Tuesday Lunchtime News Buzz: CashQuests, BTR, and RealRanking

Posted by

2

Well, this is five stories that I have been following that perhaps others have read or not!

CashQuests.com: sold for $15,000

Yes, after all those posts on creating revenue streams that you can use to sell a website, flipping websites, and increasing eyeballs and traffic, the blog was sold for about 11.5 times monthly revenue.

I’m wishing Kumiko all the best on the sale, but I wonder if the $15K will help to ease those pangs of loss as she realizes she no longer has a prominent blog, or that she has to blog every few days! I wonder what she’s upto… Still no official comment from her, though. You can find the story at Sitepoint. And the stats are impressive, too:

– Traffic: 16k unique visitors per month
– PageRank: The homepage is PR 5 and many inner pages range from PR1 – PR4.
– Alexa: 20,000
– Technorati: Top 5k ranking
– RSS Readership: Over 900 readers are subscribed.
– Over 9,800 backlinks from other sites
– 222 posts and 2,890 comments published

Kwan: I Don’t Understand Google PageRank Anymore

Well, Michael, who does? More importantly, why bother? If you blog for yourself, your PR shouldn’t be that important. If you blog for your business, then you won’t really be doing reviews, linking and so on, anyway. And if you blog for money, it’s easy to find alternatives to make money that don’t involve PR, Google or text links (or any combination thereof). So let’s not sweat it.

I hope, though, Michael Kwan is still busy writing reviews, but I wonder how many reviews he’s getting these days. I hope he’s getting lots, but I fear that many of the original opportunities have dried up in the heat over Google’s PR monkeybusiness. I’ve noticed how many of my opps have gone since I lost my PR3 just a few weeks ago.

RealRank: is it really here yet?

After the Google Debacle, many of the competitors to AdSense have started fighting for their lives, as Google aims to strike directly at the heart of text linking business based on PR rankings. Payperpost is embarking on creating a rival Ranking system to join PR as a way to rank blogs in the age of Social Networking. It’s been called several things, but the name that seems to stick is ‘RealRank’ (get it, Google?)… and it aims to measure a number of factors, including audience, traffic, authority, etc. to provide a much fuller picture to advertisers. It will be rolled out as a part of Argus, but it seems that PPP is now fasttracking it because without PR rankings business for them is getting ‘sticky’ for sure.

Ted Murphy is quoted as saying: Last night Google decided to go after some of the bloggers in our network, reducing their PR from whatever they previously had to zero. Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

SocialSpark is still under wraps at the moment. But RealRank is due to go live today. You can find more discussion here about RealRank. Let’s see if we can’t update the blog with an image … Nothing yet. But I’ll keep on it until I get some screenshots!

In the meantime, you can watch the video.

Thanks.

Commenting: How to get some fame (or notoriety!)

Posted by

2

I just wanted to thank John Chow! I got a lot of extra publicity from him through his comments, links, and the occasional post. It’s great! He really is kind fellow… Anyway, one of the advantages of living in a different time zone is his Recent Comments Plugin, that allows things like this:

John Chow Comment Bomb!

It won’t last long, but I’m hoping that I will rank among the top ten commenters soon. Such simple techniques can help drive traffic to your website, as long as you are contributing something of value to the discussion, not just spamming!

Adsense: How to cancel your account, and get your money back…

Posted by

1

Many bloggers are so disillusioned with the changes in PR ranking and the changes in Adsense. To recap briefly, Google has felled many kinds of blogs PR rankings and Adsense changes are meaning that (in the short term) income is likely to go down even further. Many bloggers are now planning a boycott of Google, including me.

The TOS of many agreements allow the agreements to be cancelled by both parties without cause (I presume that means you cancel without having to provide a reason). In other words, I believe you can write them, and cancel the agreement, remove the ads and receive all monies owed to you at the time provided that the amount is greater than $10. I’d be happy to be corrected if that were not the case. So, don’t just blow that amount and don’t let Google keep it… You really can ask Google to close your Adsense account and remit your earnings. It’s in their TOS. According to their TOS, they will send you the earnings.

Quote:
In the event the Agreement is terminated, Google shall pay Your earned balance to You within approximately ninety (90) days after the end of the calendar month in which the Agreement is terminated by You (following Google’s receipt of Your written request, including by email, to terminate the Agreement) or by Google. In no event, however, shall Google make payments for any earned balance less than $10.

Also, if you have written Google to cancel your contract, let me know the results. Were you successful or not? Share your experience.

I’d be in less of a hurry to throw in the towel with Google, though. My own plan is to keep Adsense until it gets to $100 (which wouldn’t have been that long without Google messing the formats!). So yes, I know, my Adsense is still there, but that’s not for much longer! …