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Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Australian Blogging Conference, which was a lot of fun. Instead of having speakers up on stage talking at you, it’s more like a tutorial where everyone can chime in with their stories and advice, led by one or several leaders who guide the conversation.

I sat in on Duncan Riley’s session after lunch, which was on how to improve your blog, although the conversation went all over the place covering different blogging related topics.

Then in my session with Des Walsh we talked about building traffic to blogs, which was a lot of fun too.

It was a good event, not super large, but any chance you get to sit in with a group of people who share an interest in blogging and just chat, is a fun day in my books!

Plans are for this event to become an annual thing and travel around the major cities and no doubt I’ll do my best to attend, timetable permitting of course.

Recommend Links

Here are some links I’ve been collecting for the past couple of weeks for your weekend reading. There’s a lot of “Yaro” in here, but I like to highlight people who highlight me to return the favor.

• Carl Ocab is a 14-year old kid from the Philippines, who runs a blog about making money online. He recently asked me for my “Best Blogging Tip Ever” for a series he is doing on his blog. For a 14 year old, Carl is doing a lot better than most bloggers in the niche he is covering, so don’t underestimate him because of his age.
• The Blogging Scholarship is up for grabs again. If you currently attend college and blog, are a USA citizen or resident then you qualify for a chance at $10,000 scholarship. Entries close October 6th.
• Mark Wielgus from the 45n5 site emailed me to let me know I made the Top 10 in their top 100 money making blogs list. The team at 45n5 are quite busy building all kinds of features, so it’s worth checking out their site.
• Closely following the 45n5 Top List, comes the Top 50 Make Money Online Blogs Ordered by RSS Readers thanks to Marc Eilbeck. I guess people really love these lists .
• Nicholas Carroll sent through a link to Law of the Blog - A Blogger’s Guide to Copyright, Defamation, Trademarks, and other online legal issues, which will help anyone concerned with the legal implications of what you say on your blog and what others say in comments to your blog.
• Matt from the Blogging Fingers blog has put together the Top 5 Blogging Success Stories: Exclusive Quotes including quotes from yours truly, John Chow, Andy Beard, Kumiko (cashquests) and John COW.
• Laura Milligan offers her 50 Practical Home Office Feng Shui Tips for all you home business folks.
• Qwizzy is a unique new service that lets you add a question and answer stream to your blog and other popular social media sites
• Courtney Tuttle was nice enough to include me on her list of Top 7 Internet Marketing Mentors You Can Trust. I like it that the lines between Internet marketing and blogging are blurring, since as you will see in this list, all the Internet marketing mentors are bloggers.
• Blog Mastermind students and long time blogging friends, Life Goggles, posted up 100 Ways To Save The Planet, which you can get in a PDF report.
• And to finish with, the mysterious John Cow is running a competition including prizes from Seth Godin, Aaron Wall and me, with a free three month entry into Blog Mastermind.

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Update: I’ve added a question mark to this post because it appears perhaps the PageRank update is NOT in progress. I thought I saw enough signs - a few of my sites have changed, John Chow’s changed too and a couple of blogs were talking about - but perhaps these are just random events and not indicating a full update is in progress. Apologies if I got your hopes up!

It never ceases to amaze me how much attention the budding webmaster and blogger gives to PageRank (if you are new to PageRank, read this explanation - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple).

In the last month or so I’ve seen some speculation that PageRank is no longer being updated and Google was abandoning it - or at least no longer updating the public display of PageRank on web pages. Given their now famous stance against text link buying to improve search results, it made sense that PageRank could be changed or simply left static, never to update again.

Word on the street is that the latest PageRank update is now occurring, so here we are again, all eagerly awaiting to see what happens to our sites. The speculation of PageRank’s demise will have to wait for another few months or until Google actually says something about it.

In recent times with the advent of services to make money from blogs like Text Link Ads and when selling advertising directly to sponsors, a site’s PageRank plays an important part (along with AlexaRank).

PageRank and AlexaRank are known for being terrible tools to accurately assess a website’s popularity, yet many third party advertising brokering services that bloggers and site owners depend on for a big chunk of their livelihood, rely on these tools for assessing how much money to charge for advertising.

Nothing I do is directly related to increasing my PageRank, but like most Webmasters, I love to see mine increase. I realize that simply because of the act of blogging and marketing a website, you naturally do good things for your PageRank, but the focus is not on whether the little green bar increases or not. You don’t judge your performance on PageRank, it’s just an added benefit.

Like many webmasters, I always look at the PageRank of sites and it definitely impacts my opinion of them. I don’t think it’s an accurate measure, but it gets attention, and in today’s ad driven world wide web - that matters.

So what PageRank score are you expecting after this update?

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I woke up early this morning - well early for me - to catch a group coaching call with Rich Schefren. I wanted to ask him some specific questions regarding the future of my business and get his input on how to craft a blogging product offer.

During the call there was a lot of focus on reputation building and blogging, and my name came up several times as a good example of someone who has used a blog to get the attention of the big players in the industry. Obviously it was great to hear my name so positively endorsed by a leading business figure like Rich, but there was more to it than that - Rich is really passionate about this topic.

If you are on Rich’s email list then you may have noticed a trend recently - he has begun to blog on a consistent basis (check out his Strategic Profits blog). Rich is a calculated guy, he doesn’t do anything without there being a strategy behind it.

The second part of his Attention Age Doctrine is due out in a matter of weeks. Given the topic is attention and how to capture it, and Rich’s recent blogging activities and comments in today’s coaching call, it’s clear Rich sees a blog as a key tool for capturing attention. I expect he wants to turn his blog into a focal point for participation in the community and to further cement his position as a thought leader in his industry.

Community Participation Is Mandatory

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I was having a discussion with some people about what I do for a living and again the topic of whether I really work two hours per day came up.

I was interrupted mid sentence when I was about to explain that to make money from my blogs it takes about two hours per day, but I work much more than that, when someone who knows my working habits butted in and gave a good explanation of how I currently work. It went something along the lines of this…

This got me thinking about how I, err, think, when deciding what I do with my time.

I have some basic criteria when it comes to what work I choose to do, they are:

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Robert Kingston spent some time last week visiting the Why Do Work website for a review. Here’s what Rob had to say about the site…

WhyDoWork.com is a relatively well established website, focusing on the employment market and providing people with opportunities to work from home, in positions worldwide. Sporting a job search engine, freelancing information and a community of freelancers, this website promises much but does it deliver?

If you’re a freelancer/student/stay at home mum/dad, this site might be just the thing for you. Otherwise read on anyway as we take a look at what this site has to offer.

First Glance

When you first arrive at the website, you’re hit with an interface which strikingly resembles parts of LinkedIn. I’m not sure about the technicalities/legality of it but it sure did instill a sense of trust, that the site could influence my career. I signed up and gained access straight away. The navigation links at the top were extremely easy to use, denoting the exact content of the pages they heralded.

Job Search

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