The Paterson Hypothesis

Twitter is a Great Way to Increase Your Traffic

2009-09-27T05:16:00.000-07:00

The answer to the question how do you get traffic is this: There are literally millions of ways, so you really just need to choose the ones that you like best, and do as many of them as you can, or as many as you feel like doing. There are no hard and fast rules about this, just do whatever works for you, and don't be afraid to experiment.

Get Traffic Using Twitter
Recently I have found that using Twitter has brought a lot of traffic to my blogs, with a consequent flow of revenue. If you have come to this through a Twitter link, you probably know all about how it works, but briefly, on Twitter you post messages, called tweets, which other people can read, and you can read their tweets. It has been called a mini-blogging or micro-blogging platform, which is quite a good description of Twitter's basic philosophy. The key idea of Twitter is the concept of "following." You follow people, they follow you. Twitter is huge, and still growing. It's a great way of building up a network, and if you have a lot of people following you, it's also a great way to get people reading your blogs - for free.

Follow and Get Followed
So how do you get a lot of followers on Twitter? I have found a rather effective way to do this is simply to use Twitter Search to find notable people in your chosen niche, follow them, and also follow people from the list of users who follow them. Let's say you have a blog about politics. Let's suppose you find out that one of the top political journalists, Jethro Scroggins of the Daily News, has a Twitter profile. Just follow Jethro, and then also follow as many of Jethro's followers as you can. If you do this, you will gradually build up a base of followers, all with a common interest, and you will be on the way to controlling your niche.

I like to be a bit selective about who I follow from these lists, but I know that some people will just follow ALL the followers of a particular celebrity. It's a question of your own personal taste. But do remember that if you follow too many people at once, you might hit a follow limit. There is more about follow limits on Twitter Help.

Once you start to follow people with the same interests as you, most of them will follow you back, so you will gradually build up your own following. After that, it's up to you to provide interesting content to draw these people to your pages. This method has worked for me, and it should work for you too.

Saving the Effort
After a while, you might find you want to build up a following with less effort on your part. There are a number of sites you can use to help increase your Twitter followers. You might like to try them out; many of them have a free trial, or they have aspects of their service that are perpetually free to use. Once you have got started with using them, and have got used to how the site works, and you are making money, you can maybe upgrade to the paid services for increased effectiveness.

SocialOomph
One of these sites I have found very useful is called SocialOomph. This site brings you a constant stream of followers (it has brought me on average about 100 new followers per day since I started using it) and it also allows you to easily send a welcome message to all your new followers. They give you a dashboard where you can manage multiple accounts on Twitter, you can schedule any number of tweets to be published at a later time, even when you are asleep! You can schedule a whole bunch of tweets for future publication, and then order SocialOomph to publish them evenly at regular times for you. You can easily monitor those times when someone has mentioned your username. These are just some of the things you can do using SocialOomph. And all of the above is completely free. The main advantage of SocialOomph I've found is that a lot of the boring tasks of finding followers is done for you, leaving you free to concentrate on your own creativity.

Using Free Trials To Your Advantage
If you are going by the pure Paterson Hypothesis, (which states that you can make money online without paying any money out first), then you might want to use only those free services I just listed. However, you might want to look at the paid options, which give you greater power, and which do more of the work for you, leaving you free to do other things. With the paid account, you can enter keywords and the system will find followers for you who are using those keywords. You can also schedule recurring messages, and the system will rotate them on automatic for you, until you change it or tell it to stop. The tweets will not be identical, so it will be within the Twitter terms of service, no problem. You can also set some channels, so that you can see only those tweets published by people whom you select, and all the rest are filtered out. You can have different channels which reflect your different areas of interest. There are many more things you can do using the paid account, as you can see by going to the SocialOomph website.

All of these features can be obtained by paying a small monthly subscription. They will save you work, and beef up your results from Twitter, but I can understand if you want to go by the Paterson Hypothesis, and do it purely using free services. You might be interested to know that they offer a week's free trial, and at the end of the week, it automatically reverts back to the free service, so you don't get hassled to continue with the upgraded service. It is totally your own choice. So you can use the free trial to your advantage, and then leave it, or start paying for it, and cancel any time you want.

TweetAdder
Another facility which gives a free trial is TweetAdder. You can use this at the same time as SocialOomph or any other service. Whereas SocialOomph is managed from the website, TweetAdder is a software package that you download to your own computer. There is a free trial download, and after you try it, you might want to upgrade, because it is a really effective program. It brings you targeted followers based on criteria that are set by you, and you can fine-tune these as much as you want, ensuring that the people who follow you are going to be those who are most interested in your products or your interests. Using TweetAdder you can also schedule tweets to run on auto, allowing you to relax on the beach while you are making money. As I said, it may be worth your while to buy it after using the free trial. It is a one-off payment, and there is technical support available after you purchase. But if you want to use the free trial just to gain a whole bunch of followers, and then leave it, then that will still be very useful for you.

Keep Trying!
As I said, there are many other services you can use, on their own or together, but these are the ones that have worked for me, and they have worked really well so far! I am sure they will do the same for you, I hope so.

Click Here to learn more about SocialOomph

Click Here to learn more about TweetAdder

Please leave a comment if you found this post useful, or if you have any questions you want to ask. Thanks!

The Million Dollar Question

2009-09-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

So now let's say you want to make money online, and you followed my "expert" advice, and you have set yourself up with a network of free blogs, or maybe you just have only one blog. That's OK, maybe you want to start small, you have to start somewhere anyway. Actually it's best to start by concentrating on one blog, and then maybe when you start another one, the first one can take care of itself for a while. You can't really give your attention to too many things all at once.

Maybe your blog is about your hobby, or your main interest. It's usually a good idea if your blog is on quite a tight focus, so your visitors know what it is all about. But it can be just your random ramblings, and your profound thoughts about life and the universe. This can be surprisingly successful, as you will see from looking at my philosophy blog (see blog list). That blog does not even nearly compete in quality or professionalism with many of the blogs I've seen on the same subject, and yet it draws interested readers, and followers. I have not been keeping it up lately, so it is covered in loads of cobwebs right now, but I might go in there and do a spring clean once I've got this one going.

But you may want to have a blog that is stylish and professional, or just kind of rambling like mine, either way it's your choice. Either way can work fine. Then you may want to use your blog to sell some product or service, or you may prefer to have featured ads, such as AdSense, or some affiliate program. These can bring you a nice little income (or even a large income?), as soon as you have some traffic.

But anyway, the million dollar question is, once you have your blog up and running, HOW DO YOU GET PEOPLE TO VISIT? Aah yes, that is the question everyone wants the answer to! Well it's simple really. All you need to do is set up an AdWords campaign and PAY for them to come. If you bid for $1 per click, your ad will be near the top of the search engine rankings, and you will likely get about ten thousand visitors a day from that.

But wait, I hear you scream, that's going to cost me about ten thousand bucks A DAY! Well, that's AdWords for you. No, I was just joking, you don't have to do that. Assuming you don't have that kind of money to spend, there's always the so-called "social networks" - Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc. These are free to use, and can give you oceans of traffic at zero cost, if you use them right. It's best to concentrate on one or two of them, the ones you feel happiest in. My own preferences are BlogCatalog (BC) and Twitter. BC is a bit more studious and intellectual, Twitter is a bit more fast and fun. It's all according to what you prefer.

Most of my following on Filosofia blog came from BC, but I'm using Twitter much more nowadays. I started working Twitter about a week or so ago, and I have been getting followers at a rate of about 100 a day. This has impacted on the traffic for this blog, giving it a steady rise in visitor numbers, even though it has a slightly dull title (!), and it uses no SEO at all. Twitter followers have also increased the traffic on my other blog Filosofia.

Maybe you want to know how I got all those followers on Twitter so quickly? Well for that, you will have to just read my next post on this blog....

The Greatest Little Blog Ever

2009-09-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

I read something yesterday about how creativity thrives on restriction. When I read that, I thought "Yes, how true that is." If you have everything done for you, then you often find you just do not have any creative ideas. But under restrictions, your creativity can often rise to that challenge.

Look at Mozart and Beethoven. In their day, you had to compose music with a quill pen, on music paper you had to draw for yourself, often by candlelight. Yet they composed amazing music that is still being played today. Or look at artists in the time of Da Vinci and Botticelli. They had to make their own paint and stretch their own canvases; they didn't have any PhotoShop. Yet their paintings are now worth millions.

All this is to say that imposing a restriction on yourself may sometimes be a spur to creative action, and can sometimes lead to amazing results. And this leads me to telling you about "The Greatest Little Blog Ever."

Well, of course, that is only a name we gave it. It's not intended to make you believe it is greater than all the other, sometimes quite wonderful, blogs there are on the internet, many of them made by good friends of ours on Blogger or Twitter. It is just a name to suggest how joyful it made us feel that the experiment was so successful.

Before going any further I have to tell you about reprint articles. There are now quite literally hundreds of sites which are usually called article directories. You can find them by Googling "article directory." The best of them are probably Ezine Articles and Articles Base. They publish people's articles for free, with the proviso that the article is free to be used by anyone else. So you can go on to one of these sites, find articles on your chosen topic, and easily re-publish it on to your own website or blog.

It is perfectly legitimate to do this, as long as you include all the live links in the article and the article source in your reprint, and do not try to pass it off as your own work. It is perfectly ethical also, and it is a practice that has been followed by newspapers for as long as there have been any newspapers. It is called syndication.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Greatest Little Blog Ever contained nothing but reprint articles (six of them to be exact.)

The aim of the experiment was to see how successful a particular ad could be, but with the restriction that only free stuff could be used, and nothing paid for in advance. It was a banner ad, for a dating website, provided by a well-known affiliate program, and zencath team had noticed it was performing quite well when it appeared among other ads on an existing blog. So the question was, how would it perform if it was the only ad on a blog? This is how the Greatest Little Blog Ever was born.

They went into Blogger and created a blog with a standard template, no frills or additions. They loaded it with six articles from a directory, then placed the ad on the top (it was a 468x60 banner). In the sidebar was a blog archive, a profile, and a standard video bar widget. This last was to encourage visitors to watch a video to increase their time viewing the ad. That's all.

There was no spamming, or techniques, or anything misleading about the blog whatsoever. Anyone who clicked on the ad knew exactly what they were getting. Anyway, the blog was so successful without using spamming or unfair techniques that there really would have been no point in using them. And besides, we hate and detest and totally abhor all forms of spam.

Visitors were attracted to the blog by using a simple AdWords campaign with a bid of one penny per click, and an initial daily budget of one dollar (which was increased later). This was paid for out of the revenue the ad had already made before the Greatest Little Blog Ever was created, following the set restrictions about "not paying out first". The entire process of setting all this up took around 20 minutes.

Once the AdWords campaign was in motion, the blog started to pay out anything between $100 and $300 a day, which is pretty cool for 20 minutes work.

The whole point of this blog post is to tell you that, when you are using free blogs, you should not get discouraged if something does not work first time. Learn from it, and change things based on what you learn. The internet is loaded with free stuff (such as, article directories), so you could never get to the end of all the stuff out there that you can use. Keep trying out different things, and ideas will come to you out of nowhere. Sooner or later, you will get something that works amazingly, just like the Greatest Little Blog Ever.

Some Secrets About Making Blogs

2009-09-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

This post is just to share some secrets about making blogs. I was talking before about how we made a network of blogs. There is no plan as to how these blogs fit together. This network could probably best be described as sprawling, with all kinds of nooks and crannies, some grand edifices, a few tumbled down sections, occasional repeats, duplications, loads of quite messy, semi-ruinous areas. In fact, it is everything you might expect a SEO "guru" to recoil from, and say "No Way!"

But what we have proved is that a rambling structure like this one can make money for you. You can go further and say that it will make money, it has no choice really but to make money for you. Why is this?

Well, for a start, it's free to own, so there is no outlay. That means it is a pure profit enterprise. All you need to do is spend some time experimenting, just playing around with ideas, and see what works for you and what doesn't. Then when you find what works, you just push that as hard as it can be pushed. Maybe after a while, that particular vein will "dry up", so OK you keep on experimenting, because you know that sooner or later, you will find something else that makes you money.

But when some blog seems to dry up, keep it connected, however loosely, to your network. We have known dormant blogs where no one visited for weeks or months on end, it looked like they were finished. Then all of a sudden it would produce a sale commission of $30 or $100 for nothing, out of the blue.

One blog, after going dormant for a while, suddenly produced $237 out of nowhere. That was fun. My uncle spent a few fruitless hours trying to find the particular link that it came from, but because he had got into a mix-up with the tracking codes, he was not able to locate it. This meant he was not able to push that link, which would be the optimum follow-up stratgey, as he didn't know where it was! He never did manage to find that link. To this day, we do not even know which blog it came from.

So the lessons we learn here are:

Keep your blogs live, even if they seem to be dormant.

Keep your blogs connected to each other, using blog lists, or RSS feeds.

Wherever possible, give every affiliate link its own unique tracking code.

Choose honest affiliate programs with good payment structures, such as MyHelpHub or NitroMarketing. (See the sidebar for links to these.)

Never give up.

Wait for the money.

That's it.

Why Did Paterson Impose Restrictions On Himself?

2009-09-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

The thing to always bear in mind when you read these posts is this: When Robert (that's my uncle, by the way, if you didn't already know that) started this network of blogs, which I have now taken over, with a view to discovering if you could earn an income from free blogging, it was not because he had no money of his own. In actual fact he does have some - well, lots of it, really. So why, you might ask, should he restrict himself in that way?

The answer is that he is a scientist. He started out with a hypothesis, which we now call the Paterson Hypothesis, and all the rest of it proceeded from there. The hypothesis included a set of what are called parameters, in other words, a set of rules and restrictions, to define the limits of the experiment. His aim was to show that anybody, regardless of where they started from, or whatever was their station in life, would be able to make a living or maybe even loads of cash, from doing the right kind of work online, and pursuing it without giving up.

Now I'm still following the same parameters as he followed. Some might say I have an unfair advantage in the sense that the network is already here, so I do not have to build it. But that would be to look at things entirely the wrong way, because anyone can build their own network like this one, or maybe even better. You can because it's all free.

If you look around at the different areas of this blog network, you might find some blogs that have fallen into neglect. Nobody has visited them for a long time, even their owners. And that is what will happen when you have a network like this. Some parts of it will fall into rack and ruin. But keep them going anyway (and, most importantly, keep them connected.) It is as who should say OK if that happens, because sooner or later, someone will visit them and maybe, who knows, they will bring you a profit. And this will not be a loss to them, because you will have helped them to find something they want which they have simply not found elsewhere.

Besides, those neglected areas of this network that we are talking about have often been left that way on purpose. One of the parameters of the Paterson Hypothesis is to experiment with discovering what kind of results can be achieved by occasionally NOT doing things as the "experts" would have you believe they must be done. You see, the fact that you are using free blogs means you can devise unlimited experiments to discover what works and what does not - for yourself. So you can try something out which is counter to the "principles" of the experts, and see what happens. The results can sometimes be surprising.

This is to show that you do not need to be a design expert or a neuro-linguistic professor, and yet you can still make money online.

Connect Your Blogs To One Another

2009-09-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

We were talking about having as many blogs and pages as you can.

It really does not matter what your blogs and pages are about, they can be about anything you like. In fact they SHOULD be about anything you like, you can entirely please yourself about this. Don't think you always have to be writing about making money online just so that you can make money online. You can write about anything you enjoy doing, from basket-weaving to yachting.

And don't think you have to only write about hobbies either. It can be anything at all. I made a nice little blog about philosophy which has now gained 30 followers and is ticking over nicely. Because it is a blog about a minority subject, it will probably never have seriously high-volume traffic in itself, but it will fit in well as an element of a NETWORK.

This brings us to one of the keys to success. It's the idea of connection. Your blogs and pages should be connected up, linked to one another. That way, even if you are not currently working on a page or a blog, it will still get exposure, because you have linked to it from many other places in your own network. So your pages act like search engines for each other.

This is not the place to go into a big discussion about no-follow and do-follow links. Such a discussion would be technical and boring, and entirely inappropriate to a blog like this one. If you want to know about them, they are discussed ad nauseam in other places, so you can find them for yourself.

All we need to know is the basic fact: Blogs and pages that are connected to each other perform better than those that are not connected. It's that simple. So connect up your many blogs.

Make As Many Blogs As You Can

2009-09-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

If you want to make money online without paying first, the basic idea to remember is that you should have as many as you can of blogs, sites, webpages, or anything else you can think of. Since you are using free ones, it costs no more to have a thousand blogs than it does to have one. So make as many as you can make. My family and me have found this is the best way to go.

There are lots of reasons for this. You will not find it a waste of time, but of course you have to keep going with it and don't give up. As to the reasons why you should have a lot of websites and blogs in your network, I intend to tell the story of why in the coming days and weeks.

Here is one reason. Let's say for the moment that you have one blog. You spend a lot of time creating it and you produce beautifully polished and well-written posts. Basically you pour everything into it, and pretty soon you are getting large numbers of visitors and you are making maybe $100 a day from the embedded ads in the blog. Sounds great, doesn't it? You can retire young; you can do what you want.

Then you wake up one day and find your blog has disappeared. This can happen. More particularly it can happen to free blogs or other kinds of free platforms. For example, some crawling robot may decide that your blog is non-compliant with spamming regulations, even if it is fully compliant. The robot would, in effect, be declaring that YOU are a robot, even though you are not. This is called a false positive. As likely as not, the robot will summarily shut the blog down with no appeal. Some providers will allow you to re-open it by going through some tests of your humanity - even so you will find it a hassle. But many, or most, will not entertain any appeals, and will not even give you your own content back.

This is one reason for having more than one blog. Then, if one of the blogs falls foul of a false positive by a crawler, you do not lose the whole lot. (Although there are some free host providers - ones to steer clear of, I would say - who would shut down ALL your blogs with them, if only ONE of them is declared non-compliant. We will return in a later post to how you deal with this.)

To summarise, it is better to have 100 blogs, each making only one dollar a day, than to have one blog that makes one hundred dollars a day.

See you in the next post. Have a nice day!

Aimee's Hello Message

2009-09-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

Hi I am Aimee Paterson.

I have only been blogging for a short time but I already have a large number of blogs. So many that even I do not know how many I have. This is partly because I love blogging so much, but also because I inherited loads of blogs from my uncle. His name is Robert Paterson. He began to build this network ages ago, but now he has some other projects to work on so he gave his network to me to carry it on, and I have added to it.

The reason Robert gave up on his network was because originally it was a science experiment, designed to test a hypothesis, and now he has declared the hypothesis can be accepted, within a very narrow confidence interval (vanishing). Yes, that really is the way he talks - he is a scientist!

There is to be a resume of what a scientific hypothesis actually is - and of the origins of the Zencath Network and its foundation hypotheses - in a blog that is currently in production, but briefly the main hypothesis is: You can make money on the internet using free blogs. This is a very rough simplification of the hypothesis, though, and I recommend you read my new blog when it comes online. Why? Because the method is duplicable, (that is, anyone can do it!) and it may help you in your quest for making money online. Robert has made money from the Zencath Network, and now that it has passed to me, it runs more or less on automatic. However, there is always something to be done to increase the network's potential, and I have some hypotheses of my own!

Vast quantities of the writings on my blogs were written by my Uncle Robert. The network as it stands right now is completely owned by me though. My grandpa has also contributed, and was a valuable source of information about times gone by, as he has a PhD in history. My aunt and some of my cousins were involved as well. Other writers are represented too, and zencath team have always tried our best to acknowledge their copyright. If we have accidentally published your writings without due credit, please let me know and I will put it right.

Some of my blogs are:

http://filosofia08uk.blogspot.com/
http://positivehighenergy.blogspot.com/
http://datingsingles09.blogspot.com/

If you want to know more, and perhaps join in the exciting developments coming up, please try to follow one of these blogs where you will get updates of what is to come.