www.affiliateconfession.com

I guess being an affiliate marketer and not making the bulk of my income from my blog has its advantages. The main advantage is that I don’t have to try and please Google with Affiliate Confession. Now, in my affiliate ventures I do try to follow the webmaster rules as best I understand them coming from the Mother Ship. But on this blog I have a luxury and I’m going to enjoy it.

One thing the luxury of not having to please Google, because I must make money from this blog, has taught me or rather shown me, is that I’m tiring of having to think about everything I do as if the goons at Google were looking over my shoulder. That’s just wrong. When did Google decide they’re the only game in town and you must abide by their rules of netiquette. Let’s call it what it is, Google is running a dictatorship and if you want to play in their game you must abide by what the dictator says or you get executed.

However, Google isn’t the only game in town. Over the last month Affiliate Confession has received more than 7,000 visits and more than 12,000 page views, but just 8.5% of that traffic has come from Google. The bulk of that traffic or 19.5% has come from direct visitors, people who come directly to Affiliate Confession without being filtered through a search engine, another blog, Entrecard or some other source. At times I have even received huge boosts in traffic from social media type sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg.

Google has positioned themselves as though the masses, and webmasters more specifically, are beholden to the playground of the Internet they have created for us. When the decision makers at Google issued the bizarre decree that webmasters were henceforth going to be punished for selling text links on their sites, that just made my blood boil, but I have yet to speak up about it. I don’t sell and have never sold links on any site I’ve run in the 4 years I’ve been making money online and it still made me furious. Then just yesterday, John from JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes left a comment where he stated in part:

I worry about google penalties every day, and they are penalizing whole sites for doing paid reviews. Anyone who even mentions Pay Per Post gets penalized now. I had a BizRate widget on one of my sites with all nofollow links and I got a 1 year penalty to PR0 and supplemental index in google. Once I removed that widget when my contract with Bizrate was up - within 3 days I was Pagerank 4 and back in the index.

That comment just got me thinking how dependent we’ve become on one entity in this whole Internet game. And yes, many of us are dependent on Google for much of our livelyhood whether it be through Adsense or them sending lots of traffic our way. If it weren’t for Google in many aspects, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do and have the benefit of working at home.

But back to the text link debate, I think the whole issue stems from the fact that Google doesn’t want webmasters to sell links because that’s their business with Adwords. Let’s face it, Google makes boatloads of cash from lots of people losing money on Adwords and if Google penalizes high traffic sites that sell text links, more people will have to continue to get traffic via Adwords, even if they lose money in the process. You may think that’s a dumb theory, but it is a known fact that people lose thousand of dollars just trying to figure out how to use Adwords and then they need to find a niche to be profitable in.

What has made this blog relatively easy to write has been the fact that I think of writing as more of a conversation than trying to find a keyword, and get it in the title, and make sure it’s in the first paragraph and make sure I don’t link out to something bad, and make sure I kiss up to Google every way I can so they might bless me with some traffic. Okay, I do that with most of my affiliate sites because want that traffic, but even then you never know what’s going to happen. For example, one of my vacation blogs was getting about 80 people a day from Google and hadn’t been updated since mid November, so I posted an entry thinking I would get even more traffic. Unfortunately that was a bad decision. For the last week I’ve received about 8 to 10 people a day from Google to that site. So much for trying to please them, I did nothing but update my blog and lost 90% of my traffic.

What it all boils down to is that I’m just not going to play the game with Google on this blog because I don’t have to. I enjoy writing and explaining what I do on the net to earn money and if Google would like people to know about that, they can send me some and if not, I’ll just rely on my readers and social marketing to get the word out.

Oh, by the way, my Featured Sites links are do follow.