A Thank You Biscuit - Or Is It A Cookie?

As it's a new month tomorrow - and don't they come around quickly - a few 'thank you' links.

Firstly to the Top Five Blog Referrers for October. By this I mean other blogs who have sent me traffic. Okay, here they are.

1. Make Money Fa$t
My New Zealand mate, Rob, runs this excellent blog. It's always a good read. Recently he set himself a challenge to make $500 from blogging in five days. He didn't quite hit his target but did manage a healthy $459.79. If he tries again in the future I'm sure he'll hit the target and more besides. He has the right positive approach to blogging.

2. Active Duty Military Money and Matters
This gentleman is a is a 'LTJG in the Uniformed Service. He is not a financial advisor, however, he has a lot advice on money due to his life experiences.' Vause regularly appears in my Top Five Referrers.

3. Web-Dosh
Another regular in my Top Five and the blog is described as 'an investigation into whether ther Internet can be used to make money.' And, of course, we know that it can!

4. Money Money Money
I don't know a lot about this blog's author other than what she writes on her profile page: 'I'm a British female who loves blogging. Am interested in money, fashion and books, hence my blogs!' Mmmm, I see the logic in this - think I must get my wife blogging!

5. Internet Bazaar Tips.
Another money making blog with posts on making money online and with blogging. I notice that the first couple of posts, on the blog, aren't loading properly. Hopefully this'll be corrected if you decide to visit.

The Top Five will be entered in the left hand side column for all of November.

It's interesting, well it is to me, that all five blogs are about making money and are all on Blogspot. What does that say? Goodness knows - sometimes it's possible to analyse everything too much!

Besides search engines the other top five referrers to this blog for October have been:

1. Blog Mad. Not too sure why I've started getting hits from here. It's a traffic exchange program which I joined way back when I first started blogging. I haven't been to the site for ages. Just a quick point about traffic exchanges - it's against Google 'rules' to use these if you have AdSense on your site.

2. StumbleUpon
I'm sure most readers know all about StumbleUpon. As they say: 'It helps you discover and share great websites.'

3. sphinn
Not something I have ever joined but I get a visitors from here. Their website description: 'Internet Marketing News & Discussion Forums.'

4. Instant Hypnosis
This is a strange one. I wrote a sponsored post for them through PayPerPost and now I'm getting referrals from their site. See - nothing wrong with sponsored posts!

5. Webtrh
This blog has been mentioned on this Czech forum and I've had some traffic as a consequence. Unfortunately I can't read the website as I don't understand their language.

The above shows how, once you have established a blog, traffic can arrive from the most unexpected sources.

Regarding links in general they are now on my Blog Links page - all welcome.

Good luck for November,
Mike.

Money Making With Amazon

Today I'm continuing with programs with which I have tried to make money. I'm still on the A's and today it's the old favourite Amazon.

Like a lot of people I've used Amazon for years for buying bits and pieces, mostly books. It is said that, with any form of selling, you have to like the products. Remembering this fact, it didn't therefore take me long to sign on as an affiliate when I started my blogs twelve months back.

Unfortunately everything that 'is said' isn't necessarily true. I haven't been over successful with making money with Amazon. In fact it's mostly been a waste of time to date.

As an example for this month (29 days) I have had 1760 clicks to the Amazon website. Now that sounds good - it's around 60 clicks per day. But that's the best bit! All of these clicks have only amounted to two sales and commission of £1.29 (about $3.55).

As I'm sure we all appreciate there are lots of positive things to say about being an Amazon affiliate but first the negative and, I suppose, the reality - at least as far as my experience goes.

Cons
1. The commission isn't too hot at only 5%.
2. A lot of the products are low priced (i.e. books, CD's and DVD's) and therefore the commission doesn't amount to much when you get a sale for such items. Yes, there are more expensive items but my own sales have only been books, CD's and maps - not sure why maps.
3. I'm an affiliate for the UK Amazon, but a lot of my visitors come from other countries and are therefore unlikely to actually buy from the UK website, where prices are shown in UK currency.

Trying now to be positive, Amazon is generally improving their selling aids and these make up a lot of their good points.

Pros
1. A reliable, established company.
2. Low payout figure (just £10 in UK - about $20)
3. Lots of promotional tools which include:
(a) Have your own aStore - or several if you wish.
(b) Slideshows, as above.
(c) Product clouds.
(d) Favourite and Wish lists.
(e) Context links - I use these on my celebrity blog.
(f) Banners and search boxes.
(g) Product links .... and so on and so on.

To Sum Up
To be successful with Amazon I feel that you need good traffic from the same country as per the Amazon website which you are promoting.

I'm trying out a new blog I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here which is aimed at UK residents. It's about the reality show, of the same name, which starts on November 12th. It'll only be a short run blog as the series doesn't last very long but it's more of a trial or experiment to see if I can make some money from UK products. I've got Amazon context ads on the blog.

I just wish I could say that the Amazon affiliate programme is fantastic but, based on my own experience I can't. Perhaps I haven't been promoting it properly. It might be solely my fault but I keep on thinking that 5% commission is pretty poor no matter how you look at it.

Mike's Rating: 2/5

It's always good and I suppose easy to write about money making programs where we have been successful. It's just as important though to show that not everything that glitters is gold. Hopefully you will have been much more successful with Amazon than I have.

Good luck,
Mike.

All Change Money Making

As regular readers will see I have changed the template for this blog. I purposely kept it as standard for a full year but now feel it's time to move on a little.

As someone or other is supposed to have once said: "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." Or something like that!

I must say, however, that the Blogger standard templates have done me okay and they weren't in any way a hindrance to making money - at least not to my knowledge. There can always be an argument that, with a better layout, I might just have made a bit more cash than I did. This is difficult to quantify.

What I always wanted to do was to prove that money could in fact be made with free blogs, and without any cash being necessary to start up. It's also why I never bothered with getting my own domain name. I wanted to prove to my own satisfaction that virtually anyone can make money blogging.

I'll keep the post short today as there are a few bits and pieces I have to get done. One thing I will mention, before I finish, is - links.

If your link is normally on this blog I won't forget to include it again, but it will probably be in a slightly different format. The five links that refer the most visitors will be shown monthly on the home page and the others will be on another page. There will be a link to the links at the top of each page. Hope that makes sense!

That's all for today.

Good luck,
Mike.

Getting Those Search Engine Referrals And PR

Following on from my previous post about PageRank. I've been reading that some bloggers seem to believe that if their PR has been reduced this will in some way effect the number of search engine referrals that they get each day or week.

From my own experience I don't think that PR is all that relative to your blog's positioning on the search engines - though I know some of the 'experts' want us to believe the opposite.

If we take my celebrity blog as an example this has been running for 144 days. The blog still has a rock bottom PR0 but it is getting and average of 600 referrals a day from search engines and 87.65% of these are from Google. You can see the figures for yourself on this post (86522 divided by 144 days)

As I have written before I believe it is the content of posts that will decide as to where your blog figures on the search engines.

What we write, combined with proper use of the right keywords, determines how many referrals will arrive from the search engines and not PageRank. Well at least that's what I have found to be true.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Give Your House Some Kerb Appeal

What a difference a driveway makes.

By this I mean that if the driveway to your house is a little past it's sell by date it tends to pull down the whole outside appearance of your home. And, of course, a smart new driveway does the opposite. It transforms the look of homes and I suspect that it also pushes up the value as well.

There are some great choices for driveways nowadays. I like the interlocking brick styles, which are very popular, but for my own home I think a more rustic look would be best.

Anglian, the home improvements people, have over 40 combinations of styles and colours of driveways on offer. I also see that they supply 60mm blocks which retain their strength far longer than the regular 50mm blocks.

Give your house some kerb appeal with a little help from Anglian.

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Money Making Updates: Voxant, WidgetBucks, ShoppingAds

A few readers have been following my progress with Voxant, the News feed opportunity, and have been asking if I've been paid as yet. Afraid the answer is no.

I emailed them yesterday to clarify their payment procedure. I joined on September 24th and to date I've earned $256.27 but I prefer to recommend money making programs after I have received payment.

I was very impressed with the speed of their reply to my email, even if it wasn't quite the answer I was hoping for.

It seems they have got two differing time scales for payment printed on their website. The first, and the one I read, states: 'You'll receive your check within 30 days following the last day of the month in which it was earned.' According to this I should receive the September payment by the 30th of October - at least that's how I understand it.

In their reply, however, they write: 'We actually process the checks at the end of the following month which is part of our payment process. If you made the $50 threshold minimum in September your check will be processed at the end of this month and you will receive your check at the beginning of next month.' So that is slightly different.

They also sent me an attachment, with the email, that they require completing and returning to them by fax, or mail, prior to them being able to send out any checks. The form, something called a W-8, is for taxation purposes.

I'll keep you informed regarding actual receipt of any payment as I know a few bloggers have also joined Voxant.

Moving on to ShoppingAds, which I mentioned on Tuesday. Early days but it hasn't exactly gone down a storm as yet.

I've been trying out their ads (see side column) as a trial. To date I've had 3717 page impressions which has resulted in only 1 click giving earnings of 26 cents. So not too impressive so far. I'm not convinced as to the possible success with such ads unless you have a blog that has a specific, defined, niche. If the blog is about photography, for instance, then camera ads would do okay but with a money making or personal blog I'm not so sure.

Moving on again. I'll be doing my own trial on WidgetBucks hopefully next week - unless, that is, I make a bundle with ShoppingAds! I've joined WidgetBucks because they are offering $25 for signing up. This means you only have to 'earn' $25 to make $50, which can't be bad.

That's it for today.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Look Out Look Out There Are Bed Bugs About!

I saw a television programme on bed bugs last week and it gave me the shivers. To think these little blighters suck on your blood while you are sleeping. Yuk!

It seems that bed bugs are everywhere, well not quite, but they aren't too fussy on where they do their feeding. They often spread because of all of the traveling we do nowadays. They might, for example, crawl in your luggage, even if they haven't got a passport, and before you know where you are you've got unwanted lodgers!

So what are the bed bug symptoms? Little red bite marks may appear on your body or there could be dark spots on your mattress and so on.

Is there a cure? Well my mother used to say: 'If they bite, squeeze them tight and they won't come another night.' But there are no doubt better ways!

If you want to know more about bed bugs have a read of the Bed Bugs Guide.

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