I'm moving!

This blog will not be updated (much) any longer, I'll be posting over at OSWorld.biz from now on. Myself and Gary agreed that there was no point in both blogging about the same topics in seperate places, when we could pool our resources a bit, and have just the one really good blog.

See this post for more information.

I may still use this blog to post my AIS stats, we'll see...

An Annoying Thing

Is setting up an Adsense site and forgetting to set up a channel for it in Adsense. Then several weeks later, getting untracable clicks :-(

May AIS Earnings

This post dedicated to Tom and Empress ;-)

Adsense: $119.02 [More than double my April Adsense income!]
Nothing else to report... although just Adsense this month beat my entire AIS earnings for last month.

I had my first actual Paypal payment from Dreamhost at the start of May - for $181.45 - I believe I'm owed another one today.

Adsense

I launched several new sites in April, and they got indexes and started making money in May.
I have launched a number of new sites this month too - now it's time to play the waiting game...

What's The Plan?

June's main plan should probably be to find a new product AIS to sell, and either a new affiliat eproduct to sell, or somewhere else to promote Dreamhost

Is Adsense Bad For Search Engine Rankings?

Earlier this month, I read a post on Tom's "Nothing-Ventured" about whether it's a good idea to add Adsense to your Adsense AIS sites right from the start, or to let them get indexed first.

At the time, I couldn't see any benefit to this.

So how is the “wait 6 months to add Adsense” method any better than being in the Google sandbox for 6 months?

At least with the Adsense there from the start you can still earn from other SEs while you’re waiting for G.

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense - a new site generally wouldn't have Adsense on it, unless it was designed simply to display Adsense, and the SEs know this. I have created a new site to test Tom's theory on.

However, having to go through all of my sites to add Adsense code to them later doesn't sound like much fun, and the whole point of AIS is little/no ongoing work, so I wrote a little PHP script to do the work for me.

You'll have to edit the second line - it controls the date on which the Adsense will start showing. In this example, the 28th May 2006.

<?php
if ( time() >= mktime(0, 0, 0, 5, 28, 2006) ) { 
    ?> 
    Your Adsense code goes here. 
    <?php
}
else {
    ?>
    You could display some alternative content here 
    (affiliate links etc) or just leave it blank. 
    <?php
} 
?>

Offline Advertising

Tom over at Nothing Ventured has posted an article about advertising your AIS sites offline

This is something I've been thinking about doing recently, so this article is very useful to me - giving an overview of the pros and cons of this advertising method.

People are starting to realise that they might need to think “outside the box” if they want to make significant money. And one of the ways that people might be able to do that is by bringing in visitors from the ‘real world’.

Update to "How Many Adsense Blocks"

I've noticed that another useful side effect of my "less Adsense blocks" experiment seems to be that the ads on the site I'm trying it on now seem to be a lot more relevant to the site's topic. This means that not only should it be displaying higher paid ads, but the CTR seems to have actually gone up!

Of course, it's early days yet, so this may just be a fluke. Will keep track of it over a longer time span...

How Many Adsense Blocks?

The "average" Adsense AIS site seems to have as many Adsense blocks as possible all over it. Hey - more chance to get a click, right?

However - consider how the Adwords system works, with the higher bidding advertisers getting better exposure, rather than all advertisers paying the same amount. Would you prefer to have 12 potential ad links, with some worth just $0.01, or 4 highly targetted, high value links in a prime position on the page?

I'm currently testing this with a few of my sites - expecting a lower CTR, but hopefully higher actual earnings.

Yet More Cheap Domains

Thanks to jimk for this (posted in the comments of my last cheap domains post):

Looks like RegisterFly are having another $0.60 .info domain sale this Friday.

PROMOTION HAS ENDED
The SUPERINFO special was a complete success. Do the incredible response we will be running this promotion again from 7:00 AM till 8:00 PM on Friday.

Didn't get any .infos myself during the last sale, as I was expecting to be able to pay with Paypal - aparently they don't accept it anymore :-(

Have Your Visitors Write Your Content

Those who have seen examples of my music fan sites will know that I include a "shoutbox" feature on each one. At first this was simply because I had space in my design template that I needed to fill, but it's worked out great for me...

Regularly Updated
Along with the "news" pages (using RSS feeds from Google News), this shows the search engines that the site is changed/updated regularly, without me actually having to do anything (which is kind of the point of AIS ;-))

Search Queries
Another trend that I've noticed recently is that having the shoutbox feature increases the amount of search engine hits I get. I check my own content for spelling errors, but users of the sites tend to be less strict with this. Hence, my sites get hits from users searching for terms like "artic monkeys lyrics", because someone on the shoutbox has misspelled "arctic" as "artic".

Double Edged Sword
Of course, this does have downsides - having the users chatting in the shoutbox takes their attention away from the Adsense blocks ;-)

A Good Start To The Day

Clicks: 1
Earnings: $1.50