Can’t Get Rich

A long time ago, I offered three free 125×125 ad spots on my sidebar. I updated them manually on a weekly basis, and eventually got rid of them because they were too much of a hassle. Well, I’ve found a new way to offer those spots again, and I just might make a few bucks with it too.

What it it?

A friend of mine introduced me to an interesting ad network: Project Wonderful. They use what they call an ‘infinite auction’ system to accept and place ads. It’s pretty simple how it works: Let’s say I have a 125×125 ad spot available on my site. One of my readers decides they’d like to place their ad there, so they bid $0/day on that spot for one week. As long as nobody bids higher than them, they get that spot all week. Hooray for free ad space.

But how do you make money?

Well, let’s say that two days into that ad being shown, another reader decides that he wants that spot. He’s willing to pay $0.25 per day for the ad, and bids accordingly. Since he’s now the high bidder, he immediately gets control of the ad spot. After 12 hours, the first reader decides that he’s willing to pay for that spot, and bids $1 per day. He gets control of the ad space, and since my other reader only had the spot for 12 hours, it only costs him $0.12 (or half a day at $0.25 per day). If that doesn’t make any sense to you, take a look at their graphical tutorial. It’s an interesting system, and since you’re paying for the time it’s showing (instead of clicks or impressions), it seems to be pretty much fraud-proof.

Oh yeah, they pay via paypal, and the minimum payout is $10. Not bad.

Is it effective?

Prices seem pretty cheap right now. After playing with the search options for a bit, I found a few sites that get tens of thousands of hits per day costing as low as $0.50 per day. Not bad if you want a little exposure (they’re not just limited to 125×125 ad spots either. You can have skyscraper ads, leaderboard ads, etc).

I’m jumping on board

I have no idea why this service hasn’t caught on in the “make money online” blogging niche yet. It seems like most of the big advertisers so far are webcomics. Oh well, I’ve submitted this site for approval, so you should expect to see a few ads pop up in the sidebar within the next week.

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Little podcast update:  It may or may not happen this weekend.  If it does, great.  If not, I’ll put it up as soon as I finish it.

This week’s fumbling is the result of my life becoming a good deal more chaotic.  My work schedule has changed, and I’ve been fighting with my university all week.  It seems that they’re switching to a new computer system, and in the process, losing all of my registration data.  Repeatedly.  I ended up having to go in and do it the old fashioned way (paper and pen is so last century), so at least that’s settled.

Then, my roommate had to go and have a birthday bar crawl.  That was an interesting night (power went out a few times due to thunderstorms).

I know, I’m just making excuses.  The truth is, I’m terrible at managing my schedule.  I’ll get on top of things and do my best to get the podcast out on Saturday.  In any case, I’ll be interviewing another guy from Wickedfire, one who has a habit of churning out interesting marketing tips.  Should be a good interview, I’ll try not to disappoint.

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Yeesh. I guess some of you didn’t like yesterday’s post. Seeing as how a lot of you are relatively new readers (1 month or less), I think it’s time for me to remind everybody why I created this site.

Back when I started (Novemeber ‘07), I was sick to death of all of the overly-optimistic ‘make money online’ blogs. Every time a new blogging service or product was released, everybody would immediately proclaim it to be the best thing since Wordpress and encourage people to buy/try it. I was sick of seeing the same praise coming from every single blog out there, so I decided to create a site that was the polar opposite: I would take every new product and service and explain why it sucks, what was wrong with it, and why you shouldn’t use it. Here are a few examples:

• Why BlogRush Sucks
• Why Digg Sucks
• Why Pixel Ads Suck
• Why Proxies Suck
• Why Survey Sites Suck
• Why FreeRice Sucks
• Why Writing for a News Site Sucks
• Why Paid Wikis Suck
• Why BANS Sucks
• Why Webhosting Sucks
• Why Directories Suck
• Why Entrecard Sucks
• Why Googletime Sucks

Are you guys seeing a common theme yet? All of those posts came from November through January. I could go on, but the list would be enormous.

The point that I’m trying to make here is this: being negative is my thing. While the rest of the Internet seems to think that everything is puppies and lollipops, there’s only a small handful of us who actively hate everything. Honestly, I hope that everybody who signs up for UberCamp makes a billion dollars and ends up riding around in zeppelins made of money. That being said, I can’t abandon my writing style, so I’ll continue to nitpick and point out everything that’s wrong with the idea.

Remember guys, I’m a foil.  I’m here to offer a different perspective on things.  If you don’t agree with my opinions, then start a blog and share your own.

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I never really mess with tags on my posts. I gave up with SEO a long time ago (around the time I got slapped with a PR0), and haven’t really bothered with it since. Well, it’s time for a change. I’ve decided that there might just be something to that whole ‘organic traffic’ thing, so I’ve decided to atone for my SEO sins and try to get this site indexed on Google again. I’ve already gone through and made some changes to my linkbacks, so this site is now 100% compliant with Google’s standards (as far as I can tell). I followed Collin’s instructions on how to get your pagerank back, including sending an email to Google letting them know that I’ve recognized the error of my ways, and humbly requesting a reconsideration. I’m expecting a nice juicy PR update any day now.

That just leaves one thing that I’ve been neglecting - tags. I haven’t added tags to a post in months. I certainly didn’t want to go back through all 240 of my posts, as that would take forever. Luckily for me, someone on Wickedfire solved my problem for me: Tagaroo.

Slow, yet awesome

Tagaroo is a nice little plugin that actively scans your posts and suggests tags. Using it, it only took me about an hour or two to go back through all of my posts and get everything updated. It’s not the most accurate thing in the world, but it does pick up on common themes in your posts, so it saves you at least a little effort.

The only downside that I can see with this plugin is that it will sloooooow your interface down. I’m not sure if it’s because of some coding issue, or that Firefox sometimes leaks memory like a sieve. In any case, it wasn’t a big enough problem that I had to stop using it. I’d recommend giving it a try.

Tags + PR = Traffic?

I’ve got good tags, a decent sitemap, and lots of content. Now all I need is for Google to un-banish me from PR0 hell, and hopefully I’ll be able to attract a little more attention. I’d really like to start ranking for terms like “SEO podcast”, “affiliate marketing podcast”, “blogging podcast”, and stuff like that. Here’s hoping.

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Every once in awhile, it’s nice to take a closer look at your analytics page. Here are a few of the more interesting things I’ve picked out of the last month of my statistics:

Why are you still using Internet Explorer?

Look at this:

Come on people, why are you still using IE? It’s slow, it has more security vulnerabilities than any other modern browser, and it just plain sucks. Go get Firefox. Either that, or give me a good reason why anybody should still be using IE.

Not optimized for tiny screens

Here’s a shocker:

That’s from the OS page. People are visiting this site from hand-held devices. I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. This site must like like total crap on a screen that small. Oh well, to each his own.

Something surprising

An article I wrote six months ago seems to be ranking #2 when you search for the name of a particular online store:

Back when I wrote that article, they’d only sold 400 somethings. Six months later, they’ve sold over 10,000. Congrats guys.

Diamond in the rough

I’ll leave you guys with this keyword that’s brought two people to my site:

If that’s not a reason to try to get rich, then I don’t know what is.

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