What Is Your ‘SR’ (Spam Rank) ?
With all the hubub about Google’s recent PR update I thought it was a good idea to mention the real measure of how popular your blog or website is.. The way to judge how popular your blog or site is based on a real-world measurement instead of some mystial/made-up number from Google that nobody can explain or quantify. I’m talking about your SR or SPAM RANK.
When I first moved the blog from Blogger.com to Wordpress and setup my Akismet Plugin I was disappointed after the first few months because it seemed like the spammers didn’t care about me or my blog - Akismet would only get 1 or 2 spam comments per week. I was really starting to feel unloved.
Now that’s all changed. Sure, Google has changed the Page Rank 
of the blog from a PR3 to a PR4, but I don’t care about that - I care about what really matters, my SpamRank of over 20,000! Now not a day goes by that I don’t get 5-10 worthless, lame, “trying to look real” spam comments caught by Akismet every day! I’m finally someone!
What’s your Spam-Rank?
Hottest New Blogger Video
Starring Shoemoney, John Chow and Darren Rowse.
..sometimes it’s sad the when you think about how much free-time I have..
Sometimes ‘Thank You’ Is Payment Enough
Every once in a while my wife asks me “Why do you do that blog-thing if it doesn’t make any money?” Not that she’s *cough* greedy or anything, but she knows that the website generates good income each month, and I tell her about ShoeMoney, Jim Karter, John Cow, etc, that make good income from blogging, and she wonders why I don’t do the same with my blog. Even though I do make a few dollars from the affiliate links that I occasionally post, it doesn’t really add up to much - and since there is no advertising in (here) in my blog, it basically generates no income at all.
What I always tell my wife (or anyone else that asks) is that I do the (this) blog to help other webmasters however I can or to be an inspiration to new webmasters/bloggers looking to generate income from their website or blog. I certainly don’t do it “for the love of blogging” because to be honest, I find it very difficult to write most blog-posts and I don’t consider myself a great writer or even a moderately good blogger.
About the only “payment” I really do get is the occasional “thank you” that I get - either from a post I make here, from the free ebook, or for a post I’ve made at DP Forums. I usually get a few “thank you’s” per month, but today I got one from someone that seemed particularly grateful.
SUBJECT: Thank You Mr. Brown!
Randy
I just wanted to thank you for a couple of things.
You were the one who originally turned me on to Kontera, and then Chitika (I used your referral to sign up). Actually the whole idea of “diversifying” from Adsense. I went to your blog Grown Up Geek and I love the site. I have to spend more time there learning.
I started this whole blogging thing back in August 2007, and now I have 18 blogs, and I make approx. $2,000 a month give or take a few hundred.
Anyways, thanks for making a difference in my life (and a difference in my girlfriend and 4 dogs life too!).
Sincerely,
Name withheld for his protection
Wow! I actually made a difference in someone’s life - and, he was grateful enough to take the time to thank me for it. I don’t want to get all teary-eyed or mushy, but that really means a lot to me.
Shoemoney might make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, Markus Frind and others might make over $1,000,000 per year, but can those guys say that they have actually made a difference (for the better) in someone’s life?
Sometimes… Thank you is payment enough….
A Thinner BlogRoll For 2008
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve updated, and slimmed-down my blogroll (it’s over there on the lower- right -> ).
As I mentioned back in October, I subscribe to very-few blogs, and I switch them around often. I guess it’s my ADD, but if a blog does not hold my attention or I find that the headlines just aren’t getting me to read them, I unsubscribe and move on to something new. That does not mean that I’ll never read that blog again, it just means it no longer gets my RSS vote and I’m freeing up that space on my iGoogle RSS Reader Page for something else. And since my Blogroll here at the blog is a mirror of the actual blogs I read, if i drop a blog that means that it looses a link-vote from me also.
You might have noticed that among the dropped blogs are Shoemoney and Problogger. “Blogging Blasphemy!? you say? Maybe.. But i’m realizing that I’m just not learning anything from them. It’s not that I think I know everything, it’s more that I’m not really a “Make Money Online Blogger”, I’m more of just a “webmaster that makes money”, so I dont really need tips on how to blog better.. Well, maybe I do, but I don’t do this blog to make money so I don’t need to learn how to monetize it or how to draw-in more readers, etc. The only reason I do this blog is to share what I’m doing over at the website, post how it’s doing, what I’ve done that works, and what I’ve done that does not work.
I do still relate to a few of the “make money online” bloggers (they’re still in my blogroll), and I still learn a few things from them, but I think as I find more blogs by money-making-webmasters, like Markus Frind from PlentyOfFish.com I’ll probably be more likely to subscribe to them. I checked out Shawn Hogan’s blog, but it seems that he’s just not interested in blogging anymore. So if you know of any other money-making-webmaster’s blog, please post them for me to check out.
PS - As I was getting the link for PlentyOfFish.com, I saw this profile on the front page that struck me as rather humorous.
