My blogs went down for a few hours this afternoon. In all honesty, it really pissed me off. Big time! I have been monetizing most of my blogs. And I have experienced being flagged by advertisers because they thought the review I did went missing in just a few hours or days after I submitted it. I was flagged twice by Sponsored Reviews because my blog was down during those times they were checking. Bummer! Thank goodness they were very considerate.

I have been contemplating on getting another webhost for a couple of days now. I am thinking of getting Bluehost but I heard some contradicting feedbacks about it.

My current webhost dishes out great service. I can contact them via email and text messaging if something went awry with my blogs. They respond immediately. The only thing I don’t like from them is this downtime I encountered several times already. It doesn’t matter if I am just running a regular blog. I am monetizing at least 90% of all the blogs that I have. I cannot afford to get flagged again, or lose a potential advertiser because when they went knocking, my blog was down.

What webhosting service are you using? Would you recommend it to me?

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Check out this survey that I did…

If you want to join, leave a comment and I will go and invite you. Or you can visit this link

Good news everyone! You can now withdraw funds from your Paypal account directly to your Philippine bank account!

UPDATE!
An official announcement has been released by Paypal a few minutes ago. I just received an email from them. For your questions regarding this new feature of Paypal Philippines, go to this LINK.

I just saw it now when I opened my Paypal account and have seen this option when I try to withdraw funds.

*Click image for a larger view

Check it out! Now we can withdraw funds without being charged the $5 fee. Yey!

It seems there is really some confusing implementation of Google’s PageRanking system.

I am a lurker at Colleen’s blog, PPP’s top earner. When the Google slap happened, a few weeks after the first and second hits, her blog which was a PR5 went down to PR0. Just a couple of days ago, I noticed that her blog went up to PR3 again. I emailed her last night about this and asked her if she did anything at all to get some PR back. She said that she hasn’t done anything at all.

There is hope after all 😉

Now there’s another PPP top earner’s blog that I’ve been lurking at. She’s an obnoxious person but she dishes out tips and tricks in making money online and some wordpress tricks so I read her blog entries. She has a PR4 then went down to PR0. She gained back her PR4 a few weeks back by cleaning her blog. She removed all make money banners and sidebar links. She made links No Follow and have removed any post associated with PPP. Then she submitted her blog to Google for reconsideration.

You can do that as well. So many blogs have regained their PR by doing this. But of course, you need to say goodbye to the incoming extra dollars. What would you be needing a PR for if you can’t earn from it?

Then again look at Colleen’s blog. If there’s one person in the whole www associated with PPP, that would be her. And she gained back her PR without doing anything. Tina S. is another popular PPP member doing PPP posts with a banner to boot. Yet she still has a PR3 until now.

Google’s PR is really one big mystery to me.

In my entry about Making Money with a PR0 Blog, Mel asked me this…

…how to improve my site and kung paano maka-attract ng mga advertisers lalo. (how to attract advertisers even more)

Hmm… I am not really an expert but I have been browsing sites of the BIG probloggers and these are just some tips I gathered from them:

First and foremost, choose a good theme/template. Remember that your site’s layout is the first thing advertisers see. Make sure you have a clean layout. You should have a predefined corner where advertisers can put their ads. I read somewhere that it is better to choose a SEO-ready theme. And there a lot of this kind of themes.

I love themes by the following designers: Randa Clay, Brian Gardner, Solostream. I also check out themes from Rock-Kitty.net and Sadish Bala.

If you see a layout that you love but you don’t like the colors or the header or the background of the theme, you can tweak it a bit. Don’t be afraid to do it. It’s easy. Just make sure you ask permission from the designer or it says in the theme info that you are allowed to change portions of the theme. I will dedicate a post for tweaking themes one of these days.

Content is important. Most advertisers choose a blog which is relevant to their ads. So if you want to attract travel advertisers, then write posts about travel. Things like that. And remember to write in English. Most advertisers don’t like blogs written in any other language unless they are targeting a specific audience. If you really need to write in your local language, just make sure your post title clearly states so.

Site statistics. This is very important to advertisers. Advertisers need a reason to buy space in your blog. What are the benefits of doing business with you: high blog traffic, large circulation, PageRank, Alexa stats, Feedburner count… Other bloggers down play their stats. But I believe if you really want to attract advertisers, put your stats strategically. Put it in a place where advertisers visiting your blogs would likely see it. What are you most proud of? Do you have a high PageRank? Then put it in a place where advertisers will see it right away. High Alexa rank? Do the same. High Feedburner subscriber count? Show it.

So that’s my take on how to attract advertisers. Again, I am no expert. These are a product of what I gathered doing the rounds of blogs of the BIG probloggers out there. Do you have anything to add? Feel free.

Have you noticed that Technorati has not been updating their Authority and Rank accurately? There have been some extreme ups and downs with numbers and even some are not moving at all. I already opened a support ticket for this one a few weeks back but I guess there are too many bloggers like me who are complaining about this to them.

I had this problem with one of my blogs before wherein whenever I ping it, it says that I haven’t updated for 60 days already (and counting) when in fact I update a couple of times a week. When I got the chance to email Technorati, they told me that for some reason, their spiders couldn’t reach my blog. They ‘manually released their spiders’ and my Authority and Rank jumped by a 100+. So you can just imagine the inaccuracy of the numbers because of that problem. For a time, everything was normal. Until December of 2007 when the same problems arose. Now I am waiting for them to look into the problem and address it.

Technorati Authority and Rank is important to some advertisers, especially in Sponsored Reviews. The higher the Authority you have, the better your price per review will be. So I am really concerned whenever there is a problem in updating my Technorati Authority and Rank.

Check out yours. Go to your account, click on Edit beside your account name, go to Blogs and ping your blog(s). If it accurately says how much time has elapsed since you last updated, then you don’t have any problem. But if the time is inaccurate, then you are having problems like mine. Open a support ticket so Technorati can address it right away.

I don’t know if it’s just me or you also feel this way… I get annoyed whenever there is a request for a blogger to vote for him or her in this or that contest. Let me clarify that. I don’t get annoyed if the request is from my blogger-friends. If the request is from someone I don’t even know… blah! How can I vote for you and say that your blog is really great when you’re not even in my blogroll and I haven’t seen your blog yet???

Aargh! Some people!