Becoming a Millionaire With Adsense

Six months later...

2009-01-04T22:02:00.002-05:00

OK - Firstly, apologies for the delay.

It seems that whilst I tried very hard to do everything by the book, the response from Google after the appeal was "you're still banned". No reasons, no explanations, no money.

So, after much hunting about, I've decided to restart the blog using the adbrite network. Give me a few days to get back up to speed and I'll let you know how things are going.

Finally - Movement!

2008-07-29T09:29:00.002-04:00

Google responded this morning with news that my account is being looked at. So that answers the immediate question of "How deep is the appeals pile".

Will let you know as soon as I hear news.

The Mushmoom Effect

2008-07-22T08:30:00.002-04:00

I have a massive black Labrador, called Dave. Amongst his repertoire of tricks is "Touch my nose", where upon command his nose will make contact with mine if I say that phrase to him. The cause and effect is quite simple to understand - I give the command (the cause) and Dave supplies the effect (touching a nose).

In addition to the dog, I also have a habit of talking in silly English at him. One recent occasion of this was regarding some talk about Mushrooms, where I then went off on a load of waffle about mushrooms, but then corrupted this into "mushmooms" and getting down to Dave's level, I asked him "Do you like mushmooms?", at which point he bonked his nose enthusiastically on my nose.

To my ears, "Touch my nose" and "Do you like mushmooms" sound nothing alike. So, I repeated the question to Dave - "Do you like mushmooms?" and again, I got a bump on the nose. Shortening things to "Mushmooms?" resulted in the same effect. I've no idea why saying the word "mushmooms" around my dog correlates to the command to touch my nose, but for some reason it does.

I can hear you asking "What does this have to do with blogs and adsense?" as you get this far...

Looking at Google Analytics, there are certain posts that seem to bring in a lot more traffic than other posts. Every now and then (about once every week and a bit), something is posted that causes a spike in traffic once Google has indexed it, and then continues to be bring in traffic at a higher rate. This is adding to the visitor count week over week.

One such post was totally unrelated to adsense, but it's helping with the growth of numbers of visitors to the blog. If you check out this calculation regarding teaspoons and unicorns, I come up near the top of the search results quite often. I only put it in one post, but it's bringing in a lot of visitors.

Whilst it's good to keep a blog focused on the topic at hand, I will try another topic like my list of fun items to put into Google, and see if I can pinpoint whether this is like Dave and his "mushmooms" where there is a replicable source of cause and effect.

You should check your pages in Google Analytics and see if there is a similar effect in your content.

What is the blogosphere?

2008-07-21T08:30:00.003-04:00

What is the blogosphere?

The blogosphere is a term that describes the whole world of blogs and blogging. It is in effect the sum of all blogs. If you've read a blog (which you are now), then you have entered the blogosphere.

What does the blogosphere do?

In short, it's the "personal web". Websites are generally marketing products, solutions, things to buy, things to vote for (or against), etc. When you visit a blog, it allows you to get opinions, advice, etc, from people with their own viewpoints and passion.

What can I do with it?

You can do as much or as little with it as you want. However, not getting involved with other bloggers is a bit like being in a school playground and not playing with the other children - you don't learn online social skills, you don't get inspired, and you make no friends to help you when you want to do something.

The blogosphere is something you've already encountered. The more you familiarise yourself with the concept, and the more you get involved, the more you get out of it (more friends = more promotion = more visitors = higher page ranks = more money).

Blogging Frequency

2008-07-20T08:30:00.002-04:00

If you are a reader of a blog, but that blog is only updated once a week, how many times do you go to that blog each week?

This is a fundamental question that many bloggers forget about. You have access to millions of readers, but if there's no reason for people to come to your blog more than once a week, then they won't come every day.

Additionally, if you only post one article a week, then after a year you will only have 52 posts. A blogger that posts 5 days a week will have 260.

In this new world of social media, the winners will be the blogs that are being very sociable.

Avoiding Writer's Block

2008-07-18T08:30:00.003-04:00

The problem with many blogs is people burn through far too many ideas, too fast, by posting too often. The end result of this is the blogger runs dry, the posts stop coming, the visitors stop coming, then the downward spiral towards blogging oblivion starts.

The reason the blogger normally runs out of ideas is due to a fundamental flaw when choosing the subject to blog about. You see, many bloggers have the idea to start a blog, so they pick a subject with about 50 pieces of information already stored in their head, they dump all of this into the computer keyboard as quick as possible, then run out of stuff in their head.

I'm not the first person to say this, and I'm sure I already have, but when you pick a blog subject, it needs to be something you are passionate about. The problem may be that some people don't understand what this means. Being passionate about something means you can think about something over and over and then write about it. It means you enjoy what you write about, and you probably read about it a lot in your normal life, or you experiment or investigate it in your normal course of life.

This is different to blogging about something you like....

I like black holes. Whilst I probably know more about black holes than 99.9% of the general public, this would be the perfect subject for me to pick and then hit writers block with. Whilst I could probably generate 30 or so posts on everything from what is a black hole, to what were the implications of Hawking's Information Paradox, they aren't something I study on a regular basis, they aren't something I know that much about, and I don't have much time to read about them. Hence, I would run out of material pretty quickly and the blog would enter a state of abandonment.

If you do find yourself running dry, try looking at some other blog, or article and then try to put your own spin on it. Comment on news articles about your subject. Read about your subject to make sure you keep up with recent developments.

Your readers will love you for it.

Bouncing Visitors In Google Analytics

2008-07-16T08:30:00.005-04:00

Bounce is normally a good thing in life. Having a bounce in your step, bounce in assets or even bounce sheets in your laundry. We love bounces, right? Bloggers on the other hand, hate bounce.

What is bounce?

Bounce is the name given to the event where a reader lands on your blog and then exits back out the way they came in. So, no new pages were read, no adverts were clicked, and your blog doesn't retain that person.

Reasons for bouncing visitors

Reasons for bouncing visitors range from those who accidentally landed there looking for something else, visitors who read the first few lines and then lost interest, or even those visitors who didn't like the look/feel/style of writing/etc.

Stopping the bounces

The first thing you need to do in order to retain your readers is make sure you attract the right visitors. This means applying the appropriate labels to your post, applying the proper titles to posts, and making sure you remove all ambiguity regarding what your post is about.

Having attracted the appropriate visitors, the second thing you need to do is engage them to keep them. Make sure your blog looks pleasing to the eye, and is not a jarring visual assault of contrasting blobs of "stuff" that people don't even want to spend the time trying to identify. Make sure the text is properly spell-checked.

Make sure the worlds flow easily. Don't write when you are really tired or otherwise pre-occupied. Think about what you want to write, and don't post it immediately - so you give yourself time to come back and read it later.

This way, you will increase the quality of your blog posts, satisfy your readers, increase your recurring readers and reduce your bounce numbers.

Determining Internet Traffic

2008-07-15T08:30:00.003-04:00

You may sometimes wonder where your traffic is coming from a various points of the day?

You can probably get a good idea of where the Internet is busiest using Akamai's traffic graph here.

If you've never heard of Akamai, I won't be surprised. If you haven't surfed a page that wasn't served up by Akamai, I would be surprised as they deliver between 10% and 20% of all daily traffic on the internet. Sites that they serve up include IBM, Apple, Adobe, BBC, Reuters, Hitachi, The Food and Drug Administration, MySpace, Sony, Reebok, MTV.... you get the idea...

This puts them in a rather unique position to look at their servers and work out where all the realtime activity is coming from, which gives you a small porthole to look into the Internet at real time.

Real-time heads up

2008-07-15T00:00:00.002-04:00

In the spirit of optimism, I will continue to release all the pre-written articles at 8:30am.

To differentiate between what is live and what is not live, please look at the timestamp. If it's 8:30am, it's not live. All other times are live.

Cheers,

Jase

Appeal to Google

2008-07-14T12:31:00.002-04:00

So, following on from my last post, here's what's transpired so far.

Rather than lose it with Google, because that will get me nowhere, I have maintained my composure and written the following to Google's appeal panel:

Hi there,

I found my adsense unexpectedly disabled today. I have been with the program for
about 2 years, and during most of that time ran the ads on three sites.
1. (BLANKED)
2. (BLANKED)
3. (BLANKED)

Since June 1st 2008, I added a new blog, which accounts for 90% of the adsense traffic.
This blog is:

4. millionairewithadsense.blogspot.com

It is site #4 that has pushed through the majority of the clicks.

I don't fully understand what happened here, because I don't click on my own ads, have pointed this out in my blog, and even answered questions on answers.yahoo.com to point out to other people that this is fraud. I simply don't do it.

Having said that, the only way I can possibly think that any ad clicks would come up as looking fraudulent is I access my account from 2 locations (Home and work), and both have other people accessing on the same IP ddresses. So, maybe at the point when I announced to everyone that I have a new blog, other people may have clicked. That is the only logical explanation I can offer - because I just don't click my own ads.

Regards,

Jason Coulls

So, as you can see, I've pointed out that if the reason is click-fraud, then that's outside of my control (3 companies in my building share the same ip address), and if it's the rapid rise of clicks in the past 44 days in comparison to the previous 2 years that has me flagged, then this is due to blog #4 coming online (which has had over 2500 page views by itself).

Will be interesting to see what happens!

Banned in AdSense

2008-07-14T11:40:00.002-04:00

Here's a new development that I wasn't expecting: I've got no adverts...

Whilst everyone knows that I extol the virtues of not clicking your own ads, or doing anything fraudulent, it seems that Google has raised a flag on my account and banned me.

Currently, I don't know if it's just the surge of clicks caused by this blog in the past 44 days, or if it's due to something like clicks coming off the same networks (all my networks share one IP address) caused by anyone else. Either way, both of these things are out of my control, and all I can hope for is Google realises that I've been above board

Anyway, I've started the appeal process with Google, and will let you know what happens!

Building a community around your blog

2008-07-14T08:30:00.003-04:00

Some bloggers don't translate impressions into "regular visitors" - especially those not running Google Analytics - and they think that these impressions in their AdSense report are just random people dropping by.

If you think like this, then you are setting yourself up for bad things. People interested in your blog will come back regularly. This means you need to be writing as if you are addressing the same people each day, with new people joining each day at the back of this imaginary audience.

Reference posts that you have done before, remind people of the subjects covered, make new people feel welcome, but don't keep rehashing the same information. People will join in on the comments section of posts as they get to know you, and you get to know them (and they get to know each other as well).

Building a sense of community around the blog is a goal worth aspiring to.

Promoting your blog with controversy

2008-07-13T08:30:00.003-04:00

This is a technique that whilst can work wonders for promoting a blog, but it can backfire spectacularly if not done right.

When you post something controversial, you should not do it for the sake of being controversial, but you should provoke thought, discussion and passion in the readers to want to get involved. This could be where you state what you think on a certain subject, give an example and then leave it as a question for others to think about.

An example of this type of stirring the pot is on another blog of mine to do with my views on living in Toronto (usually aimed at the TTC, the media or City Hall - it's quite boring to those who don't live here), where I questioned what is really smart about the new electricity Smart Meters? Sure enough, it caught the eyes of some people involved who then chipped in, but the point is I didn't blatantly wash over the whole thing with a "this is rubbish" style of statement.

Blogging with controversial entries requires a level of diplomacy to allow yourself to get out of scrapes if you find yourself in one. As someone once said "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' whilst reaching and feeling behind you for the crowbar", which I think is pretty accurate.

What you should never do is insult people, cultures, countries, creeds, etc. Yes, this will get people riled up straight away, but the ramifications could be much bigger, including getting yourself banned from the blog hosting service you use, getting banned from AdSense, etc, as well as opening yourself up to personal danger when people want to get back at you.

Debate things nicely, and accept when you have been wrong and your readers are all pointing this out. I think it was an Indian saying that went along the lines of "If everyone says you look sick, go and lay down" - which is a pretty good rule to run by here. You don't want to look silly.

Finally, don't be scared to ask questions and get your readers involved. But be prepared to explain yourself regarding anything you do write.

Making blogs easier to read

2008-07-11T08:30:00.003-04:00

Many people treat blogs like they do newspapers, and if you look at the broad population of newspaper readers habits, then you'll find far more read tabloids than read broadsheets.

If a blog entry rambles on for 10 screens, people get turned off. Try to get your point across, but don't waffle. If the subject is a very complex one, break it down into several posts and feed it in manageable chunks.

This way, you'll keep readers coming back for more, without them feeling like visiting your blog will take up half an hour.

Growing your blog

2008-07-10T08:30:00.004-04:00

Following on from a previous post about blogs being abandoned in the first few months, I did a little investigating to back up my hunch. I'm back now with a little more information on the topic.

It does seem that nearly all the major blogs have the consensus that a blog should be run for at least six months to gain any traction. Nearly all the well established blogs reckon that after six months you should have several hundred unique visitors a day.

Breaking this down into sizeable goals, you can probably discount the first month whilst you get yourself on your feet, so you have 5 months where you need to garner 40 new visitors per month (1 or 2 a day). Now, that doesn't seem quite too bad, right?

The question then becomes how you get these new people to your blog? In short, you should write your content as you do now, still leave links to your blog in comments elsewhere and in any forum taglines, and finally, you should promote a little here and there.

Add this relaxed method of promotion with "time" and your blog will build credibility with the search engines. This ties back to the conspiracy theories surrounding the Google Sandbox, but if two sites post roughly the same material simultaneously, the site that has been around longer will probably rank higher just because of the time that they have been around is longer. (Believers of the Google Sandbox theory will claim that their blog was deliberately held back, demoted, or otherwise buried lower in the indexes than it should be).

Keep at it. It will get easier with time.

AdSense Report Explained

2008-07-09T08:30:00.009-04:00

Today I am going to cover a few terms that people don't always understand with their AdSense Report.

Impressions

This is the number of times your pages have been served to a browser. It bears no correlation on the number of visitors to your site. One person can visit your site and generate an impression, but then if they hit the refresh button in their browser, this generates another page impression. As you can guess, looking at a number like "30 impressions" doesn't help you distinguish whether this is 1 person looking at your pages 30 times, or 30 people looking at one page each.

Clicks

This is the number of times an advert has been clicked on your pages. Clicks do not necessarily generate money (especially if your site is showing PSA's or Charity adverts).

Page CTR

This is normally just called "CTR" and it stands for Click Through Rate. CTR is a percentage that is calculated by taking the number of impressions, then dividing it by the number of clicks. So, if you have 50 impressions and 5 clicks, then your CTR is 10%. The CTR is a good indicator to use for quick glance information, especially as the numbers of impressions and clicks can vary wildly.

Page eCPM

Some people say eCPM, but most people just call it CPM. It's a term with roots back in the advertising world, and the CPM stands for "Cost Per Mille", which is fancy english for "Cost Per 1000". The "e" part stands for "Effective", so the full term is "Effective Cost Per Mille". What it is, is a calculation of what the revenue is (or would be) per 1000 impressions at the current CTR, taking into account what you've earned so far through your clicks.

Earnings

This is the total sum of the revenue for the day. Different adverts have different payouts attached to each click, so this aggregates the total into one number that accounts for all the clicks on that day. Google never tells you which clicks are earning which amounts.

Traffic Exchanges

2008-07-08T08:30:00.004-04:00

Another idea you might want to try is a traffic exchange such as AdGridWork.com.

It's very easy to setup - taking only about 3 minutes. You simply drop the ad on your blog to advertise other sites, and other sites that do the same will be advertising yours.

It is free, and you get an easy to use interface that shows you how many times your ad has come up and how many times it's been clicked. Definitely worth a try as it costs nothing.

Month Two With AdSense

2008-07-07T06:00:00.002-04:00

So month two (July) has been going for a week. So far, all indications are this is going to be a much better month than June was, despite interruptions in traffic, caused by Canada Day and 4th of July in the USA. Revenue looks to be about 30% higher this week than the average for the whole of June.

In June, things got off to a good start, then I shot myself in the foot by blowing away my keywords, losing my tracking code for Google Analytics, etc. Now that I've finished cursing myself for not taking a backup, things have been on the up again for the past two weeks.

Yesterday (Saturday 5th of July) was a surprising day, in that I got my first weekend revenue. As you may remember, I have stopped posting on a Saturday because weekend blog traffic is slow that day, but even so, I racked up a small 66 cents on 60 visitors.

Weekdays still seem to peak on a wednesday, but studies normally indicate that Monday's are the busiest day of the week on the Internet. I hope that after a few more months, I'll be able to see if there are any spikes around the beginning/end of the months, that indicate more traffic.

Another phenomenon has occured where another two blogs appeared that are trying to do the same thing as me. I won't say names, but there's some sketchy advice going on which if you followed would probably get you banned from AdSense. I will remain diligent in this blog that the AdSense advice will always be safe.

Working around Google Maintenance

2008-07-06T08:30:00.002-04:00

Another reason for people like me not to post anything new on a Saturday is that Saturday is the day that Google does a lot of it's AdSense maintenance.

Obviously, when they are running a worldwide operation, it makes sense they will stick up this multilingual page, instead of the AdSense page you normally see. It also makes sense to do it on a Saturday, because then you cover the Saturday/Sunday period, not the Sunday/Monday period, for the same reasons that I don't post on a Saturday.

It's just easier to look at that day as maintenance day.

Fun things to search for on Google

2008-07-04T13:16:00.006-04:00

This is a light-hearted post just for the fun of it.

I was looking through some old Google Trends information, to find out how many people Google certain types of information. One thing that comes up from time to time is "number of horns on a unicorn" (type that into Google and hit enter), though we should all know the answer, right?

Well, some days, this question apparently grabs the attention of the general public more than Britney Spears latest goof-up or the Iraq war, etc.

So, I thought I'd compile a list of other strange "Easter Eggs" that you can Google for, which the calculator will understand.

Here is the list:

number of horns on a unicorn
pi
once in a blue moon
teaspoons per light year
acre
the answer to life the universe and everything
time in london
10 tablespoons in teaspoons
5 smoots in inches
the speed of light
c
e
baker's dozen
au
m_jupiter
r_jupiter
h
speed of sound
Avogadro's number
e^gamma
great gross

So, if you wanted to know something like the mass of the Sun divided by the number of horns on a bakers dozen of unicorns in teaspoons per light year, you'd do something like this:

http://snipurl.com/2tyyx

Which gives us the answer of "79,709,572.2 m2 kg".

Err, I knew that... really!

Yahoo Index

2008-07-04T08:30:00.003-04:00

Whilst I am primarily only concerned about Google, I thought I'd blog a bit about Yahoo.

Submitting your blog url to Yahoo.com requires you to register with them. I decided that if they wanted my URL only after I've jumped through hoops, then I wasn't going to give it to them. They finally caught up after almost a month and now I'm in Yahoo.com as well as Google.com.

The tricks we've covered so far (quality titles, meta tags, keywords, etc) all work in the same way with Yahoo.com, so you don't have to do anything special to accomodate it. By making sure your link is on other sites, it is just a matter of time before Yahoo catches it and you end up in their Index.

Whilst I've no idea what the Yahoo crawl cycle is yet, it's another freebie that you don't have to do anything special to accomodate.

Reading Blogs at Work

2008-07-03T08:30:00.005-04:00

When many people start a blog, two things happen.

1. People think about creating a blog so that they can vent their wisdom, experiences or spleens to the world.

2. Having set up the blog, they lose interest in the subject or lose touch with who is reading the material they create.

This is where ongoing research comes into play.

If you remember from previous writings, I check my Google Analytics before and after work. Before work, I get to see who in Asia and the Middle East was visiting the site, and then after I finish work I check to see who in Europe and North America is reading. There is a reason I don't wait until the end of the day to see these figures - the visits generally stop by the time I get home. Only about 2% the traffic appears after 6PM EST.

Why? Because people generally read blogs at work, when they should be doing something else. Here's an article from a few years back, where research suggests that US workers alone waste over half a million years annually in reading blogs at work. That number is probably way higher now.

Using this little nugget of information and applying it to working smart, I don't worry or fret about the readers on central time as they finish at 5PM their time which is 6PM here, so I catch them in my figures, so it's only the Pacific timezone readers left, and on a global scale that doesn't amount to much for this particular blog. (Obviously, if I was blogging about Silicon Valley, or something similar, this wouldn't apply).

As many smart people are realising, it's not just North America exclusively that people need to be blogging to: it's the 1.3 billion prospective people in China and the other 1.1 billion in India, who are all getting to grips with western capitalism and grasping how to make money.

Finding out who your readers are, can help you tailor your blog to the masses. Whilst reaching out to everybody is hard with a blog, try to reach out to the greatest number you can.

Blogging Routine

2008-07-02T08:30:00.003-04:00

So, as I have been up and running for a month, I will explain how my daily routine has settled with this:

Scheduled Blogging: This is now done about once a week, with the odd post thrown in for anything that is time sensitive. The system releases a post Sunday to Friday at 8:30 AM (EST), but it basically runs on auto-pilot.
Checking the AdSense numbers: I do this when I first wake up, to see what Asia and the Middle East generated. When I finish work, I check it again to get Europe and North America. So, the total time is about 5 minutes.
Checking for comments and answering them: This is done each morning and evening.
Copying statistics to a spreadsheet: Because things fluctuate quite a bit on a daily basis (especially with the Weekend effect) the only way to get a true sense of where things are is with a rolling 7 day average. Both Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers use the same formula as follows: =Average(startcell:endcell) This formula basically smoothes out the bumps caused by weekends and days when the traffic drops off. Note that whilst Excel can import the Google AdSense CSV files properly, Apple Numbers tends to mess up the delimiting of cells, so everything gets bunched together in column 1.
Answer a question: I go to answers.yahoo.com, pick an adsense/blogger question and leave the link to this blog.
Check Google Analytics: This takes about 5 minutes as I scan for 4 things. The number of unique visitors, the countries they come from and the keywords that Google used to drive the people to the blog. I also check the referrals to see what sites are linking to me and throwing traffic at me - then I go and thank them.

The whole routine takes about 10 minutes a day on average. That equates at current earnings (this is written on the 27th of June) to about a dollar a minute, or $60 an hour.

On days when I write the posts, I generally spend an evening going through all the things on my list of subjects that builds up throughout the week. These then get released between about 4 and 10 days later.

Google Retiring AdSense for Referrals

2008-07-01T17:47:00.001-04:00

Late breaking news:

Google Retires AdSense For Referrals

Start taking them down apparently, it goes in August.

Focusing on strengths

2008-07-01T08:30:00.000-04:00

When you are just starting a blog, it's very easy to get disheartened when things don't go the way you expect them to. This then leads to a sense of failure, and eventually contributes to the cessation of the blogging urges.

Most blogs take at least 6 months to truly get off the ground. When I say "truly get off the ground", this means in several ways:
1. The blog and writer mature, so you find your groove.
2. The blog quality generally gets better.
3. The blogger has a better idea of the direction of the blog.
4. The blog has a fair sized back-catalogue of content behind it.
5. The search engines are all up to speed on what you do, and have had time to adjust to the rate of production of new content.
6. A fan base is built.
7. Revenue is steadier and more predictable.

There's one flaw though - 60% to 80% of blogs are abandoned in the first month.

The fact that they gave up means the blog has automatically failed. It seems that most people initially are full of gusto, then as a week goes by they start to falter, then after two weeks, the posts are becoming a rapidly dwindling stream of writing. By three weeks, the posts are getting infrequent and shorter, and by week 4, the blog is dead.

Compare the effort to someone who is starting a business: If people applied the same (lack of) motivation and energy to bootstrapping a businesses, we'd probably only have about 10 major companies in the whole world, as everyone else would just give up.

What should these people do to keep going? Simple. Create milestones that you've achieved.

Examples could be:

1. The first 10, 50, 100, 200 posts.
2. The first $1, $2, $5, a day in AdSense revenue.
3. The first comment, or the barriers of 5, 10, 20 comments.
4. The first $10, $50, $100 in a month.
5. The first $10, $50, $100 in a week.

By concentrating on the good goals, ignoring the things that irk you and just moving forward with the next post, you are building a sort of "online equity" for want of a better analogy. The more equity you have built up, the more value you can extract from the Internet.

Blog Birthday.

2008-06-30T18:00:00.000-04:00

Today this blog is one month old. Happy birthday to it.

What has the blog accomplished? Well, here are some quick stats:

389 Unique Visitors.
49 Countries
Adsense Revenue is now over $7 per day.

Money spent: Zero.

Time spent: 29hrs 17minutes. (just over 6 hours was spent fixing the silly analytics issue I ran into).

So, as you can see, I've got a good foundation.

The next month is going to be spent on promotion ideas to try and speed up the traffic numbers. Should be interesting! :-)

Pulling power of faces and news

2008-06-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

Here's one of those tricks that comes from thinking outside the box.

When you blog about a person or company, check with somewhere like wikipedia to see if there is a copyright free image of that person. If there is, grab it and use it in your blog.

Why? People like looking for people. They like photos of people. Google will give them people, if that's what they search for.

For instance, here's three links of normal Microsoft images, the faces of Microsoft and images used in news about Microsoft.

As people get more savvy at finding ways to extract exactly what they want from Google, you want to make sure you have something that falls into whatever it is you blog about.

Just because you blog about something, it doesn't mean you can't leave hooks to your blog from Google Images.

Decoupling your earning time from your earnings

2008-06-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Here's a little something to think about:

For most people, you do something and you get paid. It could be that you made something and get paid once for selling that item, or it could be that you worked for a set period of time, and you get paid for that time you worked.

This has two drawbacks: First, you can only get paid for making something once. Secondly, if you are being paid for the time you work, then you have no income at all other times of the day.

Now look at your blog entries. Let's imagine a blog entry takes 10 minutes to write. Let's also imagine that you normally earn $20 per hour in your normal job. If you had been paid for your time writing that entry, then it would have equated to $3.33 in wages.

The key to making that 10 minutes pay the $3.33 is to make sure you write something that will show up often in search results, and generate traffic and clicks. Hopefully, you can create content that will pay you back many more times the $3.33 equivalent it cost to write it.

Thinking like this will help you decouple your earnings from your time, so that you are not relying on only getting paid for the time you are at work - you are being paid for information, concepts, ideas, and experience.

Increasing AdSense Clicks

2008-06-27T08:30:00.004-04:00

AdSense colour is pretty important. More important than you may think.

Question: When you think of a link to click on, what colour do you think the link should be?

BLUE

When an impatient reader lands on your page and doesn't like what they are looking at, you don't want them hitting the back button to whence they came - so give them something blue to click (change your adsense colours).

At least this way you are letting them go with some money in your kitty, or to a different page on your blog.

On a lot of ads, you will find lines 1 & 3 of AdSense ads are clickable, and the middle portion isn't. So, make lines 1 & 3 Blue, and the middle line contrast your web page background, so that people can read it fine.

There are many schools of thought about whether an advert should blend or contrast, and it really does come down to personal preference, but make sure the clickable bits are BLUE.

Now answer truthfully if you tried to click the blue words in this page? It works!

Avoiding SEO Problems

2008-06-26T08:30:00.002-04:00

As many of you will know, I recently changed the look and feel of this blog. The way I did it was select a new template that suited the blog (and my mood) a little better, then hit save. I spent a few hours tweaking and getting it just how I wanted it.

The next morning, I woke up, checked my Asian/European surfer stats in Google Analytics and had no visitors! When I checked my AdSense account, I had hits and revenue.

I knew instantly what had happened.

When you change templates, back up the old one (using the "Download Template" button in the "Edit HTML" section of the "Layout" tab) as you never know when you might need it.

What had happened is as follows: I changed template, that knocked out all the custom HTML. However, Blogger.com does tell you that the page elements (where the title, adverts, post, etc, go) will not be lost. This is true. However, your meta tags for content and description, plus your Analytics script, all get blown away.

Guess who didn't back up? Me. I felt like poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick so I wouldn't make that mistake again. Luckily, Google didn't crawl my blog the previous night, so I quickly fixed it, but I might not have been so lucky, and could have ended up for 4 or 5 days with the wrong meta data in the Google Index.

Google Heat Map

2008-06-25T07:12:00.003-04:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I recently changed the colour scheme, as well as placement of ads. You may be wondering why I did this? It's all to do with the Google Heat Map for AdSense clicks.

In short, people are more prone to clicking in certain areas more than others, so I wasn't really helping myself much by having all my adverts in the wrong places. By observing what Google is trying to tell me, I should improve the revenue on this blog.

Blogging when tired

2008-06-24T08:30:00.000-04:00

This is a mistake that many people make. You may have a job that takes up a lot of your time and then you come home late and decide to rattle off an entry or two.

In short, don't do it.

Two major things happen when you blog when tired.

1. You make spelling and grammar mistakes.

2. Your train of thought (or lack of it) is transferred into your writing.

As a result, you will put off an awful lot of your readers and lose traffic.

The importance of quality titles in your blog posts

2008-06-23T08:30:00.002-04:00

When you blog and the entries are picked up by the search engine, the title is a very large factor in how high up the Google rankings your page will show.

In short, you should try to keep the title not too long that it will not show in the titlebar at the top of the browser, but also not so short that it doesn't convey what your blog post is about. Try to use the same keywords that you wish to be found by (or phrase that you think people will search for) and use the same words at least once in the page content itself.

This will give your page a fighting chance amongst the billions of other pages out there.

Dealing with weekend blog traffic

2008-06-22T06:44:00.002-04:00

After much thought about the problem with some types of blogs (including this one) not generating much traffic on weekends, I came to a conclusion:

As you will remember, I'm a big proponent of working smart, so, if hardly anybody is reading on a Saturday, but Sunday picks up because of the readers across the International Date Line who are now in their Monday's, it's easier to not schedule anything to be posted on the Saturday.

The net result of this is that over a month, I save 4 or 5 days worth of postings, and give myself a much greater lead on scheduled posts - meaning I can think longer about what I will blog about next. This saves a lot of time and effort, and doesn't affect the outcome of the revenue.

Google Sandbox

2008-06-20T08:30:00.003-04:00

The Google Sandbox effect is rather like this past Wednesday night's Solstice Moon Illusion: Some people swear it is real, other people percieve the effect and put it down to one theoretical proposition, and others swear these people are wrong and propose a totally different reason.

The truth is it's near impossible to tell if it is real or not.

Here's some of the arguments for the existence of the sandbox effect:

1. Some new site owners claim their brand new site should immediately be ranking very high up in Google, and for some reason it's not.

2. Some new site owners claim that their sites only show up with a high page rank for keywords that are not competitive.

3. Some owners say that they rank high in other search engines before they do in Google.

4. Some owners say that this only started happening after the Florida Update and the Austin Update.

Whilst this is somewhat a controversial topic, I'll throw in my 2 cents worth:

1. Sites may take some time to be crawled. Even when they are crawled, it can still take up to 2 weeks to be fully indexed and cross-indexed with the statistics that you see in www.google.com/webmasters. (This blog was crawled on day 4, put in the index on day 6 or 7, and didn't show crawler stats until about day 13). Additionally, new sites are often lacking the keywords, descriptions, and a common theme of content that Google can distinguish. There's also a lack of links coming both in and out (incoming count as votes for your site, outgoing are votes for other's sites but the subject of the sites still causes a bias on your final page rank score). So, for this point - I'd say keep working on content and focus on your subject.

2. This follows along the line of point 1, but if there are 1000 sites out there talking about the same widget as you, then the chances are you have a little work to do. Half those sites are probably linked to each other, and you probably need to link to them and have them do the same to you, because again, you need votes for the page rank system. Additionally, keywords and lots of content help as well.

3. For the owners who say that their sites show up quickly in other search engines before they do for Google: Let's look at some history for a second. First, read this NY Times news article on Google's Index size from 2005. Now, if the NCSA reckons that things are a bit dodgy in other search engine claims compared to Google, then I'd tend to believe them. Google's indexes have to be monstrous in comparison to MSN or Yahoo! Just looking at the 2006 results shows the word "the" comes up 2.5billion times on MSN, 6.8billion times on Yahoo! and 24.8billion times on Google - and that was 2 years ago! So, taking the sizes into account, we can then add in that Google runs the AdSense and Analytics systems, which ties into the lovely wads of data that we site owners love (and which MSN and Yahoo! do not provide) such as cross referencing all your pages against every other page that they have indexed (and vice-versa) so that they can give you this information for free, plus the gazillion other services such as video, trends, applications, mapping, talking and whatever else, which is also being indexed - and factor in that Google does sometimes have the digital equivalent of constipation with all this stuff flying around, and I'd think it's almost a given that if you submit to all three search engines, then statistically it will take longer for you to show up in Google. [Steps off his soap-box]

4. When it started to be noticed could be anyone's guess. I personally think the masses got a bit paranoid about it after the Florida update caused what were considered in many cases, perfectly good sites to come crashing down in the page ranks.

It's almost like a modern day version of a witch hunt, where perfectly sane and rational people find that their site is not where they "think" it should be, so their only acceptable explanation must be that Google is holding it back.

Whilst it might be holding back some sites, I'm having a hard time believing it. If I can create a site and get to the top of Google in 6 days, then the evidence tells me that it's not across the board, plus I had some clue as to what I was doing whereas some others don't (which is why I'm sharing that info on this blog), so it could just be that they're not doing it as well as the established sites. As of today, I have 13 keyword searches that put me in the top 10 results.

The true test would be to launch a number of identical sites, and then see if a certain percentage get held back, or if they all get held back (or not as they case may be). My guess is they would all go through within a few days.

Managing your blog time

2008-06-19T08:30:00.002-04:00

Getting a blog going takes up your time for a number of tasks, such as time to think of ideas, time to type those ideas up, time to promote your blog and time to look at figures like visitor numbers and AdSense revenues. A danger for many people is how much time they spend doing the latter two activities.

A blog generally only needs to be checked once a day to see what the closing figures were as of midnight last night, but we all spend too much time checking our figures each hour, or more often.

Checking to answer the question “Did I get that extra 10 cents yet, to push me into the next full dollar?” becomes a bit of an obsession. Whilst it’s fun when there are new numbers there, the chances are you’re going to be disappointed more times than not.

Ask your self truthfully how many times a day you check it? 5 times a day? 10 times a day? The chances are, you check your AdSense, then you check your figures whilst you are in the system. Let’s work with the model of 10 times a day, for a moment.

10 times a day multiplied by 5 minutes per check = 50 minutes per day.
50 minutes per day multiplied by 30 days in a month = 1,500 minutes, or 25 hours.

You are probably spending 25 hours per month checking something that should be done maybe once or twice a day. It’s something to seriously think about. What would you do if you got back a 25 hour chunk of your month back? How about using that time to write more, or think more?

Google AdSense Milestone

2008-06-18T18:43:00.005-04:00

So today (Day 18) I broke my second milestone: clearing an annual average of $2,000 in revenue.

To hit this milestone, I needed $5.48 in adsense revenue, but I actually have cleared $6.26 as of the moment I am writing this (if that happened every day, I'd make $2,284.90). Whilst this is a nice figure to have, it's above my normal rate of increase. Currently, my revenue climbs by about 10% a day, so given yesterday was $4.72, I should have cleared about $5.19 today, and then add 10% of that tomorrow, I would be looking at $5.70.

This is where I find the 7 day rolling average figures help out. Whilst I have a big peak today, in the grander scheme of things, I should EXPECT it to drop tomorrow, back to normal levels.

But what if it doesn't?

Yesterday, I did some serious tweaking, as you've probably noticed. What was on the right is now on the left, what was an AdSense referral is now AdSense for content, and I've added a new AdSense referral box on the left hand side under the navigation menu. This is all to do with Heat Maps, which I will cover next week.

You just cannot tell after only one day whether this made the huge difference, but I will report back if this increase holds steady. As I mentioned already, I'm not expecting to though.

Here's an updated copy of my 7 day rolling average.

As you can see, over the length of the chart, the revenue growth is pretty steady, and this is with me doing less and less work... Anything that appears on this blog at 8:30AM EST is from effort that has already been put in place - and right now I'm about 8 days ahead on the schedules (Remember, work smart - don't work hard), so a lot of what you are reading now was written last week.

Whilst I was tweaking the layout a little, I am now spending most time analysing traffic trends (I've not written about that too much yet), so as new scheduled posts come out, people are reading them, but, I still have "New Blog Syndrome" as far as Google is aware, because there are simply not enough pages of content in the Google index (currently, the index was done on the 14th, so the last 6 or so posts are all missing). That's like 12% of this blog is missing.

This should correct itself within the next day or two (hopefully!).

Google Trends

2008-06-18T08:30:00.003-04:00

When people are blogging, there is often a question in the back of writers heads, where they are asking themselves if the readers are going to find this content interesting?

Depending on your location, niche of blog, etc, you may find it hard to work out if there is any crossover between what people are searching for on Google, vs what the writer is writing about. Most people have seen the end of year lists of "top searches", and people often think that this is only compiled once a year. Well, they do only compile once a year, right?

Wrong.

You can look up what is popular here: Google Trends

Google Trends is connected to something called Google Zeitgeist, where you can look up information for all sorts of things (including the end of year lists). If you use Google Trends before you start blogging, you can make sure you get in the big thing of the day, like "what colour Angelina Jolie's handkerchief is" or whatever it is that happens to be on the mind of the searching masses.

Adsense Earnings

2008-06-17T17:18:00.006-04:00

So, I just thought I'd give a quick update as to my progress.

I've been going just over 2 weeks now (day 17) and so there's enough history built up to warrant showing my 7 day rolling average chart for revenue.

As you can see around day 7, I was just clearing a dollar on average, but by day 14, I was getting close to $2. On weekends, the revenue stops, and you can see this reflected in the downward turns for days 14 and 15, but when Monday rolls around, things pick up again.

In reality, I'm currently pushing $5 a day during Monday and Tuesday this week, so this will show up in future days on the chart, later this week. Whilst that doesn't sound a lot, it's over $1800 per year. By Friday, I hope to be around $7 day.

As part of my research, I've found a lot of sites and articles that say you need to really work hard for a long time, but here's what's working for me right now: All the articles coming up this week (except this one) are banked from last week and are being released according to Blogger.com's scheduler, so I've done no work this week. The money, however, is going up about 10% per day as new articles roll out and Google indexes them every 3 or 4 days.

I'm also not pushing as hard now on promotion - I'm letting Google.com take the strain. The end result of this is, as I stop promoting so hard, the numbers of visitors are going down, but because these visitors are looking for the information I have here, the quality of targetted visitor is going up, and so are clicks and my CTR (not discussed due to AdSense TOS) as a result.

There was one last set of changes I made.

1. At the top of the page, I went back to the link instead of the referrals, as it wasn't earning as much.

2. I needed to move everything navigation related to the left hand side of the screen, to get the adsense on the left when viewing individual articles.

3. I changed colour schemes, to make it brighter and more "airey".

Link Life-spans

2008-06-17T08:30:00.003-04:00

In my post last Friday, I left off talking about the life-span of links to drive traffic to your blog. When you post a link to your blog somewhere, people will later find it and arrive at your blog. This is a very organic approach that is quick to perform and can sometimes yield very big rewards.

The problem is that some links drive traffic for about 1 hour, and others last weeks, months or even years. Here's an example of a link that will give you almost immediate results:

http://answers.yahoo.com - Pick your area of expertise, answer a question, then watch as a bunch of people roll in to your blog over the next few hours.

The problem? Check your stats the next day and you will notice that hardly anyone has followed the same link. The reason for this is the site content has churned so fast, that nobody sees the question any longer. The easy solution is find another question and answer that one. You can repeat this exercise ad-infinitum, but the chances are that eventually you will think to yourself that there has to be a better way.

Luckily there is a better way. Blog posts are by their very nature, very good at coming up in search engines, and leaving comments on another blog entry are very sticky in comparison. When I was bootstrapping this blog nearly two weeks ago, I found that the posting of answers on yahoo! was very good at generating quick traffic, and the syndication that goes along with it (to regional yahoo sites) would give me a fair bit of exposure, but the lasting referrals are still coming in from other blogs.

The trick is to find a high traffic blog, and be in the first three or so comments on that page, so that people will see your link forever more.

Google Secrets

2008-06-16T08:29:00.000-04:00

Something that I see come up over and over is some form of webpage sale where if you pay X amount of dollars, you'll get something in the way of a "Secret Formula" for getting to the top of Google, or making insane amounts of money with Google.

Some of these are promoted like a late night TV infomercial, whilst other's are using some mystic east-asian method that only works in places like Maylasia, for instance. Some you subscribe to for a year, others you pay for a eBook, and some of the more fancy ones you have to pay to attend a seminar.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - there is no secret. In fact, nearly every reputable website you read for free will say this. It just takes quality content and a little bit of SEO work.

And there's the rub: Because nearly anyone with half decent typing skills can write content, it's the "SEO" part that is often touted as the panacea that everyone needs. For just 5 easy installments of $19.99, I too can help you reach the top of Google!

Only joking... But you get my point.

In an idea world, you write good content, alert Google by submitting your URL to them, and then they crawl your site, index it, and serve it up to people looking for what you have. As long as your content is relevant, then Google will place you very high up the rankings.

In the real world, you write good content, alert Google by submitting your URL to them, then some other person works out how to get their page ahead of yours, even though the content is not quite as relevant.

In the ongoing battle to bring the relevant search results to the top of the Google search results, Google tweaks their algorithms on a regular basis. Sometimes, it's biased towards some sites, and other times it's biased towards other sites. The reasons why certain algorithms work for your site and not others is of frequent and heated debate. But, despite the openness of Google in many ways, they never tell anyone what the current algorithm does, because if the public knows how something works, then the public will find ways to fool it.

This is the real "Google Secret"... and thankfully, it means that as a blog owner, you can rest assured that Google are doing everything they can to bring the best results to the masses, which means your relevant content will get served up where possible. Having said that, you can give yourself a boost by putting in meta-tags containing keywords and descriptions in your blog.

If you can't beat them - join them!

How long is a week?

2008-06-15T09:45:00.002-04:00

Whilst Oprah Winfrey has her "Aha!" moments when she realises something important, I have Homer Simpson like "Doh!" moments when I realise that something really obvious was staring me in the face and yet it took someone else to point it out too me...

The problem at hand was how to deal with the miserable results this blog had during the weekend. My partner asked me tonight as to why I don't just treat the weekend as a one day event and target my Toronto Sunday as an Asian Monday.

Just to explain: Back in March, I went from Toronto to Japan. This involved 4 hours flying from Toronto to Vancouver, 1 hour changing planes in Vancouver and 11.5 hours from Vancouver to Osaka. I took off at 10am in Toronto on one day and landed in Osaka at 4pm the next day.

Coming home, I got up at 7am in the morning in Kyoto, took off from Osaka at 5pm, landed 9 hours (or so) later in Vancouver at 10am of the morning of the same day which I've already taken off at 5PM from. My whole day turned into something like 39 hours, spanning from 7am in Kyoto to nearly midnight in Vancouver...

I've already noticed a large portion of my traffic comes in during the really early hours of the morning, and again around the 3pm-5pm slot from Asia. I'd forgotten that when I write content, it may be read the next day in my own timezone, but as I go to bed in Toronto, other people are hitting their lunch hours, and whilst I'm at work at 3pm, people in India are just doing some late night surfing like we do when it's late.

The net result is on Friday's here, it's Saturday across the dateline, then come Saturday here - it's Sunday over there. The Saturday and Sunday part you can't help, but come Sunday, it's already Monday in a large portion of the world.

Over the next few days, I will try to figure out how to take advantage of this.

Pinging your blog

2008-06-14T07:45:00.003-04:00

When you update your content, you will want to ping various places to let everyone know that your content has changed.

I use this site now: PingMyBlog.com

It takes about 5-10 minutes to run, but it hits pretty much every other major RSS feed or outlet that will drive traffic to your blog.

Blogging for money

2008-06-13T18:30:00.001-04:00

As many people know, I don’t normally do anything unless there’s either money or some other reward involved. Thus, when approaching how to get a million dollars from a single blog, I need to think of this like a business.

A guy I worked with about 10 years ago used to say that a business is like an animal in that if you look after it and feed it now, it will look after you and feed you later. Whilst this blog may be the battery chicken equivalent, I am treating it in a somewhat organic fashion. I feed it regularly, what it’s vital stats to see what’s working and what’s not, try to make it as fat as possible,

The big rule with money is as long as more is coming in than going out, then you’re doing good. Problems start when the previous statement no longer holds true.

The same applies to this blog. If I want to make money on this blog, then I need to not spend as much, and not spend more, than it generates. Which is where I am right now, and where I intend to keep it.

As day 13 progresses, I’m clearing $3.75 today, as figures are dropping off to the level that they were at the beginning of the week. That is probably the weekend effect. In the same way that animals inhale and exhale, so does the traffic influx and revenue.

Whilst I have my plan for numbers of visitors (as shown yesterday), it’s getting to the edge of the spectrum with what I can realistically achieve with these numbers - though it helped focus me to bootstrap this blog at lightning speed, I do understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What now?

Well, in the same way you have to adjust plans in anything else, I now have to re-evaluate where I am at the two week mark. If I can’t build Rome in a day, then how about two days or three days?

What I am finding is that my revenue is still holding true that it’s doubling every 5 days. From the first bit revenue two weeks back, there has been a steady increase on almost each successive 7 day rolling forecast of visitors and revenue, but I have to allow for some change in propulsion methods.

My task is now to take this growing animal out of the cart that I’ve been pulling it around in, and put it in front of the cart. As long as I still feed it, it should still grow. Moving away from metaphors for a second, this translates into the following specific:

There’s enough pages built up in Google’s indexes after two weeks of prolific updates on various portions of AdSense and promotion, that the traffic from Google is doing two things:

1. It’s increasing traffic by virtue of more pages meeting more searches.
2. It’s exposing me to more people that are actually looking for what I have on here, meaning my AdSense revenue is increasing, even if the immediate visitor numbers drop a bit.

This means I don’t have to do so much grass-roots promotion now, and can concentrate on other forms of growth after just 13 days. People are looking for what’s here, Google will find them and bring them in.

This brings me to the subject for my next post - going from fresh links that expire in a day or two, to links that last for months or years.

Doing things haphazardly

2008-06-12T18:23:00.003-04:00

Whilst I have a goal to earn a million dollars from this blog and a plan telling me the numbers I need to hit day after day, the plan doesn’t cover the methods, which are what I'm trying to figure out as I go along.

Normally, I am quite good at looking at the cause and effect of various things that I test to generate traffic, but yesterday I made a bit of a large mistake: I did about 10 different things in the 24 hours preceding last night’s spike in traffic, and have no idea about which nine ideas I should not try again and which one trick (if any) worked best.

I guess that I wasn’t off base when I stated that “if patience is a virtue” then I am more sinner than saint. My downfall was by being too hasty, I doubled last nights traffic and have no idea how I achieved it, so now I have to do each item again, and after each test, look at measuring the income and traffic numbers.

The odd thing is today’s traffic has been marginally higher than this time yesterday, but not by much, though my revenue has gone up roughly in line with where I expected it to be.

If you remember, I started this blog on June 1st. That makes today the 12th day. Whilst the revenue didn’t trickle for the first few days, it did start eventually. When it started coming in, it fluctuated quite a bit, and still continues to do so. This is where the rolling 7 day averages comes in.

By averaging out the days where I have lots of money and the days that have little or none, I can see whether the blog is going in the right direction.

This is the result.

Basically, the average revenue has doubled in 5 days (some days I hit $4, other days zero). If this was to keep up, then in 50 or so days from now, this blog will have reached a point where it’s pulling in an average of a million dollars per year.

Day Daily Rev Annual Rev
12 $1.90 $693.50
17 $3.80 $1,387.00
22 $7.60 $2,774.00
27 $15.20 $5,548.00
32 $30.40 $11,096.00
37 $60.80 $22,192.00
42 $121.60 $44,384.00
47 $243.20 $88,768.00
52 $486.40 $177,536.00
57 $972.80 $355,072.00
62 $1,945.60 $710,144.00
67 $3,891.20 $1,420,288.00

This is a highly unlikely scenario. But, in the spirit of keeping up the pressure, I’ll show you my daily traffic plan up to today, plus my actual traffic thus far (remember, day 12 is not over yet, and it normally gets busy later at night).

As you can see, I start off according to my planned blue line, then I hit on answers.yahoo.com, which forces my traffic through the roof almost immediately, along with traffic from a few other sites, including www.getmoneyenergy.com.

Over the next few days, I try other things, and as my “seeds” go a bit stale on the web, the traffic dies down a little. On day 7 is approximately where Google finally catches up and I get a small boost from it. Meanwhile, I kept looking at this graph, scratching my head over what would happen if my green line falls below the blue line.

On day 9, it did precisely that.

Looking at the graph and thinking “It’s all gone a bit wrong” to myself, I had to get a little creative again. Posting on the forums for www.StevePavlina.com helped, as did another crawl from Google, but I was sure that the next day my line would dip again behind the blue line.

So, I did want most normal people do: I panicked.

This is where I then made my mistake. I posted on blogs, pinged every known RSS aggregator I could think of, answered questions on yahoo, posted comments on other blog forums and blogs, blasted my url around facebook, wrote a really long posting, joined and posted on Groups.Google.com, and did everything except stand outside my house with a sign for drivers going by to look at.

By 9pm, I had doubled my traffic in 90 minutes.

I was clearly above my blue line target for that day. Today, I have my second best revenue figure so far, so something clearly worked.... but what exactly? Whilst Google Analytics is good for general analysis, it’s not giving up the answer on this one. All it tells me is the Blogger Nav-bar was the source. Does that mean it was syndication? Was Blogger.com putting my blog on the nav bar?

I now have to replicate each step, so if I find out what trick did it, I will surely post it here.

High Blog Traffic

2008-06-12T10:11:00.004-04:00

I haven't quite worked out what happened here, but last night I doubled my daily traffic in the space of about 90 minutes. Went from 46 visitors to 114...

The interesting thing is this increase in traffic did nothing for the adsense revenues, and it all came from Blogger.com's "nav.g" link.

Has anyone seen that before?

Why?

2008-06-12T07:48:00.000-04:00

A question that has come up in a number of emails is “Why am I doing this?” I guess the easiest way to start with WHY is to start with a little bit about who I am. I live a bit of an extraordinary life in comparison to many people, and I tend to keep it on the extraordinary end of the spectrum through the things that I do.

I was born in Chatham, Kent, England, in what is widely considered to have once been the poorhouse that inspired the local novelist Charles Dickens to write “Oliver Twist”, though by the time I was born, it was a maternity birthing unit - which has since been razed to the ground to build houses on. Chatham is a place with connotations that lead to it being concieved as a bad place.

I grew up in Faversham, Kent, England. This is a smallish town, but very pretty to look at and very historical. I went to the first English school to ever have a coded IRA bomb threat and after 6 years there, I left in a bit of a state of disillusionment. I made peace with my old headmaster about 13 years later. The younger generations, if they are smart, try to head towards London.

Wanting to originally become an architect, I fell into Safeway supermarkets and started down the road of becoming a butcher. When I got my first taste of job insecurity, I promptly moved to the IT department. When the management reneged on their promises that I wouldn’t ever sit on a checkout, I stormed out.

I went into computer support, then discovered two things: 1. The Windows API, and 2, The Internet. After doing a little community support to help people around the world, I was hired into Canada. This was probably the single biggest influence on my life for two reasons:

I had a clean slate where people would just me based on what I could do.

I had time to reflect and do my own thing without people telling me I should be doing something else because either they are older, more superior, richer, etc.

Whilst I like Toronto as a place, it drives me crazy as an administrative centre, taxation centre, etc. Being the type of person to voice my gripes instead of sit on them in silence, I am sure there is a file at the Mayor’s office with my name on it and all my complaints, suggestions, etc. I’ve complained about everything from the garbage collection mechanism for residents, to City TV auctioning off rocket launchers to the public for charitable purposes when they do at least 300 hours a year of TV about victims of gun crime.

With this new found freedom in Toronto came something I hadn’t expected - quite how much time I had. I set about a few projects that would answer some burning questions that I had about my existence - so now I know that I share the same common ancestral mother as about 40% of Europe (Mitochondrial Haplogroup H), and my father’s side of the family is distinctly early northwestern European (Y-DNA Haplogroup i1b2c) that was part of the second wave out of Africa.

Having worked out that, and traced about 2,200 ancestors including all my local relatives using paper and church records, I turned to music.

I was hellbent on proving a point that half the music we hear now is really another song that you probably already know. I won’t say who I was as a stage name, but I got played on radio stations around the world, and still show up in strip clubs and other places that liked my offbeat style.

Next up was my programming. I hold a number of world firsts, that not many people would even want to hold. To my knowledge, I am the first person to (amongst others):

1. Write 80x86 ASM code in Crystal Reports (Translation: Imagine putting machine code in your Excel formulas).

2. I was the first person to multi-thread an SPL application.

3. I was the first person to hook Crystal Reports to Winamp, so you could play MP3s whilst it crunched the data and adjust the style of music according to the predicted outcome of the figures.

4. I worked (as part of a team) on the the first Palm OS application for mobile banking and mobile stock trading.

5. I was the first person to hook live weather data from Environment Canada into IESO electricity grid figures to predict blackouts (on the website www.businessthreat.com - which is now defunct, but still exists in Googles caches)

Most of these items were done just because I wanted to do them, to prove to myself that I could - and if there’s money to be made, then that makes it a little more worthwhile (depending on the effort involved).

Moving on a few years, I now don’t have much time in comparison to before. Which is where working smart, not working hard, comes in.

Moving back to my real job, I spend a lot of time in mobile software or backend systems. My code runs in 40% of UK hospitals, 100% of UK ports, processes about 30% of USA perishable food imports, quotes insurance to 50% of Canadian car drivers, shifts about $2million dollars of investments per day in Toronto, makes sure $750 million dollars worth of USA teaching budgets is spent properly, as well as counting duckling mortality rates on farms, tracking habits of supermax prisoners, quoting on chocolate shipments, printing cheques for airplane purchases and entertaining people with LCD screens on buses and in pubs/restaurants.

In short, I am a real mixed bag of explosive ideas waiting for a reason to shine.

So taking into account where I’ve been and what I am attempting now, it’s probably obvious that I’m not afraid of going to where I’ve not been before, but it’s also obvious that I haven’t attempted it before, and if I can make money doing it, then all the better.

I have done various components over the years, made money in many ways, but this was an idea that came up after reading about an old music group called the KLF where they did a brazen, but timely, manual on how to become number one, and did the very same thing as the book (though the book had a few digs at the music industry which they only later carried out - See them at the Brit awards for their example of how to waste half a nations time for 3 minutes because people were getting complacent and needed a “bear bomb”).

Here’s another world first happening right before your eyes: Mentioning The KLF and Steve Pavlina in the same sentence. After the seed was planted by the KLF’s tongue in cheek book, came a moment of reading and searching and then I came across www.stevepavlina.com, for the millionth time (Hence the bear bomb reference in the previous paragraph). I don’t religiously read everything he has to say, but I like the fact that he attempts to face many things and write about them, and Google has a habit of throwing me back to his site every now and then, so I read the articles that apply to my situation at that time in my life.

One of the articles that Steve Pavlina wrote about was how to make your blog earn money. Paraphrasing, it was pretty much a case of “decide whether to do it or not, then either go big or go home”.

This set me into the mode where if I am going to challenge myself to make a million using AdSense, then it needs to be aggressively done, and done in a fast way.

I don’t want to spend the next 5 years building this. Build it according to a plan (which I’m readjusting to account for traffic on weekends), build it fast, get the money and prove it to myself and others that it can be done, and how I did it.

In other words: EXECUTE

My figures, whilst varying wildly on a day to day basis, are always ahead of my plan, except for one day where I faltered because I forgot that not everyone is like me. This was a weekend, and as pointed out by www.getmoneyenergy.com, I am learning as I go along, so I should become something of an expert as I travel through my journey. Weekends threw me a curveball.

The direction this blog takes is anyone’s guess. I didn’t plan on it being a Google SEO blog, or a “How to promote your blog”, or even a “How to blog” manual, but it’s becoming all of the above, as well as many other things.

My passion for all things in life is where I find the inspiration for what to blog about next, and there are plenty of things to blog about! I find it sad when I look at people blogging one minute and giving up the next minute.

If I stop this blog, it will be for one of two reasons:

1. The effort is not worth the reward (not working smartly).

2. I’ve achieved my goal and I’m ready to tackle the next challenge.

For anyone wondering what feedback I’m getting? It’s all positive (maybe with a little constructive criticism). It’s like everyone I know (and many I don’t know) want me to succeed. Whether that is because they like me or they want to see how I did it is neither here nor there. But it helps me to push myself further.

I am enjoying this challenge and it certainly beats watching TV or doing other non-productive things. As of day 12 (when I am writing this, as this article could be banked for later) I am earning money every day, and the money is going up.

TIP:

Here’s something I learned... Do what you can every day, but look at your figures in something like “Excel” or “Numbers”, or whatever you have, and do a rolling 7 day average on your blog figures and AdSense revenue.

When all the “Peaks and Troughs” are removed, you are left with a clearer picture that indicates whether you are doing better (it’s going up slowly) or worse than previously (it’s going down slowly). A rolling 7-day average helps you remove the minutia and concentrate on the bigger picture, which is “Am I doing better, or worse?” rather than the mindset where you think “Oh, yesterday’s figures are going to mess up the whole plan” going forward, or at least mess up the weekly figures (like how did the last 6 weeks go in comparison?).

When you bog yourself down in details (like “I did fine for 3 days and then had a catastrophe and it’s going to kill my goal”), you miss the overall progress (for example “yes, it bombed for one day, but you’re still doing better than last week by the end of the week”). I think there is a book called “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and although I’ve not read the book, or really have any clue what it’s about, the title comes to mind because of this tip.

I guess www.getmoneyenergy.com was right when it was said that I’d be learning as I go and end up an expert at the end by default. I’m only 12 days in and already my attitude is different this week from last week. I’m earning money that is going up as I go along. In short, I’m heading towards my goal.

Hopefully, the above has given you some insight as to why I’m doing this. To recap:

1. I came from two places that I really DO love dearly, though I wouldn’t want to be there now.

2. I haven’t attempted something extraordinary in a while (I have my failures, but at least I win on the things I do try), so I’m doing what comes naturally, which is buck the trend.

3. If I don’t know whether I can do something, I try. If I can’t do it, then I know I didn’t do it the first time around. There are many things that have taken two or nine attempts. It’s dedication and focus, paired with knowing when you’re wasting your time.

4. The results of this are paying about 170% more than I make per hour at work, so I’m doing something that is worthwhile right now. Knowing when to call it a day is important (See www.BusinessThreat.com, which was cool from a tech standpoint, but a real pain in the bum from a time/effort standpoint).

5. I have had much success SHARING what I know. Even if the money doesn’t flow immediately, the rewards come round eventually.

The Google Dance - Part 2

2008-06-11T16:36:00.004-04:00

OK - Google is on the move (finally!), so I can show you what I was talking about previously...

In this example of the Google Dance, you can see the new indexes showing up on www2.google.com.

In this test, I stay at #12, but that's not to say that this is the index that will roll out for the next few days, but at least I know there are no adverse effects to counter!

When the new search indexes are tested and approved, everything will be the same across the board again.

The Google Dance

2008-06-11T13:05:00.003-04:00

As I type this, I have nearly a quarter of my content unindexed by Google. They last came to my blog to gather my pages on June 8th. Today is June 11th. If patience is a virtue, then I'm closer to "sinner" than I am to "saint".

I've checked the webmaster page (www.google.com/webmasters/) to see if there has been any change there, and there's not. Mind you, last time they crawled my blog, they updated the figure a day after the actual crawl showed up in Google Analytics as a single visit from the Google network domain.

So what happens between crawl-index-publish on the Google side? They do a little dance...

If you look at the Google Dance Tool, you can see when the test servers (www2.google.com and www3.google.com) are using the new indexes as they mismatch with www.google.com. In times such as when the infamous Florida update was implemented, the Google Dance can give away a lot of hints as to what's coming before it reaches www.google.com.

Knowing when Google has crawled your site

2008-06-10T18:32:00.004-04:00

Here's a tip that I use to see when Google last came around and indexed my site.

1. Go to www.google.com/webmasters/

2. Sign in to webmaster tools.

3. On the homepage, you will see "Home Page Crawl:" which will indicate the last time that Google took a look at your page.

Please note that there is a time difference (sometimes several days) between the crawl and when the index is updated. You can normally see what the last version of the site was that they saw by going into "Statistics", then selecting "Index Stats", then click on the "Cache" link on the right.

Taking your blog to the bank

2008-06-10T18:23:00.002-04:00

The trick to making your blog successful is content. The problem is making sure there's always new content for those who return to your blog on a regular basis.

This is where scheduled blogging comes in.

In blogger, when you type up a blog entry, you don't have to post it straight away. At the bottom left of the box that you compose in is a link saying "Post Options". If you set the date and time to some point in the future, you can make it appear hours, days or weeks later.

Banking your blog entries is handy for the obvious things like going away for a vacation, but it also helps you to work smart. If you are like me, where time is quite precious, then you can snatch 15 minutes to run off two or three entries, then have them appear at a different point in time and nobody is any the wiser that your entry was written on the weekend, or when you had some downtime where nobody was disturbing you.

Working smart means thinking smart. If you think that your blog is taking over your life, identify the points in time where you know you will have a bit of spare time and then write up a few entries and post them all at scheduled times going forward. That way, there is new content appearing at regular intervals, but you also have the time in the meantime to have a think about your future posts without thinking "Argh! I haven't posted anything today!".

More Google Traffic...

2008-06-10T12:57:00.003-04:00

There are some good blogs out there. One of them is Jim Boykin's site, which covers SEO. Whilst reading this page, I saw the following comment:

"...a huge majority of sites will not get into the top 30 of Google for competitive phrases without having been online for at least 2 years."

Whilst I wholeheartedly disagree with the above statement because of this, which took just 6 days from registering a site to being at the top of Google, I understand where he's coming from.

There's a big difference between a new site with just 50 posts on it, versus a well established site with 5000 posts on it. The extra content gives Google more chances to match potential seekers to your site, as well as giving you the ability to post far more information and hone your writing skills, as well as defining more precisely the direction in which your site is going.

The problem with a lot of sites is there's no direction, no focus and no definitive feel for what that site is about. Think of your own site and ask yourself "If I wanted to look up this information, would this site come to mind?", if the answer is no, then you've identified a problem. I can show you what I mean here:

I will ask a question and supply what I think is probably the first thing to come into your head:

Think of a yellow fruit: Banana
Think of a search engine: Google
Think of a rich man: Bill Gates

You need to engrain your blog/site onto peoples consciousness. When they think of making money with AdSense, I want them to think of my blog to find out whether I achieved it or not, and if so, how. I don't want them thinking of the Rich Jerk, or Joel Comm, I want them thinking "I can do this for free, by myself and using tips from the "MillionaireWithAdSense" blog.

Think about where your own site or blog fits in...

Increasing Search Engine Traffic

2008-06-09T12:15:00.003-04:00

Today (Day 9) I reached a small milestone: Search engine traffic has overtaken the grass roots referrals that I was building for the past week, so that today 55% of my traffic is now coming from Google. The rest of the traffic is split almost equally between direct traffic and referring sites.

It is a small milestone, but it's got significant ramifications going forward.

What this means is more people are now able to find me on their own, than there are people who are finding me through something that I had to promote myself. That is the way it should be.

The benefit of this shift is twofold:
1. I can concentrate on thinking about other things to write about, tweak with, etc.
2. My CTR (Click Through Rate) has gone up because the people who are coming to the site are targetted traffic who want to become an AdSense Millionaire, instead of the mixed bag of visitors that I've had so far.

Up to this point, the traffic has mainly been direct traffic or referrals. Looking at the referral sites to see what promotion worked best, I can see the following (in order of most referrals first).

1. answers.yahoo.com (answered a few AdSense questions)
2. problogger.net (Left a comment)
3. blogshowoff.com (Entered my blog details)
4. facebook.com (sent a "forward this" message, plus posted in groups)
5. getmoneyenergy.com (linked)
6. i-newswire.com (put out a press release)
7. bloggers.com (No idea where this comes from)
8. totalfark.com (submitted a story)
9. pfbuzz.com (GetMoneyEnergy posted a story)

Each of these sites are still generating referrals, but now Google is stepping up the pace as well, which is good as my planned visitor numbers are going up considerably each day.

The other nice thing today was waking up to find I'd earned money in my sleep. Now that's something to be happy about! :-)

Blogburst vs Craigslist

2008-06-08T23:10:00.007-04:00

On Wednesday 4th, I mentioned that I was trying Blogburst to see if that would help me by attempting to syndicate the blog. Well, the short answer is I got turned down. The reason was my topic at hand apparently didn't fit with what they are looking to syndicate. It was very nicely written, and advised that at any point I could try again in the future.

Another simultaneous experiment I tried was Craigslist.com. People asked questions on the Craigslist.com money forum to which the information here may be of some help, however, after leaving a note advising them about where to find the answers, I found the responses indicated that maybe some forum members had unresolved issues with their parents... or just the world in general, and/or possibly both.

It's full of teenagers that are quite happy to hide behind a keyboard and use language that would sound like a Josh Wink tune if you read it aloud and bleeped out the profanities. :-)

Conclusion: If you want to move ahead with syndication try Blogburst.com, they are professional and pleasant. If you want to deal with teenagers that have nothing better to do, go to the craigslist.com forums.

Google AdSense Millionaires

2008-06-08T18:59:00.006-04:00

So going back a few days, you'll remember that I covered the Google keywords that I embedded in my blogger template's HTML. Now that Google has indexed me twice and I've had a few days to see what works it's time to analyse the results.

The following examples of a Google search puts me squarely at the top, or in the top 3:

Becoming a millionaire with Adsense
rack adsense clicks with analytics

This is because a) It's the title of the blog, b) it's the subject I talk about and/or c) all my keywords relate to the same thing. In short, it's because I'm focusing on what I want to achieve.

Let's take a look at the competition for a second if I type in, say, "AdSense Millionaires", which is something else I want to be t the top of the list for...

#1. http://alieneyes.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/google-adsense-millionaires
This blog entry has the title "Google Adsense Millionaires". That's very succinct and very accurate.
The content is about all the known people that have companies that used AdWords to pull in a Million dollars.
The HTML has absolutely nothing in it about AdSense Millionaire keywords.
Conclusion: This is the title and content alone that drove this to #1.

Plan of action: Make the title of this post the same as theirs. With my keywords and content (mentioning "AdSense Millionaires" a number of times!), it should haul me up to a position very close to them.

#2. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/11913.htm
This forum entry has the title "AdSense Millionaires", which again is very succinct, and very accurate.
The content is way different from the #1 slot, but still mentions the word "AdSense" a lot.
The HTML has nothing in it either.
Conclusion: Same as #1 - it's the title, but unlike #1, Google has picked up on the word AdSense being in the page a large number of times.

Plan of action: By changing the title for #1, I have also levelled this post with this site, and by mentioning "AdSense" and "Millionaires" many times on this page, I should become just as relevent on this page.

#3. http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/09/who-earns-the-highest-google-adsense-income/
This blog posting has the title "Who Earns the Highest Google Adsense Income?", so the title has some relevance to the story at hand.
The content is the same as #1, but shorter.
The HTML has the following meta content:
"meta name="description" content="While your blog loaded with Google adsense ads makes a miserly few dollars over the week, some top Adsense publishers are laughing their way the bank with thousands of adsense dollars per month... Have you often wondered who these top Adsense millionaires to be are? John Chow has an article ..." />"
Conclusion: This site is a mixed bag that is based on the context of Google AdSense.

Plan of action: As this site is not as strong as #1 and #2, so by tackling the first two, I overtake the third.

The thing to remember when doing Google SEO is sometimes it IS as simple as the content and title when trying to get to the top. There are no secrets, but remaining focused on the subject, the title, mentioning (several times) the words that you want to be found for and linking to pages that Google already ranks as important, are all good ways to make sure you are well on the way to driving traffic and becoming an AdSense Millionaire.

1 Week After Starting Up

2008-06-08T11:00:00.004-04:00

Day 7 was a slow day due to it being a summer weekend day when people are more likely to be out and about, rather than in front of a PC. I didn't make a cent today, which is still fine - for the first week figures, I'm still about 300% ahead of where I planned to be by this time.

At least I got some good news as Google has finally reindexed the site again - the downside is it was a few days back that they crawled it and there's a 2 day lag between crawl (looking at the pages) and index (getting it into Google). It's not the end of the world - it'll probably take a few more crawls until this blog and Google get into sync with my little tweaks.

AdSense Geography

2008-06-07T18:14:00.004-04:00

It's become fairly obvious over the past few days as to where my readers are:

1. India.
2. USA
3. UK
4. The rest of the EMEA.

It's also fairly obvious that the average reader either:
1. Has an entrepreneurial streak in them.
2. Has a money problem.

Taking the above into consideration, I've made a small change to accomodate the main customers - the Indian readers. After all, there are 1.1Billion people in India, so it's not something to be taken lightly.

What I've done is swapped out the AdSense for Content at the top of this page, and replaced it with AdSense for referrals.

The difference? One pays out on a Cost per click (i.e. you get paid each time someone clicks on your ad) and the other is Cost per conversion (i.e. You get paid everytime someone clicks on your ad, then signs up for something). The chosen ads are all financial, whether it be for banking, Forex, saving, investments, etc.

As far as payout goes, whilst you can average $0.01 t0 $10 on AdSense for Content, the AdSense for referrals can earn $3.00 to $100+ per referral. You can see why I swapped out that large Ad!

Getting Rich with AdSense

2008-06-07T15:00:00.004-04:00

If you were searching for, and found this page then you are probably wary of sites that purport to tell you they can give you the "Secrets" for making money with AdSense.

In a nutshell, there is no secret.

There's also no need to send money to anyone, no need to purchase eBooks, no need to do anything that you cannot do yourself and for free (which is what I am documenting as I write this diary).

To recap what I've done in this first week of being live:

1. Set up a free Blog.
2. Set up a free Adsense account.
3. Promoted the blog for free.
4. Got to the top of my search terms in Google for free.

What I could have done is as follows:

1. Paid for a blog template on a paid hosting service.
2. Paid a company to market the blog.
3. Paid for submissions to all the big search engines.
4. Paid for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

By now, I could have easily have been $800 in the red on this. Instead, I owe nothing to anybody, have no running costs AT ALL and my revenue is almost doubling every 2 days.

You have to ask yourself if you are seriously going to gain anything when you spend money. People that pretend to have "Secrets" or "Guaranteed Results" are lying. There is no secret and there's definitely no guarantee, as you will see in the small print of their sites.

ALSO AVOID ANYTHING THAT

HAS BIG RED LETTERS

LOOKING LIKE THIS!!!!!

So, what choices are there? In short, there's two general ways of working towards riches:
1. Work Hard
2. Work Smart

Working Smart is the route I am taking here. I have commitments and time restraints, but I try not to veg in front of the TV at every opportunity, and I also try to plan things. If you are the type of person who makes a shopping list then goes shopping, you're more like me than a person who goes with a rough idea of the list in their head (and then impulse purchases a whole bunch of stuff that isn't needed).

Additionally, whilst "fast action" is important, if you have an idea then think it through for a day or so, before starting - that way, you will give yourself time to either think of a better way, or improve on the original idea (or scrap it if you think it's not worth the effort).

Finally, focus: Focus on what you need to do in any step of the process, then work at achieving that step. Work out what steps need to be repeated often and which steps need to be done once a week, or just once ever. That way, you don't waste your time doing stuff that is unnecessary.

End of Day 6 - Results

2008-06-07T10:14:00.004-04:00

Day 6 was a slow day for posts due to other commitments, but the foundations that are being laid have allowed me to double my money whilst doing next to nothing.

The end of day results for Day 6 is putting me in line for probably getting a cheque from Google for the first month of being live.

Getting to the top of Google Searches

2008-06-06T12:34:00.005-04:00

Now that Google is finally indexing my pages, I can show you my next trick, which is how to get your page to #1 in Google's page rank.

Remember that the key to generating traffic is promotion. How you promote depends on who (or what) you are promoting to. When creating your blog, you need to make sure that as well as promoting to people, you are also promoting to a big cluster of Google PC's that are sending out webcrawlers.

If I look at where my Google traffic is coming from in Google Analytics, I can see this:

This is what people are typing into Google, which results in a hit on this page. How does Google know that my blog is a good fit for these queries? There's two main factors:

1. I am keeping to the topic of becoming an AdSense millionaire. If I deviate from this topic, then I will spoil my content and harm my page rank score. If I link to anyone else, I keep it relevant to what I am blogging about.

2. Hidden in my source code are keywords telling Google what this blog covers. If you right-click the page you are looking at currently (Mac OSX users can go to View->Source Code), you will see this big pile of words at the beginning of each page.

This is how I went from no blog this time last week to being indexed around 3PM yesterday afternoon and jumped straight in at #1. I go into Blogger's "Layout" menu and edited the HTML template.

Most honourable web companies will just charge an hourly rate for the time it takes to do something like this, but take note that some companies would charge huge fees for this type of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and possibly ask you to pay them an ongoing fee.

As long as I stick to my topic, I shouldn't need to ever touch this again, unless I think of additional relevant keywords to add to it.

As you can see above, the result of this SEO work means I can now see this on Google, and I've blasted past other blogs and sites in 6 days that have been around for a lot longer than I have.

So, to recap:

1. Focus on your topic.
2. Focus on who you need to promote to.

End of day - Day 5

2008-06-06T08:48:00.005-04:00

So Day 5 wasn't quite the show that Day 4 was, but I'm still higher than the numbers I needed to stay on track. Whilst the earnings was also substantially lower I was extremely surprised with what happened this morning.

Day 6 started when I saw I've had a number of people visit by breakfast time. The number was higher than this time yesterday - the shock came when I checked my AdSense page. There's a huge CTR and many dollars in the bank - all visits are from India and nearly all traffic came from in.answers.yahoo.com. This means the life of the promotional answers on answers.yahoo.com is far outlasting the effort spent putting them there.

Today is going to be a slow day for my promoting work due to a personal time issue, but I'm happy so far with the revenue and quality of the referrals coming in, which are still more than planned at this point.

Google Searches

2008-06-05T16:53:00.004-04:00

Here's something I just found out by accident:

If you search for something like "Becoming a millionaire with AdSense", then you might see this blog at the top of the list. Hit the search button again, and the list has changed.

It looks like the page rank of the various sites that are equal with me are shifted to give others an equal chance at being at the top!

Let the Google Juice Flow!

2008-06-05T15:51:00.005-04:00

OK - Google caught up (finally!) in the past hour, and guess what? I'm at the top of the search phrase I want to be under!

Now, how did that happen? :-)

Bolstering the Revenue

2008-06-05T09:43:00.005-04:00

I'm extremely happy with the revenue so far as it's gone from zero to upper 3 figures per year, and it's also way ahead of my target, because I shouldn't be breaking the "dollar a day" mark until day 10. As of this morning before I start work, I've had more visits than this time yesterday, so things are still "on the up" for now.

Google is now indexing part of the site, but not all of it. It will take a few days for them to re-crawl and re-index the pages, so they may catch the rest of the site then. In the meantime, I'm wholly relying on self-promotion.

Promoting your blog

2008-06-05T08:18:00.000-04:00

The press release went through!

I hope to see some results from that in the next day or so. I will keep you posted!

End of day figures - Promoting the blog.

2008-06-04T23:04:00.005-04:00

So, today (day 5) has ended with with me 2,500% above the competition. I ended with 61 visits. I needed at 16 to stay on target.

Tomorrow (Day 6) I need to get 32 visits to stay on target, that's half what I got today.

Mind you, things went very well today according the figures - if that jump repeated itself tomorrow, I would get 464 visits, which is stretching my hopes a little too far - that number shouldn't be passed until some point during day 11.

If you look at this chart, you can see the plan vs actual numbers for the blog so far since launch.

Days 1-4 are on track, then the promotion work kicks in. As you can see, there is a profound effect on the resulting visitors. The bulk of this came through answers.yahoo.com work, but at the end of the day there was an extra boost from http://www.getmoneyenergy.com (thanks for the mention!) that gave me a bit of an extra leg-up by reporting on my "audaciously ambitious" plan.

There are still four hours left in the "Google Day", but due to time zone differences, I can't look at this now until breakfast tomorrow.

So, to recap, here's the traffic on this brand-spanking new blog (Day#: Visitors)...

Day 1: 0
Day 2: 4
Day 3: 5
Day 4: 8

Day 5: 61

Time: 4:07

Money: $0.26

Trying out Blogburst

2008-06-04T20:47:00.002-04:00

This evening, I thought I'd try another syndication mechanism.

BlogBurst (www.blogburst.com) is a free service, but you need to be approved after alerting them of your blog. I should find out within a day or two as to whether this blog will be approved, but if it is, then in theory the content could be syndicated to any number of sites, plus it has the potential to be picked up by bigger players like Fox News, Reuters, etc.

Benchmarking the Competition

2008-06-04T18:00:00.005-04:00

One of the more recent tricks to be added to Google Analytics is the Benchmarking utility. This is accessed through the Visitors menu on the left (as shown by the arrow here).

Click picture to zoom in.

In this example, I have selected the category for my blog (Web Marketing and Promotion) and Google has then aggregated a bunch of other sites that are like mine, and stacked my blog vs all their sites when averaged out.

As you can clearly see, the benchmark was not very high (squint at the picture and you'll notice that most sites get about 1-3 hits per day, making the bottom of the graph very rough), so I've got an astronomical benchmark rating of +816.67% above the competition in since I launched last Sunday - and I've not even been crawled by Google yet, so this is the result of me actively spending 2 hours doing some promotion work as mentioned in my previous posts.

Other information you can get from Benchmarking in Google Analytics (my current stats today in brackets) is Bounce Rate (+54%), Page Views (+784%), Average Time On Site (+367%), Pages Per Visit (+1.6%) and New Visits (+1.4%)

Blog Promotion - First Day Results

2008-06-04T17:39:00.005-04:00

Whilst this may be a little premature (as the day is not over yet), I thought I'd share some results of my efforts this far.

Of the traffic that came in today, 72% was referral, and the remainder was direct traffic. Whilst it could be argued that the direct traffic was a lot of people copying the URL and pasting it into the browser (hence it's really a pasted referral), we'll leave that portion to one side for the moment.

The top 10 referrals look as follows (largest to smallest). And, no, I've no idea why #1 is what it is.

The interesting result is that the top referrer was answers.yahoo.com, and that same source then syndicated it to localised sites in India, the UK, and New Zealand and all those ended up in the top ten as well as people were referred back to this blog. Blogger, ProBlogger and BlogShowOff all contributed to a large number of referrals, but there is only one conclusion that I can draw currently, and that is as follows:

Promoting your blog to those on answers.yahoo.com, who are actively seeking the same information you have on your blog yields a nice return that is syndicated to multiple countries.

Facebook Promotion

2008-06-04T17:22:00.004-04:00

So the next trick was to find a big group of people "looking to make money using the web" (change to whatever your blog subject is about) who have congregated en-mass.

Enter Facebook.

I searched the groups and found a group of 900 or so members, and a lot were asking about the very same thing I'm blogging about. So, I mentioned on some of the posts that I have info on this subject, and made sure I put my blog link in.

Forcing Analytics Results to Update

2008-06-04T17:14:00.004-04:00

When you first look at Google Analytics, you only see numbers leading up to the end of the previous day.

If you click the date range on the top-right corner, as shown above, you can select today's date, and this will give you much more recent numbers (not quite live, but not far behind) for the day so far.

Promoting the blog

2008-06-04T15:46:00.004-04:00

So, as of 3PM, the promotion seems to be working quite well. Without giving away the numbers, there are the following countries that are now visiting this blog.

Blog Promotion - Next Steps

2008-06-04T13:14:00.004-04:00

So, as of noon today, I've tripled my visitors from yesterday's numbers and the CTR (Click through rate) is still holding steady. It's obvious that the promotion of the blog directly to the people asking about Blog promotion has had a major effect on the number of visitors.

For my next step, I put out a press release here:
http://www.i-newswire.com/

This is free, and allows you to reach a wider audience, however, the people that I reach are not necessarily targeted in the same way. Some people may pick up the story in a "Fun stuff" category of news, whilst others may read it in a "work from home" type of read.

I'll keep going and will jump in at the end of the day with the updated numbers.

Promoting the blog

2008-06-04T09:08:00.004-04:00

So I went on to answers.yahoo.com last night and spent 33 minutes promoting the site to people who wanted to know how to get AdSense to pay for their blogs. When I woke up this morning, I've had a high number of impressions already, plus generated some cents.

Looking at the Analytics numbers, I've had an increase in yesterday's figures that almost double the number of visits.

Promotion to bring in the millions

2008-06-03T21:10:00.006-04:00

The next promotion trick that I tried was "Reddit".

This was relatively fast to sign up, but then you cannot submit anything for a short while (about 10 minutes). This was a bit of a pain, but the time passed pretty quickly whilst I did other things.

Building momentum

2008-06-03T20:21:00.004-04:00

The next step to getting the hoards to come to this blog is to make sure other search engines know when this content has changed. For this, I just registered the site with Ping-O-Matic.

The next place to look at was Blogshowoff.com. What this is, is a directory where you find a blog category, you look at someone's blog, then post your blog. This stays on the list until enough blogs are added and yours then comes off the list, at which point you can go back in and add yourself again.

Finally, I'll try to get the Digg effect. By submitting this blog, it should garner some attention with a small minority of the millions who use digg.

Generating blog traffic with links

2008-06-03T18:23:00.004-04:00

In order to generate more traffic to this blog, the next tip I will share is linking and backlinks.

When I link to a blog, if they have backlinks switched on, there will be a link back to my blog (showing people which other blogs link to the blog they are reading).

Let's face it, everyone is a little bit vain, and everyone wants to see who's linking to their blog, so in the Blogger preferences, I have backlinks enabled (under settings, comments).

The next thing is to find some really popular blogs to link to, so that the most people can see the backlink pointing back to my blog.

A quick search in Google shows up Boing Boing as being a perfect candidate. I don't need to do anything special, as I have already created a link just by talking about the site in the previous sentence (and putting the link into the HTML itself). Another option is ProBlogger, where I posted a comment in a high traffic area - which many others should read and this should drive back traffic to here (again, the link is in the previous sentence).

So, although this is only two links, it's two more than yesterday.

Adsense and Analytics

2008-06-03T17:23:00.005-04:00

I'd like to take a moment to go over the AdSense and Analytics side of this blog.

AdSense is what serves up the adverts. When someone clicks on an advert, I generate revenue.

Analytics is what allows me to see how many people are viewing what, and it's done using some code that is pasted into the Blog header.

AdSense has reports that also show the number of impressions that have been served up, but I try to use this only to get a sense of approximate traffic. If I want proper numbers, and some basic detail of how they got there, why they are here, plus the keywords used to get here, then I'd look at the Analytics report.

Time Zones: Analytics compiles reports after midnight in California. Based on where I am, it means I have to wait until after 3AM to see the full day's numbers, so I only look at the report in the morning when I wake up.

It should be interesting to see how the keywords being used will affect the ratings tomorrow morning. Additionally, I also changed the theme of the blog, as one of the AdSense sections was consitently failing to show up where it should. Positioning of the AdSense sections is something that I need to play around with, but I cannot do that straight away as I have to wait for the Google spider to crawl through, page rank me and then start showing my blog in search results. This could take two weeks.

Becoming a millionaire with Adsense Keywords

2008-06-03T12:28:00.005-04:00

I've had some more visitors and made my first ad-click revenue, but won't post figures until the end of the day.

I am now adding a little bit of blogging knowledge into the mix. I need keywords that will drive up the traffic - the problem is where do you find the keywords? I used this free tool to look up what keywords to ad to my posting, to drive up the traffic using the term "Adsense".

I picked the top few entries to see what happens. These entries are:
"Adsense, Google Adsense, Google Adsense Tutorial, make money with Adsense"

Note that I did change the "Tutoriali" entry to "Tutorial", just for the sake of getting more hits in English.

Becoming a millionaire

2008-06-02T21:29:00.005-04:00

Day two:

I've had 4 visitors!

Two I know are me. The other two are not related to me, anything I'm in cahoots with, or anything I know about.

Today, I added some extra adverts by suggesting that I should get an advert at the end of each posting. This doubles my adverts today, but tomorrow I'll have triple the adverts. The day ater, I will have four times the adverts, then the next day I will have five times the adverts.

OK, this cannot continue in these numbers forever, but to have 2 people the first day helps lots. I could have had zero, but I had two.

Let's see where this goes.

How this began

2008-06-01T20:00:00.003-04:00

I've been writing blogs for a while. I've been a serial entrepreneur for a while. I like a challenge, and so I am trying to generate a million dollars using nothing more than a blog and AdSense.

This came about after remembering the KLF book called The Manual, and I realised that writing a blog showing what I do and the results that happen along the way should be able to generate a million dollars because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy waiting for Web 2.0.

I had answered my own question before I'd known what the question was.

People will come to find out any tricks I knew, then by virtue of people being curious, they'd see the numbers rack up, then this would fuel the fire as word gets around that someone is having a go at making insane money, and then I should make a few million.

In short, it turns into the snowball effect...

...At least that's the theory...

So, today's step is creating the blog, using Blogger.com. Next, I went into the dashboard, clicked on "Layout" then "Page Elements" and made sure I added Adsense to the sections I wanted (you must be signed up to AdSense already).

So, as of now, I have spent about 20 minutes setting this up, another 20 minutes typing this up and listening to music.