AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

This week I earned $35.44 bringing my total Internet earnings to date to $114.21. The largest component of my earnings this week were sponsored posts. I am only signed up to one of them so far, SponsoredReviews.com, but based on the $19.50 I got from them this week I’m signing up for more of them! I’m still waiting to be accepted into PayPerPost.

When you join SponsoredReviews your blog is automatically graded by an average of its Yahoo link count and Technorati and Alexa ranking. Once accepted you set the price that you want to be paid and then you go searching for advertisers willing to pay that price. When you find an opportunity you’re interested in you place a bid on it and then wait for the advertiser to accept or reject the bid.

The most frustrating part about SponsoredReviews is that, while some advertisers are quick to respond, others are not. In fact sometimes they never reply. Since I joined this week I have applied for 25 opportunities. Three of those were accepted and two were rejected. I’m still waiting to hear from the others. Once you are accepted for an opportunity you have seven days to complete the review. In theory I could have a lot of writing to do if all of those opportunities were accepted tomorrow!

The next best earner this week was Commission Junction where I got $8.74 from affiliates that I promote on my gardening blog. This isn’t so great really. That is the first money I’ve earned from Commission Junction since I signed up with them eight weeks ago. In fact I was beginning to think there was something wrong because whereas the clickthrough rate was always pretty good there never seemed to be sales.

An unexpected bonus was $5.77 I got from Irish Opinions. When I checked my account today I found this credited to my account. I don’t know what it was for because I only participated in one survey this week and as it turned out I wasn’t eligible for that one so I wasn’t able to complete it. Since on another occasion I wasn’t paid $3.60 for the first survey I participated in I’m willing to accept this amount as good karma!

Adsense performed poorly this week, 86c down from $5.56 last week. This is probably mainly due to my gardening blog not performing well this week. I’ve really neglected the advertising of this and it’s starting to show. I went into Adwords and made some adjustments to my $1 a day campaign but I will have to do more work with this if the Adwords is going to make me a profit.

I got 47c from Amazon.com! This is the first time I have earned anything from my affiliate account with them for six weeks. Interestingly the item I received the credit for wasn’t one that I promote but the fact that someone bought it after entering the Amazon site from my referral link still counted for me.

Finally I got 10c from Helium. At least the figure is still going up but it clearly will be a long time before I receive the $25 minimum to withdraw funds!

Overall I was happy with the week. $35 is the most I have earned from the internet in one week to date and it brought me over the $100.00 mark for my total earnings. Strangely I found earning my first dollar on the internet to be more of an event than my first $100.

I didn’t intend to do it but as it turns out I have adopted different ways to promote my various blogs. I have mainly gotten the word out about this one by leaving comments on similar blogs. My main traffic source for the gardening blog was via Adwords. The gardening blog also receives search engine traffic but that has happened by itself. Since I started promoting my new Blogumnist.com blog at the weekend I have been using social media sites. For my personal diary blog, I have taken no special measures at all and have just let nature take its course.

My launch of Blogumnist.com at the weekend was my first use of social media web-sites in a serious way and now, after it, I see what all the fuss is about!  Submitting your articles to these sites is a great way to get noticed. My experience from the submission of my post about how I quit my day job to blog breaks down like this:

Stumbleupon brought the most amount of hits, but it did so in a very concentrated way. My submission to Stumbleupon brought me 83 unique visitors in 50 minutes and nothing after that. The next most valuable source after that was Reddit. My submission on Sunday is still bringing me traffic today. It’s a more prolonged and steady flow rather than the rush that comes with Stumbleupon. Next after Reddit was Sphinn.com. It too is bringing a slow, steady stream to my site rather than a surge. Apart from those three sites the rest of the social media sites, including Digg, where I submitted my posting only brought a handful of visits.

Of course it depends on the article too. Another I submitted yesterday from my personal blog, a humorous one about sheep was taken up well on Reddit but hardly received any notice at all from the other sites, including Stumbleupon. The flow of traffic from Reddit on that occasion was heavier; just over 100 in the space of four hours. I am still getting visits from Reddit today to that post but nothing from the other sites I submitted it to. Someone else took it the post and put it onto a discussion forum which has been bringing me more visitors today.

I came across a good script on Monday which is pasted below. Paste this code onto your page where-ever you want it to appear and it allows your visitors (or you) to submit your post to the major sites as well as many of the others. It is much simpler and less cluttered than pasting all of those social media icons to the bottom of your posts. It might be worthwhile having a couple of direct links to the most important ones and using this link for the rest, just in case:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js” mce_src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js”> </script>

This week I earned $29.51 bringing my total Internet earnings to date to $70.29. Whereas it’s much better than last week (75c), I’m aware that it’s artificially inflated by a $25 bonus I got from Widgetbucks for signing up. Apart from the $25 from Widgetbucks, the rest of my pile came from: Adsense, $2.99 ($11.94);  Irish Opinions $1.42 and Helium, 10c ($2.73).

My gardening blog continues to perform the best and I think it is the one at the moment with the most potential. It gets almost all of the clicks from Adsense. The low CTR of this blog here meanwhile is good proof of the received wisdom that blogs about making money and blogs about blogging are not the best ones to make money from.

While the gardening blog is getting at least something from Adsense it is still underperforming. I am continued my $1 a day Adwords campaign targeted at the United States. The keywords are targeted at people who are specifically looking to buy gardening products and the ads are prominently displayed on my blog. While traffic is still low, between 20-30 visitors per day, my Statcounter statistics show that they do spend time on the site, browsing posts.

It puzzles me why these visitors are inclined to click on the Adsense ads but not on the other affiliate ads. Amazon, for example, has registered only one click for the last three/four days despite having more prominent ads than Adsense. My other gardening affiliate, which is promising 20% commission on sales, has more prominent ads again and usually only registers one click per day and no sales, despite having exactly the kind of items that my visitors are looking for, as well as being a recognized and reputable online dealer.

I think it’s time for me to get serious about Adwords and work out what people mean by long tail keywords and negative keywords. So far I am using keywords that say ‘buy this’ or ‘that for sale’. Strangely since I started using these keywords three weeks ago I have received nothing from Amazon whereas before when I had more general keywords the Amazon aStore was performing better.

I signed up for Widgetbucks because it was new and also because of the $25 sign-up bonus. Unfortunately none of the categories suit any of my blogs so I have taken the widget away again. Nevertheless I have made a couple of referrals to Widgetbucks. Hopefully the widget will suit their sites better than it does mine!

I did the online survey for Irish Opinions just to give them a second chance. I did a survey for them three weeks ago which they never paid me for ($3.54). They haven’t replied to my e-mails about this. When I completed this latest 15 minute survey about alcoholic drinks the $1.42 was immediately credited to my account so I’ll just accept that the previous $3.54 was lost in space. I still think they should have replied to my queries though.

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.