Blogging Way of Life

This month has been a inspirational month cause I’ve received my first AdSense payment. You get the feeling of earning money online when you start spending it. I’ve received my first AdSense payment after six months so now I have to set up my goals to receive AdSense payment each month.

My main source of income is Hubpages again. I’ve created a few more Hubs this month and I’m experimenting with different niches. I’ve created AdSense channel for each of my Hubs and I’ll develop more Hubs in high paying niches. I’ve got some Amazon sales also but my Amazon earnings are just depending on pure luck. I have to find some time from my day job for creating some time for my Amazon Associates Store. Here are the numbers for May:

Earnings for May: 42,83$

If you like this post please add to:

Once more beginning of a new month and time for monthly earnings report. After a boost up at earnings in March, I was a little a fraid to see the earnings go down and lose my excitement. Actually my earnings are nearly the same when compared to March. Last month I had very good eCPM results from Adsense. Smartpricing is a serious issue in Adsense and I got smartpriced as expected. I have to admit that my Hubpages traffic is less when compared to last month but the Adsense earnings are nearly the half. Surely I have to increase the number of my Hubs and increase traffic. What came to my surprise is it’s been a great month for Amazon Associates program. I’ve sold 10 products this month and I can see some of my Amazon capsules at Hubpages is working good.

The important thing is I finally made the 100$ milestone at Google Adsense and I will hopefully receive my first paycheck from online business. This month I’ve also seen the importance of Amazon Associates and I am working on an Amazon Store Project right now. (I will give the information about the on going project but my main purpose is to build an Amazon Store with it’s own shopping cart.)

Here are the numbers :

Earnings for April: 49,72$

If you like this post please add to:

This month I’m writing my monthly report with a smile on my face (at last). Thanks to major design & ad placement changes at Hubpages the CTR’s for adsense has gone up dramatically and I’ve managed to earn some reasonable amount from Adsense. I’ve just missed the 100$ in total with a buck and I have to wait next month for the money.

While earning money from Adsense, I was desperate about my Amazon affiliate earnings. I couldn’t make any sales until the end of month an just as I was losing hope I managed to sell a Sony CyberShot Camera (Although I don’t have any related Hubs about cameras). I am now thinking of whether receiving a Amazon Gift certificate or waiting to hit the cheque limit. I still don’t get how to focus for products at Amazon because every item I sell is unrelated to my Hubs. I am planning to publish a Amazon Store this month so I hope that things will get better with Amazon.

So end of story here are the numbers :

Earnings for March: 58,53$

If you like this post please add to:

February has been a good month (I still don’t earn any reasonable money but I am getting a good curve so there’s no reason to be pessimistic). At last I’ve passed the 15$ mark with Adsense earnings and I’ve passed 50$ on Grand Total. Google team have sent me my PIN code after 40$ so I’m ready to receive my payment when I hit 100$. I’ve also managed to sell some Amazon stuff from my Hubs. To my surprise I haven’t sold any of the items that I’ve been listing. I guess people are clicking my Amazon links and buying other items while surfing in related items in Amazon. In total I’ve passed 20$ this month.

The rise in my earnings are actually related to huge traffic I’ve received from StumbleUpon this month. I will write a detailed post about how I got a big traffic from StumbleUpon after analyzing the effects and stability of the traffic. As a result of the huge StumbleUpon traffic to one of my Hubs I received most of my earnings from Hubpages (without any effort).

Earnings for February: 20,05$

If you like this post please add to:

This month I’ve focused my attention to Hubpages. (You can check my review of Hubpages) Regarding that I don’t have so much time from my day work I choose Hubpages because it offers good organic traffic without any effort at all. It also gives me the freedom to write on any topic. This month I created two new Hubs:

Solar Power - Ways of Producing Electricty from Sun

PES 2008 TRICKS & MOVES

Both of them started generating Google traffic immediately. My Hub traffic is rising constantly and I expect double income in 2 months. Let’s cut the talk and come to the facts:

Earnings for January: 9,57$

My adsense earnings slightly increased from last month but my Amazon affiliates not producing any income somehow. Although I created a Hub about science fiction movies which seemed perfect for Amazon ads, I couldn’t get any orders.

I expect to find some time from my work this month and put some effort on my blog at the same time with my Hubs and at least earn more than 15$ in February.

If you like this post please add to:

December has been an awful month in terms of earning money. At the first half of December I couldn’t actually deal with my blog or write on Hubpages because of my day job. Anyways I couldn’t create much content but I surely learn a lot of stuff in terms keyword targeting and SEO. I focused much more to my Hubs this month which creates me organic traffic without much effort and will propably convert better in future. I’ve written Hubs on higher paying keywords so there is an increase in my eCPM. December has been a bad month for CTR and I am taking this on Christmas spirit Last month I earned a few bucks from Amazon even though I didn’t intend to. This month I intend some Amazon earnings but couldn’t make any sales so I guess this is my bad luck this month. Please note that most of my adsense income is generated from Hubpages, and I expect a linear increase in my Hubpages earnings as the number of my Hubs go up.

Earnings for December: 8,74$

If you like this post please add to:

This is the first month my blog is published and I have started monetizing my blog. In the first month of the blog I wasn’t expecting any income actually because of the low content and no regular visitors at all. I have started this blog with 100$ spending (for my hosting and domain name) and the worst case scenario for me is losing that money. Looking at my earnings I won’t lose that money even if my earnings stays same. (which isn’t likely because as the content increases and I gain regular visitors the traffic is more likely to increase in an exponential graph)

Earnings for November: 15,76$

• Google Adsense Earnings : 13,12$
• Amazon Affiliate Earnings: 2,64$

 As you can see I don’t use Amazon Ads in my blog because it’s not an item/product related blog. I am publishing my Amazon ads at my Hubs. I have sold 4 items and this is a good amount as a beginner at Hubpages. I have earned from Adsense from my blog and my hubpages account. I have accomplished my first amount with a decent amount for the first month of a blog and I am expecting the 100$ limit in a few months.

My blog has been visited 1,813 times with 3,034 page visits. The best traffic source is StumbleUpon for now. Referring Sites has %86 percentage in my traffic while search engines are %4,5. (Which is normal for a new blog) For a new blog social networking sources seems the best way to start driving traffic.

Regarding all the effort I am spending on my my Hubs created 1,620 visits in November with %60 of the traffic is from search engines. So you can use Hubpages if you want to benefit from free organic traffic without any effort.

Thanks to all supporters and followers.

If you like this post please add to:

Do you still remember the name Agloco? They tried to gain success using the same old story, “Get rich by doing nothing”. I am turning my spider senses on if someone proposes me getting rich by doing nothing. In my opinion Agloco was another pyramid scheme and I didn’t think of signing up before I see a cheque signed by them. I don’t know how an expert like John Chow got into this (money tastes sweet) but I think that he lost his hopes also. John Chow’s Agloco Page have been updated at the beginning and mid of each month until July and no more updates since then. I don’t think that even he has the toolbar installed but he was relying on 21.000 referrals in his network.

 You have to study some human behaviours before getting in a project at this scale. Agloco managed to get huge number of users following their announcement. (1.000.000 sign ups as last statistics) The idea of earning money from referrals attends people. While each individual signs up and make other people sign up as referrals, those new users will also see that the way of earning money depends on earnings from referrals so they look out for referrals too, but there comes a time when the community is saturated and no more users are signing up as referrals. No more chains added. What happens next? The last ring of chain breaks-up because they aren’t making any money actually and the links get broken from bottom to top. What you get actually is the reverse chain reaction. Agloco could prevent that by distributing cash immediately and keeping the chains connected but they are promising income in a very far away future. You can’t expect people to be patient in such a system.

Everybody knows that systems based on pyramid schemes don’t last long. It only makes the links at the top rich. I guess that John Chow knew that and he tried his luck. If Agloco ever pays out money, John Chow will be the one getting it.

If you like this post please add to:

I am a supporter of Google Adsense for bringing quality to the online ad services and they have set the standards higher for advertisers and publishers. I am using adsense units because of the confidence and believing in their good intention to provide a good experience for both advertisers and publishers. I can understand their tendency to look out for advertisers because they are the source of money. The latest news already created some buzz for publishers even before officially announced.

According to Problogger’s news Google will announce shortly the new ad click system which disables the clicks to background and texts, making clicks only available through title and url. According to Problogger Google is explaining this situation by telling :

“We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers…..This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the user’s overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.”

I have no objection to increasing targeted clicks but doing this by disabling click-able areas doesn’t seem okay with me. Google will also cancel some targeted clicks by the way. I tried to figure out the effects by making an experiment myself. I looked at some ads in various pages and I realized that I was trying to click the ads through backgrounds mostly. That’s because Google Ads has been a brand itself and our eyes are perceiving whole ad unit as a block. You can argue that people would find a way to click ads somehow but this is ads we are speaking of and people won’t be so persistent to click ads.

There’s an opinion that advertisers are going to increase the rates and the changes won’t effect publishers but I think that it will create bad results in short term and will push publishers to look out for new sources.

If you like this post please add to:

It’s been 15 days of blogging; building content, improving design and mostly trying to get some traffic. Even if you find and write down the solution for “World Peace” you won’t get any visitors without some effort. There is lot of “what to do” lists to drive traffic and I applied most of them (trying to stay away from spamming) and will review the short term results.

Social Bookmarking Services

-StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a toolbar which you can use to stumble through web pages people liked and it will drive traffic to your page if you have a good content. StumbleUpon is the source of the most traffic to my blog. It is superior than other social bookmarking services because it can’t be spoiled. Most of the social bookmarking services depend on you to promote your link and ask people for votes. StumbleUpon prevents such actions because it bans your account if you submit your own pages too much. If you have a good content people will favor it by clicking “I like it!” and your page is displayed to other stumblers and attract more audience. Even if you find a way to promote your page from several accounts or stumble exchanges people who stumble your page will rate it and the traffic will vanish in time if there is no good content. To benefit from StumbleUpon you must be a good stumbler and contribute to the system. (You can start being a giver by giving a thumb up for this post if you liked:) I will write a more detailed review about StumbleUpon in following days, it deserves more attention.

-Digg

Digg is another social network service which has its own ups and downs. It has good integrating with your blog and widely used system among bloggers but I think that it’s losing it’s purpose. If you are not in the first page of digg there isn’t much chance that you will get traffic and to get into first page you must ask people for diggs. I think that this service isn’t the dream service for beginner bloggers because you have to spend too much effort for getting diggs and I beleive it is better to spend this time blogging.

-Sphinn

Sphinn is a new social bookmarking service just like Digg, but unlike Digg it is not spoiled yet. There are people actually commenting and reviewing each others submits and I think it is a great place for starters. For me it doesn’t drive much traffic but better days are to come

-Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us introduced the tag system for internet searches and still widely used del.icio.us creates traffic to your submitted posts.

-

Reddit is another social bookmarking service with a cute logo and they create some traffic. Compared to the effort you spend on other services this one is an easy to go service. Just use it.

Blog Networks

-Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine working with a voting system for submitted posts and you can fave your favorite blogs. (You can favorite BloggerDollar by the image above) Technorati is actually ranking each blog by a ranking system called authority which is actually number of links to your blog. So as a new blogger you will have a low authority which means low traffic. I had one of my topics in Hot WTF’s for days but still didn’t get any noticeable traffic. They have canceled submitting new WTF’s lately so I guess there will be a change in their system.

-BlogCatalog

Although named as a blog directory, blogcatalog has a good forum like network where you can meet new bloggers or ask for diggs and votes.

- Bumpzee

Bumpzee is a more advanced bloggers network letting you use a widget for viewing the recent visitors to your blog and they have a community system like in blogcatalog.

-BlogRush

Blogrush is an eye candy widget displaying posts from other bloggers on your sidebar. You earn credit for your traffic and your posts are displayed in other blogs. They recently started cleaning out their users for a higher quality of posts. I started receiving a little traffic from them so I try to see the light at the end of tunnel. They also have a referral system so that people who sign up from your blog earns credits for you also. So why don’t you be a good boy and sign up from here (Don’t worry it doesn’t effect your credits)

Blog Directories

There are also lot of blog directories that I signed up which you can see in the side bar. Some of them require placing their link on your blog, some of them don’t (I put them all in my sidebar to share with you). They don’t create much traffic but a good way to increase your blogs visibility in search engines.

Socializing

If you are a blogger and you want attention to your blog then you must pay attention to other blogs. Visiting other blogs and commenting on their posts will both spread out your name and also motivate people to visit your blog. As I said before don’t be a taker be a giver.

Most of the listed services won’t bring you traffic immediately (Actually StumbleUpon does) but those methods will help you in long term so participate in each service and experience it yourself. If you have any other services you want to recommend please comment.

If you like this post please add to: