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First of all, I want to apologize for a week with no posting. It’s been a very busy week and I had a little to no time that I could spend blogging. Anyway, things are back to normal right now and expect me to be more active. Few hints about what’s comming in the next coming posts :
- The last post of the series “Best WP plugins“.
- What I did during August and the results of that
- The entrecard experiment
- September : The RSS subscribers month
And a lot more about what I’m up to, my failures, my successes and my learning experiences. So stay tuned. You can subscribe to my RSS in the box below, so that you miss nothing. (Plus, September will be the RSS Subscribers Month, so don’t miss the chance to subscribe now and be part of it - More in the coming posts)
Now to the EC call for offers I made in my previous post, I am extending the deadline to August 31st, in order to give the chance to more offers to arrive. A small number of offers was received.
A quick reminder based on the offers already received : Entrecard charges $9.75 for 1000 ECs, so please try to make your offers at least beat that. As I mentionned in the original post, I won’t be buying the ECs for more than that. I think it’s just common sense. Please refer to the original post for more details.
Lately, I’ve been going through a thinking process, that lead me to decide to keep some programs I was using and take away the others. Well, some new changes are occuring. But first, let me present a little Income Report for the month of July with the programs I kept :
- Google Adsense : $11.32 - A new record in the History of my MMO endeavor. I am happy with this result and aim to double it for the month of August which had a pretty good start.
- My Home Page Friends (MYHPF) : £0.54 = $1.05 - This paid per search program is awesome. I talked about it here and it is bringing in some revenue from something that I used to do without getting any penny : Internet searching. I am keeping it since it’s pure extra, and not intrusive at all.
- Project Wonderful : $0.42 - 4th month in 2008. Project Wondeful brings slow but continuous revenue. This program will get better and better with the traffic on this blog getting bigger and bigger.
- Kontera : $0.00 - Zero dollars - I am taking this program out. I’ve been using it for almost a year now and it is not taking off. I don’t know if it doesn’t suit my blog or if I am doing something wrong, but it is certainly not working for me. I’d rather eliminate it and gain 2 microseconds in my pages loading time.
With this said, I added 2 other programs this month :
- PerformancingAds : This is one of the newest and fastest growing Ads Network among bloggers. It serves 125×125 banners and pays a lifetime referral commissions. I an having a great offer for you to join this program during the month of August. Don’t miss it.
- MarketLeverage : One of the newest and best Affiliate Network. I am trying it with a Leaderboard that you can see in the header of this blog, promoting FREE Business and Technology Magazine Subscriptions. Iwill give it a try and see how it gets.
With focus, I didn’t make more money. I just made the same with less effort. Now, off course $12.79 is not money, but I want to show exactly how much I earn and not fake it, so that when I finally start making enough money, I will have a great story to tell So guys, stay tuned and be part of history. And don’t forget to Sign Up for PerformancingAds and have me buy your first ad. More details abou this offer in this post.
Yes? OK great! So here’s the deal. During the whole month of August, I will be the first advertizer on any blog that signs up to PerformancingAds through my link (here : Sign Up for PerformancingAds). The only condition is that it is under $5 /week. I was tempted to limit the number of those who can benefit of that, but then I thought I would just limit it in time. It’s great for me, since it gets me more referrals, and it’s great for everyone since it opens the opportunity for more bloggers.
PerformancingAds is heading to become the next big thing in the blogosphere. Within only few days of its launch, this 125×125 ads network now gathers thousands of blogs. So it’s the place to be if you’re looking for monetizing your blog, especially that those 125×125 are becoming the leading form of advertizing on blogs.
On the other hand, what often relucts bloggers (especially the new ones) from signing up to this kind of networks is the difficulty to get that first sale. I am offering that! Not only is the subscription to PeformancingAds free, you also are sure to have at least one sale, which makes all of this story a 100% benefit deal.
Plus, they have a Lifetime referral program, which can earn you 5% of each sale your referrals make. Awesome huh? So, with no more delay, go ahead and Sign Up for PerformancingAds. After you subscribe, make sure to leave a comment here to make it easier for me to browse for your blog and buy my ad.
After a few days of thinking (diversity or focus), the decision is made : FOCUS! I started working on my monetization programs messaoud.info and decided to keep the following :
Google AdSense TTZ Media
Project Wonderful Widget Bucks
Kontera Banstex AdToll Scratch Back
Focusing on these programs will allow a better control of the blog, lighter page loads, and a nittier design on which I am still working, removing the big skyline header, and opting for a simpler use of colors.
To compensate and exceed what was generated by the removed program, I am adding 3 other direct sources of revenue :
- Direct Ad Sales : 125×125 buttons costing $7/month. These come with a FREE 7 Day Trial offer.
- Stripe Ad Sales : Text Links on the Stripe visible on the top of the screen for $5/month. These come with a FREE 2 Day Trial offer.
- Paid Reviews : These are sold directly too. $15/review.
More details on the Advertize Page.
I think it is the right time to start selling Direct Ads, since the blog is now PR2 and Alexa ranking is starting to go down again (it reached 300,000 at some point, and then I had the hosting issue, and it started to go up). As Jay, from DatMoney says : “I am one of the biggest procrastinators”. Now it’s time to get things going and get this blog to generate some more money after the time spent on getting traffic. I won’t go the porn way, Jay, but I will put some more efforts on generating more and more interest around the blog : more quality posts with more frequency, more socializing, and many sleepless nights.
More to come in the next days. And hey, I forgot to tell you that I set up a new Contact Form, so don’t hesitate to share or ask questions.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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