www.affiliateconfession.com

It’s been 4 days since the How Lame Is Technorati Experiment and conclusive results are in. Technorati is lame.

In making a purposeful effort to get traffic from a source that at one time actually did provide traffic, proved to be utterly unsuccessful. In the experiment I blogged a one liner about every one of the top 10 tags showing up on Technorati the day of the post and Affiliate Confession has received 15 total visitors in the 4 days since then. Not what I would call grand results. In fact, none of the tags used in the post were actually indexed on the results page for that tag.

What’s strange and is even more proof as to how lame Technorati is, is that a few days before I even tried the experiment, Technorati listed a single post on this blog completely out of the blue. I blog about the subject of that particular post quite often, yet only once has a post on that subject been indexed. And it gets even worse. A couple of spam blogs scraping my content are now being indexed for the same tags Technorati won’t list me for.

Not only is Technorati lame, it’s not even relevant any longer. Now there’s a target Google could go after and maybe adjust their PR 8 status accordingly.

I had a post already planned for today, and then I came across The Shrinking Window Of Opportunity by Gyutae Park over at his blog. It is a great article that’s really a wake-up call for Internet marketers to get busy because of the way the landscape of the net is changing. If you aren’t building your web empire yet, it could be too late real soon for the small, independent webmaster.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea for a business on the web, you should have started it yesterday, because of the time it takes to get established and now this seems more important that ever with Google’s preference for older, well established web properties.

Even though we all know how evil Google is, the simple fact is that they control the game. While you may be able to get some traffic from various sources on the net, at this point if you don’t have traffic from Google, you probably aren’t doing all that well, and it’s only going to get worse. Gyutae points out that Google seems to be giving less relevance to or even completely discounting things like paid links, directories, widgets and more, resulting in the small business person on the web being driven out of business.

What Google supposedly wants is more relevance and in their eyes, large, established web sites will get more attention and will be pushing out the little guy and soon start to take over search results. So goes the day when everything on the web was to be on equal footing.

I don’t believe it is the end of the road for Internet and affiliate marketers and neither does Gyutae, but now is not the time to procrastinate with your ideas. If you are going to make your mark on the web, you have to start to establish yourself as an authority in your niche today. Rather than explain again how to go about that, go read Gyutae’s post about the dwindling opportunity for the independent webmaster.

As a little counterpoint though, I’m not so sure Google will always have the monopoly they do. Google’s track record as of late is to just make people mad. We aren’t reading about how wonderful Google has been to webmasters lately, we’re hearing about exactly the opposite, from lots of different sources. While they are trying to create a cleaner search index with more relevance, they could (some would argue they already have) become out of touch and elitist somewhat like the United States government.

Not that I would ever want to see such a thing, but companies who control commerce in such a way that it effects the economic stability of a large mass of people, attract the snooping eye of government intervention. With Google’s increasing record of putting people out of business, no telling what could happen if this were to manifest itself on a much larger scale. We would then have one out of touch bureaucracy giving orders to an out of touch company that controls a huge portion of commerce. Can you spell disaster?

The point of all this is to start building a relevant web empire today that will add value to the web for years to come. Don’t wait until the entry point for the small businessperson is beyond your reach.

The search engine gods, or at least the minor deities, that reside at Google have seen fit to throw a little page rank boost my way in the latest update. I first read about a page rank update being in progress yesterday on John Chow’s blog, but didn’t see anything happening my way until first thing this morning.

After starting this blog on November 1, 2007 and posting at least 1 entry every day since November 21st apparently the hard work has paid off. I can’t remember when I first got a page rank, but it was a measly 1 and stayed that way for several months. However, Google now has boosted Affiliate Confession to a PR 3.

Thanks goes out to everyone who reads and links to an interesting article here at this blog. I am immensely grateful for that. You were all part of helping to receive a better page rank here.

Of course the big question now is, does it even matter? If I get more organic search engine traffic from Google that’s the result that would make a difference. Whatever the result I will continue to blog consistently on programs, news, goofy stuff and ways to make money in affiliate marketing.

Thanks Google for a little more green in the bar up top there, now please send more traffic my way.

Have you ever wanted to stick it to Google and be in charge of your own advertising? How would you like to get 100% of the profits you earn in selling advertising on your blog? You could create your own advertising page and individually track, schedule, manage, collect payments from advertisers and more or you could get OIOPublisher and have all that done automatically. And now you can do it for 50% off.

You’ve probably seen the little 125 x 125 ads on many blogs and over to the right in my sidebar and may have wondered how all that works, what makes them rotate so you never see them in the same position and I’m sure there are a few more questions. Well, OIOPublisher does a great job of all of that and to introduce their latest updated version, they’re offering a 50% off coupon. The regular price of IOIPublisher is $37, but if you use the code QWERTY-17 when you order you can get $17 off that price. Yea, I know it’s exactly 46% off, not 50%, but it’s close enough for the title.

OIO already has a ton of features, but version 1.60 adds some significant upgrades such as:

An addition of an ad queue
You can now use html with the ad system
You can now use use OIO with non-WordPress sites (very cool)
OIO will now be integration with an upcoming ad network (ViralBlogAds.com) (so you can sell unused adspace on the network)

OIOPublisher must still be hosted on a WordPress blog, but with the upgrade, through java script you can now place ads on any website and then sell ads through your own system or through ViralBlogAds.

I love OIOPublisher and use it to manage my advertising here at Affiliate Confession and if you want to start selling ads on your blog or just need a better way to manage them you should definitely take advantage of this discount. Don’t forget to use the coupon code QWERTY-17 for your $17 discount.

Today’s thought is another that was found in Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4 Hour Work Week, but originates from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have troubles.”

This can be related a lot to the get rich quick mentality that is so prevalent on the net today. You especially see it in the multitude of ebooks for sale promising everything from blogging riches, to Adsense riches, to a quick buck in real estate, to numerous other methods of creating money.

Methods may create some quick cash, but principles are timeless and create true wealth. Are you thinking about how you can cash in on the net with the latest technique for manipulating Google or are you thinking about how you can help other people get what they want or need from life?

Sometimes it can be a struggle between these two competing drives for the Internet businessperson and I am as guilty as the rest.

Your thoughts?