I have worked hard with my website designer to have just the right colors and design and balance so that is all blends well .

Newlookimage.com is in the fashion field so to me content and design were real important . And as you pointed out I just did not want it to look like one run on link.

thanks so much for this post – it is very timely for me

take care :)

“How many uniques a day?” Around 6,000+

“If you wouldn’t have had all of those links, you might not have built up the traffic levels and even discovered the miracle of adsense, and would have been down in the gutter”

No, no, no. Before adsense, I was never doing any “look at this” posts. It was Adsense that drew me into that sort of post.

“and say that linking out isn’t worth the time. I assume that despite this, it’s still okay for people to link back to you? ”

You’ve misunderstood. I “link out” all the time. If I’m writing about X and you have a good post on some aspect of X, I’m very likely to point at that within my larger post. What I do NOT do any more is just say “Great post about X over at abc.com”.

-Terry

I don’t get it… unless you already have a nice high salary job and you are blogging for pure fun – then it makes sense I guess. But then again, why not profit from your blog and save money for your kids so they can go to college?

And to nuggetbro:

$30 isn’t really a poopload of cash. There are people out there making over $100,000/month with adsense. Personally, I started devoting almost all of my time to blogging in late April 2006. I started completely from scratch and am now averaging close to $1000/month. I have worked quite a bit to get to that level…probably putting 12 hour days in 6 days a week. But now the momentum is building. Hopefully, with a little luck I’ll reach a $50/day goal in the next two or three months.

Anyway, I’m going on and on… but think everyone out there should be motivated. If you’re not motivated, take a look at THIS adsense check for one month of work. I’d really like to kill this guy (just kidding…I’m jealous, that’s all):

http://www.shoemoney.com/gallery/v/misc/adsensecheck.jpg.html

I hope this didn’t depress anyone… lol!

Maybe once a week you could summarise the best links from that week on your linkblog into a single post on your main blog (kind of like how Darren somehow does those Speedlinking posts here). Don’t copy over all the links, just the truly useful ones. If there weren’t any great links this week, then don’t post anything.

Doing this for a while will really show you, through both your site stats and Adsense earnings, that users really do value original content way more than they do other peoples’ surfing histories.

Plus, it keeps your real blog clean while still accommodating your linkblogging temptations.

If you wouldn’t have had all of those links, you might not have built up the traffic levels and even discovered the miracle of adsense, and would have been down in the gutter with guys like NuggetPro and me (and others who earn less than NuggetPro “on a good day”).

If you have nothing or earn nothing and don’t link out .. it’s like a negative venture because then we are probably advertising and paying people money to bring in traffic to our sites.

It must be nice to be at a comfortable level earning between $11,000 and $22,000 (from your figures) per annum … and say that linking out isn’t worth the time. I assume that despite this, it’s still okay for people to link back to you? Regardless, if you were back to the levels of $3 per day or less like a lot of people trying and putting in a lot of time spent .. making only $900 in a year changes your pespective a lot. I’d probably continue linking out until it gets popular enough in the search engines that you have a positive net link-flow into your site.

One thing’s for sure – and I’m sure everyone will agree – people are rude savages and will drop you like a hot potato if you don’t keep it up .. If you stop linking out – will people stop linking in? Will people think you are too good to link out? Will people stop coming by? Then, you’ll just have to start linking out again.

It’s a viscious circle. I wish I could jump in this circle but I think I’m on the outside looking in anway.

I suppose that sites do grow gradually, and maybe mine does also, but my history over the years has been to float along at around the same numbers and then see a big jump which then falls off sharply but ends up higher than it was prior to the jump. Sometimes I’ve been able to point to a particular article being picked up somewhere bigger than I am, but at other times it just seems like a thousand new people just suddenly “found” me for no good reason..

Often that’s in the fall, which makes sense: I’m a tech site dealing with Unix/Linux and Mac OS X, so it’s probably the freshman class that “found” me.. but then you’d think I’d see high numbers of .edu domains and that hasn’t been true.. so who knows? I sure do not.

By the way, I do have a sub section (/Web) that is probably more of interest to Problogger readers than the rest of the site. Unless you are a PB reader also interested in Unixy things, of course :-)

at least Darren didn’t condemn it nor did he show any support for it in his writting.

This has proven very effective for me as well. Recently Lifehacker stumbled onto one of my posts and linked up to it sending my site into the biggest traffic surge it’s ever had with 5-7000 visits a day from just a hundred or so. I’ve managed to gain a significant number of subscribers and the traffic hasn’t even started to dwindle after 2 solid days as new sites continue to link.

None of this could have happened at all if I’d just been tossing links up by the dozens. It all happened because I’ve made every single post of mine from my own original thoughts that at best were instigated by something else I read that I had plenty more to add to.

This site is familiar. How does this fit into a post like this?

And he wouldn’t just stop after the first email. He sent me two more to follow the first one. And the tone of the email was something like ‘If you are linking to them for free, you’ve got to link to my site too’. Can you believe that?!