make money

great new ad network for blogs

Last week, i stumbled upon this new ad network called ‘performancing ads‘.

I liked the idea - they make it easy to control your own button ads using their system and take 0% in return So you can still sell button ads privately through your own blog but use performancing ads to host the images and put an expiry date on them. No trying to remember who paid you what for how long or what ad belongs to what advertiser… performancingads makes it easy and takes nothing in return for you using their service.

So not surprisingly, i signed up - i’d be an idiot not to. I said i wanted to try and monetize the blog and this would make my job so much easier. Along with the free hosting service, they also have a marketplace and this is where they make their money.

You can choose to sell ads in their marketplace which will appear on your blog. You can set the price, however performancing ads take a 40% cut of whatever price they sell for. That’s a pretty steep cut, but then again it means you get 60% of ad revenue through the marketplace sales and 60% of something is better than 100% of nothing

At the minute, i haven’t sold any ads, but i have put one of my own ads on the sidebar. I can continue to sell ads privately, if i wish, retaining 100% of revenue. But it does mean more work for me and for the sake of a 40% cut, i’d rather let performancing ads handle the finances, management of ads etc…

They also have an affiliate system, offering you $10 per signup. That’s a pretty good offer as the product itself is 100% free and 100% useful to any blogger or site owner that runs button ads. I find the site itself, however, is too simple. There’s not enough information about the program on it and there’s no mention of the $10 affiliate payout on the site itself - i had to dig deeper for that.

But overall, it’s definitely worth signing up for if you run button ads on your site or if you were thinking of doing so.

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monetizing the blog

I’ve seen first hand the sort of traffic a fairly straightforward blog post can drive. Although every post i make isn’t going to get 20,000+ unique visits, i’m pretty confident i can come up with one or two of those sort of posts per month, every month.

The site will have to start paying for itself though… there’s no way i can afford to take on a dedicated server or even a VPS until i know the blog can pay for it. So this week, i’m going to focus on monetizing the blog…

I’ll be joining a few new publisher programs, placing button ads on the sidebar, perhaps a leaderboard ad in the header etc… The site has already gotten 530 visits today, there’s still about 16 hours left in the day for analytics to count - so that means i’m in trouble

If the site does happen to go down again, i’ll be moving it temporarily to BeerChief’s dedicated server whilst i try to come up with a better solution. I do have a shared server at both lunarpages and dreamhost and also a dedicated server at lunarpages, so i’m not exactly stuck if ANY of my sites or servers were to go down

The fact i’m being forced to even consider upgrading to a bigger, better server can only be a positive thing though. I do feel restricted now in that i’m almost ’scared’ to write ‘made for traffic’ high quality posts again… so it’s important that i get some ads on the blog and let it pay for itself…

I’ll be updating my advertise page yet again and placing some image ads in the sidebar, sitewide, to start off.

another day at the office…

When i woke up yesterday urldwarf.com didn’t exist - the name, the logo, the script, the design… nothing.

Less than 12 hours later i’m receiving a $110 BIN bid for it

It took 180 minutes to complete, cost $16 in promotion and domain expenses, so all in all it means i earned $34.67 for each of those 3 hours i spent working on it

The sale comes off the back of a $100 imagehostme.com sale and a $140 sawurl.com sale both last week.

This thing started out as a ‘challenge‘ but it’s in danger of turning in to a war. Me -v- Me. How much can i make? how quickly can i make it? Can i beat last weeks income? can i set a new monthly record income?

I’m now at a stage where i can quite obviously make money creating websites if i try… that’s very comforting for me, especially at a time where i’m at my most stretched financially (with all my cash tied up in online projects - the vast majority in BeerChief).

Re-investment is key and as you seen last week with my .me buys - i’m ALWAYS looking to the future. So despite all these sales, i don’t really think of the money - i try to get rid of it ASAP before i spend it offline on stupid things. By ‘get rid’ of it of course i mean invest it wisely

It’s taken 2 years and a lot of work and learning, but i can finally say that i can now easily create a site from scratch sell it for a price that’s well worth my while.

Not only that, but i can do it in style - although nothing sensational, my logos and site designs recently have been very web 2.0 and very stylish and it’s really noticeable when my sites go head to head with similar sites up for auction.

I know for a fact these sales of mine are gonna spur some of you readers on a bit and make you say, “well if he can do it…” - but it’s not as easy as that. First of all it DOES take money despite what people will tell you. For example, i had to spend $16 on urldwarf.com before i got anything - no guaranteed i’d EVER get that $16 back - i had to be prepared to lose it.

Although it’s small money, you also have to be prepared to lose your time and morale if it doesn’t sell. So despite the easy picture i might be painting, it’s not all fun and games and you need patience, confidence and skill, plus *some* money

Anyway, bigger and better site to come and i’ll roll another one out today - don’t know what it will yet

improve on last week

This week i’m going to try and beat the $181 profit i made last week from flipping new sites.

I *did* make $181 profit, however i spent $200 on new .me domains - they’re an investment rather than a short term thing. So most people would look at that and see it as $200 ’spent’, but it’s investing… it’s not as if i’ll not get anything back for those names.

Although i really could have done without spending $200 on domains, i firmly believe the domains are worth more than that and will be worth more than that in the future. How much? - i don’t know. So it’s $200 wisely ’spent’ in my eyes.

In order to keep up my 3 sites a week challenge and keep the cash flowing in, i’ll need to produce more sites, more ideas. I’ll also be busy this week working on BeerChief stuff - we’ve slacked off these past couple of weeks (on BeerChief) but having said that we’re well on our way to delivering v2. This week i hope to get some solid dates for v2 and once that comes out, i’ll be back working on BeerChief non stop, preparing for a public launch around September.

I’ve also got a date of August 14th for my maths repeat exam which is just over 3 weeks away. Loads of time left, but i was expecting longer… it really does cut the summer short as it means i’ll effectively be in ‘college mode’ from the start of august when really i shouldn’t be until the start of september. Although this is only one exam and i’ll easily pass it, i’ll still have to sit down, cover all questions, prepare myself mentally for it…

There’s much more pressure now than there was first time around, plus i’ll be going in to an exam which i haven’t had any formal class/lectures or preparation for in over 4 months. So i’ll be going in with what i’ve taught myself, which at the minute, is nothing

But don’t worry, i’ll be well prepared on the day and the only reason i’ll fail is if i don’t show up. It’s a nuisance i didn’t want, but it’ll give me a headstart on everyone else (in maths) plus i’ll be determined to pass all modules first time around next year.

Anyway, once this week is over, i’ll put together some stats and figures and we’ll start to get some idea of the amount i’m earning per hour on average when making these sites. This will be the third full week i’ve been making and selling sites and although some of them haven’t sold, it’s been pretty successful to date.

The War on Blogs

The blogosphere has turned into a war zone.

It’s a face off between Google and Bloggers who get paid to blog.

There are bloggers who are caving in under pressure, waving white flags before it all kicks off, and for the rest of us, we face a long, lonely, wait to see what Google throws at us next.

Will it be a pagerank bomb which destroys all pagerank and resets us to ‘0′? Will it be a nuclear de-indexing which wipes us all out from the google index? Perhaps ’shoot on sight’ policies if we rebellious bloggers go near anything Google - gmail, adwords, google earth… who knows Google have the power and the technology to wipe out whoever they want, whenever they want.

On this side of the border, our leader is John Chow - a breakaway blogger who’s managed to succeed without google and force them onto the backfoot. For many, he is the chosen one, our leader. He symbolizes freedom, anti-googleisation. We also have Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe and PayPerPost - our training academies for our young ‘paid to blog’ recruits.

First blood to Google however, they’ve launched the Pagerank missiles and injured a few of us bloggers. We can either surrender now, before things become bloodier, or else we can choose to stay and fight this battle for our children, our beliefs, our wallets and paypal accounts

I for one am willing to ‘index:follow’ my way to blogging death and to the day Google have me battered, beaten and packed off in handcuffs to Yahoo or Msn.

The white flags may be out, but i ain’t goin that easy So what are you gonna do? What side are you on? Are you gonna let the Google sergeants bully you back into G-world or are you willing to make a break for it over the G-fences with us?