Affiliates

What’s happening with Adsense this month?

August 14, 2008 by Tricia

Do you use Adsense on your websites? Have you noticed that you’re making less money this month?

I have!

My Adsense income has been on a steady increase since last September and after making some changes to my sites in April I started to make truly decent income. However I’ve noticed that this month I’m only making half or even less than that of what I used to make each day over the last few months.

Today’s earnings took a real downturn. I don’t know if Adsense is being slow in reporting or what’s going on but I’ve only made a few dollars! I”m used to making quite a bit more.

I won’t say exactly what my usual Adsense earnings are, but over the last few months it’s been enough to pay more than half my mortgage, so it’s a reasonably decent amount.

Are the advertisers cutting their budgets? Are they on holidays? I don’t know what’s happening, but all month I’ve been earning at a much lower rate than I normally do, yet my traffic has gone up.

As I started out by asking – Do you use Adsense on your website? Have you noticed that you are making less this month than you normally do? I’m just curious if others are in the same boat as I am.

Tweaking my blog income a little at a time

June 19, 2008 by Tricia

I’ve been busy trying to think up ways to increase my income by blogging or through other websites I own. Once we got our puppy at the end of November I kind of slacked off on my efforts to increase my online income and it’s really put a big dent in my savings account. One of the reasons I slacked off was because our puppy turned out to be quite sick and also being a puppy she took up a heck of a lot of my time!

Now that’s she’s older and a tiny bit calmer (and almost 100% healthy) I’ve been trying to increase my blog earnings again. I made a few changes to my Adsense placements on the majority of my sites a month ago and amazingly I’ve more than doubled my total Adsense income. Now it’s nothing to jump up and down about just yet, but doubling my Adsense income pays half my mortgage so it’s a significant increase. I learned a few tricks by reading Adsense Secrets – you can see the link to the site in my sidebar if you’re interested.

I’ve also been trying out some affiliate programs. I told you last month that I was trying Chitika again after a more than year long break. Well so far so good. I think I’ll tweak my ad placements as I think that will help, but I’m happy with my earnings so far. Kontera is ok – not as good as it was when I first started with the program, but it’s still one of my top earners.

I added Widgetbucks to my site again last week (again) and if things don’t improve I’ll be removing the code at the end of the month along with the shopping.com ads. They are mostly just taking up space and slowing my site down.

I’d love to hear what programs work well for you, especially if you have a general – home and garden type blog or website. As I said at the beginning of this post I’m looking for more ways to earn money through my sites. There are so many things to try that it’s mind boggling at times isn’t it? Of course, what works well for one site doesn’t always work well for another either so that adds to the confusion! However if you guys have any tips as to what works for you I’d love to hear about it. I’ve got bills to pay! 😉

Promote your sites and articles on Quassi

June 7, 2008 by Tricia

I just joined a new site called Quassi.

It’s a new kind of site where you can promote not only your own sites but topics that you are knowledgeable about as well.

In addition to having yet another place to promote your sites you can also participate in revenue sharing at Quassi.

Here’s some information directly from the site:

At Qassia, you can add your websites for free, and without having to add reciprocal backlinks. You’ll get unlimited quality backlinks (as opposed to useless “no-follow” backlinks). You can also add intel. Short for “intelligence”, intel is a tidbit of information. Qassia rewards users who add intel in three ways.

1. Backlinks You get one backlink for every piece of intel you add. Every intel will carry a direct backlink to one of your sites. So the more intel you add, the more backlinks you get.

2. Credit When you add intel, you also get credit, in the form of Qassia dollars. Your net worth in Qassia dollars determines how well your websites rank in our directory.

3. Revenue When your intel is displayed, you get 100% of the advertising revenue generated by that page. That is not a typo, by the way: we give you ALL of the gross ad revenue.

This means that website owners have triple incentive to contribute intel. The contributed intel will allow Qassia to become a vast repository of intelligence, with unrivaled original content. And a vast amount of original content draws traffic like honey draws ants.

Right now Quassi is in closed beta so the only way to join is by getting an invite by someone who’s already a Quassi member. If you’re interested in joining just click on one of the Quassi links that I’ve added to this post and it should take you to my profile page where you should see a Sign Up button in the top left hand sidebar.

I just signed up so I can’t tell you how well Quassi does at promoting your site and bringing in traffic yet, but I’ll write an update post about a month from now and let you know how well Quassi has worked for me. In the meantime, sign up and list your sites and perhaps add some articles about topics you care about and start earning those quassi credits and sharing in the site revenue.

aLinks WordPress plugin creates automatic links within posts

June 6, 2008 by Tricia

A few days ago I downloaded a WordPress plugin called aLinks. This plugin has been around for a while, but I’d never thought to try it until now, even though Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was singing it’s praises last September. I should have tried it earlier! This plugin has a ton of potential.

Bloggers link to lots of sites in their posts. They link to their blogging friends, they link to past posts, they link to great websites they’ve just discovered and some even add affiliate links to their posts. It’s just something we do. I’ll even go so far as to bet that most of the bloggers reading this post likely link to at least one site in just about every post they write.

Why not make linking easier?

The aLinks plugin has been designed so that you can set up a link within the plugins admin area and then never have to hyperlink to that phrase every again!

I haven’t set up the plugin on this blog yet as I wanted to try it on one of my smaller less trafficked blogs first while I test to see if it causes any CPU over use problems on my server. (remember last year I went through two web hosting companies because my sites were using too much of the shared servers memory!)

If you’d like to see what one of the links looks like once it’s set up check out this post on My World. I used the built in Amazon module to quickly create a link to an Amazon page that sells dog beds. Now whenever I write the words dog bed in a post on My World it will automatically link to that Amazon page for me. Not only that, but I set up the aLinks plugin so that it will find any of my past posts that have any of the keyword phrases that I created and it will add the links to them too.

I have a number of blogs and I make references to them occasionally so I spent a few minutes setting up automatic links for my various blogs. Now all I have to do is type in the name of one of my blogs and when I publish my post the link to whichever blog I mentioned will appear. Just that alone will save me some time.

Considering that I have so many blogs I also appreciate the export/ import feature. Once you create your list of keyword phrase links you can import them to another blog using the plugin. That’s going to come in handy once I’m done setting up the first blog I’m trying aLinks on!

This plugin has too many great features for me to describe in one post.

I’ll just finish by telling you that you can add modules to the plugin for a few affiliate programs such as eBay, Clickbank, Commission Junction, iTunes and several others, as well as one for Wikepedia. This means that along with the built in Amazon module you’ll be able to monetize your blog by scattering a few links to products you’re happy recommending. Link the word “book” to Amazons bestseller page and anytime you use the word book in a post you’ll automatically have a link that could earn you money.

The aLinks plugin has been updated recently to work with WordPress 2.5.1 so if you’re a WordPress Blogger consider giving this plugin a try.

Update – I don’t use this plugin anymore because it stopped working and there doesn’t seem to be anymore updates. In fact creators page no longer seems to exist. Sorry!

Best Google Adsense day so far!

May 24, 2008 by Tricia

In an earlier post I mentioned that I’d been working on my main website for the last couple of days. Well … it’s a pure HTML based website and it’s huge so any time I want to make a change to the site I have to go through each and every page (if it’s a site wide change, that is). It takes forever, but I think the work that I just spent a couple of days doing is going to pay off big time.

Along with adding a new Privacy policy page as per the new Google Adsense TOS, I decided to implement some of the things I learned through the Adsense Secrets e-book that I purchased in late April.

I wrote a post about getting the Adsense Secrets 4.0 ebook on April 25th – I guess you can consider this an update almost exactly a month later.

I can now tell you that the e-book that I purchased for the low price of $9.95 has paid for itself several times over in the last two weeks or so.

If you are a regular reader of this site or any of my other blogs you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been playing with my Adsense placements as well as trying out a few other affiliate programs like Chitika.

Well my tinkering has paid off!

In the last two weeks I’ve doubled the income I was earning on my blogs through Adsense and by adding Chitika to some of my sites I’ve added a new great source of income.

Now for the big news.

Yesterday evening I started uploaded the pages of my HTML website that I’d been working on. I’d updated the Google Adsense code, changed the colors of the ads slightly and added two more Adsense blocks to each page of that site. I guess you could say that the new ad code and the updated Adsense placements have been up and running on that site for about 24 hours now.

Just those few little changes to the site – things I learned by reading the Adsense Secrets e-book – have more than tripled my income on that one website. In one day!

I can’t wait to see how much I earn on that site next week. I mean, it’s a long weekend in the US so I’m sure site visits and ad impressions are down a little bit …

I’m so excited. Doubled my income on my blogs and at least tripled my income on my very large website. What’s next? I can’t wait to find out.

If you use Adsense on your website or if you’ve been thinking of using it I strongly recommend that you get the Adsense Secrets E-book. Look what I was able to do in just a month (would have been earlier if I’d started tinkering right away).

I would also look into Chitika as well. They’ve just implemented a new premium ad system that higher eCPM than any of their other products. Actually I believe they are implementing some of the premium features into their other products as well so it’s possible that all of their products will have an increase in eCPM now.

I’ve been with Chitika for a couple of years but I never really earned much so I took it off my blogs about a year ago. At the beginning of the month I decided to give it another try and I can tell you that it’s already my third highest affiliate earner. Kontera and Glam are pretty much tied for second place.

Unless your totally opposed to ads on your blogs or websites it’s worth trying some of these programs. Tinker with ad placement and the colors of the ads themselves and see what works best. Oh and check out that ebook that made all the difference for me!

aLinks WordPress plugin creates automatic links within posts

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