Archive for February, 2007

Well, im jumping the gun a bit here, but there is only 12 hours left in February for me (adsense is on american time ).

Anyway, i doubt i’ll get $300 worth of clicks in that time so i’ll do a summary for you guys now…

February on the whole was my best month so far. I’ve grown theleavingcert.com (all-be-it slowly) , i’ve established JPEGr and got a steady flow of traffic to it, likewise with roykeane.net. I’ve blogged about everything i do on this blog and in doing so made a few friends and contacts…

Traffic has improved from January by aproximately 12%, and CTR has improved by about 0.5% which may seem small, but is quite a large amount. Therefore earnings in adsense have obviously increased… last month was $47.59, this month should finish at $71. A $24 increase.

Here’s the total adsense earnings for february (with 12 hours to go)..

But that’s not it For the first time ever, i’ve received revenue from other sources.. in the form of text link ads.

Ok, so it’s not much, but it’s a start! Hopefully next month, i can add more sites to TLA and earn a bit more..

So the total revenue this month for February is $73. Considering all my sites crashed for 5 hours and my main site was out for almost 2 days, i’m very pleased. I predicted $80, so had my server not gone belly up, i would have achieved that

So my best month so far, now i can look forward to March. With 3 extra days, i should beat February’s earnings easy

It’s been a mixed few days for me.

My host (dreamhost) pulled the plug on it’s entire network for about 5 hours with very little notice. JPEGr went into freefall, being down for about 36 hours and is still struggling to recover… Before the crash, figures were rising steadily and it was touching 300 unqiues a day, now i’m back at 150.

Have a look at JPEGr‘s last 5 days:

Now have a look at roykeane.net‘s last 5 days…

As you can see,contrasting results

On the other hand, this time last week roykeane.net was nowhere to be seen in google SERPs. Normally, 80% of it’s traffic comes from google so i was royally flucked.

Now, however, it’s back in google and listed higher than ever in .co.uk and .ie extensions. Almost hitting 100 unique hits a day, 80 unique’s from google

I said before i’d quit my day job last December..

Then i said i couldn’t and would stick at it until the summer…

So i’ve now penned in late May as my latest target. So about 12 weeks to save. At €250/week, i could net €3000. Obviously i can’t save all of that as i’ve a car, leisure club membership, pay parents rent etc..

But i could save €1000 without much stress. That would keep me going for about 6 weeks. I could live off my savings for another 6 weeks, giving me 3 months to put the foot down as an internet entrepreneur.

Then i’d be off to College and getting grants for rent/travel expenses etc… so i should be able to get by from what I earn online.

My websites are worth about €2-3k so by wheeling and dealing, i can free up some funds to invest in new projects.

I’m already setting aside funds for BeerChief. I need approx $1000 and i’m half way there. So once may comes around, i should be in a position to work full time on BeerChief and firmly establish it. 6 months work on BeerChief and i’ve no doubt it will be worth $20k+

So i suppose it’s a case of having the balls to work full time on the net for nothing for at least a few months. Do i like a challenge? Hell yes. I’m determined to pull BeerChief off and live off the net for 2-3 years minimum. So come late May, i should be at home, working for myself.

I already spend 30-40 hours a week on the net so the thought of spending 60+ hours on the net a week is frightening, but great

apparently, dreamhost added a very restrictive throttle to JPEGr. (thanks for letting me know )

Like i said in an earlier post, it was time to get nasty with them and confront them.

I did, and they’ve removed the throttle

In fairness to Dreamhost, i’ve never had issues with them up to now…. none of my sites have been down for more than a few minutes.. Their entire service (including their own homepage ) was down yesterday, they were undergoing major changes.

So i’ll stick with them as they’re cheap and offer good bandwidth and storage. But any more outages like the recent one, and i’ll have to switch hosts

It’s always annoyed me that i can never insert smileys into posts like i could do in forums for example.

I had to either memorize code or else go googling for wordpress smileys.. but now, i’ve found a new plugin..

It allows me to insert all the main smileys into my posts, just like i would in a typical forum post.

The plugin is available here.