The Rating Blog - How to Game Your Stats

I have made no secret of the fact that before I started this blog I delved into all sorts of black hat methods of making money online. I had fully intended on using those methods with this blog as well. My plan was simple - I would use some of my tricks to get myself ranked well in the serp's for all sorts of affiliate products and make a killing. (In the end I didn't BTW) For a quick history on Google's war with the Black Hatters see Google vs The Black Hats

Somewhere along the line I got sidetracked. I quite unexpectedly started getting readers - real people asking me questions. This threw me off a bit. It's one thing for the conscience to slap up a page of links and collect commissions off of a nameless click. It's another thing to make money off of "Bob" who has sent me an email asking for my opinion on the product I am flogging. At least to me it is. It turns out that Bob is down to his last dime, out of work, heard you can make money online and is willing to buy the product on my page if I say it's a good deal. He trusts me. Oh man...

The "Bobs" got to me. Instead of telling Bob to buy all the crap on my pages I decided to tell him about SEO instead. What the hell. If he wanted fish I'd teach him how to fish instead of buying the fish. And that is how this blog has developed.

If you are new here then you should also know that I am not a fan of chasing readers. Social blogging is fine if you want to be a social blogger but if you think you can make a living online by gaining readers you are sorely mistaken. Your readers are the Bobs of this world and if you treat them with contempt and sell them crap you will not have them as readers or friends for long.

Aside from myself and a handful of others like Vic and Court the vast majority of MMO blogs (make money online) are proponents of selling crap to readers. Almost none of them have the slightest concept of what SEO (search engine optimization) is about or how to do it. 99% of these blogs don't make money, flog the same crap as everyone else, constantly offer advice on how to gain readers in order to make money (which it doesn't) and base their success, not on how much money they make but on how many RSS readers they have or what their Alexa rank is. Alexa btw, is just a poor gauge of traffic based mostly on how many bloggers you have visiting your site - it doesn't track search engine visitors. If you are reading this then you are probably another blogger and realize that you don't spend money on the blogs you read. You are after information. Search traffic does spend money - they are regular civilians looking for something in particular and are willing to spend money to get it.

The little money made from these social traffic chasing MMO blogs comes from getting other bloggers to sign up for yet another affiliate program that is sure to make them rich. How many of you are rich yet? Some of the better known blogs get paid to promote these get rich quick programs and the herd of loyal readers quickly sign up and then begin trying to sign up their own little herd and it dies out when the lowest blogger on the ladder has no one left to sign up. Oh - nobody made money "using" the get rich program (it doesn't work of course) but everyone made a buck or two signing up the noobs below them. This of course just reinforces the belief that if you can become the top sheep herder then you can make more money by getting more people to sign up under you for a program that doesn't work. You might also get paid directly for promoting the crap from the creator of the crap if you become famous.

This is the current model prevalent in the make money online niche. A handful of people (collectively know as the A List) occupy the top rung of the ladder based on just two factors. Their RSS feed count and their Alexa ranking. Do any of them tell you how you can make a living online other than by duplicating them. No. They simply insinuate that the way to riches is by becoming famous like them and you do this by getting more readers than everyone else. Does it work? Yes... for them. Does it work for you while you are trying to get to the top? No. This means that you will not make a dime for ages until you reach the top. 99% of you wont make the top and will never make money online following this model. The thing is human nature, being what it is, tends to convince us that we are "special" and while the rest wont be able to succeed, "I" am different and "I" will make it. Sure you will... in 6 months or a year from now when you are tired of starving and still want to make a go of it (most will just quit and go back to the 9-5) come back and visit me and learn what you could have done instead of wasting all that time chasing a dream.

Now let's tie all this together.

One member of the A List isn't like the others. His name is John Chow. He has a huge fan base who think the sun set's on him - actually it does - he lives in Vancouver. He is different from the other A listers in the fact that he became well known by using blackhat methods to game his way to the top. He doesn't now and probably never did provide useful posts for helping others learn how to build a solid income producing blog or website.

He got his name out "there" by gaming "Digg", a social network. Then he gamed Technorati, a blog search engine. Then he tried gaming Google, the only search engine that matters. He got banned and slapped by all three but not before he made a name for himself and managed to create the prerequisite large RSS feed subscribers and Alexa ranking. From that point on he has made a living being paid to flog crap to his loyal herd of sheep - none of whom have made any money signing up for the crap he promotes. BTW - you can't use the same blackhat methods to game the systems as he did - he got caught and measures were taken to prevent his methods from being duplicated. I said he was effective at black-hat, I didn't say he was good at it though. A good black-hatter doesn't get caught.

I had a troll in my comments recently who seemed to take exception to the fact that I don't care for the John Chow's of the MMO niche. The troll seemed to think I must be jealous. The troll, obviously, has never bothered to read this blog. My methods and John Chow's methods are diametrically opposed. My methods can be duplicated by anyone. His can't - not even by him. He is a one hit wonder. I have hundreds of blogs ranked and making money all over the net. I wont show you them as I'm not stupid - you can ask yourself this though - if I can rank this free blog on page 1 for "make money online" and dozens of other related keywords, what are the chances that I can't do the same for any other niche that has a fraction of the competition? The irony is that someone asked John Chow to duplicate his success with a new site.

April from Of Scotland brought this little challenge to my attention. It seems that someone asked John Chow to prove himself by taking a new blog and becoming a somebody with it. See From Nobody to Somebody Part 1. He was going to show his readers how he could start an anonymous blog and turn it into a hit. The comments seemed to agree that a blog making 3k a month would constitute a hit. The challenge began on Aug 7, 2007. It has been over 8 months now and there has been no "Part 2" - the part where John reveals how capable he is at creating a new successful blog. Moreover he has refused to answer questions about this topic on his blog and none of his current readers seem to know anything about it. see my comment on this post, yet another paid endorsement for another product nobody needs.

I want to draw your attention to two sections of his "From Nobody to Somebody" post.






He turned it into a "make money online" blog because he is an "authority" on it.

Really... as an authority you would think he could have duplicated his success then? Of course if he only became famous by gaming the system and he can no longer game it then one might expect him to fail at duplicating his success...

Damn. I wish I had known that you couldn't create a brand and make money online using blogspot BEFORE I went out and used blogspot to creat more search traffic than all the A List combined in the make money online niche. Stupid me. Ah but I'm no authority - John is.

For those of you who might be thinking that I am picking on John Chow because I am looking for attention then you should know this. I don't give a damn about accumulating readers. I enjoy having readers but they don't make me money and I don't do a thing to encourage people to become readers unless they wish to learn about SEO. My intentions are quite simply to inform the readers I do have that following the methods promoted by the A list is a time consuming and ultimately worthless exercise. I am using John Chow as an example because he can't duplicate his own success so how are you going to? I have on occasion shown my readers other sites of mine that duplicate my success and I tell them how to do it themselves, free of charge and they don't need to spend money on affiliate crap to do it. I show them how I make money doing this and it isn't by taking their money. I make money regardless of having a single person read this post. I use search engine traffic. You can too and skip all the time consuming crap needed to build up a readership which is worthless anyway. (From a monetary standpoint only - I love my readers and have made many friends and this is definitely not worthless)

I do have a second reason for exposing Chow though. He promotes stuff that people don't need as well as deceptive things that can hurt the unwary. A recent post of his promotes Joel Comm's Adsense Secrets 4 and misleads his readers by telling them that it only costs $9.95.



I suppose his readers think he is an Adsense expert as well. I wonder if they notice that he doesn't use it on his blog. I wonder if they know that it doesn't work if you don't have search traffic. RSS subscribers aka readers don't click adsense ads. Chow knows this though - he doesn't use it because he has no search traffic.

As for the deception - read Mark's post on 45n5. Adsense Secrets Scam Alert

For those looking for a Review of Joel Comm's Adsense Secrets 4 see Simonne's post What Joel Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense.

Am I looking for attention or just trying to help people out?

Nuff said.

Now while I am picking on people to make a point I want to introduce you to a guy that epitomizes everything you should avoid doing. The fellows name is Alan Johnson and he is a full fledged follower of John Chow's road to not making a dime. His blog is called "The Rating Blog" and he is busy guest posting on every A list blog that will let him. His method is simple - he thinks by getting his name out there he will get a mass following and then he can call himself an expert at making money online too. What he can't do is write anything other than fluff and has no expertise so he has resorted to the next best thing - fake it till you make it. In other words he has resorted to gaming the system like Chow did and he has chosen to do it with Feedburner.

You can read the whole ass kissin' post here.



This is pretty impressive folks. A rank amature amassing 4300 RSS subscribers in only 4 months.



Granted Alexa has just slapped everyone in the MMO, Tech and Blogging niches rankings by discounting the visits to these sites by toolbar users. These sectors have always had an unusually high number of toolbar savy users and as a result blogs in these niches have always had a disproportionately high ranking compared to other niches. The new rankings are no more accurate than the old as Alexa still can't measure search traffic but they have at least stopped showing these niches as being dominant which they are not. Several of my sites get a lot more traffic than this site and still rank in the millions on Alexa. They get 95% search traffic though.

The point here is that Alan should at least be showing a much better Alexa ranking given his RSS subscribers. The reason is as follows. General search traffic don't often subscribe to RSS feeds. The people who subscribe to RSS feeds tend to be knowledgeable about blogging. They know what a feed is. These kind of people also tend to know about the Alexa toolbar and have it installed on their browser. Ergo, if you have a lot of feedreaders you probably have a lot of Alexa toolbar users. If you get a lot of toolbar users you will have a lower (better) Alexa rank. Alan's rank does not reflect his RSS feed numbers.

How could this be? Well one theory might be that all his feedreaders are complete noobs who found him while searching on Google. They don't know about the toolbar yet but were so taken by his brilliance that they learned about RSS feeds and signed up. Of course to find him on the search engines he would have to rank for something that gets a lot of searches. Since he claims to be a MMO blog then he must rank for a highly searched MMO keyword. Ooops... guess what. He doesn't rank for anything - popular or not. Squash that theory.

Maybe none of his readers ever bother to come to his site and read anything. Possible and it would explain him having only 11 comments. (Only 5 of which have a URL to another blog, 1 a scrapers trackback and 5 anonymmous comments written by him perhaps?). It does make you wonder why 4300 people would subscribe to a blog and then never visit.

Let's look at a little tool available for everyone to use.

It's called Feed Analysis.

It's a cool little resource - try it on your own feed.

If I enter my feed in the tool I can get some data about my feed like this.





Let's look at Vic's Feed stats from Blogger Unleashed. He has had a huge rise in subscribers over the last month.





Now my current stats look like this.



and Vic's Stats



Now let's look at The Rating Blog's Stats.





The fact is it is statistically impossible to be showing the results he shows. Can any of you show me a legit site that gets more subscribers than hits to the feed? Do any of you have 95% of your readers using one aggregator?

I'm not the first to point out this sham. See The University Kids post The Industries Fastest Growing Blog - The Industries Biggest Lie? Unfortunately his server was down at the time of this posting so you may have to try back later. Pay particular attention to the comments where Alan Johnson tries to explain himself and Vic's quick work in exposing his poor defense.

Am I picking on this guy just for the fun of it? No. The fact is he is spouting all sorts of crap on his blog that will hurt those who follow his advice (like using PPP and TLA among other crap) and he talks the talk like he actually has some expertise in this niche. Talk about fooling yourself. Btw Frank at Optempo.com wrote a six part series on Social Blogging and talks about how you can game your feed stats. See the Secret Guide to Social Blogging Success Part iii

I have little doubt that Alan Johnson will show up on sitepoint one day flogging his blog as a huge success and will convince some noob to part with some big dollars in order to buy The Rating Blog. This sham was discussed in my previous article What is a Blog Really Worth? and I'd hate to see another noob taken in by a worthless blog. Should this post just happen to rank well in the serp's for the term The Rating Blog then such a noob may well be warned.

My apologies to my regular readers who have heard all this before. This post is for the thousands of visitors I get daily from the search engines. Most of you are just starting out and wondering how to make money online. You found me because of the keyword you typed into Google. The fact that I was on the page that Google listed is because of Search Engine Optimization. If my blog had been plastered with affiliate links and ads then I probably would have made a few dollars from you all. I haven't done that and have just given you a lesson in how to make money online. Get your site listed on page 1 on Google for any niche that has a product to sell and you will make money online. Stay away from selling crap to other bloggers - this is the stuff you will find in the make money online niche and if you follow the John Chow method then you will not succeed. You didn't find his blog when you typed in your search query did you? You found me and that's all the proof you need that I know what I'm talking about.

I wish you all the best.

Griz