So it’s become very clear that there is very little chance of me being able to carry thru with the blogging business plan that Michael Jones paints. I’ve simply got too much to do in my full-time job. My full-time job working with computers keeps me fully occupied. There’s one part of the blogging business that is about advertising with Google. With Google you can turn any website into the most popular website overnight, as long as you’ve got unlimited amounts of money. The trick to being successful is trying to spend the least amount of money to just get you over the hump in terms of website traffic to make more money than you are shelling out to Google for each visitor the Google search engine brings to you. The trick to finding that right amount of money is many hours of intense work in front of the computer screen monitoring your business much like a day trader in the stock or commodities market actively monitors his holdings. If you don’t make the proper adjustments in the early stages you could easily lose hundreds of dollars a day.
There is another form of getting onto Google without spending money. It’s more of the “old fashioned” way. You get onto other social networking forums, and start writing content and build up visibility. It’s not as instant as when you pay Google directly, but it’s also not as stressful and risky. It will take more of my time than if I paid Google, but my time can be spread out at my pace. In other words with paying Google I might need to spend 100 hours in one week. With the “old fashioned” way I might need to spend 400 hours but I can spread it out over a year.
Speaking of Google, you may have heard about the fact that if you do Google search of “Islam is” it will tend not to offer you anything. The media have suggested this was intentional to avoid coming up with with websites that defame the Islamic religion and as a result cause a backlash. Google has claimed since Jan 5th that this is a bug they are fixing, but after one week this “bug” still remains and this just feels like an unusually long time. Whether or not this is a “bug” or an intentional setting by Google, it once again highlights the fact that Google does wield a lot of power over the internet, and the fact that you can turn the head of Google by paying them enough money to get better rankings in their search engine suggests that maybe the internet isn’t quite as free as you think.
Yes you can easily put up your own website for very little money anywhere in the world and put up any content you want. But if a company like Google decides to “black list” your website it’s almost like them pulling the plug on your website. Or if another company funds a marketing campaign on Google they can push you way down the rankings and effectively out of existence. I mean your website will physically exist and will be accessible by word of mouth, but it’s existence will never be known by the general public. This is probably not too big a deal if you only want to share a home-brew website with friends and family. But what if do want to find out the most accurate and unbiased sources of information on what “Islam Is” or find out all the kinds of reported side-effects to a newly released drug: how much of the actual information out there are you actually getting to see thru Google’s filters. You’ll never know what you don’t see.