Take More Risks

After the weekend PR update, Take More Risks has been upgraded to a PR4 from a PR3 which means that I’m now elligble to place Text Link Ads on here. Hurrah! I’d applied a few months ago but was rejected as the blog didn’t have any link popularity or real traffic. The most frustrating thing about this was that when I went to reapply I was notified that I’d have to wait until the TLA monthly review for my site to be approved. Being a bit of a chancer I emailed the TLA team and within a few hours they manually approved my site. You seriously can’t fault that for service!

Anyway here’s a screenshot of this months payment notification email -it’s increasing gradually!

Text Link Ads Tips

• Supply as many relevant keywords in the the Keyword box as you can, it’ll increase the likelihood of your listing appearing if an advertiser searches for it.
• Don’t place the Text Link Ads at the bottom of the page as this is a surefire way to halve your amount of recurring subscribers. Remember new advertisers often expect traffic as well as a Pagerank boost.
• Ad places on technology/computer related blogs are in demand by advertisers. You can find these PR3-4 blogs on Digitalpoint all the time with asking prices of between $100-200.
• Generally I don’t submit a blog until the price tag for one link until the price tag on the text link calculator is above $30. It means you’ll have to wait a month on the whole review process (unless you send them an email).

Hey, it seems like ages since I’ve last posted here! Sorry for the delay, I haven’t been feeling very well since Friday. God damn chest infections! Oh well, onwards and upwards.

Website developments 

On Sunday I had a really pleasant surprise when I found out Fart Noises was still receiving around 100 uniques a day! This is brilliant news as it means I can concentrate on developing it along with Gothic Fairies. I think I’ll develop more of We Hate Cats too.

I’ve been pretty restless lately, coming up with about 20 different ideas for sites. Most of them are mini-sites which could be fleshed out in a few months time in a similar vein to Fart Noises. It’s definitely worth a go, especially since the ideas are quite fun.

More on that at a later date.

My Plan

The plan is still to be earning $30 a day by June and $60 by August. I’ve completely rearranged how I’m going to achieve this. For starters I’ve decided against monetising Take More Risks at the present moment in time. I don’t really have the time to be dealing with the management of links and sponsored posts, I’d rather dedicate more attention to developing content on this blog and on my other sites.

The important thing is I haven’t lost sight of the target and I’m working my ass off at the minute towards that first target of $30 a day.

Things are going great at the minute with Adult Friend Finder, I’ve been consistently averaging $7 a day from it which is a surprise. I won’t start to celebrate until I’ve received my check though!

Domains 

After reading another article on X/HTML 5, I registered the following .co.uk’s

html5.co.uk
xhtml5.co.uk
xhtml2.co.uk

I’m seriously considering developing html5.co.uk as it’s something that genuinely interests me. It’d help with the Future and Emerging Technologies module we have in college next year too.

Anyway I’m currently watching my DVD boxset of Peep Show (an excellent UK sitcom starring Mitchell and Webb). I’m gonna rest for a while as I feel like my face is about to collapse. I’ll post something a little more interesting tomorrow, I promise!

I’m falling in love with the Text Link Ads affiliate program. The Paypal rollouts are unbelievably smooth with no fee for the lodgement. Again this months earnings from TLA are embrassingly modest, due in part to a massive slow down in traffic to My Kewl Space. Last month the site had reached a peak of 700 daily uniques, decreasing to around 200 recently. Since then there hasn’t been anymore interest in the links on that site.

An update on the Namedrive Experiment

Last month you might remember I carried out an experiment over on Namedrive where I bought 4 obscenely long .info domains, with the objective of ranking well for the subsequent keyphrases in Google. Here’s my earnings for February.

Success or failure? I’ll let you decide! A $0.05 return on a $12 investment isn’t exactly awe-inspiring but at least it’s taught me that relying on Google for traffic to parked domains is foolish. I think I’ll reinvest this months earnings from Text Link Ads into buying 4 domain typos to see how they perform. Surely they can’t do any worse than those 4 .info’s!

$522.30! I can’t believe it!

The best bit about it is that I can now register .com’s for $6.99 a year which is pretty cool.

Good news on the earnings side of things, I’m gradually recovering to my pre-January levels on Adsense, about $6 a day. I want to be closer to $60. I’ve no time scale penned out for it at the minute, I’m too busy concentrating on developing websites now. The earnings will follow natually if I keep penning original content.

I’m definitely thinking of moving to the mainland in May 2008. I’ll have to figure out how much I’ll need long before then though. $60 a day is the equivalent of my current wage which would be enough to survive but I don’t want to be scraping by.

I’m looking to buy a decent budget tool to track my finances. Has anyone any experience with the Accountz programs? I’ve seen some mixed reviews over on Amazon.

It’ll be helpful to seperate my personal and business accounts. Too often I’ve spent £40 on a night out and thought “Shit, I could have bought 8 domains with that!”. Similarly I’ve registered 8 domains in the past and thought “Shit, I’ll have to stick to dingy cider tonight!”.

Another update, I’ve had a great idea for a network of websites! The first of which will be wehatecats.com which is currently in development. It follows on from what I was saying yesterday on how I find it easier to develop pisstake/fun websites. My plan is to generate and reinvest the revenue from these sites into serious ventures.

I’m in the money! I’m in the money! Well not really but it’s a start! A promising aspect of the Text Link Ads affiliate program is that there is no minimum payment – they’ll pay you at the end of the month no matter how much you have earned. No more waiting 87 months to finally receive your $100.

I’m kinda ashamed by how much money I spent on holiday God damn it! Ah there is no use crying over spilt milk, what’s gone has gone. All I can do is continue to work hard at this.

And to change the topic a little here a few ideas that have been motiviating me recently.

• I want to travel the world. I want to have the freedom to spend one week in one country and another week in another.
• I don’t want to walk home in the dark at 5pm. I’d rather be in my home beside the fire.
• I want to move out and get my own place. Independence is good.
• I want to go crazy with my earnings for a while and possibly join a religious cult after reaching a suicidal low.
• I want to stay in a 5 star hotel and update my sites from a luxury suite.

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!

I know this is a bit ambitious but by mid February I want to be making $10 a day with MyKewlSpace. My aim is to make at least double the amount of money I was making earlier this month $8-10, by March.

Spent a while last night redesigning My Kewl Space and I’m pleased with how it looks. It needs better categorisation if I’m to expand it in a major way. I’ll have to see which Myspace-related terms are popular in Wordtracker first though. This is the fun part. I’m delighted that My Kewl Space is out of the Google Trustbox which means it’s ranking well for some crazily popular phrases.

I think the best way to expand MyKewlSpace is to make fun little add-ons that relate to current events. Basing something on the Borat movie might be a good idea. I’ll have a peep over at IMDB to see what other movies are coming out. The best way forward is to design things that are fun to create and use.

I’m also gonna use the Crazy Blog Dog meme that I created for Livejournal for the site. It should be popular enough. I’m worried though that if one of the addons becomes overly popular it might send my webserver down. I’m getting ahead of myself again here! All I can do is release it and see how it goes.

The post rate at Implicitgaming is continuing to increase slowly after a massive crash. The Adsense ads are performing very well too.

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.

Meaningofadream went for $210 in the end, which was a fair enough price. When I started it back in April I had serious doubts that I’d make back my original $100 investment in the copywriter but it turns out I’ve tripled my money. I’m delighted!

I’m now going to use Wordtracker to find a tight dream related niche. After that I’ll move on to Rentacoder and put up an advertisement requesting a copywriter. I think I’ll pay $10 an article for this one. Now that I think about it might be better to band the articles into different categories like so.

6 x 300 word articles at $5
6 x 500 word articles at $10
6 x 700 word articles at $15

Or something similar anyway.

I’ll have a forum on this one too. I’m becoming overly fond of them (as evidenced by my purchase of chatpsp.com). Where do I go from here? I’m thinking about selling some of the sites I made during the 50 sites in 50 days binge. The only thing is most of those websites will struggle to make $75. I might be better off developing them. I’ll have a think about it tonight. I don’t want to get too carried away.

I’m falling in love with Implicit Gaming. I need a life.

Which is quite weird considering I’ve done zero work on my sites recently. I earnt $13.20 over the course of yesterday, $11 of which came from emohairstyles.info. That and punkhairstyles.info are the only sites in my portfolio that are making anything significant.

I’d consider selling them if they weren’t the mainstays. Emohairstyles.info in itself has been averaging around $5 a day for the last two months, meaning that if you apply the 12 months revenue rule, it has a value of about $1500.

I’m seriously thinking of selling this now……..God knows why. I might even throw in punkhairstyles.info as well which has been consistently making over $1 a day.

I’m off to prepare the stats here. I’ve got nothing to lose (bar about 90% of my Adsense income, heh).

Update : I’ve put the site up for sale with a starting bid of $300 and a BIN of $1500. If it sells at the BIN price the winner will also receive punkhairstyles.info too.