Webby Thoughts

Posting frequency was down. Page views to my main blog were down. May was an uninspired month full of home projects trying to get ready for the baby girl that we are having in October and lots of questions about how I want to run my blogs.

The grand total earned in May was $154.22. Almost exactly the same as last month. Here is where the money came from.

• AdSense $42.63
• TLA $108.30
• Amazon $3.29

A lot of the projects are done and I have answered several of my questions…but not all of them. I also did not get an overtime project that would have swallowed June so I’m looking forward to getting back on track.

I made a few decisions about HOW I try to make money during this last month. I tried Auction Ads on a few of my blogs. I love the concept but it just didn’t perform at all for me. I’ll be taking it down sometime soon.

I’m also going to get rid of the Amazon Contextual Links that I am using on a couple blogs because the little pop ups annoy me and for under $4/month I’m not willing to use something that annoys me. I’ll probably be giving up on Amazon entirely moving forward. I’ll leave any old links but not be adding new ones for a while.

I signed up with Commission Junction again. My wife started using SnapFish and we love it. It meets a huge demand that we have had since switching to a digital camera a couple years back. SnapFish goes through CJ, so I’ll do a little work promoting them and see if anything happens. I’m also going to look for a couple other companies that I would like to talk about that have affiliate programs.

I tried using CJ in the past and had nothing happen during my first year but I get much more traffic these days so maybe it will work out better this time.

As far as the actual content, I really want to work on writing a higher percentage of “articles” as opposed to “thoughts.” I’m not 100% sure how I differentiate between the two but I want to focus on thinking about that on everything that I write this month.

I also need to work on getting more consistent with posting frequency…especially on all of the blogs other than my main one. I need to try to hold myself to a schedule and get at least 2 or 3 posts per blog per week.

April was a bit of a setback in terms of money earned but most of that was my fault. I posted less on my main blog and virtually not at all on the rest of them.

I also seemed to lose some Google search traffic but replaced most of that with StumbleUpon traffic which doesn’t bring as much money.

In the end, I made $154.64 in April. Down from the $215ish in March.

The income breaks out like this:

• Text Link Ads $106.31
• AdSense $47.91
• Amazon $0.42

I’m hoping to get back in the swing of things with more frequent posts everywhere and see if I can’t get the earnings back into the $200 range for May.

Part of the reason for fewer posts last month is that I am trying to spend less time online with mixed results. If I’m going to do that, I need to get better about writing quicker posts. My biggest goal this month is to get better organized, do more prep work offline, and get the posts composed and posted much quicker.

If I can get that under control, the rest should take care of itself.

Last month was a pretty big month for me when it comes to bringing in the money. I’m nowhere near ready to quit my day job but I’m closer than last month.

Here is what worked and didn’t and the details of where the money came from.

First, how much did I make?

• AdSense - $96.25
• Text Link Ads - $87.64
• Review Me - $30.00
• Squidoo - $1.16
• Total - $215.05

Pretty cool. That comes out to $6.94 per day.

So how do you go about making enough to eat lunch at McDonald’s everyday?

I’m getting a fair bit of search engine traffic to one of my sites right now. 200-300 uniques per day or so plus the regular visitors. I had a post get several thousand hits from StumbleUpon and Reddit but that actually seemed to drive my AdSense money down during those days.

I kept most of my ten slots full with Text Link Ads throughout most of the month. A couple advertisers dropped off, but a couple new ones picked up the slack. So far, all of them have stuck around in April.

I only did one post for Review Me. I didn’t love doing it and didn’t hate doing it. I would never do it for a site that I didn’t think deserved some attention and I would not want to do more than around 2-4 per month. It’s an interesting change of pace to do a very direct ad for another site. The focus is very different.

Squidoo is perhaps my most entertaining income source. You have to love anybody that will pay out once you clear $1. I have two lenses that I created back around Octoberish just to see what the site was all about. I haven’t touched them in ages but every month or two I get a buck or two with no real explanation given for what happened to earn me the money. It really is like free money.

I made a couple bucks on Amazon last month but not enough to cross the threshold for a payout so I won’t include them until that happens. Money isn’t really earned until somebody plans on sending a paycheck in my book. I’m doing the Amazon Context Links Beta on a site and it is doing absolutely nothing so far. I’m going to leave it running through the end of the week. If there isn’t some sign of life, than I’m getting rid of Amazon entirely for the time being. I don’t do any gadget sites or anything else that seems designed for making money with Amazon. Some revenue models will not work on every blog.

While AdSense is humming along, I would really prefer to find a way to earn enough money on my main blog to get rid of it. I general it would be nice to be able to do that on any blog. AdSense is such an ugly middle man scenario. In the next few months, I’m thinking about trying to get some blog specific merchandise to sell. T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. I think they might have a chance based on the theme and the basic marketing plan. It would be more entertaining to make any amount of money, even a few bucks less, selling my own stuff instead of just being the middle man in the click game.

I’m also thinking about trying to get somebody to do some direct ads. Something along the lines of a 125 by 125 pixel banner ad or something like that.

AdSense and or Text Link Ads might be the best long term option, but if I like to keep experimenting and learning how new things work so that I can know what works best for me.

That was my month. How did you do?

I got an email early this morning announcing the launch of Amazon’s Context Links Beta.  I was hoping somebody would do a nice writeup that I could link to but I didn’t notice anything when I went through my feed reader.

Amazon Context Links Beta works by dropping a bit of code into your sites template.  Then whenever a page is displayed, Amazon will read through the page and add some links to the text.  The links will lead to Amazon products that match the context of the phrase in the link.

It is a cool concept that might even actually work pretty well.

From the description, it looks Google would not want it on pages with Google AdSens since it is a contextual program, but I might be wrong.  Since the ads are embedded into text links rather than the common ad blocks server by Google maybe you could double dip.  If anybody knows anything about whether they will be allowed to play on the same page, please let me know.

The only annoying thing about the ads is that when you mouseover the link, it pops up one of those little mini Amazon images that show the picture, name, price, etc. of the product that they are advertising.  I’m not a fan of things popping up when you mouseover them.

One area that the Amazon Context Links Beta program might work for bloggers even if Google doesn’t allow it on pages with AdSense would be to put them on the Amazon Context Links on the front page of the blog.  My front page AdSense ads are worthless.  I might try to remove the Adsense ads on the front page of one of my blogs and try the Amazon Context Links instead and continue using the AdSense ads on the single post pages.

Jeremy Zawodny mentioned a pretty big discrepancy between Google AdSense clicks reported and the number of Google AdSense clicks being reported by MyBlogLog and asked what we have noticed. I mentioned that they looked pretty close to me and thought nothing of it.

Then, a post I wrote on another blog about why dads should read to their kids got a bunch of Reddit and StumpleUpon traffic that last couple days and I noticed something odd.

I ended up getting about 10X the number of pageviews over a two day period and about 2.5X today as the traffic trailed off. I’ve been getting about 15-30 AdSense clicks a day and have no reason to doubt those numbers. I know that the Reddit and StumbleUpon crowd don’t bring many clicks, but I did expect to see a very slight increase in clicks and at least end up in the upper range of clicks since the main two days were Wednesday and Thursday which are normally pretty decent days.

Instead the clicks reported by Google dropped to lower than normal (11 and 14). Strange. The following mornings I noticed something even stranger. MyBlogLog reported 23 and 33. Since MyBlogLog says which post the clicks came from, I can tell that the Google counts match up pretty closely to the MyBlogLog counts if I subtract the clicks from the hot post of the last couple days from the MyBlogLog counts. Odd.

I don’t see anything indicating that my normal search engine and normal regular visitor traffic was any lower than normal.

It makes me wonder whether Google has algorithms in place to notice when certain posts get traffic spikes and consider a higher percentage of those clicks as invalid clicks.

What would be really nice, of course, if for Google to let us see how many clicks they count as invalid.

Update: I forgot to link to the post that got Jeremy Zawodny talking about this.  Dom Ramsey noticed a difference in the counts and wrote about it on his blog in this post.

I have one blog that gets reasonable traffic and reasonable revenue through a growing variety of sources.  Then I have the other 4 (including this one).  About the only real opportunity that fits with my desire or lack thereof to micromanage the advertising streams is Google’s AdSense at this time.

To get into some of the programs and to make money with any of them, I need to increase the pageviews which means posting more often, submitting to blog carnivals and commenting on other related blogs to hopefully get some links and wait for the next PR update.

More posts, more links, more readers.  I know how to do it but it is frustratingly slow to go through it from scratch again.  At least this time I have the advantage of knowing what kind of financial payoff is available.

My Google AdSense money went down just a tiny bit in February as compared to January and December when I started making enough to get a check every couple months. Part of that is that there are fewer days in February. But, I also made just a few pennies less per day than those other months.

But, I ended up making more money in February than I have in any other month because I started listening to people like Darren of ProBlogger and his advice fo not relying on one method of income.

I was able to get one of my blogs accepted into Text Link Ads, and they sold 4 of the positions for the second half of the month which more than made up for the ever so little drop in AdSense income.

Since today is the first of a new month, I logged into my Text Link Ads account to see if any of the advertisers stuck around for another month. All 4 of them did. So, already I am locked into making about 50% of what I normally make in a month. On the first day of the month.

Plus, now I’m a little more protected if the price per click of the AdSense clicks drops or something strange happens with my search engine traffic.

Sometimes I end up reading the advice the big money people write and think but what difference does it make for us people making peanuts. Now that I’ve started to see it in action, I can see two important reasons to start diversifying early on.

1. If you happen to get lucky and have a site get huge, you will already be set up to implement multiple income streams.
2. If the plans are complimentary to each other, meaning implementing one doesn’t steal income from the other, then you can see a fairly sizable percentage wise jump literally overnight. After all, I went from peanuts to…well maybe chocolate covered peanuts while barely lifting a finger.

If you are interested in trying it out, please feel free to use this link to Text Link Ads (affiliate link).

I found out today that Google is working on another PR update.

I have a blog that is getting a little bit of traffic that talks about my kids and my thoughts on parenting.  I started it just as a way of constantly reminding myself to think about being a decent parent.  I started the site a few months back and it was too young for the last PR update to affect it.

This time, according to the PR checkers, it appears that I went from a 0 to a 5.  Wow.  We’ll see where it is sitting when everything settles down in a couple days.

The site has also managed to get indexed pretty well by Google and is starting to bring in a decent amount of AdSense money.  It took me over a year to get my first check for earnings through last November.  Now, it looks like later today, I will break the $100 barrier for December and so far this month.

This makes me pretty happy.  It is nice to get to the point where I can do this hobby for free and make some pizza money.  Now, with the new PR update, I’m going to try and get the site accepted into Text Link Ads program to see if I can manage to get another way of making a few bucks off of the site.

In a way, I wish another one of my blogs had been the one to get popular instead.  BeAGoodDad is my baby.  It is my most personal site by far.

All of the other blogging I do is much more hobby based.  I enjoy learning about how blogs work and how the money side, both inbound and outbound, works.  I’m looking forward to someday taking the time to learn to write my own CSS and how to pick a get hosting plan.  The topics that I write about are of interest to me, but they are not my family.

 On the plus side, it is very rewarding to have a site that I care so much for actually be the one that is doing the best.

I got a check from Google the other day for the AdSense program. Actually, it was direct deposit, but it still felt great. The money was earned over the period from October 2005 through November 2006. It took me around 13 months to get the first check. It looks like it will only take 2 before I am eligible for my next.

My big goal is to get to where I am getting one of those checks every month. Right now, I have one niche blog earning most of that money. I have a few relatively new niche sites and hopefully by the middle of the year, they will start performing a lot better.

One of the nice things about the money showing up in my bank account is that it actually proves that I can make money online. Now, I just need to work to increase how much money I am earning.

Tags: AdSense, making money online

My stats software reminded my that I set up a couple quick and dirty lenses over at Squidoo a while back.  I went over to try and remember what I created over there and found out I had made $1.31 I did not even know about.  I’m not planning a retirement party anytime soon, but it is always fun to get a little bit of free cash.

Squidoo does a couple things with how they pay that make me happy.

First, they accept PayPal which is something that I am just starting to get used to.  I quickly changed my preferences to have Squidoo pay me this way.

Second, the minimum payout is $1.  One little tiny dollar.  It took me over a year to get eligible through AdSense and I may never get paid by Amazon at the rate I am going.  I’m looking forward to getting my $1.31 next month.

If you are interested in seeing the lenses I created, here they are:

Curse of the 5 Pennies which is promoting a story I am working on writing.

Be A Good Dad which is promoting a parenting blog that I write.