I have been checking out some of the preseason videos for The 30 Day Challenge, and today was a particularly intriguing one. Check out this video about Google Subscribed Links.

Coincidentally, I have been asked to test out a product that could really help with this. I hope I’ll have permission to let you know about it in the next day or two.

In the meantime, why not subscribe to the Surf the Mind Subscribed Links feature!

Once you’ve subscribed, check out how it works by clicking this link. Or how about this one. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an image-highlighted link for every major product launch? Pretty exciting stuff.

Image by jurvetson via FlickrThese days it seems like everyone wants to be a “problogger”, though why that is, I am not sure.

Perhaps the word itself is appealing. Perhaps the prominently displayed revenues of a few probloggers make others wish for the same prosperity.

I am not a problogger. I make my living on the Internet. I make what many would call a very, very good living with my sites. But I do not try to make money primarily from blogging.

Blogging is fun. It’s a good way to get a nagging thought off your mind. It’s a good way to share your ideas with random strangers. It can even be a good way to make some cash.

But I am lazy. I cannot imagine myself tied to my computer and my blogs each and every day for all eternity. While my work still requires me to be online most days, my ultimate goal is to be able to leave the computer entirely for several months next year without a drop in revenue.

That ain’t going to happen with blogs. The problem with blogs is that they’re never finished.

If you build a portal or information site… lets say, “Everything you need to know about raising thoroughbreds”… at some point, your work is going to be pretty much complete. You can keep up to date on new developments, but that isn’t going to require more than one or two updates in any given month. Contrast that to tech blogging, where you can miss a huge story by sleeping for one hour.

A comprehensive information site takes a tremendous amount of work to build in the beginning (it’s like writing a book!), but once it’s done, you don’t have to tend it daily to keep people coming back. You’ve got a genuine resource that Google will adore, visitors will find useful, and your search listings and revenue will stay pretty steady whether you update weekly or monthly… or even every other month.

One site I’ve built using this technique makes me about $5,000 a month, and although I generally add content to it twice a month, at the beginning of the year I was exceptionally busy and didn’t add anything for a little over three months. My traffic and revenue did not decrease at all. Nor would they if I left it another three months.

I built another small site on a very obscure topic about a year and a half ago. There were a few other sites with one or two pages of information on this particular topic online, but nothing comprehensive. This site has no Adsense, because there are too few related advertisers to make it worthwhile, but it does have a few loosely related Clickbank products, and a lot of Amazon links.

That little site, which has NEVER been updated since it was finished, brings in at least $30 in Clickbank and $100 in Amazon referral fees each and every month.

I’m not saying you can’t use WordPress or other blogging software to create in information site just like that one. In fact, WordPress (with a load of tweaking), is a great platform for building just about any type of site. But the usual blogging format, with dated posts and archives, makes evergreen information seem dated, and makes it sadly obvious when a site hasn’t been updated recently.

Now, there are a few exceptions in my portfolio too. I have some content sites whose traffic has whithered away over time, and I have two blogger blogs that haven’t been updated in two years that have steadily increasing Adsense revenue each month for no apparent reason.

But, in spite of the anomalies, I am far more confident that I will achieve my goal of Internet-free vacations next year through content sites rather than blogging.

If you are just the opposite, and a month away from your computer sounds like a torture worse than waterboarding, then perhaps life as a problogger is just what you’re looking for.

Then I’ll come by and read your blog when I’m online. I might even click an ad. And I’ll be ever so thankful I’m not doing that particular job.

I found this list via Yahoo’s web services today, and thought it was interesting. It’s a valuable peek at the most frequently used tags for web pages. If you’re marketing a site via social media, or looking for a niche broad enough to provide blogging fodder for a few years, it is a neat way to see what the most frequently bookmarked ‘topics’ are.

1. video
2. videos
3. movies
4. photos
5. movie
6. hot
7. blogger
8. young
9. music
10. reference
11. blog
12. travel
13. fun
14. free
15. business
16. software
17. technology
18. design
19. tv
20. sports
21. howto
22. tools
23. blogs
24. money
25. humor
26. science
27. search
28. imported
29. google
30. art
31. funny
32. home
33. tech
34. linux
35. mobile
36. computer
37. photography
38. apple
39. mp3
40. programming
41. cool
42. photo
43. dvd
44. politics
45. food
46. finance
47. education
48. rss
49. vacation
50. information

Interesting to note that four out of the first five are video related. This could possibly mean that users are more likely to tag interesting videos than interesting text content online.

I’m not the biggest Entrecard user on the Net, so it took me until early this morning to notice the ad price inflation that has taken place on the service.

The change was intended to make EC more of a marketplace rather than a popularity contest, but the result, at least in the short term, was to devalue the Entrecard credit as a ‘currency.’

Right now, there are very, very few sites that it would be smart, from an economics point of view, to advertise on with EC credits because they are simply a BAD DEAL.

I’m not talking hypothetically, here.

Take ProBlog Reviews, for example. A site with four months of archives and a PR0, is currently at top of the Make Money Online price list at 262144 EC credits per day.

Given the average market price of credits on Ebay for the past month, which is approximately .0045 per credit or $4.50 per thousand credits, advertising on this blog would cost $1,179 per day in real cash value.

Problogger.com’s ad price is currently listed at 131,072 EC credits per day, which in real value terms is about $590 per day or more than $17,500 per month. I think you can get a better deal on his regular ad space through B5 Media.

John Chow’s blog will cost you a much lesser amount… 8192 EC credits per day. Still, that’s a monthly ‘real cash’ rate that’s double his ‘get reviewed by’ price. You’d be better off buying direct.

My estimate is that the Ebay price for EC credits is currently way too high. The ‘real’ price – based on advertising value – under the current credit system is .00125 per credit, or $1.25 per thousand.

So, what to do.

First, don’t buy EC credits from Ebay until the price stabilizes under the new system. Second, don’t advertise on any sites over 128 credits until prices stabilize. Till then hoard your credits or exchange with other EC users for things of real value like reviews or permanent links.. Finally, keep reciprocating and dropping, since this is still, and will remain, a very valuable way to grow traffic to your blog.

ONE FINAL THOUGHT

I recall reading somewhere that EC will begin selling credits for $10 per 1000 EC credits. Under the current credit advertising system, I don’t think this will work for them.

Assuming the biggest and best blogs out there charge $10,000 per month for an ad –and that’s way more than I’d be willing to pay, but just go with me here — then the ‘real money’ daily price for an EC widget ad shouldn’t be more than $333. If the folks running EC want the value of 1000 credits to be ~$10, then ad prices for any blog should max out at about 33,333 EC rather than the hundreds of thousands of EC they are at right now.

Does that make sense, or is my math off?

All other thoughts, opinions, or disagreements are welcome in the comments.

I promised some results in my last post about Adsense Shield. I’ve been slow to write, not only because I’m on vacation, but because I’m not sure WHAT to report.

In case you haven’t read the last post, Adsense Shield is a script that is supposed to protect your Adsense site from clickbomb attacks… where someone clicks on your ads over and over in an attempt to get your Adsense account shut down. I set the script up on one of my sites to see if it affected overall Adsense earnings.

First of all, I haven’t noticed a drop in clicks, CTR, eCPM, or earnings for the site I added the code to. So, if it is working to protect my site from Adsense clickbombing, it’s not having a detrimental effect on revenue at all.

I do feel weird that it’s a piece of software I can’t really test once its installed, since doing so would mean I’d be clicking on my own ads. So, I’m trusting that the absence of error messages is a good sign and the script is working on my pages as well as it did on the test page.

Now that I’ve seen that it doesn’t decrease revenue, I’ll probably add it to my other sites when I’m back from vacation. I’m not at all sure how it’ll work on a WordPress blog, but I’ll figure that out when I get to it.