Comment sections always have spammers even if you have all the protections in place, you’re still going to get them. Yes, even if you’re using recaptcha or similar. People from India are paid to solve these captchas. When Web 2.0 started, it really helped out spammers, because now they had tons of places to spam.

On a lower traffic site like mine, 99% of comments are spam. I do get real visitors, but they don’t really comment, as expected. So in my situation, it’s easier just to turn them off if a post is older than 7 days. If the site starts getting thousands and thousands of unique visitors per day I might enable them again. That’s not real likely with my current writing patterns and keywords, but who knows. I just write what I feel like on here and I’m not targeting anything.

Dear customer!

We failed to deliver the postal package which was sent on the 18th of December in time
because the recipient’s address is wrong.
Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our department.

United Parcel Service of America.

Some say FedEx some say DHL, some say USPS, seriously guys just knock it off. Obviously they have a ton of mail servers with different IP’s and keep cloaking their mailing addresses. I’ll look into it further if I get the time.

Not a terrible attempt though, I’m sure they’re getting a lot of people installing their trojan. They have the exe packed pretty well to avoid anti-virus and have it cloaked to look like an excel file. No doubt my email was just harvested from this site so I’m going to switch up my email some more.

What I do when I’m sitting at 3/10 QS is split test my3-5 text ads and work on the LP to maximize CTR on it. I spend something like $32 on the campaign for 32 clicks. Not a good deal, but the next day I deactivate poor performing ads and keep the one with the highest CTR and usually at that point, my keywords are sitting at 7/10 QS. At that point I can sometimes lower the bid all the way from $1 to $.10.

QS can REALLY affect your ROI. The lesson here is just to ALWAYS split test text ads and get a high CTR going on, because even if you start out with a high QS, if you don’t split test and get a high CTR your QS will drop. CTR IS the most important factor. I rarely pay attention to anything else. Then you optimize the LP for CTR. (To the offer)

Just a bit of AdWords advice.

Lots of people are picking these up for typos if you look at Facebook.cm or MySpace.cm they seem to go to some sort of CPA offer.

I think I’ll setup some email on Dylan.cm and forward it to my technologyinsanity address. When talking to people, it would be a lot easier to give out. Other than that, I might setup some kind of web page on it, but right now it just forwards to TechnologyInsanity. It’s kind of hard to get Dylan dot anything they seem to be going for over $1K for most other domains. I don’t know if Dylan dot cm is worth above $105, but it’s possible.

You might be able to still snag some good ones, mainly because people are afraid of buying this ccTLD, plus the registration fee is quite high.

However, there was quite a few dot cm domains that fetched a high price, check this out: Dot CM Auctions. (however, these prices are VERY low in comparison of what the dot com versions would go for.. I think Sex.com would go for millions.)

If you’re wondering why it is dot CM, it stands for the African country Cameroon.

Even if this site did have traffic, again the income would be laughable. So eh… Entrecard is a good enough source of traffic to bring some readers I guess. It’s also possible I’ll get a few links for top dropper day or whatever, which will help SEO a little, anyway.

First of all you need a traffic source. No I’m not talking about crappy Entrecard, untargeted, rubbish traffic that’s not worth ANYTHING. How do you get the good traffic?

Well, you can go the Adsense route and just pay for your traffic. Wait! Pay for traffic? Are you insane? We’ll get to this later. You’re actually not going to be losing money if you set things up correctly. Adsense is not something to play with or take lightly. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories across the net of how people lost tons of money by not optimizing campaigns correctly. I’m not going to go into full fledged detail about adsense, that would take forever, and there’s a lot of reading material out there if you want to get involved with it. Keyword elite is a decent tool for adwords, you can check it out here.

The second option is SEO. This is where we generate a bunch of keywords with adwords tool or similar, then analyze all of them. How? I just look at the traffic for that keyword and analyze it with Market Samurai. It saves me tons of time, but you can do it the manual way if you want. By manual I mean get a plugin for FireFox called SEOQuake. You need to analyze backlinks to that page for that keyword and look at if the site is even targeting that keyword. Does the site have the keyword in the title? The URL? The description? The header? If it does then it’s most definitely targeting that keyword You’ll need to analyze the strength of the links pointing to that page as well. Generally more links = harder to rank. Targeting the keyword + a lot of links = harder to rank. I could probably go on and on about SEO for ages, this is just basic stuff.

The absolute best way is to combine both!

Now you have some traffic, how do you monetize it? FORGET ADSENSE,  PROJECTWONDERFUL, ADGITIZE, and OTHER CPC. All that stuff is really useless if you want to monetize your traffic FULLY. If you thought that stuff was going to make all your money then you’re mistaken. You can leave that stuff up, but it shouldn’t be your main focus, ever.

The best way, by far is affiliate products. Think clickbank, CPA, and being a regular affiliate of various products. What’s your niche? What would they be interested in? For example, if you have a blog about technology (tee hee ) then if you recommend any kind of software or hardware that you can be an affiliate of, don’t be afraid to plug in your link. No one cares, the product is good to begin with correct? So if they’re going to buy it, why not buy it through the person that spent time to write the post related to the product? Anyway, if you find it’s converting with SEO traffic or other traffic sources that just seem to visit that page, you might want to add in adsense. Run some traffic to that page with some keywords and see if you can get a decent ROI. (Return On Investment, which means you make more then you spend.) You’re basically turning your blog pages into landing pages. I don’t do this really, but I’m sure it would work fairly well.

Now, I was reading John Chow’s blog and stumbled on this post: http://www.johnchow.com/how-i-make-40000-a-month-from-a-blog/. I watched that entire video, this guy really has it down and I really see how it works, and it works well. Basically what he does is try to get every visitor to his site he can to sign up on his email list with Aweber. He basically runs down through some steps about setting up your blog and monetizing it. The tools and services he recommends in his guides he’s an affiliate of. He just sends 1 email a week going through the guide. So, he’s being helpful and making money at the same time. This method would work well for any niche really, watch the video it’s a really nice system. He uses pay per click campaigns to just get people to sign up for his email list. He’s already calculated how much each visitor is worth and how much he can spend per click to get a decent ROI.

This is a very generic guide, I’m just trying to wake everyone up from their dream of making thousands by just throwing up an adsense banner and writing blog posts. That’s not how this game works, if you really want to make money with your blog you need to think outside the box, implement your own methods really and investigate opportunities. What I’m getting at is to properly monetize a blog, you basically have to be an Internet Marketer. Nothing in life is really that easy, this is no different. Wake up guys

Side note: I’m going to set up an Internet Marketing blog really soon so I don’t bore my tech audience with this stuff

As I said, I do enjoy blogging about this and that here and there so that’s why the posts keep coming

Entrecard really doesn’t interest me anymore – I mean look at some of the top blogs on there they have some serious OCD over Entrecard. In my opinion, it’s like artificially inflating your stats. People are only subscribing and posting comments all the time because you’re on top of Entrecard. Would they be there if you stopped dropping and advertising on Entrecard? I doubt it. So these are in a way not real comments or subscribers

My plan is to let people become subscribers IF they want to, and comment IF they want to. I’m not DOING anything to get them to comment or subscribe. That’s the way I want it. I don’t have any dreams to become a “ProBlogger” or anything like that. I have no dreams of becoming rich off my blog either. Most of the people at the top of EC have that dream stuck in their head and can’t get rid of it.

Me, yea I make money online, but I do not make money from this blog. Well maybe a little, like $80/mo, nothing to brag about. Pays for my hosting and a little more so that’s great The real point here is – if you want to make money from your blog, don’t even bother with Entrecard. Search engine traffic is the only way you can monetize. Maybe possible if you’re really really sticking to a specific niche all the time and all your readers would be interested in all the products you’re talking about. It would have to be laser targeted though.

I’m not dropping Entrecard from the site yet, people can continue to advertise on my blog if they want

First of all, many of the “top” Entrecard sites rely almost 100% on Entrecard traffic. Not all of them, just most of them. Entrecard traffic is so poor, it’s almost not worth having. This is the main reason you will see me drop off in the listings on Entrecard and then bounce back up every once in awhile. Sometimes I feel like I want to meet other bloggers out there and have them visit my site.

Over time, I have found a few people that do visit my blog even when I don’t drop. This is a very small number though. Most of my comments come from Entrecard as they are ready to drop them every once in awhile. My traffic from the search engines is pretty silent. I know they’re there because they make me money. Yea, they’re the ones clicking through my targeted ads you see here. I didn’t just throw them up for no reason, they’re targeted for the search phrases bringing this site traffic.

Back to Entrecard. They’re drop and go traffic mostly, and yea more active on the comment side. They view one page and leave. I have monitored my search engine traffic however and they generally explore a few pages before leaving.

So which one is higher quality? Obviously the search engine traffic is higher quality, and more interested in my site overall, even though they’re not comment happy like Entrecard. Most of the comments are just to get extra traffic to their site or free advertising. I’ve had a lot of requests from members of Entrecard to commit click fraud. Perhaps they don’t understand that the ads on my site are not click based. Except for the in-text advertising from InfoLinks. I don’t get why they would even want to do this since it’s only about $.02-$1 or something.

However, there is a plus side to Entrecard, you get to meet bloggers from all around. It’s kind of interesting, but most of them are after monetizing their blog and that doesn’t happen unless you have TARGETED traffic. Just throwing junk traffic at advertisements is not going to work. I don’t care how much traffic you throw at them, it’s not going to work. Targetted traffic is 1000X more valuable for monetization even if you only have say 10unique a day from a keyword. However, Entrecard is a bloggers paradise so perhaps you could try to advertise something related to blogging. The issue is that 80% or so don’t even stop to look at your site to even notice the advertisement since they’re in “drop mode”.

Adgitize

A possible monetization strategy, however I have made barely anything from this program, and to tell you the truth if I could rank for another “money” keyword I’d make 100X the amount I make from Adgitize. It’s almost worthless as far as monetization goes. Why do I keep it up? I know a lot of bloggers use this service so I’m being nice It’s another generator of basically “garbage” traffic. Not targeted, just someone thinks your logo looks neat, clicks it and then leaves most likely. It’s a waste of time and effort to bother with this too much, unless you’re just looking for a few comments here and there.

ProjectWonderful

Again, by me running this advertisement service I’m just being nice. It costs $.10 cents a day to advertise on my blog is that too much? It seems so. Every once in awhile I see an advertisement show up, but not very often. The Internet marketing side of me thinks this could be a cheap way to get clicks to offers by sneaking around the sites Alexa page to see what keywords it’s ranking for and what kind of offer/landing page I could promote on these websites Haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll get to it eventually. Lot cheaper than Adwords, but then again I have to figure out the targeting/keywords by hand and come up with an appropriate advertisement for the offer/landing page.

I haven’t seen anyone do this yet which is surprising, maybe I’m letting out a secret by mentioning this.

Conclusion

If you want to make money with your blog, you have to rank for keywords and insert appropriate advertisements. For this blog, I only promote products I support fully. I’m not even specifically targeting keywords, I just look to see what comes up and what is possible to monetize, what’s more I’m directing them to what they want anyway so I’m helping them while they help me. Nothing bad about that at all.

If you want just random comments from other people that own blogs or possibly some readership by all means use Entrecard, Adgitize, and ProjectWonderful. It’s also somewhat useful for link building to be part of the Entrecard community. Sort of an easy “fast start” to get your site indexed and grab some backlinks. I fully support EC in that nature. It’s very good for that. I think this site still needs more backlinks but I have too many projects to focus soley on SEO for this website.

Most of this is from an Internet Marketers point of view, and maybe not towards someone that just enjoys blogging and comments. So it’s not really “junk” traffic if you’re just looking for that. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy blogging obviously or else I wouldn’t be posting here all the time. I also enjoy having contact with some of my readers.

I still wasn’t completely convinced that Google was doing evil. I mean I had used Google for years back when I wasn’t a webmaster or affiliate marketer. No complaints. It seems like when you start to get involved working with Google that things go down hill. I mean, the user base thinks everything is great, because they don’t have to talk to Google or associate with them in any way.

Note: All of the following are owned by Google if you didn’t know already.

YouTube

Doing a little poking around, there are massive complaints from people that actually upload videos to YouTube now that it’s owned by Google. They have some issues with randomly deleting accounts and not giving warnings, also leaving the user no easy way to contact them besides phone or snail mail. You had better not bother, because they are known to just ignore you

Whether your videos are copyrighted or not, if they don’t like you, you’ll be purged.

Blogger

You want to know why I will never blog or have a website based off of blogger? They will delete your entire blog and all your work if they don’t like you A lot of the time it is related to violation of their TOS but I’ve found instances where there was no violation of TOS and the blog was deleted. Myself, I will never ever run a blog on a “free” blogging account. I like to have confidence that it will always be there. I might be even more extreme though since I don’t even trust shared hosts. I run my websites off of my VPS.

Google ranked WORST in privacy

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070612/google-ranked-worst-in-privacy/

Conclusion

Maybe I’m just rambling here, and maybe Google actually does “no evil” however, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Do you trust Google? (I realize the irony in these videos being hosted on YouTube )