WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Thanks to everyone who participated in our We’ll Pay You To Be Our Friend April 2008 Contest.

In the end, your odds of winning were 2 in 482 ballots.

• 13 posts x 25 ballots = 325 ballots
• 25 email subscriptions x 2 ballots = 50 ballots
• 107 comments x 1 ballot = 107 ballots

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• Total Number of Ballots Received (as of Apr 30, 2008 11:59 EST): 482 ballots

We put all of the ballots in order and picked a random number from random.org.

And the winner is…

The winner is About Blog Contest. Congratulations!

We’ve sent out an email to the email address that they commented with, and they’ll have to reply to us with the same email to prevent fraud and receive their paypal cheque.

About the Contest

At one point, we thought the contest could become our trademark thank-you to our readers. $25 just for hanging around. But, we’ve thought about where we want to go, and have decided to stop the contest for now.

Pros of running the We’ll Pay You to Be Our Friend contest.

• We have more subscribers. (We started with 7 and got 33 readers by the end.)
• Our Technorati rank dropped from 605,911 to 352,668. (Ah, I remember in Feb 2008, we had a technorati rank of 8,911,336. Look at what commenting on other people’s blogs can do for your blog reactions.)
• We got 13 pages linking back to us. (I wonder if we fixed up our content (i.e. stopped with the sponsored posts), would that help us to increase our pagerank? We’re still PageRank 0.)
• We reward the people who participate in this blog.
• In theory, more participation means a higher ranking in the PayPerPost system. So, in theory, this could open up better sponsored posts.

Cons

• Let’s be honest. The subscribers joined because we dangled a carrot. I imagine when we stop the contest, the majority of subscribers will fade away. (25 subscribers is nothing, anyways)
• A lot of the pages that linked back to us were from the online-contest niche. That’s not necessarily our target market. (Then, again, we’re shifting our priorities anyways. See below)
• How much help are those 13 pages linking to us anyways? The majority were contest sites with PR0 that weren’t related to the Making Money Online niche. Griz points out in his Make Money Online using Blogs (Lesson 2) that thousands of links from irrelevant sites could hurt your rankings:

Note: You can get thousands of links from sites that have no relevance to your site and this won’t help you at all… if Google catches you linking to sites that are not relevant to your site you will be penalized and lose ranking. This is how link exchanges work - people buy or sell links to anyone else regardless of relevancy. Stay clear of this.

• The contest was taking time away from our other projects.

Other thoughts.

• $25 and we got 13 links. In essence, it’s around $1.90 per link, which is cheaper than the going rate on PayPerPost. (I wonder how the quality of the blogs participating in the contest compares with the blogs who do sponsored posts.)
• If we ran the contest for 8 months, it would have been a $200 expense. Sure we could make that money using sponsored posts, but writing sponsored post articles isn’t a sustainable way of making money. If you stop writing the posts, you stop making the money. Besides for $200, we could have bought 200 domain names.

If we ran the contest in May, here’s what we were thinking about doing

• We would accept links to any post on the site, not just the contest post. Contests aren’t relevant to everyone’s cup o’tea. So, it might not make sense for you to write about online contests. But, there might be other content in here that peaks your interest. That way, we might encourage more posts than just the online-contest niche.
• We would have given 5 ballots to any blogger who didn’t erase their April contest post. That way, you could post every month about WebDiggin, and over time, those little posts would become assets, increasing your chances of winning. (I imagine some people delete the posts after the contest in the same way that some people unsubscribe from the email feed.)
• We were thinking about giving ballots for referrals. For example, if you posted a link back to WebDiggin and said that you heard about us from another blog (with a link to that blog), we’d give you an extra 10 ballots and the referring blog an extra 10 ballots. (That might back fire from people who run multiple (and similar blogs). We had a few Italian blogs which I think were run by the same individual. (Which was okay for our last contest.)
• We wanted to give ballots if you stumbled, dugg, or technorati fav’d us, but we weren’t sure if that was against their terms of service. But that would be another way to participate in the blog and get points.

So, what are we going to do instead?

Yoda has a great quote. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Bloggin on WebDiggin has been a lot of fun. We’ve learned a lot about WordPress and blogging in general, but we’re going to shift our priorities to our other projects.

It comes down to this: We can blog about trying to make money online… or we can try to make money online.

The making money online / internet marketing niche is interesting. You make money by telling people how you make money… and hope they sign up for the products you recommend. (And people blast you or recommend you based on whether they think you have the credentials and know what you’re talking about.)

People in this niche, generally don’t click on ads, and they generally don’t buy products using your affiliate links. (Some do, if you’ve done a great job at building relationships, but I imagine just as many would sign up for their own affiliate account and then use their own links to buy the product to get that secret discount.)

We’ve lost $160 from our online attempts to make money online. We don’t have any street cred, but we wanted to use this blog as an online diary of our attempts to make money online. At one point, we were blogging to talk with other people, but I think now, we’re going to use WebDiggin more for us.

That means:

• We use this blog more like an online bookmark / favourites folder. We can post answers to problems that are useful for us. Like how to get your GoDaddy domain name to point to your free blogger account. (That way, we don’t have to keep on re-googling the question and looking for the answer.)
• We’re also going to continue posting our cashflow reports and show how much money we’ve made and lost. (That way, we’re motivated to do our finances on a monthly basis and see how we’re doing.)
• We’re not going to worry about getting subscribers, comments, or backlinks. If our technorati rank rises to 8 million and our subscriber feed drops to 1 again… oh well. We know how to build it up.
• We’re not going to worry about posting regular content because this blog is shifting focus for us. 
• We can spend more time on our projects.
• We’re going to continue to comment around in the blogosphere and make new friends, but we’ll be backlinking to some of our other projects. But we’ll always subscribe with our webdiggin email address.

And, hopefully, over time, we’ll see an increase in the amount of money we make online.

Bottom line: How much time do you spend trying to make money online and how much time do you spend blogging about trying to make money online?

Question: Do you have Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound goals for your online adventures? How’s that going for you?

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