Yes, it’s time for a new experiment. I’m letting my affiliate sites + Adsense percolate a bit to see how it goes. I’m getting roughly 2 sales a month from one site and just started another one a week ago, so we’ll see how things progress.

So I saw this post on “20 Ways to Make $100 Per Day Online” from  The Internet Marketing Inner Circle (sounds ominous).

If you want to check it out yourself, click here.

The idea is that an average person can build sustainable incomes working part time from home. It’s a collection of articles written by people who made this work in the real world, so hopefully the BS quotient will be low and the ability to actually apply these techniques will be high.

So I’m going to start working through this book a little at a time and I’ll share my results. For only $27, you get a nearly 250 page book documenting 20 different techniques to try, so I’m going to mine it for all its worth.

Keep your fingers crossed! Anybody out there already gone through this particular book?

–FItz

Well, I have a few things to report on my Ad-sense Publisher Experiment…

First, as I reached the magic $50 limit for cost, I put my ad-sense campaign on “pause”.

As you can see from the above picture, I had 287 clicks in 30 days, with 566,614 impressions, an average CPC of $0.25 and a total cost of $52.19 for that campaign.

And as you can see (as the “well, duh!” moment), my campaign went downhill after I put it on pause.

My traffic has dropped off considerably.

In addition, I have had no new sales since August 9th. I wasn’t making much money before that anyway – maybe one sale every couple of weeks, but at least I was getting sales.

So I’m torn… The AdSense stuff obviously helped with traffic to my affiliate site. And it’s not really AdSense’s fault that the clicks weren’t converting to sales. So I think I may go ahead and let it run another month to see what shakes loose.

Anybody else having luck or have any good tricks for AdSense? I’m all ears!

Until next time…

–Fitz

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been using Entrecard for quite a while now. And on my main blog, I think I’ve met some great new friends and blogs via their service. But one of the things I’ve always struggled with is getting a number of “drops” per day.

Yes, there are some options…

• You can bookmark 100s of Entrecard sites and open up multiple pages in Firefox or IE and go through them a chunk at a time.  I have about 150 blogs marked this way and was lucky to get through 50-100 a day.
• You can use the EntreCard Browser from CreateIf. But it gets tiring hitting 100-300 blogs one at a time via this tool.
• And now we have the Entrecard Toolbar from Entrecard itself! Yay!

This cool new tool  does a number of things that I had to go through the Entrecard dashboard to do before…

• Allows me to switch between my blogs MUCH easier
• Allows me to [gasp] see how many drops I’ve done
• Allows me to grab 10 Entrecard sites at a time from a number of categories, including the favorite sites I’ve marked in my Entrecard profile
• Allows me to buy ads on sites
• Allows me to add new favorites to my Entrecard profile…

Get the picture? This thing does everything BUT actually do the drops for you.

I’m a big fan. Thanks Entrecard guys!

You can read more about it and download it from the Entrecard blog here.

Be sure to check it out!

–Fitz

Image via Wikipedia

I recently had an interesting experience. I had someone out of the blue send me an e-mail asking if they could “sponsor” my blog. What it boiled down to was a paid link back to their website and the best income I’ve seen from any blog I’ve created so far.

(Every time I think of sponsorships… I think of NASCAR or the movie Cars from Pixar… Is that odd?)

My only qualm about the whole thing is that its topic (beauty product reviews) isn’t really something I thought of as a target ad for my blog (which is mainly entertainment reviews). That said, I reconciled it with the fact that probably 1/2 of my readers are women (just playing the odds here) and at least a portion of those probably use beauty products.

So I happily took the money, added the link, and was off to the races. The $$ from there will allow me to advertise via Project Wonderful and Google Analytics to further see what kind of revenue I can generate.

What do you guys think of sponsors? Are they a good thing? Let me know!

–Fitz

So here we are at day 20 of my Ad-sense Publisher Experiment…

And what has it gained me? Well, not a whole heck of a lot…

As of this morning, I’ve had:

• 386,454 Impressions
• 142 Clicks
• 0.04% Click-thru-rate
• $0.22 Average click cost
• $30.89 Total cost so far
• 3.92 Average position

And of all this… I’ve had… One sale.

Yes, that’s right. After 20 days and $30, I’ve made one affiliate sale netting me $2.45. So for $30 in PPC ads, I’ve earned $2.45. Somehow I don’t think I’m doing this right or it’s a scam.

But if it was a scam, I wouldn’t be reading about people making millions of $$ on Google, would I?

Ugh. We’ll see where this goes.

–Fitz

Thought I’d put up an update on Day 10 of my latest experiment. It’s been interesting.

I dropped one of the two ad campaigns and decided to just keep the ad campaign for my affiliate site. And I have to say (and I know this won’t shock all the experienced ad words folks out there) that impressions and even clicks don’t necessarily mean sales.

So for my active campaign, over the last 10 days, I’ve had 122,601 impressions and 60 clicks for a click through rate of 0.05%. And between the active and inactive campaigns, I’ve spent $16 of my $50 budget allotment for the month.

Out of my 60 clicks, I’ve had zero conversions to sales.

Considering that I’m doing this pretty much blindly at this point, the fact that I have impressions and clicks is a good start. But I’m bummed that I haven’t had ANY sales come out of my $16.00.

We’ll see if another 10 days makes things any better.

Any words of wisdom from my readers would be great!

Thanks in advance… Talk to you in another few days.

–Fitz

It’s been a while, I know… I’m trying a new experiment. This time I’m actually paying for ad placement at Google. This is something I’ve read about over the last couple of years, but never thought I’d actually try.

However… I decided I’d take the plunge and see how this works. I created a couple of ads. One for my main blog and one for an affiliate blog I’ve been running for a while.

Over night last night with my main blog, I received three clicks for about 3000 impressions. And today with my other blog ad I received 1 click for 610 impressions, but it’s slightly more targeted than the first one.

We’ll see how it goes. I’ll check in occasionally over the next week or so to let you know.

How are you guys doing with placing Google ads? Any luck?

–FItz

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve written any blog posts here. My apologies.

However, I have found a cool tool to help you create a quick logo if you need one. It isn’t the greatest tool in the world, but it’s enough for a quick and dirty logo.

The site is called “Logo Ease” and it offers a free logo design maker.

You basically take some pre-defined images from their clip art collection (which isn’t all that great, but you get some basics) and add some text and color — and VOILA… A logo is born!

In just a few clicks, you end up with something that may not be perfect, but is close enough to start with.

So check it out. It may jump start your logo creation and add at least some unique graphic elements to your site!

–Fitz

I’m officially calling it quits with the 10-Day Cash Secret program. I’ve let it run now for nearly a month. It’s earned $0.00 for me. And it cost me $99.00. This means my net is -$99.00.

So I’ll be sending Neil a nice e-mail requesting a refund. I am in the 30 day window. I’ve given it a solid shot with three separate sites. And have received nada.

Has anybody (except Neil) made any money off this thing?

–Fitz