My New Bidding Directory – Linkerage.com

I have been busy recently creating a new directory, a bidding directory. If you haven’t come across one of these before, it’s basically just a normal weblinks directory but it’s sorted by bid amount. That’s how much money you have contributed to the link that you have added. This way, the people that have contributed the most have their links high up on the front page or high up on the category pages. You can set a minimum contribution (I’ve set it to US$1) and you can set a minimum contribution to get a number of deep links as well.

It was very easy to set up and I used a system called PHPLinkBid, which is a commercial software but isn’t too expensive. These are the steps that I followed:
Read more

Lost My Google PageRank

I realized last week that one of my sites has lost it’s pagerank. It was the TrippedOff site that I have just relaunched. I am a little puzzled as to why this might have happened. It would seem that I am being penalized for something. I have narrowed it down to a number of possibilities:

1. They’ve realized that I am selling links on the site.
I know that this can result in a loss of PageRank. It’s a bit of a vicious circle though. I want to monetize the site, so once I have some PR, I can sell links on it. Then, when Google finds out they take away my PR and the link buyers withdraw their purchases because they want some link juice from the links that they purchase.
Solution? Remove the links and I should get PR back at the next update.
Read more

Have an alcohol free July whilst raising money for charity

After a whopping success last year by raising over a quarter of a million dollars for the charity Dreams2Live4, the Dry July boys are back to make this years July drier than ever!

The challenge is simple; don’t drink for an entire month, and get people to sponsor you for the feat. You don’t get to raise money for charity very often by not doing something, and so after witnessing the pain and suffering of others last year, I decided that this year I’d jump in with both feet and was one of the first to sign up.

This year, Dry July has expanded it’s network of beneficiaries, to include hospitals across Australia, but even though it’s an Australian nation fundraising event, people from all over the World can participate.

The new and improved Dry July website is much more impressive than the last one, and allows you to sponsor people with your credit card, create a sobriety team, update how you’re feeling as you begin your abstinence from alcohol and even go head to head with other Dry Julyers in a bid to beat raise more money than the others.

So if want to clear your head this July and help improve the lives of people living with cancer across Australia, then you should take the plunge and sign up at dryjuly.com. Who know’s, you might feel healthier, happier and your pants might fit a little better too!

Relaunch of One of My Sites

You may have noticed that I’ve had to take a break from posting here on Yoomost. My apologies for that but it’s because I’ve been working hard on relaunching TrippedOff.com. I had to review the site because we weren’t hitting our targets in terms of getting content contribution, and since it is largely a site reliant on user contributed content, this was a big issue. If you have a blog or a site that isn’t performing for you, I advise you to do the same. Take a step back and review just why the site isn’t working 100%.

When I did this, I realized that the site was too complicated. I basically put in every feature I could think of, with different sections that would drill down. The end result was that the site was confusing and because there were so many sections and different navigation bars, people coming to the site wouldn’t really know how to get to specific content.

So what was my solution? Simplify, simplify, simplify. I now have less sections and features. I removed the hotel and restaurant reviewing engine and sections, and now bundle them together with the other experiences. Also, for good measure I implemented a new design – cause, a good relaunch always needs a change in design

Also, to support all of this, I’m also looking at some offline marketing activities. I hired a freelancer in India to design some flyers and will be handing them out to backpackers all over Sydney.

So, hopefully, all of this hard work will pay off and we’ll meet our targets for content contribution. You can see the new relaunched site at http://www.trippedoff.com. As usual, any feedback is welcome

Be a Part of the Blogging Community with Entrecard

You may have noticed a couple of boxes in my sidebar with the words “E drop” at the bottom of them. Ignoring the obvious drug connotations you get from that, those are actually ads being displayed through the Entrecard network. This network is a community for bloggers only, and so I thought I’d give it a try.

Signing up seemed easy; that is, until I got my rejection email (I spoke of this in my last post). I was rejected for the following reason:

“More than 50% of the content consists of paid posts, posts with links to online stores, or affiliate links”

So I responded with this:

“Hello. My site does not contain more than 50% of paid posts, posts with links to online stores or affiliate links. All the reviews of external sites and services are not paid for as the site is about using these services. If you look at the links, they are not affiliate links. I have just linked directly to the sites in my posts. Please can you reassess.”

They then let me have an account. By this time, however, I was skeptical. But even going into this experiment holding a slight grudge over the signup experience, I was pleasantly surprised by their system.
Read more

It Ain’t Easy Being Green

Kermit (Photo: Looking Glass)

Monetizing a new blog is definitely no piece of cake and even with the numerous monetization options out there, I’ve had my fair share of rejection emails. For example, although InLinks let me have an account, I can’t add this blog because it’s too new and traffic isn’t at the required levels. Same with SocialSpark. Same with ReviewMe.

I had a similar experience with Entrecard, and they came back to me saying that “More than 50% of the content consists of paid posts, posts with links to online stores, or affiliate links”. I wrote back to them saying that the site is about reviewing and experimenting with different monetization services, and that they weren’t paid posts. Luckily they activated my account following that (I still need to write the review about it – I love it though).

So when you’re just launching the site or are within the first 6 months of creating the site, your monetization options are quite limited. I have read a lot of blogs that tell you not to even bother monetizing in the first few months and just concentrate on traffic. I understand where they are coming from but in reality, everyone wants to start earning from their blog as soon as possible, and I believe that if you start trying different monetization techniques early on, you might not be earning much but you’ll be learning a lot!!
Read more

The 5 Best Blog Posts about Making Money Online

There are so many blogs out there about making money online, it can be difficult to find which are the ones that you can learn something from. I hope that this is one of them! I know that there are just as many lists about the best money making blogs, but here is a slightly different slant on it. Here is my list of blog posts that I have definitely taken something from:

1. The Dot Com Lifestyle
John chow may just be one of the most famous bloggers on the planet and I frequently go to his site to pick up tips and new information. I was truly inspired when I saw his video about the reality of the life that he can live by making money through blogging. It’s not about fast cars, partying and exotic destinations but more about the freedom that comes with money through success from blogging.

2. How to Easily Get More Members for Your Niche Community
I love the DoshDosh site because every post is relevant and informational. I especially found this post useful when trying to create a community site. Maki, the author, also puts an anime pic with each post adding to the charm of the site

3. How to Make Money Online in 3 Months
Along the same theme as Yoomost, Google Lady conducted her own experiment to see if she can create a profitable site within 3 months using the Amazon Affiliate program. She goes through what she did step by step. An excellent post that really helps you to understand what you need to do to make money online.
Read more

Goodbye, Sweet Chariot!

I sold my 1990 BMW 318i yesterday, which was sad in a way as we’d had a few adventures together. As a memorial to the car, I’m republishing a post I did before for a different site about the time I lost my car keys when I was snowboarding.

Read more

Just added CommentLuv

I’ve just added the Wordpress CommentLuv plugin to the site. CommentLuv automatically adds a link to your last blog post after your comment, so by commenting on blogs that have this activated you can increase the number of backlinks to your site.

If you have a blog, you can also consider adding this to your site to encourage more people to comment on more posts! I’ll see if adding this to Yoomost will increase the number of comments or not, and report back

See ya!

International Money Transfer the Easy Way

I don’t know if it’s the same around the world, but I’ve found Australian banks charge a small fortune for transferring money internationally. I’m very reluctant to pay a premium to do this, especially if I’m only transferring small amounts. Since I needed to transfer money from a bank account in Australia to my account in Hong Kong, I was determined to find out what the best way is to do it.

In my quest, I’ve looked into using different banks and places that wire money, but I found that they all carry a hefty charge. My bank, the National Australia Bank, has a reasonable rate of of AU$22 to do any international transfers through Internet banking.

You may have heard of Paypal, the online payment service, and I use it as my preferred method of payment online. I can pay for things that I purchase online by using it to send money to people. Those sellers can then withdraw it to a bank account in any country. Ding! A lightbulb moment. I already had a Paypal account in Australia, and so I set up another one in Hong Kong, where I wanted to send the money. Brilliant.
Read more