eXtra For Every Publisher

First off, I wanted to ask you all what you thought of these Rankings Rising posts? This will be the second one that I have done, and I would love to keep it as a staple of this blog, in order to be able to go back through the history of this site and show its growth. If you don’t like it though, let me know, and I will drop it.

It has been two weeks since I did the last Rankings Rising post, and since then, Alexa has updated my ranking with them, and things are looking amazing to finish out October.

Alexa Traffic Rank (lower is better)
October 5th - 182,030
October 19th - 111,380

Technorati Rank (lower is better)
October 5th - 44,291
October 19th - 37,356

Feedburner RSS Subscribers
October 5th - 110
October 19th - 164

Unique Visitors
September 2007 - 5202
Thus far in October - 10153

I really can’t explain how excited all of this makes me, as I continue to try to work my way up into the top one hundred on 45n5.com’s Top 100 list. Earlier this month I was sitting at the 120th spot, and have since moved up to the 108th, which is a twelve spot jump. I think that is pretty amazing, considering the intense competition I have on the list.

I have now blasted through every goal I had for this site for this month, meaning in November I will have to set even higher goals. Let’s hope my birthday on the 14th doesn’t cause me to be lax on the great momentum I have going here thanks to all the wonderful friends and readers I have on this site.

If you have any feedback, on my content, video, podcasts, please let me know. I would love to hear what you want to see more of. I have a few ideas on where I want to take this site, but I would love to have reader participation. Crawl out of the woodwork and leave a comment and thanks again for reading.

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Over on Performancing, there is a great post up that talks about the growth of your blog. I have been bringing up being able make your blog profitable a few times lately, and that is because I know that it is possible.

The post on Performancing, talks about a recent video post that Darren did on Problogger.net about focusing on the growth, rather than the income, and if you are patient, the income will eventually come.

Here is a snippet from the post:

Let’s say after the first 30 days of blogging you make $1.00 a day. Then, the next month you make $2.00 a day. When you compare both months, you actually gained 100%. While $2.00 a day is not something to brag about, you’re doing well because your trending up.

Let’s look at a long term example. If you make $1.00 day in one month and you have 30% growth every month, in just two years, you’ll make over $400 a day. Not bad for two years work, right? $400 daily is $12,000 a month.

Some of you might be wondering even how to get to that one dollar a day mark, and believe it or not, for many bloggers, that early advertising revenue mark is the hardest, but persistence, patience, and consistency with your blogging will eventually pay off. Maybe not in two years as their example says, but given enough time, nearly any blogger can make full time income from their work.

Stay positive, and you will be amazed at what you can accomplish. I like to think of myself as living proof having worked for two years, full time in the industry.

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Overview

There are many different programs you can use to buy or sell links, but the new service on the Internet is TNX.net. They are heralding themselves as the place to buy links and want to become the premiere text link marketplace.

They have a fair bit of competition though, with the popular Text-Link-Ads and other such services pushing their products on consumers.

They also have what will now be an uphill battle, with Google, and most likely other search engines starting to penalize sites that buy and sell text link advertisements as a way to game search engine rankings.

Advertising is the key to getting your message out into the marketplace, and selling advertising makes it easier to devote more time to your blog but is TNX.net a company you should be considering?

What Others Have Said

There have been many posts around the web on TNX.net, and so if nothing else, the service has gotten the buzz of the blogosphere behind it, showing that there is a need for another service such as this.

Here are just a few articles that have mentioned TNX.net:

• The Blog Herald
• Courtney Tuttle
• InvestorBlogger
• NetBusinessBlog
• CashQuests
• Digital Point Thread

My Thoughts

I have been a long time Text Link Ads customer, and that is because it was a fast way to make what I considered a fair amount of revenue for the work and time that I had put into my site, and even today, despite all the search engine issues, I highly recommend their product. Can TNX come close to replacing TLA? I am not sure, but I do think that competition breeds invention and will hopefully just give us bloggers another way to monetize our sites.

The Good
Taking a page from Microsoft’s Live Marketplace and other similar systems, TNX uses points, which can lead to a huge disconnect between the amount you are paying and the value of the money you have put into the system. It can be much easier to part with points than with dollars. I think this was a smart move, and not only for TNX, but also for bloggers looking to use this system to monetize their blog. Getting people to part with money can be quite difficult. Hopefully, they won’t realize how much money they are parting with when it’s in point form.

The design is relatively simple, but effective. I would have gone with something even more professional looking, as their competitors have spent a fair bit of time and money tweaking their designs and coming late to the game usually means you have to step beyond your competitors, especially in appearance. I still put this in the good section, because the site is quite usable, and not unpleasant to look at.

The system seems to be rather easy to use, and allows you to focus your link buying on certain sites, by a variety of quality indicators. This can mean that sites with lower rankings might not sell well on this site, or make much money when they do sell links, but it makes it easier as an advertiser to hit powerful sites where your link will be shown to a large audience.

Affiliate Program
If you love to be part of an affiliate program, and are good at getting people to sign up below you, TNX has you covered there as well.

When you refer webmasters to TNX.net, you get 13.3% (as long as your account is active) of all TNX-points that are generated by their websites. In addition, you will receive 5% of all payments, made by referred advertiser.

That can grow to be a large amount of advertising for your blog, or a fair bit of cash in your pocket. Nothing wrong with that, especially since the program continues as long as your account is active. Over time, that can be a fairly nice revenue stream.

My Concerns
Of course, as with any of these programs, you have to do your due diligence and research these companies to death. TNX.net hasn’t been around very long, and so the search engine implications are not yet truly known, but its competitors are having a rough time dealing with Google.

This could mean that by advertising, or selling advertising, on your blog, that eventually you will be manually penalized by Google and if they are a major traffic source for your blog, you could be trading traffic and Google PageRank, a factor in many advertising programs valuation systems, for a few bucks from links.

Conclusion

Whether you check out TNX.net or not, buying and selling text links is here to stay, and TNX is a quickly growing marketplace, and for people looking to monetize their blogs, it is worth checking out if TNX suits your needs.

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After the rambling that took place in August, against ProBlogger.net, David invited me once again to criticize the design of another popular blog: JohnCow.com.

I have to say that my first reaction when he gave me the link was “don’t you mean JohnChow.com?”, but after clicking on the link, and comparing it with the site that inspired it, I found it surprising that it is actually nicer to look at than the original.

I don’t mean to say that John Chow’s website has a bad design, but I think it has a very exaggerated amount of advertisement. Then again, he didn’t become a dotcom mogul by sparing on the ads.

After the initial sympathy I had for John Cow’s website, I quickly realized that it had it’s own flaws, and after the beautiful header loses it’s grace, what’s left underneath it leaves much room for improvement.

The “Pretending” Tabbed Container

First of all, the first thing that strikes the user, after looking the banner, is the list of orange buttons that feel completely detached from the rest of the design. They do not fail to look like buttons, so after clicking them the rectangle underneath them changes.

The height of the content area also changes, so that made me wonder how it would look like if JavaScript was disabled. The result wasn’t pretty…

The content you see underneath the rectangles is the content that appears individually on all of the options you can choose. And, obviously, the rectangles don’t work. Some might say “every browser has JavaScript”, and that is almost true. But whenever good web designers make a website, they usually have some concerns regarding the site’s graceful degradation, or in other words, how the site will look like if it the browser is outdated.

In terms of usability, that whole area would much easier to understand if it was design as a tabbed container. Even though they don’t look like tabs, they act like them, so common sense would say that they should indeed be tabs. Also, the selected “tab” button should have a different look from the other buttons. As it is right now, you don’t know which tab is active unless you click on it and see that it doesn’t do anything.

The Subscribe Options

Moving a little to the right we find yet another section of the website that feels out of place due to the awkward colors chosen for it’s elements.

Starting from the top we have the green-outlined and blue-backgrounded search box can missed very easily unless you’re paying attention to it. The site’s background (in the container) is green, so I think that common sense would say that we wouldn’t use green as the border of an element we’re trying to make evident.

Then we have a black white and yellow/orange RSS icon, followed by a dark gray Feedburner button, next to a green and orange box. There’s nothing wrong with those elements separately, but since they’re placed so close together they should have all shared similar, or contrasting colors. As it stands, this is probably the “messiest” part of the site, in terms of colors.

The newsletter field also has a few mistakes. For example, the input field doesn’t look like an input field. This site seems to have something against making visual elements appears as they should. When you click on the input field which has the words “Enter email here”, that text doesn’t go away.

If I had to put my money on which of the two elements, the text field or the submit button, was the submit field, if it didn’t have any words in it. I’d certainly say the button was the text field. It has most of the visual elements that we’d expect from a text field: a very light background, a light border and even a slight indentation.

Sidebar Links

Moving down, and past the six ads, of which I don’t really have anything to comment upon, we have a few lists of links, and those have two problems. First, they have the same color as the color of the text in the articles. Secondly, the font size is bigger than the text in the articles. Once again, this breaks the consistency behind the whole design.

The Articles

In the articles, we find another coherence, and usability, flaw. The title of the articles has a different font that is found nowhere else on the site. I didn’t check this, but from a quick look at the top part of the page, I can see three different font faces, which once again (say it with me people) breaks the site’s consistency.

The article’s text has a justified alignment, which does in making the content feel very organized. But for a content driven website, article texts should never have a justified alignment because it makes reading the articles very tiresome because your eyes have to adapt to the space between each word on every different line.

The Header and Conclusion

Thankfully, the critiques end here with the header, and that ends up being one of the most pleasant parts of the site.

Personally, I find it a damn shame to see a design that starts off so well at the top turn into a mess during the middle. The header of a website is, for most modern designs, the most important design element, which will define whether the content is of a high quality or not, and JohnCow.com’s is great.

If you want to do a bit of homework, you can visit John Chow’s own website and look at how he implemented a similar type of content, with even more advertisements, without breaking the site’s consistency.

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About

This video podcast will cover the projects, websites, and blogs that I am part of. I will talk about the things I do as a Problogger.

Topics Covered

In this episode I talk about being part of Mark’s GroupPlatform and how I will be part of that project with a site called Alt Sci-Fi.

I also mention how I have a SitePoint contest going for the logo design and how I hope some of the best designers will come back and revise their entries.

Other than that, I am just getting excited about getting started on Alt Sci-Fi, and hope you will all check it out once it launches.

Video Hosting

I want to thank Video.ca for hosting the Xfep video podcast. I highly recommend the site, and hope you will all check it out. I used to work for the owner and operator of the site.

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