EatonMedia

Hello everyone.  Apologies for not posting in ages! I have been a busy man for the past few weeks.

Firstly I went on holiday for 2 weeks in Turkey to Hisaronu, if you haven’t been I highly recommend it, it’s quite cheap, very hot and a beautiful place!  I now have a tan to rival David Dickinson!

Secondly I have been very busy trying to build and launch a new website, details will come soon but I am pretty excited about it.  For those of you who know what sites I have I like graphics and teenager based sites.  This is based on a similar principle but for a slightly more mature market.  It is taking up a lot of time but I am quite proud of what I am making so far.

Just before I went away I was contacted by someone about selling another one of my sites.  It is a fairly undeveloped site but with a good name and I originally had big plans for it.  Due to a lack of time I never got round to pursuing it and marketing it properly.  Anyway someone got in touch about buying it and I am closing the deal today for £700 which is pretty good as the site is only a year old.

This is the second site in as many months that I could have sold.  I am beginning to think that buy buying an attractive domain name and putting a simple site up could work well as a flipping opportunity by waiting for buyers as opposed to peddling the sites on digitalpoint or flippa.

Flippa, by the way, is the new website selling service from sitepoint.  Their entire marketplace has been moved to this new site.  It is quite good but, like most sites like this, is full of spam and rubbish.  If you can filter through the rubbish though there are some great websites to buy.  I look on there fairly often to see if I can find a bargain as I am still looking for an established site to buy to add to my portfolio.

Chris About me, Make money online

I just logged into Adsense to see that I was able to update my adsense reporting to my own currency (GBP). I thought at first I might not like it (the figure would be lower than USD) but after a while I just took the plunge… and… ITS ACE!

Seriously it’s very cool, its so much easier to figure out how much you are actually earning when things are in your own currency. I for one thought I earnt more but I didnt. For example today I had earnt about $16 at the time of my switch. It now reports £10 which isn’t too bad, it just seems… a lot… lower.

Still I am happy about it.
A good thing too is that my adsense checker (I need to release this, sorry about the delay) will automatically pick up your own currency and display your earnings in whatever your preference is set to! Win.

In other news I joined twitter, follow me.

Oh and wordpress 2.8 is out… I shall upgrade shortly.

Chris About me, Adsense

I do apparently.

One of my sites is a graphics site, serving up graphics to the masses of teens who love that kind of stuff.  It works very well and has some clever SEO stuff up its sleeve that I will probably go into on this blog at some point.  It earns pretty well too, it earnt well over $2,500 in the past year and that is taking into account an explosion I had last Christmas due to implementing adsense link units so this year it should do even better.

I received an email from someone last week asking if I would like to sell the site.  Interested in knowing more I responded asking him to make me an offer.  He offered $3,500 blind without even knowing any of the stats.  I presume he guessed at my traffic / income levels by how well I ranked in the SERPs for various difficult terms.

So what did I do?

I said no… but why?

Firstly I believe the site will, over the next year, earn the amount offered, but it also has the chance to earn more.  Plus I will be earning that amount every year unless something goes wrong.

Secondly the site has some very special SEO properties that I can leverage to help new sites I make.  Note I have not done this for my adsense challenge as I thought it would be cheating.

The best thing about it? Exactly 1 year ago someone offered to by the site off me for $400 and I almost said yes! It just goes to show how much difference 1 year can make to a site’s value and income.

Has anyone here sold a site (or had an offer on their site) for a fair bit of cash?

Chris About me, Make money online

A few of you may have noticed I have not posted for quite some time. There are a few reasons for this. First up I have been uber busy working on my niche site and secondly I was told my old hosting provider was going to shut down, in 2 weeks!! So I had to quickly find alternative hosting.

I proceeded to frantically search the web for a cost efficient and quality server to house all my sites and I finally found one that looked good.  I will probably write a full review of them later, but essentially what I was faced with now was the massive task of moving a massive array of sites and the possibility of losing money and rankings if any of them went down.

As this was the first time I had done this I made a few mistakes, but in hind sight they would be pretty easy to correct in the future.

So here is a quick checklist of things you should do before switching hosts, preferably in this order

1. Copy all the data to the new server
   I did this via a cPanel / WHM transfer and my new host kindly took care of it for me
2. Verify your data
   I didn’t do this properly and it lead to problems.  Check that not only has each account transfered, but the files are all there, and your databases are all there.  Sometimes one but not the other will transfer.  Sometimes you may have to manually copy data across.
3. Change the nameservers of your domains
   I was lucky in that I had setup custom nameservers at my old host so all I had to do was register those nameservers at my new hosting and ALL my sites moved over seamlessly – cool huh?! I’d suggest anyone do this NOW before you feel the burn of moving 20+ sites one by one.

Because I didn’t do these steps thoroughly (I said they were easy didn’t I?) I ended up in a world of pain and some of my sites went down for a number of days.

Thankfully though, all my sites are now working and faster than ever!

So it’s good to be back, its a MASSIVE weight off my shoulders, and I hope to make up for lost time very soon!

Chris About me, Tutorial, Web Hosting

So I have been talking a lot about creating niche sites recently, and how to use them to earn money online.  Well I was checking my Adsense stats today and came across something that so beautifully illustrated how choosing the right niche can really help you land on your feet.

The image below is a partial screenshot of my Adsense earnings yesterday (for just two of my sites) . Site 1 gets a lot of hits and clicks, but doesn’t earn that much as it is in a low paying niche, Site 2 is a site that I haven’t promoted much and so only gets 50 hits a day and 3 clicks a day, but earnt $3.50 which is a massive difference to Site 1!

If Site 2 had as much traffic as Site 1 then I would be laughing all the way to the bank, sadly it doesn’t and probably never will.  But the point still holds true, choosing a well paying niche is paramount to your earning success!

Chris Adsense, Adsense Challenge, Make money online, Uncategorized

A few weeks ago I ran a little test to see if using Adsblacklist can actually increase your earnings, and it does work!  One or two of you have contacted me saying you are unsure how to actually use this website, so I thought I would create a quick tutorial on how you actually use it.

If you haven’t already signed up to Adsblacklist do the following:

1. Firstly goto Adsblacklist and register an account.
2. Once you have registered click on My Account.
3. Now click Add New Domain and add your domains

If you have already signed up and added your domains then you need to generate a list of poor quality sites:

1. Goto Generate Filter List
2. Drag and select the domains you display Adsense on to the box on the right
3. Select MFA (Made for Adsense) and LCPC (Low Cost Per Click)
4. Click generate!

Now we have a list of sites that notoriously pay low for Adsense clicks we now need to add this to

1. Goto your Adsense account
2. Click Adsense Setup then Competetive ad filter
3. Paste the list generated from AdsBlacklist into this page and then Save

Now over the next day or so the advertised sites will be blocked from showing on your site and hopefully you will see an increase in earnings.  Please let me know if anyone uses this and sees an improvement!

Chris Adsense, Make money online, Tutorial

Last year everyone in our office miraculously acquired an iPhone. They are amazing phones and I recommend everyone get one. When I first got mine a friend of mine, Paul, recommended the Wordpress app. He creates a new blog every week so it suited him well, but at the time I didn’t blog so saw no need for it.

Fast forward to April this year when I started this blog. Given that I am an iPhone geek I promptly downloaded the Wordpress application and set it up. I wasn’t dissappointed.

The app can do an astonishing amount whilst retaining a useful and easy to use interface. It takes seconds to configure it to work with a new blog (remember to enable rpc-xml in your wp settings).

You can do pretty much anything from comment moderation to composing new pages and posts. This post itself was written almost entirely on my iPhone! It also allows you to add categories on the fly making life easier. You can even add photos from either the camera or photo album, albeit at a lower resolution, though I think 640×480 isn’t a bad size for most photos!

There are, however, a couple of issues.  Firstly, it doesn’t auto update when you log in. You have to manually hit refresh which thankfully takes just a few seconds to complete. There is also a bug that I encountered, only once, when I first tried to write this post in that it wouldn’t save my post. There is a certain irony to that don’t you think?! Normally when you start writing a post the app automatically saves it to the iPhone but I tend to prefer saving it back to wordpress so I can update the post later on my PC. After writing the post my save button dissappeared from the interface leaving me stranded, I had to come out of the app and lose everything I had done – so save regularily! Finally; you can’t insert links, this doesn’t bother me too much though I could imagine it being a bit tricky if it was enabled though.

Aside from the couple of niggles I mentioned the app is brilliant. I personally think of many things to write about whilst in bed or on the toilet (lol) etc. Is it just me who takes their iPhone to the toilet?? The app let’s you quickly jot down a few ideas that you can expand on later when your at the PC.

I have seen a lot of complaints about be app around the net about it not being able to do some advanced wp stuff such a plugin management etc but I don’t think the app is designed for that kind of functionality. So if you have an iPhone an blog I seriously recommend you try it out and let me know your thoughts.

Download the Wordpress app for the iPhone here

Chris Blogging, Reviews

Hey everyone. First up apologies for the lack of updates recently. I have been mega busy working, so blogging has taken a back seat. A nice saying I once heard was that “the people who make money don’t blog; because they are too busy making money” and I believe that to be mostly true, with a few exceptions of course.

I have my Adsense notifier app almost complete and it’s looking pretty darn good! I’m just adding some final touches to it. It will hopefully be complete within a week.

I now also have my adsense challenge site indexed in google with a good few articles, I will be looking to write some more this weekend.

My most exciting news related to a new SEO technique I have implemented. It’s a very special PHP class the essentially modified your site on the fly to rank your site better. I’ll post results in a few weeks.

Stay posted for a proper post soon!

Chris About me, Adsense, Resources

So it has been exactly a week since I questioned whether adsense blacklist works or not and I now have the results!

A week ago I posted my eCPM for a particular site as $2.01 for its previous week.  As of today the last 7 days (since using adsense blacklist) has increased to  $2.29 for that site.  For those of you not good with maths that’s about a 15% increase, which is good by anyone’s standards!

What I never did, and should have, was to test it also across all my sites as the competetive ad filter works across all your sites indiscriminantly.  I did notice that all my sites did appear to earn a little more too.

So all in all a good test, and a good thing to do, I encourage other peope to test if it works for them and let me know how they get on!

In closing, I think it may well be worth while updating this list quite often (say once a month??) as new MFA sites come up quite often so you want your list to be up to date.

Chris Adsense, Make money online

I was speaking to a colleague earlier about the adsense challenge.  He is going to do it alongside me following my steps but he currently knows very little about the web and Adsense etc.  This makes him a perfect candidate to follow my steps to see just how well a complete beginner can do simply by following my challenge!

He was doing a touch of research online into Adsense and came across a few blog posts that stated the Big G wasn’t accepting new Adsense publishers from people with brand new sites, in fact the general consensus is that it takes close to 6 months before you will be accepted.  In an attempt to qualify these rumours I went researched and found corroborating evidence, and this blog post, which had a few tips on how to get your site accepted quickly.

I think some of his points have merit, but some aren’t very good, so I thought I would post my own list using his as a basis but cutting out the rubbish.  So here is my guide on how to get accepted quickly into Adsense.

The real way to get accepted quickly is to have a quality site

Lets break this down into what constitutes a “quality” site, and remember that all new Adsense applications will be vetted by a human being, so we are really trying to appeal to the person reviewing your application.

There are three main factors that contribute to a quality site.

1. Quality content
   Quality content is possibly the biggest factor in any websites success.  The Adsense team want quality publishers, and to get accepted quickly, you need to be one.  What this means is that you cannot use stolen content (a big no anyway) and it can’t be flaky.  If you are unsure if your content is of a high enough quality question what you would think if you found your own site and read it.  Try get a spouse or friend to give an objective opinion.
2. Quantity of content
   As well as having quality content, you want a fair amount of it too.  A website with 3 pages just won’t cut the mustard.  You want 15-20 pages of quality content before even thinking about applying.
3. Aesthetics.
   As a person will be reviewing your site it will pay to have it look aesthetically pleasing.  If the reviewer likes your site they are more likely to accept you.  It doesn’t have to be a design masterpiece, just not gary.  Get a nice template online or create one yourself, just make sure it looks good (you can always change it later)

Some say traffic matters when applying, I’m not sure on this one as Google has no way of knowing your exact traffic details… I mean you may get all your traffic from Yahoo? Other search engines do exist!  One thing that might help is having your site indexed before applying, in fact I would suggest getting your site indexed be one of the first things you try and do once you have a small amount of content.

Getting indexed is easy, just get a couple of links back to your site and within a week or so the big G will come and visit your site.  The more links you have and the better quality of link you get, the faster and more thorough the indexing will be.  But this is a matter for another post.

Chris Adsense, Google