Take More Risks

Whilst my progress with the Text Link Ads program has been comparatively modest so far, I’m looking to establish it as one of my largest sources of income over the net few months. It’d be cool to bring in somewhere between $300-500 a month by the summer.

As you can see below I’ve managed to sell 5/10 of my ad units on My Kewl Space. If everyone renews their link subscriptions next month I’ll be making close to $70 a month. Not bad for a site that I paid $400 for!

Anyway I’ve recently added Text Link Ads to 3 more of my sites. Let’s hope that I can sell a few more over the coming weeks. I’m looking forward to adding them to Take More Risks in due course!

What I Like About the Service

• With most affiliate programs there’s normally a months delay before your payment is processed. Text Link Ads automatically credit your Paypal account on the 1st day of each month. It’s sweet.
• Earlier this week I emailed the Text Link Ads team with a query and within hours the owner Patrick Gavin replied. Talk about great customer service!
• Whilst it could be argued that I’m losing out on 50% of the link revenue, this is a small price to pay for the service provide. Not only do they actively promote your links but they also take care of interacting with the link buyers which can be a real pain to manage yourself.

I’ve just noticed that they’ve introduced a Wordpress plugin that takes care of all of the TLA code for you, all you have to do is place a small snippet of PHP code in the location in your template where you want the links to appear. It’s small things like this that really make a difference.

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!

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.

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.

Why the hell didn’t I think of this before? According to the most conservative of estimates My Kewl Space stands to earn a small fortune compared to what I was initally expecting. I’ve placed another batch of ads on one of my old blogs that I no longer update too. I am excited about this. It’ll help keep things moving along smoothly in the next few months and with a bit of luck it might even fuel a few more site purchases.

Checked my bank balance for the first time in ages yesterday and it makes depressing reading. I can’t buy any new sites until I sell a few old ones. Drat.

Hurrah though for Text Link Ads, I’ll keep you posted on any links that come through in the next few days.

I haven’t seen something like this for a long time. I took this screenshot just a minute ago and it’s kind of sad in a way, but inspiring in another. I’m delighted that I got rid of those 3 sites as they’ve invigorated my affiliate marketing efforts. I’d like to be back to earning $8-10 a day in around two months and then double it shortly after.

I forgot to mention that I acquired mykewlspace.com last night for $400. It’s a PR5 Myspace resources site with a lot of potential. I wanted to create something similar with blogcram but it just didn’t work. I think I’ll adapt its layout for this though. I’m looking forward to making it and Implicit Gaming a success.

And on that note my stomach’s rumbling and it’s just about time for supper.

Oh I’m addict for sure! Once again I’ve caved in and I’m now checking my Adsense account at least once a day. It’s making good reading these days though, I’m up to about $30/35 a week. Cool!

I haven’t developed at all tonight, I’m feeling absolutely shattered. Again. Doing nothing seems to drain the energy out of me.

I’m still in the midst of applying for my first passport. Need to buy a replacement birth certificate. Grrrrrrrr! Why must the passport office be so anal? Can’t they all chill out a little bit and maybe charge a little bit extra? I’d happily pay £150 if it meant I could send a way a half completed form to their office and still receive a passport.

Developing service based sites is definitely the way for me over the next few months. Blogcram’s still sitting there doing nothing though. Argh. I’ll write some meme’s and release them for Christmas. It’s always fun.

I love CakePHP by the way. I might set up a blog in the near future dedicated to PHP development or something. Although there are already about 70 squillion of them out there.

You’ve got to hand it to me, I have a knack of changing the subject about 30 times a post. It’s as if I’m going for some sort of record or something. Damn it, it’s my blog. I’ll write as badly as I want. Who am I arguing with here? This is nonsense.

I’m not high I swear, although the vodka kinda knocked me for six. I’ll never make a professional.

Heh, it’s official! Take More Risks isn’t popular enough yet to be listed on Review Me. I received an e-mail about the site yesterday morning and I’m assuming it’s made by the people who were responsible for Text Link Ads. In case you aren’t familiar with it already, advertisers who would like their product or service reviewed select a website from the Reviewme.com pool. The targetted site can then accept or refuse the approach and if the former is true, they must write the review for a premium.

This depends entirely upon your pages popularity, with the least popular sites being offered $20 and the more established pages receiving up to $200.

It’s a great idea, but once again I must question why the base price for a review is so high. $40 is quite a lot, particularly when the review will appear on a site that’s not that popular. Although in saying that it’s a positive sign that they seem to be rejecting unestablished blogs. I wonder where exactly the cut off point is in terms of popularity. And more importantly how the hell do they measure the popularity in the first place?

It’s something I’d definitely be interested in trying in a few months down the line.