Looking for ways to monetize my blogs, I joined many money making and affiliate programs like WidgetBucks. WidgetBucks looks very promising and as a bonus, new members are awarded with $25 for signing up. Nice! I was so excited about WidgetBucks that I failed to read their FAQs.

Today, I stumbled upon a post at 100% Batangueno which made me visit WidgetBucks blog to check the information posted and it’s verified. WidgetBucks, per their advertisers request, will not pay for any clicks made through a WidgetBucks widget from a non-US or non-Canada blog and that is how I understand it. To be specific, read below:

What are the non-paying countries or regions?

We are finding that advertisers are not willing to buy traffic from Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Egypt, and Romania. Rates for other countries, such as Taiwan, parts of the Middle East, parts of S. America, and other regions earn under $0.10 CPM. It’s really important to mention this is an advertiser decision regarding the value of that traffic, NOT WidgetBucks’ decision. We repeat: this is an advertiser decision regarding the value of that traffic, NOT WidgetBucks’ decision. I emphasize this because publishers, for whatever reason, will undoubtedly and incorrectly draw the conclusion it is solely WidgetBucks’ decision.

So, if you are in any of those countries mentioned then any clicks from your WidgetBucks widget won’t award you with anything. If you are an Adsense or AdBrite member then it’s more profitable to replace all your WidgetBucks widget with them because you’ll not only be paid per thousand of impressions but for clicks too.

The blog post at WidgetBucks blog didn’t mention anything about referrals so it is safe to assume that we will be paid for referring new members to them. As for me, I am going to replace all my WidgetBucks widgets with AdBrite (or AdSense for my other blogs) and keep WidgetBucks for referral, until of course they too stop paying members from outside the US and Canada for referring new members but until that time comes, I will keep those WidgetBucks buttons on my blogs.

A few weeks ago, the mighty lord of the internet Google dropped one of my blog’s pagerank to 0 and I’ve learned that it’s because I’ve joined some Paid To Blog programs most specifically PayPerPost.

After the drop, I found out that Lord Google and PayPerPost are engaged in a serious war which affects, most unfortunately, all PayPerPost bloggers or posties. Lord Google has been busy targeting PayPerPost blogs dropping their pagerank to 0 as they encounter them. A drop to pagerank 0 means these blogs will not be eligible to many PayPerPost opportunities rendering the blog (almost) financially incapacitated.

Not being able to get opportunities really affected many PayPerPost bloggers. Many of them (from what I’ve read) are stay at home moms and single moms who earns a little income from PayPerPost opportunities. It’s unfortunate that Lord Google does not care nor pity these bloggers. Lord Google and his minions argue that these paid post or paid reviews are just being used by advertisers to gain pagerank to their own sites and are just buying links from these blogs. That maybe true but can’t they just alter their algorithm to exclude links from getting pagerank from a detected paid post? Since most, if not all, paid post are disclosed Lord Google’s bots can easily differentiate it from normal content if programmed to do so, right? I’m asking this because we all know that only geniuses can work in Google Heaven, right?

I think it would be better for everyone if Lord Google can adapt its system based on how it is being used by the public because, as human beings, people will learn and find ways to try and beat it. An example would be DIGG. Did you know that there are now sites that pay members for digging articles in DIGG? People will find ways of beating a system and will try to make money from it. Lord Google, like a good MMORPG developer, must try to adapt and update their system to combat these things. If Lord Google can detect and penalize a link at link level then only the advertiser will get hurt and not the blog or site where it was placed. If that happens, advertisers will be forced to stop buying links and might even seek legitimate ways of gaining search engine ranking.

I don’t know if what I’ve suggested would be hard or easy for Lord Google to do but I feel that it’s a much better solution than dropping a site’s pagerank to 0. Many, if not most, of these sites are great sites and I’m sure that they’ve worked very hard to increase their pagerank to where it is before the drop, so dropping their pagerank to 0 is just too harsh and it doesn’t solve the problem. It only stops it for a moment.

Anyway, since it is still a Lord Google dominated internet there are only two things a site owner or a blogger can do and those are conform with Lord Google and not to conform with Lord Google. In the subject of taking back my pagerank, I have decided to conform with Lord Google. I may not like it but the reality is almost 50% of my traffic comes from Lord Google and I feel that it is unwise to anger the Lord Almighty. Let’s just say that it’s a compromise.

Right now, I’m just waiting for all my PayPerPost post to mature which is 30 days after approval and then I’ll nofollow links all of it. Afterwards, I’ll apply for re-inclusion and hopefully get my pagerank back.

Increasing the number of people who added your blog or site as a favorite (fav) in Technorati does increase your blogs influence and internal rank with Technorati and that is why many site owners or bloggers ask other people to fav their blogs or site.

Keeping track of people who fav’ed you can be hard specially if you wish to return the favor by fav’ing their blogs or sites too, right? These past few days I’ve been involved in this “fav me and I’ll fav you” scheme with Technorati and a few people have fav’ed some of my blogs. In return, I will fav them too but checking, verifying and fav’ing will use up a lot of my time.

Fortunately, a member of the BlogCatalog community posted a tool that will automate the checking, verifying and faving of those blogs that fav’ed you. The program is call Technoratiff (Technorati Favorite Your Fan) and can be downloaded here.

The program is so easy to use too.

• just download it
• unzip it
• run it
• login using your Technorati account
• and then start fav’ing

I’ve been using it for 2 days and I’ve already fav’ed a lot of blogs and sites using it. The updated version of the program does not work but the older program works just fine so make sure you download that.

Download Technoratiff

• Technoratiff 070523 (working)
• Technoratiff 070531 (not working)

So, if you wish you can fav my blogs in Technorati and, in return, I will fav you back using Technoratiff.

Being new to blogging, I am just learning the ins and outs of blogging and one interesting subject in blogging is Blog Contest. I’m not totally new to this blogging technique to gain traffic and popularity but since I wasn’t yet blogging before I did not take any interest in it until now.

I also thought that prizes should be in monetary form like Blog About Blog’s Christmas Contest where you’ll get a chance of winning $100 USD courtesy of their sponsor NeverBlueAds.

But I was wrong, I learned that anything of value to your visitors or audience can be made into a prize in a contest. For example, at Chinoyray.com and Kabalyero.com their prizes are not in US Dollars but in Linden Dollars which is the in-world currency of Second Life and it is very valuable to Second Life residents. Not only that,I’ve also seen blogs that use Entrecard Credits as prize.

There are various kinds of Blog Contest from Top Commentators to Guess the Picture but what’s important is that your visitors are having fun and at the same time getting some value from their contributions and loyalty.

Just received an e-mail from AGLOCO informing members that the program will be discontinued due to lack of revenue from advertisers.

We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO’s operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com.

We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.

AGLOCO Development Team

I guess those active with AGLOCO felt cheated when they got this e-mail. Why shouldn’t they? AGLOCO promised that members will earn from their program but they failed to deliver. Me? I’m not sour about it, simply because I never spent anytime with it. Yes, I downloaded and installed the toolbar but did I used it? Maybe a couple of times and that was it.

AGLOCO’s concept is still very interesting and maybe, in the not so near future, another company might pick up where AGLOCO left off and this time make it work.

It’s funny because instead of owning the internet, AGLOCO got owned! LOL!

Here is a list of my favorite Firefox extensions:

• StumbleUpon Toolbar - This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.
• ColorZilla - Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
• IE Tab - embeds Internet Explorer in a Mozilla/Firefox tab.
• ImageShack Toolbar - The ImageShack Toolbar integrates with Firefox, Internet Explorer 6.0 and Windows XP and has drag-and-drop, right-click upload, free multiple image upload and many other features.
• NoScript - The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and others mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript and Java execution only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site).
• SeoQuake - SeoQuake is a programme, which allows user to view a large number of SE parameters on the fly. SeoQuake for Mozilla Firefox consists of three functional parts: SeoToolbar (requested parameters are shown in a separate toolbar in the browser), Seobar (requested parameters are shown in a separate, fully customizable with CSS, HTML block) and output of requested parameters on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

These are my most commonly used extensions in Firefox. I’m sure you have your own favorite Firefox extensions.

The almighty god of the internet, Google, continuous to bombard PayPerPost blogs and bloggers with lightning strikes that, in an instant, will totally wiped out their blogs Pagerank. One of the latest casualty was my blog Kabalyero.com. It went down from pagerank 3 to pagerank 0. I guess, marking the posts as sponsored does not help one bit. I’ve also seen blogs with full disclosure policy got slapped with pagerank 0. This shows that Google does not care if you disclose or not.

My suggestion is, if you got a blog and you care too much about your pagerank then just stick to Google Adsense and stay away from blog advertising sites like PayPerPost but if you feel that pagerank is just a joke then go ahead and sign-up and start blogvertising.