The problem with all of this is that a number of commenters leave a comment just for the backlink. These comments range from the “Me, Too’s and Way To Go Dudes” to ridiculous nonsense. I’ve noticed a trend over time toward more and more spammy comments on FreshBlogger as well as a number of highly irrelevant comments (followable links to something that has nothing to do with the content of the actual post).

I’m also concerned that the search engine rankings of this blog have suffered due to having a large number of irrelevant links, as well. I’m not going to pretend that the affects on revenue aren’t also influencing this decision. At one point, FreshBlogger had a PageRank of 5 and has since gone down to PR2. I realize that this isn’t the ultimate indicator of popularity, but it is indicative of a generally downward trend that has definitely been felt in terms of income.

So, while I welcome all comments that add something interesting, I’ve decided to stop using DoFollow. I realize this may cause some visitors to be less likely to leave a comment here. Fair enough.

I’ve done some searching and found that a few others share this sentiment and have likewise removed DoFollow from their blogs. A couple that I’ve come across are RT from Untwisted Vortex, “No More ‘Do Follow’” and Stephen Cronin from Scratch99, “Bye Bye DoFollow.”

What I can offer, though, is this: Since this is my personal blog and I tend to write about a number of different topics, I would be happy to link to your post or web page if I find it interesting or think it would be interesting to others who read this blog. Please feel free to leave a comment here or use the FreshBlogger Contact page to drop me a line.

Matt Keegan and others have written recently about discontinuing use of MyBlogLog since Yahoo has taken over and made it more intrusive in terms of privacy. I can completely understand this. It’s alarming how much information all these companies have on us and they want to have more. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft would love to have your complete life history, including medical, financial, and any other private details they could gather. This practice may not stem from any evil intent, but it’s scary as hell, nonetheless.

The social networks are probably not the biggest threat to your own privacy, but they do present a threat against an even more prescious asset: your time. I began this post by asking how much time you spent on various social networks today. I suspect there will be a variety of answers ranging from none to a considerable amount of time. This cost of participating in social networks is what concerns me.

After being a newbie blogger for a while, I realized that I needed to do more marketing in order to get my name out there. I needed to expose my blog and my writing to more people so that I could get more traffic and links to my blog. Social networks presented a perfect way to do that. Participating in these kinds of communities offered a built-in way of advertising. All I had to do was put in some effort… and time.

It turns out that keeping up with the social networking began to take up more and more time that could have been spent in creating more and better content. I think the Pareto Principle comes into play with this, too. In fact, it’s probably significantly less than 20% of the time spent social networking that provides 80% of the results.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Being a part of these social networks has helped increase the popularity of FreshBlogger. It’s also helped me to get to know and become friends with a lot of interesting people. At some point, though, the time spent on these networks has to be seriously questioned.

The Law of Diminishing Returns does seem to come into play here, too. If fifteen or twenty minutes a day social networking accomplishes your networking goals, two more hours of time spent doesn’t necessarily advance those goals much further. Actually, I think it helps to contribute to the phenomenon of social networking overload.

After spending a lot of time on MyBlogLog, I eventually stopped going there every day. It was simply taking me too much time and energy to read the comments and check out the blogs of new visitors. I’m sure I’m missing out on some cool stuff, but I simply don’t have enough time to keep up with it anymore.

I can’t be the only one to be experiencing this. Most bloggers also have day jobs, families, and many other priorities in their lives that demand a portion of their time and energy. Social networking takes a bite out of those important resources and the returns tend to be less and less over time. If you’ve been experiencing social networking overload, leave a comment and let us know about it. If you disagree vehemently, we’d like to hear from you, too.

Andy Beard has written at length on some linking mistakes frequently found on blogs. As you would expect from Andy, it’s quite detailed and the information is the gospel as far as linking goes. One of the great points he brings up is to always use good anchor text in your links. For an example, see the words that comprise the link to his article in this paragraph? That’s what I’m talking about. It gives meaning to the link that the search engines can grab on to. For a much better explanation, follow the link.

Back to the Alexa redirect issue. Andy also points to another article that gives the final word on Alexa redirects. This article by Lord Matt gives some SEO basics and Alexa Rank mistakes and should be read carefully by those interested in knowing more about SEO or Search Engine Optimization, if you have been wondering about the acronym. It’s a great article with plenty of well-done graphics and valuable information.

These posts should help to put to rest some of the questions regarding Alexa Rank. My own Alexa Rank has been falling lately and I’m not entirely sure why. The big question is why do advertising services like Text-Link-Ads still use Alexa Rank as part of their price setting equation? I can’t imagine using such an arbitrary measure (it only counts traffic if visitors have the Alexa toolbar or certain other plugins installed) in setting a price for advertising. The fact that it is completely unreliable in measuring real traffic has been established over and over again.

Regardless, the issue of using Alexa Redirects appears to have been settled. Read the posts I’ve linked to above and you’ll come out with a much better understanding of why this is so.

There are lots of people who frown on this type of activity because it breaks the rules. Specifically, this sort of behavior is against the Terms of Service of both Digg and Stumbleupon. It’s not illegal to buy and sell your votes, but it is against the rules that you agree to when you sign up.

My question to you is this: If this stuff is bad, how bad is it? The internet is still a wild place where just about anything can be found. The attempts at establishing a sort of law and order have been only moderately successful in terms of regulating what goes on and what types of content are allowed.

This is both good and bad. Anyone with a little experience on the web knows that there is a huge amount of bad and worthless and even potentially harmful content out there. Sometimes a little regulation can protect users from this stuff. Also, a good set of rules that most people respect will make commerce go much more smoothly.

Before anyone gets their panties into a bunch, let me say that I’m generally against regulation of the web. The openness and freedom of expression available through this medium is unprecidented in history and of almost immeasurable value in spreading knowledge and free thought across the world.

Back to Subvert and Profit: Black markets are a part of just about every economy and the economy of social voting networks is no exception. Your votes have value. Is it wrong to take advantage of this?

I realize that’s a question requiring a completely subjective answer, but I’m curious anyway. It’s hard to say that black markets are wrong. Think of the underground markets that existed in the highly regulated economy of Soviet Russia. Sometimes the only way people could get enough food was to go through the black markets rather than state owned and operated stores. It’s hard to say this is a bad thing.

Subvert and Profit is simple to sign up for and offers another opportunity for web users to make some money and also for web site owners and bloggers to get some exposure and traffic. According to their FAQ, you can make $.50 for each Digg vote. You can also purchase Digg votes for $1 each. It doesn’t take a lot of votes to get to the front page of Digg. Some have said that less than 100 votes, maybe much less will get you there. The traffic that comes from that exposure can be incredible.

You have probably already noticed that I’ve signed up for the service by the referral links in this post. I’m curious enough about the service to check it out and see what happens. If you’re interested, go ahead and sign up and make sure to read their guidelines very carefully to ensure that you aren’t banned by Digg or Stumbleupon. Let me know what you think about the questions I’ve asked in this post and I’d love to hear about any experiences you’ve had with this or similar services.

It was actually a stroke of brilliance for Adnan to use the opportunity to have a contest on his blog. See, he asked in his post for his readers to guess my age. The first person to leave a comment with my actual age would get a free link for a month from the front page of Blogtrepreneur. Brilliant, huh?

What’s so smart about this tactic is that everyone loves a contest. It’s a great way to encourage readers to get involved with your blog. The prize is also something of value that doesn’t cost Adnan anything to provide. His blog has a PageRank of 5 and a good amount of steady traffic, both from search engines and regular readers. A link from this blog is obviously of use to another blogger, especially a newer blogger.

This has sparked my own creative thinking about contests. I’m going to consider some ways I can use competitions that offer something valuable as the prize. This can help to drive some good traffic as well as reward readers for coming and participating. I’d like to hear about your experiences and ideas with contests, too.

P.S. Congrats to Pearl for winning Adnan’s contest!

I think the strategy is basically sound in that posting more often will get more content in the search engines’ indexes as well as keep readers checking back on a more regular basis for fresh content. I do believe that there is a law of diminishing returns with this approach, though.

If you’re posting five times a day with short articles of only 100 or 200 words or even less, regular readers may be chased away. It’s hard to come up with good, unique content on such a frequent basis. If your blog is a news site, then it may make sense to post lots of very short articles. If your blog is in another niche, though, readers may be looking for more in-depth content and if they don’t find that on your blog, they will likely find it elsewhere.

There is another reason why readers may stop visiting, too. If there are simply too many posts for them to keep up with, they may just give up. There are some bloggers that find the time to post six or eight times a day. For most of us readers, though, that’s quite a lot to read every day, even if they’re short posts. Unless there is some important reason to be posting so often, it may be just too much.

On the other hand, more frequent posting will tend to have the effect of bringing more new readers to your blog. The more articles you have indexed by the search engines, the more likely searchers will find you. The only problem then is to keep them coming back, linking, and telling others about your blog.

Ultimately, volume blogging does make sense, especially, as Maki notes, for newer blogs. It’s a great idea to build up lots of content early on to get your blog established and provide some depth to your site for visitors to browse through. The trick is achieving a good balance between frequency and quality of posts. This is going to be different for each niche, each blog, and each blogger. Only with some experimentation will you be able to find out what works for you.

You may be asking right now, just what they heck is a blog carnival? Good question. Blog carnivals are group writing efforts that take place when a blogger requests other bloggers to write posts centered around a certain theme. A date is given by which time all posts have to be submitted. The blogger will then review the submitted posts to make sure they fit with the theme. After the deadline has passed, the blogger writes a post linking back to some or all of the submitted articles, usually with a brief commentary on each one. Pretty cool, huh?

The first thing you have to do in order to get involved with blog carnivals is go to blogcarnival.com. The site exists only to facilitate bloggers hosting and submitting to blog carnivals. It can be slightly confusing at first, but it’s really easy to get started once you find your way around.

The front page lists a bunch of recent carnivals. You may find something here that is relevant to what you post on your blog. If not, use the search function and use keywords that describe your own articles. Once you’ve found a few blog carnivals that you might be interested in, click on them to find out if they are still active. Follow the links back to the original sites to see if the blog is still hosting the carnival.

Here’s an example of a blog carnival post from The Skilled Investor’s Carnival of Financial Planning:

The actual submission process is very easy. If you click on more blog carnivals at the bottom of the list of recent blog carnivals on the front page, you’ll come to this page:

Note that there is a drop down box at the top where you can narrow the list to categories relevant to your blog topic. There are dates in the right hand columns that tell you when the last edition of this carnival was posted and also when to expect the next edition. Sometimes these dates are not correct, so you’ll have to do a little bit of checking to make sure.

When you click on the link for a carnival that sounds interesting, you’ll be taken to a page with a brief description and any requirements there may be to participate. Often, the hosting blogger simply requests a link back to his or her blog. Make sure you read these requirements to find out exactly what the host is looking for, so you don’t waste anyone’s time, including your own.

To begin submitting your post, click on the orange Submit link at the top right of the screen. The next screen will allow you to input some information about your post, including the title, the url, your name and email, and also any commentary you wish to provide. Careful, sometimes this commentary is just posted to the blog carnival without being read too closely. Try to contact the host directly by email if you have a question instead of using the Remarks box.

After filling out the form and clicking submit, you just wait for the carnival to be posted. Sometimes the host will contact you by email or by leaving a comment on your post. Other times, you won’t hear back from them at all, even if they do include your post. Keep in mind that whether your post is included is entirely up to the host and some posts will not be accepted for one reason or another. Don’t worry about this, though, because there are many more blog carnivals listed.

You’ll also want to remember that not all of the blogs you find will be ones that you want to associate with. Some may have adult or other content that you may not be comfortable with. Be sure to check out the actual blog where the carnival is being hosted before submitting your post.

If you’ve been curious about blog carnivals, but haven’t submitted a post yet to any of them, don’t wait any longer. As of today, there are 1942 blog carnivals listed on the site. Go check them out and submit your posts today.

Take a search for “Make Money Online“, a popular phrase for many search marketers, and you’ll see that there are literally hundreds and thousands of sites telling you how to make a quick buck from the net, or something along the lines of “Follow these guidelines, and you’ll become stinking rich like me.”

Whilst an extremely small minority of these may be true, the rest are hype and only hype – where the website owners are themselves looking to make quick money through eBook or information product sales. Unfortunately, many people have also seen blogging as an effective way to get a few bucks using Adsense without looking at the real way to create a viable income source using this new medium of information exchange.

So, why the short term pain? Well if you do want to create a truly successful blog, then it’s necessary to invest some time in making your website reader friendly and beneficial to those that arrive at the URL. In effect, each unique visitor is a customer, and your aim as an entrepreneur should be to look after each visitor and make sure that they leave with new found knowledge.

Here are a few things that you could do as a newly established blogger in order to prepare yourself for future benefits:

• Write pillar articles – these will form the spine of your website and will hopefully cause a flurry of links to point to your address if written correctly.
• Write linkbait – appealing to social media sites such as the ever-blossoming Digg and others such as StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us can help drive a large amount of traffic to your blog in a short period of time. This can cause rapid growth but beware, linkbait articles are not necessarily sustainable for the long run.
• Comment ferociously – be up-to-date with other blogs in your industry and make useful comments demonstrating your expertise in the subject field as well. This can help visitors to click-through to your site and hopefully sign-up as RSS subscribers.
• Form relationships – using trackbacks to point back to a relevant article on another site will show that you value other bloggers’ knowledge and will be a surefire way of developing friendships with other owners. Instant messaging can also help to build friendships which can be useful if you need someone to look after your site whilst you’re away or if you need some advice.

Of course, the above list isn’t definitive by any means, instead it should provide you with a starting point as a newbie blogger in order to sustain a good figure of growth.

But what are these long-term gains you mention? These will differ from blogger to blogger, but many of us set monetary goals. The topic of monetization can take up a blog unto itself, but simply put, you need to dedicate the hours of writing material in order to rack up some income. Search engines like Google love new and popular content, so by writing lots of posts, you will increase your chances to get some free organic traffic.

After 3-4 months of blogging, programs such as TextLinkAds can help you to knock-up consistent link sales, and sponsored review programs like PayperPost and ReviewMe love websites which have a decent authority on the net. On top of this, once you have a solid information base, you can expand your monetization with Private Advertising, the notorious Google Adsense and many other programs which are still being released today.

Of course, you may not be after the money. Long-term benefits may also include self-satisfaction as you achieve good Search Engine Placement Positions after months of hard-work, or new relationships formed on a daily basis – it’s up to you, though, to set your own aims so that you can feel happy once you have achieved them.

To conclude, blogging should definitely not be considered as an easy way to make a quick buck. Constant dedication and nurturing of your blog is needed in the present, in order to achieve the benefits in the future.

Apparently, a lot of people have just discovered the benefits of using DoFollow on their blogs and have been searching like crazy for blogs to comment on to get links. Andy cautions against doing this, though. He advises that we should focus on leaving relevent comments on blogs with relevent topics to our own blogs. That way the link will be much more meaningful to search engines. This isn’t to say that bloggers shouldn’t leave comments whenever they want, of course, it just means that if the blogger’s purpose is to get good links, then certain guidelines should be followed to get the most benefit.

Another great tip that Andy points to can be found at 1 Stupidly Simple Tip That Will Boost PR And SEO. This tip is to use deep linking in comments rather than just link to the homepage of your blog. I’ve seen this before and wondered about it, but it does make sense. Google and other search engines love deep linking. So, what’s deep linking? It’s when you link to a particular page or post within a site rather than the front page. These links are better because they point to content that is relevent to the topic of the post you’re commenting on, thus carrying higher weight with the search engines and helping to enhance your PageRank even more.

I’ve only touched the surface of this whole idea so far, but I think there’s a lot of benefit to be had by making use of DoFollow on your blog and leaving comments on DoFollow blogs. Check out the posts I’ve linked to above for a more in-depth view and also don’t forget to join Andy’s Bumpzee No Nofollow community once you’ve removed Nofollow from your blog.

If you’ve been blogging or been reading blogs about blogging for a while, I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of nofollow. These are attribute within link tags that tell search engines not to follow or count a link from a blog. Usually nofollow links are found in the comments section on the links that commenters leave for their own blogs or websites. The idea behind YesFollow is that commenters should be rewarded for leaving a useful comment that adds value to the conversation.

I use the DoFollow plugin for WordPress here on FreshBlogger. For this meme, I’m supposed to copy link back to the site which tagged me (see above) and also copy a section of text giving instructions for the next tagee. Lastly, I’m supposed to tag at least one more blog that has YesFollow.

I think it’s more than appropriate for me to tag Cesar from Flee The Cube since he (and Andy Beard) were the ones who turned me on to DoFollow in the first place. Since Andy’s already been tagged and included in the list below, I’m just going to tag Cesar for starters and I’ll update this list if I can think of any others.

Continuing the Meme

***Begin to copy here***

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra link back.
2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.
3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.
4. Add at least 1 new blog that you KNOW us using the DO FOLLOW plugin to the list in the “My Adds” section. (Add no more than 5!) Let the people you’ve added know, so that they can keep the list going!
5. Leave relevant comments on the blogs listed and get a link back to your site thanks to Do Follow!

My Adds:
Flee The Cube

Original List:
HarpzOn.com
Just Thinkin’

IHelpYouBlog
TechTraction.com
Blogging Help
GeekySpeaky
Simple Kind Of Life
3DayMom
BuyMeBlog
The Hockey Dad
Midlife Musings

Utterly Geek
Whatever I Feel Like
My Dandelion Patch
Surviving NJ
BizMark Tech
Two Dog Zoo
TDZ Travel
Body, Mind & Solar

MidLifeMusings
HomeBizBlogger
Confessions of a Housewife
Andy Beard
Randa Clay Design
Solo Technology
Improve your Online Business

IT Infusion
FreshBlogger
Mind Petals
Erik’s Blog
still unimpressive