This marks my second weekly link love wrap and I have several more great posts that I recommend you check out:

The first one on my list is written by my friend and blog designer Hyder. He gives 10 reasons why you shouldn’t be blogging about blogging. While I think he is a little harsh I do think he has a point. If you don’t have any experience or success online prior to starting your blog about blogging I’d highly recommend you rethink your strategy. There are plenty of other areas where you can get your feet wet in the world of blogging.

The next one up is on Shoemoney’s blog and while I will try not to ever link to the big bloggers (odds are you already read them) this is a guest post written by Harrison Gevirtz. He’s a 16 year old affiliate marketer that makes a lot of money through affiliate marketing. In this post he describes ways to optimize PPC campaigns. I personally haven’t tried PPC / Affiliate marketing campaigns but when I do I’ll make sure I remember the tips he’s described here.

Martin Reed had some great ideas on ways to add depth to your online community. I agree with what he’s had to say that if you’re competing against other communities and only have a forum to offer it’s going to be harder to differentiate your community from the thousands of others.

Mr Javo discusses the importance of masking your affiliate links. I’ve been using this same method for nearly a year. John Chow was the first person that I ever saw post about it actually and perhaps that is where Mr Javo found it as well - Either way I highly recommend you take some steps to mask your affiliate links as well because you could be losing out on a lot of money.

Well that wraps up another week for me here. As I asked last time during my Sunday Link Love v1 - if you have a great post that you’d like me to share with my readers please contact me and you just may see it here next week. (No one took advantage of this last week but perhaps someone will this time…)

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A couple days ago Google announced that Google Ad Manager’s availability to all.

Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

Head on over to read the full details of the announcement, but what I highly recommend is logging in to your account to check it out for yourself. All that is required is an Adsense account to gain access to Google Ad Manager. Like most Google products (all?) Google Ad Manager is free.

I’m in the process of migrating most of my forums over to the platform now; however, with that said I doubt I will ever replace OIOpublisher as this blog’s ad management system because I love how it works now.

Has anyone spent a lot of time using the ad management system yet? What are your thoughts? I’ll write a follow up post once I’ve used it more extensively but I was really excited about this program and am happy to see it’s open to all now.

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This marks the first of my weekly Sunday link love wrap up posts. I know this type of post has been done before, but I wanted to not only provide an opportunity to link out to my fellow bloggers but also to give a chance for my readers to see what I’m looking at during the week.

First up my buddy Alan over at Affiliate Confession wrote an intriguing post about the harsh reality of your blog’s unlikely profitability. It’s the 7th post in his series and I agree with Alan’s philosophy. “The harsh reality is that if you got into blogging just to make money, you probably won’t.”

Brian from Start Breaking Free wrote a guest post on life hack about 8 essential skills they didn’t teach you in school. It’s funny how many hoops the school system makes you jump through when you rarely use the skills they “teach.” (I know this ones past a week ago but I’m behind on my RSS reader )

Jason Boom discusses the future of social media sites and networks. I like some points he made; however, I don’t think that we’ll ever end up with just one large social networking site because part of what these users like is “their” community. In other words, I know many people that love myspace but hate facebook and others that like the opposite. People will always like a community that fits their needs and I just don’t believe that time will come.

Jim over at thenetfool offers some great ideas on how to make a killer link bait page.

Sly put together a list of 30 tips for exploding your site traffic. The best part about the list is that he links to other bloggers that illustrate the points he’s made in his list. Great idea!

Whew - well that wraps up the week for me. If you have a great post that you’d like me to share with my readers next week please contact me and you just may see it here next week.

I have a lot more exciting posts coming so make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed to see what’s in store.

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One of the areas that I’ve been exploring more of lately is the potential to make a small yet consistent income stream from mini sites. I’ve been doing this with BANS for a few weeks (I will touch on this during a later post); however, I’m certain that with the right niche I can build a few sites that earn a modest sum of at least $100 a month.

I will be documenting this process and providing the steps I’ve taken to increase traffic, improve in the SERPS and most importantly - make money.

The first site I’ll be working on is a niche travel site based on a place I’m going to on vacation (I should be there as of the time this post is published). I will be taking pictures, and coming up with a rough outline of the fun activities to write about for this website while I’m on my vacation. I know there is a lot of money in niche travel sites so I’m interested in taking a stab at a travel based site.

The second site I’ll be working on is my Video Game Fonts website which I set up over a year ago and haven’t touched since then. It makes minimal income; however, I have several plans to improve the site and in doing so - the income it generates.

I am sure that there will be more mini sites that I will work on, but these are the two that I will be starting with. My overall goal is to create mini sites that require some work up front but little time to maintain in the future. I currently spend a lot of time managing forums and am interested to see just how much potential there is in mini sites. no time to update (or just an update once every 6 months or so) that each generate a small income. speak of I know there is potential to dominate this small niche.

Have you found success with mini sites? Share your stories below.

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As you can tell by looking to your right my FeedBurner RSS stats have dropped in half and this is due to the Google Reader stats outage for Feedburner.

This isn’t the first time there has been a stats outage for Google Reader but I’m surprised it has happened again just 3 months later.

So if you noticed a drop in your stats don’t panic that’s why your numbers are lower.

I wonder why this happens? I’ve never noticed stats outages with other RSS readers. Has anyone ever heard of something official from Google on what has gone on?

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I’ve been pondering the idea of upgrading some of my forums to the latest version of vBulletin, but what has held me back is the fact that upgrading vBulletin is a huge pain.

What I love so much about Wordpress is that it’s so easy to upgrade and manage plugins. I remember when I first started blogging and I held off on upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress because I was concerned about how difficult the process was going to be. To my surprise it was very easy and I’ve never had any issue during the upgrade process for the past 17+ months I’ve been blogging.

On the flip side, over the past three years of administering and managing vBulletin forums I’ve had numerous problems dealing with the vBulletin software than with Wordpress. In particular the most time consuming task is working with old modifications that need to be upgrading after moving up to a new version of vBulletin. The settings on vBulletin plugins also frequently need adjustment after upgrading. In my opinion the time consumed while dealing with all apects of the vBulletin upgrade process has been much greater than with the Wordpress upgrade process.

What do you think forum admins / bloggers? Have you found vBulletin more difficult to deal with than Wordpress?

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JohnCow first told us that he didn’t sell the blog back in April but I had a sneaking suspicion that he did and the new owners along with the old owner were hiding the truth. The main reason why I believed this was because of the writing style change that occurred in the weeks after the “failed auction” on Sitepoint. So I set out to write a post about what I found but in the end decided not to post it.

So now here I am with a post I wrote back in May with a theory that JohnCow did in fact sell his blog and it turns out I was right! So even though someone that reads my post may say that I really didn’t know that the transfer occurred I wanted to share my theory anyway.

Here’s a screen cap of the draft I last edited in May.

Here’s what I had to say back in May:

I’ve been a subscriber to JohnCow for several months now. I always thought that the writer behind the blog offered nice tips written in a humorous way. Recently however, I’ve noticed a change in the tone of the writing on the blog like as if someone else is writing for it. While it’s hard for me to really provide specific examples of this in action, if you compare the style of the posts being written now with the posts written a couple month ago I believe there are many differences.

Now I’m sure many of you remember that JohnCow was up for sale on SitePoint a while ago and you may also remember that the blog was sold for $50k. A few days after the sale for the site went down for a couple days but it was announced shortly after that downtime that the bid was not legitimate and instead he would try to relist the auction. However, after that post nothing was mentioned about the blog sale. Why wouldn’t there be another post at or near the auction end date to try and stir up more interest? I believe that the blog was in fact sold but was cleverly hidden. The blog was relisted with a high reserve price (perhaps above the 50k amount so that if it was sold the new owner would be able to just flip it) to keep up the idea that it was still up for sale.

If the blog was sold than it makes plenty of sense that the new owner would not want anyone to know the original blog owner doesn’t write for it anymore because this would probably result in a drop in readership. But the part that really makes me think that the blog has a new owner is the shift in writing style. I can’t help shake the fact that the way the post are written now are done differently than they used to be. What do you think? Am I a conspiracy theorist or spot on?

Well it turns out I was right (maybe a little off on the date but there was a transfer that the new owner did not reveal) but it’s too bad I didn’t publish this post back before the cat was let out of the bag. If I would have published the post I probably could have stirred up a little controversy, seen a boost in traffic, and possibly force out the truth.

The one thing I’ve learned from this post is that next time I have something controversial to say I’ll publish first and deal with the potential fallout later.

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This marks the fourth month that I’ve offered advertising on my blog and unfortunately I did not set a new earnings record. Check out the earnings break down:

Private Ad Sales: $40
Affiliate Sales: $25 Text Link Ads

Grand Total: $65

The primary reason for the drop is because two of my recurring advertisers did not renew their banners last month. Both the 468 x 60 banner for $35 and the 300 x 250 inline ad for $75 were sold out almost every month since I began offering advertising but unfortunately this is the first month that at least one was not sold. So if you would like to take the place feel free to head on over to my advertising page for more details or click the links above.

I’m still surprised that no one has taken advantage of the 125 x 125 sidebar ads that are only $15 a month especially because in this month and the previous month a few of these have converted for affiliate sales. If you’d like to purchase one of these banners click here. I also think the $10 site wide links will fill up soon as every person that has paid for a link has renewed it every month. If you’d like to snag one of the last site wide text link ad slots click here. This is a good price for a PR4 blog.

Overall I believe I should have made more this month but I’m not upset because I know exactly where I failed. I really need to focus on blogging on a more consistent basis. Part of the reason why I haven’t been doing a good job is because I recently moved; however, now that I’m settled in I want to make sure I blog more consistently. In fact, this month I’m going to try and have a post up every other day for the rest of the month as a test to see how many new RSS readers I can get along with how much of an increase in this month’s income I can achieve based on a higher posting frequency. So I’ve set a small 30 new RSS subscribers goal (Let’s just say I’m shooting for 170 by the end of the month). I’d also like to still hit $200 in a single month especially because I have a long way to go to reach my $1,000 a month goal by the end of this year. If you’re interested in advertising on this blog please read my advertising page for more detailed information. For more ways to earn money on your blog or to read about the companies I work with check out my recommendations.

If you haven’t done so already be sure to Subscribe to my RSS feed to keep track of my progress for next month and read about more practical ideas for success online.

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