Project AdSense - General

AdSense Finally Making Some Money

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 10:27:07 -0700

Well, now that I've got your attention, it's time to report. First a product summary:

I am back to using Article Post Robot again (for article submissions). I found Article Marketer submitted my articles to too many sites who were "cheating". In other words, blogs who take in a certain type of article, then just post it. No backlinks, no acknowledgement. Most of these blogs also have no way to contact the web master (big surprise).

I am also using SubmitEaze for my directory submissions. Seems to work fairly well and since it has a way to keep track of submissions I have already done then I can do 5 or 10 a day on each of my sites and pick right up where I left off.

Article Marketing works
I know I've been back and forth about Article Marketing since starting this blog, but I finally have real examples of it working. As an example, go to google and type in the phrase: "mma is scary" without the quotes. The first site that comes up is Halloween Village. That's one of mine. The actual article was about martial arts, but in the author resource box I put something to the effect of "If you think MMA is Scary, try Halloween Village". I wrote that article in March, 2007, so it might take a while to see the rewards, but it does work.

Article Chimp is making money
I'm finally getting some traffic to my Article Chimp article directory and it's starting to make money. Not a ton, maybe $20-$30 a month, but it's a start. I'm trying a novel approach with my article directory of not loading it down with a million ads and keeping the response times good. Maybe it'll pay off in the long run.

Halloween and Christmas is picking up
My Halloween and Christmas themed sites are starting to pick up steam as the holiday season approaches. Still under 100 impressions a day, but a lot more than the 5 or 10 I've had since they've opened. I credit a bit of SEO (link building) and a bit of the season.

ultimate-fighter.net is back on Google
I've spent quite a while undoing the damage I think I did by creating a myspace page and linking to ultimate-fighter.net. Note that I also bought a paid link, but had that undone. I was de-listed for months, but I seem to be back now ... whew!

mma.gocurious.com is going great
I really wish I'd purchased a domain when I started building my UFC Results fan site. This is by far my most popular site with around 40,000 or so visitors a month and is also my main money maker (not a ton, probably will do $100 this month). Some directories won't even look at listing sub-domains.

DMOZ
I still have no listings in DMOZ, despite signing up in January.

Well, now you're up to date...keep trying, keep your expectations realistic and be patient.

Article Marketer Update

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 12:34:55 -0700

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.

DMOZ back up, finally!

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 12:16:39 -0700

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 no Google PageRank Update (export)

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 12:12:23 -0700

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.

Updated Article Site and Open Source Site and AM Rant

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 09:22:42 -0700

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.

Jan 4, 2007 still no PageRank Update

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:54:04 -0700

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)

Happy New Year!

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:49:55 -0700

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!

Project Adsense - New stuff

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 08:09:45 -0700

Well, this never say die attitude of mine might very well kill me. This week I've added forums to the recipe site, the travel site and the open source depot site. I've also purchased some new hosting for the articlechimp article site.

I've been trying to install ArticleDashboard on godaddy for about 2 weeks with little or no success (actually, I got close, but was never able to get it fully functional). So, I've decided to purchase a hosting account from hostgator and give them a try. ArticleDashboard did not work right out of the box there either (which surprised me, since it is their preferred hosting and they make money off referrals to hostgator).

Anyway, commenting out the php_flag line in the .htaccess file allowed it to work.

I then purchased a package from adinstalls which will put a default database of ArticleMarketer categories on my site and sign me up with ArticleMarketer to recieve articles. It's been almost 24 hours since I purchased this package and the install is not complete yet (although they did contact me to ask for my userids/passwords, which I gave them...so trusting). I guess I'm the only one who works 24 hrs a day!

Now, on to ArticleMarketer for article submissions. As you know (or maybe you don't), I've been using Article Post Robot for the past month or so to submit articles and while it's easier than submitting on my own, I've noticed a number of deficiencies in the product. The most glaring being that they need to allow two types of author resource box, html and non-html. So, to use article post robot effectively I find myself doing manual submission which takes me about 2 hours for 100 sites.

I noticed that ArticleMarketer allows two resource boxes (aha...somebody is thinking), so I signed up for it. That was 2 days ago. Now, they are supposed to send me a confirmation e-mail to confirm my e-mail address. It never arrived. I approached thier tech support with the problem and they replied that it must be my spam filter. I advised them that I do not have a spam filter installed, to which they replied "it's always the spam filter. So, being politically correct I gave them another e-mail address (which also does not have a spam filter enabled) and still no confirmation e-mail.

At this point, I am getting more than a little frustrated. #1, turn around time on e-mails seems to be almost 24 hours. It looks to me that they do their tech support between 7pm and 9pm, which means you get one shot at this every 24 hours

So, I've now given them another e-mail address (also without spam filter), completely unrelated to the first two, but I know it's not spam filtering, it's on their end...so I gave them a little background about myself. I worked two years in tech support earlier in my career, so I know that the customer is rarely right, but in some cases, the customer does know what they are talking about. C'mon now, I've created e-mail clients, written ftp programs, dealt with internet technologies since way before broadband was available for home users. I know what a spam filter is and how to enable/disable it...trust me, I get spam from every source imaginable, I've won the British lottery dozens of times and had more Nigerian bankers offer me money than you can imagine. I get new ebay scams daily and notes from banks I am not part of...there is no spam filtering on my accounts.

So, now I wait...another 24 hours and I know they'll plug in the new e-mail address and I know it won't work. Then what will I do? I'll ask for my money back. This is unfortunately, because from everything I've read, this is the article distribution service I need and I'm getting screwed because something is messed up with their sendmail daemon, or their javascript isn't working, or they've upgraded their php engine, or their database log file is full or some such nonsense.

Ok, so here is a partial site list of what I've created so far

Cruise Travel Review

Cruise Travel Review Forums

Best Ever Recipes

Best Ever Recipes Forums

Open Source Depot

Open Source Depot Forums

Free Classic Books

Online Bible

Real MMA

Ultimate Fighter MMA Forum

Christmas Wonderland

Project Adsense

Halloween Village - just started

Cottage Country Contractor -home of Philtor Contracting

Best Dental Site

My Fancy Diamond

Zippy Chimp

GoCurious.com eventually will link them all together

Uber Wisdom, not yet started

Who knows, there may be more.

Take it easy...I'm not going to BTW, grand total is a little more than $20

Article Writing and Rewriting, traffic from topsites

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 05:48:26 -0700

Hey, it's been another 2 weeks or so. I'd like to say my traffic has skyrocketed, but that would not be entirely honest. I have now submitted 9 articles to various article sites. The last three I've "modified" from my own works with a program called Article Content Wizard. Let me tell you, the people writing these SEO friendly programs need some help on usability and general programming practices and usefullness. The program is good enough and I'd rather spend the price than develop it myself, but it could use a little work.

Ok, the numbers. I have now made more than $15, that means about $9 in the last two weeks which would put me on track for $18/month. That would certainly be enough to pay my hosting and domain name costs, but not anything additional.

When people tell you that it will take 6 months to generate any traffic, believe them. Anyone else is selling you something (literally).

I've continued my link trading, although the more I read, the more I think it's not worth the $299 I spent on the program. I've discovered another source of revenue, clickbank. Of course I haven't figured out how to make a sale, but their commision structure looks good.

Don't take this as a sign of me giving up, on the contrary, I've never been more focused. I am adding forums to the recipe and travel sites for people to discuss and add their own info (in my dreams). I'm also attempting to set up my own ArticleDirectory. The theory behind this is that there are a lot of "auto submission" programs out there, so I won't necessarily need to promote like crazy to get content. I will of course need to promote to get people to visit and use my articles.

I'm having a little trouble getting "ArticleDashboard" installed on GoDaddy, but once I do, you can be sure I'll post exactly how on Open Source Depot

My best $ day so far was a little over $2 with 14 clicks. My second best was a little over $1. I am now averaging about 50 cents a day, but going up slowly. I'm still hitting a bunch of 3 cent clicks, I wish I knew which add was giving me that so that I could adjust my keywords accordingly.

Well, back to work on articlechimp

Project Adsense - It's been a while

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:42:08 -0700

Wow, it's been 12 days since my last entry. Don't worry folks, I haven't given up yet. I've been working away. I've also gotten a little busy at my real job too!

Here's what I've done since my last entry.

I (in combination with my travel and food experts) have written and submitted several articles. I've submitted these with the help of "article post robot" look for a review of that product here soon. However, before I review it I want to send some ideas to the developer. I think the product is a little raw right now and needs some work. It's almost worth me taking the time to write my own, but I digress. For now, if you are using article post robot, use manual mode. It takes longer, but you are not missing 2/3rds of the sites you are trying to post to either.

Project Adsense has some new sites.

Real MMA which is a blog style site for MMA predictions and gossip. Most of the content will be put up my me, but I'm really hoping to get some people willing to post their own stuff too.

Real MMA Forums This is my first venture into the forum arena and I decided to go with MMA. The reason for this is simple. I know of 5-10 people who can argue fights, fighters, predictions, UFC vs Pride, etc and that's free content for me Of course I'm going to do link promotion, SEO, keyword stuff etc to try to get many users. Who knows, some day this may be my big earner.

Speaking of big earners, the Christmas Site has been by far my biggest earner so far (my total is now over $6). I'm getting between 50 and 100 page impressions per day from the Christmas site with the appropriate 2 or 3 clicks. Some of my ads are paying 3 cents, while others have paid up to 40 cents per click.

New Domains

I've registered several new domains, but they do not have sites to go with them yet. As they come online, I'll mention them here. One which is up, but has no real content yet is

Cottage Country Contractor Which is a site to promote my brother in law's siding business north of Toronto. I tried to make the domain name keyword rich so that search engines might find it easier. By brother in law is putting together some information/pictures/portfolio to add to the site. The site is mainly to drum up business for him, but I figure a couple of adsense ads might make it worth my while too

I've decided to buy the professional version of AddWeb's web site promoter. To be honest, link market has better people to trade with, however they do not have automatic link page generation and it becomes a real black hole for my time adding items to my pages manually. I wish that link market would make their interface better and offer. Right now, for me AddWeb is a better all round solution. That's another $300 into the pot. Here are my expenses for this project so far:

Domain registrations (2 years)

9 domains, some on sale, some private - approx $80

1 hosting account $140

article post robot $127

AddWeb Deluxe 1 copy ($80)

AddWeb Pro 1 copy ($300)

LinkMarket, 2 account ($50)

Advertising (ExactSeek) $60

That's getting close to $1000. Imagine, I thought I would get away with $200 at the start lol.

But, now I'm set for my link trading and submission needs (addweb pro allows 100 link trade sites). I'd love to know if the advertising is working...I should log in sometime and check it out.

Well, talk to you later.

Project Adsense - Article writing.

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 15:33:03 -0700

Well, the latest greatest way to get search engine rankings is to submit articles to content provider sites. So, this is what I've been doing for the last two days. Well, not actually submitting them, but writing them. Writing the articles didn't take long, but then I tried submitting them (three articles) to two sites. This took enough time that I thought that there must be a different way.

I found a piece of article submission software, Article Post Robot, I'm not going to write too much about this software yet as I haven't really formed an opinion yet. If I like it enough, I'll write up a testimonial about it.

So, using this software I've attempted to submit the articles to about 100 article submission sites. The prep work for this took at least 8 hours (registering to each site, putting my info on the site). The actuall submission process once the initial work is done is pretty painless.

Now I need to figure out what articles to write, or what content from my sites to post as articles. The idea behind articles is that you end up with quality links (most of these submission sites are ranked 4 or higher) and relevant links since your article is usually intimately related to your site. You need to make your article keyword rich (which I did not do a great job of in my first couple).

Oh yeah, I made 32 cents today, pushing my total earnings so far to over $4, woohoo! I'm hoping to hit the $10 mark by the end of November, but that's just a dream.

On other news, GoCurious Christmas Wonderland is the #11 site listed for search phrase "christmas wonderland" on google. Which is pretty good considering I haven't done too much keyword optimization yet and I have a lot more link popularity promotion to do.

Project Adsense is almost in the top 10 (although christmas wonderland isn't exactly the keyword combo I'd like...I wonder why I called the site that then?).

Project Adsense - short review of Joomla

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:42:15 -0700

Project Adsense is being devloped entirely on free software, open source or otherwise. That is with the exception of our hosting/domain registration (godaddy) and one of the web promotion tools we are using (AddWeb). Other than that, it's all freely available stuff. I'd like to give a quick rundown of Project Adsense's freeware list here.

Build a professional quality web site using only free software (freeware)

Joomla

Joomla is an open source CMS system (CMS stands for Content Management System). Generally CMS systems are extremely pricey and somewhat complex to use. I've found Joomla to be quite easy to use and now a month into using it I'm really starting to appreciate it. If you don't feel like using a simple page development tool and binding pages together by hand, then you should look at a CMS system. From what I've found, Joomla seems to be moving forward the quickest. I am curently using version 1.0.11 which is the latest of the 1.0 line.

Never use 1.0 software, that's what people will tell you and for the most part, that's true. However in the case of Joomla we must remember (or perhaps it's my job to educate you) that Joomla's roots (at least the 1.0 version) are in another CMS system Mambo. In fact, if you are familiar with Mambo, Joomla will be second nature (and the other way around).

Joomla is organized in menus, sections, catagories and items. It fits together kind of like this (general, remember this isn't a book, it's an article). A menu can link to a section, category or item in a number of ways (table, list, etc). A section can link to a category. A category can link to a number of items. So, if you need to organize your website by menu's or tabs, this is ideal. Of course there is much more to joomla than that, but that is the first thing you'll end up doing...just like I did.

Joomla extensions, templates, plug-ins, components

One of the things I love about Joomla is the wide assortment of plugins and templates available for it, both commercial and free. I found a site, joomlahacks.com which has a ton of these things (over 200 freely downloadable templates). I found one that was appropriate for each of my sites and with a little modification (you are allowed to modify most templates as they're part of the GPL) GNU Public License, or LGPL (lesser GNU public license).

Components that I am using are the metataggenerator component (downloaded) and the SEO component (allowing more google readable url's for my web site. Also, like I said I'm using a differently downloaded (and personally modified) template for each of my sites. My sites are Christmas, Recipes and Travel. There are a couple more, but why go into those details.

If you go to joomla.org, you can actually test drive the software. They've set up a joomla based server and give you a demo account to play with. This is great to get a feel for the software. I think the site gets reset every 30 minutes or something, so don't expect your content to stay there. Also, please please refrain from spamming on this website! The joomla folks have been good enough to give us a great product and let us try it out live, please don't take advantage of their good nature by putting spam up there.

Which technologies does Joomla use

You could also call this section "what does my webserver/hosting package need to run joomla"?

- PHP, joomla is a PHP based system. If you don't know what PHP is, you should search around a bit. It's a language for web development (I believe loosly based on perl) which can have html embedded in it. I personally compare it to Java jsp's.

- MySQL, joomla needs access to a mysql database. It's installs will create it's own tables, but of course you need to have the appropriate permissions to do this.

That's it...although, if it is running on an apache web server it also makes the SEO stuff work better as you can (possible depending on your hosting) change the .htaccess file to rewrite urls appropriately.

Linux makes a nice joomla platform, but there's no reason why it can't run on any platform which has the above capabilities.

How hard is joomla to install

On my host (godaddy) it was dead easy. I just downloaded joomla to my pc, uncompressed the zip file, then uploaded the joomla stuff to the appropriate directory on my server. From there, I tried to acess that directory via the web browser and voila! Up comes the installation screen. I simply followed the instructions and there it was. Perhaps I'll write another article on installing joomla on godaddy (a more current one than the old ones I found which scared me away from doing this at first).

Performance

I don't have much of a frame of reference for this. Also my templates are a little heavy on the glitter. I'd say it's reasonable for what it's doing and obviously the faster the cpu and the more bandwidth your provider gives you the better joomla will perform.

Well, that's about it for now. Try it out for yourself and I look forward to writing reviews on all the free software packages that I used to put up gocurious christmas, gocurious travel and gocurious recipes!

Project Adsense - more time promoting the sites

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 05:24:02 -0700

I Spent at least two hours last night doing web site promotion using AddWeb and LinkMarket. I added the remaining sites to the linkmarket free section, that makes 8 linkmarket accounts so far. I also accepted some trades with AddWeb and initiated some new ones. While using LinkMarket, I noticed some article submission sites, from my previous reading I remember somebody saying that article submission is a good way to get quality one way links to your site. Of course, by now you've noticed that I'm not much of a writer.

I guess I could write an article on software development, the state of java or something. Ann could write a travel article and I could talk Stacey into writing an entertaining for the holidays and or planning a sleigh ride for the recipe and Christmas sites.

So far, I've been using Nucleus for this blog, but I've noticed that the templates/skins available for some of the other blog engines are much nicer. I'm thinking of switching over to wordpress or serendipity. I'd tried both of these in the past month, but dismissed them because they were not as capable for multiple independent blogs. However, that was when I planned on doing the entire GoCurious empire on one installed piece of software. Since this is just for Project Adsense, I should really take another look at those packages.

A word about link trading

At this point I am getting more link request from my free linktrader account than I am for my paid AddWeb account. I wish I could say it's as easy to manage them, but it isn't. Let me give you an example.

If I got 50 new trade requests from AddWeb and I wanted to add them all to my website, I could do this in about 5 minutes. AddWeb generates the full link page for your links every time, all I need to do is upload it to my web site (my site already statically links to that page).

If I got the same 50 requests from LinkMarket I can build links 10 at a time (for the paid account, one at a time for the free account), but I need to copy those to my own page. They are not nicely formatted, linkmarket leaves that up to you. I wish that linkmarket would have an option (even in the paid version) to keep track of all your links and gen the full link pages for you. Maybe they'll do this in the future. Or, maybe I need to start my own free link trading service with that functionality.

Did I mention that I added Project Adsense to the linkmarket, I also submitted Project Adsense with AddWeb's uber submission software. Who knows, in a month or two, perhaps somebody will be reading this!

Project Adsense - Updated the travel and recipe sites

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:25:21 -0700

Well, I did a tiny bit of updating of the

recipe site and the

travel site.

Mainly just moving some content over from the old joomla, does it all install and into the

new subdomained sites. I also did a little SEO (search engine optimization) on some of the pages. I think that writing while incorporating key phrases takes a little practice, hopefully I will get better at it over time...oh yeah, Project Adsense rules! LOL

Sorry, had to put that one in there. No clicks today so far, but the day has another 6 hours in it. Tonight (like every night) I'm going to work on link popularity a bit using AddWeb's link trader and linkmarket too.

Project Adsense - Books site revision.

nospam@example.com (AdSense Strategies) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 10:22:42 -0700

I've noticed that my online bible site hasn't been indexed by google. Their webmaster tools say that they've read all the pages, but I only see one entry when I do site:bible.gocurious.com.

So, I've decided that maybe it's because of the relative links I'm using between pages on that site. Since I've done the same thing on my books site, I think I'll make the changes there. Then I can see if books get listed first. I'm also reworking the books site generator a bit. So that there is a link back to the book and chapter at the top of each page of text. Apparently this is good for search engine optimization, but it'll also be better for anyone trying to read the books too.

I've also changed the background of that site from the dimpled paper look to a flat colour. This is so that my ads will blend better with the site. I still don't like the look of the site entirely, but I don't want to get too sidetracked on that right now. I need to be concentrating more on content and promotion than asthetics. Once I have visitors, I can worrry about how pretty the site is:

By the way, yesterday I had 1 click on the Christmas site, for $.29 (twenty nine cents). Project Adsense offically breaks the $3 barrier in total earnings. Well worth the effort so far. I am not discouraged, however as the majority of credible sources I have looked at say it might be months before you achieve any real traffic. I'l love to have had an existing web site with traffic. There was a time when my personal page was listed (no seo required back then), but that was in the very early days, before the boom and the .coms and all that. It was also serveral internet providers ago too....