It’s been quite a while since I last blog here. The last time I posted an entry was on Nov 27 last year. That’s more than two months ago. Some of you might think I’ve given up blogging. Well, far from it. Here are some of the reasons why this blog has been dormant during the past two months or so:
1. I was in Borneo the whole of December last year and not once did I have the chance to log on to the Internet.
2. I actually wanted to kill this blog by letting the domain to expire but now thought the better of it. This domain comes free with this blog’s hosting plan.
3. I fell ill, I mean, very ill, during the first two weeks of January, so obviously blogging had to take a backseat.
4. After I recovered from my illness, I busied myself setting up several experimental niche blogs to see the response. By the way, how do you know if you have hit a profitable niche? One straight-forward way to find out is this: set up a blog on a specific topic, write several keyword rich articles on the topic for about two weeks and see if there’s any traffic coming into the blog. If you see the traffic coming — several hundreds will be enough for evaluation purposes — after two weeks, and half of them are from the United States and Europe, then you have hit a good niche!
5. I was busy maintaining my better-performing blog; can’t afford to lose that one.
6. I’ve lost my blogging momentum here, which I’m now trying to regain by writing this entry. Posting an entry, any entry at all, even a nonsensical one, is one of the ways to kick-start a dormant blog.
That’s all for now folks. I’ll be seeing you here more often from now on
If you are running Chitika Ads or planning to do so, one thing you should consider carefully is ad placement.
I am currently running Chitika ads across several of my blogs, including this one, testing the ad placement of each one in relation to Google Adsense ads. Finally, I found that the best way to display Chitika ads and Google Adsense together is by placing them just after the blog title, see screenshot below:
Chitika-Adsense ads placement
Improved conversion
I notice that there is an improvement in the click through rate of both ads by between 40-60 per cent compared to putting them as skyscraper banners in sidebars.
Chitika ads are special in that they only target search engine traffic from the United States, Canada as well as some selected countries. They won’t appear to normal blog visitors or those coming from countries other than the selected ones.
Those who come to this blog entry from this blog’s front page or from non-selected countries will only be able to see the Google Ads, because Chitika will be hidden, see screenshot below:
Chitika ad collapses into nothing
By the way, this is also one of the most effective ad placement for Adsense.
How did I manage to arrange these ads?
Quite easily. Both ads will be automatically inserted in all posts — past, present and future — thanks to a minor customisation I’ve done with the Thesis Wordpress theme, the one I’m currently using. Not sure if I can do the same with other Wordpress themes though.
Google is expected to roll out its PC operating system, Chrome, next week, according to TechCrunch.
Quoting a reliable source, TechCrunch said on Friday that the operating system, which Google announced in July, will become available for download within a week.
So, would you try out Chrome or stick to either Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s Mac OS?
Lightroom 3 Beta interface... click for larger image
The version 3 of one of the most powerful photo editing software, Lightroom, is now available for download from adobe. Lightroom 3 is now on beta and Adobe is providing the software for free throughout the trial version, here.
Adobe says the beta version is to give users the opportunity “to evaluate a select portion of the new features planned for Lightroom 3, to help the team discover and address issues if any, and to send feedback that the Lightroom team can use to make Lightroom 3 an even better digital darkroom and more efficient assistant for you.”
I’ve recently downloaded the software and played with it. Here are the results. The first picture is the original:
I am a subscriber to Yaro Starak’s newsletter and an avid reader of his Entrepreneurs-Journey.com blog. I gain a lot of inspiration from people like him and the people whom he blogged about.
Recently, Yaro blogged about a man, Pat Flynn, who lost his job as an architect due to the economic crisis. Not wanting to let the retrenchment bring him down, Pat decided to start an Internet business and he now earns over US$200,000 a year.
Blogging, to a large extent, revolutionises the way people acquire knowledge.
By continuously blogging about a certain topic, for instance, it is possible for a person to become knowledgeable on the matter.
For instance, pick any topic you have an interest in exploring and learning, and start a blog dedicated to the subject and challenge yourself to at least come up with three blog posts a week on the subject.
Chances are, unless you already have a good grasp of the issue, by the third month you will run out of ideas.
Blogging forces you to read, interact and explore
It is important that you choose a topic that interest you because if you are not interested in it, it is likely that you stop blogging when the going gets tough.
Your interest in a topic is what keeps you going, spurring you to read and search for information, or else you would have nothing to blog about and the young blog will die a sure premature death.
The reading and researching will eventually lead you to others who are similarly interested in the topic you are blogging about; and before you know it, you are caught in a universe of information related to your blog topic.
You may not become an expert on the issue in its true sense because of the nature of the learning process but the knowledge will be enough tho keep the blog going.
And having knowledge on a topic is extremely important when one maintains a niche blog.
First thing first, via SP Blogger, I came to know that PayPal account holders in Malaysia can now withdraw their PayPal funds from any bank in Malaysia, a good news indeed for account holders in the country.
I’ve been a PayPal users for several years now and use it mainly to receive payments from some of my blogging activities and to purchase items online so that I don’t need to pay them with credit card.
I had accumulated some money in there but had used up most of it to buy all sorts of things including several online courses on Internet marketing and how to make money online and whatnot (though not all of them useful).
I’ve also bought a Thesis developer’s option blog theme, e-books and more e-books on how to make money blogging (and still I haven’t made a decent amount) and so on, that the fund is almost gone now.
Now that it is easier to withdraw the PayPal money, I shall stop all the unnecessary purchases and let the fund replenish itself.
On to another matter, via Mashable, here is an interview with PayPal president Scott Thompson providing a glimpse of what the future holds for PayPal.
The picture below shows part of a chart from my Kontera account, tracking the day-to-day performance up to Nov 2, that was three days ago.
Kontera Performance Chart
As you can see the income fluctuates and it fluctuates ugly. I won’t show the range, in terms of dollars and cents, in which the fluctuation takes place but those familiar with Kontera will know it fluctuates quite on the low side.
Still, there is an income to be made and the basic principle of making money online remains — the more the traffic the higher the revenue, and CPC contextual link ads like Kontera is no exception.
Set it up and forget it
Kontera ads is easy to implement. One only needs to paste the code at appropriate place, usually at the footer if it’s a blog, and concentrate on creating content and bringing in the traffic.
It won’t make you rich but with that amount of traffic, and with the help of your other monetisation methods, it can help you quit your job; that is if you hate your job because it sucks.
