Take More Risks

Checked my account earlier this morning and the CTR for one of my channels was well over 100%! It’s since settled down to something approaching normality. I nearly shit a brick! I don’t understand how it’s possible for the clickthrough rate to be higher than 100%. I take it someone must have clicked on the links more than once. It’s a bit worrying all in all. Still…the good thing is though that the CPC is ever-increasing on that channel. I’d say that out of all of my sites at the moment it’d be converting best for the advertisers.

I seen something similar over in Edinburgh. The CTR wasn’t nearly as high though and on that occassion I reported my suspicions to the Adsense team. I guess it’s better to be safe than sorry but I don’t want to be seen as an obsessive-compulsive psycho!

Yesterday I finally broke through the 100 click mark. What’s less impressive is that I registered my lowest earnings for the week on the same day. Exceptionally low CPC for the majority of my channels. It’s not a trend or anything – just a temporary blimp I think. I’m not concerned really. It’s better again today. I’ll just have to ride this one out I think.

I want to really step on the accelerator now with my plans to be an “enterpeneur”. I’d love to establish this blog as a useful resource for anyone new to affiliate marketing. It’ll take a lot of work but so far I’m enjoying it and I hope you’re getting something out of it too.

Actually that was a lie……….I’ve a long long way to go before I could possibly justify splashing out on a dedicated server. Nowadays I’m using about 5gb of bandwidth a month on Hostgator and around 0.4gb of my “1Tb” Dreamhost allowance. Both of these tallys have remained relatively constant for the last year or so. Hopefully by the turn of the year I’ll be closer to using 10gb a month on Hostgator. Most of my current sites tend to use very little bandwidth so that’ll be quite the task. Thinking about it, using my bandwidth usage to chart my success with affiliate marketing is absurd. I just want to have my own server goddamnit!

Admittedly it is a pain having to decide what server space to place a new site on. I normally learn towards my Hostgator account as I love Cpanel. I still can’t get adjusted to Dreamhost’s management system. It’s a pain in the ass.

Hostgator’s dedicated server’s ranged from $174-$374 a month. Jesus! That’s quite depressing really. I’m sure there are better deals out there. A few people have been recommending semi-dedicated servers but I don’t really know enough about them at the moment. I’ll do a little bit of research before bed. In the meantime I’ll need to have a bit of a brainstorming session for new website ideas, just so I can move that little bit closer to being a professional (with a dedicated server).

I’m not this shallow normally….do believe me!

I’ve been reluctant to invest money in affiliate marketing of late for one reason or another and it’s beginning to effect my enthusiasm for the business. Or maybe it’s the other way around – a chicken or egg thing?! What really frustrates me is that I’m still spending over £100 a week on absolutely garbage – money that I could be using to boost my online presence and really kickstart things! Grrrrrr.

Take Meaning of a Dream for example. I spent $100 to start with on a ghost writer and a further $10 on the domain. To begin with earnings were minimal, I was maybe earning a maximum of a $1 a month back on that initial investment. Things were looking hopeless. That was until recently when my income from the website rose dramatically and I’m now earning closer to $30 a month. If that rate maintains, by this time next year I’ll have earnt $360 which is triple the amount I invested in the first place.

Yet still I’m just scared of spending money for some reason. I need to get out of this habit! I wanted to spend at least $100 on backlinks but I don’t know where or who to purchase them from. Should I really go down the Text Link Ads route again? I could always use their feature where they select the websites that your ads will appear on for you but still it means I’d have to invest a minimum of $45 on three months worth of links for the campaign to have any effect.

Everywhere I turn the statement “Content Is King” is staring me in the face! I’ve heard it so many times of late it’s becoming a wearing cliche. If the truth be told I find it extremely difficult to create content day in day out when I know that I don’t have an audience. It feels like I’m talking to myself a lot of the time. It’s reassuring when you know people are reading what you have to say!

It’s just kickstarting everything that’s difficult and normally that’s where links come in. I think I’ll head over to Digital Point now and see what’s on offer. It’s a pain having to wade through the crap….

I’ve been registered over a week on Myspace and I’m still receiving this message when I go to post on a group. Very strange and unprofessional! You’d think Tom and the boys would put a little bit of effort into both their spelling and logic.

I’m hoping over the next few weeks to test what the “Myspace Economy” has to offer. I’ve no real hopes in terms of the quality of traffic. In order to get anything out of it – you seem to need to drive a huge volume of visitors to your website. My experience with mass marketing in the past has been largely negative and I’m extremely wary of using one of those services that adds thousands of friends to your contact list as it seems a bit spammy all in all. I’ll try to gain traffic through organic means – commenting on both groups and other peoples profiles with relevant comments. I’m not really expecting anything but it’s worth a shot!

To start with I’ll focus mainly on advertising my comedy sites – Gothic Fairies and Fart Noises. I’ve noticed that it’s becoming increasingly popular to dedicate a unique profile to each site and to then advertise your Myspace group through your real website and vice versa. It sounds like a excellent way to boost traffic altogether.

I really don’t understand that AcountFor7Days message though. I signed up to the service on Sunday. It’s now Monday. That’s 8 days……….

Be careful what you write online – uh oh :p
A cool tutorial showing you how to display different images as your blogs header at random.
An interesting review of Internet Explorer 7.
Information Design is 95% typography.
Firefox ist verboten – at least in Miami-Dade

Chances are that by even setting eyes upon this story, you are a net addict. If even one of the points below applies to you, you have absolutely no chance of recovering from your addiction and it will be a downward spiral into destitution 2.0 from here on in.

1. Do you regularly dream about surfing online? Do you have difficulty recalling your last dream that did not involve the Internet? Could you have sworn that the email you wrote to your colleague in your sleep last night with the subject line “TONGUE KISS ME NOW PLEASE – LOL” was real?
2. Do your pets just seemingly disappear? When was the last time you fed Fluffy? Have you abandoned all hope of keeping an animal for more than a month opting to keep robotic pal next time around?
3. When you are away from the keyboard in another room and hear the new email notification chime, have you ever rushed in, opened up your email inbox, found it’s only spam and subsequently punched the monitor repeatedly/burst into tears/urinated all over your keyboard in disgust.
4. Presuming that you’re not already in possession of an uninterruptible power supply, during power outages do you sit impatiently at your keyboard waiting for the power to come back on, shunning your family and friends?
5. When you’re sitting on the toilet do you conjure up plans to create the next killer Web 2.0 application that simply disintegrate when you return to the keyboard? Have you ever considered shipping your desktop into the restroom just so that the next time you’re inspired, you can act on it straight away?
6. When you wake up in the morning do you actually let your eyes open before you turn on the monitor?
7. If you answered no to the previous question, have you since caused irreparable damage to your retinas? Can’t you focus without seeing your David Hasselhoff wallpaper?
8. When relatives have the audacity to interrupt your net sessions, do you refuse to acknowledge their existence? Have you ever considered wiring up a live current to your bedroom door handle as a future deterrent?
9. Do you regularly slip LOL’s and LMAO’s into conversations with people who aren’t familiar with the internet? Do you label them n00b’s when they tell you that they don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about?
10. Have you made arrangements for your own funeral which incorporates a wi-fi enabled system into the side of your coffin just in case you happen to wakeup?

By default Wordpress lists your 15 most recent posts on the index page of your site. Sometimes it’s necessary to display only post, as was the case with my Gothic Fairies website. I’m sure there are probably more elegant solutions to this problem out there but regardless of this I thought I’d share my makeshift solution anyway.

I embedded the following code into the header section of the template just before the opening of the loop.

if($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == "/" || $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == "/index.php")
query_posts('p=3');

?>

In this example, the code tests to see if the current page is the index by checking the REQUEST_URI element of the $_SERVER array. If this variable equals either “/” or “index.php” the query_posts function is called which in turn selects a certain post to be displayed with the parameter referring to the specific post ID (which in this case is 3).

With a bit of luck – the post you just referred to will be the only one which appears on the front page of your website!

I’ve been toying around with TLA’s Link Worth Calculator this morning and I must admit it’s fun seeing just how much links are worth to potential subscribers. $8 for a single link at the center of the page seems to be the most I could possibly generate at the moment which is a bargain for any advertiser, if I do say so myself :p

Out of curiousity I ran a few tests to see how much the same links would be worth on Google and I simply received a “Haha Very Funny” message. Cute. Seriously though I’ve noticed that the Problogger.net website is commanding well over $1000 a month from their outbound links, I wonder just how much more a link on the front page of Google would be worth….

As a guide I tested Bebo.com and it turns out that they could receive upwards of $48000 a month for placing 10 links on a prominent position on their website. I’m guessing that it wouldn’t even contribute 10% towards their hosting bills. It makes you wonder just how big operations like Bebo, Myspace and Youtube stay afloat. They must have to invest in a lot of their resources into manpower to help keep themselves in the black.

Here’s hoping that over the coming months the value of my links reaches closer to $30000 than $3 a month! One can only dream!

Instead of writing a seperate entry for each cool page I find on the interweb – I’ve decided to store all of the links I’ve found useful in a post which I’ll update throughout the day. This won’t be strictly a daily feature to start with – I’ll see how it progresses through the coming weeks and continue on from there. To get the ball rolling…..

A list of Homer Simpsons jobs on Wikipedia
A crazy retro yet futuristic clock. Never witnessed a concept like this before. Could be prettier though.
Description of Google Website Optimizer and why it’s a must have for maximising your Return On Investment.
10 Steps you can take to guarantee failure - emphasises the importance of setting goals and targets.
Some well-put points on what seach engine optimization is not.
Cool! An article from W3C specifiying how to use GET and POST correctly.
Getting stuck and unstuck in Google an interesting post on the Google Sandbox/Trustbox
How to Get on the Digg Homepage – offers a refreshing new angle on just how to go about it!
Guy orders Ipod but gets something completely different!
Upgrading Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy Eft – Is it just me or are the names of Ubuntu distros beginning to sound like Cocteau Twins songs?

I’ve been following this since it started and I’m surprised by how successful it has been thus far. For those of you new to the website, the guy who is running it started off with oneuglydomain.net hoping to trade it for another more valuable domain name. It is his aim to continue trading names until he has found one worth $1 million.

He started off by trading oneuglydomain.net for releaseparty.com. That was subsequently traded in for celebrityaffairs.com which is a pretty good name in my opinion. It’s coming on leaps and bounds at the moment but I have my doubts over whether the idea can sustain the pace. God knows how long it’ll take until he’s found one worth $1 million, presuming that it even happens.

I was tempted at the start to submit a few of my own domain names – but I just didn’t get around to it. It would have been nice to have been part of history…..mwahahah!

Now – I think it’s about time I came up with an idea to easily make $1 million. Anyone have any ideas? I swear I’ll give you a cut of the proceeds! Any takers? Anyone?!?! It was worth a try.