AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

I signed up for AuctionAds at the beginning of October. AuctionAds displays items currently being auctioned on eBay. You get paid if someone completes an action after entering the eBay site via your link. An action is defined are defined as a Winning Bid, a Buy-it-Now or a confirmed user registration.When you sign up initially you are credited with a $25 bonus and they payout once you reach $50. Apart from the initial $25 bonus I never got anything from them.

For the first few weeks after I installed AuctionAds the statistics kept showing that my impressions, clicks and earnings were all zero. While I could possibly accept my clicks and earnings being zero I knew there was no way that my impressions being zero could be right. I sent a message to customer support about this and never received a reply.

Shortly after this it occurred to me to check the code on my site. When I did this I realized that the referral code that was displayed on my site was not the same as my referral code!

I’m still not sure how this happened. I think it’s possible that I could have been responsible myself. When you are creating the code you are first of all asked to create a campaign before you generate the code. I seem to remember that I might have generated the code first.

Even if it is the case that it was my mistake I still fault AuctionAds for (a) setting up their program to install a default referral code when this happens and (b) not replying to my request for customer support.

After I discovered this I replaced the ad with one that had my correct referral code and straight away the statistics began to show impressions. I decided that it was all my stupid fault and that’d I’d let AuctionAds run for another couple of weeks to see how it performed now that it was set up correctly.

However within a couple of days it all started to go wrong again. My statistics again started to show zero impressions. I double-checked the code on my site against my referral code just in case but everything was ok.

I have since removed Auctionads because I just don’t trust them anymore. I have basically written off the $25 bonus because I don’t think I’ll ever get a payout from them.

(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)