I currently have 4,599 sites rated positively and probably more than that negatively. I’ve been a member of the StumbleUpon for less than 9 months. Do the math. The toolbar is like channel surfing on crack. You tend to see a lot of things that interest you and it can start to take up a lot of your time.

Another draw back to this service is the privacy issue. Your rankings are on there for anyone to see. This service is a marketers dream. It doesn’t get much easier than this to do target advertising. A while back EBay bought StumbleUpon but they have not done much with it. Personally I always felt this service would be a perfect match for Facebook. Target advertising would be simple, you could share stories and websites effortlessly with friends, it would combine the best of blogging with the best of social networking allowing you to connect with people of similar interests.

In any event, I highly recommend this service. It will really open up the web for you, taking you to all sorts of places you’ve never seen.

I think a lot of my time and energy is really taken up by the fact that I work with some really inept people. Very nice, wonderful people. But oh my god can you not do anything without me babysitting you? Are you kidding me. I work for a large university, so part of the frustration stems from bureaucratic culture. Every decision goes through twelve people, things never change because no one wants to be personally responsible for anything. Then on top of that you have departmental infighting. Everyone has their own little fiefdom. Instead of trying to provide the best experience for the students, everyone reinvents the wheel to justify their positions.

I know this is never going to change, I know this problem is as old as time. It just frustrates me to work for a prestigious university and deal with such pettiness. I never cease to be amazed at just how inept people are. I don’t care if you’re brilliant at your position or if you can think outside the box, just be able to do your own job. Is that too much to ask? Sure it would be great if you could think without the rules, but just being able to do what you’re supposedly getting paid for would be awesome too. I think personal responsibility is really a forgotten art form. At least it is in any bureaucracy. Of course in most businesses employees are graded and held responsible, but unfortunately to false metrics. There are few places in the world where logic and statistics reign supreme. Where long-term consequences are judged alongside short-term profits. But that’s a diatribe for another time….

Having the widget on the side of the page lets me see if other bloggers are checking out the page and is useful for stalking. Just kidding I can’t overcome the feeling that it is all a blog pyramid scheme though, adding other blogs to your friends list, having bloggers visit your blog in exchange for you visiting theirs. It is funny too how the bloggers who use basic psychology tricks, such as thanking people for visiting their page, and asking tons of people to be friends, become the most popular. MyBlogLog taps into that inner need to feel part of a group, and to have a network of people who care about you. In the end social networking is so popular because it connects with a deep need for community and acceptance. Combine that with a voyeuristic ability to pry into others lives, and you can see why it has taken off in the last few years. We all yearn to be popular on some level and to know how others are living their lives. That’s why celebrity rags are so big with a certain segment of the population, vicariously experiencing popularity without taking any risk.

It makes me wonder if social networking will ever merge, or it will continue to splinter into small fiefdoms/communities. The first person who gives people the ability to simply share information between different social networks, carry friends over, etc. is going to be very wealthy. I can’t help but be reminded of a Pulizer Prize finalist book I just finished, The Blank Slate ( I cannot recommend this book highly enough). The Blank Slate addresses how many people in modern society deny human nature. I think if you look closely you’ll see human nature in all aspects of popular internet sites. There are basic needs hardwired into us all, those who make it big on the internet tap into these base desires (think pornographers, or Google {ask a question, have it answered}, or Facebook {look how many friends I have, look at the parties I’m going to….}) . Yeah, I guess that’s the point of this rambling post, if you want to be someone on the internet, think emotionally first, then rationally implement the plan.

The Blogobubble:

The preponderance of easy to use blogging software on the internet means that everyone and their grandmother’s goat has a blog (pot, meet kettle, I know). In order to make money from their blogs people need traffic, and lots of it. So what’s a would be millionaire to do? …..

Pyramid Schemes:

This technique made me think of “The Office” episode where Michael is explaining to his staff this brilliant new business opportunity he’s involved in and Jim walks up to the white board and draws a pyramid around his presentation. So many bloggers think like Michael. Let’s see, how do I get popular, I know, by recruiting even more beginning bloggers out for a quick buck. I’ll write articles about their articles and they’ll write articles about mine…… Seriously, how many pages have you gone to which are little more than a quote of someone’s post, a synopsis which you could have gotten just from reading the snippet, and then a link? This link trading is nonsense. How many pages do you have to go through before you get down to the original content? If the number is not zero then it’s too many. Give me just the facts when you’re sending me to another page, not your two line review. Eventually the blogs that only write fluff are going to get separated from those which actually produce content. Advertisers want results, the people want to RTFA (or at least enough of it to post their highly educated comment like, “FIRST POST!!!”), the money is going to flow towards the content eventually. And no, I don’t care what you think of another blogger’s page, because I know you are hoping that they will write the same kind of review for you.

Black Hat Advertising:

These are the spammers of the blog world. They’ll go to social bookmarking sites like digg or stumbleupon and game the system into pushing content to the top. In exchange they want your cash. These soulless weasels want to take one of the only areas where egalitarian meritocracy (I guess I could talk about markets and group mean group estimation here if I weren’t so lazy) still exists and cheat. Plain and simple, their content is not good enough to make it to the top naturally, so they cheat. If you have ever even considered using one of these groups, do the world a favor and kill yourself.

Now how do the Blackhat’s do their dirty work? Pink Hats….

Pink Hats??

Most social bookmarking sites are dominated by men. So here’s what you do, you find a titillating picture of a female, give this woman a sexy/slutty name, send friend requests to every guy you see…. and profit. Men being the one-track minded creatures we are fall for this like lemmings. HornyAllAlone18 wants to be my friend????!!?? Score! Now with sites like Stumbleupon if you friend someone you’re more likely to see the pages they suggest. You can put a link to you site in your profile. Oh and if you’re feeling really evil you can just send out messages to people asking them to check it out and write a review for you… because this is your first ever website.

Other Psychological Tricks:

Besides the old standbys of pyramid/get rich quick schemes and sex what else can one do to drive piles of traffic? Other less nefarious options include posting comments on every blog you can find with a link back to your website, stalking the people who come to your website and thanking them for stopping by, and prizes.

Prizes? Oh yeah, I love this one. Using the renowned human inability to judge odds blogs will offer a chance to win a prize to some random blogger who(pick as many as you would like): Signs up to your mailing list, subscribes to the RSS feed, writes a review of your blog, creates some original marketing campaign for you, etc. When people get the ability to gamble for free they jump right into it. So for a relatively modest cost a blogger can bring in lots of traffic.

Playing to the natural human tendencies( greed, ego, feeling part of a group, be creative, grab a business psychology/ marketing book and leave your soul at the door) works every time.

Link Bait:

What’s link bait you ask? Link bait consists of top ten lists, pictures of animals acting like humans and talking like script kiddies, telling people how your switched to Ubuntu went (seriously, it’s not that hard, shut up about it already), jokes, and anything about how great/evil Bush/America is. Oh, and guess what, most people don’t even produce the content themselves. They go around collecting it and then post it as their own. That was easy.

And in Conclusion:

To me anything short of black hat advertising and outright stealing isn’t so bad. Then again, I’m not your priest/rabbi/pastafarian minister. What else…. Oh yeah, you know what else works well? Rants about how everyone tries to drive traffic to their websites.

So, the key thing to take from this, is rather than jumping on the bandwagon and writing a blog about what everyone else is, find a few niche markets without that much competition. You might not make a ton of money on any individual market segment/blog but if you add up all the niches you wind up with a larger sum. Now onto the part about getting traffic to you.

Long Tail Advertising:

Ok, remember that Chris Anderson guy we were talking about. Well unless you are the guy from Momento I would hope so. Anyway, he wound up writing a book expanding on the Long Tail concept. He also has a blog. I suspect he might spend a little bit of time thinking about this concept so you might want to take a look.

After you’ve gone through those things, take a look at this article. The article argues that the long tail is actually getting fatter and opportunities are expanding for startups. Whether the tail is getting fatter or the market is fragmenting even more and lengthening is a matter of significant debate, but it’s still an interesting read.

There are also a couple of companies which specialize in connecting Long Tail…ers/ites with money. I want to take this opportunity to note that I don’t do paid reviews, ever. I just tell you what’s out there, you decide.

The Companies:

Hittail
What Is It?
“The long tail is an economic concept that says the collective demand for less-popular items … can exceed the all the most popular added together …. Online music stores are a perfect example because they can carry large collections of music just as easily as just a small selection. The product is digital and there are no inventory issues. So, the pay-per-click industry is now using this concept to encourage you to run ever-larger keyword buys. Their inventory of obscure, yet valuable keywords is inexhaustible…

HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It’s that simple.”

103bees
What Is It?
“It’s a real-time online tool for webmasters, bloggers and internet marketers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive targeted traffic to your websites.

103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!”

At the top of the blog world you have a few bloggers who are raking in serious cash. Six figures in some cases. The problem with this is that your average person isn’t very clever. So instead of saying, ‘wow, that’s amazing how do I learn from them’, your average person will say, ‘I’m going to create a clone of their website’.

To begin with, if you’re sitting on the internet reading blogs all day, you’re probably not the most motivated person in the world. Combine that with the fact that blogging is the new gold rush and forget it. You suddenly have thousands of people on the web trying to become millionaires by blogging.

To have any chance of making money through blogging you need to do two main things. 1. Learning from others & 2. You need to find something that you’re genuinely interested in (and no, getting rich quick is not a good idea, too much competition), and write about it consistently better than everyone else.

Be forewarned blogging is probably not going to make you rich. The blogosphere reminds me a lot of the tech bubble (we’ll call it the blogobubble because that sounds funny), a lot of people trying to get very wealthy in a short amount of time without any sort of plan. Advertisers are only going to pay for results/traffic and there is a lot of competition out there. That’s why the people at the top of the pyramid do so well for themselves, making money becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, so if you see someone out there making a ton of money, you’re drawn to their site to find out why and so is everyone else.

Now I can’t tell you what your niche should be and I can’t make you stick to it. But what I can help you with is the learning part. Below I’ve collected some articles concerning the ways in which you can make money online with your blog, the major revenue streams that bloggers use and links to some of the biggest blogs (yes you too can help hold up this pyramid). In part II of this article, I’ll teach you a little about long-tail economics and how you can do alright for yourself financially without copying the big boys.

Articles about Blogging for Dollars:

• “How to Make Money from Your Blog”
• “Earning a Six Figure Income From Blogging”
• “Ad Sense Tips for Bloggers”
• “My top 7 blog monetization methods”
• “101 Blog tips I learned in 2006″
• “Monetizin Word-Press Plugins”
• “The Art of Link Baiting”
• Not exactly an article, but Google’s AdSense blog

Some Blogs about … Blogging:

www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
www.problogger.net
www.stevepavlina.com
www.doshdosh.com
www.johntp.com
www.johnchow.com
www.copyblogger.com

The Major Revenue Sources:

AdSense:

• Google’s text based ad service. The way Google makes all of its money and many bloggers do too.

Amazon Associates:

• “Launched in 1996, Associates is Amazon.com’s affiliate marketing program. By linking to Amazon products and services you can add compelling content for your site visitors enjoyment and receive up to 10% in referral fees for doing so.”

Chitika:

• “Chitika provides bloggers the opportunity to harness their independent original content and opinions to monetize the traffic to their site. Offers retailers a new channel to merchandise their products, and gives consumers better access to a broader base of independent expert advice from the blogger community.”

Link Share:

• “As a LinkShare affiliate, you will earn revenue for driving sales, leads and traffic to partner sites. Find hundreds of affiliate programs from Fortune 500 and other leading businesses in the LinkShare Network. Registration is free”

Review Me:

• Write reviews for cash.

Text Link Ads:

• Inserts text links into your posts.