Meth and Vertigo Bring on a Blogging Paradigm Shift
Posted by chris.whiteley on Apr 9, 2008
I have been having some serious brain issues these last few days which is why I haven’t been posting or responding to comments. I have been super dizzy every waking moment of my day, but I still keep on trying to blog through the brain haze. I really do not know what the cause is, but I have some ideas:
1. I haven’t been eating enough vegetables
2. or the crack heads below me are cooking up meth
Either way this delusional nature I have been in has prompted a revelation: I hate Adsense and should have never created an Adsense blog. I thought it would be fun to try and make a living on Adsense. I realize that trying to blog and make money from an Adsense blog, is a the slow boat to China.
I have been working on building a few other blogs, well one blog at a time, but I have a bunch lined up. Anyways the goal was to work on each blog until it brings in an average income of $5 a day. My first project was my WoW Gold Farming site, and so far it has almost brought in almost more money than Living on Adsense has brought in since it’s creation. None of the income from this other blog was from Adsense, so this leads me to believe that my other blogs will start to overcome this blog eventually as well.
I built Living on Adsense to blog my journey from being a brand new blogger to..well where ever I end up. I think that I have ended up with a sour taste in my mouth from Adsense. I’ve backed myself into a niche that I am no longer fond of. As was mentioned a few weeks ago in one of the post comments:
“Isn’t your blog due for a re-branding? It doesn’t seem like you are living on your Adsense income anymore.”
Yes I do think it is time for a re-brand. A new journal that doesn’t scream “Adsense Blog.” The lack of veggies/meth induced vertigo has given me a few ideas as to the direction I am going to go. I would also like to get your feedback and suggestions as to what you think I should do here. I am thinking new name, new domain, new look, but keep all of the old posts, and re-direct LoA.com to the new blog. I just have no idea how to move an entire blog to a new domain, and delete the old.
Damn the Meth
Contextual Advertising Gone Bad with Hilarious Results- Living on Adsense Blog
Posted by chris.whiteley on Apr 7, 2008
One of the dangers of having an Adsense blog, or using any other type of contextual advertising, is that sometimes the ads don’t correctly match the context of your site. Sometimes the contextual advertising service gets the ads right on, and sometimes they miss. And once in a while they create something really funny. When I first found these pictures I laughed until I cried. Maybe it’s just funny because this is what I do for a living. Anyways may I present to you:
Contextual Advertising Gone Bad:
Although these next few are not the result of contextual advertising gone bad, but more so of human judgment gone bad:
So for those of you that run blogs with contextual advertising, keep an eye on what is happening with the ads because you never know when things may go bad!
The Adsense Blog That is All About the 5 Dollar Bill
Posted by chris.whiteley on Apr 7, 2008
A few quick little updates.
In my March Adsense Blog Stats post I mentioned that I will be randomly tossing $5 bills at people that make comments on my blog. The latest person to win the random commenting prize is Skolor from The Other MMO. Congrats!
Another tidbit of info I wanted to share with everyone is a free eBook that I suggest picking up. Recently I have been talking about the eBook at www.5bucksaday.com, and how my newest goals will set my sites to a low attainable goal of $5 per day. It’s a great little eBook, and I enjoyed the read and found it quite inspirational. In one of the previous comments on my blog Jason from The University Kid mentioned a similar eBook, but it was free. So go ahead and check out 5dollarformula.com
Being a Dork Pays Off: Cashing In On Uncool!
Posted by chris.whiteley on Apr 4, 2008
It’s near the ending of the first week of “build a blog a week.” I’ve actually decided to not build a new blog each week but to instead create a blog and then work on developing it until it is making a consistent $5 per day. I know that to some of you big bloggers this really doesn’t seem like much, but to us rookie blogger an extra $150 per month is freakin awesome!
So the first blog in this project was a revamp of a blog that I had already but was not really doing that hot: Top Warcraft Guides. I actually started revamping this blog on Wednesday so it hasn’t been a full week working on it.
I did all of the standard things you would do with a new blog (ie find a template and tweak it, install plugins etc) . I found a great checklist over at Blogging Badly to help you set up a new blog. With this blog I am focusing on 3 major issues in getting started:
1. Ranking for keyword phrases
2. Monetizing with great Adsense positioning
3. Monetizing with ClickBank
1. To start off I am working for the whole blog to be ranked for the keyword phrase “wow gold farming” which according to word tracker has 69,400 competing sites and the number 1 spot in Google gets around 160 hits per day. As of writing this I cannot find my blog in the top 100 of Google. I am also writing post that are individually targeted at other keywords besides “wow gold farming” For example the phrase “wow enchanting guide” which I currently rank 14th in Google which puts me on page 2. A pretty good start I think. I really don’t know all that much about SEO, but I found a great post that has help me a ton in getting ranked in Google
2. Monetizing with Adsense was my biggest focus as I do run an Adsense Blog, and I’m you would like to hear about how I use Adsense on my other blogs. I tried to keep it simple by using a 728 Leader Board bended to the background right below the banner, as I watched in one of the videos for Adsense Decoded that this is one of the best position and sizes for an Adsense unit. I still have no navigation for this blog, and it seems like I may not as this make the Adsense seem like the navigation. I also have integrated a 250×250 square floating to the right of the post text. It took some playing around but I finally got it to “float” to the right of the text. I used some simple CSS to create this effect.
<div style=”margin-left:40px; padding:5px”>
<adsense code>
<div>
And then I stuck the code on the Index template for my theme. As far as I can tell every template seems to be different. All I do is find a place in the template code where I think the Adsense code should be and then I check out the blog and see if the Adsense is in the right spot. If not I try again. Good ole trial and error.
3. I also am using ClickBank to make some money. There are a ton of Warcraft related items available on ClickBank. I am still trying to figure out the best way to promote these items. Right now I have the a tower banner in the sidebar closest to the post. I am still playing around with positioning and what spots will work best. I’m going to add a few other affiliate programs besides ClickBank, such as Tshirt Hell which has a two-tier program that pays out $4 per Tshirt sold.
So this is blog number 1 of the $5 per day project. I would love to hear some feedback, so if you have a few moments head to my blog about WoW Gold Farming and let me know if like what you see or if you have some suggestion for improving it.
Porn Slows Down the Blogging Process
Posted by chris.whiteley on Apr 3, 2008
Yesterday I mentioned that I was making 2 major changes to my blogging style.
1. I failed to meet my March goal for my Adsense blog, and as such I will be hunting for a full-time job to earn some real money.
2. I will be producing more blogs.
So I basically just screwed myself because now I will have even less free time, as most of my time will be spent developing blogs. Most of the comments left on yesterdays post (don’t forget to leave a comment on yesterdays post to have a chance to win $5) were concerns from readers that I would have no time to keep up with so many blogs. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it, it’s just that I was never really concerned about time management. Now I guess I have to be.
I decided that yesterday I would track my activities to see exactly where I could save some time. I thought for sure that I would have to cut down on my sleeping. Trade in alcohol for taurine and caffeine. But I was wrong. There was one activity that really took up too much of my time:
Surfing for porn.
Yeah it’s true. I’m a guy, and I like porn. It’s really tough because at any second I can open up my web browser and blam: “You’ve got porn!” It’s even worse because I have two monitors set up on my computer, so one screen can be playing porn, while the other screen focuses on blogging. A computer is good for but 2 things, making money and surfing for porn. I have at times though about combining the making money and porn, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“So Chris, what kind of blogs do you make?”
The goal is now to really focus on creating blogs. I need to create one new blog each week and have it making me $5 per day. I know that I can do it, I just need to focus and manage my time. I challenge you to take a look at your day and see where you can cut back and add a little extra time to do some blogging. I think that if a person could add an extra hour of time for blogging per day they could be extremely successful.
