Blog 7: Update & Commission Junction

I have been surprisingly successful at driving organic traffic to my site. I have been surprisingly unsuccessful at earning money from Google AdSense. I will say I have made a majority of the money in my account over the past 10 days.

Just to give you some statistics I have had ten days in a row with over 100 visitors, with a high of 176 so far today. Hopefully, this number continues to climb. I have earned approximately $16 and I have discovered my favorite feature of Google Analytics. The map feature that show from what countries, states and cities from which you visitors have come. I have 2600 visits from 77 countries.

I personally know that I have a lot to learn before I really start making any money from blogging. I use the Google Map to keep me inspired to continue on, it is my way of turning all the work into entertainment. Hopefully, you can use the same feature or find something of your own to keep you driven. I have also started a second blog that features articles from Sean Anderson. You can find it at Published Articles.

Commission Junction

I have recently started an account with Commission Junction. Basically, this is like Google Referrals, the advertisers pay per action or per sale. The downside is that it is more difficult to get advertisers. Advertisers are not obligated to let you publish their adds. I personally have been turned down several times. The good news is that some of the advertisers allow automatic access and approve immediately, Yahoo is one of those advertisers. Please, don't hate me Google.

Another, downside is that you have to apply to each advertiser. This takes more time but the upside is that you are offered more options and easier access to banners. Commission Junction minimum payment is $25 and the commissions offered are higher than those offered by Google Referrals. Commission Junction adds a new way to make money to my site but I have only had 19 clicks and have not had the ads up long enough to be eligible for commissions. Hopefully, some actions lock and I can report some earnings in my next update. I agree with one of Sean's articles to be a successful blogger you must be obsessed.


Well this is an example of one of my Commission Junction ads, and remember if you need anything please support these adverstisers from my site.

Blog 6 - Feedburner Code

I just put some code from feedburner into my blog to monetize my RSS Feed with a whopping zero subscribers. Strange, since I know of three subscribers not including myself. Well maybe I will ask them to resubscribe. If they are getting my ads even though I don't think I care too much. I mean really I don't care too much about my count. The code I have added posts all the digg and related "flare" near the comments, throws in Adsense and sends statistics to feeburner.

I'll

Well this post is really a test b/c I made some real html markups and I don't know anything about writing xml. I will have to edit this post or delete it depending on how well this next stage works. Confession: I did buy a book on CSS, but I don't really know if that counts as an investment.

The bad news is that I don't think old posts are updated. Well let's see?

Alright, I've made two attempts. Both times it failed, I went in deleted some crap on my third try now it works. I guess I just had to keep playing around. Just save your template before doing all this crap. Copy and paste it into a file. This should really be a day one task. When I relaunch my blog, I'll detail all the steps I should have taken the first time around and provide the links.

I also, put in some tracking code. It hasn't materialized in stats or I simply have my feedreader in a bad spot. I may move it to the xml. What do I know though.

As an update I have drastically increased my stats I have been getting over 50 uniques views/day with a record of 126 the bad news is that I have a 86% bounce rate. The result of this traffic has been $.68, but I have taken some steps to better monetize my blog through feedburner AdSense and I have noticed that the quality of my ads have increased as well.

The way I got the additional traffic was through unique keyword results (onsite SEO), and offsite (SEO) by traslating the keywords in off sit links. Partially, accident but I have also followed some well given advice.

Blog 5 - Update On Bum Marketing My Blog

Well, today I broke my $5.00 cherry it took me a little over a month. In two years I might get my first check from Google. I have been increasing traffic steadly actually. I have taken a Bum Marketing approach to date, and will only invest money I have earned by blogging. I guess I won't be relying on the interent to make my car payments. Guess what type of car I drive?

I try to get most of my traffic by commenting on other sites. I typically stick to two genres making money on-line and movies. I have also been incorporating Digg into my site. This has also lead to quite a few impressions.

It takes a lot of persistence to build traffic this way. Right now I spend about twetny minutes writing my blog and forty minutes trying to post real comment. After all I want people to be curious about who I am and get them to click on my link. I think it is vital that post be relevant to the topic on which you comment. If you don't have something intelligent,humerous or intriguing to say no one will want to follow your link. It is important that you be among the top ten commentators. If you want still post a comment but it won't get any clickthroughs.

On another note, I shouldn't be dogging an advertiser, but one of the ad read I got scammed 37 times. Am I really supposed to beleive that this guy is such a dumbass he banged his head against the wall thirty seven time and finally got it right. If you fail try again but change and learn something along the way. I know he wants you to sympathize and make you think he has had it worse and just wants to help out but for the love of God use some logic. Because I have failed 37 times I have found success. Where is the relationship?

Well keep up the hard work. Make that scrilla.

Google Payload by Alex Goad and Chris X

The pain the agony. This program may have worked at one point in time, but now it is being shot down. The idea is to take advantage of arbritrage. You pay a low price for traffic and resell the traffic at a higher price.

The two target search enginese were goclick.com your low priced traffic provider and searchanyway.com where you resell the traffic at a higher price. Basically, you design a landing page to convert the traffic from goclick.com to traffic for searchanyway.com. It worked for a while but as I said the program is dead. Unless of course you can find another low cost search engine that provides clickthroughs.

I will keep it simple basically goclick was clicking through with a bot. The traffic was artificial. Searchanyway pick up on this as I am sure other search engines have and now these sites ban goclick traffic, and people who send traffic via goclick.

Alex, you should have kept this to yourself. You book caused enough problems for searchanyway that they picked up on a pretty good scheme. Then again I am not sure he even knew golick had a bot clicking on links.

Blog 4: What is RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (among other things that aren't important). RSS is a feed through the Web that allows people to hook in to frequently updated sites for our purposes blogs. It shoots out the updates through a RSS reader to either e-mail, homepage, or the reader. The amount of text being delivered is controlled by the blogger. As the blogger you can allow people to see the full text, clips or titles. The most common tool used is called Feeburner from what I can tell.

To find out about Feedburner just go to feedburner.com. They have a little pop-up that allows you to see how many people subscribe to your RSS. As per John Chow I am not going to show my RSS feed as I only have two subscribers. Unfortunately, I am one of them. If only I had a hundred or so close friends and family members I could get to become RSS feeds.

Why is RSS important? It helps you get better rankings in terms of the search engines, and shows that you are important. You can also try to make money using them but apparently the yare hard to monetize. Google's purchase of Feedburner should assist pretty soon, and with that will come more methods. The major bloggers all support RSS subscriptions.

As a side note go visit Mark Cuban at http://www.blogmaverick.com/.