I too think nickle and dime blogvertising isn't the way to make money by blogging. Nor is product endorsement.

For sure Google adsense is nickel and dimes for most, and for some (like me) the height of crassness. Rather like putting adverts on the door of one's car, or one's letterheads. (I'm such a blog snob.)

Product endorsement is pretty hard. Easier to say one doesn't like something, much harder to say one likes something, and keep that up. Think how many products one comes into contact with. Many aren't liked and discarded, those that are kept are kept forever. I just couldn't keep on and on and on, endorsing a product, it'd get pretty boring, and very transparent.

However, I've got to think of a way of writing about flower delivery. Mother's day delivery of flowers. Sending flowers to say "sorry," sending wedding flowers, delivering bouquets, sending bunches of flowers, flowers, flowers, lovely flowers.

Oppposite is how much it would cost for me to buy the Google adwords for flowers and flower delivery = £44,000 a day Or £1,320,000 a month! I can't afford that, not that I've got a UK flower shop anyway. But I'd love to get a revenue share of the click throughs. "Har, Har, Har! Bloody flowers! Lovely flowers!" I'd be certain to say every month the cheque dropped through the letterbox.

So, if you want to be as big as Bill Gates, start a blog about flower delivery, floral delivery, and ordering flowers and the rest of those £3.00 click through bids.

You'd need 25,000 click throughs, so 5,000,000 good hits per day (the low industry average @ 0.5% click through, some sites have reached 5%).

And sometimes Google gives up to 90-100% of the revenue, sometimes more than 100%. We're talking big numbers here. Now, how do I write stuff about flowers to achieve 5 million hits a day? Hmmm. I'd better sleep on that. I'd better sleep hard, since I know not a jot about the damned things. Flowers? They grow in the ground and look pretty.

Scott Johnson from Feedster contacted me about my rant regarding Technocrati and Feedster (and pubSub).

I'll still say that these services and much of the blogging industry is becoming too difficult for too many, remembering that many coming to blogging have zero technical and usually very low internet experience.

He pointed out that is is indeed simple to get a subscription feed for searches. Too simple for my hurried eyes! There's an orange XML icon top right on any returned search. I see so many of these these days, I must be blind to them. Still, I can't get any such search feed to validate, thus I can't sub to them.

Yet, I can sub to exactly the same search criteria feeds in pubSub and the newer blogDigger. And I still cannot figure out how I can do such with Technocrati, I figure that there isn't such a feature there.

Also, Scott pointed out that there are reasons for claiming a feed, which I glanced over. Now glancing a bit slower, I can't see a compelling reason for going to the bother, especially as it'll be for the second time. (In the instructions for claiming a feed I missed the part about adding their special link and only their special link to a blog post, mine was buried deep in my rant, thus, it hasn't worked.) Putting only their link into a post is not for me and my site. I could drop an email explaining this, but I see no big benefit.

Again, I must emphasise that both Technocrati and much more so, Feedster are very opaque and difficult sites. Sure some things are easy, simple searching for instance, but others, for time pressed techies like me, are too detailed or too simple. For non-techies, well...
Saying that, the power of Feedster's advanced searching is wonderful if ever I needed such power, which I don't think I do at the moment.

I wonder if it's a case of Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none? If blogDigger and pubSub can do search feeds, and do them so painlessly, and seemingly do nothing else (to my racing eyes, anyway), perhaps Feedster are doing too much.

Or, as I advised Scott, Feedster needs better navigation, a site map and better copy writers. And a sit down with the UI and somebody's mum ";->"