Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Some of you might remember a while back when I started bad mouthing Text Link Ads. Ads on this blog weren’t selling while I saw links on other blogs, blogs that didn’t have as high a PR or traffic rankings as I did, selling like hot cakes!

I noticed that my blog wasn’t listed in the correct categories and that my description was never changing even though I had tried to change it many times. I also had a few other blogs listed didn’t even get into the listings. I emailed a few times to the support team and had no response worth anything. I had all but written them off.

But I stuck with them and I’m glad. Although I’ve done a few things differently around my blogs to make them more “advertiser friendly,” Text Link Ads has become a lot more responsive. They’ve drastically decreased their turn-around time for answering emails. I know email them with questions and within a day I get a response.

Also, I contacted them directly about several blogs that hadn’t been accepted yet but had good PR, traffic, and solid back-links, and I was able to get those in. This has increased my exposure on their site, and I’ve been able to really boost my earnings over there.

Thanks for improving your service TLA. It’s always good to see a company respond to complaints.

The last few months have seen steady and increasing income from my blog network. This month, I can already say, I’ve surpassed last months earnings and we’re not even half way through the month.

Adsense: $202.94
Namedrive: $96.51
TLA: $44.10
Direct Link Sales: $130.03

Total: $473.58

Hoping to keep this ball rolling and improve it even more moving it to new methods to expand and focus (do those go together) the blog network.

Here are a few more earnings from around the way…
$474.51 for the Internet Cashflow Guy
$185.75 for a new one on my list Nomar.

and once again that’s it for the blogosphere of earnings that I follow. Not too many reporting what their earnings are these days. (Or maybe I just don’t follow them much anymore.)

March was a decent month once again in terms of earnings. Although I’m still closer to a break even stage in my Blogtown Press blog network, due to paying bloggers and hosting fees, I feel as though it was a good month for me. I’m progressing towards a more realistic goal of a money earning business.

I’m making progress towards a more organized business plan approach and learning as I go along. I’ve been much more active in seeking out buyers of both text links, ad space, and posts for the blog network which has helped in the short term. I’d like to build a presence on (gasp) Text-Link-Ads so I don’t have to spend time tracking down potential advertisers right now.

Earnings for the month of March were:

Adsense: $182.88
TLA: $ 35.28
Posts Sold at Forums: $ 57.66
Links Sold at Forums: $ 80.67

NameDrive Domains: $102.38

Total Earnings: $458.87

Some of you may notice that my namedrive totals have increased since my last earnings report. That’s because I’m working on determining the scale-ability of my domain name investing method. So far so good although I would have liked to see a little higher earnings due to the investment. Still on track to make 100%(ish) return in a year.

Some others who divulge their earnings so you can be inspired…

Yaro Starak recently discussed earning money online and gave us a detailed analysis of his earnings, $6000+. He’s not a regular at doing this but these are the ones that really get you going! Thanks Yaro.

The Internet Cashflow Guy keeps moving up, great to see the progress. $485.40 last month

And that’s it!!! Looking through my blogroll showed me that I have to update it and get rid of some links from people who either don’t have blogs anymore, or don’t update them at all. I think 3 months is a good time period to go by.

OK, it’s the wee hours of the morning out here in Hawaii but I have to get this posted. Several people have inquired about my earnings after I reported a 400% increase in visitors around the blog network so I can’t dissapoint “the people.” (Thanks by the way for all your support!)

As I said it’s 1 am here and I finished up a 14 hour work day at my real job as an engineer at a biotech company so forgive me if the verbage here gets a little jumbled. But without further ado. Here’s the earnings…

Adsense - $173.53
TLA - $12.55
Namedrive - $63.48
Other Link Sales - $53.31

Total   $302.87

Yipee! I increased money coming in from December’s total earnings $165.07. As you can see from last months, AdSense went way up by over $100! Sweet!

I was also able to sell one more link through TLA (thanks to my own promoting) and I’ve been finding other means to sell links through some of the webmaster forums out there. The $53.31 is for permanent links, which I could amortize over the life of the blogs, but I’m lazy and don’t want to put estimates on, or change values every month. That’s for when I hire an accountant.

The other links that I sell as month to month links, even if I sell 3 months up front, will be amortized over the life of the link and counted as such.

Now let’s take a look around the blogosphere at some earnings.

Internet Cashflow Guy $524.02
Video Post at 45n5.com tells of $1095.00

December was a pretty good month but could always be better, much better. With 11 of my blogs over a PR3, I still have only one link sold from text-link-ads. I recently wondered why my text link ads aren’t selling, and took most of the comments to heart. I adjusted my blog and tried to re-align some things, while not losing content, but being more focused and more advertiser friendly. We’ll see what happens.

While that’s great for this blog, I have 11 PR3+ BLOGS THAT CAN’T EVEN GET INTO THE PROGRAM. I’m not the worlds best monetizer of websites (I’m learning) but I don’t think getting into the program should be that hard.

OK, enough belly aching. Onwards to the earnings.

Adsense - $65.02
Namedrive - $88.50
TLA  - $8.55

Total - $165.07

This total was slightly down from last months internet earnings of $204.85.

Other earnings from around the blogosphere:

 Nothing Ventured - $25.82
One Dollar a Day - $865.90
Building My Empire - $207.45
Internet Cashflow Guy - $445.64

About 6 months ago I signed up for and was accepted by Text-Link-Ads. Within a month someone bought a link from me. I thought “Nice! this is going to be the easiest cash ever!”

It’s 5 months later and I still have one link sold per month. I would think this is OK because I only receive between 40 and 60 uniques a day and my PR is 5 with an Alexa rank in the 140K range, with over 700 pages indexed in Google and about 170 links showing up in Google.

Wait a Second! I see blogs that are PR 3, Alexa (which really can be shifted by a lot of factors) in the 500K and 100 pages indexed in Google, with less frequent updates than my few a week with 3-7 links sold in text-link-ads. What gives? My stats are crazy better and my placement of the links sold is primo in my eyes.

This sparked me to look into why this could be? I’ve already tried changing my category once or twice to try and boost my link sales but that didn’t help (once or twice in 6 months so I don’t think doing that has hurt me). Then I started digging around the text-link-ad categories to see if I could figure out what the issue was.

Doing this got me even more confused, I saw more and more blogs and sites that don’t have near the traffic stats and index stats, ad placement, etc, as I do nearly selling out their link-ads. Is it my domain name, my look, my layout, what the heck!

The only thing I could come up with is that my blog ranges a ton of topics and isn’t focused in on one specific topic. (But then again some of the ones I found weren’t really on any topic at all and still were able to sell a ton) But this was the closest thing I could come up with. That my visitors aren’t Niche Specific enough.

However, if you look at some of the links sold on different blogs you’ll see that a lot of the link-ads have nothing to do with their niche so that may blow my theory right out of the water. I’m also listed in TLA with my Aloha Update site which receives about 50 uniques a day and would be a great travel site to link on, PR4 300+ indexed, nothing.

Am I Text-Link-Ad Cursed? I’ll keep searching the web for answers but I’m puzzled. Is it the blog focus or what gives? Can you help me figure it out?

Well, it’s that time again. It’s time to report on earnings and see what others made over the last month. Mine were decent last month. I increased earnings in all categories. I’ve also decided to start a blog network which has taken a lot of time off my hands from building my internet groupings monetarily. I hope to use this month to reorganize and start building earnings in the new year, at a much faster pace.

AdSense              $36.75
Affiliates/Reviews  $30
Text-Links           $8.55
Namedrive           $129.55

Total                   $204.85

Also around the earnings world:

$806.48 over at one-dollar-a-day.com
$206.19 for buildingmyempire.com
$56.94 at Nothing-ventured.org
$504 for 45n5.com
$430.23 over at theinternetcashflowguy.com

Although I don’t think it appropriate to tell my readers if I get payed via a pay-per-post type affiliate service, the newest launch from the text-link-ads guy(s), called ReviewMe.com has promised $25,000 to bloggers who review they’re pay-per-post program, and I was one of them.

I recieved the payment, and that’s sweet.

It’s a great service and the fact that I can give positive and negative reviews, or neutral reviews, is awesome. People shouldn’t worry about me selling out, the chance of me getting one of these rooms is probably one or two slim, but I’m ready to give my two cents!

Nice work Patrick Gaven. I’m in.

Some of you may remember that I’ve gotten into the dreaded parking of sites as an experiment and a way to see if I can diversify my internet earnings. (See Blogging Pro’s most recent post on the need for internet entrepreneurs to diversify their internet holdings and businesses.)

I jumped into the parking of sites because it’s easy money. I buy my sites through forums like Namepros or DomainState from people who have already proven the particular name to be an earner. I try and buy for a reasonable earnings multiple, and then just add it to my NameDrive account and forget about it. To try and save face I’ll say that I don’t buy porn related names and I don’t use pop-ups, or put porn related ads on a non-porn domain name. I just put ads that are relevant to the typo or type-in that I bought and see where it goes.

Now you may remember in my Septemeber Earnings Report that I said I was seeing a lower than average Cost-per-Click (CPC) on my domains that I had parked with NameDrive. I hunted around the forums and even emailed NameDrive and everyone confirmed that, yes there were lower than average CPC for domains across the board. Well it seems as though the tables have turned and my earnings are back up! This is good news for me because, as I mentioned I was doing this as an experiment and was sweating it in those few months that earnings were down.

Now NameDrive told me that they had already contacted Google about the lower earnings and that they were working towards a solution. My assumption is that NameDrive aggregates it’s ads from Google and is allowed to display them in their own way as parked sites. So I did a little more searching and notice that a lot of people had lower adsense earnings around August September and October. It sort of makes sense that these would be lower advertising spending months with kids going back to school and all. We’ll just have to wait and see if this upward trend continues and I keep seeing more cash in my pocket from having sites sit there.

This following is a paid review of ReviewMe the new service from the same company that brought you text-link-ads.

ReviewMe is another way for bloggers to make money blogging. Some people may think being payed to post about a product is selling out but I think it’s a great way for bloggers to get paid for all the time they spend bringing their readers great content. After all, a reader doesn’t have to read every post, and hopefully a loyal reader will understand the need to make money for time well spent.

The system is super simple and you can apply in a couple seconds. Your blog is rated of course by, backlinks, pagerank, technorati rank, and that wonderfully controversial alexa ranking. If you make it in, ReviewMe automatically assigns your blog review posts a price and you are given half of what the advertisers pay them.

Probably the biggest plus side to reviewme.com over other pay per post/pay per review schemes is that you can write a positive or a negative review, and the review only has to be 200 words long. Which in the world of blogging a lot of bloggers have 200 word intros to blog posts!

I’ve signed my blog up as well as several others that are in my network of blogs for the reviewme system and hopefully will start seeing some review requests in my inbox.

I think ReviewMe.com will be just as popular as text-link-ads. The world is just beginning to see what a great tool blogs are for reaching very focused audiences. We’ll see if getting paid to post reviews lowers my regular readers but I don’t think a post here and a post there will ruin my numbers. If I, and the rest of the blogosphere keeps these types of reviews to a minimum I don’t see an issue.