So I will be removing the ScratchBack widget soon and I have contacted all readers who have given me a ScratchBack, thanks! I offered them a discounted spot in my blog real estate section. Well after some play around with it and testing its 'fun' factor, I have decided to go ahead and removed the ScratchBack widget at the end of this week.
ScratchBack really did not give me too much. I mean I filled up all my spots with little marketing. Another reason why I will be removing this is because the middle man cut is too high. I left a comment about it and I know others have as well. Right now since it is still in beta and the Scratchback team has listened to their readers, they will be providing 90% commission! I wish that happened before I sold all my spots, prior to this it was 60%.
Scratchback is a really good widget to have on your blog especially if you want to make some quick money and want to try your game with blog real estate. With that said I am better off using OIOPublisher, since I get to keep 100% of the profit, leaving the middle guy in the dust. But Scratch back takes the pain of managing paid links, even though it is seen as a tipping jar. Tip someone and get some exposure great concept, but tipping and being forced to tip a website at $10? I thought it was in my good thought to leave maybe $2 or $3.
In other news, one of my good blog friends, Thomas Sinfield has released his first ebook. You may remember his popular guest post "6 Sure-Fire Ways to Know you are an Entrepreneur," it caught attention of many bloggers and commenter.
This ebook is a bout starting to make money from blogging. Thomas has been in the blogosphere for just under 4 months and has been doing great improvements on earning money from just his blog.
His ebook "A Beginners Guide to Making Money from Blogging" is all about what the title basically says. A beginner, (a noob as I call them) making money just from blogging about their ideas. This ebook is short in length but it is straight to the point. There is no in between stuff that guru bloggers mush in to make the book seem longer, it is just Thomas talking from experience.
BadCircuit has Bad Users
BadCircuit.com's writers has taken advantage of my trust and spammed my dashboard with time stamped post of all spam. Luckily I decided to go in and just check to see if anyone has been writing anything, nope. So I decided to go ahead and just turn it into my Build a Niche Store with some content, the naive of users taking advantage of trust just to get some traffic.
I do not understand why one would do so when we are sharing revenue from the blog, all you have to do is help me write and populate content! I am busy with beta testing other people's products, marketing my own products, the season, blogging, my own sites, etc, so I need help and I specifically said we would share revenue. Well no more tech blog and it will just be a landing page for a store. BAH!
Blog Real Estate Space Opening Up Soon
Soon, the banner spaces will be open and will be free to advertise any link of your choice and banners at 125 * 125. I think there is still some time before any of the text link space will be free. I also have some spots opened up for advertising your RSS feeds, the new work around for Adsense and advertising.
Adsense is Hard to Click
This is old news and I know you probably have known the whole fear factor going around about webmasters and Google. Well Google is still pissing more and more people off. Right from Darren's Blog:
that AdSense making changes to text ads so that instead of getting clicks when people click anywhere on an ad unit (including the background of ads) clicks will only work (and we’ll only get paid) when there is a click on an actual title or URL in the ad.
New Digital Product Released
This idea came to me when I first started video blogging. It took me 2 days literally trying to find the proper codecs and software to properly convert my Nikon compressed QuickTime MOV files to Windows AVI. I wished it was this simple when I first searched the internet about converting.
This little ebook has the tools and a video of how to convert your MOV files to AVI. MOVVI is the title of this little ebook and sells for 7$. It also has an affiliate system with it as well. This digital product is properly released for this season.
If you were watching my Build a Niche Store videos, I shared you can still sell digital products with physical products. Bought a camera for someone, let them have this tutorial! Also this is a great released because family and friends will want to share their videos and if they use Windows Movie Maker, they will have issues.
When I make my YouTube videos, I use Windows Movie Maker to produce what you see on screen. WMM does not convert MOV to editable formats, so you will need to convert the MOV files first and preferably to AVI. So I think I did a good job waiting on this ebook to have it released this week.
Defensio Needs a Better Defense
I took off or disabled the Defension Spam plugin. I like the user interface on Defensio.com but catching spam was very high, so high it thought anything above 50% was spam and was quarantined. Some comments did not even show up because of Defensio and they were legit comments. My accuracy was at 67%. Not really well. So to stop me from always checking my spam quarantined box I simply just disabled the plugin. It was ok not really up to par yet.