Remember all those wikis that popped up all of a sudden? Heard anything about them for a while? Probably not. The reason is because they have all but died, but it’s not the idea that died, it’s the wikis themselves, thanks to a lack of fresh ideas, decent content and effective promotion.

The Million Dollar Wiki hasn’t sold a page for over a month. The most popular pages, like “Business” and “Make money online”, got stiffed without any Page Rank. Out of 1,050 pages sold, only about half of those are even indexed in Google. The pages don’t rank high in Google for the chosen keywords. “Network marketing”, for example, isn’t in the top 100 on Google.

The Million Euro Wiki was picking up pace, but the owners who bought it from John Cow effectively killed it with their lack of ideas. It’s been over a month since the 73rd page was sold, the blog is never updated, the forums are empty, there’s no promotion going on – it’s dead. Cow did a great job of building the MEW up into something people were visiting, but since he passed it on, it’s died in the water.

I think this proves that products either need to be innovative or have constant buzz. The paid wikis weren’t innovative and the buzz died down after a while. Furthermore, people just didn’t know what to do with their pages, so the fad was never going to last.

The One Buck Wiki seems to be doing a little better, with 1,514 pages sold and most, if not all, of those are indexed in Google, but how long will it last?

Paid wikis are dead.

Tags: Around the web by Angel
5 Comments »

I was becoming a slave to one of my blogs, trying to find the time to blog every day and sometimes going so far as to skip meals just to keep up with my daily updates. My reasons for doing this were that I assumed that people had come to expect daily posts from me. I thought that my readers would be online every day and would therefore be disappointed if there was something fresh up every time they logged on.

It was obvious that I couldn’t keep up such a schedule with the amount of other work I have on at the moment, so I took a step back and started updating that particular blog every few days. To my surprise, my RSS count actually went up and has stayed up by about 20 readers, hovering a bit below the 200 mark. Search-engine traffic stayed the same, of course.

You don’t need to become a slave to your blog to make it work. It’s a different game if you have thousands of RSS subscribers because if you are in that position, your blog is something people rely on. For most of us, however, we don’t need to push ourselves that far. Granted, we may never reach pro-blogger status, but you have to seriously question what your time is best spent doing.

The only reason to update a blog every day is for your RSS subscribers, but I have already proved to myself – and now to others – that RSS subscribers don’t always need daily content. If you can write something that incites discussion and is of value, people will keep coming back to it for two or three days before they need something new.

How many of us have tried to get our blogs off the ground by writing religiously, wasting valuable time when we could have been doing other things?

Every blogger’s focus should be on providing quality content. If you can do that daily, without sacrificing other projects, then you probably don’t have much else to do, but very few of us find ourselves in that situation.

Have you ever felt like your blog was taking over your life?

Tags: Bloggers starting by Angel
4 Comments »

It’s become vogue to sell established blogs. I think it’s fantastic because it makes the blogosphere completely unpredictable and it proves to all of us that there is serious money to be made at the end of the tunnel. It’s one thing to make $1,000 a month online, but it’s another to make $1,000 a month with one blog because it increases the value of that blog.

We had heard a few weeks ago from 45n5 a theory that each RSS subscriber a blog has is worth about $30. Blogging Fingers sold for $6000 and Ryan Shamus’ blog went for $.2,500 Whoever owns and runs Cash Quests – at this stage I have absolutely no idea who that is – dropped a few hints about wanting to sell the blog after seeing how much money could be made by doing so.

Cash Quests had an average of about 900 RSS subscribers a day. The site makes about $1,300 a month. There is another theory that a site will sell for 10 times its incoming revenue. I had no idea Cash Quests was even up for auction until right after the hammer dropped. The final price? As I reported a couple of days ago: $15,000. The 10-times-income theory seems to hold more weight than the RSS theory.

That $1,300 a month is not guaranteed. Do you think $15,000 is a fair price? It’s a pretty sweet payout, but looking at Cash Quests now, there has been no activity for several days and not a single mention of the sale. It looks like it might be the end for that blog.

In another surprise sell, 5xMom is selling 5xMom.com. The current asking price is $10,000, but reception to the sale is lukewarm because the blog’s income is only $600. It will be interesting to watch which other blogs go up for sale because we will all be able to learn something from how buyers react. It also means bloggers can assess the value of their blogs. I’d say that a fair price for 5xMom.com would be about $5,000 to $6,000 given the current climate.

At the moment I wouldn’t be able to sell this blog for much more than $200, but my priorities lie in making money through other streams. Perhaps I should focus a bit more on monetizing this blog and then sell it for a huge payout. $15,000 is more than a year’s salary for me (I live in Thailand).

Tags: Around the web by Angel
6 Comments »