Free Fun For All

I don't know about you, but I've been following the advice of every crackpot "Hey-I'm-Not-A-Guru" Guru in the Make Money Online Blogosphere for a while now. Most of them espouse the keeping track of your blog traffic through analyzing clicks and visits and what not. I have statistics from a FireStats plugin on most of my blogs. I also have built-in stats from my web host, LUNARPAGES.


The thing is: I can't believe a single number from any of them because they are all telling me different things! MyBlogLog tells me I get 2 MyBlogLog users per day. FireStats says 20 per day. BlogRush says I have upwards of 3000 impressions. Ebay Partner Network says the same thing for the last 3 weeks 13 clicks for one of my campaigns, no sales while Google Adwords says I'm getting 2-5 clicks every day for that site. Adsense is telling me I'm getting 78 impressions today for all my "channels."

It's a damn shell game people! It all ads up to me not getting any cash in my pockets. I'm dipping my feet into the AdWords PPC game now and I just don't understand how they can blatantly disregard my daily budget day after day! They have some kind of thing called "over-delivery" where they will exceed my budget by 20% as a favor to me to drive more traffic. Yeah right. Their 20% turned out to be about 2000% a few days ago.

I guess, like everything else on the Web, a basic truth still exists. It held true in 1994 when I started building websites with html and FrontPage and it holds true today: Don't believe everything you read! Keep an eye on your stats but don't be a slave to them like me. The only true stat that you can probably bet on is your bank account balance. Mine's a bit sad now. Maybe it'll make me happy in a few days when Pay day and Mista BOOSH's rebates start flowing in.

So watch out, the numbers lie. This blog won't. I wouldn't steer you wrong. Now, your driveway looks a little worn out. You need me to resurface it? I can give you a fair price. How 'bout you just GIMMEADOLLAH!!! ;)

In this day and age of supercomputer cellphones, is there still a demand for PDAs? Judging from online sales, the answer is most definitely, "YES." One of the most powerful platforms ever produced was the Palm Tungsten line of PDAs. They form the basis for all Treo and Centro phones on the market today. Go ahead and get one of these powerful toys now at TUNGSTENSATOZ.

It's time to get off our aiishes and get to work on our BANS stores if you haven't already. The EBAY Partner Network is up and ready to go. That means that if you haven't done your updating on your BANS now, you'll be screwed once the switchover takes place in two weeks. If you were using the Ebay Flexible Destination Tool, then it's high time you redid all your links with the new EBay Partner Network stuff. Like any new doodad, it will pay to RTFM when you start out. Making the campaigns is the key step that you must master if you are going to plug Ebay crap in all over the web.
I had quite a few BANS sites sitting around doing nothing and also misconfigured for the new version of BANS. Version 3.0 is a pretty hefty upgrade. From all appearances, it looks like the bugs and misfires that accompanied this thing in its first outing are gone. There's some meta-tagging and better looking templates in the update. If you search around, you can find some pretty cool looking free templates for the new version as well. So get ready for war. Let this be the hour that we draw our BANS together. Fell deeds awake. Now for Wrath, now for Ruin, and a Bunch Of Money in Our Pockets!

For all of us on the BANS Bandwagon, today hit us like a shock. Ebay is disassociating itself from Commission Junction on April 1st. Wait... April Fools Day??!?! Is it a trick? No, it's pretty much confirmed and I'll supply the link to the Ebay Affiliate Blog so you can read for yourself.

 

At first, this seemed like really bad news. The whole Build a Niche Store system relies on CJ to track your earnings and get paid. Once I read that the BANS boys already knew about this and were making changes to their system, I breathed a lot easier.

 

I guess the only "gotcha" here is that you'll have to reapply to the affiliate program. Some of us were able to do this with no problems. Others had to jump through a lot of hoops. I just hope that a big aiish hoop doesn't get in my way of earning my measly few pennies through BANS.

 

Here's the link to EBAY.

 

I've decided to remove the banner ads from Commission Junction on all my blogs. Unfortunately, in this day and age, people are just ignoring banners and buttons like the Plague. No use in annoying the 4 of you that read this damn blog with useless crap. I'm putting back adsense to see if it will start make me money again after it "Smart Priced" me. Smart Pricing is when Google sees that the adsense units on your page are worth squat so they don't pay squat even if the one sucker/err valued reader of the blog clicks and converts on an ad. My problem was that I had all these CJ banners taking up space. So I'm going to keep with contextual ads and b0nes-afied affiliate links that are tied to my ClickBank account.

 

From now on, anything I hawk on here is something I truly believe in as either, a money making tool e.g. Make Money With Credit Cards or a system like Web2.0 Wealth Unleashed. Of course, the adsense is a straight up scam... unlike my DONATE button! Gimmie a Dollah! Please?? :)

 

As you can tell, I've taken the site to the world of Wordpress 2.3.3. I was a loooong time user of b2evolution. Only recently have I seriously dabbled in Wordpress but after buying the Alex Sysoef Web2.0 Wealth Unleashed Product, I became a believer. Also, looking at all the Web2.0, MakeMoney, SEO, EZ Dollahz 4U bullcrap floating around the net, it became apparent that all of the research, fake and otherwise legit was based on Wordpress as a blogging system. I think if you are going down this path, Wordpress(WP) is probably the way to go. At the very least, if you don't go with WP, then try and find a widgetized system. b2evolution has a widget friendly version out now.

 

Still, going with WP will probably be the best bet in the long run. If you're new to this, I'd highly recommend the Web2.0 Wealth Unleashed thingy. He's got a turn-key website ready to go, as well as very well done videos. He goes kind of quickly through them but they are still great tools if you are an advanced Newbie like me! At the very least, check out his website, HOWTOSPOTER.

 

This is probably bad Internet marketing typing all this crap for free, but I thought I'd let the three of you who are regular visitors know why I changed things up. I'll be able try out new money making crap with this new toy so looky looky here in the future!

It's possible to learn how to make money from the Internet, but NOT from a Jedi. Only an evil Sith could lure your online readers into credit card debt land. Hey, we gotta make a buck somehow right?

Anyway, you may be able to score a few pennies here and there by hawking your own credit card site. And, of course, they'd just *love* you to order your own credit cards through your site as well. Kinda like a bartender getting drunk on his own stuff.

Try it out and see if you get any hits from it.

The Emperor would be pleased!

Don't worry. Getting "BANS'ed" isn't a bad thing. If I can believe what I read about this thing (which for about 99.9999% of this "Make EZ Money on Da Web!" crap I can't!) BANS is the way to go to make money through ebay affiliate sales.



BANS = Build a Niche Store. Basically, you find a niche, a subject/hobby/interest that you think people will be searching for on ebay e.g. Bilbo Baggins Buttons. Just enter your Bilbo Baggins keywords into the handy dandy software and presto: you have a ready made web store. All ebay auctions concerning Bilbo Baggins Buttons will show up in your SEO, Web 2.0, insert-your-slick-make-money-on-the-web-word-here, "store." Sounds like a good idea. OK, I'm sure it's a bit more difficult than "presto" but BANS seems to be a bit more guaranteed cash than some of the other affiliate methods out there. I know for a fact that ebay is still the *only* thing filling up my paypal coffers. My old crap is gold to some folks!

Once I scrape up a few pennies, I'm going to try this puppy out for myself. I'm pretty sure there's a huge market for "slightly used but thoroughly sterilzed blowup dolls" on ebay! Don't everybody rush to steal my niche at once!

I've pretty much gone balls out on this social networking stuff over the years so my "goto's" have been slashdot, digg and myspace for the most part. None of these things have done anything in the way of $$$ in my pocket though! Now, along comes XIMMY. If you've seen digg.com or, even better, mixx.com then you'll immediately recognize the drill on XIMMY. The difference is that you get PAID. You get paid for signing up, and then if other folks follow your lead, you get paid for them. You also get "points" for submitting and commenting on stories as well as if those stories get promoted to the front page of the site. Once you get enough points, you can transfer those things into real dollars to your paypal account.

Oh yeah, don't forget to sign up as an affiliate. That's where you get the signup dollars as well as widgets to throw on your blogs. I'll be doing that shortly and hopefully some freaks will sign up and we'll all start makin' B0NES!

It's yet another way to pour some b0nes into my pocket! Brring.com is beta testing putting ads onto your incoming calls. Basically, you sign up, get a phone number and point one of your real numbers to that. Now you can send everyone your "Brring" number and they will listen to a short ad then get transferred to your real number. Then it's Mo money mo money mo money for you!! Actually, more like a nickel every call to the brring number.

Frankly, I wouldn't subject any of my friends, family, co-workers to this nonsense. But, if I'm at the mall and signing up to win the shiny new car or shopping online, heck ya. Put the Brring number on the SPAM bait and wait for the shiny nickels to roll in. The payout level is $10 so you should see some cash pretty quick.

It's been about a week and I've come to a horrifying conclusion: There's no money to be made on the Internet for small time bloggers such as myself. Maybe I should qualify that by saying, there's no EASY money to be made by small timers. As much as the Get-Rich-Quick ebooks tout all of their "no-brainer" strategies, it's all for naught.

I'm going to have to drench my poor ISP with thousands and millions of hits so that I can make enough clicks to retire on a tiny Greek Island with my much too young EuroGirlfriend in tow. I've followed some directions on how to direct traffic. The BlogRush thing has worked to a certain extent. I've seen a couple of strangers pass on by and my articles are getting shown on a few thousand other sites. I've tried FeedBurner as well. There are others out there that I've tried. I've even linked to myself but felt dirty about doing that in front of everyone on the Internet!>:XX

I haven't seen ONE FLIPPING RED CENT in any of my accounts as a result of blogging for money. The only reliable way I've been making change has been to sell my crap on EBAY. I guess because that's about as big time "brick and mortar" as you're going to get on the Internet. I have to be more careful about shipping costs though. I've screwed myself a few times in some of my recent auctions. I may have to go to a flat rate that's higher for some folks to recoup my losses.

Any way, it's not like all these BS "Gurus" and "Experts" are saying. A big part of these earnings models is predicated on the idea that people click on ads and buy crap on the Internet. THAT'S NOT TRUE. Maybe if you have enough traffic, 1 out of 10,000 people will click on an ad and buy crap. Another part is to drive the traffic to your for-pay articles, which in turn should make the hosting company money through all of those clicks and you some sweet commission money.

Well, a week in and all I've got to show for it is three nice new blogs, a bunch of ads and affiliate links, and a folder chock full of ebooks and videos about setting up your site for EZ monetization and riches! Fooey! I will end this as I always do by tenderly begging you do donate a dollar to my Cause for the Pause by clicking on my "Donate" button. In other words: GIMMEADOLLAH FOO!!!!