The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

Link Exchange Blog

The administrator of another blog asked me to write a paid post about a WordPress blog called Link Exchange.  It is a service designed to inform people about reciprical links and how people can cooperate to get more traffic to their websites.  

Link Exchange is a very new site as evidenced by the fact that although they are accepting comments, they have not yet edited their "About" section.  Presumably, however, that will happen soon. 

One of the things they warn about is getting tangled up with so-called link farms, which they describe as sites that do not have a similar focus to yours, but rather offer to link you up to hundreds of unrelated sites.  This can hurt your traffic rather than helping it, because it is inorganic.

They explain more about this in the link called add url link exchange which they shared with me.

I'm not sure how I feel about the use of the term organic to describe the integrity of search mechanics, but their point is very well taken that if your web site contains links that the major search engines view as destructive to their integrity, that can drastically reduce your traffic.  Personally, I am not terribly concerned about getting traffic for traffic's sake, but I am concerned with integrity.  I am not interested in trying to fool the search engines.  I am interested in blogging for fun and to promote the exchange of information.  I am not wholly against breaking a few rules if the rules are silly, but I am very much against breaking the law or doing anything fraudulent.  Therefore, I would avoid link farms not so much out of fear of losing traffic, but rather because they seem rather unscrupulous to me. 

I guess, though, that whatever the motive, the result would be the same. 

I've Been Busy

Advertisers have been keeping me busy on this blog of late.  But here is a little ad of my own:

That is my referral link to a new program called Kooday, more about which later, as I have another little trip planned and will tell you all about it later.

But this Kooday sounds really fun so I'm putting this here as a reminder to ME to do something about it when I get back.  If any of you want to try it out, go ahead and sign up and we'll find each other an sort it out later.  So far I have purchased links for the keywords "hydroponic" and "hydroponics" and "aeroponic" and "aeroponics."  These links cost between ten cents and thirteen cents each.   In about a week I'll be back and shop for some others.

 

Juxtaposed

TypePad hosts my blog and they do an excellent job of making it easy to publish.  They also have good documentation to help when their clients get stuck.  I have four blogs hosted by them and once in a while when the dashboards for more than one of them are open at the same time I get mixed up and post one that should go here in my gardening blog by mistake...or vice versa.

This blog is monetized with PayPerPost ads (and eventually with Chitika, I think), and I've recently put InfoLinks on my gardening blog. 

PayPerPost has a requirement that their ads are one per post with a post between each that does not contain any PayPerPost ads.  Because I got them juxtaposed, the post that belongs between entries for June 4 and June 5 ended up in the position for June 8.  I hope that doesn't make the advertisers mad ;-)

I love my PayPerPost ad sponsors and am careful to choose only the ones I like and hope you will like too.  So I like to keep them happy!

Well Meaning Friends

Several well meaning friends have commented that I don't optimize my blog for seo and my response is that I use PayPerPost, so who cares?

I also remind them that I post for personal enjoyment and to keep friends entertained and informed of my whereabouts, so to speak, rather than to make work out of it.   I can have fun, make a little money and not worry about search engine deities. 

Free WordPress Themes

Although my blogging platform is TypePad, I do know several people who use WordPress, so this post is for them.  It is also for today's sponsor who is dedicated to providing free wordpress themes that are easy to download and use. 

I just check out their site and can say they do indeed have a plethora of lovely themes.  If I were a WordPress blogger I would certainly check them out. 

 

Love Makes the World Go Round

But I was confused upon noting that  Wikipedia has two articles a song with that title.  They both start out the same way:  "It was written by..."

But in one version the writer ends that sentence with "Ollie Jones" and in the other article it ends with "Bob Merrill."  At first I thought it must be a type, but it turns out that there are two completely different songs with the same title.  Why do they do that?

Stuff about love sells, for one thing.

Just look at all the verbiage there is on the net about how to succeed with online dating.

Not being on the prowl, I've never had any direct exposure to that sort of thing, but a cyber buddy writes a blog called "It Might Be Love" and therein she writes about online dating from time to time.   She does a fantastic job of it and gets a lot of nice looking ads and, I hope, some healthy ad revenue.

For my part, the advice Chaucer's Wife of Bath offers is as up to date as any.  Experience, she said, is better than authority.   My longest relationship has been forty-plus years...so far.   And no, computers had not been invented yet when that one started.   In fact, singles ads were pretty much unheard of then, too.   According to the People's Almanac, it is said, the first known singles ad was solicited by an 18th century woman who consequently put in a mental institution for the act, even though her ad was small and tasteful, at least by our standards. 

Calendar for January 2010

This is a screen shot from gtdAgenda. I put it here as a reference for myself. Yes, there is a calendar in the sidebar of my blog, but this one is larger and I do not have to scroll down to see it. 

Where Did the Bubbles Go?

When I first starting blogging, there was a whole brouhaha about disclosure and whether or not accepting payment for blogging was an "in" thing to do or not.  In this economy I think that snobbishness has died down a bit.  In my opinion, the whole fuss was kind of silly anyway.  Those who had wanted more and didn't want any competition and those who didn't wanted something.  I just wanted to learn how the whole thing worked.  PayPerPost, which has been good to me, and which I consider a great way to monetize a blog (and this, by the way, is NOT a paid post), used to give us little disclosure bubbles to put at the end of every post, unless the advertiser specified that they did not want disclosure in the paid post.  I've only seen that happen once, by the way. 

I don't take a paid post opportunity unless I think it is interesting and on the up and up.   One of my favorites was Arizona Game and Fish.  They honored this blog by allowing me to help them spread the word about boating safety by promoting their cute little video on the topic Don't Swim with the Fish a while back.  I did about 5 ads for them; 4 were unpaid.  People remembering not to drink when they drive is important to me whether they are in boats or on the highways.

Even though most of my posts are recreational and/or public service, I do pay a little for my blogging platform and tools and see nothing wrong with getting something back.  So somewhere on here there is a site-wide disclosure notice.  

By the way, the word brouhaha is French, dating back to the 19th century, but some dictionaries footnote that derivation as "imitative" and I rather wondered what it was imitative of.  Turns out some diabolical characters in drama used to mispronounce a popular phrase then quoted from the Book of Psalms, much like the apparently related Italian word barruccaba so that is one possible explanation.  Yes, it is meant to have a slightly derogatory connotation. 

To Delete or Not to Delete

I occasionally talk about how much I like a Paid to Write program called Triond, which pays US writers monthly royalties for minimum earnings as low as fifty cents.  Once I decided that if I were to submit an article once a month every month for 5 years, I'd end up with enough articles to buy a pretty nice lunch. 

Once an online search came up with an article criticizing Triond and it contained some wrong information.  That is how I learned about Associated Content.  I signed up to write an article praising Triond and rebutting some wrong information that had been published there.  Several people agreed with me so I decided maybe Associated Content wasn't such a bad place after.  Recently they have made some improvements to their site that make it easier to use, so I try to write something over there from time to time as well.  Like Triond they have a very low (if any) automatic minimum.  I like programs that pay the residuals automatically.  Associated Content pays a bit more for page views than Triond.  Neither program will make you rich without any effort, but I enjoy being part of the online writing community.  Here is my latest, a response to the fact that a recent post on this blog got a couple of spam comments:

About Comment Spam

Triond was a bit easier to learn how to use at the beginning, but their rules are a little tougher.  I don't mind rules.  People who use PTW programs do need to read and follow the rules, though. 

Stuff is Good

There is a new site that lets you show off your stuff.  Since some of my "stuff" is this blog, I showed it off first. 

The site, called Acobay, is in beta as of this writing:

Acobay

It describes itself as a social networking site, but the twist is that it tries to group people according to their interests.  One of the high-tech gadgets I like is my Helio Ocean smart phone, so I looked for it in the category "cellphones" but it was not there.  So I added it as "stuff" under the category "Anything."  It is unclear whether anyone will find it there or not, but we'll see.  It would be kind of fun to compare notes with other Ocean owners, as I have yet to find an Ocean forum online. 

They advertise that the more "stuff" you post about, the more people will find your blog, which should result in page views.  I like that idea.