Webby Thoughts

I tried Twitter a little bit. I still don’t get it. It reminds me a bit of when I tried MySpace and eventually realized it just was not worth my time.

Twitter only really seems to have four functions and none of them seems worthwhile to me.

1. Tell random snippets about what is going on in your life. - I have email. I have a blog or five. I have a phone. There are plenty of ways for me to tell people about what is going on in my life.
2. Promote your blog. I read this post over at Mashable poking fun at Twitter being the evolution of the cat blog. That’s pretty funny and probably true for a lot of people. Then there was an update with a link to the Mashable Twitter account. I clicked over to read about how the Mashable cat was doing. Instead I found a whole bunch of links. Most of them are TinyURL links. I clicked a handful and they all redirected back to the Mashable blog. If I want to read Mashable, I’ll just subscribe to the blog, thanks.
3. Link repository - Some people use it as a place to dump links to things they find interesting. This is probably the most compelling reason to follow somebody Twittering. Some people find some pretty interesting stuff on the internet.
4. Mix of all of the above - I did find some people that were Twitting about their personal life, providing links to their own posts, and providing links to other stuff.

In the end, I decided it was not for me. I wonder what the next Web 2.0 craze will be.

I was using StumbleUpon the other day and had an idea for a little meme. I’m going to list the next 5 sites that I Stumble. Then I’ll pick a handful of people to tag so they can list their next 5 Stumbles and tag a few more people.

Feel free to comment on the sites you land on if you feel like it.

Here are my Next 5 Stumbles:

• iblocked.com - that’s disappointing. They have a search box acting as a proxy. But in reality the search box is just the Google Search thing. They are hoping you click on the links in the search results so they can earn some money.
• Piccolini - Trendy stuff to buy kids. Furniture, toys, clothes, etc. Too expensive for my taste but I do dig the colors and shapes they use.
• Search Engine Journal - How to remove your phone number from Google Search - Shows how to do exactly what the title says. The post is really just reporting something found on LifeHacker. My phone number doesn’t show up. Take that Google.
• BetterHumans - This looks to be a digg type clone that seems to focus on Health, Nanotech, Robots. Nobody appears to be voting for the stories.
• True Mom Confessions - Moms post anonymous confessions. All of the entries are plain text. I’ll stick to Post Secret. There’s something much more immediate and haunting about the images on the post cards.

It looks like I might need to tweak my preferences a little bit.

Hopefully the next group of people can have a little better luck than I did. I’m going to tag:

• Kent Newsome
• Ray Dotson
• Gayla McCord
• Quick Online Tips
• ShoeMoney

If anybody else wants to participate, feel free to join in.

After getting some semi-bad directions from MapQuest and after a few bad experiences getting directions from Google Maps, I had an idea for a little Web 2.0 mashup type thing.

I would like one or both of those sites to let users tag spots with information like where construction begins and ends, where directions are wrong or awkward, suggestions for better routes, and major landmarks. They could indicate the user notes with a special flag that could be clicked on the view the notes.

I don’t get into a lot of social features on website because most of them do not provide a value to me but I would really get into letting users tag maps.

Does anything like this exist yet? If not, please consider it an open request.

Have you read you Google AdSense Optimization Report for May yet? You know, the tips that Google is providing to help each of us make a little more money with their ads.

My optimization tip for May 2007 is:

You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site.

Thank you Google. I may in fact be doing that, but a quick review of my filter list confirms that I am completely happy with none of those sites advertising on any of mine whether they monetize well on my site or not.

For the record, that was the April tip as well. Apparently they really don’t think my filter is a good idea.

Has anybody received any different tips or are they just pumping that same tip out to everybody each month?

Google pushed out the page rank update the other day. Page rank is such a funny concept. It doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in how high a site shows up in the search results. I’m not sure what Google really gets out of having the page rank be public.

One area where it does play a very large factor is with advertising. Sites are willing to pay more for links from sites with higher page rank. It is a pricing factor in both Text Link Ads and Review Me and I’m sure plenty of others.

I find that all very amusing since Google really doesn’t like buying text link ads for improving page rank. They claim to be fine with buying text link ads for improving traffic or branding for a site but, let’s face it, the three are all blended so tightly into one that Google really just hates text link ads. They have trouble figuring out what to do with them in their algorithms.

So, back to the update. What happened in my little web empire?

Be A Good Dad dropped from 5 to 4. I got a little lazy with the site over the last couple months so I wasn’t really surprised by this but I still think I was hosed.

Kalbzayn’s World stayed at PR 4. This is my oldest site by almost a year. It doesn’t get linked to much anymore but it has had a couple pretty good links and it does seem that age helps with PR.

Talk Hawkeyes rose from 3 to 4. I did a little flurry of posting during the football bowl season and then another flurry during the NCAA tournament but the rest of the time this site was horribly neglected. I have no idea why that site has a PR anywhere near the previous two.

Wallet Advice is my first real attempt to create a site entirely in the hopes of making a couple bucks off of it. It isn’t going well since this site is almost always neglected. It did manage to rise from PR 0 to PR 2 but I think that is entirely just from linking to it from my other blogs.

Webby Thoughts. That’s where you are right now. It is now a PR 4. I believe it was PR 3 before the update. I’ve also been neglecting this site pretty badly but it did manage to get a couple of good for PR links.

Nut Has A Squirrel is my newest site. I just started it last month so it is still PR 0. I started doodling little single panel comics in my notebook recently and also started exploring and finding new-to-me webcomics. So, I decided to start one of my own as a neat little hobby. I’ve always wanted to sit down and practice learning how to draw and figured this would be a good way to force me to do it. It is great fun but I still am trying to decide whether to draw on paper and scan them or just create them entirely on the computer. This site is definitely for fun with no expectation of ever making money. It is also my first site not hosted on GoDaddy.

So what do I do with all of this now? Who knows? PR really isn’t one of those things that I think about that much. I have no idea why Be A Good Dad would rank dramatically higher than the other three PR 4 blogs.

None of my new PR 4 sites have been invited into Text Link Ads yet (I submitted them a while back and Text Link Ads rechecks all sites on the waiting list every month).

The drop in Be A Good Dad was a bit of a kick in the pants to get me motivated to start paying more attention to all of the sites so maybe we’ll have good news when the next update happens. I’d much prefer for the extra work I’m planning to turn into more traffic though.

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.

I signed up for Twitter just to see what it is all about. It didn’t really sound that interesting to me at the time and after looking at it for a week or so, I still don’t really get it.

It’s kind of like chat. It’s kind of like blogging with a very severe character count restriction.

It doesn’t really feel that social.

It seems more like a spot to stand up and shout short vague comments to the internet. There doesn’t seem to be a good way for people to respond to those comments which is where the real magic could happen.

It might be interesting if I had more friends and they were all pretty active but the thought of just letting me shout 140 characters at a time and listen to other shouts without a good way to reply to them just seems a little under whelming to me.

If you want to be my friend and show me how to make it more interesting, my Twitter ID is BeAGoodDad.

I started a new domain recently to let me play around with drawing some comics. In the past, I have purchased my domains and web hosting both through GoDaddy. I have had very few problems with them and have found their customer support very helpful several times.

With a handful of sites already set up under the one GoDaddy hosting account, I decided to start this new one at DreamHost to see what else is out there. I decided to buy the domain through GoDaddy. Everything I read says that you should use separate companies for each anyway.

Everything went without a hitch. It took about 24 hours for the DNS records to get switched to DreamHost. There is virtually no traffic so it is hard to tell anything about performance but it always loads very quickly.

I have a feeling that when the GoDaddy hosting renews early next year that I might move the sites that I want to keep over to DreamHost and keep the domains at GoDaddy.

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?