YouTube has just met its ultimate destruction. Man, it’s mayhem.
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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.
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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.
Kontera can make you money in your sleep if you have a blog or website with a huge number of traffic, something like 24,000 visitors a day.
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.
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American Idol Season 8’s runner-up Adam Lambert is coming up with an album. Is there a substance beyond the make-up? Listen for yourself.
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After shooting at arm’s length with compact cameras for many years I finally made the plunge and bought myself a DSLR recently.
Now I can shoot at eye level and hear the mechanical shutter clicking away very close to my ears, something which I had been longing for and a welcome change from the less than uplifting sound of electronic shutter in point and shoot cameras.
The purchase left a big hole in my pocket which I soon forgot because I really liked the camera.
It’s not a Canon or a Nikon, but a Pentax. A K-7 which has a 14.6 megapixel CMOS sensor, HD video, 5.2 fps continuous shooting, magnesium alloy body, weather sealed (someone left his K-7 in the cold Alaskan rain for two hours and it still worked fine), 1/8000s shutter speed, new dust removal system, creative digital art filters… and many others.
Why Pentax? Well, for one thing, maybe it’s because of personal reason. My first SLR camera was a Pentax Spotmatic which I bought from a friend way back in late 1980’s. I had taken many film photographs with it, and even fell from a speeding motorcycle with the camera slung over my shoulder.
For another, it is really due to practical reasons. If I had bought a Nikon or a Canon with similar features, it would have cost me up to RM10,000. As it turned out, I “only” needed to spend RM7,500 for the body and a 18-250mm Pentax lens, a fast 4MB SDHC card, a lens protector as well as a LCD screen protector.
This picture is among the earliest ones I’ve taken with the K-7. There are several others which I posted on my photoblog but suffice to say I am satisfied with the image quality.
The K-7 is slightly noisier at ISO 1600 and above compared to its competitors, the Canon EOS 7D and Nikon D300s, but I really don’t mind because I shoot mostly in ISO 200.
What I like about Pentax K-7:
- Weather resistant body. You cannot dunk it in water by please feel free to shoot even in pouring rain.
- Superb image quality
- Solid feel
- Digital art filters and if tweaked properly, can mimic the effect of a lomo camera
- Dedicated RAW button
- In-body shake reduction so every lens attached to it is stabilised against camera shake
- Compatible with any — and I mean any — Pentax lens, even those produced in the film era
- In-camera barrel distortion correction
- HD video at 30fps
- Adjustable white balance to suit a photographer’s preference
What I do not mind about the K-7:
- 5.2 fps is slower than Canon 7D’s 8fps or Nikon D300s 7fps but it is fast enough for my purpose
- Noisier at higher ISO level but like I said, I seldom shoot at high ISO
- You can hear the sound of in-body focusing motor as you focus on a subject
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Despite a prolonged neglect, this blog has been contributing in a small way to the bottomline and each time it did so, I made a solemn promise to reward it with a blog entry — a promise which, like many other promises made by mortals, has remained a promise.
But this month I want to make good of the promise I made and try to blog an average of one entry a day throughout the month of November and see how it can contribute to the overall activities of “blogging for money”.
It is not going to be a small undertaking as not only will I blog here on a daily basis, I will also do so on two of my other blogs, making it 90 entries all together this month.
The things is I need to know. I need to know if doing so will result in some improvements to the overall income, which should be the case, logically.
So, irrespective of whether you are blogging because of pure passion or because of the lure of commercial success — even more so if its is for both reasons — one thing you had better do on a regular basis is to reward your blog regularly instead of waiting for the blog to reward you.
Make sense? I does to me. See you tomorrow for the third entry of the month.
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While analysing the traffic to my photography blog recently, I found that some of them came from a particular website I never heard of, called Addict-o-Matic.
Out of curiosity, I went to the website, and lo and behold, a new kind of Internet search experience awaits, an “out of this Google world” kind of experience.
When you enter a search on Addict-o-matic, it immediately pulls in the latest buzz related to the search term from numerous sources such as Twitter, Bing news, Google blog search, Digg, Friendfeed, Twingly blog search, Tweetmeme links, Bloglines, Ask.com news, Flickr, Technorati, Wikio, Yahoo web search, Wordpress.com, Blinkx and YouTube.
It will not replace legacy search engines like Google or Yahoo or MSN but is useful if you want to get a feel of the buzz relating to a certain term. Try it out at Addictomatic.com.
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Which Hindi song is your favourite? Mine has got to be “Mere Man Ki Ganga” from the movie “Sangam”.
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If I were a full time blogger earning a living off the Internet, I would be very worried by now. I would be very concerned about how would I pay the bill, put food on the table, not to mention coping with a change in lifestyle — for the worse.
Barb Wire
Everything seems to he heading south, for me at least, in the past two months.
I’ve done all the things I normally do but the revenue, despite being already small as it is, keeps on sinking and now nearing the bottomline.
It’s like going through a field of bard wire. You know where you are going, you see the direction and the horizon but you just could not cover a good distance the way things used to be.
Is CPC dying?
CPC is my main type of monetisation, as it is the easiest to implement. You install the code and concentrate on creating content for the blog and hopefully there will be hordes of visitors coming and some of them attracted to the ads and clicking on them.
CPC, of course, stands for cost per click, meaning you get paid each time a visitor click on the ads displayed on your website or blog.
Google Adsense is a type of CPC ad, so is Chitika, Kontera and Infolinks — all of which are implemented across several of my blogs.
But still, things seems to be going down. Some say you don’t make anything by going the easiest way. How true!
24,000 daily visitors not enough?
In my previous post, “The Critical Mass You Need To Make Money Online“, I mentioned that 24,000 daily visitors is the magic number a blogger needs to achieve before he or she can quit his or her day job and become a full time blogger.
This is based on my own experience of making at least US$1.50 from 240 visitors a day. The number of visitors to one of my blogs is of course more than 240.
But things are not quite the same nowadays. I could no longer achieve the same average from the same number of visitors. Is CPC dying?
Ad blindness
According to a New York Times article, net surfers a now becoming more reluctant to click on ads.
Quoting a study by research firm comScore, it reported that the proportion of American Internet users clicking on display ads at least once a month fell to 16 percent from 32 percent over the 20-month period ending in March.
This is certainly bad news for CPC publishers. It seems they need to look elsewhere if they ever hope of making a good earning online.
I am certainly looking at all the options available, while at the same time keep on maintaining my better blog out of passion for the topics I am writing about.
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Freemind
My friend Joe said in an e-mail I received recently he often wondered how I could manage with so many blogsites when he struggled with only one.
While it is still true that I maintain several blogs, including this one, the sad fact is, I no longer able to write as often as I wanted to, or should, in each of the blogs.
I actually maintain five blogs but two of them have been idling for some months now while two are still breathing but barely alive.
Jaxon’s Review — this blog — is one of the blogs which is breathing but barely alive; which is a pity because the only way a blog can thrive in the cyberspace is by having fresh content on a regular basis, or at least three posts a week.
Map your mind
My photography blog is of course my most active blog. Even then, I’m struggling to keep up the need to blog day in and day out. Thankfully, there is a way brainstorm fresh content on a regular basis and the technique is called mind mapping.
Wikipedia defines mind map as: “… a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.”
In the old days you mind map with paper and pen. In this high tech era, you can use Freemind. The video below is an excellent tutorial on how to use the software so I need not explain it in writing.
Mind mapping has been useful for me in generating content ideas for the photoblog.
Mind mapping blog projects... click for larger view
Here is an example of how I mind-map the content for the blogs I am currently running. It is still in its early stage but you get the idea.
Do you mind map? Download Freemind here.
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