Ch ch ch changes!
As of today you’ll find a number of changes happening here at Mathew Packer dot com.
The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m working on a new theme, and call me insane but I’m going to be working on it live! No one in their right mind would work on their website live while it was still getting hits, and normally I wouldn’t as I wouldn’t want to negatively effect the advertising click potential of the site, however I’m willing to work on it this was as I don’t care about the advertising clicks on here as I’m ditching the advertising!
So as you just read the second big change is getting rid of the advertising on this website. As of about 2 weeks ago my subscriber count has risen from 20 people per day up to 75 per day, this is a pretty huge increase but my click rate on the advertisements has not risen at all. This has lead me to the conclusion that people actually enjoy what I write enough to actually subscribe to the RSS so I figure I would do everyone a favour and serve the site sans advertising.
Over the Christmas period last year I was all about ‘making money online’. Pretty well every post was about some form of revenue generation and blah blah blah, it’s all a bunch of ‘me too’ content that was being said by every second blogger out there. Looking back now I can clearly see that I was just jumping aboard the copycat express with everyone other sucker out there.
A month or so ago I started supplementing my MMO articles with real life articles, the couple of recipes I’ve posted bring in more traffic than any other ‘insert big affiliate marketing website name here’ article that I was writing as has the Lite n Easy Diet progress articles that I’ve written. This is the direction I now want to take my blog in.
From here on out I’ll be writing various posts on things that are happening in my life, around home, around work, etc. I’ve got plenty going on with all the happenings at I’m With The Band, launching the new targeted pain relief device Pain Gone, getting my ‘how to start a business’ website together at A Business Is Born, the medical news website that I’m helping work out with Medical News, Stat! , and I’ve even had a few emails from people in the last week asking me if I could develop blog themes for their websites as they saw me advertising myself as Freelance Matt.
All these changes are effective immediately! As soon as I hit the ‘Publish’ button I’ll get started on the theme changes, it’s going to look a little different around here sometime in the next minute or so..
Oh and for those of you who are still interested in Making Money Online, and Making Money Blogging, I’ll still publish the odd article about how I’m doing this as I’m concentrating my advertising and what not on the other websites I own, I may even still publish income reports……
Cheers, Matt
The Best of The Week [TBOTW]
Well I’m only a day late posting this weeks TBOTW article, I have excuses and each one is better than the last..hehe Anyway, no need for a long winded introduction this week, let’s get straight to the list!
Here we go, and in no particular order;
10 Signs That Your Blog Is On The Right Track by Daily Blog Tips - Starting a new blog or growing an existing one can certainly be frustrating, as it may seem like you are not on pace to achieve your goals. Like anything worthwhile, building a solid and effective blog will take some time and hard work. Read more..
The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers by The Blog Entrepreneur - If you are going to be successful in the blogging world or really at anything then you need to learn to play to your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. This sounds easy but in reality it can be incredibly difficult. Read more..
With Darren Rowse over at SXSW at the moment the guest posts have been coming through thick and fast on Problogger. There have been a few articles that I thought were great, this one would be the pick of the bunch for mine.
12 CPM Alternatives to Adsense by Problogger - Video content publishers face a unique capitalization challenge on the internet today. Sites that rely on new media for the bulk of their content are unable to earn as much from Adsense as those sites that feature more traditional written articles. Read more..
Anywired is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs to read, and with the rising number of people writing and selling ebooks over the last couple of months this article will give you a head start over the competition.
5 Short-Term Strategies for Building Long-Term eBook Sales by Anywired - What’s the #1 deterrent that keeps people from writing and selling their own eBook? According to the people who e-mail me for advice, it’s the so-called grandeur of the task. Read more..
and last but not least
Instant SEO boost using Google web history, 70 extra visitors a day by Seopher - SEO is a strange beast; you can try really hard to optimise a piece of content for the search engines only to have it sit in your archives, alone and unloved. Did you know that there’s an excellent SEO tool sitting right under your nose? Read more..
So there you go, the articles in my RSS feed that I either enjoyed reading the most or that I took the most useful information from.
As always feel free to suggest some articles or blogs that I should be reading and let me know if there’s anything here you liked by Digging or Stumbling this post.
Cheers, Matt
Income Report - February 2008
Time flies! Hard to believe that February has ended and that summer, in Australia at least, is over. Where has all the time gone?
This month has been pretty well a write-off in terms of this website. It’s almost been in a constant state of flux with the design changing dramatically as well as dropping a couple of advertising channels and completely changing the focus of how I monetize this website.
You’ll notice that I’ve dropped Bidvertiser and TTZ Media, basically they were earning nothing for me on this website so I dropped them from the adverts being served and instead have just kept the Bidvertiser referral button as I do have a couple of referrals and they’re basically the only income generators for me on Bidvertiser.
The other big change you’ll notice is that now I’m selling my advertising space through AdToll, and if you’re looking to place some advertisements on this blog I suggest you do so now while it’s so cheap! $0.40 for a 125px button, you cant beat that.
Voice 2 Page, more commonly know as Pay Per Play, went live this month. They had a lot of teething problems, in fact I still think they are having the odd issue with people gaming the system, but have started serving the odd audio advertisement to this website. Apparently they’re only serving a small number of websites at this stage, calling it a ‘controlled release’ but hopefully this website will start to receive a few more adverts this month.
This month I’ve also seen an increase in traffic, page views and even RSS subscribers. This is a big success for me as my subscriber level sat quite low for months and months and to increase around 400% in one month is huge, obviously I’m writing content that people are wanting to read.
Here’s the raw numbers as I didn’t get a chance to do the graphs before we jumped in the car this morning!
- Adsense - $8.88
- Bidvertiser - $0.05
- TTZ Media - $0.60
- Voice 2 Page - $0.33
- AdToll - $0.25
Total earnings from advertising - $10.20
Bit of a drop from last month’s income, however considering all the changes around here I’m not suprised.
Anyway, I’ll add the pretty graphs in as soon as I get back from the road trip as I know they’re the only reason you really read this report..hahaha
Cheers, Matt
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