Here’s hoping the Cardinals take this run all the way to the World Series and win! Many thanks to Philadelphia for the end of season play against Atlanta and helping the Cardinals make this amazing dream season a reality.

Sometimes.. it’s not about the money. It’s about the passion and St. Louis baseball is all about passion.

Great job, Cards! Thanks for making this October so fun and best of luck to finish it out with another World Series Championship!

(Don’t take this too personally, Phillies fan. Ryan Howard is still one of my favorites!)

In the mean time, I wanted to show a post of my summer earnings with Google AdSense. The following video shows the last couple months and as I previously reported, June was the first time I ever made over $3000 in one month from online earnings. Very exciting times for me! With my Amazon and AdSense earnings, I made just over $3200. The video below was taken on June 24th so my earnings don’t look to be quite as high this month, but it still looks like a very strong month so I have no complaints.

As always, I present this video as proof for those who have doubts about making money online. It’s never my intent to brag but rather, to encourage. I really believe that anyone who puts a focus on creating quality online content and achieving online earnings can absolutely find great success!

Here is the AdSense proof. (You can expand the video to full size from the bottom right corner and hit ‘Esc’ key to minimize again)

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Focusing solely on AdSense (or any one method) to make money probably isn’t the wisest thing to do. So just over three months ago, I decided to diversify and look for something else I could add to my online portfolio. Amazon seemed like the clear choice to me. I had heard of many making a very nice profit with Amazon and the recent California ruling brought more attention to Amazon affiliation that ever before. It’s clear that it’s a working system.. if you know how to work it.

Jump ahead to this month and I’m pretty excited to announce that my Amazon system is working well! I don’t have AdSense-like earnings to report, by any means, but I seem to have found a very steady system of making money that is working well and will be a great foundation to build on. Last month, I earned $264 with Amazon and this month is looking to be around $400 by month’s end. I’m also quite proud to report that with my AdSense earnings last month, my combined total for the month of June was, for the first time ever, over $3000! I have always strived to show you guys videos and pictures of my earnings because I think so many sites are making numbers up and I want people to know that this is the real deal. I don’t ever want to come off like it’s bragging but rather, my desire is to show anyone that “you can do this”! It’s really possible to make a very good amount of money online when you put all your efforts and focus into making it happen.

So how did I do it with Amazon? I contemplated writing another quick overview of how I am making money with Amazon but I have decided to switch gears and instead of giving you a brief overview, I want to slow it down and really expound on this process, giving some very precise details for others to build on. Please keep in mind that I’m pretty new to making money with Amazon, but based on my own experience in building sites that do well with AdSense, it’s clear to me that having a working system is all that it takes. After that, it’s just a matter of repeating.

What I’m going to do is spend the next few weeks blogging on how to make money with Amazon. I promise to increase the frequency of my posts and I’m going to really try to offer something that everyone can find of value. If you’re someone who is already making money with Amazon, I really hope you’ll leave a few comments and let me know what you like or dislike about my system. I’m really hitting Amazon hard these days and I’m going to give it more focus than ever before in the coming months, so I hope you enjoy! I anticipate I’ll learn much more myself along this journey.

My first tip? Get very familiar with Amazon, if you aren’t already. Be sure that you sign up as an affiliate and look for something to sell that you might enjoy! I always stress this with everything I do online. Don’t start websites on products that you have no interest in. There are so many great subjects. Pick something of interest to you every time. Find things on Amazon that you would genuinely want to refer to others. This makes the process of building a website so much more fun and you’ll really enjoy creating something that brings value to others. If you are building bland sites just to try and make money, it all starts to seem much more like work and a lot less like the very profitable hobby it can be. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, you’ll do it less often and you simply won’t profit like you could and should.

So tune in! This week, I’ll be creating my first post, in a very long series of posts, on how to be a successful Amazon affiliate.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

What did I do different? Quite honestly, not much! I just saw a large increase in traffic and let’s face it, after working a website for about a year that should start happening. Hard work is paying off!

I still very much encourage anyone thinking about building a business online to just jump in and begin. Time is such an important factor to achieving online success.

In any case, it almost seems funny to me that I was still wondering if I could hit $2000 by year’s end. I’m quite confident that will happen in the next three months now.

I’d be curious to know if AdSense is treating others as well?!

Keep writing!
Amy.

What changed my path was coming across a copy of “The Strangest Secret I’ve Ever Heard” by Earl Nightingale. It was by accident but as I sat and listened, it completely changed how I felt about visualization and goal setting. I wanted to know more so I first grabbed “Think and Grow Rich” (since Earl specifically mentioned it), and many more to follow. There’s much I could say about these books but the fact is that the principles are sound and visualization is a “secret” of sorts that many still don’t utilize for the advantage that it gives. 

Fast forward to today and after about 9 months of working my own websites, I finally achieved my first month of making over $1000 with AdSense. Perhaps nobody is more surprised at how quickly this has happened than me.   I anticipated that it wouldn’t be until the end of this year before this happened but March simply took off and one of my websites almost tripled in traffic.  The earnings shot up like never before and I’ve been extremely excited at the result. 

I’ve posted only sparingly here at my blog since I originally created it and have made mention on several occasions that I would increase my blog activity after finally hitting the $1000 mark.  The time is now.  I’ve hit the mark and I’ll be posting a video with the final number at month’s end.  Currently, I’m on track to hit $1300.  Not bad for nine months of work!

First of all, I’d like to mention that most “make money online” websites are run by internet marketers with a sole purpose of trying to get you to buy something.  That’s not what I’m about and it’s not what this website is about.  I want to share my success with anyone else who is interested.  I want others to feel the excitement of earning hundreds or thousands every month.  It’s a very real thing and I really believe that anyone can do this. 

There are many people earning a lot of money online but there are many more people trying to figure out how to do this and throwing a lot of money away in the proces.  For those interested, I really want to start focusing on how to make a few dollars a month with AdSense.  That may not sound like a lot to many but understanding the formula is all it takes to be successful online.  If you can make a dollar a month with a website, it becomes easy to increase that.  Also worth pointing out is that after a site achieves a few dollars a month with AdSense, it will naturally increase traffic (and earnings) with every month. 

So expect a few more posts on AdSense as I seem to spend most of my online time with a goal of making money with Google AdSense. I’m looking foward to giving back and helping anyone who might be interested, as well as just striking up some good conversation with some others experienced in online earning.

Many people choose to do their redirecting by editing the .htaccess file of their website.  If you’re using WordPress for your blog (and who isn’t these days), then you have a lot of options for plugins.  Easy Redirect Script is one of the more popular add-ons.  The Easy Redirect Script download is a bit pricey though and while I won’t discourage anyone from using it to make your link cloaking about as easy as possible, I do my redirects by creating my own file.

The whole idea of affiliate link cloaking software is to disguise a hyperlink to look like it’s being forwarded to another page on your site and then on clicking the link, it sends the visitor to your affiliate link where the landing page is hopefully setup well enough to earn you a commission.

Here’s an example of how I do it (for free):

SocialMonkee is a great website for creating backlinks. I decided that I wanted the premium version of the product. It’s the difference is creating only 25 free backlinks a day or 100 free backlinks, 3X every day. They have a great offer that allows you to forego the $47 fee and simply refer 12 people to their site. That’s a great offer! I could tell people to visit the site by clicking here.  But as you hover over that link, you’ll easily see it’s an affiliate link.  It’s human nature that most people don’t like to help others succeed (unfortunately) if they’re not succeeding themselves.  To cloak this link, it’s as easy as creating a page called get-backlinks.htm and placing the following code inside:

<html>
<head>
<title>Get Backlinks</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”www.socialmonkee.com/index.php?af=27434″;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=www.socialmonkee.com/index.php?af=27434″>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds,
<a href=”www.socialmonkee.com/index.php?af=27434″>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Now I could encourage my visitors to learn more about my offer by clicking here.   Hovering over that, a visitor plainly sees that s/he looks to be staying on your site.  This will obviously generate far more clicks for your affiliate link.

However you choose to cloak your links, it’s an important part of referring people to other sites.  Just be sure to keep an honest approach with your referral links.  It’s okay to encourage someone to learn more by clicking your link.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen sites cloak links and tell people to click them to read their review.  That’s just an outright lie that will rarely ever lead to a commission.

In any case, maybe there’s someone else like myself out there, who is too cheap to spend money of affiliate cloaking software and simply wants an easy and free alternative to cloaking links.  This post was for you.

1. Do What You Love!  I know… this is one of those overused phrases that has the effect of being completely ignored because if you’re like me, you’ve just become numb to hearing it all your life.  But I encourage each person to ask yourself if everything you do online is something you enjoy doing?  Let me explain how I arrived at the importance of this..For the first time since I started trying to earn significant money online since last year, I was getting burnt out.  What I was doing was working but I can honestly say that I did not enjoy much of it.  Based on spending a lot of time at the Warrior Forum (a site I do recommend for those looking to increase online earnings), I was doing a lot of the mundane tasks that many others considered a necessity to making money.  It was advice that I initially took because everyone seemed to be doing it.  The one that was taking most of my time is a process called article writing.  Article Writing is visiting the many article directories online and submitting news stories on different topics and linking to your site(s) within the articles.  Since many sites copy article directories, you will notice a nice increase in backlinks over time.  It does work.  Unfortunately though, I found myself dreading the process more and more as time went on.  Trying to create new articles just for the sake of creating articles is not all that fun for me.I finally took a look at all of my time being spent and asked myself if I couldn’t do something equally as productive but more enjoyable?  I focused on what I was good at and started getting back to designing, programming and interacting with others socially.  I made an immediate decision to do away with writing articles to promote my blogs and I will never look back!  I’ve been spending that time finding like minded blogs, getting to know people again by participating in discussion and leaving my backlinks in this way.  The joy is back!  I’ve started looking forward to opening the computer every morning again.   I’ve found that others are stopping by my blogs and  reciprocating.

   Since I enjoy programming,  I’ve also been working on an entire website design that I could potentially sell down the road (it’s a secret hope that I’m quietly working away on).  Programming can be a slow learning process at times but I love it.  It’s fun to create something from nothing.

2. Change those AdSense colors!  For the longest time, I used the traditional bright blue links that are most common all over the web.  Sometime last year, I read an article that this might be the worst color to choose simply because people have ad blindness regarding this overused color scheme.  I tried changing the color in February for the first time.  I went with solid black links, wondering if the ads would stand a better chance of being looked at.  By months end, I was still just barely above 2% for my CTR (click through ratio).  That is almost the exact percentage that I’ve always maintained (my highest month was December with a 2.55 CTR) since firing up AdSense last summer.For March, I went with another new color based on some more research I was reading.  It’s a bit too early to truly determine if this was just pure luck or if this color is the real deal but I’m happy to announce that March had a CTR of 2.91%.  That’s a substantial difference.  What color did I use?  Try 000080.  You’ll notice that’s still a shade of blue but it’s a darker blue that’s a bit more sophisticated, easier on the eyes, and I believe it just naturally grabs the attention more.
3. Use More Ads.  For the longest time, I used only one ad size on my page and that was 336×280.  This month, I tried incorporating a lot more ads into many of my blogs and I saw an increase in clicks.  I should point out that the color test I described above was only looking at my 336×280 channel but overall, I simply saw the most clicks p/ impressions that I have had to date.  I placed 280 width sidebar ads on all of my blogs and another 336 ad channel under my posts as well as several places in the middle.  I’ve never been a huge fan of muddling up a page with the overuse of ads so I do try to incorporate them tastefully and I’ll reserve this technique for a few of my blogs but overall, I still don’t plan to get to crazy with the idea.

That’s it in a nutshell.  AdSense is slowly crawling upward and I have every reason to believe that it will be over $1000 a month by year’s end.  That’s pretty exciting as that will almost cover the expense of my monthly mortgage payment!   I’ll post my next AdSense video when I hit the $1000 mark.  This month will actually see a profit of around $800 as I’ve done a few installations and coding projects for a handful of people on a forum I belong to as well.  However, I’m still keeping AdSense earnings as my ultimate online goal.  (Have I mentioned that I LOVE Google?!)

Outside of AdSense, I’m diversifying my online portfolio a little more.  I’m venturing into some new projects and I think I’m going to start utilizing this blog a little more by showing an example site of mine and how I modify it as well as promote it.  There is so much we can all learn from each other online and the more involved we become with each other, the greater the success of each individual.

How’s your online business treating you?  What kind of plans and goals do you have for 2011 and what steps are you taking to get there?

In January of this year, the Google AdSense Blog announced that sites with auto generated content will not be permitted to run AdSense.  This could make for an interesting year and a big change for many sites.  Up until now, the practice of “auto blogging” has been widely used by internet marketers to create sites the easy way.  Plugins such as wprobot3 and the MultiPress Autoblog Plugin allowed people to purchase a utility that would go out to other sites and scrape content.  The consumer plugins have generated a lot of money for the creators and some users report a decent income using them.

And consumer plugins have only been following in the footsteps of larger sites such as the Huffington Post and FanPop that have led the way.  Scraping has taken on many forms and many sites have profited greatly from it.  So is Google finally cracking down?   The January blog entry states “We don’t allow sites with auto-generated or otherwise unoriginal content to participate in the AdSense program. This is to ensure that our users are benefiting from a unique online experience and that our advertisers are partnering with useful and relevant sites.”

I would be surprised if we hear of any smaller websites being affected, as directly related to Google stating this in their blog.  Instead, I think it was done in preparation for the Google algorithm change.  Last Thursday, the Mountain View company announced a significant change to how websites would be indexed.  Sites that copy content, as a primary source of information, got hit the hardest.  Associated Content was on this list.  According to SISTRIX (a top web analyzation company), Associated Content lost 93% of visibility in Google.  Can you imagine?! EzineArticles and HubPages (both widely used by internet marketers) were also big losers.  EzineArticles responded immediately by issuing a new set of rules, effective today, setting quality standards for all new submissions.

The companies emerging as the biggest winners included eHow.com, Popeater.com, Sears.com, and Epinions.com.

The change created a major impact with some of the biggest websites online but if anything, it has made the smaller websites more accessible, clearing out some big name domains that were hanging out at the top of the Google search rankings. There are already several reports on the Warrior Forum of smaller sites seeing an immediate and positive impact in the amount of traffic.  The Warrior Forum is a meeting place for internet marketers and those interested in making money online.  The new algorithm was intended to crack down on “content farms” or those sites offering information deemed to be less valuable.  The change is expected to affect 12% of search results.  That’s a fairly large and substantial number but I’m willing to bet that the amount of content farms, if you look at personal sites, is far greater.  Is it possible that smaller websites are going to be the ones to prosper from the algorithm change?  It’s probably a bit too early to know for certain but early indications are that it’s a good possibility.

The internet is such an interesting place right now because unlike television, radio and every other medium you can think of, the information is not yet controlled.  It’s amazing when you think about it (I think it’s inevitable that this will one day end).  And when you allow that kind of open freedom, there will be many that take advantage.  Content farms are a direct result of this no police policy.  The closest thing to regulated control is the power of one search engine company called Google and it seems they’ve decided to start cleaning things up a little bit.  Ironically, Google is probably most responsible for the mess.  When they created the AdSense program years ago and started allowing anyone with a website to display ads and make money, the internet changed overnight.  Thousands of people realized the importance of getting the top spot in Google’s search results and the web started being gamed for any advantage.  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was suddenly more about quantity over quality.  Maybe this new change will actually start turning things around and creating a positive impact.

Stay tuned. Better search results are on the way..  maybe?

I don’t care for preview feeds myself but I do understand why many people prefer to use them.   I will always publish full feeds and I tend to get annoyed at finding a new blog that offers the preview only.  Since I tend to unsubscribe from preview only feeds, you can bet there are many other readers doing the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong.  My preference for the full feed isn’t because I plan to slap it in my favorite RSS reader and never visit the site.  I always take the time to visit the authors I like, but not for every article.  Many people, such as myself, have an ever expanding list of rss feeds they track and it would simply be impossible to visit all those websites.  I choose the sites to visit and comment on based on the full rss feed that gets sent to me.   If you’re looking to increase your visitor count, I’m just not convinced that offering a couple sentences of your article is going to achieve the desired effect.  I’m more convinced that you’ll lose subscribers and visitors in the long run.  Those full length articles really pop in my RSS reader and easily overshadow the preview feeds.  Likewise, sending me great content will almost certainly make me want to visit and comment.

So what to do about those authors that refuse to give anything but a preview feed?  Well, you could unsubscribe, do nothing and be irritated (if it bothers you at all), ask the author to consider sending out a full feed or… use my new RSS Full Feed Creator.  With this tool, php is used to follow the preview feed to the full page, look for a pattern on the article page, and pull the full text.  It works quite well and so far, it’s working on about 90% of the feeds that only provided preview feeds.

The RSS Full Feed Creator took a lot of time to write and I will give the credit to my husband for developing the script.  I expressed my frustration one night while sitting on the couch and he took to the task of creating the script right away.  A couple nights later, he gave me a first copy and it worked pretty well but it was only about 50% accurate at the time.  I provided the sites it still wasn’t working in and a few “if then” loops later, I now get full feeds from almost all the websites I enjoy!  He’s still working to update the script and accomplish a 100% result.  I think you’ll find that the current version works on almost all sites though.

Stop by and test the functionality with a feed that I have built in for illustration purposes or create your own.  If you need a full length feed,  simply insert your web address and convert.  You can then use the new url in your RSS reader and grab the full text.

Hope you enjoy and find it useful!

Well I have made an effort to show my AdSense earnings to everyone every month.  Since the change is minimal, I won’t record a video this month (see previous month’s videos if you’re interested), but I’ll tell you that the increase was just over $40 from November and I finished December at $551.37.   The month was an AdSense roller-coaster that went straight down by month’s end.  The first two weeks saw my earnings higher than they have ever been, hitting the $40 mark twice.   I had a few $30+ days as well.

But then…  along came mid-December and the earnings took a dive straight down.  I expected this a few days before Christmas but my decline started around the 15th and just seemed to get worse.  I did what any worried AdSense patron would do.  I started checking all of my sites to see if they were de-indexed (Go to Google and type site:yourdomain.com to check this and make sure results show or you have a problem!).  Everything checked out there.  I visited all my sites to make sure AdSense was still showing on them.  Check.  I visited a few AdSense forums and discovered many who were complaining of the same thing.  Since it seemed to be happening to others more than usual, I decided not to worry.  All in all, December saw my best earnings since beginning my AdSense journey in the second half of 2010 so I was still very pleased.

Along came 2011…  Christmas just ended and I was certain online shopping wasn’t going to pick up too quickly, so I still wasn’t in panic mode.  I was correct.  My pages were getting considerable less impressions every day than anytime since the beginning of October 2010.

After the first week of 2011, my impressions picked back up but unfortunately, earnings did not!  Okay.  Now it was time to let a little panic set in.  I had to figure out what was happening.  Since the impressions were back, it was simply a matter of determining if the CTR (click-through-rate) of my pages had declined or if that number was the same and my problem was attributed to the amount of money I was earning per click.  If you’re new to AdSense or haven’t yet started, you should know that Google has a very nice control panel and it’s pretty easy to see some very in depth statistics.  In my case, I still had the same CTR and it appeared that many of my clicks were now earning about 35% of what they had been the last few months.  I think I would have much rather seen the CTR rate down, as I could optimize for that.

So now that I knew the situation, I needed a solution.  Enter the AdSense Competitive Ad Filter.  As a publisher, you have the right to block competitor ads from being displayed by adsense.  For the first time, I paid very close attention to what ads my sites were displaying and I noticed several that seemed to be following me from site to site.   MFA or “Made for AdSense” ads become easy to spot as they typically have a pretty catchy title and a spammy feel to them.  You definitely want to stop these ads from showing on your website, as they steal clicks away from your higher paying ads.

There are websites that will do the work for you as well, but I haven’t used them so I can’t give my nod of approval.  I think that by paying close attention to your ads being displayed and your daily earnings, you can collect a good list of blocked sites.  I plan to work this new system for a while and then simply try turning it off for a week to see if there’s a noticeable difference.

The results thus far?  In the last three days, after applying over 80 urls to my ad filter, my earnings have jumped back up to about 75% of November clicks!  I feel November to be a more accurate representation of what click earnings should be.  December is obviously seeing a lot of bidding wars.  However, I am at almost the same rate as October was paying so perhaps Christmas really was the reason for the great (and fast) earnings I saw the last few months.  I have no proof that my changes had anything to do with this.  Just lucky timing?  Maybe.  We will see over time with a lot more testing.

Overall, I’m not disappointed.  This month will likely be a couple hundred (or more) less than last month but I am still making a few hundred to sit on my couch, watch TV and “play” on the computer.    More importantly, I’m moving forward with learning new things that will continue to help my AdSense earnings.  I knew the upward trend wouldn’t continue every month (despite secretly hoping it would!) and I feel confident that just as I see some low earnings in AdSense, there is coming a time where this last AdSense check will look minute in comparison.

Let me know how your AdSense earnings are doing and what you have seen as a result of the holidays.  I’d love to know!