This brings up a whole raft of questions about the status of bloggers and those who pay or give them products to write posts in the UK. One of the main issues goes to heart of what blogging actually is. Is it journalism or advertising? And if it’s neither it falls between industry regulation in the UK.

Traditional media

Journalists are paid by publishers. Those publishers have an obligation to separate advertising and editorial content. (one that the Daily Express doesn’t always take seriously)

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) challenged the Daily Express, suggesting that features it had published were in fact controlled by the advertiser – not Express Newspapers – and that the paper had not made this clear by labelling the content an advertorial. The ASA also challenged various claims made about the effectiveness of each product.

The Press Complaints ComissionPCC  has a voluntary code governing journalistic ethics. It is only loosely adhered to in some quarters ( I’m thinking the Sun and News of the World) and doesn’t specifically mention the subject of journalists being influenced by cash or gifts, but does stress the importance of journalists not abusing their position by printing misleading information.

The truth is that while journalists are given quite a lot – press trips to exotic shores, healthcare products, consumer gadgets, etc – there is only a tacit understanding that they will ever write about what they are given, a sort of gentleman’s agreement. 

Journalists aren’t paid by third parties because it is considered that such payments would affect their impartiality. Advertising departments do occasionally put pressure on them to consider writing about certain products or companies, but cash isn’t paid to them directly.

A blogger’s integrity

As we all know bloggers self publish – making money if they can and want to from advertising, affiliate schemes, sponsored posts and selling links.

While the FTC’s guidance leaves a lot of question marks (read here for a good look at some of its essential problems) for the blogging community it seems no one is particularly concerned as it currently lacks the clout to police what it is proposing.

There are effectively no rules that affect blogging in the UK in the same way that the ASA polices advertising or the PCC patrols journalism.

So? you may well ask, does it really matter?

The community regulates

Well yes and no. 

It matters to some more than others. If blogging and social media is democratising the media – allowing anyone to publish their own thoughts or news – then we all hope content is trustworthy and transparent, as we rely on it to shape our world view.

In some senses it doesn’t matter how bloggers are paid as long as their blog stays true to its subject matter. If it doesn’t and quite clearly becomes a mouthpiece for marketers then it will lose readers, comments, links and ultimately value.

So it’s not how bloggers are remunerated that matters, but what they say and whether readers trust them that counts. As this blog’s very own Patrick Altoft tweeted:-

If a blogger has credibility they just chose the right things to write about and keep that integrity intact.

Blogs sit on a scale somewhere between advertising and journalism. Each one at  a slightly different point on that spectrum attracting a different audience who are well aware of  their approach. If you start to go off topic or post on products or issues your readership has no interest in they’ll soon let you know.

So bloggers aren’t just self-regulated, but also checked and balanced by the communities they attract and inhabit – which is perhaps more powerful than any official code.

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Does it matter how bloggers are paid?

RE: Making Money to Support your £1Billion Valuation

I have money. Not a lot of it. And I don’t want to give it all away. But I do have some. I would like to reach out from my pocket and give you a few quid if it makes a difference. However, unlike you, I don’t want to give anything away free, so please find below some things I want to pay you for.

OK, I want to pay for the use of my a/c. It has made huge difference to the way I work and mix with my community. And because of twitter, I feel valued amongst my peers. So I would like to pay you a fee of £5 a month for the use of my a/c. Its not a lot, but like I said I have money, but not a lot of it. If you don’t want to charge me, I still want to give it to you to show my appreciation for a great service. Please let me know where I can send you the £60 a year.

I am a marketer. I love data. I am also very nosy. So I will pay you a further £2 a month to find out:

1. A time line of my followers and when the started following me.
2. Who left my followers count (I used Qwitter but it doesn’t work properly anymore. Any way I want the data in a dashboard please.)
3. I would like to know who blocks me.

I am willing to pay you an extra £10 a month to show me some real stats. Something like google analytics. Some of the stuff I would love to track:

1. Number of clicks on tweet links I send out.
2. Retweet numbers
3. Who retweeted and who clicked on my links. (yeah I KNOW you are tracking clicks – just share that data with me, please)
4. People who clicked on my profile link.
5. Incoming links to my profile from other sites.
6. Number of visitors coming through my profile from other sites and search engines.
7. What keywords people used to find my links.
8. I want it all in ONE place.

So as a simple user, I am willing to part with £17 a month for the above. I know you have an analytics service coming out for businesses, but I am not that rich. And I know there are third party tools that can give me a lot of this data. But they aren’t very reliable, and I don’t want to pay them, I want to pay YOU. So you can improve the service better. So I can show you my appreciation.

Regards

Rishi Lakhani

p.s I asked a few people whether they would like the service…

p.p.s Of the millions of users you have, even at a ceiling of £10 a month, and say 50,000 users buy the service, then you get £500,000 a month = £6M a year. Not a billion quid, but better than you are getting now right? Plus I am a cheapskate, I wouldnt pay more, although the hundreds of small / medium sized businesses may pay much more.

p.p.p.s Can I get a cut of that action?

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Make Money Online! Twitter, Heres How:

Controversially for someone who’s so closely associated with a display ad network (www.adpepper.co.uk), I don’t think that the premise by which many operate (i.e. that pages are classified / tagged correctly) can be trusted by advertisers. I also think that advertisers can’t rely on an ad network to ensure that ads aren’t inadvertently placed next to dodgy content.

Why is this important? If ads aren’t relevant to a web user then ROI is affected. If your ad appears on a fighting or porn site and Panorama gets hold of the story, then the consequences are much more serious: Your reputation takes a major battering as well.

As Revolution reports in its latest issue, Bernard Matthews has joined other brands to minimise risks associated with the latter problem (one attempt to assess the risks is at Brand Republic).

This is where semantics and its ability to classify and make sense of the sheer volume of new online content being constantly generated comes in. I have to admit that I’m slightly biased, having devoted much of my life since ’98 to the area (when I got the first patent relating to the analysis of textual digital content for its meaning, based on prior human analysis of words and their senses). I also have to make a disclosure, in that the Revolution story concerns a product based on the technology that I developed (SiteScreen). It vets sites before ads are placed to make sure they don’t contain any of 12 categories of content that the brand would find objectionable to be associated with.

But don’t take my word for the potential of semantics to help online marketers: ask Google which bought Applied Semantics in 2003 because it saw the power of ‘disambiguation’ to make search results more relevant. Microsoft recently bought Powerset because it didn’t want to be left behind.

Whether it realises it or not, Bernard Matthews has just become part of the discussion about the semantic web. Academics, futurologists and technologists have expended a lot of energy trying to define terms but others have been busily applying some of the key principles, with online marketers in the vanguard.

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Bernard Matthews to place trust in semantics to save blushes

This afternoon is the World Poker Crown and if you watch it live they are giving people a chance to win a trip to play in the World Series of Poker in Vegas later this year.

The prize includes a $10k buy in, travel and 10 days in the Palazzo amongst other things.

Get full details by clicking the “Vote to win” button here.

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Why I’m spending the afternoon watching poker online

The site gets 700,000 uniques per month and ranks very well in Google, revenues are $40k which means the site is selling for about 12 months revenue, that is amazingly low for a forum.

The issue gets more clouded when you look at the revenue sources, a lot of the revenue comes from people submitting to the directories which is hardly a sustainable business model. Monetizing forums is almost impossible and judging by the price of v7n the users aren’t worth much either. V7n values it’s users at around $10 each.

An interesting statistic is that if v7n was monetized as well as JohnChow.com it would earn $300,000 per month.

What do you think? Bargain?

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Is v7n.com going cheap?

Interestingly the domain was registered 6 years before MySpace was invented so how on earth did Nominet rule in favour of MySpace you are probably asking?

The case heard that the domain was an abusive registration which I’ve had experience of trying to resolve in the past. This case (and the case I worked on) both hinged on the fact that the domain was parked and full of PPC ads related to the legitimate domain.

Had the owners of MySpace.co.uk set up a service on the site then it is highly probable that they would have been able to keep the domain for ever, in 5 years time that domain and the site it was on could have been sold for a lot more than whatever they earned in domain parking revenue.

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How MySpace.co.uk could have won the battle

Straight away I used all sorts of SEO methods to compete with the major sites and used some of the most aggressive tactics available. I’m a firm believer that unless you have tried every SEO technique you can never know how to use them to your full advantage, it is hugely important to know where the line is with SEO and to make sure any important sites stop pushing before they get to it. How can you stop a site getting banned if you don’t know where the line is?

My tactic was to get top organic rankings quickly in MSN and Yahoo and hope that these held until Google followed up a couple of years later. As you can see from the income report below by April 2006 things were picking up nicely and by June the site was making a nice income. These figures are for the previous month so the income for June was paid on 17th July. Some payment codes have been deleted from my screenshot, this is all from organic traffic so no PPC costs.

Ranking number 1 for a search term like this (I won’t tell you what the site was but it is in the finance industry) was great and for a few months the site did very well. Then the income and traffic started to tail off. First the site was banned from MSN (it was reinstated a couple of months later but didn’t ever rank as well) and then Yahoo decided to use the sites Yahoo Directory title as the title tag and traffic nosedived.

Even after these issues had been resolved the site was still not ranking in Google due to the aggressive link building strategies I had been using so the income was totally reliant on MSN and Yahoo. Of course the last few years have seen such a large downturn in the UK market share of Yahoo and MSN that the traffic is now pretty much zero even though the site still ranks in the top 10 for most of the major search terms. The amount of ads showing on Yahoo and MSN means that traffic below the 5th result is pretty much non-existent.

This reduction in traffic combined with more competition in the marketplace (some merchants using PPC are paying a cost per acquisition of more than twice my affiliate commission) makes it almost impossible to compete.

The net result is that this site has made $0 so far in 2008. Luckily I don’t rely on this money for my income but it just goes to show how the internet marketing landscape doesn’t just make you rich quick it can make you poor quickly as well if you only have one income stream.

Here are some things I learnt from this:

• Google is like an elephant, it never forgets
• Diversify your income
• Diversify your traffic
• Don’t upset a search engine with 90% market share
• Don’t be afraid of targeting competitive search queries

This is my entry to Daniels blog tutorial project so please vote for it!

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How to go from $0 to $7000 per month and back to $0 again

What will be your advice to a new blogger who intends to start on a niche that is already saturated eg. “Make Money Online”?

My first advice is that the more competitive the industry the better. Why? Because the more blogs there are in a niche the easier it is to get links and readers. If the biggest blog in your niche has 500,000 RSS readers then it is very easy for you to get 500 readers. If the leader in your niche has 1000 readers then it will be much harder for you to build any buzz for your new site.

The next piece of advice is to approach things from a different angle. The only dedicated make money online blog people really need to read is John Chow’s. I’ve yet to find any value in most of the other blogs because a lot of them post about the same things. This problem exists in most industries but over the last few months the make money online industry seems to have filled up with blogs whose purpose is to help the owner make money online rather than the readers.

If I wanted to start a blog in a competitive industry I would make sure people had a reason to read my blog over all the others. For example if you have a news blog you need to write news before it gets featured on the major news sites and blogs, be original and break the stories first.

If you want to start a blog about internet marketing or making money online you need to write top quality content and somehow persuade the really big bloggers to link to your site rather than other peoples. Larger sites frequently write about news they have read on smaller sites so if you can consistently be that smaller site you will find people wanting to subscribe to your feed so they get the news quicker.

The only way to build a blog is to get as many links from other blogs as possible. How you go about that task is up to you.

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How to start a new blog in the Make Money Online niche

Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan invested for a performance related stake of 25% each with a 20% stake to be returned if targets are hit.

The site is still very new and doesn’t cover many areas outside London but it’s interesting to see Dragons investing in affiliate sites again, even one like this where the potential revenue is only 9% of a sale which probably averages around £15.

What do you think about the site?

* Since the program finished 2 hours ago the site has come from nowhere to 1st for the term “hungry house”. Google using query and toolbar data to correct itself in real time?

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HungryHouse.co.uk gets Dragons Den funding

The good news for those of you running php is that my guide to geotargeting with php will help you make sure you only display WidgetBucks to people in the areas that you make money from.

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How to Stop WidgetBucks Displaying for Non US Visitors