visnum

I choose the long and hard way to monetize my websites and blogs. This way consists of writing quality articles and establish a user base. This is a long term strategy. It’s benefit is it is like renting your home. You have to buy or built a house from scratch and then give it to rent. This way, you can have a decent income afterwards, without having to do too much to keep that income.

On the other hand, some may need to have their blog monetized instantly. This can be fast and bring you a relatively less income however this is a method anyway.

To achieve this, you have to mimic blogs like boing boing. This imeans, you will become a news blog. By news blog, I don’t necessarily mean a political one or a blog about finances, that’s not necessary. You have to have editorial skills and you have to pick posts and articles, images, videos, any interactive thing that may interest people and then post about them. By “about them” I mean that you will not copy and paste them. You will select a blog post, and blog about that post. You will select quotations from that post and use them in your own post and comment on them a little bit.

That’s what boing boing does and they are very successful. They are successful in their editorial skills. They choose wisely, they don’t choose randomly. And remember, there are around 30 posts on boing boing every day.

If you believe that you have this editorial skill and you can also make wise selections around the blogosphere and the web, you may quickly establish a user base and a little profit by doing that. I assume you have already made the optimization about where to put ads. I am not going to talk about this here because that’s another story.

By blogging about blogs, you are going to build backlinks and they will help you grow in your search engine visibility. It will be much better if you keep this meta-blogging in a vertical manner. For instance, you can only choose to blog about blog posts that are about parenting. Or only about cars or only about gadgets. Get it?

Since you are going to post about 30 times in a day, this would bring quick attention for search engines. Search engines love updates.

Other blogs that keep this strategy are: kottke.org, the blog of Matt Mullenweg (he is not doing this for monetization purposes but he is a good example for what I am trying to tell here anyway), and many other blogs about web 2.0, widgets, themes, etc.

There is one other advantage in this. Such meta-blogs do not exist for a variety of topics. There isn’t any famous one about recipes, flowers, art, etc. which means there are already niches out there.

A drawback of this strategy is that you have to put content everyday. Because what you do is not time-less. You will be about actuality. You cannot say after six months, “that much content is enough for me to post less from now on”. That’s not possible. You will see sudden drop in your traffic and thus in your advertising revenue.

I can’t suggest this strategy for myself but this doesn’t mean that it is not working. It does work, I have done it in the past and I was successful. However, for myself, I want to build an hotel now so that people come and go and pay their rent… endlessly.

As you may already heard of it, we suffer from internet censorship here in Turkey. Therefore, I have to use alternatives to reach certain websites such as Youtube, Geocities, some blogs on WordPress, etc.

I won’t disclose sites from which I gather proxy information for obvious reasons but I have to tell you something interesting about two of the proxies I used.

One of them shows itself as it is from Liechtenstein. However while using it, when I surf to Google.com, I see an option below the search box and the anchor text is “Go to Google Bahrain”. The proxy is indeed in Bahrain.

Another strange thing is when I use proxies from Saudi Arabia, they work for many many long times. No downtime, and you can use it virtually forever. There is one Saudi Arabia proxy that I setup for a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago and it is still working.

People who work with proxies and surf the web are familiar to change them usually within a day or two because this is their life time. Therefore, it is strange to have a proxy working for weeks without downtime.

Moreover, on both proxies (both in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia), there is still censorship. You cannot watch videos on Youtube which are flagged as adult. You cannot look at pornographic material. Further than that, I observed that I cannot look at videos on Youtube which are about satanism.

On one hand, providing a working proxy with minimal or no downtime is a good service to the world. On the other hand, they still serve to the purpose of cruel conservatism. Yet, a non-stop working proxy is suspicious. I am not sure whether they collect user information there or not. Providing such a durable proxy requires investment and I wonder who is / are the people behind it.

Google started something called Power Readers. You can now follow what famous political opinion leaders reading and sharing. Here is the list of people that you can follow:

• Obama and McCain campaigns
• Mike Allen, POLITICO
• Chuck DeFeo, Townhall
• John Dickerson, Slate
• Mark Halperin, TIME
• Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
• Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
• Jon Meacham, Newsweek
• Patrick Ruffini, The Next Right