Blogging With Random Shock

Not Saving Under Expand Widget Templates

2008-04-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

I've been having some problems with my template not saving under Expand Widget Templates in blogger, instead I receive a full page error message. I can save when Expand Widget Templates is un-checked.

A solution.

I've realized the problem is I've added some code to my template that blogger can't save, or produces an error page.

For me the main problem was the Google Analytics code I added to my template, once I removed it everything worked perfectly.

So if your having this same problem, you may want to check out the codes, widgets etc that you've added to your template, the solution may be as simple as a few lines of code.

Blogging your Yuwie Downline

2008-04-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Yuwie is a social network just like Myspace only Yuwie pays their members to use it.

One of the best ways to earn more from Yuwie is to refer new users, the more you refer the bigger your downline and the more money you'll make.

Earnings are based on page views. As well as the pageviews you gather, your referrals pageviews count towards your end of months total pageviews to.

So, more referrals equals more pageviews which equals more money for you.

The Bloggers Advantage

As bloggers we have some pretty close relationships with other bloggers and the trust that is built up over time lends itself to sharing ideas with each other very quickly.

So as you can see a post like this could potentially spread like wildfire.

Getting referrals is actually pretty hard, but for us bloggers the process could be a whole lot easier, the more people that share this post the bigger all of our downlines will be and we could all potentially be part of the biggest Yuwie downline ever.

Here's the instructions

Step 1: sign-up to Yuwie.

Step 2: Copy and paste this entire post (change the introductions you like) into a new blog post on your own blog.

Step 3: Remember to replace the link in "sign-up to Yuwie" with your own Yuwie referral link, you can find this web address in the control panel of your Yuwie account after signing up.

Step 4: Post it, promote it and pass it along to your blogging friends. The more bloggers that repeat this post the bigger all of our downlines will get.

Step 5: Because we are sharing this post we will all be connected in a "Blogging your Yuwie Downline" Army, it starts here and onto infinity. So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride and I'll see you on Yuwie.

*Please feel free to change the introduction before the instructions.

Join the Yuwie Army

2008-04-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

I've been looking into Yuwie for a few days now and what I've found is that they really do payout, the earnings are decent, the place is very active and the people are very informative.

But to make the serious cash you're going to need an ARMY of referrals.

So that's why I've started the Yuwie Army, I have a plan of attack for this service and it should really payoff.

I'm looking for just 5 dedicated people to sign-up under me (every things free by the way) through the banner above. My mission is to multiply our referral trees by 5 on each level all the way to the tenth and beyond, that's where the real money is.

That means every individual referral only has to refer five new people to Yuwie, not a lot of work at all.

And by the tenth level you should have nearly 10 million referrals.

Here's a great example for you to project the numbers.

For a detailed look at the numbers take a look at my blog post on Yuwie.

If the Yuwie Army achieves it's mission of multiplying by 5 on each level all the way to level ten and beyond, we could each possibly be sitting on $30,000 plus a month in earnings.

What are you waiting for join the YUWIE ARMY now.

Yuwie wont make you rich, well...

2008-04-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

...unless you know how to use it.

I signed up after a long time of avoiding it, I thought it would be full of nothing but spam, judging by my first impressions I was wrong.

You could say Yuwie is much like Myspace and you'd be right, though there's a slight difference, Yuwie is actually useful. Every other page I encountered on Yuwie was packed full of information, videos, blogs all seemingly written by actual real people, unlike Myspace which seems full of junk.

I'm actually excited about using Yuwie.

What's Yuwie all about?

In a nutshell it's a social network, just like Myspace, you can add your friends, meet new people, blog, add photos and videos, leave comments, join groups and a whole lot of other features. The one major difference with Yuwie is they pay you for using their service.

Now there seems to be two different camps when it come to making money with Yuwie, there's those who add as many people as they can as friends in hopes of getting their pages viewed, which will earn them money.

Then you've got the recruiters.

The friend adders I feel would have to be at it 24/7 to make any decent cash, so the best option to make money with Yuwie would be to become a recruiter, this involves getting as many people as possible to sign up to Yuwie through your special referral link and then teaching your referrals to do the same. This way you earn a percentage of what your referrals make and you also earn a percentage of their referrals and then their referrals and so on 10 levels deep, by this time you should have a network of hundreds if not thousands of referrals and you earn a percentage from all of it.

As far as I can gather having an army at level 10 has the most earning power.

So if you want to make money with Yuwie, sign-up and start spreading your referral link any where you can, friends, other social networking sites, forums, blogs, anywhere and advice your referrals to do the same and to advice their referrals to also do the same and so on.

Otherwise if your not into making money with it, use Yuwie as you would any other social networking site.

Chitika really is as good as Adsense

2008-03-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

I'd put off using Chitika for awhile mainly due to their recommendation that your site should have more than 10,000 page views a month, I've been exceeding that for awhile now on some of my blogs, so I started implementing the eMiniMalls code and nothing happened, I wasn't making any money, so I went back and adjusted my tags to relate more specifically to my blogs, once I did that I started making just as much as I would have with adsense.

The great thing is, I'm still earning the same with adsense per day plus I'm now making equal that with Chitika, I've doubled my earnings in that respect.

The other great thing is Chitika pays through paypal as well as checks, I choose the paypal option as the minimum payout is $10.

My experience so far is that if you're earning with adsense you'll likely earn with Chitika, most probably about the same amount, and with their low payment threshold and payments through paypal, way more convenient than adsense.

Paid to search deal

2008-03-11T03:41:00.000-07:00

I just signed up to the best of my knowledge a pretty newish paid the search program called "My Search Funds", now they say they're partnered with Ask.com so it seems pretty reliable, but I think the program is to new to see any proof of payments.

So here's the deal, when you sign up you're asked to install a browser add-on which replaces the search box in you internet browser, when you use this search box it counts your searches which in return earn you a few cents per search (well pence I think they call it, British money). That's all you have to do, use the search box for your daily searches and earn cash, the search results are provided by Ask.com.

I've been using it a few days now, doing my routine searches, a couple dozen searches in total and have made pretty good earnings, works out to a couple NZ dollars. I've worked out that if I just use it for my daily searches I should make 20 quid a month from what I've seen so far, that's about 60 bucks NZ cash.

The only problem now is if they pay, haven't seen any proof of payments, but that's probably due to the long wait periods and the program being pretty new.

UPDATE: Earnings are calculated on My Search Funds once a day, so you'll have to wait until the daily update to see how much your searches have earned you.

There have been rumblings of payments been made, but I'm guessing that because the user base may still be small and not a lot of people are eligible for payment yet due to the age of the program not a lot of people have been posting "proof of payments" online.

Though on the other end, I haven't seen anything about people not getting payed.

My guess is that by April 15, the next payment period, the user base will be enough that people will be on a rush to post their "proof of payments" online or shout "they don't pay".

So it's still early days and I'm going to keep using it, well because 100 searches is equal to a couple pounds in earnings and that ain't bad at all, that's about 6 bucks NZ money.

Privacy Policy

2008-03-05T18:28:00.001-08:00

Privacy Policy for http://randomshock.blogspot.com/

If you require any more information or have any questions about our privacy policy, please feel free to contact us by email at randlet211@hotmail.com.

At http://randomshock.blogspot.com/, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by http://randomshock.blogspot.com/ and how it is used.

Log Files
Like many other Web sites, http://randomshock.blogspot.com/ makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons
http://randomshock.blogspot.com/ does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

Some of our advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on our site. Our advertising partners include Google Adsense, Commission Junction, Widget Bucks, Adbrite, Clickbank, Azoogle, Chitika, Linkshare, Amazon, Kontera.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on http://randomshock.blogspot.com/ send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

Google Adsense as a third party vender uses the DoubleClick DART cookie to serve ads on this site, it enables them to serve ads based on your visit to this site and other sites on the internet, which will provide ads relevant to your interests. You and other visitors can opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

http://randomshock.blogspot.com/ has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. http://randomshock.blogspot.com/'s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.

Project Wonderful Thoughts

2008-02-17T22:40:00.000-08:00

I tried out something called Project Wonderful the other week, PW is an advertising network, you can buy and sell advertising space across a network of sites and blogs, what you try to do is outbid the advertiser that is already filling an ad space you desire, if you outbid them you'll take over that ad space for as long as you set it for or until someone else comes along and outbids you. You only pay when you win a bid and only for how long your ad is served.

I tried it as an advertiser.

The directory of sites you can choose isn't really that varied, the majority of sites seem to be for online comic strips, but I found it great for a few of my blogs topics. What I found interesting is that literally most of the sites have very low bids, maybe 10-20 cents each and with the amount of sites you could possibly buy a lot of cheap advertising pretty fast.

I tried out a couple cheap bids along with a higher bid, I did get traffic from all of them, though not a huge amount, but what I'm thinking is that if you buy a lot of ad spaces the traffic will ad up.

The statistics for the publishers sites was also pretty cool, they have daily and weekly estimates of traffic for each site in the directory along with graphs showing bid performance and previous traffic reports over previous months, it gives you a sense in knowing how an ad of yours could perform.

I haven't used PW to try and sell advertising space on any of my blogs yet, but I'm thinking about starting soon. Even with small bids on your ad space, if you can fill em you could regularly make a couple bucks a day and even more if your in demand.

What led me to PW was that I was looking for a cheap easy alternative to adwords, and it's certainly cheap and easy, still got a few bucks in my account and I can withdraw that back into my paypal account anytime I want as long as it's over ten bucks, I can even use money earned from selling ad space into buying more ad space myself.

It's a very flexible easy and cheap service to use and actually pretty fun, I never knew how big the online comic strip niche was.

Time at the Races

2008-02-15T02:34:00.000-08:00

With betfair you can play the horses live, while the action is on, place your bet and be part of great fun that is horse betting.

I've never been to the track myself, the closest I have gotten is placing a bet and watching the race on Television.

I think it's a pretty interesting idea batting on the horse online, all the races forms at your fingertips, ease of placing a bet and the ease of collecting your money, but as with any betting, you may come away empty handed, the thrill of the race should still be there.

Betfair also has bonuses for signing up and winning and also by referring your friends, they also have a number of other opportunities for betting such as sports, poker.

The site is very extensive and is frequently updated with all the latest betting opportunities.

Whenever I decide to have a bet I usually bet small but I really get into it even though I have little on the line and it's always such a thrill when I win. I usually try to follow my brothers lead as he is always winning, he doesn't play much but when he does he wins, trifectas and stuff, that's really exciting.

A Noobs Formula to Affiliate Marketing

2008-02-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

In my first attempt at promoting products from Amazon I concentrated on a small niche, had a pretty good conversion rate, the market wasn't that big though and the commissions weren't that great as the products were in the price range of about $5 to $20.

It really was my first test, the formula seemed to work, so I repeated the formula again slightly different though and this time I concentrated on a product worth around $500.

Today it payed off, I sold my first targeted $500 product, commission to me about $30.

The thing is I don't think I'll be selling this product on a daily basis, I've only been getting traffic to this page for about two weeks now so only time will tell. I'm repeating the process again with another product but I'm still in the promotion stages.

All three have pretty much the same setup.

Product research - I try to find things I like and that I can talk about without getting bored.

Affiliate Research - Finding programs that fit really well with your product choice. Amazon is well known, but what I've realized is that there are many more affiliate programs out there that are willing to pay me a better percentage for the same products I can find on Amazon. With my second test, along with Amazon ads I have a pay per lead program running, when a user clicks through from my site and fills out a form I get payed $1 for the lead, it's converting pretty well, it's offering something for free and there's little effort on the users part.

Keyword research - I try to find the most non competitive keywords/phrases I can, but also have at least some daily traffic, I use this tool to gauge it. It presents a list of alternatives to your main keyword along with daily traffic estimates, that's handy in itself, what's better is it also uses Google trends to gauge traffic and competition for the keywords/phrase, just click on the little bar graph graphic next to a phrase to get the results.

What your wanting and what I find doable is a phrase or bunch of related phrases that have competition under 60,000 and for it to pay off, traffic estimates of at least 60ish.

Less competition equals easier promotion.

Just make sure the phrase you choose is what you'd think most people wanting to buy your product would use.

Building the site - Title it your best found keyphrase, the URL should be the same, sprinkle your found keywords/phrases throughout your site within meaningful content. Make sure you content is geared towards your chosen product but not just selling it, make it interesting, fun and informational, and because you also like the product you chose you should be able to talk about it all day long with glee.

Make your site visually appealing and easy to navigate as well.

And don't add any ads yet.

Promotion - Mainly link building, this should be the same old stuff, link trades, social boomarking etc, basically gaining links that use your keywords/phrases as anchor text and/or surrounding text. Because of your research in finding a low competition phrase it shouldn't take to long to rank within the first few pages of results, if not the first.

And Finally - Once your placement has settled down in the search engines and your seeing steady traffic, start adding the ads and test test test.

So that's basically my formula, it seems to work and I'm rolling with it for the time being.

It's free and easy, it just takes a little time to get setup, I definitely won't be making mad cash with just a few of these sites floating around what I'm hoping is that with a hundred of them I will.

I'm already making money online doing this

2008-02-06T05:23:00.000-08:00

I've been trying some new things lately, namely finding affiliate programs and products to promote. In the past I've relied heavily on PPC programs such as adsense and paid to post programs such as .

The thing is I've gone off doing paid to post deals some what, even though it's really good money, I find that I can never find assignments that really relate to my blogs involved.

And PPC programs, the amount of money I'll make will increase as the traffic to my blogs increases, so it's just a waiting game with PPC programs.

That leads me to promoting affiliate products. I've had some pretty good success selling products for amazon, especially taking into account how much traffic my affiliate site gets, I think in 5 months I've had a total of 2,000 visits to that site, not much at all, though it's a very small niche and wouldn't expect much more than that. The thing is I've made a total of $1,442.95 in sales for amazon with my cut being $73.21.

I make about 20 sales a month with traffic to the site being about 400 visits a month, that's a 5% conversion rate, which means 5 out of every 100 visitors buys something through my site.

The product I'm promoting is something that I think the only reason anyone in their right mind would be searching for it would be to buy it, so that works out great.

The niche is so uncompetitive that I pretty much dominated the search engines for my keywords over night, but I only targeted it because I knew there was a trickle of searches for the keywords I was concentrating on.

What I'll do differently though is to research alternative affiliate programs, what I found with my test product is that Amazon were the only place selling it and frankly their commission rates suck.

At the moment I have a page that is ranking well for a few choice keywords, what I like to call a "buying phrase", the only reason people would search it would be to buy it. Because of this I've been looking for Affiliate programs to promote on the page, I know I won't find it on amazon, so I've been using Affiliate networks to find products.

Affiliate Networks bring together a big number of affiliate programs, programs selling anything from cellphones to ebooks.

Here's the networks I'm using at the moment.

Shareasale - Huge list of programs, I find pretty much anything I'm looking to promote.

Commission Junction - Good collection of programs, though I've heard if you're not active they'll close your account.

Join Pepperjam Network today! - A pretty new network, not as many programs as the above two, but super cool looking.

- Just signed up to these fellas, quite a few programs to promote, they had what I was looking for and after a day I'm already making cash, $1.00 a lead and I've made a few, see how it goes.

So at this point I don't actually know what I'm doing, all I know is there seems to be huge potential in promoting affiliate products, for example you have a home loans site and you rank number one in google for the term "home loans" and you find an aff program that pays $300 per lead, say a signup form, why not promote it on your home loans site and make bank. Huge example and I'm no where near going to compete in that niche, but you get the picture.

Niches and news

2008-01-30T19:06:00.000-08:00

Been awhile since my last post here, nothing much has been going on, traffic is slowly sliding up on most of my blogs, what I've found is all I have to do is post to them regularly, lol just kidding, kind off.

As a blogger I'm pretty slow at putting what I know into practice and at the moment I'm going down two paths, one is what I've been doing the whole time, just blogging about what I like, the only difference being is concentrating on new stuff to the net, for example a new video that appears online that no one has written about that has the potential to become viral, I'll blog about it, gain some quick links to that post and appear first in google for the keywords and when the video catches on I'll be there to reap the benefits, well until someone else gains more links than I do.

The second path is finding niches to sell affiliate products in, these are low work sites, set them up and forget them, but for me I'm trying to find topics that interest me so I can write on a regular basis, but the main emphasis is catering to a buyers need.

The niches I've found so far are very tiny and specific, low traffic, with very low competition. I know this works because I've been selling amazon products through a very small site in a very small niche with maybe 20-30 hits to the site a day. The niche is so that the only reason anyone would be searching for it would be to buy it.

And finding similar type niches to explore isn't that hard at all, you just have to do your research and think outside the box, sure I'd love to be selling HDTVs but imagine the work involved in trying to compete in that market.

ScratchBack Tips, Gice a tip, get a link

2007-12-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

Seen these ScratchBack widgets popping up lately so I thought I'd give it a try, the widget is just to your right, I don't expect to get any tips, but I'll leave it up as an example.

If you have a paypal account, buying a place in "Get In My Top Spots" is easy as, click it sign into paypal, pay and your all done, your link should appear in the widget.

I've tipped a couple sites and the process was really easy, though the selection of sites to choose from at the moment isn't the best, but I'm guessing that once the user base increases the market will become pretty competitive. It also seems to me that most people are opting for the autobump option, where your link slides down the widget and eventually gets bumped off the list. They also have daily, weekly and monthly options available and you can set you own prices, I've set my widget up for $5 for a month.

Other than that I don't know to much else about the service, seems like an interesting idea though.

Is Entrecard traffic any good?

2007-12-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

I've been using Entrecard for a few days now and the traffic sent from them is pretty decent, checking over my google stats it's number 5 on my traffic sources.

The traffic has mainly come from I guess people searching for sites to advertise on, I haven't bought many advertising spots myself, taking things slow. My feeling is that traffic would be next to useless as they are probably looking mostly for if your site is worth their credits.

The whole deal reminds of sites like blogexplosion so far, I guess once I have enough credits to buy ad spots on some bigger sites I'll get a good picture on if it's worth the time.

My advice for Entrecard is to move slowly once you've signed up, all my ad spots were full within minutes of signing up, 5 in total all worth 2 credits each for a days advertising, I've been rejecting them ever since and now a days advertising on my blog will cost you 22 credits a day.

Take it slow, because it looks like the sharks on it already know the ins and outs of it, kind of taking advantage of the newer users, though not in a mean way.

Three kinds of traffic and how to monetize it

2007-12-17T17:07:00.000-08:00

What I've found is all you need is traffic to make money online, varying forms of traffic mind you. Most of the examples below deal with traffic from search engines and not referrals from other sites, but if you can find sites that give similar results to search engine traffic, all the better and please let me know lol, though they'd probably be niche specific.

Three kinds of traffic.

First is what I like to call "all traffic" this is all the traffic coming to your blog, if your blog is focused then "all traffic" is "targeted traffic" this would be greatly suited to contextual advertising like Adsense and because your blog is focused any traffic you get would likely be interested in much of the rest of your blog and the targeted ads displayed.

Second is the age old "targeted traffic" this is traffic that arrives at you blog because of your focus, a post you wrote or a specific topic. Targeted traffic works well with adsense on a site wide level, targeted traffic also works wonders on post level with affiliate and referral programs, for example if you write a post about a product e.g chewing gum and you have an affiliate link in there that sells chewing gum and the traffic you get to that post wants to buy chewing gum, then you've got yourself a winner. The thing is that traffic came because you targeted it and you did your research to make it happen.

Lastly for now is "long tail traffic" this is traffic that would come under "all traffic" but is not specific enough to be hugely "targeted traffic", it could work well with adsense but probably wouldn't be so great with affiliate and referral programs, mainly because you haven't targeted what they are looking for. The upside to this is if you notice a pattern in you long tale traffic you can write a targeted post concentrated on it and turn it into targeted traffic, adding in a few aff links or what not, if it suits it that is.

How would you go about getting these types of traffic?

All Traffic - You get this traffic as you keep on keeping on. Keep your blog focused and the rest will be a lot easier to achieve.

Targeted Traffic - Takes work, research and testing. Research your keywords, competition, get targeted backlinks to your posts and blog, then look into how you can monetize you efforts.

Long Tail Traffic - These are happy accidents in my opinion that you can turn into targeted traffic sources.

So there's three kinds of traffic that you can monetize, do it, increase it, repeat it and make more money online.

Web Hosting Search

2007-12-17T16:55:00.000-08:00

I was looking at web hosting awhile ago for side project and with all the options available I spent a lot of time looking for the right host for the project, it got a little out of hand as they all said pretty much the same thing.

If I had of known about http://www.webhostingchoice.com things probably would have been a lot easier and definitely faster. With Web Hosting Choice you input what you want to spend plus what you needs will be and it'll bring up a list of compatible web hosts along with the info you need and a rating system. It's pretty in depth and their database seems huge.

Hard month in blogging

2007-12-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

It's been a hard month keeping on top of my blogging world, mainly due to my split focus between blogging and work. After a shift at work I just can't think, my brains a mess and every attempt at blogging ends up a draft.

I've missed my earnings report and it's put me out a bit, though I do know in total I've made just over $2000 blogging, that's the whole time I've been blogging though.

I'd have to say that things have plateaued big time, that's not a bad thing, it just means I'm not improving and with my lack of enthusiasm to do sponsored posts what I'm left with is increasing traffic to my blogs to earn a passive income, and in the end it'll be worth it's weight in gold.

Sign Builder Online

2007-11-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

At BuildASign you can build any number of signs online and have it made and delivered to your door.

There looks to hundreds if not thousands of sign designs to choose from, sign categories range in topic from holiday signs to safety signs and once you've chosen one that suits you, you'll be taken to the sign editor which works much like a word processor software, very easy to use and fully featured. All that is left to do after that is to order it and have it sent to you.

Sort by Cheapest, Save Buckets

2007-11-28T03:27:00.000-08:00

This seems like a cool way to shop for that particular piece of tech you may be looking for, it's called Save Buckets. Type in a product you want, say a laptop for example and it will sort related products based on the best and cheapest price. Another example is MP3 players, the cheapest I saw was around 5 pounds, I didn't even know you could get them that cheap.

Addicted to PR

2007-11-19T17:44:00.000-08:00

It has been a really hard month trying to make money online for me, first the PR reduction then the no PR at all for my main blog, though I now have oodles of PR3 blogs, which I am unlikely to do anything with for the time being.

The thing is even though a lot of these PR based money making programs can make small time bloggers loads of cash, myself I'm just a little sick of em all, I found myself searching for ways to increase PR, find the best ops and found myself adding filler content to accommodate payed posts.

I know it's different for everyone, but I just got a little addicted to it all, the quick cash, making more than I ever did and feeling successful because of it.

Though I will likely continue with these programs, I will not focus all my energy on them and probably will not expand any further into this way of making money.

I'm going old school, though it's going to take a whole lot more work, in the end it should payoff, basically increase traffic = good for targeted PPC advertising, secondly is to concentrate on an affiliate product or deal I can promote, now this is something I really haven't explored to much, apart form maybe Amazon products, I just realized there's life beyond Amazon and they usually pay better as well.

Online Casino help

2007-11-19T17:28:00.000-08:00

Think your good at poker, maybe even some black jack, but don't have any casinos near you? why not try your hand at an online casino, they're just like the real thing though I feel not as intimidating.

The site above has a nice list of online casinos, all rated and reviewed so you can decide which is best for you.

The site is easy to navigate and nicely designed with a top list of casino sites as its main focus.

I have seen huge amounts of online casino sites and I'm thinking it would be tough to sift through them and choose the one that is right for you, so having some place to go that lists and reviews some of the ones out there is not only useful but really convenient to.

Have fun while playing others online, Texas Hold-em is my game, I'm great at it on line, not so hot in real life games.

Wanna see the Digg effect in action

2007-11-18T02:51:00.000-08:00

Sure you do, so be sure to check out World Rumors, it has 6 posts in total and I'd say about same age in days, it's had more traffic in the past day than most of my blogs combined.

The post that's getting all the attention is The World`s 9 Weirdest Natural Phenomena, not that unique, but digg users seem to really love these types of things, I'm also guessing that some digg users are taking the images the wrong way, I'm more along the lines of illustrative not accurate, but the digg users are kicking up a little fuss about the tsunami image.

I wonder what it feels like to get dugg.

WidgetBucks Referral Stats

2007-11-13T02:41:00.000-08:00

For Widgetbucks to work for you I feel you have to have the right kind of blog, me I don't think any of mine suit it really well. That being said, they do have a really nice looking ad box and if your site suits any of the categories they have, well I reckon you could be onto a winner.

Onto the referral stats, in the My Bucks section I was happy to find that I had earned a commission from my referrals, they seem to be doing better than I am. Another thing I noticed is that they have now added a referral stats thing to the main stats page, I'm hoping this is updated along with the main stats because it would be really neat to see how my referrals are doing throughout the month instead of at the end of it. Again they seem to be doing better than I am.

Widgetbucks offers a $25 bonus just for signing up, the minimum payout is $50, so all I have to is make $25 and I'll be paid. I really didn't think I would be able to reach that amount judging by how it's not the ad network for my sites, but after seeing that my referrals are doing OK I think I may be safe.

Free Business Cards

2007-10-31T17:38:00.000-07:00

One part of marketing a blog is the off line aspect, this is something I haven't really done, sure I've mentioned it to people, but I find they never visit my blogs mainly because they have to remember the address, having business cards with all your blog details on them would be great for this.

You can get Free business cards made up from vistaprint, 250 to be exact, I'm probably going to go through the process now.

It's going to be so handy having business cards to drop on people who are interested in visiting my blogs, instead of what I have experienced "got a pen?", great stuff.

Blog Round-up for October 2007

2007-10-31T01:37:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween people, if you celebrate it that is, as with most of my blog round-ups I usually get them out a little early, nothing to interesting to report, nothing comes to mind anyhow apart from the huge google PR fiasco, my main blog took a hit but most of my newer blogs now have PR, including a 1 page blog that is now PR 3, go figure.

Nothing much has changed on my blog that got hit, in fact I'm seeing better rankings and more traffic for some of my target keywords phrases.

Been a good month traffic wise for MPL, especially since nothing of mine went viral, 17,640 visits and 29,058 page views.

Strange Clips got 1,216 visits last month, I must have a nicely indexed page because I do nothing with that blog at all, maybe I should.

Earnings Report - I made a bold goal on my newest blog Game Junker to make at least $1,000 in October, well that hasn't happened at all, my offline job got in the way, more hours and not enough for blogging. Could I have done it, made $1,000 in a month, I'm not to sure, maybe if I went like a bat out of hell yea.

Earnings:

Total earned in October: $230.98
Total for September: $296.08
Total for August: $434.92
Total for July: $82.91
Total for June: $87.78
Total for May: $57.99

Total for 6 months: $1190.66

Half of that came from sponsored posts and the other half came from other types, adsense for example.

I don't know, I think I have to think of another strategy, on the plus side natural search engine traffic is increasing and so is passive income, but that could be due to the theme and that it's Halloween at the moment, though some of the keywords I'm ranking for are pretty good and I have never ranked for them before.

On another note I've recently come across a blog similar to mine in that it keeps up with the news of a certain niche, only difference is they have like 10 times the amount of posts I have and about 4 times the posting rate, for me it's a nice blog to aspire to be like.

5 things I didn't expect to sell through Amazon

2007-10-30T17:56:00.000-07:00

So I've been trying to sell products from Amazon and have made a few sales, but here's the thing most of the sales have been products I was not targeting at all.

I mean how do you go from Pencil Cases (the niche I am no longer targeting) to Aspirin Tablets. My guess is that I referred people that were on a spending spree, they needed a pencil case but also needed a few other things, as in one case where in a day I sold a pencil case along with 3 travel books about certain European countries, I can imagine they needed a case for travel and they also wanted some guides.

Anyway here's the list of 5 things I didn't expect to sell through Amazon.

5. Well this product is out of stock, Clear String Lights Set, I sold 15 units of this bugger, someone must have been throwing a party or something.

4. Music seems to be a theme though out most of my sales, funny thing is I've never targeted music at all, I can understand a few of the products below, but this thing, na a.

3. Scrap that, I don't understand this one as well, maybe they were going on holiday, needed a pencil case or something to store it in.

2. I understand this one, I have an astore where I sell similar products.

1. Sort of understand this one as well, I had no idea what the hell it was upon first seeing I had sold it, I was equally shocked at it's price, my cut $10, there cut priceless.

If you can target a product well you could probably sell a lot, but if you can target a product where people follow on with other purchases I guess that would be better, it's like targeting cameras along with batteries and memory cards, tripods etc, if they buy the one thing they'll likely buy the rest and that's what I'm gonna be testing soonish, not with cameras though.

Myspace Video Comments for Traffic

2007-10-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I woke up and checked my traffic stats like I usually do and was shocked to see that I had double my usual traffic, so I quickly looked at my referrals list and was shocked to see it was traffic from myspace, myspacetv to be exact.

What had happened was someone had linked a particular post of mine as a source of information about the video on myspace, I actually saw an increase in earnings for those couple days I was receiving myspace traffic.

The video was at the top of the video charts and that's probably why I got that much traffic. I've been randomly checking out myspacetv, nothing to in depth and I've got to say I'm amazed they allow links in comments, because the amount of spam comments seems to outnumber real ones like 3/1.

I haven't used this myself, finding videos on the top of the charts that I can add to constructively is pretty much impossible, but hey I'll be keeping an eye on it for something paranormal like I can add to, with a link that is.

ClickTale, watch your visitors in action

2007-10-28T02:36:00.000-07:00

ClickTale is a stats package with a difference, it has some of what most free stats services have, but the difference is you can actually watch how your visitors interact with your website.

I've had this site in my bookmarks for I don't know how long, but it was always in beta but after some cleaning up of my bookmarks recently I saw it was now in full swing.

It's easy to use, just sign up, set-up some easy options, add the code to you blog and I found within minutes I was able to watch videos of my visitors in action on my blog.

It's a pay service but it does have a free option which limits you to 100 recordings a week, I used my recordings up within an hour or so, I chose to record every visit but you can set it to any number of ratios.

Watching the videos is very easy and very very interesting, what I have found with the blog I have ClickTale on is that most people watch the videos and leave, the second thing I noticed was about half the people stick around to read comments and the third is only a few stick around after that.

Most of my ClickTale recordings are about 2 minutes long, but I have one that is 35 minutes long and I watched the whole thing, I watched the visitors every click what they watched and what categories they were interested in.

So far for me it's a novelty but I imagine if you were to watch and analyze each video it could be a very useful tool.

Sales Training for Success

2007-10-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

Avand has been a successful trainer of plumbers in the UK for around three years now, they have decided to expand upon this and enter the business of Sales Training . If you're successful in the area of training plumbers and being able to expand the business across the UK, you must know a thing or two about sales, so being able to pass that knowledge on could expand that business even more.

Having good sales knowledge is a skill that you could apply to many situations in life and one thing I've learned from blogging is that if you know how to get your content out there and hook people into wanting to share it, well then your on your way to success.

How has the PR drop affected you?

2007-10-26T17:54:00.000-07:00

If you were one of those hit by it, for me nothing has changed, traffic seems the same, I'm earning just as much as I was previous to the drop in page rank and my new pages seem to still be getting indexed pretty fast and all my top posts are in the same positions in google.

Should I be waiting longer to see a gradual drop in things, I'm not sure, all I am hoping is that PR doesn't become as important as it was before google decided to throw everything up in the air.

I don't know change seems to make things more fun, especially since I am only making pocket cash and don't rely on my online money making to support myself, if it's the way I feel it is, there's gonna be a whole new way to do things and for me it feels refreshing.

Garages for your Section

2007-10-25T18:37:00.000-07:00

These Sectional Garages are from a UK site that specialize in concrete garages, now I haven't seen garages quite like them before, very unique and actually pretty nice looking, I'm used to the metal ones.

Now the site has a great selection of garages to browse through along with complete lists of extras you can add on and even alternative designs making your choice of garage very customizable and unique.

From my experience the site is very easy to navigate and you can even download pdf files with all the info you want on a particular garage.

From the selection I looked at I'd have to say if I were to buy a garage and seeing that I have a small section I'd go for one in their sheds and workshops range, I've said this before and I'll say it again, i really wouldn't mind a dedicated place to store all my art supplies and tools.

PR loss for a small time blogger

2007-10-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

Well no, my main blog has gone from PR4 to PR2, though it's still 4 on some Google data centers. So what does this mean for me as a small time blogger? Well a few things.

First I have been using Text Link Ads on there and have been writing sponsored posts, the buzz is that these kinds of programs are the cause of all this PR loss, I know I'll loose money from TLA, but that ain't no biggie. The payed posts I'm not to sure on, I hope I continue to get assignments because they have been a great way to make money.

Second is probably the most important to me, I really hope I don't loose traffic because of the PR loss, but at the moment so far so good, traffic hasn't changed, for the moment anyway.

Other than the above I don't really care that I have lost PR, but remembering back on the last PR update, I lost all my PR only to have it settle down after a couple weeks to PR 4, here's hoping something similar happens this time.

Find the right Printer Cartridge

2007-10-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

I think most people with a computer have a printer, I do, but most of the time when it runs out of ink, I stop using it.
At Cartridge Finder you can easily navigate to the printer you own to see what ink cartridges it takes, what I found interesting is that one type of cartridge can work with multiple kinds of printers, it looks a lot easier finding what you need at cartridge finder than being faced with the assortment one finds at stores.

Last Rant about Widgetbucks

2007-10-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com

See my previous posts about Widgetbucks here.

So I've been trying out Widgetbucks, I see a hell of a lot of potential in it's current state and the amount you could potentially earn seems like a lot. My experience however hasn't been as profitable as I would have liked it to be, my highest traffic blog isn't really suited for the program, lousy click through rate and doesn't really have anything to offer to my audience. A few of my other blogs would really work well with Widgetbucks I think, pity they have no traffic to speak of, about 100 UV a day combined though I haven't been working on them all that much.

At this time widgetbucks seems to have a limited amount of ad inventory but I guess as time goes by this will fill up, what I have noticed is as I do some random site/blog surfing I have come across sites that have filled up their pages almost elusively with widgetbucks widgets, made for widgetbucks springs to mind, now I don't know if this is against their TOS, but say having a computer product site with decent traffic with nothing more than widgets for the visitors to click on and with the high pay per click Widgetbucks currently has, well people must be making a ton of cash, though lets see if they get payed.

I'm just bummed that my site doesn't convert very well because judging from the clicks I have had there's a lot of money to be made.

Free stuff because of your blog

2007-10-16T03:13:00.000-07:00

From time to time I receive emails from mostly TV related persons offering me free products, mostly so I can review the items on my blog or give them away as prizes.

So far I have had quite a lot of book offers and a few DVD pack offers, some pretty cool DVD packs mainly related to the paranormal. The thing is I actually haven't ever followed up on any of them, I don't know why either but I guess the main reasons are that I think they're scams, I don't want to give out my address over email, though deep down I know most are legit.

The thing I find interesting is that I am by no means a big figure in blogging, but I am in a niche where there are a lot of others but there's also not if that makes sense and being contacted with offers of free stuff out of the blue is very cool, makes ya feel important or in demand.

I can only imagine if I were a big figure in a tech related niche what kind of free offers I could expect, though books and DVDs are still pretty cool, I should really follow one up and get the stuff, I have a hankering for running some competitions but I don't want to pay for anything, a free promo product would be ideal.

Heated Garage for my games room

2007-10-16T01:24:00.000-07:00

Now I don't have a garage but I really do want one, not really to park my car at night, not even really for a place to store my tools, what I really want a garage for is a games room, a place to hang out with everything I could possibly want to chill out with.

I've hung out in quite a few garages and one thing I have always noticed is they're not the warmest of places, now a garage heater would be perfect for a garage gaming room.

Enough space for all the fun things and enough space for all my buddies, all without catching a chill.

Finally Some Results I can Share about Widgetbucks

2007-10-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

So I've been testing out Widgetbucks for a little while now, tweaking the placement and such, for me the stats on widgetbucks seem to be going all over the place, money earned on a previous day doesn't show up while later days do, strange.

I've been reading on DP forums about the nice amount of cash people have been making per click and in my various niches it's a lot better than what adsense earns.

On to my results, I had the widget placed in an area on this blog that turns out not to convert very well, just under the header, so last night I moved the widgetbucks ad to the right sidebar and it's converting much better. All up I've had 6 ad clicks and have earned $1.66, 4 clicks came over night with the placement change, 2 clicks over about a week and a half with the badly placed one, so I'm hoping to see some more results tomorrow.

Comparing this to what I make with adsense I need at least 5 times the clicks to make the same amount, so if I manage to get the same amount of clicks that I do with the sense I could be looking at 8 bucks a day.

Though I hear people were getting more per click in the beginning and that the per click average has reduced over time, hopefully it stays at the rates it is now or similar, my average is 28 cents a click.

I had auction ads in the place where widgetbucks is now and with auctionads I did used to get a lot of clicks, so here's hoping. All that is left now is to get to the minimum payout and see if they pay, though with there payment process it could be another month before we see reports of people getting payed.

Download Norton Anti Virus for Free

2007-10-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

Norton came with the computer I have but with any computer you buy you could end up with a different one installed, my version wasn't full, it was free but I had to buy a subscription for it to be fully featured. If you want to free download norton anti virus you can do so at the link, it's absolutely free for a limited time and fully featured.

My last computer didn't have any virus protection on it and it pretty much got devoured by all sorts of nasties, which made it very difficult to get anything done.

I feel it's pretty important to have virus protection on any computer you have.

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Widgetbucks Impressions

2007-10-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

So far I'm not to impressed with Widgetbucks, they are new so I'll give them that, but I haven't been able to gauge if they are worth my time, either the stats aren't updating or I haven't had any click throughs, though I have had a lot of impressions.

My thoughts are that if you do well with sites like Amazon or Auctionads you'll do pretty good with Widgetbucks, all my blogs that do suit this kind of thing don't have the traffic yet to show any real payoff, I'll give some more time just to see what the potential earnings could be.

Cash Advance and Pay Day Loans

2007-10-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I may need a cash advance if I feel like I haven't earned enough with my day job or if I have a few unexpected bills show up, getting a small $100 loan shouldn't be to hard.

Getting Payday loans over the Internet should make the whole process a lot easier, apply for a loan, get accepted and the money will be instantly transferred securely to your checking account.

That's were Cash Advance 1500 comes in, they offer information on some of the top cash advance sites, you can get a loan from $100 to $1500 over the Internet, instant emergency cash for those unexpected moments. They do not require credit checks but employment and income are factors, repayments are based on your next pay day, so interest is not a factor but small fees sometimes apply.

For those times when you need a little extra quick cash, cash advances can be a great way to achieve this.

Update on Widgetbucks

2007-10-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on how widgetbucks is going for me, I'm still getting used to the interface but the stats page seems to be updating, though there are a few warnings saying things along the lines of "reporting currently delayed" and such, but the impressions part seems to be about right, though no clicks so far so I can't report back on how it's earning for me.

I'll keep y'all pasted, I still can't believe y'all seems to be a word.

XML Aficionado blog

2007-10-08T19:08:00.000-07:00

The XML Aficionado blog covers most anything related the XML (Extensible Markup Language). Aficionado blog is run by Alexander Falk, the CEO of Altova, Inc.

Alexander's blog uses a classic blogger template which some maybe familiar with, the posts are packed full with well written useful information and not just about XML either, there is useful info about any number of tech related news and some Red Sox thrown in as well.

While reading it I came across a post about a service I had given up on and well from his post I just found out that they had added a feature that I wanted all a long so I may give it another go.

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Trying out WidgetBucks

2007-10-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

After reading about Widgetbucks a little I decided to signup and give it a try, mostly because I saw a few screenshots of earnings and it looked like they were making a pretty good amount.

So with the outlook being that of milk and honey I signed up and added the widget to a few of my blogs, they have a few different ad unit sizes you can use which should fit into most blogs, they also let you choose if you want the unit to show contextual ads or you can choose what category of ads you want displayed, so far the contextual option doesn't seem to be showing anything related to my blogs, but it may take time to build up or something.

It's a PPC system, so you get cash each time someone clicks on the units. They pay through paypal or check about a month after the previous months earnings with a minimum payout of $50, though you get a $25 bonus yourself just for signing up, so your half way there.

They also have a referral program where if you send referrals you get 10% of what they earn for a whole year.

I only started with widgetbucks last night, took me about ten minutes to set everything up, very easy implementation and the ad units look pretty snazzy to, though for me the widgetbucks site is pretty slow, I'm also not liking the way the stats are updated and from what I've read it takes awhile, so it seems like I'm going to have to wait a few days before I get a good picture of if it's working out for me.

Worth a try just to see if it could be a good alternative to some of the other PPC programs out there, I'll post again once It's run its course a little more.

Tattoo Dating

2007-09-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

One of my first blogs ever was about Tattoos and I knew the body modification community was pretty big, I got out of that game because I knew I couldn't offer what people wanted to see.

But with sites offering tattoo dating for tattoo singles I now realize I should have stayed in it, the links above are for a dating site specifically for people with tattoos or some kind of body mod, the site is nicely designed with great imagery and easy navigation, even if your not looking for that special someone, browsing the pics will give you loads of enjoyment, even if you're not into tats.

Blog Round-up for September 2007

2007-09-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

So it's that time again to look back on the months activities, wasn't a very active month, I'm actually having trouble remembering if I did anything significant.

I think there's two things worth mentioning, one is my Amazon Affiliate products site, I'm taking things slow with it so I can fully analyze what it's doing, along with most of the sites competing for the same key phrase it keeps jumping around all over the place, if I do some link building it'll jump onto the first page of results but will slowy go back down, if I update it'll jump to the first page. What I think I have to do with it is to, well, update and build links, I'm guessing that when I have just enough it'll have stable search engine placement. Most of the competing sites don't seem to be link building, but they are proper sites and probably optimized nicely.

The second thing worth mentioning is that I have gone on a quest with my new blog Game Junker, the quest is to own the ultimate gaming system by the end of the year using only money earned online. Before I started this I didn't really have any kind of a goal with what I wanted from this whole making money online thing, I have roughly a grand all up so far coming my way in the next two weeks, but I'm using that to pay off most of my debts and any new money made online will go towards the quest. I need about US$3,000 to fulfill my quest and I hope to achieve this by the end of this year, so I better get cracking.

Traffic Report - Not much to say, MPL is my biggest traffic getter, but I haven't been able to increase what I usually get daily, one thing I have noticed with topic of the paranormal is that the common words have loads of competition, though not as much interest as I thought they would have had and the jump in traffic from the main keywords to long tail and sub-niches is pretty substantial.

Earnings Report - I wanted to make about $400 for September but wasn't able to achieve this, only a hundred bucks off that goal though and was my biggest month without the bonus I got in August.

Earnings:

Total earned in September: $296.08
Total for August: $434.92
Total for July: $82.91
Total for June: $87.78
Total for May: $57.99

Total for 5 months: $959.68

A large chunk of my earnings came from payed to blog programs, namely Payperpost and payu2blog, the other major chunks came from my regular monthly earners which bring me in about $30 each, namely Adsense and Textlinkads. I think it's time to get a regular plan in place for the Payed to Blog services and also concentrate on gaining loads more traffic, time to get going and hopefully I'll have a better month to report on next moth.

Dell Computers in France

2007-09-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

Dell desktop computers seem like a very nice and easy way to get yourself a customized computer, call them up or build one online, mix and match your ideal computer and get is delivered to your door.

Or you can get one of their package desktops, ready made for any number of uses, they are also a world wide company anywhere from France to New Zealand, Dell seems to be every where.

I myself haven't got a Dell, but seeing some of the television commercials, they do seem to have some great deals with some of the cheapest prices I've ever seen, especially from where I am.

Sick of widgets

2007-09-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't tried out Blogrush yet even though in seems to be the new hyped up blogging thing at the moment. To tell ya the truth I'm over this whole blog widget thing, I've had a mybloglog, blogcatalog and a few other widgets throughout my blogs for a long time now and I have to admit I don't use any of them, I found that I couldn't keep up with the extra time it took to be involved in the services.

Though blogrush seems to be more of a set it and forget it type of thing, I just can't be bothered taking on something that is the "new pink" of the blogging world. I'd rather just visit other blogs directly and leave comments, by far the most interesting out of blog networking and I think one of the most effective, it's back to basics, no fluff, core networking.

Ranty rant over, no facts here.

Retail Job Growth

2007-09-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

Retail jobs are on the rise. Retail is one of the largest industry segments today, estimated to currently employ 12 percent of the workforce according to the US Census Bureau. Additionally the retail workforce is growing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the retail workforce is expected to grow by 10 percent over a 10-year span to a total population of 11 million (2004 – 2014). This growth indicates vast opportunities in retail jobs, including retail management jobs, retail sales jobs, retail customer service jobs, retail loss prevention jobs and the list of retail jobs goes on. With all the growth in the retail industry, job seekers who are considering a retail job have the benefit of choice when it comes to the type of store to work in as well as the job. If you or someone you know are looking for a job in retail, check out www.RetailFit.com, an online job board focused exclusively on retail jobs ranging from management, hourly and part time positions from the nation’s top retailers.

Propeller the new old Netscape.

2007-09-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

So netscapes changed things around majorly, netscape is now your more traditional news page, while the social bookmarking aspect has been moved and is now known as Propeller, it seems to be exactly the same as the old netscape though all the PR juice has gone.

When it was Netscape I had a profile page there that had a page rank of 5/10, I'm pretty sure it would have gone up next PR update.

Time to start over I guess, though I've noticed an increase of votes since it changed over, but that could be due to having kick a$$ content, highly unlikely.

Need a good place to eat in London?

2007-09-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Trusted Places is a site where you can share your opinion on just about anything that involves the hospitality industry, this includes bars, cafes, restaurants, shops and many other places. It's a user generated guide on whats worthy of your visit, you can even discover places to eat that you may have not known about, suggested by users such as yourself.

The great thing is that it covers the whole world, you could be in London looking for new London restaurants to try out or you could be from anywhere in the world maybe on your way to London for a visit and want to get a good idea of what's good.

I really like this idea, I find that when I'm looking to buy something I drift more towards the user reviews to get a good idea of what a product is like.

You need back links for everything!!!

2007-09-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

The one thing I hate most about trying to be a successful money making blogger is link building, yet it is one of the most important in terms of google search engine referrals. If you want each and every post you make to be at the top of the results for your keywords you need links from other sites pointing to it.

From experience I know it's hard to create content that loads of people want to link to naturally and one workaround to that as you may know (I talk about it a lot) is social bookmarking sites, they only get you so far though and if your submissions haven't taken off pretty much instantly on those sites you can pretty much forget about people discovering your links and linking to them that way, but at least you'll get a few back links from the social bookmarking sites themselves.

The few times I have been at the top of such sites the back link benefits have been pretty good, usually driving such posts to the tops of search engine results and keeping them there.

In my recent activity of trying to rank well for a few choice keywords I've come to realize even in pretty uncompetitive niches that you need more than just what the quick fix solutions can offer and at the moment I'm kind of stumped about how to go about it, I know the age of these blogs could be a factor, to young, but I just don't see a way to build links with the topics I'm concentrating on, one could be seen as spammy, but it's not, the other just doesn't seem to have a community to back it up.

I may have to go and do a bunch of directory submissions (I hate that) or something, maybe I should have thought the whole process out before jumping into it without setting my self up and knowing that I had everything in place to feed off of.

Just a bit of a Rant on my part, I know that starting a blog from scratch does take time and it does take a lot of work, it's just that I can see another couple of months of doing stuff that I have pretty much forgotten about, but hey if early estimates are anything to go by, once I am dominating these areas I should be raking it in.

To many links, lots of my time, but it will pay off.

Storage Bins and Art Supplies

2007-09-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

What would I be using storage bins for? Well or my art equipment for one, over the years it's just become a complete mess and maybe I would make more art if all my equipment was stored properly, I do have some storage, but I have more art supplies than I have storage.

I guess what would be most useful is a storage bin that has multiple compartments all with different sections for different sizes, something with open spaces as well.

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I actually made some money with AuctionAds

2007-09-12T21:57:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about AuctionAds I went really quite hard with it, loads of impressions and loads of click throughs but after about a month of testing I had yet to see any cash from it. So I ditched the program altogether.

But for the last few weeks I have been adding their ad units back to some of my newer blogs, mainly because they fit the niches quite well and they fit what I'm targeting.

I guess AuctionAds never worked for me in the past mainly for the same reason Amazon never worked for me, I wasn't targeting the customer, in the past I'd just throw up some ad boxes in my sidebar and expect everyone who visited my blogs to be interested in them, what I didn't realize back then was the only people interested in them were people who were actually looking to buy the stuff.

For example, someone arriving at my blog through the key phrase "man in monkey suit" is probably only wanting to see a man in a monkey suit, someone arriving for the words "monkey suit for sale" is probably interested in the ads.

It's all in how you target your visitors, having a blog full of posts that are not in the least targeting people who want to buy stuff will likely be unsuccessful with these types of ad programs.

So yea I made some money with AuctionAds, not much though, but for me the way I'm using Amazon to sell stuff seems to be working out the same for AuctionAds.

Make a survey for your blog

2007-09-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

If your into fun quizzes this may be the site for you, not only that but you can take or make your own personality tests, surveys and polls.

It seems like a fun place to use and you could probably spend hours taking other peoples quizzes, but the thing that I find most interesting about it is that you can actually make a serious survey or poll that you can use on your own website and gather useful information, the ability to put together a proper survey is what appeals to me most.

Amazon continues to sell

2007-09-09T04:48:00.000-07:00

So I've been following my Amazon stats patiently waiting for each update just to see if I've made any more sales and I have had a few more orders, I'm still shocked by it all. So far so good, the big flurry of sales wasn't just a one off and it seems to be sustainable, most of the items sold were all pretty much under the $10 mark which makes sense seeing that the items I'm targeting myself are around $10. The item I'm targeting seem to be something people will buy along with other things.

Why I find this so shocking is that it was so easy to achieve and it is repeatable, I never really thought the advise I was following would pay off.

The advice I was following was from The Thirty Day Challenge, I followed the whole thing and it really does work and you can apply it to pretty much any niche you can think of, I'd highly recommend taking on the challenge.

I feel the secret of the course is how they show you how to research and how to accurately gauge it.

I don't want to get into it to much because it won't do the course justice, it is thirty days after all, there's a couple of powerful tools they introduce throughout the course that I think should be illegal, just kidding, but they're so powerful and best of all free.

Anyway I'm off to research a few more ideas now and do it properly this time around because my half baked attempt is making me money, imagine if I actually put some effort into it, I'd be rolling in it.

A little more about Amazon

2007-09-06T06:26:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update about how my Amazon stuffs doing, all items ordered have now been shipped, all up I've made $9.71 from those items.

My sites been up on the first page of google results now for about 5 days, $10 profit ain't to bad I think.

Inspirational Messages from Karl

2007-09-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not the most positive person in the world and sometimes I need some inspiring words to keep me on track, that's where Karl's blog comes in.

Karl Moore is an entrepreneur and best-selling author who has a blog for anyone who wants to feel inspired, for example his latest post is about saving a spider, instead of instinctively squishing it, why not save it by moving it outside, myself I already do that and you know what? it does feel good.

The post mentioned above is for Karl's regular Monday post "Random Act of Kindness" and he also has another regular post called "Friday Factoid".

So if you need a little spiritual pick me up I'd suggest checking out Karl's blog.

I don't understand Amazon but it works

2007-09-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

I have no idea how amazon works, I've been logging in everyday to see if I have made anymore sales, but it seems that it takes ages to update, I even clicked some of the links myself and no update for a couple days.

Today was different though, I was expecting a few more link clicks than usual because my affiliate site has moved to the first page of search results for my key phrase, what I wasn't expecting was to have 21 ordered items staring me in the face, my site has only been on the first page of results for about 4 days and if this is the result I can expect I am one happy man.

The thing I don't understand is that all but one of the products ordered are not what I'm targeting at all, shipped vs ordered must be different as well, I'm only seeing earnings for shipped items. I'm also pretty happy with the percentage I am getting, I was expecting a much lower amount than what is shown, $94.84 revenue equals a $5.70 cut for me, I'm happy with that.

In trying to work out what went down, I've figured that one person bought 3 items, one person bought one item in bulk totaling 15 items and the rest are separate purchases.

It's quite a shock to me, I've been signed up with Amazon since I started blogging, maybe two years ago and up until a couple weeks ago I had never made a single sale.

Once I figure out Amazon a bit and see if this wasn't just some random one off, I'll put something together on how I went about this whole affiliate marketing thing.

Can you handle the comments?

2007-09-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

We all like getting comments right, can you handle when the comments get so involved that they're beyond your control, I know I can't. I try to answer every comment I get, be it from responding to a comment on my own blog or visiting the blog of those who left the comment and leaving one of my own.

Sometimes though I leave the commenter's to their own devices, such as one post on My Paranormal Life about a movie called Zeitgeist. The comments left on this post are huge in comparison to any other comments I get, it's like reading a short story, they are very involved and it's gotten to a point where I no longer feel able to respond to most of them, I just don't have the knowledge to.

So I leave it up to those who comment on that post regularly. Quite a bit of controversy there and there's one person that seems to respond to any comments left so I leave it up to him, he's very passionate about the topic and his comments fit the controversial nature of the movie quite well.

I really wish I gad more comment action like this, it was nothing I did apart from share a video on my blog, something I need to learn is how to create on going discussions, it makes people regulars.

I know I can make at least $20 a day blogging

2007-09-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

I know I can make at least $20 U.S a day blogging and in terms of conversion rates that adds up to a part time jobs pay for me. Last Friday I set out to concentrate on doing payed to blog assignments, I did four that day one worth $25 another worth $10 and two at $5 each for a total of $45 U.S, that's about $65 here which is pretty descent.

I have enough payed to blog offers available to me and more coming in each day that I could realistically be making $20 everyday. The only problem is I like to post a couple of regular posts along with my sponsored posts, so if I can't think of a post to make I don't do a sponsored one.

I guess what I have to do is work on building up a backlog of posts so I don't feel so overwhelmed by the task of doing payed to blog offers. Also maybe working on the rep of my blogs so I get higher paying assignments offered to me and maybe getting some more descent blog and website real estate.

Lunia Fansite

2007-09-04T00:04:00.000-07:00

I think you can tell the strength of any online game by the strength of its fansites and Lunia has one such example in a Lunia Fansite, it has all the info you should expect from a fan site including videos, screenshots, guides, FAQs and what looks like a very active Lunia Forum, always a good sign.

It looks as if this game Lunia has a pretty good and active user base, which I feel is probably the most important aspect of any online game, if you have the community the game will be so much more fun.

So if want to check out the game, check out the community fan sites first just to check what the community is like.

Sponsored Post.

How much cash can I make online today

2007-09-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

So I want to record how much money I can make today online and will finish when I go to bed, I have no plan, but I'm going to start out with what I know and work into the not so known.

I will update this post as I make some cash online, strictly speaking it won't be money in the hand, I'll still have to wait for approvals etc

So stick around and see how much cash I can make online today.

Just did a post for PayPerPost = $5
Just did 2 PayU2Blog offers for a total of = $10

Been a little distracted, was going to go hard, but $15 today ain't to bad so far, lets see if I can make some more.

Edit: Time to stop, I'm gonna try this again at some point when I have a clear day ahead of me, to many distractions today. I'll just sum up things quickly total $15 from payed to blog deals, plus some income from adsense and a few other places adds up to about another $1.50 so $16.50 ain't bad.

I should have done this on Friday when I did actually put more effort in, made $45 that day.

Disclosure Policy

2007-09-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

This policy is valid from 05 September 2007

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. For questions about this blog, please contact Clip, Right Here.

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

AIMpromote lead management Software

2007-08-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

AIMpromote is a lead management CRM Software that lead aggregation companies can use to run their business from.

CRM stands for Customer relationship management, so the lead would be the customer, so it all boils down to customer management.

I could see why it would be very important to have software such as AIMpromote, if you have a large base of customers, keeping track of them all would be very difficult without a good system in place. I would imagine that being able to organize and have easy access to your list of customers would make your business more effective.

Now I'm all for software making life easier but a lot of software sometimes comes with things you don't need or probably wouldn't be useful, so I was happy to read that AIMpromote is very customizable, meaning you can grant access to only the features your sales team needs and they don't have to use valuable time learning something they don't need.

I know that at some point I'm going to need a piece of kit that will help me organize what I do online, in terms of money made, but also at some point I'll be moving into a couple of new websites that would need such a thing as AIMpromote.

Sponsored Post

Just got my first payment from Payu2blog

2007-08-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

I signed up with payu2blog about three weeks ago and from the get go they were serving me up offers like no bodies business. In about a week and a half I had completed 10 offers each worth $5 each, those 10 are what I have been payed for, I have a few that will be payed next cycle and I'm sure I'll be given a few more assignments before then.

I'm really enjoying their service, I find I end up relating to the offers I have to complete and that's how I end up writing them, from a personal point of view.

Great service, makes me feel like I have an online job.

Life as it should be. Coke Zero

2007-08-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

The new promotion for Coke zero seems pretty cool, Life as it should be lets you add your your own script to movie clips on the Coke Zero website, then you can share them with all your friends.

It's pretty out of it, type in some sentences, hit play and be amazed that what you just typed you can now hear playing along with the movie.

I like Coke zero a lot, Real taste, zero sugar and I drink it all the time, mainly because of the zero sugar part.

I've just noticed something about Netscape

2007-08-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

Maybe old but I thought it was worth mentioning, if you take a look at various member pages you'll notice each has varying Page Rank, I have a netscape page rank of 5/10, but a lot of other members pages are upwards of 7/10, 8/10, some have none and a bunch are under 5/10.

Now I know from experience that Netscape submissions get indexed by google and pretty fast as well, I'm just wondering if netscape passes along the PR, if it does could you imagine a bunch of 9/10 netscape members submitting your blogs.

I also wonder that if you get a bunch of votes your links will appear on every page of the people who voted and with the massive amount of PR around netscape who knows what could happen.

What I notice most about netscape is that I never see anyone talking about the service, it's always digg this or stumble that.

I don't know, it just seems crazy that no body seems to know how powerful netscape is.

When the big boys use your work without permission

2007-08-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

What do you do when a big company uses your work without your permission and introduces it to a very large audience, I'd probably be happy and want to share what the big boys had to say about it with anyone who cared to listen.

This is what happened to Christopher Knight of The Knight Shift, he had a video up on youtube that he produced and payed for himself, his clip then appeared on VH1s Web Junk 2.0, from what he wrote he didn't seem to mind. He uploaded the VH1 segment onto youtube, but it was latter taken down at the request of Viacom claiming that the material was infringing.

I don't really get how they can do this, they used his work without permission and then slap him in the face for wanting to share what they made from it.

My thoughts are that they know what they're doing and don't give two hoots about the little guys, sure I can see that it's some kind of commentary on Web Junk 2.0s part, which kind of makes it journalistic, which could kind of protect them from copyright infringement, but to treat the original creator like this is just rude.

So what could you do to protect yourselves from such a situation, all I know and it's not much, is that if you made it then you own copyright, it's yours no mater where it goes, though there are things such as parody, satire, fair use to think about, these could be held up as reasons by others using your work.

My thoughts are that if you don't let people know how you would like your work to be used, if at all then people could act dumb I guess. So what's a solution to this, my solution would be to point to a creative commons license, it's as simple as making it clear and linking to the license you want used for any of your work, for example

EDIT: just reading some youtube TOS action, you sell your soul when you upload to youtube

in the description field of your youtube videos write a little disclaimer about the licence and link to a CC license you want to use.

The most lenient of which lets others use your work with pretty much no restraints apart from crediting you as the source, which could include mentioning your website your name or whatever, on the opposite end you can can make things very restrictive to what people can do with your work. CC is just a way to let others know how they can use your work, I have no idea if it holds up in court.

All in all I think it would be good to get noticed by the big boys, but even better would be to be appreciated by them as well.

Taking a Beach Holiday

2007-08-29T01:37:00.000-07:00

I've never been over seas and to tell you the truth I would have no idea where to start in planning one, luckily there are services like Dialaflight who will help you plan out your beach holidays.

I've always dreamed of exotic beach holidays, I live near the sea here but the beaches are definitely not what you'd see from beach resort holidays.

I guess knowing what Cheap Flights, Holiday Offers are available would be one aspect to look for when planing a trip and one thing I like to do before purchasing anything is to do my research online, that way when you do decide to go and buy what you want you'll be in the know to what's going on, that's why such planing sites a are very useful, you'll know what you want before dealing with anyone.

When I do decide to take a holiday overseas I have a few destinations in mind including Cancun in spring time, Tahiti would be another, I need a vacation and with summer just around the corner in the pacific, nows a great time to start planning at the cheapest possible rate for a great time in the sun.

I wonder if it's summer in Cancun, need to check that out.

Sponsored Post

Blog Round-up for August 2007

2007-08-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

Just an early little blog earnings report, I know I've made quite a bit more this month than previous ones, The reason for this is mostly from payed to post services along with a couple of referral payoffs.

Traffic Report - Not much to say across all my blogs apart from MPL, got wind of a popular story and benefited from it pretty nicely, had over 20,000 visits and over 33,000 page views for august, plus I got quite a few natural back links from it.

Earnings Report - Got a referral payment from google this month worth $250, which was quite a shock.

Also been doing a good amount of payed to blog offers, seems to add up over time and the count downs to pay days is pretty exciting, gonna start seeing loads of emails from paypal saying "you've got funds".

Also been doing a little affiliate marketing with Amazon using the thirty day challenge as my guide, seems to have worked out ok, made a couple of sales now all I need to do is get better search engine placement for my site.

Earnings:

Total earned for August: $434.92
July's total: $82.91
Junes total: $87.78
Mays Total: $57.99

Total for 4 months: $663.60

Without the google bonus I would have made just over double what I did last month, I guess for September my goal will be to earn what I made for august without the bonus payouts and to explore this affiliate marketing a little more, would be nice to have that little bit of extra income.

In conclusion what have a learned in august, if you don't have the traffic for PPC services they probably won't improve until your blog does, that's why payed to post services are great to boost your blogging income.

Can't blog on a hang over

2007-08-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

Dang I've been trying to get the energy back to blog, had a pretty hard weekend. I don't mind not blogging on the weekend, my traffic dips at this time of the week and posting to keep it up hasn't ever really worked, the problem is that if I'm not blogging I'm partying and more often than not I'm hung over for Monday and Tuesday.

That kind of situation doesn't really fit well with doing sponsored posts, over the weekend I received a rather large amount of offers, if I had my A game I would have taken most of them along with writing a bunch of regular posts to go along with them, but I had to let most of them pass me by.

On another note I think it's about time that I started promoting this blog, I haven't done any for Random Shock, a few forum posts but that's about it. I've come across a few Social Bookmarking sites that are dedicated to this kind of blog, money making and SEO etc, really wish I had bookmarked them, need some back links.

Though I think this technique is probably going to get made redundant in the near future, I have no evidence apart from if you do your research and put in the effort it's so darn easy to rank well for pretty much any topic you want.

Alive Blog Directory with Benefits

2007-08-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

One thing a lot of people suggest to blogging beginners is to do blog directory submissions, there's quite a few reasons for this, a couple are you can possibly gain traffic and another reason is to gain back links.

One thing I like to see in a blog directory is nice simple, easy to navigate design and Alive Blog Directory has that, they have payed listings that have benefits that I haven't really seen before, for example, one submission can get you five back links.

As you can see from the image, it looks as if they are very dedicated to their site.

Sponsored Post

Dclickads

2007-08-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

Dclickads is an advertising and promotion service for both publishers and webmasters, they offer graphic banner ads, text link sales and inline ads and as a publisher you can specify if you want to charge by time intervals or by pay per click.

I'm going to give them a try, first impressions of the website, well it seems all pretty straight forward, a lot easier to understand than a few of the other sites I have signed up for recently.

I've had some success with text ads before and I'm seeing that the more I have going the more it all adds up, set it forget it and be assured that I know what I'll earn at the end of the month, provided advertisers want to deal with me.

Blogger Video Upload

2007-08-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know how long this has been a feature but I did see something about it awhile ago, must be in beta or something.

Anyway I hadn't noticed it before but blogger now has the option to upload videos, pretty much the same as uploading images, though after uploading you have to wait for the video to be encoded and processed.

Below is my first blogger video upload, looks like they're using google video as the host.

Two years on and Two Sales

2007-08-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

I have been an Amazon Associate for more than two years now and up until a couple of days ago I had never made a single sale, this weekend I made two sales and I put it down to loosely following the Thirty Day Challenge
.

I followed the challenge, did my keyword and competition research following the advice in the challenge and settled on a key phrase to test it all out. The key phrase I chose estimated that it would get about 250 searches a day on google and in Ed Dales experience if you set things up right you could/should get one sale per 200 targeted visits. He seems to be right about that, my traffic compares to what he has said through out the challenge, about 400 visits and two sales.

Now that I know this works I'll probably be less half arsed about it and give it more attention, though the products in the niche I chose are very inexpensive it does have really expensive counterparts, though I'll probably look for a aff program that pays better than Amazon does, for now though I'll still be in testing.

Just signed up to Blogsvertise

2007-08-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

I just signed up to Blogsvertise which is a pay to blog service, I really like the way they describe how you can write about the offers they send you, suits my style fine, especially finding a way to relate to what I am writing about, I find it brings a little but of me out.

Well we'll see how it goes.

What I think I know about Successful Blogging

2007-08-22T05:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I'm going around in circles when it comes to blogging, sometimes I understand it completely and sometimes I don't. What I am sure of is that the more you blog the more successful you will be. Learn from everything you do, failures, successes everything will add to your success.

So what do I think I know about blogging, just warning ya now this may get ranty.

Content is King, nuff said.
Your post pages are just as important as you main page, every post you make has the potential to pull traffic to your blog.
Back Links are important for every one of your pages, get links to you latest post for example.
Just because you write it doesn't mean they'll come, you may have to publicize your posts to get them in front of people by using social bookmarking sites etc, I see sites like that as places to submit little mini press releases.
Get more back links.
Interact with people, other bloggers, on forums, social networking sites etc. This is one aspect I am really hopeless with, but I see major benefits with it, for example you'll have people you can turn to, ask advice, exchange ideas, get critiques, ask favors and stuff. you know what they say, there's safety in numbers.
Be ahead of the rest, be the blogger that people turn to, though I think this is something that is really hard to achieve.
Do your research, with your posts, keywords, stats, competition.
Make money by not concentrating on it, unless it is something like payed posts, but once you get into the swing of things with those it's easy as. If it's something like adsense well that's a passive earner it will increase as your blog does.
Know how the money earning programs make you money, I have found that pretty much every other program I have use makes pretty much the same as adsense would, though I don't have enough room on my blogs to use them all.
Be organized, set up feed readers, organize your bookmarks, know of the most useful places for you.
Test things, once you know what works write it down, stop testing it and leave it as is.
At some point you'll get to when there are areas of your blog that you won't have to tweak anymore, leaving more room for posting and I feel eventually all that will be left to do is write posts, after post activities and socializing.

Not a complete list, just what I could think of off the top of my head.

Quick Rant about Payed Posting

2007-08-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

I've gotten into payed posting quite a bit lately, not to much, I'm kind of liking Payu2blog, I like the pretty liberal way you can write the posts, most of the ones I have done, I have written from personal experiences related to the assignments and I'm finding I'm writing a bit more about myself in doing so, more than I would with not doing the assignments.

I'm also finding that with PayPerPost it's pretty competitive, new offers come up and before you know it the spots are already full, though I have always got a few offers I can do.

That leaves with the other similar services that I have signed up with, not really worth mentioning, well because assignments are very far and few between.

Payed to post services have definitely given my blog earnings a major boost, with them I've doubled my regular earnings of last month, all I need now is to be payed for all of it, then I'll have more to say.

Latina dating

2007-08-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Very nice looking dating site with latina singles in mind. Very nice design with easy navigation and the profiles are very nice as well.

It's free to sign-up and when I checked it out there were a lot of profiles to browse through, if your part of the latina dating scene you should probably check this one out.

Oh you can also search for people in a very specific way, age, by man or woman and even from with-in your own area. A lot of the profiles also have photos which I think is always a bonus, you know what the person your contacting looks like.

Showing up in Search Engines fast

2007-08-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

A few posts back I wrote about how I had a post show up in google within half an hour. I was a little shocked about it, I've never seen that happen so fast before, thinking about how that may have happened I can only think of two things, either spiders had just crawled my blog or it was attributed to where I had submitted the post.

The post that got placed so fast was this one, Haiti UFO videos, the content of that post at the time was just beginning to take off and most of the other sources hadn't mentioned the second video, so I knew I had to get it out there before someone else did, so I quickly went about submitting it to a bunch of social bookmarking sites and a few other places I know about that have huge traffic.

After that process I checked out my stats to see what was going on, I was pretty shocked to see quite a few referrals from google for that post, I was actually pretty happy about it.

Why do I think this happened? Well the social bookmarking sites for sure, though my post didn't take off on all but a couple of them, the backlinks are what helped, more places to be seen and the keywords at the time weren't competitive, so I got a load of traffic from a rising hot topic.

The Secret, A few posts back I wrote something about not giving your secrets away for fear of them becoming to common, well I might as well give that away now since the Thirty Day Challenge are teaching people exactly what it is, though a lot lot better than what I was doing.

Basically what I would do is do my keyword research, competitor research and submit the post to Netscape, wait a few hours, a day at most and watch as my blog post reached top position of the search results.

With the way I was doing it if I did a search for a term I wanted to use and it yielded low search engine results I could be fairly certain that I could rank well for it with just one submission to netscape, the only problem was I couldn't be certain if the search term would bring traffic, the thing I was using to estimate traffic is pretty old and I don't think accurate at all.

I guess the other social bookmarking sites helped quite a bit, but usually I'm to lazy to go about submitting a post to a bunch of them and I find Netscape does a pretty good job of it.

Anyway if you want to try this out with the best possible advice I'd suggest doing the Thirty Day Challenge, the techniques they share are pretty mind blowing, especially the techniques that show you how to pick a key phrase and show you how to properly gauge the amount of traffic it will pull in.

Little more about PayU2blog

2007-08-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

I just got my second batch of payu2blog assignments, there are 7 in all each worth 5 bucks a pop, right now for me it seems like a lot, especially for the blog I'm using them on.

You can set the number of assignments you would like to receive, but just as a test to see if I can cope, I'm gonna take all they give me, I now have 10 assignments, all up I'm gonna make $50, and well next week I'll have another batch.

How I plan on tackling them is to post a regular post each time I do a sponsored one, it'll certainly make me write a post everyday.

Payu2blog, Easy as

2007-08-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

So I've started using a payed to post service called payu2blog not on this blog though. I signed up using MPL as my blog, I think I tried to sign-up before using this Random Shock, but I never heard back, which tells me it wasn't accepted.

Anyway I tell you about my experience so far, I signed up with them using MPL, I was hesitant about doing sponsored posts on that blog, still am a little, but I'm gonna go with it for now. I got an email from them pretty much saying if your not serious about using the service don't go any further, the reason for this is that you have to take all the ops they give you, I left it for a day or two, I wasn't sure if I could do that, but I decided to go for it.

Once I had my log-in details, I well... logged in and found three assignments waiting for me, I've got a week to complete them and I don't think that will be any trouble, the assignments a crazy easy to do. The requirements for each that I have to complete are minimum 60 words, one link and a key phrase and that's it, easy as.

The ops are no way related to the topic of my blog, but the best thing is there are pretty much no restrictions to what you can write, the only rule is it can't be negative.

So when writing them I just add in a little paranormal theme, write personally and that's it, 60 words later and I'm done.

Oh yea each of the posts I have been offered so far are each $5.

I'll do something proper about payu2blog later, this was mainly ranty.

Fun with Wizetrade Blog

2007-08-15T11:11:00.001-07:00

Wizetrade is a stock market trading program, it helps analyze... well the stock market.

They also have a blog Wizetrade that is for them to communicate with their current and future users of the Wizetrade software program.

So the blog is not really what you would expect, it's nicely designed with a lot of useful information about stocks, the difference and I was surprised by this is that it is also some what of a video blog and it looks like the star of the videos is someone called Lindsay Hall, a market expert. The videos are delivered in a very fun way, one that I watched had Lindsay swing dancing while giving a tip about swing trades.

It's a pretty cool company blog that I was very surprised about, I didn't know the stock market could be so fun.

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Blogging is like playing multiplayer games

2007-08-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

Blog To Self

Sometimes I have moments in blogging when I get this feeling of "gee that was a good move", it's a feeling I used to get when playing video games, especially multiplayer games.

When I first started playing online games I'd enter a server not knowing what to expect, what I was usually presented with was an onslaught of expert players who would proceed to beat the snot out of me, I would stick with it though, but sometimes it was frustrating because it felt like I wasn't getting any better. After awhile though come those moments, where you start holding your own, you start getting better shots off, people start praising you and even asking for you to join their clans and eventually before you know it your an expert player to.

Much like blogging I think, at first your a small fish in a big pond, you wonder what the hell is going on and if it will ever pay off, then all of a sudden you get a huge spike in your traffic, you make your first dollar, people start linking to you etc and you get to a point where you feel you can compete and not feel so over whelmed.

With video games though there is always someone playing better, but if you keep at it you'll eventually get there as well.

I remember one game I used to play called "Soldier of Fortune" there was this one player that no matter how good I got he was always one step ahead of me, I liked that , it made me strive to be better, it didn't matter if I never got to the level that he was, the journey was worth it.

Stainless Steel Cabinet in my Home Office

2007-08-13T23:33:00.000-07:00

So where would I put stainless steel cabinets in my own home? I have to say in my home office (bedroom), I have a lot of art supplies that need to be stored and a Stainless Steel Cabinet would be ideal, though along with those art supplies I also have a lot of tools that are at the moment stored in an old dressing unit, very untidy, most of the time I don't bother putting the tools back into that and a lot of the time I loose tools, so a Steel Cabinet would solve that problem.

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Another look at VuMe

2007-08-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Just like to talk about VuMe some more, I've been making pretty steady cash by placing links from my blogs to my images hosted on VuMe. I know that if I put a little more effort into finding places where I can easily drop my image links I could stand to make a lot more from their service.

There's nothing in the TOS about disclosing such info so here's a picture of some of my earnings.

Click to enlarge - So as you can see the earnings do add up, you make $3.00 for every 1000 views your images get, I have been payed from them through paypal. All this by posting about the images on my blogs, all I need now is to do my research and find other places to drop my images.

One thing that I always wondered was how they make money from it, they only show one ad on the image pages, I'm not sure on this but it seems they promote some very profitable affiliate programs, I really hope it converts for them because I really like using their service. Before looking into this I got the feeling that they couldn't possibly be making anything out of providing this service and paying people to use it, but I see that if what they're doing on their end is converting they'll probably be OK.

My reason for this doubt is that I had used similar services in the past, no where as good as VuMe though, which worked on a cpm system for image views as well, those other sites had no regulations, eventually filling up with copyrighted material and nrop and would just disappear without warning.

Totally the opposite of VuMe, friendly place, great images, regular payments, I have read of uploading problems and such, but they have a moderation process and I haven't experienced any technical problems at all.

So all I have left to say is that there is huge potential in making money with this service, all you have to do is upload your best photos, know where and how you can get people to see them, for me only my blogs at the moment and just get hits, coz you'll know what you'll earn for your effort, it's easy to analyze, you just got to find where you can share your images. Can't be to hard in this 2.0 world.

P.S

Kind of a semi rant.

Revver CPM ads

2007-08-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Revver are testing out a new CPM feature as another way for creators to earn from their videos, they play an ad pre-roll maybe post-roll as well, not sure, on videos 30 seconds or longer, it's still in testing.

With CPM you get payed for impressions, you don't have to rely on ad clicks, this is cool because if your able to just get lots of people to see your video and it has the CPM ad you make some cash. How much can you make from this new feature? I'm not sure, it all depends on how many people see your videos, I'd be happy with $2.00 per 1000 views, it certainly makes the whole video promotion a little more worth while, especially if you put all that work in only to have your videos "not take off", you'll get what you get from ad clicks plus impressions.

The only issue I have with it is that the pre-roll ads may be a little distracting, but I don't mind if I'm making a more cash from having them.

One last thing, if you don't want CPM ads in your videos you can opt out of having them, which is cool.

Catching that Rush Hour traffic

2007-08-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

So I made a post last night about being shocked that I was already receiving google traffic for the post with-in half an hour of posting.

So it's been half a day since then and I'd like to look at what is happening while it's still hot. I came to the video a little late, most of the places I would usually submit my posts to already had the story and they were very popular to, the only problem with their submissions was that they hadn't done their research, there were actually two videos, that's why I think mine has taken off a little, people are linking to my post saying "hey look there's a second video".

In half a day I have had nearly 4000 visits to MPL, I expect to be at 5 or 6 thousand by the end of the day. Money wise, there's a little increase, but nothing to write home about, what I am happy about is the number of links this post is getting I keep seeing new referrers every hour or so, mostly from forums, but I'm collecting these forums up coz it looks like they like this stuff and they are busy forums and I can use them in the future.

So how am I looking at this, I'd say I took a story that was at the brink of being at rush hour, I added to it something most had missed and nudged my way into that rush hour traffic, though I think of my post as a skateboarder hanging onto the back eighteen wheeler.

How did I nudge my way in? I know where the highways are, sure I use the diggs and the sumbleupons, but you should never forget the old school, pre 2.0, they work great.

The traffic will die down, I will be left with a bucket load of natural links, this can be repeated as well, the only problem is I miss 99% of the time.

GothScene, dating with a difference

2007-08-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

GothScene is a dating site for the more freaky of us out there, I've never come across a goth dating site before, I have seen a few other dating sites, but this is a lot more different, for starters you can view profiles without having to sign-up which is a lot better than some of the more traditional dating websites out there.

The design of the site is what got me, it's so easy to navigate, punch in some details and presto you got a multitude of profiles to view, I got to add again, without being forced to sign-up.

You can look up goth guys, goth girls and judging by the search results there are literally hundreds if not thousands of goth minded people to meet.

GothScene is one of the easiest dating sites to use that I have come across and there's some very beautiful people to choose from.

Indexed in Half an Hour

2007-08-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

I'm a little mythed by this, I just made a post on MPL not 30 minutes ago, I think the videos I used are a little hot at the moment, the thing that has me baffled is that the post is already in number one position on google for part of its title, it's already indexed (kind of) and I'm receiving referrals from google search for it, all within half an hour.

I know that these specific videos will probably end up having multiple other blogs and sites writing about them and I'll eventually get pushed down, but showing up in google this fast seems kind of strange, never experienced that before, fastest I've ever had pages indexed is like 24 hours.

I did SB it though ;)

AdBux: Make money with a few minutes each day

2007-08-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

So I've been trying something called AdBux out for a few days, it's basically a payed to click program, your sign up, they serve you links, you click em and get payed. They pay through PayPal and the minimum payout is $10.

I've been getting served on average 10 links a day, most of which are worth $0.01 each, so I've made $0.30 in the three days that I have been using them. I don't mind it, eventually the amount will ad up and it only takes a few minutes out of the day to click a few links.

What I found interesting was that you are able to refer other users to the service and the amount you can refer is unlimited, I'm not to sure on this, but I think you can earn up to 150% of what your referrals earn, they earn $1 you can earn $1.50.

All that is required now is to get loads of active referrals, couldn't be to hard the service only takes minutes to complete each day.

Starcraft: a game I have not played, yet

2007-08-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

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I consider myself a little bit of a gamer, I've played a number of online games, but for some reason I've never played Starcraft. I have seen it around a lot and it seems like a pretty big game.

StarCraft: Brood War is a real-time strategy game for the PC, were you choose one a three species all with their own units, buildings and abilities to choose from and you battle it out against the other species, FTW.

I got to say that I get hooked on these types of games and I should really check Starcraft out, especially since part 2 is on it's way, the cinematic trailer for Starcraft 2 is absolutely awesome.

As with games of this type, the online community is very active, check out CreepColony a starcraft fan site, you also have forums, blogs, online clans (not to sure what Starcraft users call them). I think that the strength of an online community that goes with these games is one factor that makes them so fun to play.

I'm definitely going to have to check Starcraft out, I know that if I do I won't be blogging for awhile.

Adsense Referrals pay a dang lot.

2007-08-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

To date I have referred one sign-up to adsense that user is active and when they made their first $5 I received $5, I never really thought much of it, but today when checking out my account I noticed an extra $250 dollars, at first I thought it was from an ad click and I was like wtf, took me awhile to figure out it was from the referral making their first $100.

My thoughts are that if your able to refer many people to adsense the bonuses should be pretty much guaranteed, it is the most common way to make money online and most people I think would stick by their accounts and use them.

After receiving that referral bonus I took a closer look at the bonuses and the amount of money you can make from them is pretty crazy.

Here's a run down:

Adsense - When a publisher your referred makes $5 you get $5, when they make $100 you receive $250, if you can get 25 other referrals to do the same as above you will be awarded a $2000 bonus. All of this is with-in a 180 day period.

There's a few other bonuses available for other google products to.

The bonuses seem crazy as, so much money to be made, I just wish I had a few other referrals under me, anyway that $250 made my day and it just adds to what is looking to be a great month of blog earnings for me.

Blog Round-up for July 2007

2007-08-01T04:08:00.000-07:00

Time for another blog round up where I see what was successful with my blogs last month.

Well I've cut out blogging at a lot of my blogs, Embed My Video is one I still want to carry on updating, but I just figured out why I wasn't getting a lot of submissions there, about a month ago I changed the email address for the submissions form and I forgot to change it back, the email was going to an account I don't check to often and well I've got a lot of work ahead of me on that one, about 50 submissions, that's 50 posts the way I do it, rrrrr.

So posting was up a lot at MPL, but the traffic is kind of not increasing like I would have expected, in fact it seems to be decreasing, I'm not to sure why this is, most of my popular posts seem to be in the same serps places, maybe people aren't searching for the topics that much, or maybe some of my low rank pages are starting to move down in the results, gotta figure it out.

Strange clips is kind of strange, I haven't posted there in awhile and haven't done much with it, but I am still seeing about a hundred visits a day, mostly from google and a post there got picked up by a pretty big site which gave the blog some decent traffic for a few days, maybe I should get to strange clips because it was pretty easy to make posts, pretty much instant content, no thought required, on my part or the readers, just fun. I just had an Epiphany, I'll tell ya if it works next month.

You may have noticed I'm pimping my affiliate links a lot here, main reason I haven't really had much to post about here at Random Shock, not to concerned, it's just my log and I don't ever see RS taking off, no promotion at all.

So lastly what have my earning been like, I haven't been keeping track, hopefully I made more than last month.

Total Earnings for the Month of July 2007:

Total earned for June: $82.91
Junes total: $87.78
Mays Total: $57.99

Total for 3 months: $228.68

Argghhh dang errr, oh well less than last month, adsense hasn't been that great this month, made less than half what I did in June. Though I've done three sponsored posts, which ad up to $22 dollars. Another thing is I had five Text Link Ads purchased a week before the end of the month which earned me about $17, I was hoping that the advertisers would stay on for this month and they have and have already made $35 for august, great start to the month. I'm hoping to break the $100 mark in august with my and with the addition of sponsored posts, TLA and a few other programs I'm looking at I should be able to do it.

I'm also starting to think of trying to make money online without blogs or sites, I'll see how that goes.

What makes me money now.

2007-07-28T01:54:00.000-07:00

So I have let y'all know what has made me money. I think it's time to bring up some new blood and some ones that have been actually a little bit of a surprise.

I'll start off with the new ones.
Most of these are referral links.

Neoffic - Neoffic is a CPM banner program, the minimum payout is 0.50cents, they pay through paypal and e-gold, for every 1000 impressions their banners get on you blog they pay $1.50, though I saw on the site that they now pay $2 for 1000 imps. I've had their banner up for 10 days now and have made $1.50, I could request a payment right now if I liked, Sign-up was very easy and the rules are pretty lenient. Though where the traffic comes from is part of it.

Exoclick - Exoclick is a PPC program similar the say adsense, you get payed when someone clicks an add displayed on your site, sign-up is easy and they pay through paypal, check and some other ways. I can't really say what the earnings are like as I have not used the program to much and again the rules are pretty lenient, they also offer up adult ads, I mean really adult, so if you have an adult site this could be a great PPC program to use.

Now on to some of the old ones.

Text Link Ads - I'm still amazed by this service, mainly because my experience with offering up links for sale has never really worked, maybe it's working because the blog that I use them on is pretty well established. It has actually sparked my interest in using the next service I'm about the mention.

AdBrite - It works kind of the same as TLA, you create a listing, set a price and hopefully someone will purchase a spot, if not they'll place filler ads that pay on a PPC basis until someone buys a spot. They also have many other ways to make money including referrals, inline ads and interstitial ads. So I'm hoping that what has happened with TLA will also work with adbrite.

- I was pretty hesitant about using this program, mainly because I didn't think I would be able to write anything good enough to get my posts accepted, but after actually completing an offer I see PPP as a great way to make extra money from blogging, more so than a lot of what I have been using to make cash online. I think that if your just starting out in blogging, granted if your blog is 3 months old, this I feel is the fastest way to make money online.

Plus there are many other programs like PPP out there, the other one I use is Smorty, which is pretty cool as well.

So those are the ones that have my online income improving, other than that the three I have used the most are pretty much the same as last month, no improvements, that's Adsense, Revver and VuMe, the last two pretty much pay you for your content creation efforts, so if your not making new stuff you income can't really improve.

Traffic Pulling Tips - Getting traffic from google

2007-07-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

What brings me the most traffic to any of my blogs is search engine referrals, mainly google search, I used to get a lot from MSN but not so much these days and I have never really got that much attention from Yahoo search, I really have to look into what's up with that, I shouldn't really be relying on only google for traffic, especially since changes seem to be on the horizon.

The best advice I can give you on ranking well on google is to do your keyword research, figure out if the term you want to use is highly competitive, if it is able to send you significant traffic, write a nice post, keyword rich, and try and get some nice link backs to your post using the keywords, phrase you used for your title.

I use this tool to roughly gauge what kind of traffic I may expect from my keywords, something in the 30,000 searches a month would be highly competitive, something under 1000 is likely not and should be easy to take out, all you need is a few good back links with good keywords, but I only do this if I feel I can add more to what is already there with a post, that's mainly why I ain't rolling in traffic, but over time with multiple posts taking out top results the for low traffic keywords, the traffic will eventually build up.

It's easy, it works, but it takes time to build up. Unless you got a huge following of bloggers and such to spread you link like wildfire and have must see content, aiming for high traffic keywords is a dead end.

Though with all this change talk about google I may have to start thinking about MSN and yahoo.

All my Text Link Ad spots are full

2007-07-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

I've managed to fill all of my Text Link Ads spots, 5 spots in total, valued at $15 a month each for a total of $75 split 50/50 with TLA, that's $37.50 for me. Though I don't see that in my earnings report, but I think that's to do with it being so close to the end of this month.

I really can't believe it's worked out so great with no effort at all, all I can attribute this to is that I have cheap ads, not that much competition on TLA for my niche, MPL is established with PR and under 1 million Alexa Rank and that's it.

I really want to increase the number of link spots I have open, but I think I'll hold of on that for awhile, I also want a better PR and Alexa ranking so I can request a raise in how much a spot on my site would cost. So there's a few things to aim for to make more money with Text Link Ads.

Blog To Self - Concentrate on what you can handle

2007-07-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

So I think I've done it, I've stopped working on pretty much every blog I have except MPL and this one and I'm really happy about it. Everything thing seems to be going smooth and I have a lot more time to slack off and I think MPL is already benefiting from it. I'm posting to it more frequently without wondering off to work on blogs that I don't really care about or don't have the time to update, I have setup a few regular post topics on MPL so at least I have something to post on those slow news days, they utilize either my art or the time that it takes to check my feeds and daily visits, the best part is one is a regular link love post which should benefit my fellow bloggers.

Feels so good not to be blogged down, concentrate on one and do it well instead of spreading myself to thin on projects that suffer from lack of attention, it saves time and the content should benefit from it.

What Has Made Me Money #8 Smorty

2007-07-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

Just recently started getting into this sponsored post bizo, I stood off for quite awhile because I didn't think I was up to the challenge, but I dived in and it wasn't as hard as I thought it was.

I just received payment from Smorty a day or so ago for the first offer that I took up with them and well I see the draw that these services have, there are few such services around and most seem to have offers at a minimum of about $5, here's a List of Paid Post Sites.

It feels pretty good getting such a large amount (compared to what I make in a day) and at this point in my blog magnetization it could likely let me spend a little more time blogging. I just hope PPP gets back to me some time soon, it's been a pretty long time since I submitted my first sponsored post to them.

Digital Photo Frames, the conveniant way to display your photos

2007-07-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

I've seen digital frames in movies and such, but I haven't actually seen a digital photo frame in real life. It seems like a great idea and seeing I barely ever print any of my digital photos I think digital frames would be a great way to show off some of my family photos, my artistic photos and such.

Looking at some of the selections at the site mentioned above, I've got to say that they aren't as expensive as I thought they would be. They seem pretty easy to use, connecting to USB drives, taking multiple kinds of memory cards, they play video and sound and they also have multiple configurable features so you can show your photos the way you want to.

I really like the idea of a digital picture frame, saves on paper and it's instant, no having to take film to get developed, just pop your memory card in and your ready to display, great stuff.