In honor of Labor Day, I didn't have to work Monday, and like a damn fool, I thought I had eluded the proverbial "case of the Mondays". I was wrong. That dirty bastard sneaked into my Tuesday, and screwed it up, allowing me no time yesterday to update my online revenue earning progress. Anyway, excuses excuses, blah blah blah...here's my week one summary:
Financially speaking, this hasn't been a very successful week:
Financially speaking, this hasn't been a very successful week:
- I've made a whopping $.07 through Adsense Revenue on this blog, due to my 0% CTR
- I mentioned earlier that eHow is currently buggy, so I've only published one article (though I have several on the back burner). That article has netted $.49.
- At the moment, I don't have any other revenue streams, leaving me with a grand total of $.56.
I know $.56 is nothing, but it's something (riiiiight) - it's a start. Despite not earning enough income to even buy a scratch off ticket, I'm not writing off week 1 as a failure. I think I've set a pretty solid foundation for myself with this blog, and by ingesting a healthy dose of research, I've learned more about SEO, SMO, good blogging practices, and general online money making strategies in this week than I have my whole life. Not to mention, my Google Analytics report reflects a positive trend in traffic to this site. Though I have a very low unique visitor count (number of individuals who have visited the site - not page views), it continues to grow each day. Here's the Google Analytics traffic breakdown:
Yep, 36 unique visitors over the course of the past six days. Not much, but I'm optimistic. One encouraging element, is that the average visitor spends 05:06 on the site, which I believe tells me that the few folks who have wandered onto the blog are actually reading something.
On the flip side, one discouraging element is that my traffic is almost exclusively from referrals. Though I'm thrilled to have referral traffic, I haven't had one visitor set foot off of a search engine. I've checked, and the major search engines have my posts indexed, however, after examining my Google Webmaster tools reports, I allegedly have no attractive keywords.
Generally speaking, I think these results can mainly be attributed to the blog's infancy. After consulting the Google FAQ, it was brought to my attention that Google's crawler bots can take a while to build a comprehensive assessment of your site. When you combine this with the fact that my backlink count is currently weak, and that the "make money online" blogger's market is a savage place for a newbie, I don't think I'm doing too horribly. If a month from now, a reassessment shows that I'm still failing to pick up any search engine traffic, I'll strongly consider reevaluating my strategy. For now though, I'm accepting my results with a grin, and moving forward.
Note: If anyone has any suggestions, or has spotted a bonehead mistake or omission in my current SEO strategy, please don't hesitate to call me out. I'm still learning to ride, and I need an Uncle Joey to help push me a long (that's right, I alluded to Full House - wanna fight me?)
Regarding Project Friend Whore, I haven't made terrific progress. Stragglers from my first wave of invites are still wandering in, putting me at 128 friends. I'm still waiting for my siblings to "Suggest" their friends for me. Did you hear me? I'm still waiting!
Before I close, I'll note my most accomplished feat of the week - one that I didn't even consider before starting this online revenue earning project; of the 36 unique visitors who have stopped by CashMoneyRetards, nearly 10% of them have left me very constructive feedback in my comment postings. So, to Crystal, Scott, and Tim - much appreciated. I got warm fuzzies up inside of me...I can't blog to my mother so I blog to my diary...
Yep, 36 unique visitors over the course of the past six days. Not much, but I'm optimistic. One encouraging element, is that the average visitor spends 05:06 on the site, which I believe tells me that the few folks who have wandered onto the blog are actually reading something.
On the flip side, one discouraging element is that my traffic is almost exclusively from referrals. Though I'm thrilled to have referral traffic, I haven't had one visitor set foot off of a search engine. I've checked, and the major search engines have my posts indexed, however, after examining my Google Webmaster tools reports, I allegedly have no attractive keywords.
Generally speaking, I think these results can mainly be attributed to the blog's infancy. After consulting the Google FAQ, it was brought to my attention that Google's crawler bots can take a while to build a comprehensive assessment of your site. When you combine this with the fact that my backlink count is currently weak, and that the "make money online" blogger's market is a savage place for a newbie, I don't think I'm doing too horribly. If a month from now, a reassessment shows that I'm still failing to pick up any search engine traffic, I'll strongly consider reevaluating my strategy. For now though, I'm accepting my results with a grin, and moving forward.
Note: If anyone has any suggestions, or has spotted a bonehead mistake or omission in my current SEO strategy, please don't hesitate to call me out. I'm still learning to ride, and I need an Uncle Joey to help push me a long (that's right, I alluded to Full House - wanna fight me?)
Regarding Project Friend Whore, I haven't made terrific progress. Stragglers from my first wave of invites are still wandering in, putting me at 128 friends. I'm still waiting for my siblings to "Suggest" their friends for me. Did you hear me? I'm still waiting!
Before I close, I'll note my most accomplished feat of the week - one that I didn't even consider before starting this online revenue earning project; of the 36 unique visitors who have stopped by CashMoneyRetards, nearly 10% of them have left me very constructive feedback in my comment postings. So, to Crystal, Scott, and Tim - much appreciated. I got warm fuzzies up inside of me...I can't blog to my mother so I blog to my diary...
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5 comments:
I would say your biggest friend in all this is producing constant content. As long as you're pumping out something new, people will keep reading and new people will find you(speaking from the failed experience of a lazy blogger). Also you never know what keyword will queue off a massive amount of traffic. Back when I was semi reguarly blogging, one of the biggest posts was one just commenting on an interesting site I found. Today it's still the second google link if you search for the site 'wikimapedia' garnishing 50ish hits a month.
Really loving your blog! I want to write like you when I grow down. (Can't do it when I grow up beings all 10 of my grandkids are older than your daughter so I know I've already got you beat age-wise by a decade or two at least.) Anyway, I was curious about hubpages and planning to check them out this week so I used your link to get there and sign up. As an experiment, I'll try to remember to click a link every time I visit. Is it just the clicks that do the trick for you or do I have to also take some sort of action once I arrive at the site? For the hubpages link no problem, action has been taken! Also, is there danger of triggering some kind of click-fraud alarm if clicks consistently come from the same computer? Not that I'll be looking at things that don't actually interest me but I'm still curious how all that works.
Hey Crystal,
Although I sincerely appreciate your support in funding my site through ad revenue (I truly do), I strongly encourage you to only click a link if it is an ad that legitimately interests you.
To answer both of your questions; All my ads are through Google Adsense, which does not require any further action (only a click). However, there are serious threats when it comes to click fraud (especially when it comes to Google). A couple years ago, I told my buddy about a blog I had just started, and within 15 minutes, I had inexplicably made $15 - my CPM was like $1500. But just as quickly as I received the pleasing adsense report, I received a letter from the big dog, Google, giving me my first and last warning.
For as much as I love Google, they scare me to death, so please, only click on ads that interest you. Coincidentally, I was just checking out hubpages the other day...looks like a decent revenue sharing service.
Please don't interpret this response as a reprimand, I honestly appreciate your support, I just don't want Google to murder me.
Thanks again!
Dave
Tim,
Thanks a lot, man. That's encouraging. I enjoy writing, so hopefully the production of consistent content won't be an issue...I'll just have to forget about quick results for a while.
Cool story about wikimapedia. I hope similarly pleasant surprise show up in my next analytics report.
Thanks again!
Dave Lopan
Not to worry, Dave. I will only click on ads that are truly of interest. It was just a happy coincidence that I was already intending to check out hubpages this week anyway.
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