Making Money

Ideas for making money, including my own business, websites, and ideas!

Dead End Blogging: Don’t get screwed, get informed on who pays what, when and how

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In Dead End Blogging , I introduced the concept of the Blogging BlackHole. Today, I’m going to look at the Money PotHoles that you will likely encounter as you drive up Dead End Lane.

We’ll Look After Your Money

There are many sites out there that provide services to bloggers, some for free and some for money. In either case, it is the blogger who decides whether the site is of value or not.

But there are also sites out there that prey off the bloggers, esp. the new bloggers, the ones without much experience… Such sites will purport to provide bloggers with opportunities to earn money by advertising their services on your blog. When a reader clicks on the ads, joins up or purchases a product, the blogger willl earn a sale – Chaching!

Show me the money!

Except in many cases, you the blogger will NEVER see the money. Yes, that’s right. NEVER. Why? Because you failed to reach the minimum cashout limit. For example, if you choose to be an affiliate with a well-known hosting company, you may earn upto $65.00 per sale. Sounds great. However, the minimum payout is $100. Oops! Sorry. Everything will be okay if you make another sale…

Reasonable? Perhaps. But when sites like Google pay cents on the dollar for clicks, it can take months for you to reach the magic payout number of $100. And that’s if the site is honest. Everyone knows that Google undercounts clicks.

Are you all honest, guv?

But what about those other smaller sites, the ones that come under the radar? Affiliate advertisers, content providers, and ad networks? Are they as scrupulous as Google is? Worse, are there sites that take the money and never seem to payout?

AdToll ($6.00) is also holding on to some money that belongs in my bank account, as are a number of other companies: Scratchback ($12.00), TTZ Media ($1), Amazon Affiliates ($21.36), SocialSpark ($20), PayPerPost ($26.50), Linkworth ($35.00)… The current outstanding total from sources that I’m aware of is in excess of $215.00. Not a lot of money, but I’d rather it was earning interest in MY bank account, not theirs.

Even, it seems PerformancingAds is facing similar issues. Transactions booked on PerformancingAds just disappear, despite having registered as a payment. There are no stats to show that an ad has been recorded if you happen to delete the region you created. Oh, and for that booking I had – sorry no payout. My account defaulted to $50 minimum cashout.

Scrooge – you’re hired!

In other cases, there are sites that make even typical CPC rates look generous. The NewsRoom was one that I used to generate interest, earn a little revenue, and add video to my site. Wow! That backfired.

First, the videos weren’t properly archived, although my posts were. I still get a lot of traffic on pages that are several months old. But that’s bad luck, the video footage is often unavailable on old stories. Whoa! Sorry. So now I have to go back and remove the old footage which is often attached to relevant stories.

Secondly, and I’m sure this is against their TOS, I have so far received 25 cents for 157 plays. In other words, they are siphoning off my viewers, for less than 1/6th of a cent per view. I have earned 25 cents in total … and the minimum payout is 100 times that amount. That’s an awful lot of plays by my reckoning. Even John Chow would be raking in just $300 per month on that one.

Lies, Damned Lies and Affiliate Statistics

My affiliate account with two host companies has recorded literally hundreds of clicks, perhaps even thousands, and how many have signed up over the two or three years I have worked these programs. None. Not one. Zero.

I’ve pushed a variety of affiliate programs over the years, as well. I’ve seen consistent success with Amazon Affiliates but other programs seem dubious at best in terms of performance (ie. clickthroughs). But what is to stop an affiliate scheme from deliberately undercounting its clickthroughs? I guess that’s where a new blogger won’t be able to tell. Only an older or more experienced one may know that you need to track the clicks yourself. Don’t rely on the site’s stats alone.

I don’t want to sound negative, but in this series of posts on Dead End Blogging, I do want bloggers to realize that they are at a distinct disadvantage when using a middleman for the transaction. So make sure the middleman you are using has a good reputation, pays out regularly and/or has a low mimimum cashout.

June Income Report on InvestorBlogger Dot Com

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It’s July 1st, we’ve reached the half-way through the year, and the stockmarkets are in a dive, ad revenues are falling, and oil is way up! How are we doing on InvestorBlogger? Well, in some ways it’s a very mixed bag.. here goes…

Background

In June, as many of you know, I spent nearly a week re-arranging the sites on my server as well as cleaning up the server, but server problems continued with nearly 24 hours of outage in June alone!

To that end, I’ve spent quite a bit of time setting up my primary sites on their own hosting with a fair amount of punch to each. I’ve been using several hosts, including BlueHost, and HostMonster to name but two. I’m now looking at a third ‘meatier’ host for one of my other clients… and my own blog(s). This has sapped my time, commenting and online socialization somewhat as I spent most of the time working on the sites,… I’ve still 2.5 clients to go as well.

Results

Grand Total: $11,101.00

As you can see from the numbers, I’m only recording the actual categories that have any income at all. This month, affiliates didn’t produce much income at all.

* Bank Interest: $28.71
* Dividend Income: $107.11
* Blogging: $63.75
* Advertising: $149.68
* Hosting = $131.15
* Consulting = $113.10
* Total = $593.51

This brings my grand total to a shade over $11,101 for the months since I began blogging about my journey to wealth. It’s still pretty impressive, but I’m now setting higher goals and looking at ways to boost traffic to the site in the coming months.

Traffic

In 2008, June traffic was of course DOWN on previous months, but compared to 12 months ago, it showed a healthy 50% jump, and the traffic is fairly resilient. In fact, Google Search is now sending more traffic than ever before. Other traffic is down as I’ve been less aggressive promoting my site on social networks that I typically used to. Once my sites are migrated to new servers, I’ll start doing more of this. Total page views are a little over 1920 from over 1260 visits. It’s a far cry from John Chow, isn’t it?

PayPerPost vs. SocialSpark

This has caused me to rethink my stance of 2007. While I’m not ready to abandon my stance, I feel that it’s only a matter of time now before I do.

TLA income is now reducing, and that has been my biggest reason NOT to switch policy. It’s pretty impossible to do Payperpost now anyway because of their stance on links, and my relative lack of PR. In fact, if I get PR back, then I can’t do Payperpost as you are not allowed to accept no-follow links (PPP’s choice). If I keep my stance, I can’t do PayPerPost at all, because of the lack of PR rank (PPP’s choice) and the serious competition for opps (PPP’s choice). In November 2007, and subsequently, it was possible to make a choice, but right now, Payperpost has backed me into a corner, and shows no signs on standing down on any of the three problems it has caused me:

  • 1. Opps requiring PR;
  • 2. Not requiring no_follow;
  • 3. and Inpost non-disclosure (coercive non-disclosure).

It’s now seeming very silly of me to continue to ‘co-operate’ with PayPerPost when the issues that I face are the result of decisions that PPP made. I will very likely go totally no_follow on all my links, shortly; a decision that I will not reverse again. In fact, I stopped doing PayPerPost in January, because of conflicts with my existing advertisers; and it’s ironic that a company that helped me to develop my blog is now the single thing holding back the development of my blog.

Top Five Articles in June

  1. 10 Reasons Why Adsense Sucks for your Blog
  2. A Man With A Plan
  3. Asus Eee PC 900 with Vista
  4. Weekend trips around the NE Coast of Taiwan
  5. and Harley Davidson Launches in Taiwan

Challenges

Unlike JohnChow, I didn’t set out to make money solely from this blog. Rather I set out to describe my journey to wealth, along the way noting what worked and what didn’t work. The biggest challenge I face is simply lack of time; I don’t have enough hours in the day to build up my wealth in other ways, though if I were working full-time as an employee, this would be a bitter pill to swallow. As a part business owner, I find it easier to accept!

The second challenge is sheer lack of technical skills in the area of server management and configuration. I know what I want to do, but since I’m an Arts major, I find it quite frustrating to try to fix things that go wrong. Don’t get me wrong: I do know how to fix a whole host of problems, but when it comes to networking and the Internet, I’m a relative newbie!

All of the other challenges result from these two alone! So I need to find new ways to face this!