About Nice4Rice.com

Here’s a quick summary for busy people:

1. Who is Spud Oregon? 

It’s just a silly, but fun nickname. My real name is Nick Ramsay, and you can learn all about my life as an English teacher in Japan, on my personal blog, LongCountdown.com. 

2. What is Nice4Rice.com?

A collection of articles and blog reviews, with a “make money online” theme.

3. What’s all this nonsense about rice?

I wrote a post called Get a Free Backlink! which explains how the rice-giving voting system works.

Got time to for more? Here we go…

Who is Spud Oregon?

My real name is Nick Ramsay, but for Nice4Rice.com, I decided to use the name Spud Oregon. Why? I don’t know! I was taking a shower and the name just popped into my head. According to New West Bend, Oregon is famous for its potatoes:

 The first place that comes to mind when someone asks where most of the country’s potatoes are grown is Idaho. And although Idaho is the birthing grounds for many a fine spud, a new type of potato being grown near Bend could revamp the industry and make Central Oregon the new potato capital.

Actually, I’m British and live in Japan teaching English, which would explain why I chose rice to represent the links and traffic that this website is designed to generate.

What is Nice4Rice.com?

When starting a blog, I considered the following three things:

1. What am I most interested in?

Without a doubt, my passion is the internet, and I am particularly interested in making money online. Everyday I religiously check my stats and earnings from my other sites, and read blog after blog after blog about earning an online income.

That’s why I decided to start my own blog about computing, the internet, and how to make money from it. It’s common knowledge that if you don’t write about something you’re passionate about, you’ll either give up or get bored of working on your own site!

2. What’s my target audience?

Webmasters, bloggers, business entrepreneurs and anyone else who might have the same interests as me.

3. How can Nice4Rice.com stand out from the crowd?

This was my favorite question because I needed to come up with something original. First I had to consider what my target audience wants.

Webmasters, including myself, will do almost anything for a free backlink. The more sites that link to your own, the more popular it will become and the more revenue you can generate. So, I needed a means of giving free links. To do this, I made my own Wordpress theme which allows visitors to vote on an article.

Each vote is represented by a bowl of rice which when you hover the mouse over, a description of the voter’s site pops up, and clicking the rice will take you to that site. Not only that, but I didn’t use the “nofollow” tag, so these links are search engine friendly. As well as the rice links themselves, I made a Top Givers list which ranks the most active ‘donators’, providing yet more free links to their sites.

While voting on an article may pull in some traffic, the articles need to be good enough to keep people coming back for more. What better way to create interesting content than to write about other sites and articles in the same field, with Spud pointing out the good, bad and ugly of what they have to offer. Update: After a few months of doing this,  the process of reviewing sites for the sake of it had become really boring! Now I just write about whatever takes my interest in the ‘make money online’ game.

An advantage of reviewing blogs is that Nice4Rice will get a trackback or pingback in the comments section of the article reviewed. When the owner of the blog sees that Spud has reviewed his or her site, they might be tempted to encourage their own visitors to come and give rice to Spud’s review, pushing them up the Top Earners rankings! Update: This worked well when I was reviewing blogs, but as mentioned above, I just write about what I enjoy now.

Finally, I wanted to create a site with a gimmick. The idea of giving rice to a potato-loving reviewer in exchange for more rice, on a website with a cheesy title, seemed gimmicky enough.

And that folks, is what Nice4Rice.com is all about! So Remember… be nice for rice!

Spud Oregon.

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