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Looks like Google got around to updating their pagerank again, and my blog’s pagerank has increased from a 4 to a 5 which is pretty cool considering the gap from getting a 4 to a 5 is a heck of a lot larger than having a pagerank of 2 and moving it up to a 3.

I knew my link building campaigns would help my pagerank, but considering my blog isn’t even 6 months old yet I didn’t expect to get a PR5 so soon.  I want to thank everyone who has been congratulating me on hitting the pagerank 5, as it is quite an accomplishment for such a new blog, however to me this is just a number. The reason I am happier is because the new pagerank update has made Google’s million-lines-of-code algorithm know that my domain is a trustful site, and has blessed about 15 more of my posts allowing them to now be on the first page for new google searches.  I have also been seeing a few number one results for very old posts of mine.

In conclusion, yeah it’s awesome that I actually hit a pagerank 5, but the real reason for me to be happy is that this will increase my search engine traffic which is the ultimate goal of the link building I have been doing. Whether you went from PR0 to PR3, or PR5 to PR4, stop wasting your time wondering why and just keep your focus on link building because at the end of the day, search engine traffic is what matters, not some number that you and only other tech-savvy webmasters know exist.  Now having my blog be a pagerank 5 will also give a lot more dofollow juice to those that read and comment on my blog frequently, so if you are looking to voice your opinion and be rewarded with powerful links, then the top commentator spots are for you, so long as that you do not keyword stuff your comments, and that your comments are actually topical to the blog posts.

As I have been writing this post, I have been multi-tasking reading my emails and my RSS reader, and I noticed that Darren Rowse of Problogger.net has already made a video emphasizing my point that you should focus on keep moving forward rather than worrying about your pagerank. You can read his post and video over at his recent video called forget about pagerank and build a better blog.

A sorta off-topic note worth mentioning is that the rapidly growing Digg.com competitor Mixx.com has increased to a pagerank 7, and every article you submit to Mixx is a dofollow backlink. So if you aren’t building links with Mixx, there is no better time than now.

I have just signed up with the NeverBlue Ads Affiliate Network.

“Always keep learning, because if you ever stop there will always be someone who is better than you somewhere else in the world.”

This is one of my best quotes, because it is my motto for making money online.

I make a good deal of money online with viral marketing, search engine optimization, link building, as well as cool startup websites, however if I don’t stop and learn affiliate marketing I will be leaving money on the table.

To increase my online earnings, I am going to be experimenting with pay-per-click (like the sponsored ads you see on Google searches), and promoting other people’s products. After spending a few days looking around at the best affiliate network, I see a lot of people making huge amounts of cash with NeverBlue Ads, and thought it would be a great place to start.

Now like learning nearly any other form of internet marketing, I expected to lose a lot of money before I figured out everything. To my supprise, my 2 day test run for a few “make money from home” campaign pulled in $12 with only 37 visitors. If my blog converted as well as affiliate leads did, I would have made nearly $2000 from a single ad last month.

The thing I like most about NeverBlue Ads is that 80% of the time, you don’t even need to sell a product to make money. When I had originally thought of “affiliate marketing,” I assumed I would have to sell an expensive product to make any money. The real truth is, companies will pay you just for finding the leads (contact information, email addresses, etc) even if they don’t buy anything. Some of these companies are offering a lot for these key leads too.

For example, an automobile lead on a one page form can earn you $6. There is also an affiliate offer for free college scholarships going for $4.50 a lead, and there is even a poker affiliate that pays you nearly $2 just for getting poker players to enter an email address! If that doesn’t provide an easy enough way to make money, I don’t know what is.

I have been using Neverblue Ads for about 24 hours now, and I have earned $14. This has been all from just simple marketing, as I have not started any Adwords campaigns yet, thus putting my expenses at $0. In less than one day, I am more than halfway to making the minimum monthly payout, which is an awesome feat for a “zero experience” affiliate marketer.

I am going to be investing a lot of time and money into learning everything I can about affiliate marketing because there is a lot of potential to make ample amounts of money, and because it will give me a good introduction so that I can compete in the top affiliate challenge. (See my top affiliate challenge audition here).

While I am no affiliate marketing guru and won’t be telling you what to do, I can tell you that a LOT of people are making a TON of money with Neverblue Ads, and I made $14 profit today as an experiment. I will be continually updating my blog with my affiliate marketing ventures now. If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing with me, I suggest you get your feet wet with Neverblue Ads.

Join Neverblue Ads today!

This is a quick follow post about Sitehoppin, which I have previously written about.

SiteHoppin is, in short, a browser-in-a-browser which lets you visit websites based on tags and categories. You can submit your site, tag it, and rate it a five - afterwards, people that use SiteHoppin will sometimes be directed towards your site. I’ve consistently been receiving 2-3 visits per day since adding my site.

This brings me to the point of beer stocks. Following with the “bar-hopping” theme of the website, SiteHoppin is now offering to sell you pages at sitehoppin.com/yourpage, much like the recently popular paid wiki websites. With Sitehoppin, 33% of the total traffic will be evenly divided between all of the beer stock pages. After making my own page at sitehoppin.com/make-money-blogging, I’ve gotten 63 unique hits from Sitehoppin in the past five days.

The stocks are designed to either bring traffic to your website or be sold later on for a profit. Since they’re pretty new, some good keywords like make money online are still available - it could be a good decision to grab some keywords before they’re all gone.

SiteHoppin’s also got an affiliate program for beer stocks - any stock sold through your link will snag you a 15% commission, although I am not using any for this post.

Beer stocks sell for variable rates depending on the size of the URL you’re buying:

• Vowels (any letters a,e,i,o,u) - $10/each
• Consonants (any letters other than a,e,i,o,u) - $1/each

Max has generously offered me 5 free “beer stocks” at his site. As I stated earlier, I used one for myself and I gave one to a close friend.

Luckily for you, I’ve got three more stocks available and I’ll give them away to three random people who comment on this post so leave a reply below and you could get a free beer stock (aka free traffic for life) after I do a random drawing this weekend.

Update: I might have jumped the gun on this post.  If you look at your profile under “grid” ( http://raithe1337.stumbleupon.com/blog/0/grid/ ), the links are dofollow. However, the old “List” format shows them as nofollow still.

Just by doing my daily browsing over at Stumbleupon, I noticed the new user pages look a lot nicer and easier to read. However, upon further inspection it looks like the external links have had the evil “nofollow” tags stripped from the links. This means that not only can Stumbleupon send massive amounts of traffic, but can even send a bit of pagerank and authority over to the sites you like.

Since the grid system on the Stumbleupon profiles is a new thing, the missing nofollow tags might have been an accident that they will fix. Hopefully this is not the case, but until then we can all enjoy traffic and backlinks from using and abusing stumbleupon.

If you don’t mind, I would greatly appreciate it if you added me as a friend on Stumbleupon.