Project AdSense

A few days ago others were reporting that a PageRank update had been done. I hadn't seen any movement on any of my sites. This morning however, all of my sites are showing some sort of improvement. The numbers range from a low of 0, to a high of 4. Once I analyze the differences in my linking and article marketing strategies for these sites I'll post the results. My gut feeling is that my early reciprocal link efforts are having just as much effect on these numbers as my article writing. I wish I knew exactly what date this is based on though

Article Marketer finally set my account straight. Whew, but in the end they did the right thing. Thanks Guys!

In other news, my X10 Commision Junction membership finally got approved, so now I can start using ads like the one below on my sites!




BTW: I actually do own some X10 products and have been using them for about 7 years now. I've purchased:

1) The ir to rf to ir converters (for sending remote signals from other rooms)
2) Video Sender/Receiver units (for watching TV outside, or where there is no cable (like by the hot tub).
3) Home automation. Turning hard to reach xmas lights on/off and hooks up to computer to simulate somebody being home when you're not.

They have quick shipping and for those of you who are in Canada, they ship to Canadian customers out of Toronto (so no duty at the border).

I finally decided to convert this site over to Serendipity from Nucleus. It looks like the import process worked fairly well. This will be my first post under Serendipity for Project Adsense.

If you're wondering why, it's because I found Serendipity a lot easier (that is easier to make a nice looking site). Also with the HTML Nugget plugin, it should be dead easy to ad my adsense ads.

If any of you read my Article Marketer rant, you know I haven't been terribly happy with their customer service. Well, they finally updated my sisters subscription (after my sister approached paypal with the problem).



I had another problem that they weren't really willing to help out with. My Author Name appears to be the same as another Author they have in their database, this was/is causing problems with submissions to some directories and my name as showing up blank in these directories.



I approached them and their response was:



"Choose your author name carefully, if you really want to change it, you can re-subscribe with a new name".



So, now I'm out another $79. Did I mention that it was supposed to be $74.99. Also, they signed me up with a 3 month recurring subscription, but on their page I clicked a link saying I would get 3 months and 3 free for $74.99.



Apparently Article Marketer's heads are still shoved somewhere...



I dream of sitting on a gold mine like they have and they're wasting it away on poor customer service...what a shame. Let's hope that they come around this time. I've sent them a note giving them 48 hours to straighten it out with paypal, or I'll go to paypal (which is apparently all that they listen to).



Too bad, once you get set up, their service (not customer service) seems to be pretty nice.

Yesterday, I checked the dmoz directory, something I've been doing every two days for three months now and voila! It's back. I proceeded to submit my various web sites, hopefully this will help a bit with my rankings and traffic.



Since January 1st, my traffic hasn't been terrible, but my click through rate has been awful. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because it's post Christmas and nobody is interesting in buying anything. Seriously, I've had days with 200 impressions and no clicks. typically I do a lot better than that.



Anyway, DMOZ is back up, if you haven't registered your site at DMOZ, do it. It might be one of the best things you can do for your search engine rankings.

Still waiting for Google to export their newest PageRank list to Google toolbar. Chances are it'll be late January or early February. This has been one of the longest waits between updates ever. I believe the reason for this is that dmoz has not been accepting new submissions for the last 3 months. I think Google is waiting for them to come back online to give everyone a fair chance, of course this is merely speculation.

The effort continues. I'll tell you though, I was getting used to the $3 days around Christmas. It shouldn't surpise anyone that traffic has dropped off since xmas. My best site (traffic wise) was by far the Christmas Site



Of course, the reason for that is simple. It's the site I spent the most time on, both content and promotion wise. I added the Christmas site to a couple of top site directories and they pushed quite a bit of traffic to me (quite a bit is relative to other sources...I know there are bigger better things to come).



My next challenge for the Christmas site is how to promote it now that the Christmas season is past us. I'm not going to think about that too much for now.



I just wrote my first article promoting this site. I've written between 10 and 20 articles so far and am quite happy with the results so far. I no longer have illusions that this will be a short term project. I'm now looking at making money over the course of years instead of months. I do however still believe that there is money to be made out there.



Anyway, about the article. I've read so many who claim you can make big money, only to turn around and try to sell you something. Don't get me wrong, the right tool for the right job...but most of the tools are rediculous wastes of money. Here's a recap of what I've "bought" so far for article submission and their results.



Article Post Robot

This is an piece of software for $139, it is designed to post to numerous article sites either automatically or manually. This software has a number of great features, but is also missing some very key features that I've found in other submission services. At this point, this one falls under "waste of money". If they ever fix their logging to be more accurate, include both html/non-html versions of the articles and author resource box and automatic account creation at article sites, then I may look at it again.



Article Marketer

I use Article Marketer from two standpoints. The first is as an article directory. My article directory Article Chimp gets most of it's articles via their service. I can't complain about this as they've sent me over 30,000 articles so far.



I also use Article Marketer to submit my articles (after having tried both manual submission and Article Post Robot in the past). I must say that the service is a great idea and parts of it are very well executed. However, their customer service is painfully lacking. Here's what I've been through. Step by Step.



1) I sign up

2) I never got a confirmation e-mail to activate my account

3) A week of account changes/back and forth and my forth e-mail provider, I finally get the confirmation message

4) The tech who changed my e-mail address the last time had a space on the end...this caused their own software to fail when I tried to submit a new artile

5) Got that figured out, now the service is working fine.



6) Recommend the service to my sister (who runs a Travel Site )

7) She signs up for a deal listed on their site (3 months for $74.99 with 3 months free). When we get to pay pal it asks for $79 (mistake #1), there is no mention of the other 3 months free (mistake#2). Ok, it's an extra $5...big deal, so we figure we'll sort out the rest later...not

When my sister goes to submit an article the site shows her as "Not Subscribed". With a link that she can pay $79 to subscribe. We double check that paypal has gone through and send them a message via their contact us link...

9) 5 e-mails later, they have still not responded to my sister, she now has to resort to reversing the transaction and lodging a formal complain with paypal. If anyone from Aritcle Marketer is listening SMARTEN UP!...you have a money making machine there, all you need to do is check your f-in e-mail once in a while and respond to your customers.

10) I noticed that my articles are showing up on other article directories (including mine) without an author name...I sent AM an e-mail...you guessed it, no response.



ARTICLE MARKETER, GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR BUTTS



With all that said, AM is still the best way I've found to get articles as an article directory and the best to submit them as an author...once you get past the intial set up bull.



I've also bought another product Article Content Rewriter. They promised a rewrite in 14 seconds, took almost an hour on my machine. One hour for the software to do some simple submissions and about 5 hours putting in alternate phrases...the tripe that came out the other end did not make it worthwhile. I can see where this program could be useful to some, not to me.

I'm still waiting for even one of my sites to show pagerank other than zero on the google toolbar



While I know that pagerank is an ongoing process, it would be nice to know which of my techniques (link trading vs articles vs nothing) is having the best results, or even if some of my sites have been penalized.



Patience my friends, patience.



Hey, I noticed today that a google search on "Project Adsense" puts this site at #4. Not bad, I wonder if anyone actually searches on that term (other than me)

Well, Christmas has come and gone and New Years Eve was a blast! Now, I'm left with the realization that my most popular site was the Christmas site and none of the others are really getting much traffic. So now, it's time to start concentrating on the other sites.



My sister is really putting a lot of effort into the travel site. I need to start concentrating on the Open Source site. I'm now successfully signed up with Article Marketer (both for receiving articles and submitting them). Let me tell you, they could use a lot of work on their customer service though. My sister signed up with them about 2 weeks ago, paid her $79 (the link said it would be $75). The link said she would be signign up for 3 months and getting 3 free, but when we look at her account it says "not subscribed".



So, two or three e-mails later, Article Marketer still has not fixed the problem. She even sent her pay-pal confirmation to them. I'm telling you, I am not impressed with them from that standpoint at all. I told her if they don't respond within another 48 hours to send them another e-mail saying that she's going to ask paypal to reverse the charges and log a formal complaint with pay pal. Maybe the thought of having their paypal priv's revoked will make them take notice!



On to better things.



Over the holidays I had a couple of $3 days (all on the Christmas site). Now that the holidays are over, I'm back to 10 and 20 cent days (how depressing). The only people who've registered at any of the forums (family and friends aside) are spammers.



I'm having a little trouble keeping motivated at this point.



Grand total spent $1500ish

Grand total made $35



As you can see, it isn't paying off just yet. I did notice that google has now started indexing the bible site though. I'm not really doing any promotion on that site, so cash wise, it's meaningless.



I found some public domain cook books that I'm going to make available on the recipe site,



I'm also considering using some of the articles from the Article Chimp site to boost my content on my other sites. I figure maybe it'll help both sites out.



Take it easy and have a great 2007!