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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I read a post from a blogger that recommended that if you have been paying the same price for a server for an extended period of time that you should try and negotiate for a lower price (sorry I can’t find the link). The basis for his argument was that because technology is always getting cheaper why should you continue to pay the same price for a server every month? The answer to this question is that you shouldn’t!

I have always been a fan of never giving up when it comes to getting what I want so I set out to negotiate with my current web host based on the argument I listed above.

The following is the conversation I had with my current host (scroll down if you want to see the end result as the exchange is fairly lengthy):

Me: Hello, I’ve been an existing SoftLayer customer for over a year and as we all know the price of technology decreases over time. I see based on the specials you’re running now the cost of my server could actually be a little less.

So am I able to get a price reduction on my server?

Employee Response
Hello,

The specials that we offer on the site are used mainly to provide incentive for new orders, and cannot be retroactively applied to exisiting servers.

If you would like to place a new server order, I would be happy to assist you in getting the best possible price based on what we are offering right now.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can assist you with.

SoftLayer Sales

Me: So in order to get a discount I’d have to buy a new server transfer the old stuff over to the new server and then close my old server account?

You can’t just apply the discount to the one I’m currently using to avoid the hastle?

Employee Response
Hello,

I’ve reviewed your account and your actually paying $20/mo less ($159/mo) for this server (Intel Xeon 3060) than what we are offering it for now ($179/mo). It also looks like we provided you with a free 100Mbps port upgrade.

The only thing available for a discount on your current setup would be the 250GB SATA II HDD for $20/mo but to do this we would have to negate any special pricing already on the server which would make the price $214/mo. So the deal/pricing you have is actually better at $204/mo.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions or request.

Thank you,

SoftLayer Sales

Me: Well, there is also double RAM for free now as well which is $50 a month.

What about just adding in 8 free public IP addresses?

Employee Response
Hello,
As noted above the double/dobule promos are for new server orders only. However we will be able to make a *one-time* exception and allow you to have the additional static ip’s at no additional cost as a thank you for your continued business with us. Simply add the static ip’s them directly though the customer portal, once this has been done update this ticket and I will get it to Accounting to have your invoice updated.

Thank you,
SoftLayer Sales

I already had a really good deal on my server when I first signed up when I negotiated for a lower price, a port upgrade etc. so I knew based on their first few responses that I likely wouldn’t be able to get the price knocked down much further. After I realized that I was probably not going to get a price discount I moved onto going after something I was already looking to pay for - more IP addresses. So after I went back and forth with the hosting company I was able to get 8 free IP addresses. While this seems like it’s not that much (I think it works out to like $8 a month or something). The important thing to remember is that I wouldn’t have gotten the free IP’s (which I had already planned to buy this month) if I didn’t ask for them.

I highly recommend you try negotiating for a lower price or some freebies (more RAM, additional hard drive, more bandwidth etc.) if you have been a customer with a hosting company for a period of time.

Have you tried this before? What successes have you had?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

PepperJam is offering a $10 sign up bonus for new publishers (oh you’ve heard?) but they’re also paying bloggers just to write about it (heard that too? - keep reading…). However, what surprises me the most is just how successful this July promotion has been. Now I’m just an outsider looking in, but if you look at the number of blogs that are promoting PepperJam you can see the effect of this announcement on the blogging world has been tremendous:

ProBlogger, JohnChow, Zac Johnson, Jim Karter, Affiliate Confession, Ian Fernando, RockFuse, Arbit Blog, Bukiki, My Build a Niche Stores, Yimto, Networking Blogger, Blog about your blog, Market Secrets, NetProfitsToday, Tech Yard, The Affiliate Post, SuperNoobice, Just 4 Families, Mixed Market Arts, Melvin Blog, The Sports Dollar, Feed Flare, Link Building Bible, Dfunda, Affiliates Miami, the Puck Writes.

And many more…

That’s a fairly long list and I didn’t even spend that much time searching! For those of you that are already members (like myself) the program offers $10 per post (like this one) and up to 5 posts per month for a total of $50 a month.

Here are the official details:

Blogger Incentive Program - Bloggers are the lifeblood of the PJN Publisher Referral program and tend to be our biggest supporters and closet friends. As a result, we thought we’d create a sort of “Pay Per Post” incentive program where any PJN publisher / blogger will receive $10 for each post you make (up to 5 per month) that promotes Pepperjam Network or any Pepperjam Network tool. If you are looking for blog ideas check out the Pepperjam Network blog - www.pepperjamnetwork.com/blog. So that our team can track your efforts and eliminate spam please e-mail bloggers@pepperjamnetwork.com prior to making your post to gain approval of the topic (i.e. I want to write about Pepperjam Chat or the launch of the PJN Blogger Incentive Program, etc.). BTW - of course you can use your PJN Referral Program affiliate links and make even more money every time you post about Pepperjam Network!

So what do you think of their Blogger Incentive Program? Do you believe PepperJam is profiting from this promotion? Is it only being used to help build brand awareness? Or something else?

Kris Jones care to comment on my questions? (I see you’ve responded in several of the above posts)

Discuss below

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!