directories for months and months and months  and sell text link ads on them until they choke and stop bringing in traffic.
• Keep building quality sites that will actually stand the test of time, have a hope in hell of getting real traffic someday, and wait patiently for everything to come together so I actually make money.

I’m taking the second direction - well, mainly. I’ve got a couple of co-blogging projects in the works which I’m hopeful will bring in a lot more money than any three of those sites where I’ve got text links coming in. There’s a part of me that really wants to launch another text link site really quickly, skip all the promotion effort and just see what happens… but given how busy my personal life has been lately, I think it’s better to just hang in there until the other projects start. I’ve already fallen behind a little on Project Mai Tai - no big deal, but not something I want to make a habit of, either.

I’m feeling frustrated, however, because suddenly B-2’s traffic has dropped. This happens every May/June as summertime rolls around - all my sites feel the effect of people having something better to do than surf, but B-2 seems to feel it the most. I keep telling myself to just forget about this because on the other hand that site is pulling in some impressive inbounds now and appearing on some blogrolls that used to be too “good” for it. I’m definitely improving the site’s branding, which is at least as important as traffic for my longterm plan (to get investors to back it in a few years as it launches into a whole new phase).

But I want it all now, of course.

Either way, I feel very good about that site’s future.

But Project Mai Tai is another story. It’s doing okay on traffic - steadily growing, though the overall numbers are still pretty low. It’s also ranking higher than I’d expect on search terms pretty much the minute I put them in the title, which is what B-2 did (so that’s promising). I don’t have a master plan for it, though, and I wish I did. I have some scattered thoughts that might lead me to a master plan, however:

Networking blogs together

Something I may want to consider in the future is forming a blog network with some other people. I’m slowly brewing a couple of team projects, which should give me a feel for that style of working with others. If I could by myself write 10 blogs that all fit well with the brand I’m trying to create, that’d be great, but who has time? But if you and some others you trust can assemble a few blogs and network them together… well, I think at first you’d see a big boost for the smaller sites, and then the whole network would gain momentum and hit a tipping point.

Monster domains

On the other hand, you can do this all on one domain, which is especially good if you want to keep more control. Set up blogs in subfolders or subdomains for some other writers, let them put their own ads on (or you control the ads and pay everyone according to an agreed-upon setup). The advantage to having multiple domains would be you have multiple chances of getting in good with the search engines - if they fall in love with one domain, that link love spreads to the others. The advantage to having it all on just one domain is the mountain of content it’ll contain, which the SEs generally love.

Hmm.

It spits a huge block of code into your source, between the bot and your content. Go check your source code, if you use it. See that? See how far down your content starts? I don’t know why more people don’t realize this matters for SEO. I see a lot of templates and Wordpress themes that are supposedly SEO-friendly which also put dozens of lines of code between the bots and your content. This is basic SEO, people: your content needs to be as close to the top of the source page as you can get it.

I searched for a lighter solution and found it: Link A Dink. Now, Link A Dink won’t build your Amazon links for you. It’s basically a sophisticated version of search and replace: you pick a phrase, then you type in the precise code, including the link code, you want to replace it. You can also use Javascript, which is pretty cool, as long as you strip any returns out of the code - Alinks doesn’t work with Javascript. But Alinks did require your users to have Javascript, while Link A Dink doesn’t. And finally, Link a Dink doesn’t generate tables and bloat your database. Lots of advantages here.

I’m a writer with a creative type personality. That means normal, routine jobs are such a poor fit for me, I was 25 before I realized they weren’t actually designed by a supernatural force bent on destroying me. I always wanted to make a living full-time as a writer. But I had to earn a living while pursuing that dream, and a few years ago I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere: jobs were sucking the creative spirit out of me, so the writing suffered in quality and quantity. And I had no social life. I was miserable.

At some point I realized you could make a living on the internet. At that point, I didn’t even know about the snake oil promises to earn millions in your underwear. I was thinking in terms of web design - this was in the 90’s when that looked like an ever-growing field where you could easily earn a good living. I started teaching myself HTML and CSS and all that stuff. I bought Dreamweaver and Fireworks. I designed ugly but fast-loading websites, and slowly realized I needed a lot more training and far more expensive tools to make a real living at this.

I don’t remember how I first heard about affiliate marketing. I do remember it was 1999, and I thought that was the answer. Why sell a service that means work when you can sell for a commission? And back then, it was insane - I remember About.com had an affiliate program through CJ, and I got a real, bona fide email from an About.com employee named “Mary” confirming that yes, I could sit there clicking my own PPC link to About.com as much as I wanted because their real goal was to get tons of hits. (Yeah. I think of that every time there have been debates about PPC, click fraud and Adsense.)

Besides - and this is important - if you earn commissions rather than dealing with clients, you can live anywhere. You don’t have to pay to live in or near a city full of clients. You can move to the boonies and still make ends meet.

Anyway, I straggled along as various things happened in my personal life. All I knew was if my day job prevented me writing well enough to quit the damn thing, the least I could do was work on making a living online, which might someday free me from the job and give me time to write. Even if it didn’t, I’d rather be in business for myself doing something creative instead of doing a lot of meaningless tasks that has more to do with companies’ egos than actually getting anything accomplished. Also, I have never been a fan of the modern urban lifestyle. I don’t want an SUV - I want veggies I grew myself. Nothing tastes like really fresh organic produce grown in rich soil out of doors like nature intended. Trust me - that’s the kind of food I grew up on, thanks to my grandparents. 

For several years, I suffered from not knowing what I was doing and not knowing where to get help, and also from thinking small. In 2004, I met a few people who actually helped me quite a bit, and since then I’ve met more in the form of bloggers in this niche that I trust. As for thinking small, I think I’ve really only recently overcome that. I grew up below the poverty level and learned how to use frugality to enjoy life more (as opposed to being miserly), so ironically that frugality limited my perception of what I could/should be earning. I was almost intimidated by the idea of making thousands of dollars a month at this stuff.

And that’s where I’m at now. My goal with internet marketing is to escape the rat race and the expensive city I live in with a portable income.  I want to move somewhere that’s less congested and allows for living a sustainable life with solar panels and composting. I want to buy an acre or so of land with a modest house on it and start a garden (I may need to hire or barrter for help from an expert at first). Also, I’ll need insurance coverage, which will be an additional expense (whereas most everything else will reduce my cost of living).

And maybe then I’ll have time and headspace for my writing. But even if I don’t, I’ll enjoy what I’m doing so much more than the lifestyle I have now.

So what are you looking to get out of online earning?