Abandoned Blogs For Money

by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Staff Writer

 

Blogs have become common in the multitudes on the Internet. Nobody really knows how many there are, and some of the available research goes back to 2002. This means any of the data used in this article could be up-to-the-minute, or it could be a little older; what you will see is the most current information I could find. It is still useful for making the decisions we will discuss.

People use blogs to express their opinions about many things like food, politics, or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most blogs. Most blogs are textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting).

Rick Bruner, President of Executive Summary Consulting, says there are four types of blogs more successful than others:

The Thought Leadership Blog allows bloggers to distinguish themselves as being a well-informed industry professional. Professionals might use this kind of blog to get their name before peers who can use their services or products in some way to profit the blogger.

A Customer Relations Blog engages with customers. With this kind of blog, new products can be quickly introduced along with helpful tips on how to use existing products. This helps make satisfied customers who will give marvelous referrals for your business.

Blogs Directed at Marketing to Peers offer a way for marketers to get the word out about new products. If enough traffic can be generated to one of these blogs, a lot of sales will result. A serious marketer will do whatever is needed to generate many links to such a blog.

Media Relations Blogs can be used to augment a marketing plan by furnishing press releases. The idea is to create a personal relationship with journalists and the general media.

As an entrepreneur, if you have gone to the trouble to create a blog, there is every reason you should use it to bring in as much income as possible. Any of these blogs may be used as a base for making money from products, services, affiliate programs, advertising, and any other wealth-generating source your creativity may develop. Your blog is just like any other Website you have and needs to have large volumes of traffic to generate income for you.

For several years I’ve written about the importance of blogs; I have one on the Wordpress.org platform, so I’m well aware of the problems with getting recognized by the search engines. My blog has only recently been recognized by Alexa and it has a very low rank; it’s a work in progress and requires a certain amount of constant effort. My goal is to begin generating a moderate income from it in the near future. A lot of other people write constantly about blogs, but there are some things that aren’t readily apparent to the current or prospective blogger, because most writers don’t mention them. The idea for this article arose from random Web surfing that turned up the method of using abandoned blogs to make money for someone other than the originator of the blog. This first seemed like a great idea.

The author of Financial Hack says he has encountered several abandoned blogs that he was able to access as his own after some period of inactivity after the original owners had abandoned them for all practical purposes. One, he says, was The Bored Investor. This was one of the abandoned blogs this author found and decided to claim as his own. You can see the last post (when I read it) was last updated in 2006; he says he never does anything to it but, according to him, he gets about $200 a month just from Google ads.

Here is where you will begin to see one of the problems with using abandoned blogs originally started by others: it’s a lot of trouble and requires much continuous Web surfing. According to Financial Hack, here are some things to look for and suggestions about what you do to claim a site:

1. While you are surfing, you may find a post you want to read, only to end up at a broken link. This indicates the blog may have been deleted by the original owner.

2. When you get a broken link, enter the main blog URL. If that says the Main Page URL does not exist, this indicates the blog has been deleted by the original owner—the URL may still be available with pages that go with it. Just because the link is broken does not necessarily mean all pages have been deleted. It’s like any other Website—if you take the site down, all those pages are out there somewhere. I have several of these still shown way down in a Google search; the same thing happens sometimes with blogs.

3. If you’re using Google’s Blogger platform, Financial Hack says to use your blogger account and see if you can claim the abandoned blog. If the blogger deleted their account, you will be able to do so. If, however, the blog was deleted by the blogger administrator as a “spam blog,” then you will get a notice that the blog is already claimed by someone when you try and enter the URL. Hack says such sites, if you find one, can easily be monetized with little effort.

4. Another way to find abandoned blogs not on Hack’s site is to type in random URLs, like “http://???.blogspot.com/” and see what you get. If you continue this long enough you will no doubt find some abandoned sites.

A commenter to Hack’s blog says the current policy of Blogger is to wait six months after a blog owner deletes it before making that URL available again. This would preclude doing what Financial Hack has done. For this reason, I say try this a little bit and see what happens, but the time required is probably prohibitive for most Internet entrepreneurs. This is why I want to present a different approach to abandoned blogs which includes the use of new relatively inactive blogs used primarily to generate income.

Let’s discuss a word of warning here. There are sites that some feel are spam blogs, better known as “splogs.” These sites usually have no meaningful content, are never updated, and their only purpose is to generate links to another Website in order to achieve higher search ranking for the other site or sites. This kind of operation often results in having a blog taken down by the platform administrator because they clog up band width and server capacity. Later we’ll discuss some ways to avoid this appearance but still provide a reasonably simple stream of income from less than active blogs.

How many blogs and abandoned blogs are out there? Of course, nobody really knows, but here are some figures from Caslon Analytics blogging, Sifry’s Alerts, and The Boston Globe.

In 2006, one of the Pew Projects estimated the U.S. blog population at 12 million with about 57 million readers. Among these, Perseus reports that somewhere around three million blogs had not been updated in two months at the time of their survey, and these are assumed to have been abandoned. This high rate of abandonment results from the unexpected effort involved with frequent writing, loss of interest in the original blog subject, and the ease of setting up a blog. Some say the major reason for abandonment is availability of free blog platforms like Blogger. This could be a factor—I pay about $100 a year for my blog plus the effort I’ve put into it, so I’m not thinking of walking away. Perseus did say there was one abandoned blog that had been maintained by the owner in some way for 923 days, almost 3 years. That owner could have been doing what we are talking about: just getting regular income from it (we don’t know). Some other studies indicate 70 million Web logs worldwide with Japanese the most common language followed by English.

The idea of finding unused blogs with an established income flow sounds really great. However, from my research, I’m not sure this can still be done because of restraints placed by the blog hosts, plus the fact it somehow seems unethical. Add to this the time and trouble to find these sites, when there are few of them, seems to tell us this is not a very good idea. What does come out of this knowledge is that it is possible to revive old blogs you have neglected for a while, or, if you have no old blogs, this tells us you can create one or two and use them mostly to generate income. It’s important to try not to create an image of spamming the search engines. How can we create sites like this?

The first thing is to find a free blog platform that allows advertisements; not all of them do, so you’ll have to check this before you go to the trouble of setting up an account. Two that allow some forms of advertising are Blogger (by Google) and
BlogMaestro. Most sites will allow Google AdSense and possibly some other forms. A nice list of other free blogs is 40+ Free Blog Hosts; you will have to check these to see what you can do with them.

Next is to find ways to direct at least some traffic to the site. A very good way is to write useful content for your site, then modify the articles a bit and submit them to article providers like these:

Amazines
Article Alley
Article Dashboard
Article OnRamp
Article Teller
Article Gems
Easy Articles
Ezine Articles
Go Articles
Search Warp

Put a resource block at the end of your article with a short biography and the name of your blog. If you do this on a regular basis you will eventually generate traffic. Many people do not like to write; what to do? Go to one or two of the sites above and use a few of the thousands of articles they have available. My choices from the above list are Amazines and Ezine Articles; they are all free, so use them. Just search their site for the keywords you want for your blog and take your choice.

Another way to get a bit of traffic is to use one of the text ad services like Text-Link-Ads.

A third way to keep fresh content is to use something like Article Marketing Automation, a program that automatically furnishes your choice of text articles automatically on a regular basis. This is not free; the cost is $47 per month after a 30-day free trial.

A further recommendation is to search the engines and find out everything you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Much of this you can do free, it just takes a little learning and some time.

If your blog platform allows a bit of leeway with advertising, you should try to use Kontera ContentLink. This program exhibits ads in a block as the cursor passes over a keyword; you can get a lot of coverage this way. Another excellent marketing site for bloggers is Pepperjam; their PepperjamADS is a way to deliver many ads from different advertisers automatically

Try one or two of these in addition to your regular blog and see if you can get a little extra income from them. What’s to lose? Most of it is free, and if it doesn’t work all you have to do is quit and try something else!

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Yank is a home-based entrepreneur and freelance business writer living in Hurricane Alley, North Carolina, U.S.A. His Website is http://www.alternate-choice.com and you may contact Yank at mailto:newideas@alternate-choice.com.