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It is the first of the month, which means I will post my income earnings from my blog for last month. I have since changed the main topic of my blog to make money blogging, so I choose to publicly disclose all of my income totals every month so that after my blog is at least a year old we can all look back to see the growth. I will begin with my blog statistics and then move into my January blog earnings.

January 2008 Blog Statistics

*Parentheses represent last months numbers*

• Google Pagerank: 4 (0)
• Alexa Rank: 58,481 (110,051)
• Technorati Rank: 20,986 (61,585)
• Technorati Authority: 252 (106)
• Total Visitors: 85,152 (7,392)

Welcome to everyone who is visiting for the first time due to John Chow’s review. Feel free to look around and find a few inspiring blog posts! I will be going back on topic tomorrow but wanted to throw a few quick notices out for my readers:

1.) I had a typo in the “RSS by Email” link, so if you previously tried to receive your blog posts by email and received an error, it has been fixed.

2.) If you had not figured it out yet, this blog talks about blog marketing, different ways to make money blogging, search engine optimization, link building, and a little “mix” of other internet marketing tricks on increasing traffic. Feel free to browse the archives or you may check out a few of the recommended posts on the right.

A few years ago the giant forum we know today as Digitalpoint developed a mass link exchange program called the DP Co-op Advertising Network (aff). After signing up, you then add 3-5 links on every one of your pages, and this earns you more linking power (coop weight). The more weight you have, the more links to your site you receive from other members in the coop. You can choose up to 15 anchor texts and there are over 30,000,000 available links in the network today. Sites have been using it to rank #1 for “Debt” “credit cards” “bankruptcy” and “loans.” Such a simple method is allowing them to outrank massive authority sites like Wikipedia, but the main concern is how long will this gravy train last and when will Google do something about it?

After launching my weekly blog contest, it is finally time to announce the first Weekly Winner.

The $25 paypal goes to the homebiz resource bukiki blog for their entry. Please contact me as soon as you read this and I will gladly send over your money as well as your bonus.

Bonus Prize:
A kind fellow named Ethan Christ has sponsored the bukiki blog with a $50 adwords voucher. Enjoy all the free advertising!

Ethan Christ blogs over at Slam Blogger, which is a unique controversial blog thats sole purpose is to make fun of other bloggers! He actually did a review of my blog which seems to be one of the two posts in his entire blog that are actually positive remarks instead of negative ones. Thanks Ethan!

Let me start off saying that if you do not use Google Webmaster Tools, you should start trying it out. It is a great tool that shows you near-instant updates of backlinks to your posts, how often Google views your blog, as well as any errors that the Google bot finds.

Utilizing the tools will help you keep your blog search engine friendly and clean. Now for the point of this article, Google normally has a “normal” and a “slower” option for how often it will crawl your page. If you write at least a few times a week you should keep this at “normal,” but if you have a slow webhost or another reason that you do not want Google visiting a lot you can set it to slow.

Well it looks like the Technorati favorites spammers that Darren and I posted about earlier have developed new ways to compete with the likes of Akismet…

Blog spammers have now made thousands of fake “proxy blogs” to be able to mass-friend one main blog to rank it in the most popular section on the Technorati homepage, ultimately sending the blogs lots of traffic and a few strong backlinks.

Pill spammers are now the 99th, 95th, 83rd, 10th, and even the 3rd most popular blog in the world! I really hope this new idea does not take off like the previous one did, as that would make the top 100 page completely useless. It seems like Technorati has done nothing to thwart these spammers so far and I doubt that they will do anything soon.

After sponsoring two contests earlier which yielded successful results, I am ready to run my own. Rather than running the occasional type of blog contest, I wanted to change things up a bit. I want to have a lot of winners rather than just one. I have developed a way to promote my blog while giving away money every week.

The Contest - Enter for a chance to win $25 and a link every week.

Every week I will announce one winner who I will send $25 via Paypal. The weekly winner contest will run forever, allowing many people to be able to win a $25 prize. Every week I will also give a link to the winners blog, and that winner will also be eligible to receive any additional prizes that were donated that week. For those people who are kind enough to donate cash/prizes, I will give you a free plug about your site, blog, or product.

I have been busy updating my version of Wordpress to the newest release (2.3.2), and doing a lot of finishing touches on my new blog theme. Everything is finally ready and published. The new theme allows for much easier reading (white background, black text), gets rid of the dominant orange color scheme, provides additional advertising methods, and features the best information prominently. The new theme also features the updated logo/brand for my blog.When I started my blog last November, I told myself not to start monetizing for at least 30 days. Well today, 73 days later I have officially opened up some bargain advertising deals on my blog.