With the advent of the new Web 2.0 business and website model, more and more people are trying to cash in on the new content creators of the Internet; you and me. It has become easier for “professional” bloggers to bring in enough money to sustain themselves through advertising revenue just by driving enough traffic to their website. This is not a rant that I do not get a lot of traffic; this is not a rant that I am better than everyone else because I do not succumb to the commercialization of blogging. Lets face it; theres a lot of subpar blogs and websites out there, many run by so-called “professional bloggers” or “professional reviewers”. Please note that I do not call myself a professional blogger because quite frankly, I am not a professional blogger and I know that most of the time, I rant and merely present my opinion on an issue. I know my place and I will not pretend to be one of these people. Please read on…

Multiple Pages
The people that run those websites are so desperate for hits on their websites that they will go to extraordinary lengths to get those needed hits. If you don’t believe me, take a look at any one of these websites in the genre of “hardware and game reviews”. The reason why they spread about a page’s worth of content over multiple pages is to get multiple ad exposure hits. Every time someone pulls a document from their server, it also fetches ads from other websites who in turn give some money back to the site owner. The more times those ads are fetched, the more money they make. The only reason why I put a little teaser on my site for you to click the More link on is for the sake of brevity. I don’t want to have the full text of every article on my home page because it would otherwise slow down viewing my website for everybody and waste bandwidth.

Advertising Brevity
There are some websites out there which are completely covered with advertisements to the point that the content is obfuscated and not worth my time to read. Yes, I am looking at you, Thinkcomputers.org and your network of websites. If you have a website that is completely ad-laden and obtrusively ad-oriented; I will do you one-up on ad blocking. I will stop visiting your website period. I have not visited Thinkcomputers.org in over a year now. I don’t care about whether the content is any good or not. If it is a pain in the ass to read it, I won’t come. Period.

“Viral” Marketing
Many people have tried to create a good system for ranking and sharing websites of which people have a common interest. StumbleUpon and Digg are such examples. StumbleUpon has wasted many hours of my life, but they were never in vain. Digg on the other hand; I don’t know where to begin. It has also wasted many hours of my life as well; waiting for the damn site to load. A website has gone viral when people have begun passing it around on their own accord and free will; not clicking on a link to raise it’s Digg quotient.

Social Skills and Digg Submissions
I admit it, I am not a talkative person online. But generally, when I chat someone up that I haven’t talked to in a while, I try to make up for my former lack of talk in the process. I do not attempt to get them to do me a favor and vote for an article on Digg. If an article of mine happens to make it on Digg, it isn’t because I submitted it; someone thought that it was worthy enough to submit. I have been getting a lot of Digg spam lately from people that I don’t talk to fairly often, enough to the point that I have turned my AIM buddy list into a white list and removed several people. If I’m on your AIM buddy list and you do not see me online, this, amongst other things could be the proximate cause. If you feel that I am in error, please use the Comments box at the bottom to convince me that I am indeed in error. I welcome criticism; both vitriolic and constructive.

“Professional” Blogging
If you are sustaining yourself via your blog, I highly suggest that you brush up on your business skills, go back to school and get a job because the bubble is going to burst on professional blogging. Think about it. The economy is now in an energy-related recession; the value of a dollar has never been this low with respect to the rest of the worlds currencies. When companies are finding it harder and harder to be profitable, they do several things; the two most popular being cutting costs and services followed closely and/or preceded by screwing their customers over. I’ll save the screw your customers rant for another article and focus on cutting costs. In any company, regardless of size, there are several areas that they can trim costs; IT, marketing, management, manufacturing, etc. Marketing is the most attractive area because those costs can be fairly flexible as new marketing avenues open up. So when marketing costs get slashed, marketing and advertising firms who manage this sort of activity head into profit-saving mode. When they do that, particularly when they are relying on you posting their ads on their site, the cost per click/viewer goes down.

This causes an entire ripple effect in the chain. When you have a large number of people offering similar websites and similar content, the market is saturated. This is definitely the case with game and hardware review websites. If you want to have something that people will continue to return and visit, you have to satisfy a certain niche. For instance, I am a repeat customer of Element Owners Club because it satisfies a specific and fairly narrow niche; people who are Honda Element owners. Your numbers will be smaller, but when you have people who are fanatical about your website, you will end up better in the long run. If there were 20+ blogs, forums, websites, etc. related to the Honda Element, I probably wouldn’t even bother.

So now you see kleine kinderbloggers why depending on advertising revenue alone is a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great way to get beer money to meet your buddies at the bar and maybe buy a round or two. There is nothing wrong with that. But when you are paying your rent and utilities with this money and a website outage will cause you to miss your rent, then you need to take a serious look at your current lifestyle and think about how to sustain it.

I am not saying that Internet business is not a good way to make money. In fact, it is an excellent way to make money. What I am saying is that if you want to be the best; you have to be the first to do something that nobody else has done before. You have to become the benchmark. You have to exemplify and be synonymous with your content. Peace out.