…and I made a whopping $6.21! That’s basically 14 days worth of Adsense exposure since I bought the site over at Digital Point and got everything live. No affiliate revenue yet, but I only had the affiliate links up for a few days, and I am getting a couple clicks in that direction. At this rate, it’s going to take awhile to achieve world domination…
I installed the Adsense Deluxe plugin for this blog, but…not sure how to activate the ads. Do I just post the code into each post? How do I get them into the sidebar if I want them? I think I may need the plugin/download specifically for Wordpress 2.1, but I got the impression that wasn’t necessary. I may hit up Andreas to see what’s what.
I’m still behind the power curve overall on Wordpress. For example, I don’t have a blogroll yet (how do I show it?), and those extra links (hosting, etc) are still showing up in the Meta list in the sidebar. I’ll get there…
I missed a really nice domain name yesterday. I’ve been poking around on The Domain Name Aftermarket and ran into a really nice mortgage domain a few days ago. It was 12 years old (!), had live .edu and business.com backlinks, and a page rank of 4. That’s a premium domain name. I couldn’t find any registered trademarks, and the non-hyphenated version of the domain wasn’t live. I almost missed it, but I ran it through dnscoop, and was shocked to see how nice of a domain it was. I kept watch over it for a couple days, and started to bid as the auction neared its end.
Unlike ebay, TDNAM adds two minutes to the auction if a bid is placed within the last 2 minutes, so no sniping. It’s evil, but it probably is the way to go (especially if you’re TDNAM). Well, long story short, I got into a bidding war. I was hoping this domain was going unnoticed, but it already had some bids, so I wasn’t expecting anything. Those last ‘two minutes’ turned into an hour of bidding with almost 200 bids! I’m pretty sure that towards the end it was just me and 1 other person bidding. As the price really started to rise, I got a bit nervous, and finally had to enter my FINAL FINAL bid and walk away from the computer. I couldn’t afford to go any higher. When I came back after 2 minutes, the domain was sold to the other guy. Some guy got a really nice domain.
Bummer it wasn’t me.
One of the blogs I’ve become very interested in lately is having a contest - review the Linkrain Articles blog, get a free PR4 backlink, and possibly win $50. Linkrain is run by Andreas Moser, who works for a real estate site as the SEO and Marketing Manager. Among other sites, he runs the Linkrain Web Directory, which is the parent site for his Linkrain Articles blog. I’m happy to do my own review of this blog.
Ok, BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) Scoring (0-10; 0 being shite and 10 being the Google-buster):
- Design: 6
- Content: 9
- Communication/Community: 8
The details:
Design: Although I rated Linkrain’s design a 6, the overall design is solid. Clean, functional, but nothing special or fancy. He recently cleaned up his design a bit, such as getting rid of The World’s Most Beautiful RSS Button (it really wasn’t). I’d probably give him a 7, but I’m seeing the sidebar sitting below the blog entries in IE6. It looks fine in IE7.
Content: This is where Linkrain shines (is there a pun in there somewhere?). Andreas has some great tips and advice, and he seems to share it freely. Here’s some of my favorites that you might like, too:
I didn’t particularly care for his posts on Good/Evil blogs or Madeleine McCann, but there’s tons of other posts that are great and definitely worth reading.
Communication/Community: While probably not a full community yet, Andreas has some great communication on his blog. He responds to comments, has the top comments plugin to reward frequent commenting, and has launched a very useful Ask/Answer program. This really gets readers engaged and coming back for more.
Overall, I really like Linkrain Articles SEO Blog, and I look forward to reading it every day. I suggest you at least give it a read or two.
The same guy that thought up the Million Dollar Homepage (the pixel ad site that pulled in over $1,000,000 by selling/auctioning 1,000,000 pixels on a web page), Alex Tew, is giving everybody a chance to win $1 million dollars. He’s created another pixel ad page, called Pixelotto, that gives registered users the chance to win a million dollars just by clicking on ads. Just click on an ad, and you’re entered to win the million dollars. I’m in. You can also buy pixel ads on the Pixelotto page for $2 a pixel, minimum 10×10 ($200). It’s a PR6 page.
He’s only sold ~$152,000 worth of pixels, though, so let’s hope he sells all the ads. If he doesn’t sell them all, the jackpot is 50% of the ad sales. 10% goes to charity, and Alex Tew keeps the rest. The lotto is UK based, so you have to check to see if the lotto is legal in your country.
Ever hear of those people that make a full time living from their blog/website(s)? Well, apparently this guy, Yaro Starak, does it.
Problogger Darren Rowse (you may have heard of him, he makes big bucks on the net, too) points out that Yaro’s launching a new project, called Blog Mastermind, where he teaches you to do the same thing - make a full time income from blogging. You can get an idea of what he’s offering from his Blog Profits Blueprint. The full Blog Matermind program includes quite a bit of e-mentoring - lessons via email, audio series, a members-only forum, blog case studies, extreme makeover advice for your blog, interviews with Yaro and some bonus interviews with Pro Bloggers like Darren. The program sends you a monthly package for $47 a month - but it’s that price for only a few days while he markets his launch.
This program is geared for beginning to intermediate bloggers who want to make money from blogging (sounds like me…). The $47 a month is a bit steep (especially if you’re not making money!), but it’s got a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel at any time. Problogger added his endorsement to it (but with his own affiliate links, mind you), so it sounds like a pretty good deal. You can check out Blog Mastermind here. That’s an affiliate link, and I haven’t tried the program, but I’m seriously considering it. I’ll let you know if I do and what I think of it. I’m posting it now (before I tried it) because the price is scheduled to go to $77/month in a few days.
If anyone has signed up, please drop a comment to let me know what you think.
Thanks to John Chow, who pointed me to the All In One SEO Pack. This Wordpress plugin lets you control the title, description and keywords META tags for every post, as well as separate META tags for your blog homepage. The Wordpress defaults aren’t the best for Search Engine Optimization, so this plugin helps Google understand your blog pages better. If you don’t know what META tags are, you can learn about them in this book. That’s where I learned the basics. 
My plugin is installed and running.
I also changed my URLs so that they’re more easy to read. Before I had:
http://www.artifexus.net/?p=9, which humans don’t understand and doesn’t help Google, either. Now, I have:
http://artifexus.net/world-domination-just-pennies-at-a-time-9.htm, which helps us people AND the Google bots.
Emily tells us how to fix it (you should do it before you launch your blog). Go to Options and then Permalinks in your admin panel. You should see the default option selected. You want to select ‘Custom’ and insert the following:
/%postname%-%post_id%.htm
That tells Wordpress to use the name of the post instead of the id number. The id number is tacked on at the end to help wordpress navigate quicker to the page. Once you do that, hit Update Permalink Structure, and you’re good to go. There’s other options, like category/postname, and other steps you need to do to make it work, so make sure you check out the instructions on emily’s post. Thanks, Emily!
You can enter a contest to win a new 24″ wide screen LCD monitor over at JohnChow.com.
The monitor is the L245WP from LG Electronics and features digital HDMI input, 1920×1200 resolution, 1000 to 1 contrast ration, and 8ms response time. Nice!
All you have to do to enter is write about the contest and link to his make money page using “make money” as the anchor text (like I just did), and link to BluFur.com using hosting canada. Link to the contest post as well. Once you’re done, just send him an email with the url of the post. Simple! Entries are due 31 July and the winner will be drawn at random. If that’s not enough, John points you to another chance to win a 22″ LCD monitor.
Hmmm, I could put this nice monitor to good use on my way towards world domination…
So I logged into my Google adsense account last night and was delighted to see I earned $.09! 9 cents, whoohoo!
It’s ridiculous to be excited about 9 cents (I wouldn’t have felt the same way about finding a dime on the street), but it’s nice to know the website I recently bought is earning something. I also got a click today and earned $.20.
I’ve performed two calculations to project my return on investment:
If the average of the two days’ earning remains constant, and I make the same amount every day (on average) going forward, I’ll make my money back in a little over six years.
If the rate of increase in earnings remains constant (roughly doubling every day), I’ll be a millionare in about 22 days, and a billionare 10 more days after that.
Here’s to world domination, just pennies at a time.
I switched themes. I hope I can stick with this one.
I was using 123RedBlack, but it had a couple quirks I wasn’t willing to try to fix.
I like this theme, but I really wanted 3 columns. I’ll just have to live without. Plenty of blogs get by with just 2 columns, so I can, too.
I will say one thing - once you download the template, switching between themes is a breeze. Just one click and it switches everything over. Nice.
I’ve always gone by the 20 second rule. It appears I’ve been shortchanging myself.
Two Connecticut College students actually set out to test the 5 second rule - you know, the one where if you drop your food on the floor, and as long as you pick it up within 5 seconds, it’s ok to eat? What they found is that wet food (they tested apple slices) is actually good for at least 30 seconds before bacteria starts to cultivate on the food. Dry food (skittles) actually takes about 5 minutes!
So the next time you drop your food, just pick it back up and brush off anything that’s crunchy or moves on its own, and eat it! Anything else would just be wasteful.