There are, of course, more than 10 reasons why I hate your blog. Feel free to suggest more.

Those of you who work from home will be horrified to learn that, yes, I worked all day Christmas Day in my office. I will also be at work the morning of New Year’s Eve and the afternoon of New Year’s Day. Am I to expect double time? Triple time? Nope. I am not being paid anything other than my usual salary and I’m working my fingers to the bone.

I enjoy my job thoroughly, but am giving some serious thought to the idea of taking some time off once my contract runs out. I sincerely doubt I will ever go through with working from home entirely, but the temptation is there.

What’s most important for me at this stage in my life is that I enjoy what I am doing, both in and out of work. For this reason alone, I have cut back on a lot of my freelance and part-time work. I’ve been turning down or passing over paid gigs because when I hit 25 last month, I realized that all I did was work.

Since I cut back on my workload, things have been great. I have more time for my girlfriend, for promoting parties, DJing and just enjoying the time I have. I could stay at home all the time and work myself to death. Sure, I’d make tons of money, but I’d miss out on so much more.

However, with age comes responsibility. I am taking the first steps to buying a house. If I have a mortgage, things will have to change and I will have to focus on work a little more.

I feel like I’m at a crossroads at the moment. Have you ever found yourself in this situation, caught between adulthood and childhood, responsibility and freedom?

It happens on about half of the blogs I leave comments on. It doesn’t happen on all of them, so I rarely look to see if there check-box is selected that would subscribe me to the entry. Please, bloggers, set your comments up so that people only subscribe to an entry through their own actions. It’s annoying to log into your email account and find dozens of emails, one each for the latest comment left in an entry you ended up signed up for.

Sometimes I want to receive updates by email, but those are the times when I will check the box myself. Otherwise, it’s as good as spamming your readers, especially on posts that attract a lot of comments.

You may have seen them on webmaster forums.

Get 1,000 back links for $5

Sounds great doesn’t it? The deal is that you pay a sum of money, usually between $5 and about $50, and you get a number of blog posts, with links, on blogs across a blog network. The selling point of such packages is that the blogs have a respectable Page Rank and are on multiple IPs blah blah blah.

So what’s the catch?

The catch is that the Page Rank these blogs may have does not trickle down to the links you put in your post. You have the option to delay the postings, but the most interesting feature is the ability to spin one article into a number of unique articles. What you actually end up with, though, is dozens of articles that are absolute gibberish on blogs made up of hundreds of articles that are absolute gibberish; they have no value to you, search engines, or the Internet in general.

I can tell you these packages are a waste of you money because I bought one out of curiosity. I spent $5 for the sake of an experiment. Firstly, few, if any, of the blogs in these networks are indexed by Google. This means that your links are worth nothing. The blogs are mostly not listed on Technorati too.

For my $5 I got 50 blog posts spun from one post that I wrote myself. It included three links, but these are of no value because the blogs are dead weight. My Technorati rating stayed the same and nothing changed in Google. I didn’t use this blog for the experiment, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I may as well have bought a pack of Pringles and got some satisfaction that way, ‘cos these services fail to deliver big time.

Don’t use them.

Don’t take my word for it; have a look at one of the blogs in such networks and tell me it has any value to anybody. The real kicker is that these blogs are on dropped domains, which are domains that have expired and not been continued by their owners for one reason or another. While the PR may hold up in the future, the chances are slim, and buying the links now will really not help you in any way. Remember: If a girl calls you “sweety” on the Internet, it’s because she’s after something. People are making thousands of dollars selling posts on blogs like this. Let’s put an end to it. Spread the word.

So the situation I’m in is that I have to wait until Saturday before I can get my laptop fixed. I can turn it on, but I just can’t use the power adapter, possibly due to a problem with the socket at the back of the computer. The problem itself was caused by my good friend Mother Nature, who chose to throw down an alarmingly-on-target lightning bolt right at my friends house, thus tripping the switchbox, but not before a power surge found its way to my still-plugged-in IBM.

So I’m out of touch. I can’t check emails, I can’t read blogs, I can’t even blog myself. And here is my blog, wondering where its master has got to. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s only now that I understand just how much I use the Internet. Although I like to preach about how I could never work from home, I still spend far too much time on the Internet.

A few days away from the web, however, is good time for reflection. The blogs I have on auto-post with pre-written articles will tick over during my hiatus, but the ones I’ve not had time to write in advance for, like this one, could suffer. Let this be a lesson to us all, that if you blog daily, you must prepare for unforeseen circumstances. We’re all trying to make money online here, and so it pays to always be a step ahead of yourself.

Of course, I’ve found myself in situations like this before, and I always vowed that they would never happen again, but such is life. Sure, I can use the Internet while I’m at work, but strictly speaking, I have work to do during office hours.

Have you ever gone without the Internet for a prolonged period? I swear it’s like loosing a limb.

No tactic could be said to go too far if it works and makes money, unless you are outright lying to your audience and trying to get ahead by stealing. I came across a blog called The Affluent Blogger. I had a browse through the content and didn’t find anything too inspiring. My confidence in the blog was boosted by the large number of RSS subscribers: it was at over 500, so I thought that this guy must be doing something right.

Then I noticed that the number of comments was strangely low, and the posting was sporadic. Nothing about this blog stood out and said “subscribe!” to me. I right-clicked the RSS button and, to my amazement, The Affluent Blogger is using the Feedburner button of My Two Dollars, a blog that discusses various matters related to making money.

I haven’t contacted either of these bloggers about the matter because there’s really no need to. They’ll both see this post and can act upon it as they wish. Maybe the blogs are run by the same person (although this looks unlikely), or perhaps the two bloggers are friends (again, unlikely), but the fact is that one blogger has taken something from another to deliberately mislead his audience.

It goes beyond content theft and into new territory. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to trust new blogs, like mine, because too many bloggers are going out of their way to destroy any sense of trust that might have once existed. This works in the favor of John Chow, Darren Rowse, Kumiko, and anyone already established in the field of making money online, but it pisses me off.

What are people stealing from you? Probably more than you think.

Update: The blogger in question removed his fake RSS counter already without so much as a comment here.

Although not a great deal, I was proud of that check, but I have no intention of letting it inspire me to “get rich or die trying”. In other money-related matters, here’s what I got in my Paypal account this past week.

That works out to about $325. Not bad going for something I do in my spare time. The thing is, I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing, and I’m going to continue making more and more money, but it’s not going to be the last thing I think about before I go to sleep at night. The last thing I think about before I go to sleep at night will be the girl I love, or the story I’m writing for a magazine, or my family back in the UK.

My last thought before I go to sleep is “Wow! I made $500 in a single day on the internet”

I did once think “wow, I made $1,600 in one night” before I went to sleep after I organized a party in the UK. That was worth getting excited about. And then there was the time I got paid more than $700 to write health articles for a clinic.

My point is, you don’t have to be all about the money to make money. You have to be all about the money to make the top dollars like John Chow is and like I believe Kumiko will be in the future, but are you doing this professionally or on the side? And would you even want to do this professionally?

So, is money always on your mind?

Today I received an email from a high-profile Thailand blogger saying that the entire WordPress domain has been blocked. Such situations make us bloggers in Thailand feel like we are banging out heads against brick walls. It’s unclear whether this was intentional or whether the MICT and ISP responsible just messed up.

It makes me want to scream!

I personally find reading guest bloggers rather tedious. For whatever reason, guest bloggers often feel the need to assert themselves in a condescending, patronizing tone, as if talking to a bunch of primary school children. I assessed my own blog-reading habits and it turns out that I purposely overlook guest bloggers’ posts. I couldn’t work out why, but I think it’s just that I don’t care what another voice has to say on somebody’s blog.

When you get familiar with a person’s blog, if other people start posting then there is the temptation to ignore the new poster (by me, anyway). Look at John Cow as an example. Over the past couple of weeks there have been a multitude of posts by random people, and I can’t remember any of them.

I wrote my own guest post on John Cow, but I had no intention of writing a formulaic blog post about “the top five whatevers” or “the dos and don’ts of this and that”. I made up five stories about cows and posted it, and you know what; it didn’t do me much good. I’m of the disposition that until my blog is pulling in huge numbers, I’m not going to give my top content away to anybody.

This would mean that anything I write as a guest blogger would be substandard garbage and, as a professional writer, I’m not prepared to do that. Kumiko recently said that all guest bloggers must die. Her argument is that guest blogging is good only for the guest blogger and the blog owner, and I have to agree with this. From my perspective as a reader, guest blogging is like an advert in a magazine that doesn’t catch my eye.

Darren Rowse said this week that when he handed over his blog to guest bloggers in April last year, his traffic soared. That seems like a freak event. John Cow’s line on the Alexa Traffic Graph has dipped a bit in the past few days, but a similar thing has happened to Pro Blogger, John Chow and Cash Quests.

By Kumiko’s logic, guest blogging is still a good idea for the guest blogger. I think her decision to kill all guest bloggers is a bit extreme, but I know where she’s coming from.

Stop! The million dollar wiki is not worth your time and effort.

The way the Million Dollar Wiki works is that a bright spark named Graham Langdon created a wiki and started selling pages on it for $100. There are 10,000 pages available so Graham stands to make $1,000,000. Throw in a few sob stories about Graham having student debts to pay off and you’ve got people hooked. While nobody could say that Graham was making a mistake, perhaps people splashing out on the wiki pages are.

It’s only $100

If you think like that then you don’t belong in this game. Only $100 could be used on any number of things, including higher ranking links than the Million Dollar Wiki will ever get you. Heck, you can get yourself reviewed on Cash Quests for $70 and have $30 left over for pizza.

The content of the wiki is abysmal. From a reader’s perspective, which is how I approached it when I first logged on, there is very little of value there. There is no logic or method to how the pages are arranged. You can either view a random page or else view the pages in a list of popularity. What good is that to anybody?

There are 265 pages sold so far. Most of those pages have less than 100 page views and will probably get buried beneath even more pages. John Chow, smart as ever, promoted the Million Dollar Wiki on his blog through a paid review. He made a point to say that he had bought a page which inspired 70 of his readers to shell out for pages themselves. Now he has teamed up with Graham and is running a contest for people who buy a page or write a review of the contest.

The majority of pages on the Million Dollar Wiki are nothing more than adverts. I’d be wary about purchasing a page just because John Chow told you to.