Happy First 5,000 Page Views – Heres to Many More
Happy Holidays to you all. Its been a little more than three months that this blog has been up and running. It looks like today I hit the first 5,000 page view mark. More than half of that has been within the last 3 weeks as I started promoting the blog more. I just wanted to say thank you for those of you who stop by regularly to make this a fun blogging journey for me.
Also want to note for those of you that check on the ongoing Whypark Review I’ve been doing. I will be ending that this month with the final cumulative stats. The reason is that I’ll be using the domain MoneyNe.ws for this blog sometime in the future. Once I figure out the hosting/template design etc. It would be a good time to sign up to Money News by email so you don’t miss any posts when I transition over to wordpress.
Now on to the good stuff! For those of you who use Entrecard stay tuned as I’ll be putting up a contest of sorts for some Entrecard credits in the coming day or so. If you have an idea I should use for a contest entrance besides the usual sign up to my rss or blog about me types leave me a comment. If I use it I’ll give you extra contest entries with a link back to you =).
[Have posts e-mailed to you by signing up to Mitch at Money News]
Popularity: 1% [?]
Sweet I Earned Money From Squidoo
Remember back in October I wrote about making two pages on Squidoo? Well I just wanted to post an update since I logged in recently just to check how things have been going with those pages.
I had a nice big rush of traffic from Google at the beginning since it was a newly created page, and then the SERP went down slowly no visitors a day after about two weeks or so. That’s the Google engine for you, giving new engines good ranking for a day or so after release. Then sticking it into the infamous sandbox. I don’t blame them though, the site only has nine back links so I’m still surprised that its even getting hits at the moment.
Anyways it looks like Yahoo finally indexed the page recently, and I’m seeing a steady steam of visitors daily from that search engine now for the keyword free 3d mmorpg. The other one I have for Team Fortress due to all the clan sites, and gaming site promotions isn’t fairing well. This stream of people looks like its also pushing the Squidoo rankings back up as well. At its peak in October my Metin 2 site had around a 1400 ranking. This was just from being indexed in Google initially. Until recently I think the site has been sitting in the 25,000th position, but climbing back thanks to Yahoo Search to a currently around 9k. On Google for that term I don’t even show up in the top 50. On Yahoo my site shows up as #4. How you like them Apples now?
Since Squidoo does the payments about a month out I finally get to see what type of money comes in from just having two pages. (well I’m just going to count one since the Team Fortress page doesn’t bring in anything).
A nice sum of [drum roll please]: $2.07
Not bad, for a single page with only 9 backlinks, most of that being my own blog with the rest from my re-syndicated on some splog or rss sites. I think its especially good when the top earning lenses only earn about $10 from Squidoo.(they earn the rest via affiliate advertising) I think I should go back an maybe change a few things on that web page to help it out. And Yes there is an affiliate link on the site for the Metin 2 page I made on Squidoo. Also even if not many people visit the site, I’ve had 363 clicks outgoing clicks logged. Meaning this is a great free site to get pre-sell visitors to your affiliate links. I’ll have to take a look at this site again to make some landing pages for more Clickbank offers I think. Its definitely cheaper than paying for 300 clicks via Adwords.
If you haven’t made a Squidoo lens yet, sign up for one. At the very least to create a nice back link to your website for keywords on Yahoo, that you can’t quite rank well on Google with.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Lets Pay Scrapers More – Making Money Online Blogs Just Moved to You Tube
We all know that people copy videos, and then upload them to You Tube. Why? So they can put a link to their site for some of the traffic. While they(Google) have tried to keep this down to a minimum, it still occurs on a massive level. The last Mr T commercial for example has 400 of them. When a popular video is released, people download them, and then upload them to You Tube to get some hits. While this is great in making some video advertising viral. It does mean it gets abuse with people ripping off other peoples work. Now the people who upload someone else’s content will get paid even more.
Anyways guess what You Tube just announced a partner program that will let You Tube users get paid for people watching their videos. They haven’t yet released how this was going to happen yet though the TechCrunch article seems to mention adsense ads from the You Tube site. I think they will start making the embedded videos more like the video adsense ads or the Metacafe videos that pop up ads in the actual screen even for embedded ones.
What’s the criteria for joining the program?
You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions.
You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.
You live in the United States or Canada.
Who will this benefit? Video bloggers who already get thousands of hits to their video blogs. Chris Crocker anyone? The people who sneak in camcorders to the movie theaters, especially for hits like the Star Wars trailors.
What is this going to do to the overcrowded making money online blogs? I think we’re going to stop seeing wall of text niche keyword posts, and more video posts like Pam on Shoemoney. Videos while they don’t have a lot of SEO power, will be a lot harder to scrape. Scraper sites that take just the videos, won’t get any keywords from them to get money from adsense either.
What else are we going to see even more now? A major abuse of social networking like Digg, Stumble etc to just get the hit counters up. Don’t we already see this now for sites like Metacafe? Yes we do. Is it going to get a lot worse from here on out if Google doesn’t be careful? Definitely. Now excuse me while I go sign up to this, and buy a camcorder from Amazon.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Does Starting Out Small Mean You’ll Never Grow to be Great?
I was surfing the net, and stumbled across this page on Doshdosh about a CashCrate Review. With the check Maki got a whopping $5.28(picture is still hosted on a free image server). This got me thinking that everyone who starts out needs to start from somewhere. Back in 2006, it seems like Maki was doing quite a bit of reviews on Get-Paid-To websites, until moving onto the internet marketing niche which seems to be more of the focus nowadays.
What’s the point of this post, your probably asking. I was just looking for a little bit of inspiration I guess. Knowing that another person who is currently successful in gathering a large audience also started out by doing programs like CashCrate is always enlightening. Especially if the first CashCrate check I got was bigger. It just means that I need to work harder, try out more programs, and find new things to do.
Its also good to know that people can change around or maybe change the focus of what their blog’s talk about over the course of time. Its nice to know that blogs or the topic of blogs can evolve at the same time that the writer grows and matures. Sometimes for worse, but most of the time for the better. Who knows what I’ll be writing about a year from today. Will I still be logged into World of Warcraft making gold to sell? Will my blog still be about me making money online?
Are you a blogger that is just starting out? What plans do you have a year from now? What inspires you or what makes you keep going?
Popularity: 1% [?]
ScratchBack – Tip The Blogger, Get a Link Back
Back at the beginning of October after I read a TechCrunch article about it, I had put up a widget on my side back called Scratchback. Since at the time I was preparing for my Cozumel trip, I had completely forgotten to write up a post about it. Better late than never I guess eh?
What is Scratchback?
Its an online tipping system that gives back to the tippers by allowing a publisher to “give back” links or images in return.
Isn’t selling links bad? Won’t I get penalized by Google?
Notably, the system has been approved by Google (they checked) as every link is “nofollow” and the widgets are built in javascript; this is a product that provides an alternative advertising model that won’t see publishers punished in future Google crackdowns.
What kind of templates are available?
There are quite a few different colors, but it seems like you can’t customize them fully by setting your own bgcolor.
Does it cost me anything to sign-up?
No it doesn’t, and you can actually make some money if someone gives you a tip.
Do I have to let someones link on my site if I don’t like the contents?
You are under no obligation to show or approve any listing you find questionable for ANY reason. There are no refunds either. Your readers are tipping you for your efforts.
How Do I Get Paid?
Payments for earnings are ONLY paid through PayPal. If you don’t have a valid, working PayPal account, you shouldn’t use Scratchback as a publisher because you won’t ever get paid. In the future we may add alternative payment methods so stayed tuned. Payments are made at the end of a thirty-day cycle. It can take up to 15 days to remit payment to your PayPal account at the end of each cycle. Publishers must earn at least $25 to initiate payment.
Note: Current payout is set at $10 according to this updated post.
How Much Do I Charge For My Top Spot?
Totally up to you (minimum $1.00). We suggest you set your pricing for tips based on your own perceived value of your website or blog. Mine is currently set at a bargain price of $1 until it fills up. I’ll raise the price after the 10 slots are filled.
Does ScratchBack charge a fee or commission?
Yes, after Paypal fees they collect 10%, and give you 90% of the tip now. This is a lot better than the 50% they first opened up the program. The change was noted here in this post.
Okay I signed up for Scratchback how can I let people know I have the widget?
There is a blog post here that you can comment on. There is also a Scratchback user directory which has free listing.
I hope that takes care of any questions regarding Scratchback. Did I do a good job? You could always Scratch my back. =) Like I said earlier, for a limited time I will put tip cost at $1.00 until it fills up, after that I’ll think about raising the tip jar.
Popularity: 1% [?]
