Comments on: Hannah Solo: the 18-year-old that knows it all

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:45:36 +0000

Rich,

You’re right that I can’t be absolutely, 100% sure of the intentions or work of another person, but I base my beliefs on what I know of Darren and what I have seen him do.

Others that are more vocal about their exact earnings (Upstart Blogger) are still requiring us to take their word for it. Maybe they’re doing that well, maybe they’re not.

I look at the work Darren has done online (not all of it is heavily publicised from ProBlogger.net at present, but I have followed his work for several years) and various statistics from independent sources do seem to verify that he is good at what he does.

By: Rich

Rich — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:18:56 +0000

Hannah does have a point though.

Andy, how can you state with certainity how successful Darren has been with “Professional” blogging ? He has never disclosed the income he makes from Ads. For while he was also touting Chikita E-minimall as the best ad program, only to later disclose that he was getting paid to do those reviews.
Even in the book he has written on Amazon, he is very vague about how you actually monetize a blog. Would it hurt to share his “insight” he as on that ? Not really, unless he has no insight and is like the typical snake oil salesman on the internet world.

By: Thoughts on Baiting For Blogs – Dead Site

Thoughts on Baiting For Blogs – Dead Site — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:57:04 +0000

[...] why I did. Worse of all a comment that was actually heavily critical of a blogger resulted in a couple of posts linking back to said blogger. Maybe I should just make [...]

By: Ripping off people’s content is illegal, whatever you think of them-- Andy Merrett

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 20:34:02 +0000

[...] Hannah Solo: the 18-year-old that knows it all [...]

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Contextual and sidebar ads: a double-edged sword-- Andy Merrett — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 11:56:01 +0000

[...] Hannah Solo: the 18-year-old that knows it all [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:55:22 +0000

Hi Darren,

No problem. I’ve been fairly strong in my criticism because there’s such a huge gulf between “problooger” and “hannah solo”, with accusations of spam blogging and fraudulent advertising that I found it hard to let it sit.

Strange, in some ways, because you’re bound to have plenty of vocal opponents to what you do or how you do it. I’ve no objection to people disagreeing with you or critiquing your work or methods, nor with “new kids on the block” having their own ideas, but a blogger with 4 posts and an incomplete design suggesting that it’s a good idea to take up full time blogging for money, but then completely rubbishing one of the true experts in that field, is crazy.

I don’t want this to turn into a war either. Perhaps this is some kind of marketing ploy, it’s hard to tell on such a young site. It would have been simpler just to ignore it completely but I think you know what I’m like sometimes!

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:29:35 +0000

Thanks for the comments Andy – particularly for drawing together that list of posts I’ve written (good to have them all in the one place). I’ve commented on Hannah’s blog and won’t say much more here except to say that I hope it doesn’t become a flame war and that we can all find some resolution to it. I don’t mind Hannah or anyone else critiquing my approach (critique makes us better) but hope that the comments I left on her post bring a little balance to it.

Anyway – thanks for the post and that list of posts.