Yakezie.com

I get about five unsolicited e-mails a day from PR companies and random folks asking me to pitch a product or click some link of theirs. The unsolicited e-mails wouldn’t be so bad if the sender at least addressed me by my name, followed my site, or mentioned something interesting in one of my posts. But when you get a “Hi Mr.” or a “Hey” or a nothing, e-mails start to become a drag.

If I get five spam e-mails a day, that’s roughly 7,500 spam e-mails since I started blogging. What a waste of finger energy and time, deleting them all or responding with a “No, thank you.” I’ve already demonstrated how you can earn passive income from comment spammers in a previous post, now I’m going to demonstrate how you can conceivably grow your blog’s readership and revenue over time with e-mail spammers.

GROW YOUR BLOG WITH REVERSE E-MAIL SPAM Read More

Spammers are annoying, but thanks to technology we’ve got great tools like Akismet to keep most of them at bay. Furthermore, I’ve realized spammers can be a great way to earn passive income!

From a spammer’s point of view, if they can send out 1 million spam messages and just get 1% to go through due to an unsuspecting blogger or a hole in the spam protector, then the spammer is doing his job. 1% of 1 million is still 10,000 spam messages let loose in the world!

The Feds have cracked down on text spammers, blog spammers, and e-mail spammers over the years with increasing force. I remember one AOL spammer seven years ago facing 11 years in prison. On the fine side, each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000. See the FTC website for more. Being a professional spammer is not what you want to do for a living. Read More

Blogging can sometimes be a real chore if you’re focused too much on the metrics and dollar signs. I did my best to ignore everything from Google Analytics to my Paypal account for the first two years until I finally had to start paying closer attention when I started planning to leave my job in Spring 2012. With so much more time nowadays, I can’t help but check the accounts everyday now.

I think most of us who’ve been around long enough have received a compliment over e-mail or through a comment about how our content has helped the reader in some way. This immediate, positive feedback is probably the #1 thing that keeps us going even when things get a little tough. Heck, I even pontificated on whether blogging is a form of charity to encourage myself to keep on going.

The transition from part-time blogger to full-time blogger has been pretty straightforward because I don’t rely on my blog income to live. That’s what my passive income streams are for. But as I focus a little more on the “pro” side of the “problogging” journey, I’ve become much more aware of how to do business online.

THE BIGGEST CONCERN FOR BLOGGERS Read More

Over the past five years, I’ve thought little about building links to Financial Samurai. I couldn’t be bothered after I got rejected from my first blog carnival in 2009. I was bummed because I knew I had written a good article, but it was clear the carnival host had her own little clique and based her choices on who she knew rather than quality of article. After getting rejected, I focused all my effort on writing better content and connecting with the community instead.

I love commenting around the blogosphere because first and foremost, I’m a huge fan of blogging. Blogging is one of those jobs I’d do for free, partly because that’s exactly what I did for the first couple of years and loved it! Reading people’s viewpoints and interacting with authors is a joy. It feels weird not to leave a comment on a well-written post since the author put so much time into writing. I always appreciate it when a commenter picks out some line in my post that is a little quirky. It shows they are reading and not simply reading the title and skipping down to the questions.

The main benefit of commenting is building relationships that may last forever. I’m much more willing to let a regular commenter guest post on my site rather than someone who e-mails me out of the blue for example. I’m sure all of you feel the same way. I’ve also developed deeper relationships over e-mail that first started with comments because either I reached out to the commenter, or the commenter reached out to me privately. Finally, I’ve made plenty of new blogging clients and personal finance clients that first started off as commenters as well.

The funny thing I didn’t realize until a couple years after starting blogging is that one of the other benefits of commenting is you also get to build your back link profile, despite all the links being no follow. It seems obvious that despite the links being no follow, ranking metrics still include no follow links to determine the overall authority of your site. I received an e-mail just last week from an end client (not an SEO) asking me if I could remove her comment from 2011 because her site got manually penalized by Google! From 2011! It makes me think perhaps commenting does have some link power.

I’m pretty anti-SEO as you’ve read in posts such as: Is SEO A Waste Of Time? and Thin Content Is Out, Thick Content Is In. Beyond basic SEO that should be naturally incorporated in your posts, there’s nothing much else to do. We only have so much energy in the day. To spend time with SEO is to not spend time building relationships and writing good content. The search algorithms are efficient and sooner or later any inefficiency you are exploiting will be closed, which results in wasting all your time.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we should definitely be spending much more time thinking about SEO strategies. After all, there are actually services out there that make money by commenting on other blogs on your behalf! I thought this was pretty silly at first, but I’m ever so slightly thinking there’s some efficacy to such a strategy. Let me share a recent dialogue I had.

DIALOGUE EXCHANGE TO HIGHLIGHT NEW COMMENT LINK BUILDING STRATEGY Read More