The Blog Of Oussama Messaoud - Ways to make money online -

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These last days, this is the main dilemma I am having : Should I continue diversifying my monetization sources on the blog, or should I choose 1, 2 or 3 programs and take all the others off?

Honestly, I can’t decide !!

Pros and Cons : A comparative work 

To help me decide, I put this list of (+) and (-) for each option. I am doing this work live while writing the post, so I will discover how it looks like at the same time you do. Here’s how it comes out :

 Diversity :
(-) Confusion from the visitor’s side
(+) Not putting all my eggs in the same basket
(-) Less paying programs could overlap higher paying programs and thus the revenue potential decreases
(-) A lot more time to manage all the programs
(-) The blog looks messy with a lot of little banners flashing here and there

Focus :
(-) Less alternative solutions in case one or more programs are not performing well
(+) Clearer and nittier look for the blog
(+) Less time to manage all the programs
(+) Higher chances to catch the visitor’s attention towards one of the programs
(+) Gaining bigger expertise in the programs that I focused on.

Analysis and decision making : 

Hmm… look at that.  Apparently the choice is easy. Well. I don’t know! Does anyone think of any other points to put under each of the lists? I may have missed something here, for it looks too easy.
Do yo guys have an opinion? Can you advise?

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

With this new service : My Homepages Friends (MYHPF), which allows you to earn around £0.015 per click. All I did was subscribe, login and set the searchbox in my Firefox toolbar. It is very discrete, and didn’t cause any change in my search habits since I always use my toolbar search box. The only difference is that my previous search box was linked to Google, while MYHPF is linked to Yahoo. Although I prefer Google search results, I am willing to use Yahoo which is not that bad, and earn some money.

And even if the amount earned doesn’t seem that interesting, if you do the math it’s actually not bad at all. In average let’s  say that I do between 10 and 15 searches daily, which represents between  £0.15 and £0.225 / day = between £4.5 and £6.75 / month. Which is a good deal Vs. what I am getting today for my searches : ZERO, especially if you know that £1 is almost equal to $2.

So, I started yesterday, and I invite all of you to do the same. Nothing to lose here. It’s 100% free money.

Today is March 1st, so I am going to present the revenues report for Jan. and Feb. 2008. Here are the figures :

February Revenue : $13.48 broken down like this :
- Google AdSense : $3.60
- Dollars For Life : $9
- Kontera : $0.10
- Project Wondeful : $0.78

January Revenue : $5.48 broken down like this :
- Google AdSense : $5.28
- Zlio : 0.05 EUR
- Kontera : $0.03
- Project Wonderful : $0.10

Now a little flashback, back to 2008 goals, since the first milestone is coming up as March 31st is fast approaching.

Here is a reminder of the goals of Q1 2008 :
” Having reached $145 of monthly income and an RSS readership of 200 by March 31st, 2008.”

Situation as of today :
- Monthly revenue $12.7 (8.75% of Q1 goal)
- RSS Readership : 25 (12.5% of Q1 goal)
- Alex Rank : 351,290 (No goal set)
- Google Page Rank : 1 (No goal set)

I need to concentrate effort on improving my results and try to get the closest possible to the Q1 goals. I need to come up with the right strategies to achieve this. I will keep you posted about this. For Alexa Rank, I will try and get in the top 250,000.

I welcome every suggestion you can help me with. Thanks everyone.

If, when reading the title, you asked yourself : “Who the hell is John Chow?”, then I am afraid you are either a Martian or a brand new blogger. John Chow is one of the most famous professional bloggers out there who earns an average of $25,000/month from his blog.
This said, I asked myself this question : “Is John Chow Losing Momentum?” when I saw the evolution of his Alexa Rank on the last 6 months. Here is the graph :

It looks like a big drop to me! But then, it’s still the big question of how much is the Alexa rank relevant as to give information about the real traffic of a web site.
However, it seems like John Chow is starting to lose readers and I wonder why is that happening.
- Are people starting to get bored with his Vancouver dinners plans?
- Are people starting to be fed up with the amount of Paid Reviews they read on his blog?
I mean, you don’t read anything new anymore on John Chow dot Com. What made the blog very popular once : the tips, the challenge of making it a big revenue blog, etc. is no more present now. That may explain the loss of interest that readers are showing .
Again, these are all personal assumptions, and my point of view on the subject. And for me, there is a discussion beyond that :
- How can someone who reaches the top of the blogging hill, remain on the top of the freaking hill?
- How is it possible to always come up with new things and manage to keep the interest of your readers.
From another perspective, the subscriptions to the RSS feed of John Chow and the monthly earnings are constantly increasing in the last period. So I may just be basing my thoughts on some kind of erroneous indicator, namely Alexa.
In any way, there is always something to debate out of this observation of John Chow’s rank drop.
So what do you guys think? Is he losing momentum or is Alexa playing games?

I subscribed to DollersForLife, in the year 2007, and I ended up earning $6 that year from the program. The idea of the system is simple: You subscribe by paying $19 once broken down as follows :

• PAYMENT #1 to Referrer — $9
• PAYMENT #2 to Random– $5
• PAYMENT #3 to Admin — $5

Once you pay that, you get 10 rotations in the system and get paid $9 every time your refer someone, and get a chance to randomly win $5 everytime someone subscribes, even if it’s not you who referred him/her.

So yesterday I got another referral and got sent $9 to my paypal. The program also accepts e-gold and AlertPay as payment methods.

As a summary, I encourage everyone to subscribe to DollerForLife, for these very reasons :
- You get paid $9 for every referral.
- You get paid $5 randomly, for life.
- You allow me to receive $9 extra dollars
- As a “Thank You” I will be sending 200 ec for everyone who subscribes under me in the program (Just drop a comment on this post, so that I know you qualify for the ECs)

Rankings are best when they drop. My blog is now in the first 600,000 sites ranked by Alexa and I can do nothing but be
happy.
On a less happy note, you may have realized that my posting frequency also dropped this last week. In fact, it was a very active week offline at work and I didn’t find any time to write something worth it. And in this wild blogging world, you pay instantly in terms of readership, when you are absent for more than one day. My stats show this tough reality. I am learning the hard way.
If you want to keep people coming to your blog again and again, subscribing to your feed (Subscribe to mine and I swear I will be more disciplined in terms of posting frequency. Please, don’t let me down. I learned my lesson), being involved and link to you, then don’t do what I’ve done this last week. Or you can do it but then you will have a beg people like I just did to get RSS subscribers. Not very self-accomplishing I must admit.
Quality content provided fequently is the key tip for a loyal readership. Get yourself a strict planning of posting and abide to it.
I will have to work on this one to come up with a way to write frequently even in times of crazy schedule. I know this is a challenge for most of the guys and gals who are not blogging full time, so I am very interested in knowing your experiences about this issue. Any stories?

Remember I told you about Google paying me for my AdSense earnings? Well today I received the check ! Yayy!! My first Google check ever. Want to see it ?? OK! Here you go :

I worked hard during 2 years to get this freaking paper. This is an important moment because it’s the accomplishment of a long period of time when I was making my way as a newbie through online money making world.
It’s the first time I touch Internet money. Before that, it was only small paypal payments, all electronic.
I hope this is the first drop of a big rain.
Now, I want more of those checks. Keep’em coming.

Since a lot of our fellow bloggers are talking about it, I won’t talk about BidVertiser and its new program of RSS ads, especially that I didn’t write a post for 3 days now.

However, I will talk about a new change that will happen in this blog very soon (maybe today) : I am removing AdSense. I took this decision after reading this excellent article from CourtneyTuttle.com.I will keep AdSense on other websites I own and that have a fair enough CTR, and remove it from those who have a low rate. This blog unfortunately belongs to the second group and I will be replacing by Bidvertiser for the moment. At least, they have a low minimum payout and even if CTR is low, I can get my money quite quickly. I will see how it turns out with them, and then decide if I keep them or if I sell those spaces privately.

I also am happy today to notice a new improvement in my Alexa Rank Now I am in the Top 700,000. The RSS subscriptions are also getting slowly better. Seems like I’m on my way to hit the 2008 target!

Note : This post received some editing in order to meet the 300 words count for it to be “technically” valid and counted in the vote. The editing didn’t alter the spirit of the post.

Winning is a state of mind, and losing is one too. Sometimes to win, you just need to act like a winner and not count the effort you put into pursuing your goal. Sometimes it just takes few simple steps to follow and you can get yourself a hundred bucks :
1. Feel lucky
2. Take a very deep breath
3. Open 2 browser windows
4. In the first one open http://www.winningtheweb.com
5. In the second one open http://www.tylercruz.com
6. Now get yourself a drink, some snacks, a pen and a paper. Then, perform a deep comparative analysis of both blogs and assess which one would win if they were competing.
7. Now you’re ready to enter the contest held by WinningTheWeb.com and TylerCruz.com, for a chance to win $100. In fact, if you vote for the winner, you may end up among the 3 lucky winners that the losing blog will have to pay $100 each. (More details about how to enter the contest on both the blogs)

For my part, I will vote for WinningTheWeb.com for few reasons :
- Winning The Web is the challenger here. I think it’s more sensational to see the challenger winning.
- I am already one of Winning The Web loyal readers and I appreciate the effort Gyutae is putting in his blog.
- I want that free T-shirt. I know I know, this is kinda cheap but still. I want it!
- I was chosen as the blog hop of the week on Winning The Web, so it’s nothing but normal to vote for a blog that is helpful.

I hope I can be $100 richer in few days. If it happens, I will use it to work on my blog’s promotion , and try to drive more loyal readers. I can’t wait for the draw. (I am not questionning if I am being part of the draw or not, since I am sure that Winning The Web will win)

Yyyyyyeees ! Less than a month after the official launch of The B.O.O.M under messaoud.info, we are for the first time of our history ranked in the first million sites in Alexa! Boy it feels good to see only six figures in that Alexa Traffic Rank. As of today, we have a traffic rank of 958,117. This is a great start for 2008! And this makes me add an extra goal for the year: finish it in the top 20,000 sites . I have no idea whether this is realistic or not, but I will do all that is humanly possible to achieve the goal.