Easy (Kinda) Money

It has become clear to me that most of my visitors come from a direct links and bookmarks. As wonderful as this is, I want to optimize my search engine ranking. However, this can be difficult with a dynamic front page. As you know, every time I update this blog, the new information is at the top of the page. Then, I read a great post at pro-blogger.com. I am going to begin to use my sidebar header and footer as static search engine anchors.

I will explain it to you this way. Because my blog is dynamic, in other words, each time I post to my blog it is at the top of the page. Therefore, every day my search engine keywords change. Granted, it is true that each individual post page has its own search engine ranking. However, I want to be sure that I can rank the main index page as high as possible.

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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.

This is a re-print og an eHow article that I just posted. On eHow the title is How to Make Your Blog Better, this is because all the good titles were taken. If you are asking, “Why a reprint?”, read my post Killing Two Birds with One Stone.

Here it is:

How to Make Your Blog Better

If you want to know how to improve your blog, you must first decide on what your definition of improvement is. For the sake of this article, let’s say that improvement is creating great content that people want to read, then driving traffic to your site. After all, what is the sense of creating good content if nobody ever sees it?

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If you think about all the different ways of how to improve your blog, the first thing that should leap to your mind is, of course, great content. continue reading…

 If you read my posts are regularly, you know that I am a big of fan of eHow. I would say is that the vast majority of my passive income comes from eHow. I would like to take a little time to teach you how to use eHow to increase your passive income.

First of all you need to understand that eHow pays you with a certain percentage of ad revenue. Ads will be placed within your article and you get paid when somebody clicks on the ad. The nice thing is that you do not have to place ads; eHow does this for you. In addition, eHow automatically submits your article to the Google search engine; so, now you do not have to worry about search engines submissions.

The first thing you need to do is get in the eHow account. Go to www.eHow.com and sign up for an account. Now that you have an account, make sure that you understand the terms and conditions. eHow is a great way to make extra passive income,  but you must be careful; they are strict about plagiarism, repeat articles, and as spam type articles.

Now that you have an eHow account, it is time to write your articles. You may be worried that you do not have enough ideas to produce in inventory of eHow articles. You would be surprised at the breadth of articles that are written on eHow. You can write an article about anything from the” theory of relativity”… to “how continue reading…