The blogging world is changing and unless you change, you’re going to be left behind.

Before you launch your new blog, you’d better have a long, hard think about what you’re getting yourself into. The days of publishing new, fresh and insightful posts have gone. The days of starting a new niche blog every couple of months have gone. The days of making money with a blog have gone.

You missed the train, buddy.

Blogging is dead. It has ceased to be. It’s not tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk and it’s definitely not pining for the fjords. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It’s kicked the bucket. It’s shuffled off its mortal coil.

However I have had a look around the back of the shop and I might just have found a replacement for you.

It’s called blogging.

Confused? You will be…

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I’ve been busy working on a number of projects (film and web based) for the last few weeks which is why I’ve not had a chance to write anything. Let’s also factor in something of a nightmare regarding my living arrangements (won’t bore you with the details but it involved a brief period living in a cardboard box with a tramp called Eric) and a severe case of blogstipation. It all adds up to the longest period I’ve not updated the site in 18 months. Sorry about that

Whilst wading through my RSS feeds, a couple of things jumped out.

Google Robots.txt Generator - Now forget about how useful this tool will be to folks who are scared to play around with their robots.txt file, the key point here is that after years of evading the question Google have finally confirmed that the Googlebot is a boy!

We all know how friendly Googlebot is. And like all benevolent robots, he listens to us and respects our wishes about parts of our site that we don’t want crawled. We can just give him a robots.txt file explaining what we want, and he’ll happily comply.

Google Privacy Policy Template - Big G recently changed their AdSense policy so that you now how to include a privacy policy on your website if you want to run their ads. The ever brilliant Tim Nash of SEO Nottinghamshire fame has come up with a cut and paste policy for you to use. Huzzah!

I’m going to spend the weekend wading through the rest of the 700+ unread posts. In the meanwhile if someone could either invent another 24 hours in a day or point me in the direction of a time management guru, I’d be very grateful…

One thing I did notice whilst looking through Google Reader is that I’m not the only one who hasn’t been posting as regularly as they used to. A number of other sites I read haven’t been keeping to their regular posting schedule and more than one have announced that they’re calling it a day.

Do you think that people are moving away from posting every day? Are folks running out of things to say? Has the blogging bubble burst?

Over the past few days there have been some indications that, despite previous comment and conjecture, a drop in toolbar PageRank can actually lead to a drop in search engine rankings and, in some cases, a dramatic reduction in search engine traffic.

Jeff Behrendt runs the Aviva Directory and his site was zapped from the SERPs during the initial stages of the Google Bitch Slap (maybe we should call this stage of development the Google Bitch Shove?). Along with many other directory owners, Jeff found his site penalized by Google and not even ranking for it’s own name.

On the evening of September 2, 2007 my wife Aviva ran to my office in a panic. She exclaimed that Aviva Directory no longer seemed to be ranking for its own name in Google. I tried searching this, and sure enough, she was right.

As Yoda might say, begun had the Paid Links War.

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been asked by a couple of folks to review their eBooks. I had a bit of downtime today so I thought I’d take a look.

Blog Monetization Strategies by Matt Jones

Matt runs BloggingFingers.com which covers blogging tips and money making strategies for blogs so it should be no surprise that his first eBook covers how to make money with a blog. It is aimed very much at the beginner so I doubt anyone who has been running a monetized blog will learn a great deal from the book, to be honest. That having been said, there are some nice little tips and pointers that Matt covers including an interesting take on when to start monetizing your blog. He also covers strategies for monetizing different styles of blogs based on your core audience.

There’s some good stuff in the book but I wasn’t overly taken with it. For starters the layout and presentation of the book is a bit messy and uninspiring. Also I found the writing style a little bit clunky on occasions which is a surprise as I find Matts stuff on BloggingFingers pretty good.

The eBook is only 16 pages but covers quite a lot. My personal feeling is that it would be better to make the book a bit longer by changing the presentation, splitting pages up, using a larger and different type font and breaking things up with either screen shots or images.

You can download the eBook here but, and here’s my final gripe, you’ll need to provide your email address to do so. I’m not a big fan of having to submit my email address just to receive a free eBook.

How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress by Caroline Middlebrook

Caroline only appeared on the scene back in August of last year but if you follow any of the web marketing blogs you’ll already be aware of her. She covers making money online on her blog so it’s no surprise that her eBook looks at how to make money using WordPress.

Again it’s aimed at the beginner and covers things like the basics of installing WordPress and how to use it as a content management system rather than as a blog. In fact you have to get to page 27 out of 41 before you get to any of the meaty stuff on monetization and, even then, I felt a little let down.

Now I know that Caroline says in the eBook that monetizing websites or blogs probably warrant a book all of their own but I really didn’t feel that this book delivered on its promise to develop money making sites with WordPress. The actual process of finding a niche, doing keyword research, content creation, looking for suitable affiliate partners and all the other things associated with making money with a niche website were glossed over in favour of covering the technical aspects of setting up a WordPress site. In Carolines defence, her introductory paragraph does say “this Ebook is not about making money - it’s about WordPress” but, if that’s the case then perhaps the title of the book is a little on the sensationalist side.

Putting that to one side, the eBook itself is well presented and is an easy read. For anyone new to WordPress it will probably be a very useful guide on how to set up a well structured site. Whether it’ll help you make a bundle of cash is something else but I still suggest you download a copy of the eBook and make up your own mind.

…John Reese in his email and blog post about the launch of TrafficJam.com

Some people were disappointed by the traffic results they received when testing BlogRush

I deleted all but one of my sites from BlogRash so I can’t give you a full breakdown of figures but the one remaining site has had ~150,000 impressions and..wait for it..9 clicks so that’s a click through rate of 0.006%.

I still see the widgets knocking around so is anyone having any success with it?

UPDATE: I’ve just read Andy’s excellent post about TrafficJam and I’m going to look into the plugin he references and maybe give BlogRush another whirl. As ever, Andy takes an interesting spin on the subject and has made me think that maybe I wasn’t being smart enough with the way I used BlogRush.