The winner of my 1000 Entrecard credits contest is:

Diet Pulpit
Thanks for the awesome links everyone and Lady Rose, the check is in the mail.

I know I haven’t been blogging much recently but I’ve been busy as hell at work.  Sorry for the delay but I fully intend to get back into the swing of things soon.  Work’s given me lots of pent up hate, I’ll have to vent somewhere.

photo credit: Inkyhack

Not everyone’s honest, wanting to make their money the old fashioned way online (providing good content).  There are people out there who only want to start a splog (spam blog), make a quick buck and get out.  Well, today I’m going to give you a few tips to starting your own splog.

I already covered beginning blog mistakes.  Well starting a splog is a lot like starting out a beginning blog, except you want to make a few of those mistakes on purpose.  If you’re going to be sleazy and try to earn a quick buck, you may as well do it right.

The ads are king: I’m going to start off with the most obvious thing.  If you want to make money you’re going to have to have ads.  You can use referal ads, Adsense or any other paying per click ad system on the planet.  CPM isn’t going to work well as you’re not really drawing big enough crowds on a splog.  If you’re going to be slimy you might as well go for those opt in services where you get paid for each e-mail address you harvest.  The ads should be tricky and placed so that people feel they MUST click on them.  Place your ads right in the middle of your “content,” place them where people might click them accidentally and place as many as you can.

Remember, you’re not trying to help your visitors:  I learned this years ago when I was running a splog and making some good spending cash.  People found my site mainly by googling looking for information.  I didn’t want to give them that information.  I wanted them to almost get the information from me but feel the need to keep clicking onward (to my ads).  An example of this would be to have a post on installing an oil filter into your car.  You can talk about how it can be tricky, the fact that you’ll need some tools and you might have to jack up your car.  You can even mention “1999 Honda Civic Oil Change” in the post somewhere to draw people looking for really specific information.  They won’t find it, but your ads will probably say “Learn How to Change Your Own Oil” and on they click.

Content is ONLY there to draw traffic:  This is an extension of the above.  Feel free to title your posts whatever you want if you think it’ll draw traffic.  Have a bunch of keywords in your content and you don’t even have to make sense.  This is all about search engines.  Your spammy blog isn’t going to get mentioned on Digg, so you’re probably going to need lots of search engine traffic.

Lie, cheat and steal to get that traffic:  I once ran a semi-spammy blog.  It really had no important content.  I learned that this one site would send over 10,000 daily visitors to my site if I got a link on their homepage.  They were a news site.  But I figured out quickly they didn’t read the stories I submitted, only the titles.  So I’d title my stories whatever I thought would grab their attention (in this case edgy stuff with lots of drug references) and the story would be about whatever.  I got a great link every couple weeks from this guy all because he was too lazy to read the stories he posted up for his readers.

Write your own content: This part sucks.  99% of splogs are automated and steal content from other websites.  Google hates this as do all the other search engines.  They want original content on your blogs.  So when they see this people get penalized.  You simply MUST write your own content to run a decent splog or you’ll have to run a million automated splogs to make the same cash.  Also you can integrate things like affiliate links and be as tricky as you want with the search engines.

A flashy design fools a lot of people: A good looking template will fool lots of people.   Almost every splog I see uses one of the default Wordpress or Blogger templates.  Take the extra 30 seconds to find a good template and people will trust your website a lot more.

 
photo credit: DanielJames

Oh man, do I hate daylight savings time.

No, it’s not because I was late to work today.  I’m not a moron.  I pay attention to the news and know which way to turn my clock.  I hate it for one major reason (and a few minor ones).  It doesn’t work!

A recent study by an economist at UC Santa Barbara found that daylight savings time wastes energy.  How is this possible?  The most infalible man of all time Benjamin Franklin, a man who used to sit by his wide open windows naked, came up with the idea 300 years ago.  Who are we to doubt his infallible logic?

Well, we live in an era of cooling, heating and light bulbs.  The original idea was that we’d save energy by not having to light our candles and whale blubber as early during Summer months because the sun wouldn’t set until later.  That way Ben could gaze at the ladies walking by and fantasize about Turkeys without having to melt all his wax.  But, what he didn’t figure was that during the summer people liked to avoid being balls hot.  So they turn on their AC.

Without DST people would wake up when the sun was already up and go about their business.  Then they’d get home as the day started to cool and sit down for a nice dinner while the sun set.  Then they’d turn on their lights and go about their lives.

With DST people wake up when it’s dark and very cool and go about their business.  They come home when it’s still hot as hell, turn on the AC before sitting down to dinner.  Then an hour later they turn their lights on.  Air conditioners are way less energy efficient than light bulbs.

Now what did our dumbass Republican congress and President do in 2005?  Did they study this issue and figure out if it worked?  No, they decided to “save energy” and make summer time LONGER!  Why would they research these things first?  Common knowledge is always correct.

Oh, and another thing I hate about DST?  “Springing forward.”  I don’t spring.  Springing is as lame as “leaping, prancing or frolicking.”  I’ll jump forward begrudgingly.  It’s not as cutsey, but that’s the point.

Daylight savings time is inefficient, screws up people’s schedules and causes grown men to use the phrase “spring forward.”  What are the odds we can all be like Arizona and ignore it all together?

Website Review: Infect the System

Infect the System is a blog attached to a web hosting company.  The blogger attempts to help beginning web designers, hosters and other web masters get going.

OMG TLI!:  Its odd, when I visit a website that wants to blog about CSS, hosting your own web server and being a web designer I expect to be flooded with information.  Most people who blog about this kind of stuff have a billion things to share and they tend to try to pour it all into every single post.  This website is the completely opposite.  Maybe I should applaud the writer for showing some restraint but instead I’m going to mock him for treating his probably very tech savvy crowd like morons.

Easy example, his current series on Starting a Web Hosting Company starts out with a post dedicated to choosing a domain name.  The post is maybe 200 words long and gives no information that would be new to someone who’s chosen a domain name before.  This is all about targeting your audience.  It’s very important to know who you’re catering to.  Anyone thinking of opening their own web hosting company is going to know about domain names.  It’d be like having a blog on advanced sugar work (ex made me watch Food Network) and having a post on the difference between a frying pan and a sauce pot.  Good information, wrong audience.  Treat your audience like they’re smart and you’ll be surprised how much more they’re into your information.  Also it greatly raises the chances your post will get picked up by Slashdot or Digg.

Honesty is our Number 1 Policy: There are many websites out there in which the designer feels the need to trick the visitor into clicking on ads.  It’s like they know the visitor has no interest in clicking on ads but they want to make money, customer retention be damned.  This guy has the complete opposite strategy.   His ads are labeled “Google Adsense.”  Kudos for honestly.  I’m all about the honestly (yes your butt looks fat in those jeans).  But there’s got to be a happy medium where the ads don’t stand out like a sore thumb and aren’t hidden and sneaky.  Obviously it’s not this guy’s intention to make a living off his ads.  I’d get rid of them entirely for reasons I’ve mentioned a million times before.  The blog has to do a better job of drawing people to the hosting company.  Make the link (both literal and textual) between the two a little more obvious.  It’ll lend the blog credibility and get the hosting company more business.

Their is alot rong with this blog: Alot is not a word.  A and lot are two separate words often paired together.  I’d like to make this abundantly clear to everyone reading.  There isn’t a spell check on this planet that will allow “alot” to go through without a bleep.  Yet somehow this happened on Infect the System.  Maybe his system is infected, ha!  Also a lot of the grammar is stilted and clunky.  There’s an article called How to Prepare for a Web Design.  I get it, it’s like “How to prepare for a fire drill.”  But it just reads wrong.  “How to Prepare for a Web Design Contract” or “How to Prepare to Be a Web Designer” would both work better.  Look, I’m no professional writer.  I’m an engineer.  I remember getting Ds on several writing papers over my life.  But I typically know when something just sounds wrong.  The writer needs a little help with his English, that’s all I’m saying.

Smart Man, Dumb Blog: I hate this website because it’s teetering on being a really good useful website.  The guy running it knows a shitload about what he does.  Unfortunately he’s not good at sharing it.   Also he appears to take long periods of time off as there hasn’t been anything new posted in almost three weeks and posts before that were quite sporadic.  I skip a day here and there but never three weeks.  That’s like years in the real world.

Make a million dollars blogging! Quit your day job, work from home blogging. Be the biggest earning blogger on your block. Niche blogging to make big bucks!

Technorati says that there are over 175,000 new blogs started each day. I honestly believe 100,000 of them are on how to “make money blogging.” And that pisses me off.

What’s so wrong about this? There are a billion blogs on tech products, I don’t hate them (yet). Why do I have no love for “make money blogging blogs” (I’m going to call them MMBB from now on)? Because the vast majority of them make no money themselves.

I might as well give a shout out to the big dogs. Darren Rowse and John Chow. These two guys make a very good living talking about how they make money blogging. But guess what, they’re already making a living blogging so they get to be the experts. You’re not an expert because you registered the domain name www.imakeabilliondollarsblogginginmysleep.com and started writing about this new “ad sense” thing you discovered.

These guys have millions of readers each month. They both are living a dream (of sorts). They work from home, run their own business, are famous in their circles and make good money. I’m sure they both work 80 hour weeks, but that’s not the point. In the eyes of the blogging community they’re living the dream.

I’ve seen plenty of blogs out there with people who say they’re going to quit their day job and take up blogging full time. What do they blog about? Trying to make money. It’s pathetic and it’s going to fail right out of the gate. Why?

Let me learn you by example: Neither of those big dogs I mentioned set out to make a living blogging when they started blogging. In fact neither of them started a MMBB until they were already making good money off other websites. Darren started a digital photography blog to talk about photography. John Chow started a technology site to talk about technology. If they had started off saying they’re going to make money first thing they’d have looked like idiots.

It’s always going to be hard making money off a MMBB site. It’s easy to make money if you have a product or service to blog about. There are plenty of camera stores that will pay well to advertise on a popular photography blog. But who wants to advertise on a MMBB? Maybe ISPs? There are ebooks to sell and consultation fees to collect but on the whole there are very few services to sell to prospective visitors.

Mostly what annoys me about MMBB is the fact that they offer nothing new. They all post the same links to the same sites with their referral codes trying to get commission. They all claim to have the answers to every problem in your blogging life (see my stupid advertising slogans above) yet none of them has any experience in the field in which they’re trying to earn a living. They all either lament or brag about how easy or hard it is to make money online. It’s pathetic.

I hope someone finds this site after searching for “make money blogging.” They won’t. But if they do I hope they take my advise. If you want to make money blogging write about ANYTHING ELSE other than making money blogging. Write about a hobby, write book reviews, write about last night’s Laker game (P.S. I hate bandwagon jumpers, that’s another post for another day) just write about something you’re actually interested in. Then read the sites by the people who actually make a living blogging and learn from them.

photo credit: Chealion

So I’ve made some changes to I Hate Your Website, all for the better.

I’ve eliminated the ads in the middle of the posts. No one clicks on them anymore and they’re distracting. You’re welcome.
I’m starting to directly sell ad space on the side of my blog. If you’re interested in thousands of people seeing your ad a month click on my “Advertise” tab for information.

I’ve also added a new tier of reviews, the Guaranteed Website Review. This is a good way to guarantee I review your website on my blog. Click the “Get Reviewed” tab to find out more about this option as well as my traditional Free Website Review option.

Why did I post a picture of Canadian change?  Because right now it’s worth more than American change.  Take that!

Website Review: Word of Morgan

Today’s review is on the website Word of Morgan. This blog features the rants and raves of a “libertarian atheist.”

Greetings Fellow Ranter - If you couldn’t guess I love a good rant. If you’re angry and can top 2500 words on a topic, I’m game. Bonus points if you include at least three conspiracy theories in each rant. This Johnny Drama look-a-like is especially fun to listen to. He’ll start out sounding perfectly rational and BOOM he’ll be an inch away from claiming there are aliens living in George Bush’s skull.

Crazy, Party of One - The guy’s a Ron Paul supporter (duh) and in this post he talks about why he supports RP. Cool, I got love for Ron Paul. Then at the bottom he gives reasons why no one else is a good choice. McCain has a 50 cent gas price increase in the works and Huckabee will pass faith based legislation. Awesome. Someone needs to watch Schoolhouse Rock again but the President can’t say “boo” and make up laws like this. Stuff like this is totally paranoid and I love it. His piece on corporate criminals being more dangerous than street crime is also gold. Shame he didn’t list “Fight Club” as one of his sources.

But Carl, What About the Design? - Oh, that’s what you care about. Design. You’re so lame. I like some things that are old. Give me an old bottle of wine, classic car and a 26 year old stripper (old in the stripper world) and I’m going to have a wonderful evening. But I don’t like old logos. This logo was either designed in 1993 or was designed by a colorblind cheese grater. It’s got a headless horseman, a horrid American flag font and a cut off atom icon as part of the text. The site itself suffers from similar cheese grater design. It’s cluttered and scattered to no end. There are at least a dozen “blogger aps” clogging the right hand sidebar. The guy created a 125×125 logo of his head and didn’t scale it right, so his head looks like it was sat on by my ex-mother in law (she was fucking huge!). I like visual stuff in posts (except on my blog, because I’m lazy) but this guy overuses photos to no end. He’ll have six in each post. Cut it down. Also that lame “WhAt dO yOu ThiNk?” graphic has got to go. See my post on announcing how lame you are if you want to know why.

Love The Content, Hate the Site - The site just does a lot of things that annoy me. Shame because I really enjoy reading a good rant and this guy is a step away from standing on a street corner in Berkeley. That’s not an insult, I love this shit. Another favorite? A post on why he hates Paula Deen on the Food Network. Short version: her accent! Apparently people from the South with really pronounced accents are annoying. Love it, love it, love it. Shoot the designer and this can turn into a really fun blog.

  =

File this article under “unsolicited hate.”

This is something that’s been getting on my nerves for decades and I just didn’t have an outlet.  Finally on this website I’m encouraged and paid very well to be mean and spiteful.

I hate people who put the word “gate” at the end of the name of every scandal.

Why do I hate them?  Because they’re fucking morons.

The reason Watergate was called Watergate was not because it had something to do with water and there was a scandal.  It’s because it took place in the fucking WATERGATE HOTEL in Washington, DC.  Here’s a photo of the hotel:

photo credit: bankbryan

Hell, they even have a website.   Why is this so hard to understand?  You can’t just put “gate” at the end of something to make it a scandal.

Plamegate, Nipplegate,  Spygate and (my favorite) Whitewater-Gate.  How lazy and stupid must you be to start attaching “Gate” to the end of everything even remotely resembling a scandal.  There’s even a list of them on Wikipedia.  Can’t think of a creative name?  Then call it the White Water Scandal!  Although I do wish they called the whole George Michael in a bathroom thing “Mastur-Gate” that would have been A-OK with me.

Why can’t these news anchors and the monkeys who repeat them day in and day out (normal folks) learn a little history.  The DNC headquarters was located in the Watergate Hotel.  Richard Nixon ordered some of his cronies to break in and steal information.  They were caught.  It was huge and caused him to resign.  He didn’t steal a bottle of water.  The French Revolution was not called Bastille-Gate.  This is not acceptable.

From now on, whenever you hear someone say “Anything-Gate” I want you to punch them square in the mouth.  That or educate them.  Blame me, I don’t care.  We’ll call it “I-Hate-Gate.”

Website Review: Meowlicious

Meowlicious is a blog which is self-described as “The Cat Lovers Guild.” The writer blogs about her cat, cats and online contests.

Thank You Jesus- My life generally sucks. I have a job I don’t really like, I have no social life to speak of and last night I drank too much, threw up and lost my wallet at the bar (goodbye $100 bill, hello identity theft). There’s not much to be thankful for there. I suppose I have my health, but the way I’m heading I probably have the body of an 80 year old by the time I hit 40. Then I look in my queue of websites to review and I see Meowlicious. As the website loads on my browser a ray of sunshine shoots through the could cover. Someone up there threw me a bone today.

I Hate Cats But I Love Pussy - Isn’t it ironic? Probably not because most of the girls I’ve met with cats are girls you wouldn’t want to sleep with anyway. Now I’m drifting off topic. So if there’s one topic for a website that’s sure to draw my ire, it’s cats. But you know what’s curious? Almost none of her posts are about cats. The vast majority of her posts are entries into online contests. Why?

This Website Has No Need For Traffic - There are sites on the internet that pine for people to visit them. Can you imagine a Woot or a Digg without a community and heavy traffic? Of course not, they’d cease to exist. In fact there are a dozen Woot and Digg ripoffs on the net without a community and they’re awful. This site has no need for anyone to ever visit it. There’s no information, there’s no reason to return and there’s nothing to do. If this site went off line tomorrow, no one would notice. Probably not even the blogger.

A Guild of One - Maybe this is nit-picky but a guild is defined as multiple people joining together. It’s like a union. You can’t have a union of one. Apparently you can have an Army of One but that’s just a stupid marketing slogan to get you to want to run off and get shot. This website is billed as the Cat Lover Guild. Where the hell did that come from?

Mr. Template Meet Mr. Blogger - There’s even nothing interesting about the design. It’s a regular default template. Funny enough this chick put together a custom header. What a good use of time. Let’s make a header no one will ever look at.

Cat Chicks are Fat - This site is stupid, lazy and pointless. Just like a cat. Maybe if this site actually discussed cat loving, cat owning or cat feeding I’d find some use for it. But as of right now it’s a waste of 100kb on Google’s servers.

photo credit: .:Amy:.

It’s very tempting to run a contest on your blog or website. It’s an easy way to draw in traffic, you can do it fairly cheaply and contests promote themselves. Well, I’m here to teach you my Inverse Proportionality Law of Internet Contests which can help you run a better contest on your blog. Let’s just call it Carl’s Law for short.

The law states that every internet contest has many pairs of variables that are inversely proportional. That basically means when one thing goes up, the other must come down. Let’s examine some of these pairs.

Number of Entrants vs. Complexity: This one is quite logical. The harder you make it to enter, the less people who will enter. That’s why those lame e-mail address harvesting “enter your e-mail address and win a free iPod” ads used to work so well. It was so simple to enter! True, there was no real prize but that’s hardly the point.

Simplicity vs. Benefit to Website Owner: I wish I could run a contest that required everyone to subscribe to my RSS feed, send me a website to review and post my banner on their website. That would be enormously helpful to me as a blog owner. Unfortunately that makes the contest complicated. And a complicated contest won’t have many entrants to it because most people won’t go through all that trouble. Keep your contest as simple as possible. Only go for one goal at a time. Subscribe to your RSS feed? Fine. Post a link back? Fine. Do both? Not fine. Too much. It’s less benefit to you in the short run but in the long run you’ll get more people looking at your website.

Prize Value vs. Potential Complexity: If you’ve got a car to give away you can make your entrants jump through a million hoops. If you’re giving away $10, you’re not going to have much luck getting people to do all sorts of crazy things. Prize value is not an absolute thing. If have a contest with a free snowboard as the prize I won’t get nearly the response or benefit that a blog focusing on winter sports would have even though the prize has the same monetary value. When in doubt, everyone likes cash. Cash is good.

Ease of Entry vs. Reader Retention: A website I visit frequently is Engadget. They run contests in which all you have to do is leave a comment in a thread. Very simple. They’ve got millions of visitors a month and don’t have to worry about people forgetting about their contests. My website isn’t nearly on the same scale. If I require someone to comment on my post to enter a contest they’re not likely to return. It’s just too easy to forget. In this case we need to strike a balance. Making someone e-mail me with their favorite post from my website would make them think a little and is simple to do. If they think about my website, they’re more likely to return.

Contest Frequency vs. Difficulty of Entry: I alluded to this in the previous post. But if you have good frequent contests, you can make it as simple as possible to enter. People will keep coming back to see when your new contest is starting. This is how Engadget gets away with such simple contests, people will keep coming back to check when they happen. I personally can’t afford a weekly contest of any real value, so entering my contests just can’t be that simple.

Conclusion: Running a internet contest is a balancing act. You must balance things like ease of entry, prize value and benefit to yourself. Think of what benefit you’re trying to achieve and go backwards. My current contest is very simple, it’s meant to advertise my website to people who would benefit from it (webmasters, bloggers) and it offers something these people want. I’m sure I’ll get dozens of entries, each of which can potentially draw in new visitors who might be interested in a review site written by a cranky man. If you want to make your contest really complicated and have a high benefit to you (like people signing up for Adsense with your referral code) you’ve got to make it really worth the time, energy and commitment it takes to enter. Give away $10,000 and you can have people do anything.