In Febuary, my online income was $364.31. I set a goal to get over $500 in March. I am proud to say that I have well and truly smashed that target… so much so that I have gotten to a point where I feel a bit uneasy to disclose my income except to say that I can now say that I have finally joined the club.

photo source: Flickr

I started this blog with the goal of making a million bucks. Initially, I tried a few get rich quick ideas but eventually I learned that to make money online takes a lot of learning, a lot of trying, a lot of slowly slowlies - Yes, there are people who get rich on one great idea, but they are the oddities that strike it lucky rather than making it through good planning and hard work.

Whilst I’m not quite a millioinaire yet, I’m well and truly on my way. My current money making avenues include

Adsense

This is where I made my first buck online - and to that, I owe a lot to Google. The way I make money with adsense is to buy old domains with keywords that are fairly popular but not so much so that they are over saturated in competition. I build lots and lots of mini sites by paying someone else to write 20 to 30 articles. Then I start meticulously building as many back links as I can get from social bookmarking sites and do follow blogs until I get indexed by google. In comes the visitors and… ka-ching - residual income in the bank!

Affiliate Marketing

I’ve always thought that affiliate marketing made a lot of sense. With adsense, you are really just adding an extra layer between your site and the ppc guy pushing an affiliate campaign. If affiliates can pay google to pay you to put a link up, then there must be good money here. I tried my hand early on in ppc but I suck at marketing… especially the part of writing the copy! My luck really turned around though when

1. I noticed that ALL the ads on one of my adsense ads were for this one product. This site was making about a dollar a day with a 50% click through rate. That’s good money there so I was a bit hesitant to change the site. I didn’t really like the product on offer but, I thought, if these guys are going to own my site with such ad domination then I’d try and run this offer myself. To my surprise when I slapped on the affiliate ads, my revenue jumped up to an average of $7 a day - that’s a 700% increase! woohoo! From this moment on, I stopped spending my time on creating mini sites for cpc to creating mini sites for cpa!
2. I have always found it difficult to pick an affiliate campaign that I could wholeheartedly push. There are not many companies out there I would buy from myself and also happen to have an affiliate program up. Luckily for me, there’s
   • eBay - everyone buys from eBay… including myself. I always thought it’d be profitable promoting ebay auctions and, early on, I tried putting up a few of their links and auction feeds without much success. I knew that the big players were taking advantage of the ebay api but I never had the time to familiarising myself with it. My breakthrough came when a chap named Wade Wells came up with a plugin that uses the eBay api to populate your wordpress blog with ebay auctions. I could have spent a whole weekend coding away at this, but how much better was paying $49 for phpbay - a ready built wordpress plugin! PhpBay is absolutely awesome… well no I guess I should say that populating your sites with auto-generated content from ebay auction listing is absolutely awesome - phpBay is just an easy way to fast track the build process. For some reason, google absolutely loves ebay auction content and for some sites, I am ranking in the front page of google for two word phrases without me even adding ANY backlinks to the site. If you’re not on the ebay bandwagon, get yourself signed up and buy phpbay today.
   • Symantec and ZoneAlarm - two of the world’s best anti-virus software companies. Which one do you own?
   • SnapFish- Printing online by Hewlett Packard. In Australia, they’ve recently dropped photo printing down to 15cents which finally makes it competitive with printing at the shops. Also they give away the first 30 prints for free.
   • GoDaddy - I register ALL my domains here and so should you.
   • VistaPrint - you get 250 free business cards … sure there’s limited design range but it’s free so why not?

So there you go - a nice bunch of reputable companies to promote! :) The affiliate Networks that I currently use and can recommend are Commission Junction, NeverBlueAds, MaxBounty, and WebGains. I’m also an AzoogleAds member but there was a campaign that I was promoting and I was not getting any conversions… the moment I switched to NeverBlueAds for the same campaign, I started seeing the money roll in - go figure.

Consulting

As a result of some of my sites and this blog, I have helped a small number of people with technical work - predominately setting up mediawiki and wordpress mu. I’d prefer to work on my own sites but of course, everything has a price and I set my opportunity cost of not working on my own work at US$100 an hour. That might sound like a lot to those peddling around at $2 an hour but anything less is really not worth my time.

So there you go, March was awesome and April is already looking up! Adsense clicks seem to be worth more and eBay has a new geo-targetting tool which means you can now redirect visitors to the eBay of their country - kaaaa…ching! :D

Popularity: 20%

If you have a MFA (made-for-adsense) site, then this tip is going to be pivotal in increasing your CTR. We all know that you need to blend your ads into the site so that they look like normal informational links rather than ads. You can’t change the ad font type and size (it’s against google’s TOS) but you can alter your own site’s font to exactly match that of the ad! This is probably the most underused tatic out there.

To find out the stylesheet details for the adsense blocks, just right click on an empty area and view source. (Do it on someone else’s ad to avoid accidentally clicking your own ad!)

Here’s the stylesheet used for the popular 300×250 text box:

a:link,a:visited,a:hover,a:active{color:#e1771e;cursor:pointer;}
body,table,div,ul,li{font-size:10px;margin:0px;padding:0px}
body{background-color:transparent;font-family:arial,sans-serif;height:100%}
#aus{height:250px;width:300px}
#ads{left:0px;position:absolute;top:0px;width:300px}
#ads ul{list-style:none;}
#ads ul li{clear:both;float:left;height:58px;overflow:hidden;width:300px}
.ad{margin:0px 2px}

.adt{font-size:11px;font-weight:bold;line-height:14px;}
.adb{color:#ffffcc;display:block;font-size:11px;line-height:14px;}
.adu{color:#b3b3b3;font-size:10px;line-height:12px;overflow:hidden;white-space:nowrap}

.adus{cursor:pointer;}.adc{width:100%;height:58px;table-layout:fixed;overflow:hidden}
#abgi{left:220px;position:absolute;top:233px}
#aubg{background-color:#333333;border:0px solid #333333;height:250px;width:300px}

The two important classes are the adt (ad title) and the adb (ad body). As you can see the

• font-family is arial,sans-serif
• font-size is 11px
• line-height is 14px

Unfortunately, the style sheet changes depending on the number of ads in the box. I just try to accomodate the most common one which is four ads and a font size of 11px.

Popularity: 12%

Febuary was an intense month for me. I’ve been:

1. Juggling the blog theme redesign
   As you can see, I’ve almost removed all traces of the copyblogger theme I started with - it’s still a work in progress though. I’m glad I’ve done this cos whilst mandigo was nice and flexible, copyblogger loads a million times faster and now I can say there’s no other blog that looks as crap as as unique as mine
2. Searching for and registering domain names.
   My domain count is now at a massive 97! That’s 3 more to crack the ton! Whilst there’s still the temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has costed a bit more, the rewards have been worth it. These domains get indexed faster and I’m finding that (for my cases anyway) google seems to look at the keywords in the path more than the domain name itself. So what this means is that instead of getting a brand new domain like FindASoulMate.com, I’d rather get DatesOnline.com if it is 2years + old. I’ll then make it a mini dating site and have a page with the path datesonline.com/find-a-soul-mate/.

   This actually makes sense to me and I think it’s a smart change for Google. Often the best sites on the net have meangingless domain names (from a keyword perspective anyway) - Take techcrunch and mashable for example.

4. SEO’ing my mini sites
   this has been the most time consuming and boring part of the process. Trying to obtain endless links for my sites has become to labourious and I’m researching the best options to either outsourcing this or automating this. More on this in a later post… I hope.
5. Increasing my PPC and Affiliate knowledge
   There’s a growing tidal wave of affiliate bloggers out there and I’m soaking in all I can. Apart from putting a few ad buttons here and there, I’ve always been lazy about pushing affiliate programs because I’ve had the impression that it’s a dodgy industry and I hate faking / lying in an ad copy just to get the sale. Let’s face it, 90% of people who sell affiliate stuff have never used the product themselves so how can they endorse it with a massively long landing page that proclaims it’s the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from the dodgyness of it, I’ve also lacked to passion to promote stuff that I’m not interested in (online dating??, dieting??, ringtones??, etc.,) Well, in the last few months ( and more so last month), I’ve stumbled across a few programs that I absolutely think rocks, passes my ethical / moral test, and I have no problems pushing to even my best friends. More on this later… I hope again.

So what has all this meant for Feburary? A grand total of $364.31 for the whole month.

I know it’s still way less than what I earn in day offline but I’m happy that it was more than Jan - as you can see I was flat out in Feb and I haven’t had a chance to monetised all 97 of my domains. March looks more promising though, especially with the changes to the Adsense T&Cs (which reminds me, I still need that adsense compliant privacy page) and my affiliate endeavours. I’m aiming to break $500..! :D

Popularity: 44%

If you were like me, you would have been presented with the updated Adsense T&Cs, skimmed through them, and blindly hit the accept button. Whatever.

Today I did more reading on it and apart from adding references to video ads which I don’t use or care about, there were a few HUGE changes that absolutely EVERY adsense publisher should be aware of. Makes me wonder why they don’t highlight the changes to you.

1. You MUST have a privacy policy on every site you display adsense

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

crap. What cookie management??? Someone give me a generic adsense compliant policy!

2. More than one adsense publisher ID can be used on the one page

This was removed from the T&Cs:

In addition, You agree that while You may display more than one (1) Ad Unit on each Site Web page, You shall not display any Ad Unit on a page that contains Ads associated with another Google AdSense customer (e.g., Your Web hosting company), unless authorized to do so by Google.

I can see all the free web hosts and adsense sharing site owners rejoicing already!

3. You can have a referal button on its own page without additional content

This was removed from the T&Cs:

Each Web page(s) that contains a Referral Button must also contain other content related to Your Site.

I haven’t used google referrals much, except for get firefox now. I can see this being a huge bonus and might dabble into this again soon

4. You can display adsense on error, registration, thank-you pages… even in EMAILS!

display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or “thank you” page (e.g., a page that thanks a user after he/she has registered with the applicable Web site), on any chat page, in any email, or on any Web page or any Web site that contains any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content;

The no adsense on error pages, rego pages, and thank-you pages were always questionable for me. It was so easy to slip up on because often you just install a cms, plug in your adsense code in the template and with most cms you can’t control which pages it doesn’t appear on. This is more an admission from google that they’ve realised it’s not that important anyway so let’s keep it easy for us publishers.

The email part of this T&C is interesting. By removing the reference to emails, this means that now you can display adsense in an email? How do you even do that? I’d imagine you need an email client that lets you edit the html so that you can insert the adsense scripts. Certainly if you just tried this on gmail, it would auto convert your adsense tags into normal text rather than rendering ads out.

I wonder if this is a typo from google in that they’ve actually accidentally removed too much out of this T&C. To be able to include adsense in an email is open slather for all the spammers to embed adsense and get readers to click on the ads. How would google be able to police this when they can’t access the original email that the adsense is displayed on?

Popularity: 11%

Happy New Year guys! It’s been a great break and unfortunately, I haven’t made my millions yet so I’ve had to come back to work. December was an awesome month. The jostling for christmas shoppers meant that every click was worth that much more. I’m now up to 51 domain names and my adsense income for December came up to a grand total of… $263.66. It will be hard to beat this figure in January as I’m already noticing that the returns per click are substantially lower than they were in December. Some people have rumoured that maybe it’s because I’m using the old adsense formats instead of the new ones. Sounds a bit far fetched and I doubt Google has become that evil.

With the growing number of websites that I now own, it’s probably doesn’t add any value for me to keep listing them all and breaking down their profits per site. Suffice to say, I’ve managed to secure some ripper domains, so much so that I’ve started to auction some of these off at my new domainholics blog :) Currently the auction is underway for StumbleMe.com which has a highest bid of $80. I’m finding more and more killer domain names than I can handle so whilst I do have intentions to build a site for each, sometimes it makes more financial sense for me to let some go to give me some immediate returns and cover my hosting and domain rego costs. Next up on the auction list, I’m thinking about putting MediaLeaks.com and SEOpinions.com on the market. Both, I think are high quality dot coms that would be worth $x,xxx for the right end user so it might just be too early for me to give these up…

With all these domains, I’ve also been experimenting with domain parking. From some of the guys over at NamePros, it seems to be making them a lot of easy money. However, after a month of trail, the returns for my type of domains are too low. Mind you, I’ve only used Sedo as my application for Parked.com was rejected. I suspect with domain parking, you really only make money if you have some super type-in domains (like iambored.com or whatever.com) or if you are into adult xxx related domains and poker / gambling where the cpc’s are supposedly much higher. For me, I prefer to ‘park’ my own sites with adsense as this way, I am free to do whatever I want with site design and it has a chance of being on top of Google’s search results for a variety of key terms.

Popularity: 13%

In October, I made about $20 from adsense from 3 sites. I’m pleased to report that in November, I’ve grown my site portfolio to 9 and my adsense earnings have now increased to $86.64 (from 95,636 page impressions)! My domain portfolio has also leaped to 39. I’ve grown addicted to purchasing domains that I think are at least worth more than their purchase price. What do you guys think of

1. stumbleme.com
2. bitminds.com

I particularly like Bit Minds because I think that it’s a great name for an IT company… maybe my new company :)

The formula that I’ve used to grow my earnings has been the same.

1. buy a domain
2. build a site
3. put some adsense on it
4. build some backlinks
5. constantly build more backlinks, experiment with site design, and improve

It’s working well so far but I’m conscious that I’m putting all my eggs in the google search results and adsense market… o well, what can you do when they own ALL the market?

Popularity: 15%