Thank you for 2007

It's the end of the year plus the end of the month so it's a time to say thank you. Firstly thanks to the bloggers who have sent this blog traffic during December.

This month I've done a Top Seven as there was virtually no difference between 5 and 7. Other organisations, search engines and websites may send me more readers but I especially appreciate the efforts of smaller bloggers like myself - so thanks everyone.

1
My Quest To Make Money On The Internet
2
Make Money Fa$t
3
Blog About Your Blog
4
Active Duty Military Money And Matters
5
Money Money Money
6
Web-Dosh
7
The Gospel According To Rhys
These seven will stay in this blog's left hand side column for the coming month. I also have a MMMM Links Page where I'm happy to list the links of other bloggers. Any niche blog welcome - no rules other than must have at least 10 posts, see details here.

Also a big thank you to subscribers and those who visit the blog regularly. I appreciate this very much.

Same with advertisers on this and my celebrity blog - thanks for your support.

All in all, it has been a good 2007 blogging wise, especially over the last quarter. I've made some decent money and have enjoyed the journey.

I wish everyone a successful and profitable New Year - and yes, you can make money with free blogs!

Good luck,
Mike.

YouGov: Complete surveys and polls for payment - genuine company.

Odd Money Making

It's been a busy holiday period for me personally but it's nice to see that the likes of Voxant, AdSense, FriendFinder, Amazon UK and a few others keep pulling in the commission regardless.

These are the sort of money making programs I like as they tick over by themselves with very little effort - as long as the traffic keeps arriving at the blog.

I did see a dip in traffic over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, on my main celeb blog, but it seems to be picking up nicely again now.

Celebrity Insider Christmas Week Traffic
That's all for today as I have some family commitments. I'll leave you with what Voxant say are their most popular newstories in their 'Odd' category.

Good luck,
Mike

Money Making TradeDoubler

A lot of bloggers use Commission Junction as an umbrella for many of the affiliate programs they promote. For many people this usually works okay.

There is, however, an alternative that may be of interest - especially to UK and perhaps European bloggers and website owners. This is TradeDoubler.

TradeDoubler have hundreds of affiliate programs to join - subject to your blog or website being approved. These are generally quality companies and all banners and promotional material is provided.

It's possible to search what programs are available by category i.e. Art, Business & Finance, Cars and Transport, Computers and Internet etc. etc.

I looked at the Home and Garden category, as an example, and there are about 35 companies to choose from with UK well known brands such as British Gas, Co-op Electrical, Halfords, John Lewis, Kodak, Littlewoods and so on.

It takes a couple of days to be approved and accepted by an individual affiliate program and each program has there own payment structure - i.e. pay per click, per order etc.

Payments are made on 'cleared funds' once £30 has been accumulated. This is made by bank transfer direct to affiliate's bank accounts. There is no other method of payment.

From my limited experience with TradeDoubler it all works okay. I promote CD WOW and AllPosters through them on my celebrity blog. Both have sales on at the time of writing this.

Might be worth looking at, especially if you have UK traffic.

Good luck,
Mike.

Seven Things

These are strange days between Christmas and the New Year.

I always feel that life is somehow in abeyance until the shiny, full of promise 1st of January finally appears.

Ah, a New Year ... success, happiness, wealth, relationships ...

The problem can be, however, that we wake up on the 5th or 6th and it starts to sink in that the new year is somehow very much like the old one. This can, of course, be either good or bad - depending on how 2007 stacked up.

One of the things I do is always to have seven things to look forward to.

Not too sure why I chose seven, but it's a number that appeals to me - and it is supposedly linked to good luck.

These seven 'things' aren't anything to do with targets or objectives and so on but are just 'things' to make life interesting and help to stay focused on the good 'things' in life. These can be absolutely anything and would be completely different for everyone.

Perhaps bigger things like a holiday, weekend break, a new something or other but they can also be small like starting to read a new book, watching a much awaited DVD, a night out, visiting a friend or friends, a football match, concert, a planned walk along the beach, making love, planting a tree, having a sauna, eating chocolate ... I don't know, simply anything that gives pleasure and a feeling of expectation and perhaps excitement.

So many people seem to think of life as dull, routine and not very interesting but, if we have seven things to look forward to, it creates a whole new perspective.

And I guess you can do this with blogging or anything else.

There's no reality in life. There is just our realisation of how things are.

Good luck,
Mike.

Happy Christmas

Wishing everyone a very Happy Christmas, Happy Holiday or just a Happy Week.
Best wishes,
Mike

Passive Money Making

I just wanted to enlarge slightly on yesterday's post - the part about passive income.

I'll give an example as to why this form of income is not only preferable but is also essential if you want a really big income.

The main reason is time. Take my wife for instance ... please! No - that's a joke.

Anyway, my wife designs and makes dresses. It's a hobby she started years ago and it developed into an income, and all from working at home. She's good at it and has been listed in such places as Vogue.

It earns her money, which she is happy with. It's almost become a social thing as well as she knows her customers well and enjoys the chat, cups of coffee and gossip that goes with it.

However she can only make a certain amount of money in a week - unless she wants to work all hours. She has only one pair of hands.

If she had wanted to take the money making to another level this would have meant developing a passive income from the business.

In other words she would have to stop doing the work herself and get other people to do the graft for her. She would ned to become a supervisor / boss / manager, or whatever title you would want to choose.

In blogging things like sponsored posts are work.

Adverts, AdSense, other affiliates you have introduced to various programs and so on are examples of blogging passive income - whereby you do very little yourself. You have to supervise, of course: where the ads go, swapping things around, keeping stats etc. but this isn't real work and is therefore less time consuming.

It's what you get other people or 'things' to do for you that will make real money. Otherwise it's limiting. This is fine if you want to make some pin money or a little extra - but it won't make you rich.

Quite a while back I did some consultancy type work for an American networking company who wanted to start up in the UK.

I envisaged that they were a big organisation. It turned out there were just three of them plus a sort of office worker come dogsbody.

All of their business was done by other people and companies on their behalf. They had someone else to source the products, a fulfillment house to the dispatch goods and every aspect of their business was covered.

All they had to do was supervise and think up ideas. Oh, and count the profits!

It's not what you do yourself ...

Good luck,
Mike.

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Celebrity Insider - Photos & News: News, photos and gossip of worldwide celebrities

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Tribute To Make Money Fast

I wanted to pay tribute today to Rob who publishes the Make Money Fa$t blog - and about 30 others as well. He's one of the 'good guys' within blogging.

For about six months Rob has been working three days a week at his blogging to see if he could build a full time income this way. It was a brave thing to do but he wanted to try and cultivate a lifestyle whereby he could see his children more and generally have a better life.

Unfortunately he has now decided to go back to working at a full time more traditional job - though his blogs will be continued. What knocked him was the Google upheaval with PageRank and the way this hit sponsored posts in general. You only have to read his 500 Dollar Challenge to see how he was well on the right track.

Though maybe things haven't worked out exactly as Rob hoped he has learnt a lot about blogging. He wrote:

"For a while there I was almost living the dream and the lifestyle was great, however reality has set in and its probably more sensible to work hard for a couple more years, earn some real money and just keep building the passive streams."

Two things from the above:

(1) Knowing when to change is an important part of being successful.

(2) Passive streams of income are the way to go. By this I mean building incomes -from whatever means - that do not involve too much personal involvement.

If we look at sponsored blogs, for example, they take a lot of work - especially if you have to write stuff for a small return. Plus the potential is limiting - there is only so much time in a day. It's much better to try and develop your income by some other means, where there is no real effort involved.

As 'they' say: It's not how hard you work, it's how clever you work.

As for Rob he'll be a success and he will fulfill his dream. He has the right positive attitude to life. He writes:

"The exponential growth part of our experiment will still be a driving force for me, however I am going to really try to work on the passive side of it more than anything else."

Good luck, Rob.

Mike.

The 20-80 Principle Or Pareto's Law

You may well have heard of the 20-80 Principle, sometimes known as Pareto's Law.

What the principle means, in brief, is that 80% of virtually everything is owned, achieved or created by 20% (or sometimes less) of the people.

In business this means that 20% of the people create 80% of the profits.

So what has all of this got to do with blogs?

Quite simply it means that:

(a) 80% of your profit will come from 20% (or less) of your products
(b) 20% (or less) of affiliate programs will give you 80% of your money making income.
(c) 20% (or less) of affiliates you sign up will produce 80% of your affiliate introductory bonuses.

We can use this Principle or Law to our advantage by concentrating our efforts on the 20%. It's why I often write about 'playing to your strengths'.

If there was a school reunion where 20 of your class mates attended 16 would have just 20% of the combined wealth. The other 4 would have 80% of the wealth.

In simple terms - whatever is making the most money from blogging is where our efforts and time should concentrated ... but, of course, most of us don't do this as 20% of our time produces 80% of our effort - the other 80% of our time only generates 20% of our income.

Food for thought as this 20-80 ratio applies to most things in life ... happiness, gambling, wear and tear on a product, users of natural resources ...

20-80 - use it wisely!

Good luck,
Mike.

Wealth Toolbox Revisited

I was looking through a few things today and went to Wealth Toolbox. Remember them?

They put $50 in members accounts (it's actually now $100!) and trade up the money on some sort of Forex exchange and then two years later will pay you all the money in your account. What do you have to do? Nothing! Good eh?

I hadn't looked at my so called account for ages but it was initially shooting up in value: Joined Feb 25 - $50; Feb 26 - $60; Mar 13 - $82,80; Mar 26 - $237.56; Apr 19 -$293.93; May 25 - $306.47; Jul 17 - $317.98 and now today ... $82.34 - whoops!

So looks like the Forex Power Strategy Course they were offering at $495 can't have been too hot after all. One of their examples from their founder Jason Steele was:

'Just to give you an idea of how powerful this stuff is, my most recent trade using this method turned $2,000 into $4,744. That's 237% profit for 45 minutes of work.'

But, of course, anything that looks too good to be true most often is - and this is the case with anything to do with Wealth Toolbox.

I only joined Wealth Toolbox (anonymously) to see what garbage they were churning out. As the small print in their Terms of Service quotes:

"... we cannot and do not guarantee any amount of funds within your account upon maturity."

I'd suggest that everyone steers well clear of this program.

Good luck,
Mike.

Other Reading:
Wealth Toolbox Warning

Money Making Keyword URLs

When deciding a domain name it appears that it may be an advantage if keywords are included within the address.

By this I mean if the site is about, say, 'Alsatian dogs' a URL including the words alsatian and dogs would probably attract more search engine referrals than a site without the words included.

I've noticed quite a bit of discussion on this point on various forums and discussion points. Some feel that Google gives a higher ranking to keyword rich addresses.

In other words a URL such as alsatian-dogs.com could well appear higher in the Google search rankings, when 'alsatian dogs' is being searched, even if it had little to do with Alsatians. This could well be higher placed than an informative site about the dogs.

I've personally found that using keywords, even within Blogspot addresses, brings in search engine referrals. I started this blog with no knowledge of this fact but including the words money and making, in the title, was one of the better things I did when I started blogging. More luck than planning.

I also found this to be true when I did my experiment with the I'm A Celebrity television show.

If you enter imacelebritygetmeoutofhere into Google search I'm still on the front page - despite no longer updating the blog. When the program, which the blog was about, was on television for a while it was in the top three entries.

I guess all of this boils down to the suggestion that, when choosing a name for a URL, it may well be worth including your main keywords in the name.

Oh, and by the way alsatian-dogs.com is still available!

Good luck,
Mike.

P.S. And here's Britney - well it is getting near Christmas!

WidgetBucks Goes International

I thought I'd mention WidgetBucks again today as I have now switched over to their International Ads, as opposed to those directed only at USA and Canadian readers.

Here's how WidgetBucks say the International Ads work:

"At the time a user visits a page containing the widget, we will sense the geographic location of the visitor. If they are in the U.S. and/or Canada, the user will see the normal WidgetBucks widget. If the user is outside those two countries, then our system will determine a country-specific CPM ad to display."

This all seems reasonable enough. I'm trying not to be negative but I haven't seen any real improvement with the click rate at the moment.

The International Ads I've seen so far are a real mixed bunch. Note that you can't specify what these products will be, as you can with their widgets. I've had ads for supermarkets, Ugg boots in Australia (even though I'm in the UK), free smiley faces, international currency trading, free extra mobile 'vibes' and so on. Not ads that are really compatible with this or my celebrity blog.

I'm sticking with WidgetBucks though, primarily to get my first $50. Looking at stats for people I have referred myself most, like me, aren't getting that many clicks.

I must admit that I have been disappointed with responses to WidgetBucks Ads. I wrote here what I thought bloggers should expect from Pay Per Click programs. With around 6000+ page impressions a day I should be making much more money from the program.

I'll see how things progress this month and no doubt I'll give an update on WidgetBucks early next year. They do mention that they are 'building credibility with advertisers' - when referring to non USA and Canadian advertisers. Time will tell if they succeed.

Good luck,
Mike.

Penthouse Buys FriendFinder

As regular readers will know I promote FriendFinder and AdultFriendFinder on my celebrity blogs and have made some decent money from them.

What I can tell you now is that the group owning these websites, Various Inc, has been sold for $500 million to Penthouse Media Group - that's the Penthouse magazine publishers. It's not thought that this will make any difference to the workings of affiliates.

Penthouse CEO Marc H. Bell says:

"We are very excited to welcome Various (previous owners of FriendFinder etc.) and its employees as a part of the Penthouse family. Various is an attractive addition to our already strong print platform, and one that puts Penthouse in a very robust position in the ever-growing online social networking arena. We like where the business combination puts us and that this transaction will enhance PMGI's current and future licensing, print and interactive ventures."

Lars Mapstead of Various is also excited!

"We are excited to be combining our substantial Internet presence with one of the most recognized entertainment brands in the world. Together we will expand in many areas, both online and offline, to solidify our position as the world leader in adult entertainment."

This really illustrates the strength of this market. Friendship, in it's many forms, is massive business. AdultFriendFinder, for example is a Top 50 Web Site and is one of the most trafficked web sites in the world, with over 18 million members.

Though they have a huge slice of the cake there is still enormous potential plus, with the now backing of Penthouse, there is money to be made by switched on affiliates.

New Year is a peak time for when people search for friendship, romance and so on. It's a market worth considering if your blog is suitable.

Good luck,
Mike.

Making Money With Voxant

I'm always being asked how I'm getting on with Voxant and their Newsroom and whether I have received payment. I'm pleased to say that I received my second check from them yesterday for $155.98. See proof of first payment here.

So far so good checks have now been received for two months running. My total earnings from them to date is $581.97.


It seems that Voxant have been having some problems with websites bending the rules. This is part of an email sent out to members.

"One problem we have noticed is people using multiple autoplayers.While our member agreement did not previously spell this out as a violation, it's clear that this is a 'genuine user interest' offense as no-one can watch multiple autoplayers at the same time. As you can imagine,this is also in violation of our licensing agreements with our content providers who don't want their content to be handled in this manner.

To address this problem, we are taking action today to convert all autoplayers to non-autoplay. We are also removing the auto-player from the player gallery."

What this means in effect that it will now be more difficult to make money with Voxant as blog / website readers will have to click to see news videos. Previously they could be set so that they would play automatically.

As earnings are based on 'plays' it can therefore be seen, from the above, that the money making possibilities have been reduced. In saying that I will still continue with the program, for my celebrity blog.

Good luck,
Mike.

Note: I am not being paid for this post nor do I make any money if you join Voxant as a member. It's purely for your info.

Voxant Video Samples

Make Money Doing Virtually Nothing

Perhaps I got out of bed on the wrong side or something today but I'm a bit narked. Some clown is copying virtually every post I write on this blog. Obviously I'm not going to give any links for him.

It'll be interesting to see if he copies even this one. He might though as he is doing everything automatically.

Maybe I shouldn't moan as he also publishes any links I include in a post.

What I don't like is that he hasn't even the basic politeness to ask if it's okay to copy stuff I have written. But there again he's bone idle and doesn't bother to write posts. Why should he when he can pinch other people's stuff?

I traced his original blog. He did actually try and write about eight posts all by himself but then gave up in August because he decided stealing other bloggers posts was a darn sight easier.

To quote his final post (no, I didn't ask his permission!)

"I've especially noticed at some posts concerned to the automated blog. It sounds interesting.

You can create as many blogs as you like, with an automatic tool which will crawling some website or extract from some RSS feeds, and then it write automatically and immediately to your blog.

You'll have a blog which is updated frequently with enormous contents and high quality articles without losing even a sweat. That's nice. For example, you created 50 blogs and then each month, each blogs give you 1$, it means that you'll have 50$ easily. Is it worth to try, right?"

So there you go, that's how to make money without doing virtually anything yourself. Is this the secret to successfully making money with blogs?

Not really because you still need traffic and traffic is the real secret of success with blogging.

That's my moan over for this week.

Good luck,
Mike.

P.S. I must point out though that there are many excellent, honourable bloggers!

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Celebrity Insider - Photos & News: News and photos of worldwide celebrities.

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How To Make $100 Per Month With PPC

I thought I'd do a bit of a reality check today about pay per click (PPC) programs. By this I mean where companies pay you a sum for every click made from your blog to their website.

There are lots of such programs about so I won't mention any names.

Okay you sign up for a pay per click money making opportunity ...

What would you hope to earn from such a program?
I guess it would make things simple if we said you'd like to make $100 per month.

From what I can see most pay per click payments average out at about 10c or 11c per click.

This therefore means to earn that $100 you need either 1000 or 909 clicks per month - that's around 33 or 30 a day.

How do you get those 1000 or 909 clicks?
By getting lots of traffic - as I've said before a lot of money making with blogging is a numbers game.

How any page impressions will you need to get 1000 or 909 clicks?
This is a bit tricky but I reckon a CTR of 1.7% would be about average.

For those who may not know, a CTR is a click through rate and is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad by the number of times the ad was delivered (page impressions).

As I've already said I reckon 1.7% is average so to get your 1000 clicks you'll need about 58,500 page impressions per month - that's around 1950 per day (58500 divided by 30 days).

How to make $100 per month with pay per click.
My reality check therefore indicates that to make $100 per month you will need 58,500 page impressions per month (1950 per day).

Good luck,
Mike.

Consistency Makes Money

When I started blogging I had no real idea of how to build readership. I knew that I couldn't simply wait for traffic to arrive miraculously but I wasn't too sure what else to do.

My solution was discipline!

I decided that every day I would find at least one new way to try and gain visitors (but without spending any money). And this I continued to do for several months until I had gained a little more knowledge of what blogging was really all about. If I ever had to miss a day I doubled up the following day.

I started by hitting the blog directories such as Bloglines, Blog Hub, Brit Blog. There are dozens of them out there. What I found though was that most of them didn't actually bring me much traffic.

I then looked at things like Klik and Links 247.

I moved on to free advertising and would leave my blog address wherever I could.

Then there were communities to join like MyBlogLog and forums such as Blogger Forum, Digital Point; discussion style sites myLot and ...

... I won't go on and on but the important point I'm trying to make is that consistency brings success.

Sure I joined and tried things that were a waste of time but it was all a learning process. This was all before I properly appreciated the power of content, keywords, search engines and other sorts of links.

My advice to anyone in a blogging rut, or just starting out, is to do something positive about whatever the situation is and do this every single day. Before too long the answers will come - but if we sit back and simply wait, it'll be a long wait!

Good luck,
Mike.

Other Reading
Money Making With Free Blogs

The Unique Gem Way To Success

It's strange sometimes where an idea actually comes from. Why, for example, would anyone want to publish a magazine or a blog about 'To-Do Lists'? And why, for that matter, would anyone want to read such magazines or blogs?

But they do, and this illustrates that success can arrive from all sorts of directions, especially if we start from somewhere new.

It's what Sasha Cogen has done and her blog is now a book.

Seven years ago she began collecting these lists and became publisher of a magazine called appropriately To-Do List.

Sasha asked for people to send her their To-Do lists and they did just that - thousands of them. So many in fact that a selection of them have now been made into a book called, yes you've guessed: To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us. Well you probably got the first couple of words!

Why did she get fascinated by To-Do Lists? She says she, 'became fascinated by them because they are such a rare window into our everyday lives – and everything that’s on our minds.'

Often when we think about publishing a blog we tend to start with the obvious. This is fine but thousands of others will also be thinking along similar lines. Now if we could get our minds working differently who knows what we could come up with. Perhaps a unique gem that might just catch on in a big way.

Thinking differently from the herd is one way to success.

The video below is Sasha talking about ... To-Do Lists - obviously.


Good luck with finding your unique gem,
Mike.

King Text Makes Money

I have touched on this previously but I reckon that most banner style ads, and even those popular small squares, are in the main a waste of time - in respect of making money from them, that is.

To me a lot of the stuff we pack in our blog side columns is wasted space and gets very little response. Though I know some prominent bloggers may disagree it's AdSense that gets me by far the most clicks. The pretty, and sometimes flashing banners, just turn people off.

Text style ads are King! Well sort of.

When we join all of those different money making affiliate programs what do most of us do? We get the banners and plonk them on our blogs and then we ... do nothing. So what happens ... nothing.

Okay, there are always exceptions but to move products we have to write about them and tell everyone how great they actually are - because text is King.

This can be done by:

(1) what I call an advertorial post or
(2) a couple of sentences at the end of a post.

These two methods, in my experience, have more authority and get better responses - and therefore make more money - than any flash banner style advertisement.

I especially feel that this is true for the average blog that perhaps doesn't have a big readership. If you have hundreds of thousands of visitors of course a few will click on banner ads.

To a degree making money with blogs is a numbers game but ... by using text to sell (make money) you up the stakes so that the odds are slightly better in your favour.

Try King Text and see if it works for you.

Good luck,
Mike.

The ad on the left is okay but the following will get a better response: AdultFriend Finder. I have made nearly $1000 from this affiliate program. It will do well in January - over 20 websites to promote.

Back Catalogue Brings Traffic Today

I wrote about the importance of images a short while back and how I was quite chuffed that I'd had 50+ referrals from Google Images in a day.

Now I don't know what has happened in the last nine days, since I wrote that post, but I presume Google must have done some sort of update. I say this because over the last two days I've had over 1000 referrals from Google Images on my celebrity blog.

So I say again, to emphasise the point, images/photos can bring traffic. Well they can, providing you have a blog that lends itself to publishing several a day.

I look on photos as I do old posts - they are my back catalogue.

Pink Floyd's Back Catalogue
It's a little like a pop stars' old hits. They may not be in the charts and selling hundreds of thousands of copies but they hang around and they still get bought or played on the radio. So they continue to make money.

It's the same with old blog posts and their images. They may not get the same number of hits as newer articles but they can still attract traffic. It's why it's important that archives are easily accessible and aren't deleted.

It's also another indicator of the importance of trying to include the right keywords and so on within each post. A little extra effort now can reap dividends.

If we do it right, old posts can bring us visitors today.

Good luck,
Mike

Pssst! Want To Buy A Blog?

I must admit that I've been a little slow in reading my favourite blogs recently and I was surprised, therefore, to hear from Rob that CashQuests.com had been sold.

You may have read that CashQuests was the blog that sent me the most traffic for November.

The interesting point about this is that the blog, or perhaps the domain name, sold for $15,000. A not insignificant sum for a blog that had been only up and running for about 12 months.

It makes you think, doesn't it? Perhaps building and selling blogs is the way to go - or at least another stream of income to consider.

With CashQuests the supposed income was about $1400 per month, but $580 of this was from writing reviews and sponsored posts. Will the new owner be able to attract this sort of business? Obviously that's not the problem for Kumiko who now has $15000 in her bank.

I don't fully understand why anyone would want to pay this sort of amount, for a blog type website, where the success is based on the writer's particular style of writing. It will be difficult for anyone else to duplicate this.

Okay they've got a PR5 domain name but most of us could build this if we went about things the right way (and didn't sell links or do sponsored posts!). As for the income this will go down the drain unless the new owner can retain subscribers and readership.

'Tis all very interesting as several blogs have sold recently - you may find a few on offer here.

So are you ready to build a blog, with a domain name, and sell it?

Good luck,
Mike.

I'm A Celebrity Experiment

I wrote early in November about Dead Blogs And Experimenting.

Part of the post was about how I had started a new blog I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here as an experiment.

It is based on a UK television reality show which was only running for three weeks, and finished last Friday.

The experiment wasn't all that successful, probably too short a time span, but as with most things I gained some knowledge from doing the blog.

The blog really ran for only 46 days, thought it'll hang around the blogosphere for a long time - as I don't cancel old blogs.

The most visitors I managed to attract on a daily basis was 371 and for the 46 days, starting from scratch, the blog had a total of just over 7000 unique hits. The interesting thing was that 4250 of these came from the search engines.

What this emphasised was the value of the right name for a blog and having this within the URL. I got lots of referrals from people searching 'Imacelebritygetmeoutofhere'. In other words it's seems beneficial to use keywords for a title and domain name.

As the show has been around for eight years there was a lot of competition from established websites and the tabloid newspapers. They had the advantage of being set up and running long before I got going.

I also realised that virtually everyone was regurgitating the same material - only so much happens on a TV show each night. So why should anyone regularly visit my blog when they could get the info from a newspaper website?

I found that the only way to boost traffic was by concentrating on a couple of the contestants - and yes, it was the attractive girls (Gemma Atkinson and Cerys Matthews) who pulled, if that's the right word, best. It's the old thing about how 'sex sells'.

All in all it was worthwhile trying. I managed to get some Amazon orders, a few AdSense clicks and I was able to use ads directed at the UK - as 75% of the traffic was from the UK. I also got referrals from I'm A Celeb to my main celebrity blog.

I shall update the I'm A Celeb blog from time to time if any of the contestants do anything newsworthy.

I'm now looking for another niche for a blog to experiment with.

Good luck,
Mike.

Money Making November 2007

As long standing readers will know I always used to do a Weekly Money Making Report stating how much I had earned each week.

I have now stopped doing this but I'm still often asked as to what sort of money I make each month. For various reasons I'm not going to say any more but will give an indication for the month just gone. All I'll say is that it was over $1250 but less than $4000 for November.

What I have done today is shown a few proofs of some of the money I have received (but not all of it). This isn't meant as a boast but purely to show that it is possible to make money from free blogs and without any capital outlay.
Providing I continue blogging, and don't move onto something different, I would hope that my earnings will now increase month on month.

I would stress, however, that this hasn't been an overnight success. I've had to work at it and I feel that most people will need a full year to get established. Okay, some may do it quicker but I think that an average 12 months continuous, daily effort should reap rewards. Remember though that most bloggers pack it all in within three months.

It's the sustained effort that brings results.


On the page you'll find my PayPal November payments received, checks (cheques) I have received and are ready for banking tomorrow and AdSense earnings - note that with AdSense you get September commission in November. I think the 'proof' on this post adds up to about $950.


If you want to make money with free blogs it can be done. I purposely didn't spend any money in doing so - that was the 'mission' I set myself at the very beginning. This is why I haven't got my own domain name and why I have stuck with Blogger - this puzzles some people.

I do have the outlay of my broadband connection but I would have this whether I blogged or not.

Good luck with your own mission.
Mike.

Thank You Links For November -

Another month so time to say thank you for all of your visits and/or referrals during November.

The Top Five Blogs sending referrals to MMMM were:

1. cashquests.com
Kumiko wrote a very positive post about MMMM and this brought a lot of referrals. The thing about Kumiko's blog is that it is controversial and opinionated but never dull. Her post titled 'WidgetBucks Is Run By Monkeys' emphasises this point. I think she got her figures a little skew-whiff in the article but she says what she thinks. No wishy-washy sitting on the fence.

2. Make Money Fa$t
Rob is always in my top five. A genuine guy from New Zealand who wants to make a million dollars and, with his positive attitude, he'll no doubt succeed.

3. Blog About Your Blog
Another of my favourites. We started our blogs at about the same time and it's been interesting watching BAYB grow and develop into the success it is today.

4. Money Money Money
Money Money Money is another of my regular top five entries. I reckon from the title you can guess what it's all about.

5. Web-Dosh
'An Investigation into whether the Internet can be used to make money' is the strap line. And do you know what? I reckon it can!

Each month my Top Five Blogs are listed in the left hand side column.

I always get a few surpises as to where referrals come from. Last month I had unexpected good responses from Netvibes, and StumbleUpon without doing anything.

The MMMM Top 10 Keywords for the month were: money making, making money, voxant, adultfriendfinder, mike perry, mikes money making, mikes money making mission, money making blogs, shoppingads and wealth toolbox. Pretty much as expected.

Thank you to everyone who has had anything to do with this blog - it's appreciated very much.

Good luck,
Mike.