Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As I recently discussed in my first adsense payout article, I’ve been blogging and taking a stab at the wide world of internet publishing and marketing for only 9 months. Now for some guru’s who got it right from the get go, 9 months is an eternity. They would have already made $100K by now. But for those of us who are learning as we go and don’t spend all waking hours at this, I feel breaking the $100 a month mark is a pretty good milestone.

I say this because this month I will have gone over $100 in internet earnings for the second straight month! Now a good portion of that has stemmed from my recent purchase of revenue earning domain names, about half to be exact. But aside from earnings I have learned a few things and began to shift my focus from what was originally thought to be the “right way” to pursue online riches.

First off I have seen the amazing power of networking and connections you make just by publishing content on the internet. I was “found” by an old high school (when I say old I mean 6 years ago) classmate who began writing for our blog Fueling The World about alternative energy. He runs his own site and has been a great contributor to that blog and we’ve kicked around a few good ideas and may even get a previous teacher to contribute to the writing.

I’ve also been contacted by a publishing company to review a short Golf Book that they sent free of charge. It turns out the book is rather short and feels more like a pamphlet but none-the-less, I was contacted!

I was contacted the other day, out of the blue to advertise on my Hawaii Update Site and sold and ad block on that one. I ended up selling it for way less than I should have considering the site has been increasing in traffic over the past few months, but that doesn’t really bother me. I sold ad space from doing nothing. (By the way the last time I added any content to that site was August 3rd, almost a month ago, so that was promising)

I am in no way, shape, or form, remotely close to what steve pavlina has accomplished with his single blog, but for some reason that hasn’t deterred me from wanting to continue with online publishing, marketing, and site development. Seeing him and Darren Rowse, and Jason Calacanis succeed and expand just makes me realize that I too can make this crazy internet thing work.

In my Blog Network development I would say I’m about 20% towards where I want to be. There’s a ton I want to do but don’t have nearly the same amount of time I’ve wanted to spend on blogging and development. I’m still trying to maintain 12 blogs and build traffic on all of them. I still want to add forums, redesign the sites, create a few new blogs, demolish some old blogs, and start development of 2 social/provider type websites. That’s a lot for someone who enjoys his free time in an outdoor setting and works full-time.

We’ll see what the next 9 months bring but I’m nowhere near packing it in. Sure I haven’t made squat with how much work I’ve put in but (insert cheesy line) who can put a price on learning.

(By the way I still haven’t learned how to manage getting back to all the emails I get sent so sorry if I am slow to respond to you.)

((Also by the way, this blog may be changing some direction, less personal, more informative and opinion based be excited for that!!!))

technorati tags:Blog, Network, Making, Money, Online, Advertising, Entrepreneur

In the 9 months since I began caring about getting my pages listed in search engines I haven’t had much success doing just that. I would consider myself an SEO genius, heck, I have a Michelle Wie News Blog that I write at a few times a week and that’s not even on the top 10 page results for google. I’m on page 12 or 13 or something.

This blogs referrals from Google fluctuates more than Google’s stock itself. I recently began to really think about how I can get my sites listed higher in Google search results and haven’t come up with a brilliant way to do so.

Sure I can do what every so-called “SEO expert” says to do which is develop more content and get quality links that mention the particular keyword in them. Frankly I think it’s a load of crap. I have about 20 links from just Michelle Wie sites that link to my page and I mention Michelle Wie’s name about 2-4 times and article, not too much, not too little.

Anyway, as I was searching my usual blogs to see what was new in the sphere I travel in I happened upon a neat little article over at osworld.biz related to pure AdSense sites getting lower and lower listings in Google thus resulting in less traffic and lower revenue. You can read about it at his AdSense derailed article.

It made me wonder if Google has been playing with their search results algorithm to combat all the sites that are made from freely available articles and are published strictly for the AdSense revenue. I’m not sure if it would make sense from a business model to reduce these pages traffic, especially if they’re producing high click-through rates, I mean it is Google that’s making the money off placing those sites higher.

Either way I’ll have to do more research but I thought it was interesting and helpful (since these AdSense site guys and gals are pretty secretive about how and what they do) for him to publish his latest AdSense earnings and trends, linked with results from Google Search.

Let me know if any of you know of a change to The Algorithm. I hope to just keep building a good base of useful content and good links and hopefully in a year this network will have some quality traffic.

I feel like I’ve made it to the doorstep of the club.

I’m not going to lie, I started this whole blogging endeavour with the hope to make as money. Possibly even as much money as some of the heavy hitting bloggers like Steve Pavlina or Darren Rowse. I had all the ambition in the world, what I thought was a good idea, (who doesn’t want to become good at everything), and the technical know-how to tackle the internet.

9 months later and boy was I wrong!

Turns out writing in a way that is connected, focused, and draws people back day in and day out, like a newspaper or magazine does, is tough work. I see it can be done, but as the title of this blog (which may soon change, I’m feeling frisky), I want to do everything and doing everything requires me to change directions a lot and keeping focused is tough.

I did however manage to begin making money regularly, about $10-$20 from AdSense, and $10-$20 from various other affiliates and advertising companies. And this month I just looked into my bank account to see that Google had deposited my first ever payout, ranging from the last 9 months, a total of…

$101.22!!!!!!!!

It’s been a long time coming but I can see the potential, I have some interesting ideas for new blogs and new directions of blogs, and maybe soon enough I’ll be able to say I’ve joined the club of bloggers who could live off their blogging salaries.

I had to read about it in Time Magazine this week. A service that lets you text one main site your wearabouts and inform your friends, friend of friends, and your crushes where you are.

The site: Dodgeball.com. The parent company: Google. Tha’ts right maybe I missed the boat but Google has added yet another company to it’s arsenal of internet empire.

Dodgeball.com is a social information network. If you’re in one of their 22 cities across the United States you’re in luck. You can signup, choose your friends, choose some crushes, and begin to text your Happy Hour location. Within minutes you’ll get notified if any of your friends or friends of friends or crushes are in the area.

Then those friends will get notified of where you are, with address and be invited to join you. One text message to get all your friends in the same place.

You can also text the bar name to get detailed address data sent back to you.

The crush thing seems interesting. You have to choose a crush and then they will be notified if they are within ten blocks of you. I guess that’s a good way to stay away from your stalkers. Pretty soon GPS will just let you know where these wierdos are.

An interesting idea. Although they don’t have it here in Hawaii I’m not sure if I would use it but let me know if any of you are part of the new text messaging craze!

technorati tags:Dodgeball.com, Social, Networking, Google, Text, Messaging

Here are 10 little productivity boosters from James Henderson. He’s a good writer and you’ll find most of his explanations why they’ll boost productivity amusing.

Good blog, and amazingly a PR5 after only 4 months of semi-consistent posting. Some people are just loved by Google. Either that or I am doing some things wrong?

Anyway, check out his list which deals with:

MSN
Akismet
FireFox
and Optimization

Head over to his post at TooLazyToBlog.com 10 Ways To Boost Your Productivity

technorati tags:Time, Management, Productivity, Getting+Things+Done

Over the past month I have been looking for ways to optimize and integrate advertising to increase revenue. I, along with bloggers in the Network I’ve started are putting in a lot of time to generate useful and insightful content and I figure it’s about time I try and monetize that content. (Sorry to those who think ads are the devil but seldom are things free in this world)

With that said I have been looking at ways to blend ads and use advertising that would be useful to readers and not just pollute my websites. Google Adsense, the king of online advertising right now, has many ways to blend ads. A lot of people may say that doing so tricks readers into clicking on ads. That may be so but the ads that appear on my sites look helpful and I’m sure take people most of the time to useful sites.

One of the newest things Google has done is to update their Adsense for Search by allowing the results to be viewed in your site rather than taking the reader to a google landing page. Now obviously this would make people click through on potential ads more but it also has the potential to make readers more at ease with the results and search through your site a little more.

Check out what Google has to say about it over at their Adsense Blog under the post titled Inside AdSense: Search no further than your own site.

 

 

technorati tags:Advertising, Google, Adsense, Money, Making, Internet

Are you a computer programmer in need of a senior thesis for the upcomming year? I know most people probably already picked theirs long ago and are going to write some great program for a Palm Pilot to control your Tivo from zimbabwe. What use is that? Maybe to Britney Spears of Angelina Jolie, but not the rest of civilization.

Why not do something useful?

If I had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of spare people around me (such as a college campus), and I could find a professor willing to use senior funding to pay said students, or had enough money to tell my professor to piss off and do it anyway than this is what I would do.

I would make a program based on data collected from at least 500 participants typing a representative list of words (probably at least 500 different words and phrases) over and over again. From the lists these people create I would then run some statistical analysis on the results. The data/results could be reduced to split up left and right hand as well as those letters close to one another. This would eliminate outliers like going to type an F when your pinky hits Q, or your right pinky hits [. From this one could then generate an easy alrogithm in which they looked at consectutive letters begin typed as well as location on the keyboard and give probabilities for mistyping. The results could easily be check against a new random sample and random list of words, and if the results were drasitcally different you could group the new results with the old results to get a new algorithm.

What could you use this for? For someone wanting to buy domain names that would generate a lot of typo/type-in traffic. Great internet tool.

If someone decides to do this let me know, I want first crack at seeing how it works with generating some good typos. I realize that more goes into finding a domain name with traffic and click through potential but would something like this be nice for the domaining community?

Here’s to July and here’s to a huge improvement. Well I hope it’s and improvement and not a freak of nature. We’ll see come the end of August.

Athletically I was pretty tired all month but managed to complete two triathlons. One consisted of 400m swim, 13 mile bike, and 3.1 mile run. The other was an 800m swim, 24.5 mile bike, and a 6.2 mile run. The first I finished in 1:16 and the second in 2:19. Since then I have taken a few weeks off to golf and surf! (Although I did bike 45 miles on Sunday!)

I also traveled the 10 hours back to Wisconsin for a weekend for a buddies wedding. Great time!!!

My internet endeavours are also growing. I have 11 blogs, one half hearted AIS site and I am also increasing my parked domains portfolio.

Blogs
Adsense and Chitika: $24.20
Text-link-Ads: $8.33
Affiliates: $19.95

Domains
Namedrive: $61.89
UrbanData: $7.68

Total $122.05

That’s right I blasted way past the $1 a day mark and headed into $4 a day!!! Part of the reason I made more money everyday was because I invested in domain names. Some worked out and some didn’t but I have been learning what to look for when I purchase domains. Mainly if I purchase already proven domains I look to be able an recoup my investment in less than a year. Sounds impossible but with the ever changing internet there’s a big risk in purchasing domain names that could go out in a few weeks.

The blogs are improving I am well over 100 unique visitors on every single blog this past month (this blog gets around a thousand) with three of the blogs over 200.

Thanks to all those who have been helping and encouraging me in my quest. Let’s hope this next month is just as productive.

Aloha