Blogging For Money

As the holiday shopping season nears, this is when many sites who are all about physical items like digital cameras, computers, clothing, books, and so on make a lot of their money. I think I read that 80% of the money spent online this year will be spent in the next month and a half. This is due to commission links, where if someone clicks through your link and buys a toy or something, you get something like 5% of the money spent paid to you.

Places to sign up include Linkshare and Commission Junction. You've probably clicked through one of these links at least once, if not just today while browsing for gifts!

No, I'm not another blind-faith Google worshipper. But, you gotta respect their vision. They give away free blogs and hosting to anyone who wants it (including me). I mean, all these blogs are probably sucking up some serious bandwidth. The key is, no ads! Geocities, Tripod, all those other "free" webhosts make you put up ads on your site. Blogger? No ads.

...enter Google Adsense. Now, you put up their ads for them, because you get a cut! Notice that they don't tell you how much of the actual ad revenue they keep. Brilliant, I tell you. When's the last time you went to a Geocities webpage?

Stopped bloggin' for a while. I gave up and put up some Google Ads on my site. I've gotten about 5 bucks total for the last couple months, which has almost paid for the domain name so that's good!

I actually have a Google PageRank of 4 now, which is exciting. I also notice that this blog has a PageRank of 3 too! This basically means that my links "mean" something to the search engine gods, so if I link to someone with the link "Lindsey Lohan Drunk" then when someone searches for that phrase, it is more likely that it will turn up. Very neat. This will inspire me to start posting again!

Happy Halloween Everyone. I finally get some time in front of the computer, to look at my vast lack of activity. Sigh.

Things at work have been hectic, and I haven't been walking the walk after talking the talk. The surprising thing is traffic is picking up at my blog. I've developed some good relationships with some fellow bloggers, and they have added me to their links, so I am getting some traffic from people interested in my subject. Also, it looks like MSN Search has indexed my site, which means that I am showing up in their search engine. This is great news. Hopefully Yahoo and Google will follow shortly. Google always seems to take the longest, so I must keep writing. I'm still not putting up any ads, but things are looking pretty good. Gettin back on the wagon!

Oh, I check all my blog stats by putting up a free invisible tracker from StatCounter.

Not many people online over Labor Day, I know I wasn't. My readership is steady, and I am getting a decent stream of comments. Only 2 people read my RSS feed, though. I'd like to get at least 100 visitors a day and 20 readers before I start any kind of ad campaign. There's really no point otherwise. I've discovered that my niche area doesn't really pay that well. There are tons of sites trying to sell you the best paying keywords, but after talking with some people in the area and reading some, my area isn't as hot as say, gadgets.

You can also see what's hot in the search engines currently with Yahoo Buzz. Too bad I hate American Idol.

My traffic is returning a bit now that I am posting again. I'm sure there will be a lull as Labor Day weekend comes around. I realized why I was having zero RSS subscribers - I was giving them the wrong RSS address!!! I guess what I've learned from this is that most people are lazy (me included). If something is broke on your site, chances are nobody will tell you! I fixed it, and I also found this cool plugin for WordPress, that helps you track your subscribers better by redirecting everything correctly to Feedburner. Let's try this again!

I'll be back posting soon, but for now you can get a domain for two bucks at Domains.Yahoo.com. Even if you want to stay on Blogger, you can register it and have redirect to your blogger webpage. I would've bought blogformoney.com, but it was taken.

I've been busy due to a side effect of a certain large hurricane. My family is fine, but others' are not. Craziness. My blog has been hurting a bit as a consequence, it's amazing how fast traffic falls when there is no update. My feed now has no readers. It's a bit disheartening, but I like what I am writing about so I'm not anywhere near stopping. Tomorrow is another day!

It's Monday and work stank, so today I did nothing put post 1 entry in DaBlog. I decided to check and post my StatCounter stats:

Day	Date	Page Loads	Unique Visitors	First Time Visitors	Returning Visitors
Monday	29th August 2005	86	47	43	4

Not bad! When I get to 100 unique visitors a day, I will start to think about putting up some ads.

Money made so far: $0. (No ads or affiliate links up)