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This marks the second month that I’ve offered advertising on my blog and unfortunately I did not make more money than I did last month. The primary reason why I didn’t pass my numbers was because of an inline ad sale that got pushed to this month’s numbers and a sponsored review that didn’t come through. There were a few problems with my ad management system OIO Publisher that caused the delay but they look to be resolved now. I just received the paypal payment for the ad today but because it didn’t go through last month I didn’t want to apply it to last month’s. Anyway enough of the excuses check out the earnings break down:

Private Ad Sales: $65
Kontera: $.95 (Didn’t run the whole month)

Total: $65.95

It’s too bad that the sales I had expected to come in didn’t, but these things happen and you can’t let them get you down. I’m an inside sales account manager in my day job and have had my fair share of sales that I expected to come in that didn’t, but June is a new month. I’m sure that I’ll hit $200 this month especially because I already have a good start and another banner renewal coming in (no hopes up though lol).

Advertiser Shout Out:

Thousand Dollar Profits - Thanks Mark! Too bad we couldn’t get the order in last month though
Fresh Press Themes - Hyder won the 468 x 60 banner two months ago and decided to renew it last month because he was receiving some good traffic from it.
I Need Alex - Thank’s for your blog button purchase Alex
Web Design - Nice snag on the sitewide link. I’m surprised more people haven’t taken advantage of this considering this blog now has a PR4 and the links are only $10/month!

I’m still making progress towards my $1,000 a month goal by the end of this year and although there was a slight downturn this month I remain confident that I will reach my goal. 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.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have several case studies that I’m currently running and will be posting more info on those this month. To ensure you don’t miss out on some great ideas be sure to Subscribe to my RSS feed.

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I gave away free advertising last month to celebrate this blog’s one year anniversary. Now that the free advertisting for the winners has expired I finally have some space to sell. Alex has already picked up the first slot and as you can see by glancing to the right side of your browser there are still more slots available which you can purchase for $20 by clicking here.

My good friend Hyder who not only designed this blog, but happened to win the 468 x 60 ad during the last contest received enough traffic last month to warrant renewing the ad for another month. He also plans to renew it for another two months so that spot may not be available for a while. However, I have since added another option to promote your website by purchasing a link under the banner ads for $10 a month which you can do so by clicking here. Someone has already taken advantage of this offer and purchased the first link but there is still room for more in this new advertising space.

Another option for you to further promote your company, product, service, blog etc. is with a sponsored review of my honest opinion for $50. Here are some sample reviews I’ve done in the past: TNX Review and WP Auctions. You can purchase a review by clicking here. More details can be found on the advertising page of this blog and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Now help me break my $200 goal for this month by purchasing an ad today!

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What criteria do you look at when deciding what type of forum you should start? I’m sure you’ve heard many other people recommend that you should start a forum based on a topic that interests you. The logic if obvious, if you don’t really care about the forum topic(s) than how can you set about creating a successful forum? I agree with this reasoning and even wrote about this a while ago. However, what can you do when the topic that interests you is not a profitable niche?

How I Chose My Niche

As some of you may already know by reading my story about getting started earning money on the internet, I run several video game related forums. I’ve always had a passion for video games and have even played Halo on the professional level. I also sell Halo lessons through my blog (in need of a serious redesign) over at thehalogod.com. In fact, I was even fortunate enough to use the success of my Halo videos to help launch a couple game related forums. However, as I look at the forums I’ve created I can’t help but think about the profitability of the niche I’ve chosen to target on the web.

The Low Profit Niche

I’ve focused most of my web properties around video games and in one circumstance - a single video game franchise i.e. Halo Boards. The question I now ask myself - that I should have done long ago - is how can I really make good money from these video game focused forums? Now I’m not just in it for the money and in fact if my revenue ever grew a substantial amount I would sponsor bigger events, provide giveaways, make improvements to the forum, and the list goes on. However, how can you really expect to make money off of advertising when nearly all of the active members and even the guests that find the site through search engines or other websites already own the video game system and games that most of the conversations center around (as in the case of Halo Boards)? The answer is simple - it’s extremely difficult. Even if the members of the website do click ads you have to remember these ads are still focused on video games which are frequently low paying.

Now the reason why these keywords don’t pay out well is because quite simply the ads that are displayed are for inexpensive items. When you see ads to buy third party game controllers, new video games and xbox live subscription cards you know that because these items hover around $50 there is not a lot of money to be earned with each sale. The advertiser can only make money if the cost of advertising is low enough that the conversions outweigh the cost of the ads. So to even make a decent sum of money you’ll need a lot of clicks.

The High Profit Niche

Now lets look at another example. Let’s say you run a forum focused on HDTV’s and the discussion of new HDTV’s, reviews and anything else related to this “new” technology. Immediately you know that a significant portion of the members on the forum are there to buy a new HDTV and are using your forum as a resource to help make an informed decision. And because of the nature of the forum members that are gathering more info to make a purchase, if they do click an advertisement they’re more likely to buy. This will help prevent your Adsense account from being smart priced but that’s a conversation for another day.

The cost of an HDTV can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. As you can see the products that will display in the advertisements on the HDTV forum example are much more expensive than those being displayed in the low paying niche. Naturally, because the products are so much more expensive advertisers have to pay much more for their ads ad clicks. With one low paying niche forum you could make a couple hundred dollars a month and on the other high paying niche forum you could make a couple thousand dollars a month with the same traffic level and activity. So before you launch your next forum make sure that you are not only interested in the topic but you also ask yourself, “How much money is there in this this niche?”

Lessons Learned

I’m not going to look back and view the decisions I made as a mistake, because starting those forums is what got me into earning money on the web in the first place. I also had a lot of fun doing it, but now that I’ve learned some lessons I’m certainly going to do more extensive research to determine how profitable the niche is.

Have you ever made this “mistake” before? What factors help you determine which new websites and forums to run with?

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This if the first full month that I’ve offered advertising on my blog and although I haven’t implemented all of the tactics I plan to use to maximize my earnings I did manage to make some money last month. Here is the earnings breakdown below:

Private Ad Sales: $75
Sponsored Reviews: $50
DealDotCom: $2.63

Total: $127.63

By no means is this a large sum and it’s humorous that I posted the $2.63 from DealDotCom, but it’s a start towards my $1,000 a month goal by the end of this year. As I mentioned earlier there are still several ways I plan to increase the money I earn on this blog. Here are a few:

Implement Kontera Content Link Ad Code
Sell links through OIOPublisher
Stop giving away free advertising lol

The free advertising that I gave away in my blog’s birthday contest took up most of the ad space on this blog, so when these spots free up I expect some of those will sell which should help to further improve my earnings. After those ads are done running I also plan to fully implement the OIOPublisher code on my site to make it easier to manage the ads so far I’m really impressed with the plugin though. I’m also interested to see how Kontera performs because the only experience I had with it before was from using it on video game related forums.

Next month my goal is to hit at least $200. I know I have a long way to travel to reach the $1,000 mark, but I still believe I can do it in 2008. For more ways to earn money on your website or to read about companies I work with check out my recommendations.

Subscribe to my RSS feed to track my progress and read more practical ideas for success online.

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TNX.net is a website that allows you to buy or sell text links on any webpage in their marketplace. Upon first going to TNX.net you will see a quick break down of the primary features advantages and benefits of their program for Website Publishers and Advertisers which I will go into later on in the review. But what you’ll see next are the stats showing the sheer size of their network.

At the time of this review, there are over 25,966,645 pages that links can be purchased on. You’ll also notice that there are currently 52,808 users on the site with a daily growth rate of .23% (about 121 new users a day!) So you should already know by these numbers that TNX is an established marketplace for buying and selling text links that not only serves to pad your wallet but also to improve your rank in the SERPS.

Selling Text Links

What I like most about being a website publisher on the site is the fact that you simply copy and paste the TNX code into your website and the links are automatically listed to be sold to thousands of advertisers. You also don’t have to spend any time figuring out the price of the link as this is calculated automatically (based on PageRank, link popularity, inbound links etc.). They also only take a 12.5% cut as opposed to some other services out there. You can also get paid out via PayPal which is always a plus.

The process for adding the code to your website, a new website to their marketplace and selling your TNX points is very simple. This is all done via your control panel which also displays the number of TNX points you have. From the single forum I have added to TNX.net nearly two months ago I’ve gathered 7,847 points.

Currently you can sell 1,000 points for $.78, but this number will continue to go up as the TNX network grows too. There is a way to sell your 1,000 points for $.82 but I don’t want to adhere to the guidelines to get the higher payout. The first line on the guidelines is the only one that doesn’t make it worth it for me:

1. Links are not all in one block (up to 4 links), but spreaded throughout entire page (4 blocks). Only one link is allowed in footer.

I would prefer to just have all of my links in the footer as opposed to setting up the code in additional spots to ensure I meet the requirements. But if you’re generating thousands of points and have several spots on your website that you can add different blocks to then I would recommend doing so to get the extra five cents each time you sell 1,000 points.

Going back to the number of points I’ve accumulated you’ll see that I’ve made about $6.00 worth of points which may not seem like a lot for having the code installed for nearly two months, but as I recently discovered I could have made four times that much!

From your site list there is a link that you can click to “show site options” this pops down (picture to your right) and you’ll notice that there is a way to increase the number of links sold on your website. I had it left at 1, but after writing this review have since increased that to 4. I left this number at the default of one because I never really noticed that you can increase the number of links sold on a website because this is not mentioned anywhere else in the TNX control panel. I really think that the site options should just all be displayed by default because it also shows you a lot of other important information.

Another great feature is that you’re able to go in and see the links that are put on your website and delete or block them from showing on those pages again. Because I’m using a forum I’ve sold 401 links, but most of these links are on pages without a page rank so if you have a site with multiple websites with at least a page rank of one you’re going to earn a lot more points. As an example, on my forum I am getting 750 points a month for a PR2 link.

Buying Text Links

As an alternative to selling your points you can also easily use the points to buy links of your own. I love the ability to just take what you’ve already earned from selling links and apply it towards buying links. The concept sounds so simple, yet there are so many other publisher programs that don’t allow you to take the money you’ve earned and spend it through their advertising program so I’m happy to see TNX offering this. Now almost everyone knows that inbound links and the anchor text used for those links play a key role in determining where you sit in the SERPS for various keywords and phrases, so one strategy to improve your ranking is to purchase links.

Like the control panel for users looking to add new websites, sell points and check out their list of websites there’s also an equally easy to use control panel for advertisers.

It’s very easy to set up a campaign in three simple steps. First you set up the the initial steps of the campaign by choosing the category of websites you want the links to be displayed in (obviously choose categories related to what you’ll be promoting). Each category also has a little “$” indicator to show which links are more expensive “$$$” and which sites are less expensive “$”. You’re also able to select which websites you want to advertise on based on the number of Yahoo Backlinks and Google Page Rank and even which language the website is in. After you select all of these options you then set the number of points you want to spend each month.

After inputting all of these options you’ll be able to see an estimation on how many links you will be purchasing. So if you look at the final number and realize you want to get more links than that simply increase the point spending limit, or lower the page rank of pages you’re targeting and it automatically updates the estimated number of links you can get.

Second you will be setting up the actual text of the campaign. Pictured below is the “simple” way to set up the text for your campaign:

But you can also choose an advanced option to put in several different variations of keywords that will be randomly used before your link, for your link and after the link. So the end result is several different phrases and links that point towards the same webpage. It’s always recommended that you don’t use the same link and instead provide some variation so that your links look “real” to search engines.

Lastly you can set the number of links you want to appear in the variations of page rank and yahoo backlinks. It’s recommended that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and instead seperate the links you plan to purchase accross all of the categories. You can also limit the number of links that will display on the same website as well which helps to add a further level of control as to where your links show up.

Wrap Up

Overall, I am very pleased with TNX.net and am happy to say it’s made the distinction of being offered on the Chris Recommends list which contains quality products, services and or companies that I have personal experience using and recommend to my readers. It made my job much easier to do this review for TNX when I had already been using the service for nearly two months. It also makes me feel more confident in recommending that you sign up for an account and test out the service on some of your websites. I plan to add the TNX code to more of my websites and purchase multiple campaigns in the coming months.

Click here to sign up at TNX

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I haven’t been to DealDotCom for a while, but I just happened to check out the site today when I noticed they have the OIO Publisher Plugin on sale today for only $15! For those that haven’t heard of DealDotCom it’s basically like Woot but for non physical goods. Once a day they offer a deal on a product at a significantly reduced price.

Today’s deal happens to be the OIO Publisher plugin. If you haven’t heard of this plugin before, it basically allows you to sell ads on your blog and it takes care of all the management and back end work for you. So rather than having to keep track of how long an ad is set to run for on your blog this is all managed by the OIO Plublisher plugin.

I just recently started to offer advertisements on my blog after the new theme went live and being the lazy guy that I am I want something that would take the work out of managing the advertisements. So anyway, I never got around to purchasing this plugin because I didn’t know when I’d have the time to implement it; however, I just bought it for $15 over at DealDotCom. Now I don’t have first hand experience using this plugin yet but from what I’ve read this is well worth the regular $37 price and it’s a steal at $15. I’ll write about my use with it later but if you have $15 in your paypal account and are looking for a way to manage your blog advertisements I’d go buy it.

Head on over to DealDotCom to snag it. The plugin will only be available at that price for the remainder of the day.

*lol sorry for two “sponsored” type posts in a row, but this deal really is honestly really good.*

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For those of you that have been long time readers of my blog you may remember a post I wrote about the YouTube partner program after it first launched. I sent in my application so long ago I almost forgot I had applied.

Now after nearly three months I’ve finally heard back from YouTube about my application being denied. With the size of Google/You Tube I don’t think I can weazel my way into this publisher program like I’ve done in the past so many times. However, I thought I might slip into the program by barely meeting the requirements. But I really don’t have time to maintain a steady stream of halo videos that the program requires.

I plan to apply again using the profile I set up for one of my forums that receives user submitted game videos on a regular basis, but for now I believe the profile is still too small (see it here). However, I still believe video is a great way to help bring in new visitors to your website though as most of the people on YouTube will have never been to your website before anyway.

Seeing the email from the YouTube partner program reminds me of the Adsense Video Beta. I’m also really interested to see how people are doing with that program, as I am going to need way more video views to make it into that program.

Has anyone here made it into the YouTube partner program or as an Adsense Video Beta participant? If so, how have the programs performed?

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