Where to from here?

I've been trying to make money online since April, with not much success at all.

The best survey site I've been using is Valued Opinions...with an $18 credit and $10.50 pending credit, I'll be able to walk away with $A30 in vouchers for my Christmas shopping.

Adsense has ended up best for advertising revenue on my blogs. Mainly because you can put it anywhere, and steadily reap the benefits. My current balance is $US18.21, pretty useless, considering I can't get the money until my balance reaches $US100. Its taken me six months to get this far, at this rate it will be another 2 years before I get paid!

So where to now? I've long since given up on getting traffic to my blogs from online communities like myspace and orkut. It was too time consuming, I got plenty of traffic, but no money. The next thing I tried was my own community search engines, Swickis like the one on this page. I've been getting a steady stream of traffic through them, but the income generated is still very low. I worked out I'd have to create 50 or more Swickis to get an Adsense cheque by next Christmas.

I'm heading for the job search sites. By my calculations they're a much better place to make some spare cash.

I Still Don't Get It.

I still don't get it. I'm just not making money out of this online venture. Not from Adsense, from Swickis I've created or from banner advertising.

I should explain what a Swicki is. Swickis are community search engines - you can target the results of the searches to go to the best sites for your topics. Immediately I created my first Swicki - the Joke Swicki, people suddenly started using it. The only problem was they didn't go anywhere near the advertising.

I think most people making money from advertising on blogs are cheating. Getting all their friends to click on their pages. I've been asking my friends not to click, but I'm still getting clicks in the last half of each month and not the first half. Are people trying to increase revenue in the second half to get paid at the end of the month? What's going on?

International Bloggers Day

Wednesday was International Bloggers Day.

To celebrate, I've decided to compile a list of my earnings to date.

1. Adsense. Current Balance $US2.65 . Google will pay only when the balance reaches $US100. Maybe I'll get a cheque in a few years.

2.
Clixgalore Affiliate Marketing. 40 Australian cents and 150 Indian Rupees.

3. Valued Opinions $AUS12.50 from three surveys. I can actually claim a $10 voucher!

4. Ciao surveys 1 survey @ about $4. Can't be claimed yet.

5. EmailCash 500 points, equivalent to about $AUS5. I need $31 to claim a reward. At this rate that would take a year. To be honest, EmailCash isn't really a survey site. Its a loyalty program. The best way of earning points from EmailCash is to buy things from their partner sites.

6. WhatDoYouThink 723 points, which can get me a $20 BBs coffee voucher. Otherwise I have to wait another year until I get above 1000 points for any other rewards. Anyone ever heard of BBs coffee?


And the winner so far is... Valued Opinions. What a pity they don't have an Affiliate program, so I can increase my revenue. Maybe its because they don't need one.

Making 12 cents with Adsense

Adsense wouldn't advertise on this Blog, so I created a new one. JokeVault . As soon as I started posting to it, people started reading! My free counter from Bravenet started ticking, before I had even told anyone it existed. It turns out that whenever its advertised as updated on blogspot, people come to read it.
Good, I have some visitors, now for the revenue. I reapplied for Adsense and was accepted. Contextual ads started appearing. Great. Only problem is, its not making any money. My google adsense account is currently listing about 600 page impressions (thats 600 times the ad has been viewed) and I've only got 12 cents in my Adsense account. To earn $10 I would need 50000 page impressions. To earn $1000 I would need 5 million ad views. Is it just me, or is there a problem here?

Not advertising with Adsense

Adsense is a wonderful scheme from Google for putting their advertisements all over everyone else's web sites at their advertisers' expense. Apparently the quickest and easiest way to get adsense is to set up a blog here on Blogger and apply from here first. I did, but Google refused on the grounds of "Page Type".

"Page type: We currently don't accept websites that offer incentives
(monetary or point-based) to users or third-party beneficiaries for
online activity including, but not limited to, clicking on ads or
links, performing searches, surfing websites, reading emails, or
completing surveys."

I changed the blog. Got rid of bits talking about exactly how much money you can make from resource-a-day. Got rid of a couple of other links. Applied again.
Same answer.
I give up. Google can keep their enormous adverising revenue away from this Blog.