Purrfect Domains

Yeah, I know, It’s been over a year since I last took the time to sit down and write something here.  There are a lot of reasons why this is however I’m not going to go into them because I doubt that anyone really wants to know all those oh so gory details.  Suffice it to say that I’ve been busy with a number of things that had to take priority.

Oh I suppose that I could have taken a few minutes here and there to write something however it wouldn’t have been very good or focused because my mind was on other things.

You see, When I started this blog project, I decided that this blog would stand on it’s content and only on it’s content.  I would not use it for writing the kind of inane nonsense posts that exist only to serve as a poor excuse to include a link that I’ve been paid to place.  I’ve written thousands of such posts on other blogs and I don’t think I actually like any of them.  Few, if any, of them have any real meaningful content.

It’s true that I wanted this blog to generate an income but that was never intended to be it’s primary focus.  The purpose of this blog is to be a place where I write actual real content, be it about blogging, SEO, my opinions about whatever topic interests me at the moment and so on.

Since I have managed to write myself into the subject of “paid blogging” and the paid links that it is inevitably all about, I’ll say something about it.

DON’T

Seriously.  Don’t get sucked into it.  I once let myself believe it was the way to go and while I made a little money from it, I also dragged several otherwise good blogs down into the mud where they now get less than 50 page views per month and almost no advertising clicks.

There are plenty of companies that will pay a blogger anywhere from fifty cents to five or even ten dollars to write posts that exist specifically for the purpose of including a link to an advertiser’s web site.

They do this to generate traffic to their sites and to gain better rankings in the search engines.  For most blogs participating in this kind of work, they’re only looking for links that search engine spiders will follow back to their sites and improve rankings.  This is because most blogs, unless they actually get several tens of thousands of views per month, simply cannot generate enough traffic to be worth spending money on.  They will however be more than happy to spend five bucks on a link that gets included in a post.

However while five bucks here and there is welcome (I know *I* welcome it quite a bit), the end result is that sooner or later (usually sooner) the search engines, Google in particular, will notice the trend of links and before you realize it your blog is penalized.

Suddenly your blog loses ranking in search which means that you’ll get less and less traffic from search engines.  This is when you discover that people using search engines to look for content about the topic you write about were a major portion of the traffic coming to your blog.  It’s also the lion’s share of the people that end up clicking on your advertisements.

Your page rank drops to zero which means that fewer sites will be at all interested in linking to you because in spite of the fact that pagerank is not nearly as important as some would have you believe even these days, many still use it as a measure of whether a site is worth linking to.

Instead of making the mistake that I made and going down the road of paid links, concentrate instead on writing the best content you can.  Be informative, be entertaining, and visitors and advertising clicks will take care of themselves.

If I had done this from the beginning then those blogs would now be generating a decent income, at least $300 to $400 per month and I would not have the financial problems that I do now.

Learn from my mistake.  Don’t do this to yourself and your blogs.