Take More Risks

It turns out that Take More Risks is now at Pagerank 3. I’m a little disappointed to be honest, mainly because I wanted to sell Text Link Ads from the site and now I won’t be able to until the next update. I guess it’s a minor issue really, heh I can always try Adsense!

The only other use Pagerank serves in my eyes is to help reflect the value/popularity of the site. Since I wouldn’t sell my blog for anything short of $5 trillion it really isn’t a problem. All I can do is concentrate on sharing my experiences in more detail and I’ll continue to do so until I’m bankrupt.

Not many of my other sites were effected by the update but here’s a brief rundown anyhow.

Everclearalcohol.info – PR3
Ia.mthebest.com – PR3
Fartnoises.info – PR4
Gothicfairies.net – PR4
Thingsgodhates.com – PR1
Rockontshirts.com – PR3
Lawriesanchez.com – PR3

The good thing is I’m beginning to sense serious movement with my efforts here. I need to apply myself more towards this to begin to see proper rewards and only I can make that happen.

The negativity is still there unfortunately and I’m the only one who can deal with it!

Yoohoo! I had a great holiday and I’m convinced all the more that I want to do this full-time. I wanna be like Jack Kerouac with a laptop creating second-rate sites instead of classic beat novels. Enough of the waffle, I want to talk about MyKewlSpace.com

When I bought the site in mid-January it was averaging approximately 150 uniques a day. We’re now averaging slightly over 300! Today the unique tally is at 150 and that’s before noon!

Wahey, I’ve sold my second Text Link Ad on the site! Ideally I would have wanted to have shifted a few more within the 4 days I was away but I guess this will have to do. Adsense earnings for the single ad unit on the left hand side of the page has stabilised at about $0.50 a day. I’m going to experiment with other units over the coming week.

I can’t believe that Alexa ratings are regarded at all as a sign of a website’s popularity. This blog is ranking somewhere within the 400,000’s with 10% of the traffic of mykewlspace – which is struggling to maintain it’s spot within the top million. I’m guessing more webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed than Myspace users which is why this is so.

I’ve just noticed too that mykewlspace’s ranking has decreased over the week – even though traffic has doubled!

Why do posts always have to have an ending?

I probably won’t update my blog until I get home on Wednesday. Seems a long time away! I’ll re-invest any money that I may have left over from the holiday into buying more established sites I think. It’s the way to go.

I want to establish a large portfolio of sites from now on – rather than aiming for any specific Adsense targets. Making sites for Adsense can be compared to styling your home to fit the needs of only one renter. When that person leaves you’re in a mess! I’d rather concentrate on growing existing sites and then monetising them when I see fit. Sites like houses will mature and increase in value on their own except in certain circumstances (like a huge algorithm change in Google).

I’m only going to sell sites that aren’t established from now on. It’s too easy to disregard them as worthless if they are just sitting there.

Anyway back on topic! Edinburgh! It should be good. It’ll be the first time I’ve ever been on a plane believe it or not. I’m not scared of flying or anything, in fact I’d rather be in an aeroplane crash than a car crash. At least when you crash in aeroplane you can almost be sure that you won’t survive. I won’t have to worry about being conscious of severed limbs or impalements.

At which point did this post become so morbid….

So yeah, I’m excited but I have to write a technical report for an ongoing project over the next 2 days. Not fun. I’ll get it sorted though.

In the meantime I’ll do a bit more SEO on mykewlspace.com and kick back. Oh the Life Of Riley.

Wahey! I received the notification last night that I’d shifted the first ad unit on My Kewl Space. I’m set to receive $13.50 for it each month so if I can replicate this with another 4 links I’ll be making $67.50 within that period. Promising stuff. I could even recoup my inital $400 investment within 6 months with Text Link Ads alone. Excellent news all in all.

Now it’s just a case of selling those extra links!

I can’t believe I sold I Hate God.net for $100! According to the Text Link Ads calculator I could sell ONE link for $30 a month and a total of 10 for $110. You live and you learn don’t you?

As appealing as it might seem to receive instant cash for one of your websites it’s always best accurately evaluating your website’s value. I’ve found this out the hard way at least twice. Hopefully I can continue to build upon My Kewl Space and make up for this error.

Come on Google and roll out the Pagerank Update already. I can’t wait to see what PR my blog receives. And this is coming from a man who was largely indifferent towards Pagerank until about a week ago!

In what has to be one of the quickest site turnarounds known to man, I sold Chatpsp.com for $45 last night – $10 less than I bought it for only a few days earlier. It was worth it though, I’ve learnt to be much more cautious since then. It’s far too easy to go out there and buy up all the sites that even remotely catch your eye and later regret it.

I’ve yet to see any sites over on Digitalpoint that have made me think “I must have that now and I’ll kill to stop anyone else buying it”. It’d take a really cool football or dreams website to do that with at least PR5 I believe. It’ll happen one day I’m sure and when it does I’ll probably be completely skint.

Anyway I won’t be buying any more forums unless the subject area really appeals to me. There is too much involved trying to keep debate flowing. At the start it’s almost like trying to keep a failing campfire lit on a rainy night. Oh the stress! Oh the crap analogies!

The site is looking so much tidier now without that massive ad unit in the center, which wasn’t converting that well anyway. I’m not sure what I could place above the content now. I’ll have to have a think about it.

Removed some Non-Reciprocal links on the right to give link buyers on MyKewlSpace better value for money. We’re now down to 13 which isn’t so bad. I think it was over 20 before.

I need to find a better way to distribute my profile memes. I’ve been thinking about acquiring a Myspace account with a lot of friends but I’m almost certain that’s against their TOS. It might be better to just buy a few bulletins on some popular profiles. If anyone can point me in the right direction I’d be grateful here.

I tried applying for Text Link Ads as a publisher for Take More Risks but I got rejected. I’m guessing it’s the lack of popularity and Pagerank that’s to blame. That’ll all change within time.

Every post is an investment in the future. Every extra idea, reflection or revelation adds more value to the blog.

Know your users. Know what they like, hate and love. Know what will inflame debate and know what will turn them off. Know those who will be pivotal in your forums future. Promote them accordingly.

If you see a forum as simply a business venture you’ll struggle to succeed. You need to delve deep and interact with everyone for it to work properly.

If you have a bad memory, keep a spreadsheet of all of your users and note personality traits. Note who they are friends and enemies with. This may sound like it’s overdoing it but if you have a complete profile of your userbase you’ll be in a position to create topics on your forum that generate a reaction!

Have you ever completely overhauled how a site is optimised in the search engines only for you to wait impatiently on Google catching on that something has changed and subsequently updating it’s index? I’m in that situation now. I seem to be checking my logs every 20 minutes to see if Googlebot has been and if it has for some reason I immediately check site:mysite.com in Google.

They say that a watched kettle never boils for a reason!

No more news on the Text Link Ads front, I suspect it’ll take at least a week for me to sell my first unit which is fair enough I suppose. Still quite excited about it.

My Adsense earnings won’t recover at all at this rate. They’ve been extremely poor so far this month but it doesn’t particularly bother me now. I’m more concerned about generating traffic for My Kewl Space and passing it onto my other sites. None of the meme’s I created have been a particular success so far. Ah well, it’s only a matter of a time before I find the winning combination!

I should look more into Myspace marketing….

Once again Google have updated their Terms of Service placing further restrictions on the way in which we can display ads on our websites. I can’t help but be infuriated by their escalating levels of arrogance and their blatant disregard for hard working publishers who offer up their traffic to Google.

It’s as if by placing Adsense units on our websites we’re granting Google an editorial role. We no longer have the final say as to what will appear, at least if we want to maintain a decent income.

I’m far from being a gloom merchant but I can only see this situation getting worse as Google’s power increases and if it continues in the same vein it’ll be what leads most publishers away from Adsense.

Below, I’ve constructed a few points outlining issues that I believe are particularly important.

• As publishers there are no guarantees that our accounts will be active when we check them in the morning. Google makes it seem as though our business is worth very little to them when the exact opposite is true. Small publishers don’t really have a voice; it is Google’s way or the highway. Only there isn’t a highway! There are few feasible contextual alternatives to Adsense. And by feasible – I mean programs which return relevant ads that achieve click throughs.
• Google seem to be capitalising on their monopoly by striking fear into the hearts of publishers. We’re willing to jump when Google says so to keep our main streams of revenue. Dulling the way we express ourselves isn’t a problem if it is to appease the wrath of our paymasters and to maintain our income
• And Google is a paymaster for many of us. As much as I’ve tried to diversify my streams of income in the past, Adsense always seems to payout the most. Is this Google’s problem? No, but somehow I can’t feel liberated when they are toting a gun down my throat. At any point I could be fired without the chance of an appeal which is actually much worse than working for a regular employer!
• I’ve become so paranoid about being banned from the Adsense program that I’ve started emailing the team every time my click through rate is higher than the norm. Should I be held accountable every time some silly beggar decides it’ll be fun to click 100 times on my ads? Google should strive to protect both it’s publishers and advertisers against fraudsters.
• Adsense isn’t dying and it can only to continue to grow with Google since it’s now such a key part of their infrastructure. It makes sense that Google will only try to further increase their current stranglehold in the market by enforcing additional restrictions on creative expression.
• Sure enough though it is their program – but taking into considering their size they have a responsibility to shape the Web for the better. Instead of being so damn inflexible they could make provisions by instating variants of Adsense for sites that vary from the family-friendly norm. If Google continues to neglect this market it won’t be long before another company develops a monopoly in this sector.
• Where will it end? Will Google start demanding that all publisher sites should adopt the Google corporate look and feel? Will we be penalised if we don’t sign off our sites with a Google Copyright notification at the bottom? Will we have to brand ourselves with a Google Tattoo to actually get approved for the program in the first place?
• Finally, our only long tem hope of attaining security within the program is to eventually become a premium publisher. For many of us – there is more chance of visiting Jupiter. Still, it seems to be the only way in which Google will acknowledge our existence without immediate contempt or suspicion.
  Presenting our new logo!

Don’t get me wrong, I think Adsense is an excellent program. It’s just that every day, more and more horror stories are surfacing about publishers being banned for next to nothing. Without offering some TLC to their publishers, Google run the risk of losing the people who helped fuelled their monumental growth over the past few years.

So yesterday I inserted the Text Link Ads code into the includes file for My Kewl Space fully oblivious to the fact that I’d just crippled the rest of the my site.

How? Why?

Well Text Link Ads seems to make use of an XML file which stores the ads that will appear on your site. By default this is a relative URL in the form of

$LOCAL_XML_FILENAME = “local_80767.xml”;

This will work fine as long as your site isn’t divided up into sub directories and the xml file is kept within the folder where the rest of the files appear. This isn’t the case with My Kewl Space which meant that most of the site was inaccessible for a period last night. D’oh!

I resolved the issue by inserting the absolute URL to the XML file, in my includes. The really annoying thing is I created a new Myspace Stalker tool last night which sent an extra wave of traffic to the website and I’ve failed to capitalise on it. Grrrr. These things happen though I guess.