EDIT

Jim has apologized, so hats off to him for that. As for misrepresentation, I do not care - there are a lot of people out there that have not heard of this blog yet, and even a small opinion can help shape their opinions… if it was a correct one, fair enough, but as it was a completely unfounded one, I have no sympathy for the public bashing - an eye for an eye so they say. Even being mentioned as one of those blogs is not right - have you heard of the phrase ‘guilty by association’?

Nonetheless, I will not hold him too responsible, as the thoughts in that post appear to be misrepresented. This post still stands though.

Another thing that irritates me are the members of Digital Point; mentioned by my good friend Chenzen in the comments section below. Just because I possess an ability to write half decent eBooks, I’m compared to another member that could do as well… looks like the eBook market really wasn’t as saturated as I thought. You can see the thread here; I thank all those who backed me up.

If I did not make myself clear, I not once have ever had a duplicate account on any forum, mainly because it would be a pain in the ass to maintain.

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I’ve been tipped off a few times about this during the last few days - being on holiday, I can’t do much. What I’m talking about is people thrashing TUK, talking absolute rubbish or misguided nonsense… stuff that will happen when you get up an opinionated website to anywhere near being half-popular.

One such example, and one that irritated me was this post at Bloggeries… now, I wasn’t a member there, and never would have found out about it if it wasn’t for someone tipping me off, but this post really irritated me… you’ll see why in a bit.

The post was about TUK, in a thread Sites claiming to earn alot, are they for real. First off, let me state that I have been as open as possible with this blog, and anyways - statistics are easily checked, especially when talking about Alexa, RSS subscribers and all that; as for earnings, there is a degree of trust involved, however I have never lied about how much I’ve made… if I’ve bombed at something (as has happened quite frequently ) I have let you guys know.

Here’s a direct link.

Overreaction on my part, perhaps? I’d say not… although that comment is a veiled one, it is in effect calling me a liar… something that seems to be done without a moment of thought, because if you take a look at that post, it claims that there is no way TUK earns so much - the problem is that I never said it does.

My earnings posted are overall earnings - not just for The University Kid. Obviously I’d love it if the blog pulled in $1-2k a month as then I could flip it for around $10/$20 grand as that would be great, but I’ve repeatedly stated - this blog earns nowhere near what it should do for the amount of work I put into it, and if my good ole buddy had taken a little bit of time to do some research, he would have realized that the majority of my earnings have been from flipping - eBook websites, and the proof is there at Digital Point and Site Point, in the length of the sale threads and the public end price for the website.

Now, that post alone would not have been too much of a worry - no one is going to really listen to someone with no credibility, and even if they do - who cares. The real irritation is the email I got from my forum poster friend, a while ago - I’ll post it below. I did not reply, as I have not replied to any emails except the most pressing ones due to me being on holiday, but you can have a look.

This email came from one and the same - now let me ask you an important question, in public. Why the hell would you want to exchange links with a blog that lies? Not to increase your own traffic at all, eh? For a pitiful, unrelated blog, with low traffic and Adsense everywhere (there’s a reason most of the bigger blogs don’t use it, you know), saying one thing in private, and then a totally different thing in public not just exposes you as a backstabbing tool, but a pretty ignorant one at that.

This is the only link I’ll give my buddy - here you go. Once he sees the backlink in his Wordpress dashboard, there is almost a guarantee he’ll read this post… let’s hope he has a credible reply - something I doubt in the extreme, but ah well; fool by name, foolish by nature I guess.

There we go, feel free to let me know what you think. Idiot-acknowledging posts have become a rarity at TUK, and you guys really, really missed them, didn’t you?

New advertising slot

I’ve been thinking of putting up a new advertising slot, mainly as I’m looking for more ways to monetize this blog - at the moment, they’re pretty unobtrusive (I hope, at least; if they aren’t, you can always let me know ) and until I start up to find some decent affiliate products, the best way to increase revenue is by adding an extra ad.

At the moment, the two I’m looking at are the bar at the top of the page (image courtesy of Can’t Get Rich) or a Peel Away Ad (which you can get free if you want by reading this post). At the moment, I’m leaning towards the Peel Away as it only opens if you well… peel away it ( ) and is a lot better looking than that boring bar. What do you think?

Affiliate Marketing… begins!

I started a basic form of affiliate marketing yesterday, once again using a friend’s Adword account… the first item I’m going to promote is a language course to learn Spanish. Why? Well, I was looking at the list of items in Clickbank and wanted to get started… the sales page looked interesting, so I thought I might as well give it a go

At the moment I’ve only received five clicks, out of around 13,000 impressions… those five clicks cost me less than a dollar. The payout for the offer is around $60~ so I will keep promoting until I’ve used up fifty dollars and then decide whether to continue or not depending on whether I’ve made a sale. If I do well with it, I will of course update; I’m also going to try using NeverBlue Ads a bit more, so we’ll see.

I do want to reach my goal of $100.00 in affiliate earnings so far, and I need a little bit more to push me over - you can help by signing up for TLA, Hostican or even Adtoll… it may help, who knows.

Before I run, speaking of Adtoll… wtf is with their rates for certain websites? Take a look

Compare the Alexa rating with the price. $200/month!

I need to move into the business category for blogging

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