Is this some kinda joke?

I was studying my analytics today and saw a new referrer to one of my posts. Naturally I visited it to see who it was who was kind enough to send me the traffic.

But then I realised that the site is some kind of (automated? must be?!) content scraping site. All the posts follow an identical format: a brief (but normally ridiculous) introduction; a scrape of someone elses content (mine in this case); and a source with a link back to the original post (no rel="nofollow", interestingly).

Here's the introduction to their post that they scraped from my blog:

"I’ve a passion for Telephones and keep looking for good articles. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘adsense blogging’ in Google and found this:"

What? Telephones? Adsense blogging? Give me a break. What kind of garbage is this?!

Of course, the site as Google Adsense all over it and is designed to pull visitors in (thanks to other hard-working bloggers' content) and earn from Adsense clicks.

Surely this type of site can't earn the guys running it anything? If it does...it shouldn't! What value is it adding to the world? Despite them sending me traffic and inbound links, I can't help feeling like they're stealing other peoples' content for their own benefit.

What do you think?

Find out who makes $40k per month blogging

So you're trying to earn a crust with your blog, right? Well...here's some inspiration for you!

I just stumbled across Paula Mooney's list of blogger (and webmasters and affiliates) earnings. The figures reported for annual earnings range from the multi-millions at the top to a few tens of dollars at the bottom.

Notable entries are:

• Kevin Ham. $300,000,000 empire with multiple sites including weddingshoes.com. Interesting this one in that it (weddingshoes.com) is a keyword-rich site around a niche with pretty much all links being AdSense links. The content draws people in...and the AdSense sends them elsewhere with Mr Ham making a few cents (or more!) in the middle. Also interesting from an SEO perspective is that the title tag of the home page is just 'Homepage'. And there are no META keywords! So he builds sites like that and still makes $300,000,000!?!?! Sheesh.
  
  
• Steve Pavlina who says he makes about $40k per month from his blogging activities
  
  
• The inspirational Darren Rowse of Problogger.net clocking in at around $360,000 per year.
  
  
  
• Grant from Million Dollar Project who is on his way to reaching the goal implied by his blog's title...reporting annualised income of $981. Go Grant!! Actually, he reports that part of his income has been generated by commenting on Paula's list. (So, yes, I commented too!)
  
  
  

So...even the small guys can get on her list! Of course, the key to earnings is content and targeted traffic through lots of exposure. And as Paula quotes Yaro Starak..."All I can say about this is that it pays to talk about how much money you make online if you want exposure."

In which case, you'll be wondering what I earn from this blog. That's not something that I've calculated yet. No, honestly. But when I have, you'll be the first to know!