Written on October 5th, 2005 at 08:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Attention Apple - time for a PowerUpgrade
I really hope that this next Apple announcement event has a nice update for the PowerMac like all the rumor sites seem to be hinting about. My little powerbook has been great - but its starting to slow down and I’m looking for some more power and a larger screen.
Next time they upgrade the PowerMac this little blogger is going to snap one up with a couple of nice 20 or 23 inch screens. Then we’ll be blogging with grunt!
Written on October 5th, 2005 at 02:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Journalist Interviewed by Blogger
Jeremy has turned the tables on a blog journalist and is interviewing them about blog over at b5media. His interview is with Nick Douglas of Blogebrity and it’s full of all kinds of interesting information on the current blog network scene.
Written on October 5th, 2005 at 10:10 am by Darren Rowse
How to Rotate AdSense & YPN on one page
Jensense has instructions for those of you lucky enough to be in the YPN beta test who are wanting to Rotate you AdSense & YPN ads on the one page using phpAdsNew.
Written on October 5th, 2005 at 08:10 am by Darren Rowse
Gizmodo Expands into European Languages
Nick Denton has announced that Gizmodo is going to be translated into six European languages:
‘Under the terms of the partnership, Gizmodo’s content will be translated from English into 6 additional languages, then augmented with local coverage for each market. Besides English, Gizmodo.com now will be available in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian and covering the Belgium market in Dutch as well….’
Written on October 5th, 2005 at 01:10 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika eMiniMalls - How Much Money Do they Earn Me?
I’ve been getting quite a few excited emails from readers who have signed up for the Chitika eMiniMalls that I reviewed last week. There has been a lot of positive feedback so far from those who I’ve referred over to the program with some people earning some significant money from it so far (including ‘Rachel‘). There have also been a few (less) emails from bloggers who have failed to see them as effective.
The most common question that I get asked by readers about the eMiniMalls include:
- ‘How do the money from eMiniMalls compare to earnings of Adsense?’
- ‘How much money do you earn from eMiniMalls?’
(update: the third most asked question is ‘how do I increase my earnings?’ If you’re asking this you might also like to check out Chitika eMiniMall Tips for increasing earnings)
I’ve resisted talking about specific figures of money earnt to this point because I wanted to clarify with the Chitika people whether I was allowed to do so. Today I just got confirmation that it’s ok for me to talk about daily earnings figures but not CTR, impressions etc. The reason I want to talk about this is simply because I really believe in this ad system - as you’ll see from the figures below - it’s had a pretty amazing impact upon my earnings and I’d like readers here to have the full picture of what the potential to earn money with it is.
So let’s look at yesterday’s earnings for me with both Adsense and Chitika were. Update: due to Adsense terms (that I misread) I have been told that I cannot reveal my daily Adsense figures but only gross payment figures (monthly totals). So I’ll do that here instead of a daily figure for yesterday. You can pretty much work out what the Adsense earnings are from the figure if you know how many days are in August! All I’ll say is that yesterday was a bit under August’s average.
Adsense earnings for August - $15,849.73
Chitika eMiniMalls earnings Yesterday - $702.45
Let me follow the figures up with a few statements of qualification:
- Yesterday Adsense was a little below average for me
- While I can’t mention how many impressions there were for either program - they were very similar to one another
- The Chitika eMiniMalls figure is before their auditing process takes effect. From what I’ve seen of this process last month - this is likely to decrease that figure by around 10% - update this turned out to be an accurate estimation of the audit figure for this day.
- The ads appear across a range of sites (17 or so - NOT just this site). In most cases they appear on the same pages as one another (remember that you need to disable the contextual ad function of the eMiniMalls to do this and stay within Adsense’s TOS
- The CTR for Adsense is significantly higher than it was for the eMiniMalls
- The click value for eMiniMalls is significantly higher than it was for Adsense
- From what I can tell from these results and those of readers who are trying eMiniMalls (Chitika is yet to add channels) - the best performing sites seem to be product related blogs including blogs about gadgets, clothing, etc. Having said this I’ve heard from a number of bloggers with VERY general, non product related sites that are doing reasonably well out of them also.
- These are not just one off or fluke numbers - I’ve had no major increases in traffic over the past few days - I have added the eMiniMalls to more pages in the past week - but the numbers seem to be consistent over the past few days. Time will tell whether they will remain at this level but I have no reason to believe that they will not.
- The above figures are in US dollars.
As you can see from the numbers - I personally have reason to be pretty excited about eMiniMalls. If these numbers continue they will more than double my daily earnings and taken them to a level that is over $1000 per day. This is less than some of the bigger blog networks out there but for an ordinary guy like me who has only been at this blogging thing for under 3 years - I have to say that it’s very promising. I can’t guarantee that they work on every blog - but they are definately worth experimenting with.
Disclaimer: the links to Chitika in this post are affiliate links - if you sign up using these links I earn a small amount as a commission. It does not impact what you earn from Chitika but rather is paid by Chitika. While these links are affiliate links I genuinely believe in the product and have endeavored to point out both its benefits and weaknesses in all my writing about it.
Update - I give an update on my Chitika Earnings in this post.
Written on October 5th, 2005 at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse
YPN testing RSS Ads
Looks like Yahoo’s Publisher Network is widening their beta test to RSS ads if the RSS feed of our friend Jen is any indication.
Still patiently waiting for them to widen their test to non US testers….
Is anyone out there actually earning anything significant from RSS advertising? I have to say that my own experiments with the medium have had very INsignificant results.
Written on October 4th, 2005 at 11:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Webby Media Blog Network Folds
Brand New Blog Network - Webby Media has just decided to call it quits just a week after launching. Omar explains it at Too Much, Too Fast? He’d previously announced that Webby Media would give 100% of earnings to bloggers that joined up - I was always fascinated to see how this could be financially viable for not only bloggers but also Omar the blog network himself. Perhaps it really was a case of too much too fast.
One of his lessons learned reminds me of my post last week on Why some Blog Networks are Successful (a post about building a network on credibility and profile). Omar writes:
‘Brand is the only competitive advantage. So if you can’t compete on technology or advertising, what can you compete on? The publisher’s brand. Eventhough I’ve been publishing online for several years now, I really haven’t spent time building credibility. This point is unbelievably crucial. It’s just critical.’
Best of luck in whatever you choose to do next Omar. It’s probably best to fold after a week than after a few months when you’ve put a lot more time into the venture.
Written on October 4th, 2005 at 03:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Camera Phone Blog gets a New Editor
I’m really excited to announce that I’ve just recently started a process of putting some quality bloggers into my blogs to help lighten the load of blogging. This will free me up to spend more time blogging at enternetusers and working on some of the other exciting projects that I’ve been throwing myself into recently at internetusers, six figure blogging and a couple of yet to be announced projects.
The first blogger that has come on in a paid capacity is BJ from Adventures in Net Marketing. BJ will be editing my Camera Phone blog (one that will be hopefully getting a complete redesign in the coming weeks).
BJ came on board at the Camera Phone blog way back in June when I asked for guest bloggers and at the end of my time away when it came time to hand the reigns back over she asked if she could continue on a voluntary basis - getting only a link back to her blog on each post. Since that time she’s put more and more time into posting and in the past week or two has taken over the reigns of the blog almost completely as I’ve taught her my system there.
It’s been a learning experience not only for BJ as she’s learned the ropes of how I run the blog - but also for me as I’ve had to consider how to explain what I do. I’ve also found it an interesting experience to sit back and let someone else work on something that I’ve been putting so much time into over the past year. While I’m enjoying the extra time that this gives me - it is a strange feeling stepping away from something that has taken up so much of my focus.
Also a part of the process is working through the eternal question of ‘how to pay’ authors who come onto one of my blogs. I think we have a system that is mutually beneficial to us both - time will tell if we need to tweak it! I’m not going to go into details of what the arrangement is - BJ and I haven’t talked about whether we’ll make it public - but I will say that it’s a bit different to any of the other revenue sharing systems I’ve seen in other blogs. At the basis of it however is incentive for BJ to blog in a way that builds up the blog’s quantities of content as well as readership.
At this stage BJ is the only extra author I’m ready to take on but in time as we see how it goes I’m looking forward to either expanding her role to other blogs and/or to engage the services of other bloggers on my blogs. This will not be a quick process. I’d rather take it slow - find the right blogger for the right blog - make sure I have a good relationship with the blogger/s concerned - and find the right compensation system for the blog and blogger.
Written on October 4th, 2005 at 09:10 am by Darren Rowse
Venture Capital and your Blogging Business
There’s a good post over at Whitespace titled Boom 2.0 which talks a little of the struggle of the 9rules guys to work out whether they wanted to accept venture capital funding.
“Last week we were offered a “generous” sum of money to fund some of the projects that we wished to work on. Initially, we jumped all over the offer for the simple reason that we continue to tell ourselves that if we could get away from doing client work for a couple of weeks/months then we could dedicate 100% of our time to the stuff we really want to do. After some time though and a lot of discussion we decided to turn down the money mainly because the offer didn’t feel right to us. I wish I could say it was an easy decision to make.”
Being approached by someone who wants to inject big dollars into your blogging business is a pretty amazing journey. I’ve had approaches from a number of VC people over the past 18 months and the feelings that come along with it are a real roller coaster ride.
You go from feeling totally exhilarated by the number of 000’s being mentioned - to totally freaked out by the size of it all - to a depressing realization of what the money will cost you (no one ever gives you money without some strings) - to feeling invincible as you consider the size of what you could build - to feeling that you could greedily build your own empire without having to give anyone else a share, to feeling convicted that money isn’t everything… etc etc etc
In each case that I’ve been through I’d given some serious thought to the idea but on each occasion I too, like the 9rules team, that things were not quite right.
On one occasion the VC guy needed an answer ‘now’ (here’s a hot tip - if someone insists on a ‘now’ decision, warning bells should be going off in your mind - why do they need a decision ‘now’? More often or not its because they know you can get a better deal elsewhere). On another occasion I would almost literally have been selling my soul for many years for the money. On another one I just didn’t feel right about the people behind the deal having looked over some of the other projects that they’d funded.
I’m not anti VC. I know some bloggers are totally against it on principle - but I see that there can be times and places where investment can be very appropriate. Having said this - I’m a pretty picky and choosey kind of guy and would only enter into this type of deal if everything lined up well. One of the dangers of going down the VC path can be that you put your blogging business on hold while you negotiate the deal and get bogged down in contracts and logistics. I know of a few small-business owners who have become quite obsessed with VC - to the point where the businesses that they were trying to get funded suffered.
My approach is to keep building what I’ve been working on as if VC will never be an option. If opportunities arise - each are evaluated on an individual basis. The deal needs to be ‘right’. If it’s not it is business as usual.
Of course I now have the luxury of being able to reject offers that are not ‘right’ because I’ve built things to a point where it provides a decent income - however as I look at the first VC deal I was offered - I’m so glad that I knocked it back as I’ve managed to build things well past what their best ‘now’ offer was.
I’m interested in others thoughts on the topic. I’m by no means a financial wiz - but what advice would you give someone looking at a VC deal?
Written on October 4th, 2005 at 08:10 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika eMiniMalls Plugins
x74..org has posted a Chitika eMiniMall WordPress Plugin to help you insert eMiniMalls inside your posts.
It’s similar to some plugins that I’ve seen to do the same thing with Adsense which might be helpful.
However keep in mind that inserting ads inside individual posts means that you later on if you want to remove ads or change colors of them that you will probably need to go back to each post you’ve inserted them into to manually change them.
This is why I prefer to use templates of my blog to insert ad code. You might find it slightly less flexible in terms of ad positioning if you do this - but later on if you want to move or change the design of your ads you simply have to change one thing and rebuild your site rather than surfing to individual pages.
Having said this - some people love these plugins because it gives them complete control and flexibility over individual positions for ads on their blogs - if that’s you this might be worth installing on you WP blog.
Speaking of Chitika eMiniMalls - those of you experimenting with them might like to know that you’re not alone. Today I was surfing by the massive Gizmodo and spotted that they are rotating them through a number of their ad blocks also.
Congratulations to Chitika - it looks like their beta test is turning out to be a very successful trial.
-
enternetusers Sponsors
Team Blogs
Blogs from b5media management and staff members.-
internetusers
-
Active Apparel website 1cecilia392
-
Active Apparel website 1cecilia392
-
network Apparel website 1cecilia392
-
enternetusers
-
-
Active Apparel website 1cecilia392
-
-
-
b5media Mobile RSS
-
I reviewed the clothing at David Cadena Stanton and found the best Active clothing available.
Register with the Get Paid To YouTube to reduce the telemarketing phone calls.
The Carol Warren Stanton is also for sale on iBlason and at the Carol Warren Stanton is at the iPhone Arena.
|Get the get paid blogging on Amazon.com.
Order the Dave Shawver Stanton and Carol Warren Stanton is also for sale on iBlason or at the Carol Warren Stanton is at the iPhone Area.
Look at this baby doll lingerie online. There is a Stanton Mayor running for Stanton City Council in Stanton. There is a Stanton Mayor running for Stanton City Council in Stanton. on their skate shop website. There is a Rigoberto Ramirez Stanton and Rigoberto Ramirez Stanton at ibattz.com. I bought edelbrock throttle linkage while ordering a tiktok smart watch to put into edelbrock throttle linkage for my vehicle. We purchased edelbrock torker while buying stock video marketplace for the video recordings to be uploaded to the mobile stock video marketplace. Register with the edelbrock pro flo 3 1cecilia54 edelbrock pro flo 3 to reduce the telemarketing phone calls.I reviewed the clothing at David Cadena Stanton and found the best Active clothing available.
Register with the Get Paid To YouTube to reduce the telemarketing phone calls.
The Carol Warren Stanton is also for sale on iBlason and at the Carol Warren Stanton is at the iPhone Arena.
|Get the get paid blogging on Amazon.com.
Order the Dave Shawver Stanton and Carol Warren Stanton is also for sale on iBlason or at the Carol Warren Stanton is at the iPhone Area.
Look at this baby doll lingerie online. There is a Stanton Mayor running for Stanton City Council in Stanton. There is a Stanton Mayor running for Stanton City Council in Stanton. on their skate shop website
