Archive for April, 2007

03 Apr 2007

Evilliate links

Posted in Work | 3 Comments

Get it? Evil-liate links (affil-liate) :sad:

it took me about 30 mins to re-shuffle my affiliate links and get them looking like this:

Pretty cool, eh? There are a few more, but they are the main ones i’ve used so far in posts. So to the untrained eye, all of those links don’t look like affiliate links. Plus, they are easy for me to remember (as i created them) and they cancel out any risk of being thumped by Google for over-affiliating/spamming.

So if you haven’t used this evil strategy for affiliate links, do it. I can’t think of any negative effects it could possibly have.

For those of you too lazy to compose your own re-direct file, here’s the code i used… just add your own affiliate url and rename the file to whatever you want.

<html>
<head>
<title>Text Link Ads</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=50174″;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=50174″>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href=”http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=50174″>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>?

03 Apr 2007

Referral Links..

Posted in Work | Leave a comment

Firstly i’ve got an RSS readership of 21 now, my highest ever ? :lol: So i must be doing something right. It’s a great confidence booster as it tells me people think my blog is half decent and worth reading once in a while. More subscribers also add more value to this blog in terms of pagerank, link value’s etc.. so the bottom line is – the more subscribers the merrier. Screenshot Below…

feedburner.JPG

Anyway, onto other things..

My referral links, for example to text link ads, auction ads… are all standard referral links (i.e. www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=50174). But i’m not happy with that. It’s always been nagging me. Firstly, i believe a lot of people don’t act on links they know are referral links like the above. It’s human nature. Why would they want to see me earn more money on the back of them? Now most people, probably don’t even notice a referral link or know what it is, so it’s only a small minority of people i’m talking about. Anyhow, i’m going to change my referral link’s urls by adding seperate files under my own blog extension (smemon.com).

So rather than www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=50174 it will be something like www.smemon.com/go-tla , so i’ll create a file named ‘go-tla’ and then add my text link ads referral into it. So i’ll basically be disguising my referral links. John Chow has adopted this tactic and i’ve been thinking about it for a while so i’ll just do it. It also looks cleaner and tidier and could possibly improve the site SEO wise as there are rumours search engines don’t like a site with too many referral links as it sees them as spam. Whether or not that’s true is another matter (it certainly makes sense), but it’s a risk none the less. For the sake of an hour’s work, it’s worth doing imo.

So once i get a bit of free time, i’ll start adding seperate files for all of my referral links.

02 Apr 2007

risky or just stupid?

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One of my readers, quite rightfully has highlighted the fact that i’m giving up on an above minimum wage job to go back to about $15/week currently working online.

Not many people would do that, because they couldn’t afford it above all else. I estimate i can ‘free-wheel’ for about 3/4 months without stopping for gas. In other words i can go for that length of time without earning anything. If i give up in May, that would take me to about July/August. Assuming i earn a few bob for various jobs here and there (like designing sites for relations, doing a bit of IT upgrading for them), i should be able to survive until September; College time. At that stage, i could well be broke, beaten and severly damaged confidence wise having failed miserably with BeerChief.

But somehow i can’t see that happening. In may be broke in terms of cash flow – yes. But i think i’ll be running a site worth a few grand at least. In fact, i’d go so far as to say i KNOW i’ll be running a site worth a few grand. Provided, the market doesn’t collapse overnight, there will be a demand for BeerChief if ever it goes up for sale. I know from experience, i’ve watched social networking sites go for thousands over on sitepoint. Nothing special, php fox based site. A semi- brandable name maybe and a few thousand members. Bang – $15,000 in the back pocket. Probably cost $1000 to put up.

But i’m not making BeerChief to sell it, if you offered me $50,000 for it right now this second, i’d refuse. Money isn’t an issue for me at the minute.(although i doubt i’ll be saying that much longer). If i got $50,000, i’d only re-invest it in more sites :smile: that’s the stage i’m at. I believe in my ideas and want to see them through. No amount of advice or criticism will stop me :twisted: . BeerChief is the first big one, so ignore the rest of my sites as they pale in comparason. BeerChief is judgement day as far as i’m concerned. If it fails, i’ll have to re-shuffle and take a step back for a while.

02 Apr 2007

which city?

Posted in Work | 2 Comments

I’ll be heading away for a few days in the summer with the girlfriend, to a top european city. I’ve being doing a bit of research on some and adding a few to shortlist. I’ve narrowed it down to:

  • Helsinki
  • Stockholm
  • Amsterdam
  • Lisbon
  • Rome
  • Zurich

Zurich and Rome are both very expensive so perhaps a bit of a waste. (i’m not a millionaire yet).

I could sources flights for peanuts to Amsterdam. So it’s the cheapest out of them all.

Helsinki and Stockholm are places i’ve always wanted to go to for some reason. So if the price was right, we could well be heading up there as there. Lisbon is the girlfriend’s choice, even though i feel there’s nothing in it only sun and beaches :roll:

I suppose Rome is the top choice in terms of things to do. All the hotels are ancient 16th century, crumbling messes though, which i hate. If only i could find an ultra modern steel skyscraper hotel in the middle of rome…. :mrgreen: To makes matters worse, the old city centre hotels cost about €300 a night :roll: So the cost and quality of hotels in rome is putting me off.

If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to add your suggestions :lol:

02 Apr 2007

March Earnings…

Posted in Work | 4 Comments

Having bagged $73 in February (shortest month of the year), i was hoping the extra 3 days in march would see me hit the $80 mark.

Not the case. In fact, i’ve gone backwards. Total revenue for March was $69 :???:

But looking at the statistics, it’s easy to see why and although my revenue has dropped, i’m continuing to raise click through rate through testing new ad formats.

march-adsense.JPG

The above are my adsense earnings for march – $58.59, plus i’ve earned just over $10 from text-link-ads. So in total, $69.

Quite simply, the impressions aren’t there. Last month, i had almost 25,000 impressions, this month it’s at just over 14,000. So a HUGE dip in traffic. There’s a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, one of my big 4 – roykeane.net has been delisted and de-indexed by google. Massive blow for me as about 80% of the traffic was from google. It was listed no.2 on google frontpage for ‘roy keane’ (which gets about 8,000 searches a month). Needless to say, that’s where a large chunk of traffic has gone.

Secondly, JPEGr was recovering after collapsing under it’s own weight. It was out of action for a few days and hasn’t really been the same since. But i’m determined to keep working on it and get it back bigger and better than ever before.

Thirdly, I have to admit i was pretty lazy in March for some reason. I’ve been working more at my day job than normal, plus i’ve been taking days off here and there to go to football matches and shopping etc with the girlfriend… So i’ve probably been neglecting my sites a bit too much.

But with 5 weeks left until i become a full time blogger, things can only get better. Quitting my day job will make or break me. If i can’t put in the work then, i never will. So a disappointing month last month, but i reckon i can top it easily in April. Things have started well with $15 in text link ads already. Add in the $5 in adsense so far (yesterday and today), i’m at $20 already for April (two days in).

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