Sometimes life isn’t fair. There are the real winners, and there are the rest of us who are the real whiners. Or maybe that’s just in terms of money. But when you read about TechCrunch earning $240,000 per month, you’d be bound to have a double take. Hey, that’s more than what most of us earn in a year.

Today, TechCrunch has a full-time staff of eight. This year, it hired a CEO. In August, 1.25 million people visited TechCrunch or its affiliated blogs at least once, according to comScore Inc. It brings in $240,000 per month in advertising, according to Arrington, and pulls in additional revenue from conferences and parties. Most important of all, TechCrunch is in the black.

“When I started the blog, it was just a hobby,” Arrington said. But, after a while, “It was pretty clear that I could make more money blogging than from anything else.”

If I’d founded TechCrunch I’d be laughing myself to the bank right now. Wait, isn’t that what Arrington does? Probably.

I should stress that this is the exception rather than the rule. There are a very few excellent blogs out there that make really big bucks. Then there are those so-so blogs that still make even bigger bucks. A modest number of us in the blogging business make a decent living, but aren’t exactly swimming in cash. Then most bloggers out there can only dream of making a measly buck out of their blogs.

Yes, some blogs are profitable. Stress on some.

Disclosure always has been the horse to beat to death among bloggers. Bloggers, especially probloggers (whatever that is), are supposed to be honest, beg and warn you every time they want to make some money on your back that they actually could make money if you are no greedy all for free internaut.

Finally, I’ll come clear with things here and agree with the Master, Shoemoney.

You should assume everything written on this blog is a lie. You should assume I have motivation for linking to everything on this page and will benefit from it somehow.

To be entirely honest honest with you…

I assume you know that I everything I write on this page, I will benefit from it somehow.

Yup, that is correct. I can already see those $ signs in your eyes, but forget it! Being a Jack has some advantages! See, I’m a muppet, I can write what I want here. I can rant & rave. Even at your expense.

As long as I disclose. And I think disclosure doesn’t go far enough yet. Also Jacks and Muppets should disclose [their relations]. And best thing to do that, is the lovely XFN code.

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their <a href> tags

On a side note, XFN also is the perfect way to get screwed in your search engine rankings, but I digress.
To be entirely honest, I think XFN is for netiquette wussies. Those who believe that the web only consists of hugging cybergenes and cuddling cyberDNAstrings. But one of the best things online always were the flames. What is funnier than sit back and enjoy a great flame war and Wikipedia or Usenet.

But what about disclosure?

• rel=”useless”
• rel=”wannabe”
• rel=”whiner”
• rel=”wussy”

Of course no limitations are set, but when disclosing… better do it consequently.

I do. And that’s because they make the world look cluttered. Imagine my disgust when, checking out a few favorite personal blogs, I realized all their latest posts were about rhinoplasty, botox, hair transplant, real estate agents in San Diego, liposuction and whatnot. And I hear these people only pay a couple of bucks per post—with the sponsored links of course. Sure, some people put in their paid links in the context of relevant posts. But others do it just plain wrong—the whole post is about the sponsored topic.

Heck, sometimes it feels that their blogs have turned entirely into sponsored blogs.

I don’t want my feed reader to get cluttered with posts about all that junk, so I usually just unsubscribe the first sign of having sponsored posts right on the blog post title. And I don’t have the patience of weeding through pages and pages of sponsored articles until I get to some relevant (i.e., non-sponsored) content. I’m okay with those links appearing discreetly within relevant posts. At least I get to read content with sense.

In my opinion, the purpose of sponsored links, anyway, is for link-building, so as long as the link URL and anchor text are there, the sponsors are happy. I don’t think anybody is still gullible enough these days to mistake those sponsored write-ups for honest to goodness blog posts by the author. We should be way past that.

A sign that a blog is going downhill is if it continually spews out sponsored post after sponsored post, again usually with the sponsored listing eating up the whole post.

Bloggers, consider the tradeoff when writing these posts! Is your credibility worth the couple of bucks per post that they pay you? I don’t think so.

By now everyone already knows that bloggers have a pretty exciting life! Exciting and relaxing. Just like Franky, I’m sitting here naked from the waist down and haven’t shaved for weeks.
But as if all that wasn’t enough, a Union to protect my rights, both on insurance and financial level is exactly what I still need! I want a Union! My kingdom (and the overused wheels of my office chair) for Unionized bloggers!.

Let me explain.

A blogger’s life is hard, it’s the epitome of every professionalized freelance dream. Unionized protection IS needed!
Here’s why.

Blogger’s wake up hours need to be protected
One of the biggest advantages of being a blogger is the freedom to decide my own working hours. And start working whenever I want. With the growing amount of wannabes, it becomes important to protect this advantage: no blog network owner should be allowed to impose me to publish entries before 6.00PM (my local time!)

Coffee is expensive and should be paid for by the network owner
Bloggers are notorious coffee addicts and belong, together with (web) designers, to the resident group of $tarbuck$ squatters. Both $tarbuck$ and good coffee beans are expensive. Those expenses have to be covered by the blog network owners. No coffee beans below Lavazza or Segafredo quality should be accepted. Daily at least 3 outdoor Mochaccinos should be paid for.
Every blog entry hitting the Digg/Reddit/Netscape/Techmeme front page should be rewarded with a bonus kilo of exotic Arabica coffee beans!

Fruity hardware, allowing anytime wireless access has to be provided
How can you call yourself a decent blogger if you use a box equipped with Redmond software? Of course you need the shiniest gadget, allowing you to be online at any time. You never know you might just get that stroke of genius while you’re in the middle of the pampas, far away from your internet connection. Your iPhone will save you and allow you to publish your marvelous entry at anytime. Fancy touch keyboard inclusive.
If you live outside of the distribution area of new, shiny gadgets, it’s the blog network owner’s task to hire a bunch of hackers and make sure anyone, anywhere can access and use those oh so shiny gadgets. And brag about them on their blog. Paid by the network owner of course.

Maximum working time has to be minimalized
It is important for bloggers to be allowed to whip out quick and dirty entries. Entries that only need 4 minutes of work, proofreading inclusive. Actually, the maximum time devoted to an entry should be limited to 4 minutes. If a blogger wants to work longer at an entry, this should only be goodwill-based, not expected.

At least 200 social contacts has to be provided by the network owner
To make sure that bloggers have enough of distraction and IM noise, every network owner has to provide at least 200 active social contacts to newly hired contributors. Minimum 40% of those contacts voluntarily have to cyber on cam whenever the blogger feels the need to go dirty!

Travel equipment and expenses have to be paid for.
Being the overactive, glued to the office chair or couch, blogging species we are, I demand that every 3 months a new set of pillows and ‘soft wheels’ for my office chair and couch are provided. More experienced bloggers will get a new duvet and new bedding every 6 months.

It is obvious that we bloggers, freelance contractors, special working requirements have and those need to be protected by our future Union!
Furthermore, we shall continue to enjoy the right to decide ourselves not to work under a certain rate/entry. But that… that’s a freedom we already have.
Maybe we can oblige blog network owners to include links to at least 5 of our own sites as well. On every network blog of course!

Please give me that Union now! Let my own voice, personality and (in)competence be oppressed (protected) by the strong voice of an Union, putting everyone on the same level. Obviously Union leaders will be the best paid ones among us

For a more serious take on the topic, go read Jeremy Wright’s view on the economics of unionized blogging.

I’ve been fiddling with Text Link Ads on my personal blogs for quite a while now. I’ve been handling technical aspects of Splashpress since I joined the network, and for a time I was responsible for actually applying for site approval and installing TLA code on some of our blogs. It’s great that most of our sites already have text link buyers, though some sites are just recently entered into the system, and don’t have ads yet.

Thing is, while my personal blogs have been on the system for about a year or more now, it’s only now that advertisers have bought links on these sites. I’m not really depending on TLA to earn big money (same with Google AdSense). The blog network pays enough for a full-time income (from where I come from). But the extra funds I find useful to pay the blogging-related bills like hosting, domain charges, revenue share with the team blog writers, and the like.

However I’m quite concerned with the fact that Google is now penalizing sites that sell text links. Maybe they’re not directly downgrading the search ranking of these sites, but some argue that Google is downgrading the link juice from these sites. That means that even if your blog or site is already a trusted site with high authority, your links to external sites (particularly those identified as paid links) are likely to not be given much weight by Google’s algorithm in computing for the linked site’s authority or credibility.

This might turn off advertisers. And for a blogger, this might mean that sites I link to (whether paid or not paid) get less benefits from the linkage. So in the end, if this really pushes through, then that means the power of the link would be diluted all across the Web.

Somehow that makes me want to rethink the concept of selling text links on my site.

Matt Cutts, de facto spokesperson of Google in the blogosphere, posts here how to report paid links to Google. The meat of the discussion (although quite implied) is that Google wants to downgrade sites that sell links. Now I’m not one to question Google’s methods, but this sounds like discrimination to me. And it sounds like Google is admitting that their algorithm still cannot match human intelligence when it comes to filtering content.

Tony Hung, over at Deep Jive Interests, wonders whether this is Google’s Achilles’ heel.

Personally, I’m beginning to wonder whether or not if Google will EVER be able to meaningfully track paid links if they’re not overtly notified as such on your blog. Google’s worries are valid: paid links are fine for traffic, but not when it comes to alerting search engine results — or page rank. The problem is that links can be paid for and sold without any notification on your blog, and there would be impossible to tell. For example, not that I would do it (or AM doing it for that matter), but there is no way of knowing whether or not reviews of anything, including web2.0 properties, have been discretely paid for behind Google’s back. The presumption is that the link is “organic” and that its ranking in Google is based on the worth I’m placing towards the link destination.

Wait a minute. So does this mean each and every blog that sells links—yes, even through Text Link Ads and other similar link programs—run the chance of getting downgraded in their pagerank/trustrank? We are opening a very big can of worms here, so to speak. It’s not only the ethical issues (i.e., what constitutes link spamming? How many paid links is too much?). It’s also the business issues I’m concerned with.

Is this the end of TLA, ReviewMe, and even other paid link/review programs? Is this the end of private link sales on sites and blogs? A lot of blogs and sites thrive on paid links and affiliate marketing. And I don’t think all sites that sell links and ad space are bad. Yes, some sites live solely for the purpose of selling links. But this doesn’t mean all sites that sell links are like that.

Then there’s the question of abuse. It’s like DIGG users ganging on certain other DIGG users, burying stories en masse. What if a group of no-gooders decides to gang up on sites they don’t like, and report to Google as link sellers? What if competitors report each other? What if I decide to report sites out of the blue?

This might make people who write PayPerPost or ReviewMe articles choose not to disclose their writing for compensation.

One thing I learned from blogging as a form of online entrepreneurship is the value of niche blogs. The more, the merrier, they say. Blog networks thrive on having blogs on just about anything. There is a multiplier effect—even if you run blogs about the obscure topics, with select readership, combine these under one basket, then you have immense traffic and revenues. Citing the long tail principle (sorry, folks), the sum of the benefits from many, small, obscure blogs, will be greater than running one big blog.

But another thing I learned in the blogging world is that you can’t beat great quality content. So no matter how many blogs you have on obscure topics, you’d better make sure these are well-written, too. And you better be sure you have a lot of time on your hands to manage these—and even micro-manage—if the need arises.

So what’s the solution? Run a fewer blogs, but this time bigger, and covering a more comprehensive scope of topics. Be sure your writer or writers give more passion to writing their content. A bigger blog would have better chances in making it big in the already-crowded blogosphere.

So is there still room for niche blogging? As I see it, in a problogging sense, maybe not.

The cost per click payout method of Google AdSense has been controversial since the time it was invented. There has always been the possibility of manipulation, which translated to advertisers paying more for worthless ads. Click Fraud, as they call it. Advertisers just end up wasting their money on fools who click on their own ads for the sole purpose of generating a payout.

But of course, Google is smarter than the rest of us, right? They banned such curiosity clicks from their terms of service, and created a method to detect whether an account’s click ratio is within acceptable limits. But then the unscrupulous AdSense publishers worked around this by hiring click monkeys to click on ads randomly, and still maintaining the click to page-view ratio. This was mostly from overseas (where labor is cheap). So Google invented the smart pricing. Clicks cost more if they originated from higher-income countries, or countries where the advertiser’s product is actually sold.

But you still can’t get stop wasting money. That’s because even if those clicks are from legitimate users—even your actual market—all they ever do is visit your site. And what happens next is up to them. Even if the conversion rate was zero percent (meaning no one actually buys your product or service), you still end up paying for the click.

Google is exploring a better system: cost per action. Similar to how affiliate marketing schemes pay out publishers. You only pay when people actually do something, like buy a product or sign up for a newsletter, or give you their contact info.

Even the New York Times gave it some attention lately.

Under the “cost per action” system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.

Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, since they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by “affiliate marketing” companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.

Cost per action ads are appealing both to advertisers and publishers. Advertisers can finally get 100% (or close) conversion rate, and they won’t have to pay for wasted clicks. And if the price is right, publishers, meanwhile, would be happy to earn more from affiliate sales rather than live by with the few cents that a click can bring you.

Of course, this is still wait-and-see. The advantage of AdSense is that you don’t really have to push your advertiser’s products (in fact, it’s illegal to encourage users to click). But with the usual affiliate systems, you have incentives to push the products yourself since you don’t earn until someone actually makes a purchase. I wonder if Google’s cost per action system will allow for this.

We hope this new results-oriented Google advertising scheme works.

The team over at Performancing gave a fantastic offer last week: that they would help you “reboot” your blog, pooling the resources of all their individual skills and experiences as probloggers-:

Do you have a blog sitting around that you want help with? Want to take it to the next level but don’t know how? Well youre in luck. We are a panel of experts that’s right all of us in someway whether design is your flaw, content creation, or no inbound links or marketing. We have all the tricks up our sleeves.

And we are sitting here waiting to help.

~ Ok that sounded way to much like a late night psychic hotline commercial. But seriously. I’m itching to help someone even if it’s my own blog become successful or profitable. So toss me a blog below in the comments if you want some free advice and a simple makeover tour.

We will take one a week and spend one week giving you tips and sharing that with the community. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to really launch your site into the next level of authority.

And they followed through, choosing as their first reboot-: ThroughBall.com.

There were some 50 comments left in response to this post at Performancing, and the blog owner seemed really pleased with the feedback he received.

So for all you suffering bloggers, whose blog might be sinking and needing a “jack up”, head over to Performancing and get in line for a future reboot.

Heck…I think JOAB needs one. What the hell has happened to this blog?

Andy Merrett asks over at the Blog Herald whether super-short posts are good for one’s blog. He argues that a lot of A-listers do it (a.k.a. the speedlinks). He cites some informal studies that say soundbites of about 150 words or less per post are more easily indexed by search engines and likewise easily digested by readers, too.

How’s that for great writing?

Well, in my opinion, it’s not really in the length of a post (or lack thereof) that makes your writing effective. It’s in how your writing gets your point across that matters. So you can write a thousand word essay and not make any sense at all. Two well thought-of, excellently-worded sentences might be all it takes to cinch that deal.

Then again, somewhere in the middle might be the most convincing.

Here’s a good example. AhmedF has a case study at TechSoapbox. He rambles and rambles, and 15 minutes after, he edits his ramblings and came up with a shorter (although not significantly so) article, but a better read at that!

Here’s where 229 words are greater than 326.

His conclusion. Those who write the lengthier posts are lazier than those who write the shorter ones. Or rather, those who edit their posts for brevity, clarity, and ease-of-reading deserve to be called great writers. It’s all about the editing.

Sure, blogs are mostly for rambling. But while you’re at it, why not make your ramblings more readable and understandable? You can even probably earn better from it (if you’re monetizing).

Remember the elevator pitch? You get 30 seconds to pitch your idea to an investor, your CEO, or anyone in power to help make things happen. That 30-second pitch should be brief, but well-thought of.

Be straight to the point, but do remember to include the essential details. Keep it short and simple.