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As a part time webmaster, you only have a certain amount of hours you can spend on the web building your business so it’s really important to focus the time you have to work on your websites that have the most potential to pay off. Why start a bunch of little websites that take up your time and can ultimately lead to spreading yourself too thin? I asked myself this question when I took some time to look at the websites still hosted on my old shared account. Why did I even bother creating these websites?

Nearly a year ago when I got into buying domains and websites on NamePros.com I bought a little flash arcade site (I was making such terrible money at my previous job the $10 arcade was about all I could afford at the time. My thought behind the purchase was that I’d simply put little affiliate buttons on the side of all my video game based sites and use that traffic to make a little extra money off the arcade. Unfortunately, what I didn’t count on was the time it would take for me to set up the website, get it transferred from the seller and place all of the buttons on my websites. And when I transfer this arcade to the new owner the total work will probably come out to about 4 hours or more. All this work for only $8.25 via Adsense for the website’s 9 months of operation. Looking back, was it really worth the time to take the time to deal with transferring the site from the seller, learn how to use the new arcade script, apply and put arcade banner exchange buttons onto the site and now to transfer it to the new owner? It really wasn’t worth the time and so this is why I recently decided to liquidate some of my really small sites that have not made me any money and just sit there reminding me of the time I wasted on low priority items.

As a part time webmaster it’s important to focus on continually driving more traffic to your primary sites that are already set up and optimized and other sites that show great growth potential. Don’t spend your time working on sites that already have a preset limited potential cap like a sub par arcade script site that can be found anywhere else on the web. If you find yourself working on new websites and the extra work load prevents you from providing the same amount of focus required to maintain your primary websites you have a problem. This is a mistake that I am focused on avoiding in the future; however, I hope some of you bloggers, forum admins and website owners will learn from my mistake.

Have you ever spent a lot of time on a website that showed little promise for growth and success? Or allowed the time you spent on a new website to take too much focus away from your key moneymakers?

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Merry Christmas everyone. I’m stopping in to write a quick post on what stuff I got this Christmas. I never write a Christmas list because if I really want something I just buy it rather than wait several months for a birthday or Christmas to come along. However, I rarely buy stuff for myself so I figure it’s fine that I just buy things without waiting ;). In any case, it’s always interesting to see what my wife and family get me without having any ideas to go on.

So here’s what I got:

USB Rocket Launcher check it out here.
NorthFace Jackets and Fleeces (My brother has an REI discount :D)
Geometry Wars Galaxies for Wii
Mass Effect for Xbox 360
A Garmin for my car
Misc candies

And yes, I put the funniest thing on the top of my list hah hah. I’m probably going to bring it into work sometime and shoot at my co workers. What did you get for Christmas? Unfortunatley, the one thing I didn’t get for Christmas was an extra 100 RSS subscribers :(. So if you want to give me a Christmas present subscribe to my full RSS feed! Perhaps I’ll put that on my list next Christmas…

Technorati Profile

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I received an email from Ramon asking for some suggestions on how to improve his webmaster forum 9mb.com. So I decided that it’d be a great opportunity for readers to improve their forums if I started offering free forum reviews on occasion to help out everyone. So I gladly accepted his offer and took a little time to review the forum and throw out a couple ideas on how to improve things. Here is the email he sent me:

Hey Chris,

Can you maybe give me some advice how to get my forum to the next level ?

I see you have a lot of experience in the forum scene! and I wonder if you can
give me tips or suggestions for my forum at www.9mb.com

Thanks in advance,

Ramon

My response was:

Hey Ramon,

Yah I’ll give you a few tips:

First off, I think that you should have actual articles on the front page of your website otherwise there isn’t really a huge reason why you should use vBadvanced on the front page if the only thing you’re going to display is recent posts. (Although, I do have a similiar setup on my WoW forum but I haven’t been focusing on that forum as much to even care )

Also, one thing that turns off possible registering members is if they see subforums that haven’t been posted in for a while. I see overall many forums are pretty active but you should try writing threads that ask questions that can then encourage readers to post (not unlike what bloggers try to do to get people to comment on their blog).

I think in your header you should remove Google Whores and replace it with webmaster forum as well because that’s what your forum is about. When I hear Google Whores I think of the post John Chow made long ago about how much some people were making on Adsense, not a webmaster forum.

And I didn’t check, but if you run a webmaster forum I think it’s hard to get by without doing some sort of a revenue sharing model otherwise why won’t someone just go over to the forums at digital point where they can make money while they post?

Lastly, I would highly suggest you install the improve registrations plugin found here: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=119572 you’ll get more members to register that way.

Ramon let me know that he currently shares 100% of the forum revenue with members which is certainly a great way to generate activity on a webmaster forum. I wouldn’t recommend this strategy if the forum’s focus was photography for example because the members likely don’t have an adsense account so there is no reason to even talk about adsense revenue on a forum like that. But because he’s doing this on a webmaster forum I think it’s pretty good strategy, just make sure you start selling private ads sometime too.

If you would like your forum reviewed for free send me an email and I may review it in a future post. Simply send me an email via the contact form and if I review your forum you’ll see my response in a future blog post. So don’t ask for a forum review if you don’t want your forum’s URL posted on my blog ;). I may eventually charge for this service, but in the meantime take advantage of getting it for free by contacing me now.

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I’ve been getting a fair amount of traffic after being mentioned on John Chow’s front page, so I thought I’d write a post to introduce the new readers to my blog by showing 5 of my favorite posts. I believe these posts encompass what the main focus of my blog is. I love to write about interesting topics that relate to what I do online which is manage online communities and more recently - blog. So if you like these posts you should subscribe to my RSS feed or just come back for more. So without further ado here they are in descending order with number 1 being my favorite of course:

5. Is it worth the money to pay for a new blog design?

While I wrote this recently I think it’s a good way to look at your blog and how serious you are about being successful. I just recently decided that I’m going to pay for a custom design and in fact I just heard back with a quote from Unique Blog Designs. The price tag is pretty hefty though, so it may have to wait until after Christmas

4. John Chow effect on a top commentator

I did an experiment to see just how much traffic I’d receive by being on John Chow’s top ten list of commentators and the results of this little experiment are actually pretty surprising. Check out the post to see what I mean.

3. Favicon’s - use them to improve site branding and professionalism

Favicon’s are easy to make and a great way to add a further layer to improver your branding and make your site look much better. Check out my post on how to make them.

2. Never give up on a publisher program if you’re at first denied

My philosophy is that it never hurts to ask so why not ask if a publisher will manually approve you if you’re at first denied? I’ve done this twice now and been accepted after calling them up to try and get in.

1. Finding time to work as a part time web publisher

For those of you that haven’t read my about page yet, I’ve been a part time web publisher for nearly three years and got my start on the net with forums. The challenges we have as bloggers and web masters are much different than those of the big name bloggers that don’t have to put in 8 hours before they can work on their websites. This post is about finding that extra time to get things done.

The focus of my blog is on my experiences as a part time web publisher and blogger. I share what has worked for me and what doesn’t work. If these topics interest you subscribe to my RSS feed :D!

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John Chow is not just an internet entrepreneur famous for making money online. He is also a savvy investor and fun to hang out with, but I’ll get to that.

So I arrived at Ralphs Grocery & Deli at 6:10 PM, nearly an hour before the Seattle Blogger Meetup was scheduled to begin. I came in so early because I work in Seattle and had a friend drop me off after we went out to eat for dinner. One by one people began to come in until John and his wife Sarah arrived a little after 7:00 PM. There wasn’t enough room for us all to sit at the main table so I sat with John Chow and Chris Bloczynski in a booth off to the side of the main table area.

In the booth we talked about a wide range of topics from trading foreign exchange currency, using life insurance as a tax shelter and we also touched on fun conventions to go to. Some random guy actually came and sat in our booth to talk to John about doing some business with him in the future. John also talked about people that have applied to his TTZ Media network that try getting into the program when the blog still has the “Hello World” beginning WordPress post. There were even people that used their Agloco referral URL or offered a URL that went to a GoDaddy landing page for a site under construction. It makes you wonder what some people are thinking out there.

One thing that I found surprising however was that of the 19 attendees that I saw at the event I believe that there weren’t too many people that really knew who just how influential John is in the blogging world (Chris Bloczynski was the only other blogger I spoke with that had been reading his blog for a long period of time). It wasn’t until later on in the night when he started talking with some of the other attendees that they heard more about his blogging success.

The background stories for all of these different bloggers were incredibly varied so it was fun to talk with all of people about their careers and what they blog about. There was even a couple there that had met each other for the first time at a Seattle Blogger Meetup, began to date and later got married which I thought was pretty cool. Surprisingly there wasn’t as much talk about blogging as there was about what was going on in people’s lives but I thought that was great to. But to sum the whole experience up, overall I had a blast talking with all of the bloggers that were at the event and am really glad I took the time to make it over there. It makes me want to go to the next blogging convention or try and meet up with more local bloggers. Going to a Blog Meetup is a great way to network with other bloggers and get out from behind your computer screen so go do it!

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Update: Both John Chow and Chris Bloczynski have blogged about the experience. Read their take on the meetup.

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When I noticed my Adsense earnings slowly drop over the past 6 months I decided that it’s time for me to try out new ad programs and mix in new ones. So I have been seeking out alternatives to Adsense that can payout well and possibly replace Adsense if it continues to perform poorly. Besides, the same principles that apply to investing apply to monetizing your websites. It’s important to diversify!

I’ve tried Yahoo publisher network and terrible targetting and equally terrible results only to switch back to Adsense a month later. I’ve even tried out a smaller niche publisher network called ApexGamingAds to no avail. Lately I’ve been using AdBrite on one of my forums and am interested to see how they turn out, but my initial results haven’t been amazing. The next couple ad networks I’m going to test our are Bidvertiser and CasaleMedia. Another avenue I’m looking towards is private advertising as well, which I believe can be one of the biggest money makers if you can find advertisers that are looking to target your niche. I’ve already sold a couple of ads on my World of Warcraft Forum that made more than twice as much as Adsense did for the month and I didn’t even have an “advertise” page up.

At the start of next month I expect to switch over an entire forum to another publishing program in an effort to get some data that I’ll share with all of you here, and provided detailed stats for your viewing pleasure. Besides, it’s always good to find ways to make more money by utilizing different publisher programs.

Besides looking for replacements to my Adsense units that run on nearly every forum I have, over the past several months I’ve also been focusing on complementing my earnings with programs that can easily stack on top of other ad programs without the need to sacrifice a whole lot of extra ad space. One of these main complementary ad networks I’ve been using a lot on almost all of my forums is text-link-ads which has been a nice extra boost to my earnings for no work. And I’ve sold a least one ad on nearly every site I own, but again it’s not really something that replaces the ad space I’ve previously reserved for Adsense. I still recommend you use TLA on your websites as I continue to see success with them. I’ve also been using Kontera for about six months on my largest forum but haven’t had the best results so today I applied for Vibrant Media and intend to try out their program instead.

What have you tried doing to reduce your reliance on one advertising program? Click here to see what programs I recommend.

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I just found out about the youtube partner program a little while ago and had to write about it. You can find program details at youtube.com/partners

The program basically allows you to make money off of your youtube videos much in the way you make money off of Adsense. If accepted the revenue from ads is split between you and YouTube (Google). The restrictions are listed below:

Who qualifies for partnership?
To become a partner, you need to meet these criteria:
You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
You own the copyrights and distribution rights for all audio and video content that you upload — no exceptions.
You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.
You live in the United States or Canada.

I just applied under my youtube account that I use to share my halo videos thehalogodDotcom which currently sits at a little over 200 subscribers and about 17,000 video views. If only I had a youtube account before when I first created and posted my videos I’d have a lot more views and be much more likely to be accepted. Look at this URL for one of the earlier Halo videos I created http://youtube.com/watch?v=xwMUawpNJuY it has close to 300,000 views! And a couple other users posted the same video and those are in the 6 figure range as well. Either way, my subscribers and video views will go up a ton after I release my first Halo 3 montage and if I’m not accepted into the youtube partner program now I’ll definetely reapply after my next video is released.

I’ll provide an update wether I’m accepted or not, but I’m near certain I won’t be accepted because I didn’t have my videos posted on youtube when they were first made, instead someone else got all the views.

Have you applied yet?

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