13/11: What Sucks and What Doesn't This Week

This is just a good old fashioned "roundup" of worthy links and information to start off the week.

Smorty have been much blogged about recently since launching a referral program. I’d been meaning to investigate their service for some time so I headed on over to their website and complete their publisher sign up process. Foolishly, I didn’t thoroughly read the terms before doing so. The following day I received notice that my blog was declined, not just for being c**p, just that they have a policy of only accepting blogs installed in a root domain. Now, had I read their terms I could have avoided the trouble, but it’s a rule that will certainly exclude a lot of decent blogs. What’s stranger though, is that blogs installed on a subdomain are fine. The reasons for these policies? Your guess is as good as mine.

So, maybe their program works fine for some bloggers but they don’t fit the bill for me. (There is no apparent way to delete the declined blog or the account as a whole, and I was unable to edit the URL to remove the ’/blog’). I’m not sure the site installed in my root here at TCH is suitable for Smorty, so I’ve decided not to bother. A shame, as I think I could have pulled in some good referral numbers. I’ll not say it sucks, but it has some sucky rules. So, what else can be considered suckworthy this week....

SEO sucks - according to Rob Watts it’s also a waste of money. For a non SEO type like me, this is one of the best posts I’ve seen on the topic in a long time - I mean, it’s actually very interesting and very readable.

Do Blogger blogs suck? According to some snobbish publishers they do and Mark defends his choice of platform with respectable passion. The folks who knock the "free bloggers" might like to subscribe to Mike’s Money Making Mission who proves that making money with no initial outlay can be done. I’m sure plenty of folks would be more than happy with results like that. I would be pleased if my blog ever directly contributes as much to my online income.

Garry Conn asserts that being a fake sucks and his post does link in nicely with comments I made in a recent meme about honesty online and the damage unethical marketers do. On the other hand, a while back, Jane advocated the Fake It Til You Make It approach which had some good advice too.

My ability to sell advertising on this blog sucks and I can’t even fill five Scratchback Top Spots at a dollar a throw This illustrates why blogging is not always a good choice as your primary earner! It’s also a little embarrassing for a blogger who talks about monetization so much, but I try to point out that this is as much a learning platform for me as it is for so many others and the blog is not, in itself, a big money maker. My blog is another doorway to other things however. Having said all that,a place in my TopSpots represents great value by virtue of the fact that you’ll probably get to sit there for a fair while!

Widget Bucks doesn’t suck if you’ve got a few successful referrals, a lot of traffic, or both. It might suck for some. As for me, I’m not relying on it to pay the bills, but I’m still pleasantly surprised by it’s performance and looks, especially since they upgraded their code to make the widgets load faster. I think like most services of its type, it would work really well on a site focussed on the same sort of products on offer in their widgets. For others it may not work as well. You want other alternatives to Adsense? Fortunately Robin Good has already published a great list of contextual advertising programs for us. You must be able to find something that doesn’t suck there.

Google sucks (sometimes) and Lucia talks about publishers being offered money to remove sponsored posts by the advertisers who paid for the links in the first place. It’s astounding (a) how much power Google wields and (b) how fearful of them so many people and companies are. Both of these things suck.

The fact that my blogging platform is preventing me from having a "subscribe to comments" option is frustrating me and sucks. As an alternative, readers could use CoComment as I do. This allows me to follow everything through my feed reader because CoComment kindly provide all conversations you choose to track in RSS
format. Neat. On the subject of feed readers, Google’s reader sucks. I’m using Snarfer at the moment and it’s pretty cool. You can import Bloglines feeds straight into it with a click too. (You could also syndicate all your comments, or all your subscribed conversations, and display them on your own blog if you wanted to). CoComment therefore doesn’t suck despite being buggy.

In closing, and still on the subject of RSS - partial feeds suck so if you’re worried about what your readers prefer go and get this (further improved) excellent plugin by Stephen.