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A few days ago I talked about making money with mini sites. Whilst I am still looking to make money using this method, my priority at the moment is still to monetize and promote Blogging Tips and if I have more time, I want to start getting Electric Bandits off the ground.
One of the most effective ways to promote a blog is through social media. Although I’ve read lots and lots of articles on the subject, I still consider myself a novice in social media promotion as I have found it difficult to become active within these sites. To be perfectly honest, I find it time consuming and I don’t like requesting votes for my articles. Most of the bloggers I know buzz me for diggs and stumbles frequently so clearly this is one important aspect of getting traffic from social sites.
I logged into my Google Adsense account today and out of curiosity, checked how much money it had made me since I started using it. I was really shocked. Apparently from June 23, 2003 to November 3 2008 I’ve made $289.99. I’ve never used adsense on any of my main sites but I still thought that I had made over $1,000.
Breaking Down My Stats and Puitting Things Into Perspective
For me, the most important stats on the adsense report page is the Page CTR (Click Thru Rate) and the Effective CPM. Google explains the Effective CPM as :
From a publisher’s perspective, the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the eCPM would equal $180/45, or $4.00. However, please keep in mind that eCPM is a reporting feature that does not represent the actual amount paid to a publisher.
I was speaking to John Lessnau via email yesterday about the WordPress plugin for LinkXL (which I am planning on reviewing soon). The site scans your website and looks for keywords etc but it wasn’t able to do it.
John then pointed to my plugin directory and said that one of the many plugins installed was conflicting with theirs. I pointed out that I didn’t actually have that many plugins installed and had just tried a few out (ie. most were not activated) but what did concern me was that everyone could see my plugins. I am not an expert with htaccess but I’m familar with most basic techniques. I’ve just been lazy and taken the time to hide my folders from the general public. Thankfully it is painfully easy to do this!
How to stop people viewing files in your directories
As most of you know, I recently purchased this blog from David Shaw, so you may be unsure about what direction the blog is going as I never really spoke about it in my announcement post.
First off, this blog was launched as a ‘Making Money Online’ blog and thats something I want to continue. It will not be targeted to bloggers exclusively and many of the money making methods I will talk about will not be related to blogs at all.
There are hundreds of ‘Making Money Online’ blogs on the net today. There are a few great ones but generally speaking I think that a large percentage of them are giving bad advice and most of them are not actually making money through the web, which in turn leads to a case of the blind leading the blind. There are many who subscribe to the idea that you can Fake it til you Make it which may be one reason why so many of them sell their blog before they make any kind of return from it.
Branding is a very important part of promoting a website, be it a blog, forum, online shop or service. Personally, I can design basic websites and simple logos and graphics but on the whole, design is not my strong point. I always say I’m a jack of all trades and master of nothing!
Due to this I outsource a lot of my design work. In the past I have contacted designers directly when I have been looking for a new logo but recently I have instead held a contest. The site I use for this is 99designs.
Many of you may already be aware of 99designs. It was originally the contests section in the SitePoint Marketplace but was later moved to the domain 99designs.com (your sitepoint login should work on the site). The premise of the site is simple : 99designs is a place where webmasters hold design contests and designers submit their entries and the webmaster chooses what he thinks is the best design. Thousands of designers visit the site regularly and the standard of designs is pretty high.
