ScratchBack Review

ScratchBack

So, I still haven’t made enough to get my first payment from ScratchBack, but I have seen other bloggers mention that they have, and for me this means that it is worth continuing to use. Thus far, I have made $20.59, and need $25 even to be paid by them.

What is ScratchBack?

Selling text links has been seen as a bad thing in Google’s eyes, and since Google is the search engine that drives most of the traffic online, many people were looking for a new way to sell text links, while making Google happy. ScratchBack came along with their JavaScripted, no-followed text widget that has slowly continued to gain more and more attention.

Currently, during Beta, which has been going on for some time now, you can earn 90% of the revenue generated by people purchasing links, and what’s even more interesting is that you set the rates.

Who has advertised here?

I added ScratchBack around the end of November and you can read my post about adding ScratchBack for more details. Since then, I have had five advertisers, each one filling one of the five spots on my widget.

I have the widget set up to only remove a link if it is bumped off the list. So if another advertiser stops by, and purchases a link, the bottom person will be dropped off the list. The great thing for advertisers is that I only get one new advertiser every two or three weeks. And so those that have advertised have had their link up for over a month and a half for only five dollars.

I wanted to issue a big thanks to each one of my advertisers thus far, by including a mention to them in a blog post so all of my readers can see their link, and the great support they have been to this blog.

Advertisers thus far include:
Blogging Cents
Post on Fire
HD BizBlog
LocLookup
Hosting Diary

Recent News from ScratchBack

People are doing some interesting things with ScratchBack, and I wanted to highlight some of that here.

The first thing of note is Zac Johnson, who has used getting a t-shirt as a value added way of getting people to add their link to his ScratchBack widget. While sending a t-shirt to those that advertise might add up to a fair bit of money, but you can be assured that he will end up ahead. The cost to be listed on his blog, and qualify for the t-shirt is $25, and your link stays up for one week.

The second interesting usage of ScratchBack is from the owner himself, Jim Kukral. He has created a widget for his video podcasts that allow people to sponsor his shows. It is $10 for a week, but if he does a video nearly every day, that works out to be less than $1.50 per video to have your link next to the content he creates.

If you have come up with an interesting and exciting way to add ScratchBack to your blog, site, service, or whatever, I’d love to hear about it. I am very happy with the way things are going with ScratchBack, and I wish them nothing but continued success.

Originally posted on January 17, 2008 @ 7:17 pm

Scheduling Things In: Forgetting about Podcasts

So, I have only been a panel member on one of the five episodes of WordPress Weekly, a podcast being run by Jeffro of Jeffro2pt0. I have had every intention of being on more of them, but what ends up happening is on Friday night, I am busy doing other things, wrapping up my week, and I totally forget about calling in to the podcast.

The amusing part is that I usually remember about two hours too late.

This really brings home the issue I have with scheduling. From week to week my roles, responsibilities and hours change. I am pretty much always tied to a computer though. You would think that I would have an application set up to remind me of such upcoming events, but even if I did, I don’t think I am diligent or organized to constantly keep it up to date.

What’s a blogger like me to do? Maybe I should just get Jeffro to change the recording time to suit my needs? (Joking of course) What do you think?

Oh, and check out Episode 3 if you want to hear me giving out my opinion on a variety of WordPress related things.

Originally posted on February 12, 2008 @ 12:26 pm

Facebook Has Become Spambook

Over on CrowdSpark there is a great post up that asks the question, has Facebook become Spambook? I think the answer is a resounding yes.

I think this paragraph from the article sums it all up nicely:

Facebook now resembles the preverbal high school party to which one invites a few friends and ends up hosting the entire school and then being left with the cleanup the following morning. Gone is the neo modern facade and the clean interface, hijacked instead by a throng of applications which are nothing but glorified billboards waging a battle for eyeballs. Walls now resemble teenage bedrooms plastered with posters and littered with the remnants of countless fast food excursions. Not to mention the painstaking process of weeding through invitations to add all manner of useless applications.

I have continually found myself more and more frustrated with the continuing de-evolution of the Facebook profiles. I actually banned my wife from Facebook a few times, as she got a little obsessed with the site. She even went as far as deactivating her profile, though she only lasted a week before re-activating it. I almost get carpel tunnel just from scrolling down to the wall on her profile, as I pass the fun wall and super wall applications she has added.

It has gone beyond ridiculous. The whole data portability thing only matters to me if someone comes up with a better, more professional, grown up Facebook. That way I can leave that stupid site behind. As a quick side note, and thumbs up to Facebook, it was, at first, nice to interact with my High School friends once again.

Check out CrowdSpark for more high quality, well written articles.

Originally posted on January 8, 2008 @ 10:49 pm

8 Bloggers to Network With

I want to give a huge thanks to Steven Snell of Vandelay Design for including me in a recent post on Pure Blogging entitled “8 Bloggers That Won’t Bite”.

Networking is one of the things I tell everyone to focus on in this ever changing landscape of web publishing, and it is nice to know that people have noticed that I enjoy networking with others. When you work from home by yourself, any contact helps stop me from going crazy.

People listed on Pure Blogging include, Courtney Tuttle, Tay, Jon Phillips, David Culpepper, Adnan, Pearl, and Karen Zara.

A great list of people, some who I have talked to before, and others who I plan on networking with soon.

Originally posted on January 25, 2008 @ 6:46 pm

Twitter Blogs are Annoying

So, I also wanted to take a few minutes today to rant about something that has been annoying me for a long time now: Twitter blogs. Basically, there are many ways to feed content from Twitter, a popular micro-blogging tool, into your WordPress blog. Unfortunately, people aren’t writing real content for their blogs anymore; instead, pushing their Twitters onto the world.

What you end up with as a reader are half a dozen or so one hundred and forty character messages, most of which have no meaning or relevance to you as a reader since they are responses or aimed at specific people.

It is really a shame to see so many blogs heading down this road, and that Twitter has captured their attention so much that they don’t continue to work on their real blogging efforts, a type of communication that can’t occur on a platform like Twitter.

Please, turn off whatever you use to feed your Twitter conversation into your blog, and put some kind of widget in the sidebar instead. Then, as your blog becomes decrepit, hopefully it will shame you so much that you come back and post something decent.

By the way, my Twitter information is www.twitter.com/davidcubed if you want to follow me.

Originally posted on February 6, 2008 @ 3:20 pm