Althaf, the ex-owner of Blogrepreneur has started a personal blog at AlthafAhmed.com. From what he tells me, despite plans to not market or monetize the blog StumbleUpon has already sent well over 69,000 unique visitors in its first week!

If you didn’t know already Ben has sold BloggingExperiment.com (around the $16k mark) after 9 months of experimenting. The new owner Max Davis has kick-started its new life with a fantastic post about What blog buyers want. It’s a very useful look from the other side of the fence. One golden tip he left till the comments is to check in the source code to make sure that the owner hasn’t inserted Google analytics tracking code twice, because that can double the traffic count.

Garryconn has started sending Top Quality Blog Tips On PDF to his mailing list. If you are not on it yet, you should be!

For those of you who are still wondering, it was an April fools Joke to borrow JohnChow’s Feedcounter graphic. The 23k mark still looms ahead!

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Long time readers will remember I used to give out links to my favorite blog posts of the week in what I called “Saturday Linking”, which provided those who were interested with some weekend reading. I’ve decided to start doing this again but this time on Fridays and with a new name; blog plugs!

How You Can Get A Plug From Blogging Fingers

If you have written an especially good post or are releasing something that you need the worlds attention brought to, then contact me and I may just include in the next weeks batch of blog plugs! Only tell me about your very best posts and they must be about blogging/making money online/web marketing so that Blogging Fingers will be interested in reading it.

This Weeks Blog Plugs

81 Useful Affiliate Marketing Resources from Blogtrepreneur. My submission of this on digg actually made it to the front page, but it must have got auto-buried very quickly because it remains on just 71 diggs. Nevertheless it makes a great read for all you affiliate marketers out there!

More great material for affiliate markets can be found at RuanShamus.com where there is a new indepth guide to making money with ClickBank.

Free e-books are all the rage at the moment but the abundance of them being released pushes the standard higher, which is reflected in Caroline Middlebrook’s How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress.

Yesterday I read my favorite ever post from Problogger, entitled Confucius said - Build a Better Blog.

This is the quote that stood out to me the most.

Confucius said: “Do not make haste, do not covet small gains. If you make haste, you cannot reach your goal; If you covet small gains, your efforts will not culminate in great achievements.”

The quotes from Confucius left me pontificating for hours. What a waste of time.

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Another free eBook that seems to be of far to high a quality to just give away is the The Blogger Proof Workout written by Israel from FatManUnleashed. I understand not everyone has the luxury of having such fine young fingers as me, so I’d have a read of it, it’s good for you.

Third and finally, the competition on Blogging Fingers where you Guest Author On Blogging Fingers And Win $100! ($10 guaranteed!) has had several people state in the comments they will participate but they are yet to guarantee their $10 by sending their post in! The game is still afinger afoot!

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Instead I have had to narrow down this vote of thanks for a few bloggers who I felt had a significant impact on the success of the $6000 sale of Blogging Fingers. Please do not be offended if I have missed you!

If I don’t mention you but you think I should, read on to find out how to get a free link…

I would like to thank CashQuests and Blog About Your Blog who both covered the sale twice! John Chow who sent the most traffic with a mere passing mention, John Cow for the post-sale congratulations, Problogger for the evaluation, 45n5 who wrote about the sale shortly after I contacted him. 45n5 recently made a smashing follow up post. I thank you all!

A shoutout must go to Alex from Shylockblogging for solving my addon domain transfer problems.

I am also thankful to Yaro of Blog Mastermind for his tips.

Other friends I want to thank are Garry Conn for advising me about transferring some addon domains. Garry is also a sponsor of Blogging Fingers. A word of thanks must also go to George from Can I Make Big Money Online for helping spread the word behind the scenes.

Extra thanks goes to Israel from FatManUnleashed for his guest post a while back and also for CristianR for sorting out the headers on some of my niche blogs.

If you wrote a post covering the sale (before or after it was sold) drop me a link in the comments and I will moderate it to allow it to be posted up. It is not to late to write a post about it and add your link!

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I am 100% certain that the Blogging Fingers Homepage has been penalized by Google because it has received (so far) a measly PR3, when all the signs looked like it was heading for a PR5.

Why It Doesn’t Add Up And Why I Must Be Being Penalized

Take a look at the screenshot below. It is using iWebTool to show the PR of some of the internal pages on Blogging Fingers visually.

You can see that number of posts actually have been given a higher PR than the Homepage! Lots of other posts actually have the same PR as the Homepage with is clearly a load of shit evidence of slappage.

I am of the belief that I am somehow being penalized for selling sidebar text links and banner advertisements without using “nofollow”, which if you are listening Google I have now added.

In Google Webmaster tools it says the Blogging Fingers Homepage has roughly 5000 links from other sites but the pages awarded PR4 have a mere 100-200 which definitely shows up some fishy goings on.

What I don’t understand is that the ads that I thought caused the penalization were sitewide and so should have caused all the pages to have a lower PR.

As well as this my tiny niche blog about cheap airsoft guns has been mockingly awarded the same PR as Blogging Fingers. Naturally I am pleasantly surprised that my airsoft site has a PR that high, but it is insulting when I have spent 100s of hours more working on Blogging Fingers.

Who knows if Google with take the time to restore my deserved PR or if Blogging Fingers will be left in limbo.

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Whatever the marketing success of The Next Internet Millionaire I am a fan of the show and enjoy watching it.

A few major blogs have written about the Youtube/Adsense deal for publishers but it is all in the very early stages. There isn’t even any info about it on the Youtube blog.

Adan from Blogtrepreneur continues to grow his blogLOUDER service. If you need any proof Adnan knows his stuff well enough to teach it with blogLOUDER, his blog has roughly 800 RSS subscribers and it was Adnan who came up with the ideas for the new layout Blogging Fingers is currently displaying, which has already made me money from direct ad sales.

Sphinn, the highly fashionable and fast growing social voting site for bloggers and internet marketers has come out of beta. Their new logo sports the tagline “Internet Marketing News & Discussion Forums”.

Just because it’s a Saturday don’t go thinking that’s it for the day. Subscribe via RSS to get the next update.

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Exiting Links

This week there have been some major events in the blogosphere!

45n5 builds on the top 100 list and introduces 45n5 MoneyLinks Beta. This is a truly brilliant idea and makes me very glad Blogging Fingers made the grade currently sitting at position No. 80.

Sitefever has been sold for the very cheap price of just $1250. I’m sure it could have gone for something nearer $3000 or more, but the author John is in a rush to visit South America!

John Cow has a beautiful blog redesign that makes us all look like amateurs.

Happy reading.

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This means the winner is….

Ray from WebAppers who guessed 1250, an incredible 5 visits off from the exact figure!

Ray you have won a free review of WebAppers worth $35, which will be published within 7 days.

Web Hosting Packages

I has been over a month now that I have offered you to get free links from Blogging Fingers by writing a post about web hosting and linking to my web hosting packages page. This has resulted in the web hosting packages page creeping up the Google SERPS so that it now sits on page2 for the term “web hosting packages”.

There were some great entries here, so if you happen to be looking for web hosting check them out:

Web Hosting Woes
- By John

Blogging Fingers has Web Hosting Packages!
- By thepinkc

Some Tips On Web Hosting
- By Tejvan Pettinger

Win Free Links From Blogging Fingers
- By The Prize Blog

Web Hosting Packages
- By Aaron

blog migration series - choosing a webhost
- By blogmunch

Domain name, check. Webhost, check
- By Thomas

So, You Are Looking For Web Hosting Huh?
- By YC

web hosting packages
- By Malathy

web hosting packages
- By Rob Ladin

Free and Easy way to get additional targeted links
- By Mikael Rieck

Starting your Own Blog: Finding a Good Host
- By Suzanne

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