AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

(Update: See Why I Dumped AuctionAds, November 11, 2007)

My Internet earnings this week were five times those of last week! That doesn’t sound too bad. But if it weren’t for a once off shot in the arm they would have been only half those of last week. Total earnings this week were $27.13 bringing, my total earnings to date to $40.03.

Here are the figures for this week:
AuctionAds (My shot in the arm!) — $25.00
Adsense — $2.00
Helium – 13c

As you can see I clearly haven’t set the world on fire yet! If it wasn’t for the $25.00 that AuctionAds give you just for signing up, then my total earnings this week would have been $2.13.

I’ve had the AuctionAds code inserted in the top right hand corner the page for a few days now. So far it hasn’t done anything. I’ll need to earn another $25.00 from AuctionAds before I get a pay-out, the minimum being $50.00.

There isn’t much I can learn from the $25 from AuctionAds, except to know when to sign up for something when you see a good offer. As far as Adsense goes I can now see where the clicks are coming from. The url channels I have set up show me that my gardening blog has been the only one to generate any clickthroughs, so the entire $2.00 came from there.

I would say part of the reason why I’m getting clickthroughs from the gardening blog is because of the niche quality of the site. However I would say a greater reason is because the majority, in fact almost all of the visitors to the site seem to be coming via my Adwords promotion of my aStores. Since most of my visitors to the gardening blog arrive there through ads they are obviously the type of people to read them. However if I’m spending $2.00 per day on Adwords and only getting $2.00 per week from Adsense as a side effect of that, then that is clearly not something I would want to sustain.

It was also a bad week for my aStore. Up until this week it was getting one or two sales a week. Not spectacular but I could see potential in it. I had a $1.00 per day Adwords advertising campaign to promote my aStore. I decided to refine my Adwords campaign, cutting my keywords in half and removing general keywords and concentrating on ones like ‘buy this’ or ‘this for sale’. I also set up a UK advertising campaign and pointed it towards my UK aStore.

I think most of the reason for the failure of the aStore this week is down to my own fault: I left the aStores in a semi-designed state as I didn’t have time to sit down and finish the whole thing off this week. It’s a lot like trying to run a shop with hoarding and scaffolding outside. My aStores at the moment don’t look as good as they did last week and that is probably what my potential customers thought too. I won’t have much time to do it this weekend but I’ll have to spend some time working on the aStores and giving them a more finished look. In the meantime I think I may as well suspend my Adwords campaign until I have this done.

Helium continues to earn me small but steady amounts of money. Thirteen cents this week with 13 articles published on the site. It seems like I would need to write thousands of articles to make real money from it.

All in all, this wasn’t a good week for me. The figures of $27.13 this week compared to $5.33 last week don’t give the full picture.

(Update: See Why I Dumped AuctionAds, November 11, 2007)

The promised Blogrush ‘flavours’ are now online. A really handy thing about them is that no change to the code is required to select a new color. Just log into Blogrush.com, click on ‘Settings’ and then on ‘Flavors’. If you have more than one blog registered, select the blog you want the colour applied to, click the colour and then click ‘Apply Flavor’ and it is done. There is a good selection of colours and they certainly improve the integration of the widget into the colour schemes of my blogs.

I am now looking forward to the extra categories that are being promised. I think this should lead to an improvement in my clickthrough rates, which are continuing at the rate of a handful a day per blog. In fact when you consider how open the system is to abuse at the moment it is amazing that the click-through rates are as good as they are! Of course the fact that it is new and that people are still aware of its presence in the sidebar might help to balance the abuse out somewhat.

One of the improvements that John Reese announced on income.coms blog today was that manual reviews of new blogs would begin shortly. If you haven’t signed up already it might be a good idea to sign up now to avoid any possible backlog which could occur once the manual review procedure begins.

I found this very comprenhensive post about how to start out marketing your blog on Problogger.net - How to market your blog in 2007</a>.

I think it’s definitely worth a read. While the information is excellent it’s also a little daunting as I realise how much more work needs to be done.

It’s a simple idea. I read it on BlogsForMoney.Com and I’m just passing it on. If you’re like me then you’re probably your own best customer: You visit your web-site more often than anyone else, checking comments, for maintenance purposes or just for the sake of naval-gazing.

The accuracy of Alexa rankings are disputed. Whether or not they give a truly accurate representation of the popularity of your web-site, a good Alexa rating is more than helpful if you want your site to be recognized as having ‘made it’. This increases the property value of your site and makes potential advertisers more interested in you.

Alexa ranks your site by the number of times that it is visited by people with the Alexa toolbar installed. So install the toolbar! Every little helps! When you visit your own site you help to improve your score. Also encourage your friends and visitors to your site to download the toolbar, just like I’m doing now!

(Edit: September 26. It’s early days yet but since I downloaded the toolbar two days ago I now have a ranking on Alexa. Admittedly not a good one (6,073,354) but at least I’m registering a score now whereas before I just didn’t exist. In addition to downloading the toolbar I also installed an Alexa widget on this blog. This seems to have made the difference to my ranking since I have used my browser with the toolbar to visit my gardening and personal blog the same amount of times that I visited this one but so far this is the only one that has achieved a ranking. Each time the widget is downloaded Alexa registers a hit so that seems to be the biggest

Blogrush continues to be one of the new hot topics among bloggers trying to increase their traffic. With the widget installed on my blogs for a week now I am starting to get a better picture of its effectiveness.

The first thing to be aware of is that the statistics offered by Blogrush themselves are not accurate and in fact are understating the number of clickthroughs from the widget.

According to the Blogrush dashboard I have received no clickthroughs from the widget whatsoever. However when I look into the stats on my blogs I get a different story. Referrals from widget.blogrush.com now account for ONE THIRD of all referrals to my personal blog. Referrals to my gardening blog and to this one have been lower. Only one or two in each case.

My own unscientific explanation for the difference is that my personal blog fits neatly into the ‘Personal Diary’ category whereas this and my niche gardening blog are languishing in the very broad ‘Computers and Internet’ and ‘Home and Garden’ categories respectively. Once the categories are adjusted I would expect to see an improvement.

Since my personal diary is doing so well as it is, I can hardly wait for the promised removal of cheaters. I have seen a few of them myself by following links on the widget and search as hard as I might I couldn’t find any trace of a widget on their sites to link to anyone else.