Thursday, 6 March 2008

Blog Performance and Monetization Update: February 2008

Readership got a boost in January when I started promoting some of my "best of" posts using StumbleUpon. This had less effect in February when I'd gone through all my best posts and only promoted the three or four posts during the month that would probably appeal to a general audience. Visitors are now averaging around 100 per day (80-90 if I don't post new material, 110-120 when I post), and sometimes spikes up to 200-300 visits if a post is promoted using StumbleUpon.

Revenue from blogging has reduced to only $15-20 per month from Google AdSense. Although I haven't yet reached the $100 payment threshold, so I may never even see this money. Google recently sent me an email warning that they may revise the payment calculations as they had detected some traffic coming from "paid-to-surf" or similar sites. I can only guess this was due to a small amount of traffic that was coming from TrafficSwarm, where I had setup an account to get some extra people to visit the site. As far as I can tell, this only produced a handful of visitors each day, and none of them appear to have been clicking on the AdSense ads anyhow. I've now disabled the link from TrafficSwarm, so hopefully this will fix the potential angst with AdSense. I'll have to wait and see if my AdSense account balance is actually adjusted - it's currently sitting around $95, so I'm hoping to hit the magic '$100' threshold this month and get some income from AdSense in April.

PayPerPost no longer has any suitable opportunities for me to blog about - the drop in my Google PageRank to 0 makes this blog ineligible for most PayPerPost opportunities. The new PayPerPlay system went "live" last month (with very limited numbers of ads playing per site - my site got to play only 20 ads after 15,312 hits), and my grand total of accumulated payment due from PayPerPlay is only $0.07 - I doubt I'll ever see any payout from PayPerPlay! There are a few sponsored post offers coming through from Blogsvertise, but many of those aren't for services I'd be happy to write a neutral or positive post about, so I can't count on any revenue from sponsored posts in future.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

3 comments:

Andy said...

I am probably in the same situation as you....I did get some private ad deals in the last month which increased my earnings. But one these ad deals required an embedded link, which google does not like so my page rank went from 3 to 0. I did not realize the value of page rank unitl I saw my Pay Per Post and all the opportunities I had with a PR3 are gone (about 95%)! Like you Adsenses is not providing me much.

I do have a couple other affiliate programs I participate in like bidvertiser and adbrite - but not much revenue to speak.

I just did a review of Centro Properties based on a reader question - do you think it is worth buying at 0.34c as a short term trading play?

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

Centro certainly has the volatility to be a good trading play, but whether you'll make a profit going long or short depends entirely on timing/luck.

My mum had Centro as a long term investment since the 90s, but luckily she sold out completely early last year, before the price started to tank.

I did a trade when they initially dropped to around 40c - buying on the rebound at 60c and selling out around $1.00 for a nice profit. At 34c they could be worth buying as a recovery play, assuming they manage to stay liquid by selling off US assets and retaining their Australian shopping centres. If they had to sell off their Australian centres to stay afloat, they US assets could be severly devalued during a US recession, so they may just be delaying the inevitable.

As a trading play you'd have to be more focussed on trading patterns (and hence the psychology of other Centro investors/traders) rather than fundamentals. But any unexpected announcement could see you wrong-footed. Good luck.

Anonymous said...

How did your pr rank get reset to 0?

Please email me at johnbougearel@gmail.com

Thanks

John Bougearel
SuccessfulTradingTips.com