On Sunday I sometimes run through a bunch of links to blog posts that I’ve found useful over the past week. Well, this week I didn’t find much of use out there. Most people seem to have been posting pictures of themselves at Blog World or else are writing about how blogging is like a TV show or other mundane stuff.

For me, this week was all about making money. I’m well on my way to my first $1,000 month of making money online. It isn’t all through blogging, and most of it is not related to this blog, but it’s a grand that I will be really happy with. So where is the money coming from?

Linking

I’m still making decent money from linking out to other sites. One technique I explored this month involves placing paragraphs of text from a client at the end of old blog posts. The paragraphs contain links and I made $200 from putting five paragraphs at the end of five blog posts. I feel like sticking it to Google really. The blog in questions is my personal blog and I only really value the RSS subscribers, direct traffic and return visitors I know I have. The search-engine traffic isn’t my concern.

Blogging for other people

By sheer luck I’ve come across a guy who has a blog but doesn’t know much about blogging. He’s an SEO expert and his blog has a Page Rank of 5. He saw how I was doing my thing on a few blogs and enlisted my help to start making his blog work. At the moment, the money is good, but it has the potential to get even better. If I didn’t care about my career, I could quite easily blog for a living here in Thailand.

Selling blogs

Now that they have Page Rank, some of my blogs have been easier to sell. The problem has come with selling to buyers who don’t know how to transfer a website. In reality, I didn’t know much about the process until recently, but some of these guys on Digital Point no absolutely nothing. (I will write a post about how to move a blog in the near future.) It would be fine if I had a speedy Internet connection so I could upload and download websites, but I can’t even download an episode of TNA Impact in under a week. Regardless, I still made some money.

Actually, this week I started feeling a bit bored of reading a lot of blogs. I’m also hung over today so haven’t been able to get much work done, which I hate. Beer = lazy. Happy Sunday.

Tags: Internet income by Angel
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Wow! It’s been a crazy first day at Angel World Expo. It’s been a most humbling experience. I feel like a blogging celebrity. Every five minutes somebody shouts, “Hey Angel, sign my chest,” and I’ve had heaps of interviews to do all day, but it’s been a riot so far.

I set up Angel World Expo because I’ve been unable to contain my excitement about all the stories and pictures that have been published this week from Blog World Expo. I invited all the make-money-blogging bloggers in Thailand and so far I’ve had a great response.

Here’s me, showing how much fun everyone is going to have over the next few days at Angel World Expo. Crazy!

I got my booth organized at 7 am this morning. As I’m holding Angel World Expo in my apartment, I only had to turn my laptop on and everything was ready. Here it is on my bed, which doubles as my office.

The food at Angel World Expo has been phenomenal. Just today, I acquired a pack of cookies from the Angel World Expo bakery. I’ve only got one left. Take a peak. Looks good enough to eat, right? A pack of five cookies cost me 40 cents.

One of the great things about holding Angel World Expo in Thailand is that the costs have been kept to an absolute minimum. All the guest speakers have volunteered their time in exchange for fried rice.

But wait! You didn’t think we weren’t going to finish this off without a crazy blogging party, did you? Oh no! At Angel World Expo, I’m throwing a party every night – and the beer is free!

Join Angel World Expo

If you aren’t lucky enough to be taking pictures with blogging celebrities at Blog World Expo, I’m giving away free tickets to Angel World Expo. All you have to do is link to this post and I will send you a personal invitation to the show.

I’m keen on milking things to their limits, so Angel World Expo will be going on for the whole of November – imagine how many photo opportunities that will give you to blog about! You won’t have to write anything for weeks.

It’s up to you: Blog World Expo or Angel World Expo.

Tags: Blogger light relief by Angel
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Today, I was surprised to see an email drop into my inbox from a Google employee. I won’t reveal his name, but I checked him out and he does work for Google. I also checked out the header of the email and verified that it came from Google. Part of the email was a disclaimer warning me not to republish any of the email’s contents. I’m probably jeopardizing my blog now, but what the heck, you’re only young once, right?

The email was an invitation to the Google Elite Sector. I’d never heard of this group before, but according to the email, the Google Elite Sector is a collective of individual webmaster who have access to increased Page Rank, better SERPs and easier indexing in Google. Basically, you get your blog or website streamlined.

When you join the Google Elite Sector, you get an automatic Page Rank of at least 5, instant indexing of all your pages, a top-10 position for any 10 search phrases and a top-30 position for another 20 phrases. You have your website or blog turned into what Google calls an Elite Google Product.

It sounds like a great offer. According to the email, only 500 invitations are sent out to webmasters and bloggers every year. Each invitation is selected by a team of 10 Google employees based on five factors:

• Quality content
• Style of writing
• Topic of the website or blog
• Language of the website or blog
• The marital status of the webmaster or blogger

The more I read about the Google Elite Sector the more excited I became – until I got to the catch. To join Google Elite Sector, you need to pay a one-time fee of $10,000. I was shocked to see how much it cost to join this group. Would you pay $10,000 to get in Google’s good books?

Of the 500 people invited each year, only about 50 of them accept the offer and pay the fee. If you look around the blogosphere, you can start to see who has paid the $10,000 to Google. Invitations are sent out every two to three months. Once you have an invite, you are given seven days to accept the offer. If the time expires, then you become automatically excluded from any future Google Elite Sector invitations.

I did a bit of investigating and I am starting to see the Internet the way Google does. If you look at sites like Cash Quests, Shoemoney and Pro Blogger, you start to see patterns emerging. I don’t want to say for sure because I risk my neck if I’m wrong, but those blogs look to me like they are part of the Google Elite Sector.

I also read on an underground webmaster forum that both John Chow and John Cow refused entry into the Google Elite Sector, which is why they have lower Page Ranks than they should.

If this is the sort of level Google will stoop to, it makes you wonder what else is going on behind closed doors. Don’t be surprised if my blog “disappears” in the next few days. Lucky for me, I don’t live in the US. If I did, there’s no way I would publish this blog post.

Stay safe.

Tags: Around the web by Angel
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