It’s really strange and interesting at the same time how things can happen. This morning I woke up and thought about branding yourself or your website and how much I like talking about it. This led me to ask myself an important question: “Am I full of shit?”. This is a very honest question to ask and I think you should ask yourself very often as you can look at things from a different angle. What that made me think of is: “What if I stop advertising what I am or my brand? Could it be possible to have no brand, still bring visitors and have a certain feeling of success?” (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now and it really obsesses me. Do you sometimes have the feeling your online journey won’t bring anything good to this world? I am not talking about blogging or running a website for a purpose or to give tips and tricks on a specific subject, I’m talking about building websites or blogs on a subject you have absolutely no clue about just to get money through AdSense or whatever affiliate program? (more…)

I thought about leaving the body of this article blank and just let the title speak for itself, but I thought it would look like I’m being lazy. I seriously think the title says it all, but let’s elaborate on the subject. Before we go any further, I want to say that this article mostly applies to people building a business with their website or blog and being serious about establishing a personal brand. (more…)

I really want to talk about the fear of taking action today. While I don’t know if I can call this “fear”, there is something holding a lot of people from taking actions and it is the main reason I think some people will rise faster or reach success while others won’t.

The step by step guide to success

Why do you think ebooks are so popular? I’m not talking about the ebook you write and give for free just to get more subscribers to your newsletter (By the way, if you have a newsletter, please make it interesting!), I’m talking about 5, 10, 100$ ebooks sold with the help of ugly (but very effective) landing pages. Also, why step by step articles and step by step guides are so popular? Why the hell do advertisements like “You can become rich in three easy steps! If a 15 years old can do it, you too can!” work so well?

I say it’s because most people want to have success overnight and most people don’t want to work. Trying to sell a “success package” with a sales pitch like “You’ll have to work your ass off and sleep 4 hours per night for the next year to MAYBE get some sort of success” probably won’t work even if that’s the reality. I don’t know a single person who made money online overnight without hard work.

Anyway, you already know you have to work hard so let’s get back on track. So we know people buy these “Make money overnight” packages, but do they really take action?

Risk of failure

I think the main reason some reach success and some don’t is the fear to fail. For example, let’s take a “success package” detailing how you can make a million dollar within three months by investing 25,000$. Let’s say there’s a pretty well detailed way on how you can convert that 25,000$ into a million dollar. Are you going to take action? Are you going to invest 25,000$ to build that million dollar? Would you actually take a 25,000$ loan because you know you can convert it into a million dollar? Most people won’t. Why? Because of the “What if it doesn’t work?”. If it works, you get yourself a million dollar, but if it doesn’t work you just lost 25,000$.

On a smaller scale

This is a pretty extreme example and I personally don’t think I would take the risk of  losing 25,000$ I don’t have, but let’s transpose this to a smaller scale. Are you ready to take some small risks? You know, I think it takes money to make money, but it doesn’t have to be a lot. By small risks, I’m talking about a small 10$ or 20$ here and there that could help you make 20 or 40$ after a couple of months. You’re not experiencing the results right away and it takes some time, but converting 10$ into 20$ is 100% ROI.

As an example, I bought OIO publisher (Shamelessly putting an affiliate link here) this month to manage the ads on frogstr.com and I will also be using it on other websites. OIO publisher (John Chow get out of this body) is 30$ with a promotional code (I used “johnchow”) and that’s what I paid for it. At the beginning of the month, I didn’t have a single clue if I would sell advertisements here, but I decided to take that 30$ and take a small risk. You know what? It’s already paid, a little less than a month later. The next months will be 100% profit and I can only see the amount of money to growing.

You see, when I say taking risks it has nothing to do with investing 25,000$. You’ll make some good investments and some bad investments, but in the end if you invest wisely it usually pay off.

Experiment

Taking risks can also mean just wasting your time. My first ever online revenue was through Google Adsense, but do you think it happened overnight? I actually tried a couple of niches and spent a lot of time building non-profitable websites before getting things right. I didn’t invest money, but I invested a couple of hours of my time every week without having a single clue if I was going to make money out of it!

Then I started making 0.10$ a day, then 0.20$ and eventually over 10$ a day. It’s important to accept that making 0.10$ a day for a month or two is actually OK and that eventually by working the same amount of time it’s going to be possible to double that amount every month.

Moderate risk taker

I’m a  moderate risk taker. I don’t want to ruin my life by investing 10,000$ I don’t have, but I’m ready to invest some money here and there. It’s also important to consider that for some, 10,000$ might be a small investment: it’s relative to the amount of money you make and the amount of money you’re ready to invest usually grow with the revenues you’re making online.

Some have big balls and don’t fear losing it all. Good for them and good for you if you’re one of them! I really admire that because you really maximize you chances of making money, but you’re also maximizing your chances of losing it all unfortunately.

Take the risks

What I wanted to say was that if you don’t take any risks, not much will happen. These risks don’t have to be related to money: it can also be your time or anything you personally consider a risk.

You know, a lot of bloggers want to be at the top, but aren’t ready to take the same risks the big guys took.

I am not going to make friends with that one for sure. As most of you know, I published an article last week about how you could artificially inflate or fake your Feedburner subscriber count and strongly advised you not to do it for obvious reasons. Now, do you think I would let you guys get away with it that easy? Of course not!

Wake up!

By exposing how easy it was to fake the subscriber count, I guess I wanted to say a little something to every advertiser out there: “Wake up!”. If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not an advertiser you are wrong because the minute you comment on other blogs, you advertise your website. Advertising doesn’t mean paying money for an ad spot: to me it means having your brand displayed elsewhere. What I am about to say does apply to paid advertisement, but I’ll explain why it does apply to you also.

The main reason I think people are faking their RSS Subscriber count is to sell advertisements or reviews for more money. You know, some people will ask 25 or 30$ a month for an ad on their website simply because the feedburner chicklet shows 600 subscribers: it’s a common thing. Of course, you can check out some Alexa stats to make sure that number is real, but ShoeMoney has an Alexa Rank of 101,291 which makes me think Alexa is mostly crap. I also have another blog getting about 50 times more traffic than this blog with a crappy Alexa Rank as well. If we can’t really rely on Alexa Rank  – and I’ve talked about it in the past – it all comes down to the Feedburner subscriber count, right? Well it pisses me off because a lot of bloggers fake it and there is NO, absolutely NO return on investment when advertising on their blogs. It’s important for every advertiser out there to know what the real numbers are and I’m about to show you how (mostly).

I hope advertisers will read this because it will help them maximize their return on investment (ROI). The same applies to you, the average blogger with not so much money to invest in advertisement. I want everybody to make the wisest choice when it comes to advertisement and trusting the Feedburner chicklet is probably the worst decision of all.

I don’t pay for advertising, how does this apply to me?

You comment on blogs, you advertise. Whether or not you pay for it, every single time your link appear on a blog, it’s called advertising. Now, why does it matter? When you comment on blogs showing 600 subscribers, you’re actually making that blog a little more powerful because you’re advertisers more reasons to think the blog is active with real readers.

Can’t we use comments as a metric?

Unfortunately no, a lot of popular blogs out there don’t receive a lot of comments even if they have an impressive REAL number of subscribers. Take John Cow for example, he doesn’t receive 50 comments on every post, but he has a pretty good subscriber count and pretty good traffic. It’s a good indication, but we can’t use it as a very good metric.

Google Reader is the key

Not many people know that with Google Reader, you can get the number of subscribers subscribed via Google Reader for a particular feed! It doesn’t show you the real numbers because it only displays the number of subscribers subscribed using Google Reader, but this can give us a pretty good estimate. Where is that feature? It’s hidden a little bit, but when you select a particular feed in your Google reader, you will see a little “Show details” link and this link is the key! As an example, here’s are feed details for The Net Fool:

How can this help me get the real numbers?

Let’s do some maths here and compare the Google Reader count with the Feedburner chicklet on some blogs I have in my Google Reader:

I tried to include some well known sub 1000 blogs as well as some bigger blogs like Dosh Dosh, ShoeMoney and John Cow. There’s only 7 blogs in the list as I only took some blogs from my Google Reader and didn’t do an extensive search for feeds. While some might say it’s not that much and we can’t really get any statistics out of that, just check your Google Reader and you’ll notice it’s around 25% for a lot of blogs.  So you guys can basically do your own investigation, but you get the big picture and you know where I’m going with this.

What’s a “normal” ratio?

You’re the judge on that one, I don’t want to go out and say “Anybody under 10% is a cheater!”, I just want to raise a flag. I strongly encourage you to go through your list of feeds in Google Reader and check who looks suspicious. I unsubscribed to A LOT of feeds, especially in the MMO niche because of that and trust me, I know who’s faking it out there. I won’t point the finger at anyone as you’re all able to figure it out on your own.

I also want to point out that anybody with 300 Feedburner Subscribers and 15 Google Reader Subscribers is extremely suspicious. But as I said, you’re the judge.

Contests brings the ratio down

BS. While I agree contests are extremely popular and one of the requirements to get entries is to subscribe by email, I don’t think it would impact the count that much. I think most people will unsubscribe after the contest and subscribe to the feed via a reader if they like the blog. Even if people don’t unsubscribe, I’m not sure it can cause the ratio to go THAT down. The Net Fool ran a lot of contests and still has a pretty decent ratio. John Cow ran a lot of contests and has a pretty low ratio, but with 10,000 subscribers it really is a different game. We all know John Cow is getting traffic so there’s no question there.

I’m not saying ShoeMoney is cheating

Some might say, Shoe is at 5%, is he cheating? I don’t think so because if you check ShoeMoney, TechCrunch and big blogs like that the ratio is very low, mostly because the subscriptions come from so many different sources. For sub 1000 subscribers, it seems that the stats are pretty accurate. I also made some research online and it seems to be a well accepted fact that the Google Reader market Share is around 20-25% (That’s what it is on frogstr…)

Feedcompare.com

Another method Chris at chrisguthrie.net mentioned me is to actually have a look at feedcompare.com. It really is a nice website that let you have a look at how Feedburner feeds evolve into time. With it, you can actually see if there’s anything unusual on a feed if the feed in question has the “Awareness API” enabled. Mine isn’t enabled as I don’t like other websites and outside sources to have access to my feed without me knowing, but here is an example of a suspicious feed:

I’m not saying this guy is faking it, but going from 395 to 690 in two days is very suspicious…

You’re the judge

As I said, you’re the judge on this. I’m just saying you should be careful with the Feedburner count and don’t necessarily take it as a very good metric until you confirm the numbers by yourself. Google Reader is a good way to estimate the numbers and I honestly think 10-25% market share is a pretty accurate number. So, be careful when you buy advertisement, the Feedburner subscriber count shouldn’t always justify a higher price.

Prove me wrong

If you’re an honest blogger with 300 subscriptions and something like 15 Google Reader subscriptions It would be great if you could share some detailed stats. I would be more than happy to blog about it and say I was wrong!

Share this

I hope you guys will share this. Not because I want some link love, but because I want the community to know. I personally think the Google Reader subscriber count is a much better metric simply because Google Reader is the most popular reader out there and it’s a lot more harder to fake.

I obviously want each and everyone of you to be better bloggers by reading this blog and for that I want you to think twice before pressing that evil publish button. Too many bloggers just press the publish button without even reading the post they just wrote and I think this is a mistake. If you’re the best writer out there this doesn’t apply to you, but if you’re like most bloggers you’re not in the business because you won the Nobel prize in literature. So, this applies to you.

Review until it flows

It is important to reach a certain level of quality for all your posts if you want to attract subscribers and eventually be an authority in your niche. Nobody writes a perfect post without a review, nobody. How many times do you read your posts and notice there could be some improvements but don’t bother? If you feel like there could be some improvements, then imagine what your readers think. For that reason, read your posts before publishing them and read them as if you were the reader, not the author. Always keep in mind what would make you stop reading and what would make you continue reading a post. Is your post catchy enough? Is the post too boring? Could there be some humor in it to keep the reader hooked? Are some sentences too long? Could there be some crap you could cut?

I think you get the big picture and you understand where I’m going. You know your readers and you know what they like, so offer that.

Stop until it’s too late

Sometimes I write an article and halfway through I realize how the post sucks. I’m sure this happened to you also and I hope you didn’t publish that crap. It’s probably the worst thing to do because if you’re not convinced about what’s you’re writing, your readers will feel it and if you think your post sucks, there are good chances your readers too! In a situation like that, save the post for later, and it might turn into a gem eventually, who knows.

Not every post is worth a Nobel Prize

We’re all writing bad, OK and awesome articles. The key is really just to minimize the bad posts and maximize the good posts as you probably already know. It’s something we have to accept as bloggers: we’re not always going to write the best post out there. Now, imagine if we can cut the “bad posts” part simply by reviewing every single article we write to make sure it’s at least an average post. You know, sometimes it’s not the content, it’s really the way we say things that just makes a post boring. With a little review time, most bad posts can become OK posts and that’s really what we want because nobody wants to write crappy content.

Preview on your blog

It’s important to preview your articles on your blog directly, not in the admin editor. Why? Because you will truly feel like a reader and trust me it works. Sometimes I make a first review in the editor and then read it on the blog to find out there are a lot of improvements to be made. It just feels different when it’s out there on your blog, so use the preview tool!

I don’t have time to review

If you know you just wrote a gem and it doesn’t need a review, fine. Otherwise, wait until you have some time.

Do you review?

I will end this post by asking you the obvious question: Do you review your posts before pressing the publish button?

After, “Do I look like a comment bitch?”, here’s “Are you a web prostitute?“. I came up with the idea to write this post by reading an article on John Chow’s blog (Not to confuse with The Cow here…) because John Chow is one of the best web prostitute out there.

I used to hate John Chow

I used to really hate John Chow. Not because he makes 400K a year with his blog and I don’t, but just because of the way he makes that 400K. You know, his blog is filled with hundred of ads, it’s hard to find the content and more than half of the posts are damn sponsored reviews. ShoeMoney makes the same amount of money out of his blog, but it looks so much cleaner and he actually writes very good content. I then analyzed Chow as the web marketer, not as the person and I have to admit he’s a damn good web marketer. He’s good at driving controversy and he knows how to make things turn viral. There is a lot we can learn from John Chow and I finally ended up respecting him because I think he knows his stuff.

The Web Prostitute

Let’s get to the core of this article: Are you a web prostitute? Would you do anything for a couple of bucks and some traffic to your blog? Personally, I wouldn’t, so we can say I’m not a web prostitute. Unfortunately, this isn’t about me, so the question is not cleared. I occasionally read johnchow.com and the day I ended up reading him in the week, he was writing a sponsored review. It wasn’t a review about some cool WP plugin, some good website to drive traffic or whatever, it was about a natural sleep aid and fat burner. What? I was so pissed off when I read that post.

I receive tons of spam comments everyday with anchor text like ‘Burn fat’ and ‘one rule for fat stomach’ and then what? These bloody products get into my Google Reader inbox because one of the biggest blogger out there is a Web prostitute.

This is really bad. I don’t subscribe to a web marketing blog to be spammed by these fat burner products. It’s OK to do sponsored reviews, but IT HAS to be related to your niche.

Did Chow really needed that 500$ he charges for a review? No, but it’s an easy 500$ I guess and he wanted to check what the reaction would be. I can tell you, the readers weren’t very happy.

Being a web prostitute will hurt your business

Being a web prostitute will hurt your business in many different ways. First of all, accepting money from everybody is a great way to make money in the short term, but it’s a sure loss in the long term. Your readers will lose faith in you and will go away. Also, your readers won’t see you as a respected authority in your niche, but more as a greedy blogger. It is also disrespectful to your readers to think you can just write any crap and they’ll enjoy. As examples, let’s have a look at some of the comments on the fat burner pills article:

This has to be the oddest post I’ve seen so far on your blog. I know it’s a review, but it was definitely surprising to see a post about a sleep aid. I thought I had clicked a wrong link.

See? People not recognizing your website anymore.

Unfortunately the quality of the site starts decreasing once products like this one start getting reviewed. But for $500.. If would do it too.

You are a frickin’ web prostitute too.

Just before I doze off… I read this, and while the review is reasonably honest, I really think that accepting these kind of sites for reviews here is stretching things a bit.

This is really bad and I think it degrades the quality if this normally excellent blog. The whole thing reads like an infomercial and the author then adds that final paragraph to try and add a bit of balance, which is too late. I hope John will remove this article from his site. Sad day for this blog

Ok, this go on and on and on. Probably this won’t affect Chow too much because he’s one of the big guy, but he certainly can’t do it on a regular basis or people will start to go away. It’s the same for you, your readers will go away if you do stupid things like that.

Paid reviews are OK

As I said earlier, paid reviews are OK and are a good way for bloggers to make money. Always remember it’s YOUR blog, you can always refuse offers if you think this will hurt your business.

So, are YOU a web prostitute?

You know these days when something really pisses you off for no obvious or particular reasons? I was just getting back from work today when it kind of hit me…I’m not a frickin’ comment bitch.

I started to get a little more involved in the community recently by increasing my amount of comments on blogs and I’m shocked by the amount of bloggers who don’t answer comments. What’s the point of commenting if there’s no feedback at all? I’m not asking every blog owners out there to answer every single comment and I personally don’t even care if these bloggers answer my comments personally or not, I just want them to act like they are a little interested in their readers!

Answering every comment

I answer most of the comments personally on here. I’m surprised when I go to other blogs with like 1,000 rss subscribers and I see things like 1 or 2 comments on each post. You know why? Because the blogger doesn’t care about his readers. Some people will comment for sure, but they’ll get bored eventually. A blog is much more than writing content, it’s about interacting with the community. It’s no surprise if I get at least 10 comments on every post even if the blog is kind of new: I answer comments. That’s my vision as a blogger, but I’m also a reader: don’t expect me to comment on your blog every day if you don’t answer a single comment.

Drop a comment on your readers’ blogs

So you have people commenting on every single post of yours and you’re not even dropping a comment once in a while on their blog? Blogging is a two way business and you have to share a little bit if you want people to stick around.

The big guys don’t answer

Of course the big guys like ShoeMoney or JohnChow don’t answer every single comment. First of all, they have way too many comments to handle and people go completely crazy when they jump in the discussion. Shoe once explained how it feels when he posts on DigitalPoint forums with the name ShoeMoney: people actually start to argue about whether or not it’s the real ShoeMoney instead of talking about what’s important. I can understand how this can get really annoying.

Please answer some comments…

I’m just asking every blogger out there to answer some of their comments. Your readers don’t expect to be answered personally on every comment, but it’s nice for them to see you actually care about what’s going on. So, even if you answer someone else’s comment, it’s good!

Google monopoly

The recent deal between Google and Yahoo means that Google ads will now be displayed on the whole Yahoo network. Some say it’s good news, some say it’s bad news and some really don’t care. The biggest issue with that deal is concerning the monopoly Google would get in the Internet ads market. You know, they already owned a huge part of internet advertising and on top of that this year they aquired DoubleClick and signed a deal with Yahoo. It’s as close as it can get to a monopoly I agree.

The Google monopoly

People fear that a too strong presence of Google on the market will make the prices of advertising go higher for advertisers and down for publishers. That’s what having no competition usually does: you try to cash in the maximum you can before some other company come and take some of your market share. Google made sure to confirm the prices won’t go up because buying advertisements with Google is based on an auction system. I agree, I agree…But big G…You wrote that auction system, you can do whatever you want! Anyway…At least they tried.

It’s not Google’s fault

I’m really neutral when it comes to Google, I both love and hate the company. I’m just sick of people bashing Google on the monopoly issue because of that new Yahoo deal. We have to understand the core reason why Google is in a monopoly situation: there are no decent competitors! Google dominate the market simply because they are the best at what they do! I wouldn’t mind using another CPC system on my websites, but they aren’t as good as Google! I tried some other CPC programs, but none of them even come close to Google’s Adsense/Adwords system. I would put the pressure on companies to come with a decent system that can beat Google Adsense/Adwords. But for now, as a publisher, I only want Google to loose its monopoly if there’s a better alternative out there. Otherwise, they give me too much money for me to hate them and say go away!

I would do the same

We would probably be doing the exact same thing Google is doing right now. Let’s say you develop an advertising system that is so damn good it beats every other system out there. It’s also so good that publishers can put little code on their website to earn money easily. Nobody is able to beat your system, what would you do? Spread the damn thing! That’s what Google is doing my friend.

Come with a decent alternative

I put the pressure on other companies, not Google. Come up with a decent system able to beat Google’s system and we’ll open the monopoly debate again. Until then, they just do what every corporation would do.

I just visited DigitalPoint and was shocked to see this post:

Adsense clickers group.

messege me for info

Hurting the business

Less money