gabo's ramblings down south

Make money online - My September earnings 2007

2007-10-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

The total blogging income for the month of september was:

AdSense: US$53,76
Text Link Ads: US$0

On the bright side, I haven't invested any time to increase this figures, this's been totally passive income, which is great.

NYSE:FXI the xinhua report

2007-09-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

Finally after 25 days I sold my shares, and made a 13.98% overall profit. I entered at 147.34, and left at 172.17, not bad for a complete rookie.

Some say this is a bubble which will burst anytime, others that we are only seeing the rise of china, and this is a one in a lifetime opportunity. What do you think?

It´s funny because no matter what you do, you can always back it up with some experts opinion, and at the end of the day you move based on what your guts tell you to do.

I only hope tomorrow falls, so I can pick it up cheaper.

Make Money Online - My August 2007 AdSense Earnings

2007-09-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not really doing much to increase my earnings online. I've been more focused on my day job, and other activities, but still I love the passive income aspect of making money online.

The figures for august were the following:

AdSense: US$52.86
TLA: US$0

Any tips to make this number increase ten times?

It´s official, I´m trading...ETF FXI

2007-09-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

I´ve followed one of my friend´s advice, and I bought some stocks, actually they are ETF, that follow the chinese market. The fund is called iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index (ETF). My rationale was this: China market is on the rise, and will be for a number of years to come, and the progression so far of this fund is just awesome.

I´m a complete newbie on this field, but there has to be a beginning to everything, right? So that you know, my expectancies are around 30% a year. What do you say? Will it make it? Any tip to share?

Undestanding Web 2.0

2007-08-22T12:16:00.000-07:00

I'm still walking the understand web 2.0 & enterprise 2.0 path, in order to be in a position to explain it to others, in my company. Again, in the middle of my research I came up with something worth sharing. I leave it to you, enjoy!

Web 2.0 We are the machine

2007-08-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of a state of the art recopilation about what really means web 2.0, and enterprise 2.0. Doing some research online I came across this video, it's worth it.

Do you think it succeeds in nailing the core concepts of web 2.0?

Be a Blogger who Shares

2007-08-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

Following the example set by John Chow an ever increasing number of bloggers are sharing their monthly income (me among others). Now, why would anyone want to do that? Let’s see, sharing your monthly income has some benefits I can think of:

It provides a point of reference for newcomers to the blogosphere, enabling them to build realistic expectations around potential revenue in blogging. In plain English meaning, helping newbies answer: how much money can I make with blogging?

It creates buzz around your blog, talking about your monetization strategy allows others to get ideas, and to give ideas, providing useful tips you were not expecting

It encourages others to come forward, and share their earnings as well, and if a reasonable number of bloggers buy into sharing their income, then we could do some statistics, and that’s when it gets really interesting, since we could answer some tricky questions, like:
- How much money is an average joe making with blogging? and how is this number changing with time? Is this number increasing or decreasing?
- What are the best paying affiliate programs out there? Which ones are the most popular? What’s the expected revenue per program? Sharing information, as a consumer of affiliate programs, puts pressure on the providers, hopefully making them improve their offerings.
- How’s the income of a blogger affected over time? are there seasons to it?

These are questions that have been going on for a while, and even if we have good guesses for some of them we lack a good answers.

Who is sharing already? I could come up with a list of thirty one bloggers that have shared their income. Most of them do it on a monthly basis.

July 2007 Reports

I've created some reports based on the data published by the bloggers who shared their income. They are the following:

Blogger Earnings over time

Best Paying Affiliate Programs

Most Popular Affiliate Programs

Earnings Distribution

Bloggers Income Ranking

I want to collaborate. What do I have to do?

You only have to post your earnings in a monthly post published within the first ten days of the month. Contact me and I’ll add you to the crawl schedule of "my data collecting robot".

It is best that the posts be titled [Month –Year ] Income Report, or [Month – Year] Blog Earnings Report, and that figures are presented using a html table, like the following (it doesn’t have to be as horrible, though):

Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Earnings over time

2007-08-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

This chart shows the reported income by the group of bloggers who shared their income over the months of may, june, and july.

Not all bloggers share their income on a monthly basis (they should start doing it though :) some are just spots in the chart, while others for whom we have historic information we can show the trend in their income.

Now without Jhon Chow, and the rest of big money makers...

Any observations, or conclusions from these charts? (keep your day jobs?)

Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Most Popular Affiliate Programs

2007-08-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

The following chart shows the number of times each affiliate programs was referenced by the bloggers who shared their income.

Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Best Paying Affiliate Programs

2007-08-14T21:56:00.000-07:00

The following chart shows the average of the income values reported per affiliate program.

Of all the affiliate programs referenced this chart was created only taking into account those that were referenced by at least three bloggers.

Best Paying Affiliate Programs

The figures...

Affiliate Program	Incomes Sum	Reference Count	Income Average
ReviewMe	3115	7	445
CashCrate	1516.69	4	379.1725
AdSense	7605.99	23	330.69522
Private Sales *	1610	5	322
Text Link Ads	4232.87	14	302.34786
Kontera	1013.96	4	253.49
SponsoredReviews.com	970.5	5	194.1
PayPerPost	1366.09	9	151.78778
Commission Junction	401.62	4	100.405
Linkworth	659.18	7	94.168571
Tips **	281.66	5	56.332
Blogsvertise	55	3	18.333333
Amazon	56.42	7	8.06
AuctionAds	13.05	8	1.63125

Income Sum being the addition of all the incomes generated by that program, as reported by the bloggers group of reference.
Reference Count stands for the number of bloggers that reported earnings for that particular program.
Average Income equals the total income reported divided by the number of times one program was referenced. Some bloggers reported the use of a program with zero earnings, this was taken into account.

(*)Private Sales stands for independent ads sales
(**)Tips stand for Buy my data collecting robot a Beer type of donations.

What do those numbers actually mean? It could be argued that a sample of 31 bloggers is not enough to pull any hard conclusions, and I'd agree. In my opinion these figures are a good hint about which affiliate programs are really paying the bills for bloggers today.

What do you think?

Bloggers Income July 2007 Report - Earnings distribution

2007-08-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

The following chart presents how the income is distributed among all the bloggers taken as reference. This results are a bit different from those shown by Darren Rowse on one of his polls. He had a bigger sample group, I take his results are more accurate.

Still the number of bloggers who receive the highest earnings is very small, about 12.5 percent.

I hope more bloggers may be willing to share their income in a near future, even those who may not be that proud of their numbers yet. If you become a blogger who shares, please let me know so I can add you to the crawling schedule, of "my collecting robot".

Bloggers Income Ranking - July 2007 Report

2007-08-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

This list was assembled from the collected data of 31 bloggers who are sharing their blog income. Most of them do it on a monthly basis.

Are you a blogger who shares? Do you want to be added to next month's ranking? Then email me (glr[at]gabouy.com) with your blog details, and you'll be added to my "collecting robot" schedule.

Blog Ranking	Blog Url	Monthly Income
1	http://www.johnchow.com	12,406.76
2	http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk	8126
3	http://www.simplekindoflife.com/	5965.92
4	http://www.mydebtfreegoal.com/	3,046
5	http://earn-onlinemoney.blogspot.com	1081.9
6	http://demp.se/y/	1041.55
7	http://www.theinternetcashflowguy.com/	644.5
8	http://dotmyspot.com/home/	604.48
9	http://www.dailyburger.com	572.92
10	http://www.carlpei.com	545.62
11	http://www.erikvossman.com/	473.58
12	http://www.theanand.com/blog	436.29
13	http://geniustypes.com	396.29
14	http://aprobloggermom.com/	355.25
15	http://sabrinasmoneymadness.com/	341.09
16	http://www.thatedeguy.com/	295.88
17	http://www.erikkarey.com	274.76
18	http://www.realitywired.com/	231.87
19	http://www.derrich.com/	231.02
20	http://blogaboutyourblog.com/	215.23
21	http://www.buildingmyempire.com/	190.01
22	http://www.andy-coates.com/blog	180.05
23	http://pinkhatseo.info	169.77
24	http://www.sharingmytwocents.com	168.74
25	http://i-nicholas.blogspot.com	157.76
26	http://dereksemmler.com/	116.3
27	http://www.matthuggins.com	112.42
28	http://en.gabouy.com/	46.79
29	http://tjantunen.com	45.18
30	http://www.bushmackel.com/	24.74
31	http://www.ahmadaffzan.com/	15.52

Check which are the best paying affiliate programs on average!

meet my collecting robot...

Enterprise 2.0

2007-08-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

I'm on a journey to understand what's the meaning of Enterprise 2.0, and how it can be leveraged in my company.

For starters, these slides have some interesting concepts.

Much more of this to come...

Is xforms dead?

2007-08-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

I used to work on a server side xforms implementation back in 2002, in a java software shop, so I used to read everyday the spec, and follow the evolution (or the lack of it) in the w3c process.

The separation between logic and presentation, defining forms once and deploy to multiple devices, all the abstraction involved, all very promising features, and yet the thing never took off.

What happened? The idea behind the whole thing seemed really good, we were bringing light to this world. I understand there are some implementations out there, but the big players never really bought the idea.

Now I'm facing a design decision, I have to pick an xml format to define forms in a browser agnostic way and I'm not sure which way to go in the middle of the RIA's war (XAML vs Flash MX vs JavaFx).

The spirit of the spec seems to be right for what I need, yet the industry is clearly not backing the spec. Look at the following Google Trends query...

Google AdSense love has arrived to Uruguay

2007-08-07T18:20:00.001-07:00

The south exists too for Google, that's another reason why they are such a great company.

(661 bucks, the biggest so far)

Make Money Online - My July 2007 AdSense Earnings

2007-08-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another issue of how much money I've made online this month, the monthly exercise about sharing facts in the online money making business. I hope this may help other fellow money making bloggers and microentrepreneurs out there.

This month, and after some thinking I decided to remove my Text Link Ads sold links block, from my From Uruguay blog. This is part of a strategy whose goal is taking me out of Google's Sandbox (aka Google Shitlist). The Text Link Ads, and selling links experience in general was for me a four month experiment, from which I take some valuable lessons, among them:

1 - Selling links is a one way, direct, ticket to Google's Sandbox. Nothing is free in this life. It should be decided on a case by case evaluation, whether TLA is a good deal for a specific blog or site. If your scenario is Google searchs is a major traffic source (as it was my case), then selling links is a baaaad idea, at least through public brokers.

2 - Diversifying income sources for low traffic blogs is not easy. AdSense still is a really easy access market, with relatively good revenue, without parallel yet.

3 - If this was more than just a hobbie, diversifying would be a major priority. The simbiotic dependency with Google AdSense is of a very high risk. Google can decide at any time to send anyone to the Sandbox, without any form of notification, and then your revenue is gone.

4 - Seems the real money to be made with Text Link Ads is not in selling links, but in the referals program. One referal is worth 25 bucks, while each link paid something like 2.5 dollars a month for my PR4 blog (if you have a different view, i'd like to hear your story).

July 2007 figures

Well, without further ado, July 2007 figures:

AdSense: 46,79 USD
Text Link Ads: 0

July earnings were the lowest of the year so far. Based on the same period last year I'd have expected the numbers to keep steady or to increase a little, but this was not the case. Among the reasons, might be the decrease in blogging frequency in my english written blogs, which are the biggest earners.

The following chart shows the evolution of my AdSense income along time, since I pretty much started with AdSense, almost a couple of years ago.

The good thing is that the money I've already earned this year (444.43) is more than the money earned the previous year and a half period (379), and I'm not taking referrals into account. Considering money earned through AdSense Referals (270 usd this year) then I can say this year I've made almost twice the money (714) I had made the previous year and a half.

So... how much do you think will be my income this year?

Customize your Blogger Template

2007-07-09T00:09:00.000-07:00

Blogger is an, easy to use, mainstream, blogging platform, but it has some drawbacks, among them the lack of blog templates. There are few templates to chose from.

There are a number of sites ([1] [2]) that offers templates for Blogger but for the most part they provide templates for the old version of Blogger, and they don't support the new Blogger (ex Blogger beta) tags markup.

The following is a very basic web application that based on a few parameters, and on the k2 base template generates a customized blogger template, and it's free!

Blogger K2 Template Wizard

These are the required parameters to generate the template.

Keywords. List of comma separated keywords that best describe your blog
Description. Brief description of the type of content the blog has
Image URL. Web Address of the header image to use (ej: http://www.k2headers.misterdimbert.com/d/90-1/Fishing_01.jpg). Actually there are whole galleries of k2 template header images. The preview button allows to confirm the url is correct.

How to modify a blog template in Blogger

Once the template code has been generated, copy & paste it in the blog management console, in the Template/Edit html section.

WARNING:Before updating your blog template it is advised to back it up, as well, as the content of all the defined widgets.

A very good practice when customizing a blog template is to use a separate, sandbox blog to test and fine tune a blog template. Once changes are tested the can be commited to the target blog.

When saving the new template you might be prompted with a warning, notifying that some widgets will be lost. This is an issue. Widgets are declared in blogger templates, but widget content is stored in Blogger databases. There are two ways around this. One you take the loss and redefine them. The second you manually edit and update the template, copying the widgets markup from the template backup to the new template. If you ask me, recreating them is usually faster, make sure you've made a back up of the widgets content.

Now that you have a customized blogger template, all you need is a custom domain ;)

Make Money Online - My June 2007 AdSense Earnings

2007-07-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

I've been a blogger for a bit more than two years now, and I've been running AdSense Ads for almost the same time. One thing that would have helped me was to know what to expect in terms of online income. Out there you only read about the success stories, the get rich schemes, the six figure probloggers, but the truth for the average Joe, is far from that.

That's why I decided to publish each month, my online earnings, primarily with AdSense, but also with TextLink Ads, to provide another point of reference for those walking a similar path.

To give you a rough idea I have six blogs/sites/online projects, which get an average of 10000 pageviews a month all of them.

Money made online June 2007

June turned out to be a mediocre. Ad blocks didn't perform very well. On the other hand for the first time I earned 250 for an AdSense referral conversion.

These are June's figures:

Google AdSense: 308.47 USD
Text Link Ads: 8.55 USD

Total money earned on the internet: 317.02 USD

Given the average AdSense monthly subscriptions I expect to get at least the 250 bonus twice a year.

How much are you making?

Become a SEO Consultant in 15 minuntes

2007-06-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I read the whole SEO´s body of knowledge can be learned in less than 6 months.

I don´t know if this is true, but a very good SEO's best & worst practices summary can be found in this 15 minutes SEO list.

Isaac & the CARPET Project

2007-06-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I came across this link in digg.com, about this guy who says he's worked in the DoD with extra terrestrial (aka alien) stuff, doing inverse engineering on some alien gadgets, involving invisibility, and anti gravity.

True, false. Microsoft viral marketing strategy for Halo3. Who knows?

The truth is out there, right?

what's the deal with all the singing and dancing in Indian movies

2007-05-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

I don't watch much indian cinema, but the few movies I've seen they all involve singing and dancing.

I mean, what's the deal with the singing every ten minutes?

Selecting ASP.NET web hosting

2007-05-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

I´m in the process of choosing a web hosting provider. I need it to be ASP.NET 2.0 compatible, and with lots of disk space, since I´m planning on storing images and video on the website.

I´ve created the following table, which evaluates some of the existing alternatives, and compares them with criteria relevant to me.

Google Web History

2007-04-25T19:35:00.000-07:00

Matt Cutts blogs about the uses of Google Web History new feature.

It doesn't sound awfully convincing.

Well this is my history, seems I tend to peak on Wednesdays, how about you?

How many posts should I write before I go public with my blog?

2007-04-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

How many post should someone write before going public with it?

A couple of days ago I was discussing this same matter with a friend. He decided to take on blogging, but when I asked him to show me his stuff, he answered he was waiting to have at least 3 posts before he'd go public about it.

I was struck by his answer, after all, I found I had to agree with him, there are indeed some reasons I would advice someone to wait before marketing a blog. These are among the questions that a waiting period would help answering:

Do I have enough motivation to keep a blog going?

Motivation is not something to be taken lightly, and it takes time to know if something is love, or just a one night stand crash. Waiting some fixed period of time, or a achieving a number of good quality posts is not a bad thing to discover this.

What will be the blog's topic?

In my experience, I would start blogs with funny, clever names, but at the end of the day every post would be about a different topic. It was a matter of time before I found my blog topic pattern, the things I would tend to write about. This is specially true for novice bloggers. Is not that is a bad thing, but the more you focus your blog content, the better it will do.

What is the best posting frequency for me?

Is it realist to think I will blog everyday? This depends on whether you have a steady source of content, from which to get blogging posts ideas, and whether you work full time, or part time, and how many other activities, do you split your time with.

Closing thoughts and conclusions

There are some caveats though, it's reasonable to wait some time, but everything has its limit. It's a good thing to have trust circles, friends, or fellow bloggers, that you can share your content with, and receive honest feedback from. Besides, a blog is a living thing which is changing all the time. Tunning a blog is a never ending activity, and waiting for it to be perfect is an illusion.

TextLink Ads are affecting my Goolge Page Rank

2007-04-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

I've been running AdSense for about one and a half year now, on my precious from uruguay blog. I made nothing for the first couple of months, zero, nada. Nevertheless, I wasn't blogging for money, and (to some extent) I still don't, I guess I blog, for blogging's sake.

But after the first couple of months something happened, and I started making from 15 to 25 bucks a month, on a regular basis. The amount would change from month to month but the visits were growing slow and steady. Well, until last march.

Last March, I started to run TextLink Ads on from-uruguay's blog, and also Review Me ads, in a campaign to diversify my income channels, trying to put my eggs in different baskets.

The results is the page views of my blog seem to have dropped at least by half. I used to have about 60% of income traffic coming from google searches, while now I have only 10%. I've noticed the links added by TextLinkAds are without the nofollow attribute, but I had never thought it would be affect the blog like this. Has anyone experienced something similar?

In a month and a half, I've sold two links, earning 10 bucks a month from them, and I had one review ordered, which I turned down (it was a splog). I'm still not sure the cost benefit ratio of introducing more advertising channels is profitable. I think it's still to early to say.