If you read my blog, it is most likely you are either a) a friend who is trying to get inside my head, or b) want to make money from blogging. I am going with the latter. You, like me, may be frustrated with Google for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into, but I am here to say there are alternatives. I am partial to BidVertiser myself, but I am looking into a number of affilate programs right now to replace Google on The Hart Blog Network blogs.

The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger.

John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals.

Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network. What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions.

Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an interview with Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam Network

Earlier in the week I posted that PepperJam Network was giving all new publishers who signed up with their network a signup bonus of $10. Today I’ve managed to get a quick interview with Pepperjam Network’s CEO and President Kristopher B. Jones to ask him about the network, why he started it and what tips he could give us as publishers for using it in a way that earns us the most money.

John Chow has been pushing NeverBlue Ads pretty hard of late. I am also interested and owe them a return phone call. It seems these days even the bigger blogs are abandoning google so fast we can smell smoke. Possibly it is the guys at google taking the torch to ever more bloggers. It is hard to say for sure.

Earlier in the week John also wrote on TinyMasive.com

What do you get when you combine the contextual advertising of Google AdSense with an interactive shopping widget that can offer some pretty good deals to the visitors of your site. In some respects, TinyMassive.com may just look like another shopping-based ad network, but over the course of doing this review, I came to discover that it has a few unique qualities as well.

There are many other networks available. Some of them are sketchy. Some of them just hard to get into. Some of them only in beta, like Yahoo. They are out there though and for those who are frustrated with Google, fear not there are options.

Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either.

The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done.

I checked back a week later and nothing since that day had been indexed. I sent another ticket and posted on the bulletin board the same day. Three days afterwards I received a reply to the first email and was told the blog had been indexed, what they didn’t say was it was done shortly after I made the problem known on the bulletin board. I have since had to make more than half a dozen posts in order to get the blog regularly indexed. Who ever is in charge of doing that does it pretty speedily and should be rewarded for it.

I have received several answers as to why this is happening from the board admin, and none of them are very likely. First I wasn’t given an answer. The second time I was told there was just a delay in indexing. The next time they blamed it on the number of anchor links some of my posts contain. They have blamed it on the number of tags. They have always fixed it an done an auto update but they refuse to address the key issue many bloggers are having. Neither the automatic ping services nor the manual ping at Technorati are working for many of us.

As I said this isn’t just my problem either. If you surf over to the Technorati discussion board you will find quite a few people who have gone a couple of days without being tracked to those who have gone weeks. One blogger reports his blog hadn’t been indexed for more than a year. I have no idea how often he posts, but Technorati simply can’t say his problem was a simple delay in indexing.

If you are a serious blogger with a Technorati account don’t just assume it has been working for you, go check it out. I know some of you are asking what the big deal is. First off if you are displaying the Technorati logo on your blog, you are advertising them in exchange for a service which includes indexing and providing search traffic. If they aren’t providing that, then they are operating on a fraudulent principal and should be paying you for the advertising. Secondly they are getting paid advertising because of the service they provide, I think the advertisers that pay them should be made aware that they aren’t getting everything they are paying for. I know I certainly would if I were paying big bucks to advertise on a site making claims of tracking a hundred million plus blogs, but only updating three quarters of their claim. The fact is they are a corporation and all corporations private or public need to be held accountable to proper standards.

I won’t debate whether they have the right or not to deny tracking of individual blogs, but the fact is they have an obligation to tell people that their blogs will not be tracked. They don’t even have to provide a reason, they just have to be honest about doing it. Of course none of us know if this is a softwarer glitch, which they have never admitted to, but they need to come out and say something one way or another. Failure to do or say something is the best way for them to lose their credibility. I can live with it being some sort of technical problem, we have all experienced those, but the fact is something needs to be done and done soon.

5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart.

The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio.

4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times.

3) Starting out with a free blog is the way to go. This might be true if you are just keeping a private journal, but if you ever want to make money on your blog, this is not necessarily the best advice you can get. Less than $20 can get you started right here on Zyon. After a month you will know if you going to give this up or keep at it. The longer you are established on your own server the better it is for your rankings. The longer you are on freebie blogs the harder it is to make the switch and the greater the detrimental effects to your blog there are.

2) Posting Frequency Doesn’t Matter. Unless you are writing a personal vanity blog detailing your life posting frequency does matter. Do you have to post every day? No. Do you need to post a couple of times a week minimum? Yes. In order to achieve any real following you need to post with some sort of frequency. If what you said in one post is interesting, but don’t have any sort regularity I might be kind and add your feed to the more than a two hundred and fifty I subscribe to, but if you don’t pick up the pace you will get relegated to the lowest priority folder, the check once a month if I have time category.

1) Only Write the Highest Quality Posts and Never Write Filler. This is fine when you have 25,000 daily feed readers, but when you are starting out regular posting is essential to getting momentum going. This is not to say write a crappy post, you shouldn’t do that either. When it comes right down to it, you should be able to come up with at least one good idea five times a week and knock out a few hundred words worth reading.

Filler posts may not be the best idea you have ever had. That doesn’t matter so long as you put some thought into it, made it readable, and did a good job with the SEO. There are many ways to come up with good filler posts, many of which are some form of linkbaiting. Trips Around the Blogosphere, Daily Del.icio.us Updates, or Twitter Digest Posts are just a few examples of this.

Not every post is going to interest every reader that is just a fact of life. Snobs will say a post is crap simply because they didn’t get anything out of it, but if you the blogger got something out of writing it, then you can guarantee someone else will to.

Remember to take good advice when you see it, but don’t be afraid to question the motives of those who are giving it to your.

The question of whether you should make theme adjustments is always a difficult one to answer. It is even be harder to do and not negatively affect your onsite readers. That being said here are my thoughts.

• Limit major theme changes to no more than once a month. Anymore than once a month clearly defines you as a noob. A complete theme change is sometimes necessary especially as you are learning, but should be done with caution.

• When building or choosing a new theme make sure that it is easily tweaked later on. Having a CSS class that will allow the quick insertion of more banners or advertising will save you countless hours of work down the road.

• Work out all changes before hand on a test blog with actual posts and pages. I prefer to run a local server using Apache, mySql, and php management on my windows PC

• Make changes when the fewest people are reading your blog and with a very clear head. A pot of coffee by your side while making these changes isn’t a bad idea either. Only make the changes to your real blog after you know they work perfectly on the test blog. Upload the entire theme under a new name if it is a variation of your current theme. If you need to switch back to your old theme quickly, because the test blog and the real blog had some difference or something got distorted in the FTP transfer having your old theme will save you a lot of time, panic, and cursing.

• Make minor tweaks as necessary, but keep them small and do them one at a time. As noted before always have a backup of your current theme or you can really screw yourself.

With these tips in mind you should be able to make changes with the smallest possible impact on your readers. Good luck and never stop improving the functionality of your blog anytime you can.

Here is your daily round up of everything you should have read today, but didn’t because you were jerking all morning, napped this afternoon, farted around with your new theme project this evening, watched idol, blogged about idol, wondered where all this traffic came from on The Other Blog, fooled around some more with your theme and then wondered what you were going to post today over in Blog Boy. i suppose I could have twitted all that today.

Mani at The Daily SEO Blog brought us Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability

Darren blogged on branding your blog with your name in The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog

Last but not least Sara gives us a very appropriate post on tax day in Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance