Easy (Kinda) Money

One very important thing bloggers should do is to capture the e-mail addresses of people that read their blog. This is something I have not done yet. I have been putting it off because of what I perceive to be the complexity of doing it. I had searched for widgets and plug-ins and I could not find anything that I could install. Additionally, I wanted something to do more than just capture e-mail addresses. I wanted something that would auto respond, help me manage a mailing list, help me send newsletters and product promotions. continue reading…

Between my hard drive crash and the other projects I am launching, I have seriously neglected this blog. I apologize for that. However, here is what I have learned over the past 2 to 3 weeks. I am starting to comprehend how to build blog traffic. Even with my sad updates, I am receiving 150 hits per day. This is twice what I had last month…. I have you to thank for that!!!!!!!

I make a commitment to update this blog as least four times per week from here on. I truly want to update you with the new information that I have gained over these past few weeks.

My projects have been fivefold.
1. I am creating three new blogs. Two of which will be linked to this site. continue reading…

If you have been reading my blog for some time you know that I have been searching for referral sites and affiliates. One thing I was certain of is that I did not want to push an affiliate site that I did not believe in. In keeping with this philosophy, I have chosen my first affiliate as Bluehost.com. This is the hosting company that I use. I, in turn, learned about it from Pat, at the smart passive income blog.

I have now been using Blue Host for three months. And, I’m not only satisfied, I am impressed. To begin with, the price is unbeatable. I am currently being hosted for $6.95 per month. This includes unlimited domain names, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited Pop e-mail accounts. Okay, many hosting services offer similar programs, however, I was highly impressed with the amount of one click install software that blue host provides. This, of course, includes WordPress. In addition, there is Perl support, Ruby  continue reading…

At this point, I am trying to build up a readership and I do not worry too much about monetizing my blog. However, I have been playing around with different ad combinations, and I found some of the results quite interesting.

Firstly, I was very disappointed with Adbright. It is not that this ad program is inherently bad. However, it did not work at all on my blog. You may have noticed that green underlined links; these were Adbright in-line ads. As I checked out the ads myself, I noticed that they were unrelated to my blog. Of course, I want to have links to increase my income. However, I do not want links that bring you, the reader, to unrelated sites. Therefore, at this point I am completely suspended my ad bright advertising. I will continue to look into the Adbright program to see if there is a better way to control these links.

My Adsense advertising on the other hand is looking up. To be truthful, this month the total numbers are very lame. You will see this in my July passive income report. However, I think I have found the proper ad format for Ad-sense to attract the eye of the reader. I have noticed in my Adsense reports that for the first half of the month I had next to nothing in revenue. However, after I changed the format of my ad-sense advertising placement, I began to see some activity.

I began my Google Ad-Sense ad placement as a skyscraper. This temporary placement is a narrow tall box with image and text ads available. After this, I went to the other extreme, and I chose a small link box. Both of these methods produced the same result, nothing. Lastly, I went to the middle route, which is the ad box that you see on the blog now. This particular Ad-Sense configuration seems to be attracting some interest.

 For the short run, anyhow, I think I will stick with this configuration. I will of course, keep you updated on how this is working.

Don’t laugh when you see my Adsense results for July. These results will be ridiculously low. However, as I notice the pattern, I hope to discern the direction in which I want to go on this part of the project.

My only complaint about Ad-sense, at this point, is that they do not offer PayPal as a payment option. The only options are a check, or a direct deposit into your checking account. I prefer to keep my income streams separate, so this is a little annoying. However, I think I can deal with it.