WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

WebDiggin.com is an adventure to Make Money Online. The WebDiggin cashflow report is where we show you how much money we’ve made and lost online.

We had a profit of $32.07 in April 2008 from our projects to make money online.

We’re still trying to recover from our 2007 losses of $459.84. Last quarter, we made $299.48 online, so we’re closing the gap, but we’re still at a loss.

In April, we experimented with increasing the readership of this blog by running two contests. (Basically, we tried to pay people to be our friend.) 

It was a neat learning experience, but we’re shifting our efforts away from the make-money-online genre.

Right now, we’re focusing on two areas:

• Trying to make money using content websites powered by Blogger and WordPress.
• Trying to make money using search affiliate marketing.

So right now, we’re just going to maintain this blog as a diary, showing how much money we’ve made and lost, as well as any tips we’ve picked up along the way. (i.e. how to point your GoDaddy domain name to your blogger account.)

Inflow: $473.43

In April 2008, we made $473.43 through three streams of internet income:

• The bulk of the inflow ($386.53) was through Commission Junction affiliate sales (by buying Pay Per Click traffic).
• We made $36.40 from contextual PPC ads (Google AdWords and Rubicon Ads).
• The final $50.50 came from writing sponsored posts. Last month we made more money with PayPerPost. We’re shifting away from sponsored posts for a few reasons: 1. There seem to be few opportunities. And, 2. There is the infamous Google PageRank slap where you’ll be penalized with a Page Rank of 0 if you have sponsored posts on your site. We didn’t really have any luck with Smorty.

Outflow

We spent $441.36 in April 2008.

• $411.36 went towards PPC advertising costs to drive traffic to our PPC search affiliate campaign. Although it looks from the cash flow report that we lost money doing search marketing ($386.53 in commissions; 411.36 in advertising), our one working affiliate marketing campaign broke out even in April. (We made $410.92 in commissions (click date), and spent $411.36 on advertising.) When our commissions lock in a month and a half, we’ll get a 20% bonus for moving over $2000 in merchandise - which means that we’ll turn a $80 profit from the campaign in April.
• $30.00 went towards contest prizes, but we recovered that money in sponsored posts.

Bottom Line:Life has gotten busy lately, which may be a good thing. We’re going to focus on search marketing because at this point in the campaign, we can just monitor the clicks and commissions and make sure we’re at least breaking even.

Question: How do you make money online?

If you’re looking for the A-list Money Making gurus, they’re over at JohnChow.com and ShoeMoney.com. This is just a collection of notes for me, so I can trace my steps next time.

(You know when it took you a while to find something good online, and you want to remember the trick for next time, but because you use multiple computers, you can’t just bookmark the site…)

Ok. We prefer WordPress and Bluehost over Blogger and GoDaddy domains. But, we can appreciate the fact that not everyone has a hundred bucks to spend on web hosting.

So, we thought we’d have a second go at trying to make money using free blogger accounts.

Step 1. We bought 5 .info domain names from GoDaddy for $5. We could have gotten free privacy registration for all 5 domains, but we messed up and only got it for one.

Step 2. We followed blogger’s instructions on how to point our GoDaddy domain names to our free blogger accounts. That got our www.discount-domain-names.info website to work, but not discount-domain-names.info.

To get our domain name to point to our free Blogger account without the www. part, we had to read Compender’s post about Setting up Blogger for Custom Domains on GoDaddy.

(In a nutshell, you have to 1) set up a CNAME referral for the alias www under GoDaddy’s Total DNS control panel to the host ghs.google.com and you have to 2) set up a CNAME referral for the alias yourdomainname.com pointing to the host ghs.google.com. No one else mentioned the second part. Compender is brilliant.)

Step 4. Get rid of the Blogger navigation bar at the top.

Blogger Templates shows you how to get rid of the Blogger search bar at the top. Just add #navbar-iframe {display: none !important;} at the top of your template and you’re set. (Read the complete instructions here)

Bottom Line: On a side note, we’re not posting as often on this site as we were. Has it affected our ratings? Our Alexa rank has improved a little from 490,191 to 262,757, we’ve been detected by the people at Compete, and apparently our rank is now 468,755, and we still have around 33 readers in our feed count. Interesting.

Question: Do you prefer Blogger, Wordpress, or some other platform to power your blog?

We’re doing some web design housekeeping here at WebDiggin. Fixing up the layout, broken links, and plugins. Here are some of the things we are doing …

Monthly Archives

We used to have a basic WordPress archive listing, only showing a list of our posts. Then, we noticed how Caroline Middlebrook’s archives page was neatly sorted by month. So, we decided to install idunzo’s SRG Clean Archives plugin on this blog as well.

Disclosure and Privacy Policy

Josh’s post about new and old adsense policies woke us up to the fact that we need to add a cookie policy to our sites that have adsense. (So we clicked on the link in his post to a third-party adsense privacy policy generator.) It’s nice to have, and we just added it to the generated disclosure policy that we use for our sponsored posts.

Fixing up the Dead Links

We haven’t been checking our error logs as much as we should be. (There are whole heaps of php error messages that I don’t even know what to do with. So, I guess we’ll naively ignore them for now.)

We did, however, notice a lot of 404 page errors. (374 page errors for this page: Get $50 credit from Yahoo and $50 from AdWords). It wasn’t so much that we moved our blog over to webdiggin but that we changed the permalink addresses.

We have Janis Elsts’ Broken Link Checker plugin installed. 120+ dead links to fix up in our posts. Now we have to go through each post to edit the links. I wonder if each time we re-publish a post, it will show up in the RSS feed. That would be annoying.

Turning off the leaking pagerank taps by adding a nofollow tag in our links

We learned in March that it’s important to turn off the pagerank taps in our links. So we started to add a rel=”nofollow” to our affiliate links or any links in a post that didn’t need the pagerank (like Wikipedia links. If we learn something from someone else’s blog, we’ll link back to the source with the link juice turned on.)

But our blog started last year, so we cleaned up our older posts and added some nofollow tags.

We use SEOBook’s plugin for Firefox to find which links have a nofollow tag included. A big problem we discovered was that if you are editing a post that has a nofollow link and you have the SEO plugin turned on, then your nofollow link will become red. If you then save that post, WordPress saves the formatting and now your nofollow link is permanently red.

Oops. So we had to go through our posts and manually turn off the red highlight that got accidentally saved in the post. That was a hassle.

Categories and tags

We had a long list of categories and only a few tags here and there. The problem, of course, is that no one can really use the categories to find what they’re looking for. So we followed Butterfly Media’s advice on categories and tags and tried to tidy things up.

We wanted to have less than 10 categories. Armenian Eagle’s Category Converter plugin allows you to group together your existing categories. It looked promising, but unfortunately it hasn’t been updated for the latest versions of WordPress.

In the end, we converted all of our categories to tags to have a fresh start. We tried WordPress’s built in category-to-tag feature, but for some reason, it missed some categories. Eventually, we found this hack that let us convert all of our wordpress categories into tags. (Be careful - you can’t undo the conversion.)

It won’t let you convert categories if the tag already exists. So we used the simple tag plugin to delete all of our existing tags. Then, we used the built-in WordPress category-to-tag converter.

We’ve only just discovered some cool features of the simple tag plugin that we’ve been using since forever. We thought the plugin was only good for suggesting tags when you’re writing that post, but…

• It has an auto tag feature that will go through all of your posts and search for keywords to appear in your tags. You can also run this feature on old posts, so you don’t have to manually go through and tag things.
• You can batch edit tags without having to open up the post.
• The tags for your post show up in the meta keywords header which helps with search engine optimization.
• The extended tag cloud widget is customizable. (I think there’s a way to add a nofollow tag in the options page to save our link juice, but we couldn’t get it to work, so we just modified the plugin directly.)

Fixing Security Issues and Preventing Your WordPress Blog from Getting Hacked

We’re not security experts. But during our travels in the blogosphere we came across some articles that made us nervous. Matt Cutt’s has a post on how to lock down your wp-admin directory to only a few IP addresses. That way if you’re not using your home or work computer to modify your WordPress blog, hackers have a harder time accessing the wp-admin folder.

We have a dynamic IP address where the last number changes xx.xx.xxx.*. I thnk if you drop the last number, it will work (xx.xx.xxx)

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx

Protecting your plugins

Visit any blog that is powered by WordPress. Add /wp-content/plugins/ to the domain name and you should see a list of plugins that the blog is using. (So, for example, http://webdiggin.com/wp-content/plugins/).

Apparently vulnerabilities in your plugins can be used to hack into your WordPress blog. So we followed dailyblogtips advice on how to hide the plugins:

If you visit the folder /wp-content/plugins/ on most blogs, however, you will be able to see all the plugins that are being used. In order to hide that list you just need to create an empty index.html file and drop it there.

Bottom Line: It’s like spring cleaning your home. A chore, but it needs to be done.

Question: How often do you go through your webdesign to spruce things up a bit?

Apparently everyone needs to think about Search Engine Optimization and PageRank. For the longest while, I was quite happy just blogging my thoughts away without thinking about SEO, PR, and all those other acronyms. Apparently, I’m wrong.

Josh Spaulding’s post on robots.txt showed me the light. Here’s what I learned about robots.txt from Josh’s post and by looking at his robots.txt file:

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Thanks to everyone who participated in our We’ll Pay You To Be Our Friend April 2008 Contest.

In the end, your odds of winning were 2 in 482 ballots.

• 13 posts x 25 ballots = 325 ballots
• 25 email subscriptions x 2 ballots = 50 ballots
• 107 comments x 1 ballot = 107 ballots

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• Total Number of Ballots Received (as of Apr 30, 2008 11:59 EST): 482 ballots

We put all of the ballots in order and picked a random number from random.org.

And the winner is…

The winner is About Blog Contest. Congratulations!

We’ve sent out an email to the email address that they commented with, and they’ll have to reply to us with the same email to prevent fraud and receive their paypal cheque.

About the Contest

At one point, we thought the contest could become our trademark thank-you to our readers. $25 just for hanging around. But, we’ve thought about where we want to go, and have decided to stop the contest for now.

Pros of running the We’ll Pay You to Be Our Friend contest.

• We have more subscribers. (We started with 7 and got 33 readers by the end.)
• Our Technorati rank dropped from 605,911 to 352,668. (Ah, I remember in Feb 2008, we had a technorati rank of 8,911,336. Look at what commenting on other people’s blogs can do for your blog reactions.)
• We got 13 pages linking back to us. (I wonder if we fixed up our content (i.e. stopped with the sponsored posts), would that help us to increase our pagerank? We’re still PageRank 0.)
• We reward the people who participate in this blog.
• In theory, more participation means a higher ranking in the PayPerPost system. So, in theory, this could open up better sponsored posts.

Cons

• Let’s be honest. The subscribers joined because we dangled a carrot. I imagine when we stop the contest, the majority of subscribers will fade away. (25 subscribers is nothing, anyways)
• A lot of the pages that linked back to us were from the online-contest niche. That’s not necessarily our target market. (Then, again, we’re shifting our priorities anyways. See below)
• How much help are those 13 pages linking to us anyways? The majority were contest sites with PR0 that weren’t related to the Making Money Online niche. Griz points out in his Make Money Online using Blogs (Lesson 2) that thousands of links from irrelevant sites could hurt your rankings:

Note: You can get thousands of links from sites that have no relevance to your site and this won’t help you at all… if Google catches you linking to sites that are not relevant to your site you will be penalized and lose ranking. This is how link exchanges work - people buy or sell links to anyone else regardless of relevancy. Stay clear of this.

• The contest was taking time away from our other projects.

Other thoughts.

• $25 and we got 13 links. In essence, it’s around $1.90 per link, which is cheaper than the going rate on PayPerPost. (I wonder how the quality of the blogs participating in the contest compares with the blogs who do sponsored posts.)
• If we ran the contest for 8 months, it would have been a $200 expense. Sure we could make that money using sponsored posts, but writing sponsored post articles isn’t a sustainable way of making money. If you stop writing the posts, you stop making the money. Besides for $200, we could have bought 200 domain names.

If we ran the contest in May, here’s what we were thinking about doing

• We would accept links to any post on the site, not just the contest post. Contests aren’t relevant to everyone’s cup o’tea. So, it might not make sense for you to write about online contests. But, there might be other content in here that peaks your interest. That way, we might encourage more posts than just the online-contest niche.
• We would have given 5 ballots to any blogger who didn’t erase their April contest post. That way, you could post every month about WebDiggin, and over time, those little posts would become assets, increasing your chances of winning. (I imagine some people delete the posts after the contest in the same way that some people unsubscribe from the email feed.)
• We were thinking about giving ballots for referrals. For example, if you posted a link back to WebDiggin and said that you heard about us from another blog (with a link to that blog), we’d give you an extra 10 ballots and the referring blog an extra 10 ballots. (That might back fire from people who run multiple (and similar blogs). We had a few Italian blogs which I think were run by the same individual. (Which was okay for our last contest.)
• We wanted to give ballots if you stumbled, dugg, or technorati fav’d us, but we weren’t sure if that was against their terms of service. But that would be another way to participate in the blog and get points.

So, what are we going to do instead?

Yoda has a great quote. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Bloggin on WebDiggin has been a lot of fun. We’ve learned a lot about WordPress and blogging in general, but we’re going to shift our priorities to our other projects.

It comes down to this: We can blog about trying to make money online… or we can try to make money online.

The making money online / internet marketing niche is interesting. You make money by telling people how you make money… and hope they sign up for the products you recommend. (And people blast you or recommend you based on whether they think you have the credentials and know what you’re talking about.)

People in this niche, generally don’t click on ads, and they generally don’t buy products using your affiliate links. (Some do, if you’ve done a great job at building relationships, but I imagine just as many would sign up for their own affiliate account and then use their own links to buy the product to get that secret discount.)

We’ve lost $160 from our online attempts to make money online. We don’t have any street cred, but we wanted to use this blog as an online diary of our attempts to make money online. At one point, we were blogging to talk with other people, but I think now, we’re going to use WebDiggin more for us.

That means:

• We use this blog more like an online bookmark / favourites folder. We can post answers to problems that are useful for us. Like how to get your GoDaddy domain name to point to your free blogger account. (That way, we don’t have to keep on re-googling the question and looking for the answer.)
• We’re also going to continue posting our cashflow reports and show how much money we’ve made and lost. (That way, we’re motivated to do our finances on a monthly basis and see how we’re doing.)
• We’re not going to worry about getting subscribers, comments, or backlinks. If our technorati rank rises to 8 million and our subscriber feed drops to 1 again… oh well. We know how to build it up.
• We’re not going to worry about posting regular content because this blog is shifting focus for us. 
• We can spend more time on our projects.
• We’re going to continue to comment around in the blogosphere and make new friends, but we’ll be backlinking to some of our other projects. But we’ll always subscribe with our webdiggin email address.

And, hopefully, over time, we’ll see an increase in the amount of money we make online.

Bottom line: How much time do you spend trying to make money online and how much time do you spend blogging about trying to make money online?

Question: Do you have Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound goals for your online adventures? How’s that going for you?

Just purchased a few domain names with free privacy for a buck each at GoDaddy using Mirjam’s trick from MeMyselfandI. (And this time, we didn’t mess up the free privacy when we registered the domain names :))

Blogger gives you instructions on how to set up your custom domain name.

• Basically set up a CNAME alias referral for

  www

  to point to the host

  ghs.google.com

But, the problem is that only works for www.yourdomain.com. If you enter just yourdomain.com, it doesn’t work.

Took us a while to figure it out, but Raymond at Compender has the fix on how to get your custom domain on blogger to work properly.

• Basically set up another CNAME alias referral for

  yourdomainname.com

  to point to the host

  ghs.google.com

(We don’t use Google for our domain name email, but the Compender post talks about it.)

Bottom Line: So, now, www.floccinaucinihilipilificatious.info, and floccinaucinihilipilificatious.info both point to our blogspot floccinaucinihilipilificatious-info.blogspot.com

Question: What blogging platform do you use to power your blog?

Sometimes we learn what to do by looking at what other blogs are doing. Sure, it’s hard to be the leader when you’re following the pack, but hey, we’re still learning here. (I think it’s called adopting best practices. It’s how we found plugins to make this site more comment-friendly.)

We’ve seen Entrecards around. The web’s version of the business card. (Heck, JohnChow has one on his site, so it can’t be all that bad.) Whenever you see a website that has the entrecard widget, you can click on it to leave your entrecard. Hosting the widget on your site, allows people to leave you their card. Basically, it works on a credit system:

• Get credits every time you send or receive a card.
• If people want to advertise on your entrecard widget on your site, they’ll pay you in credits.
• Once you build up a bank of credits, you can use it to spend credits to advertise on other sites or sell them for real money.
• Go around to your favourite sites (which you do anyways) and drop off your entrecard daily.

Why did we sign up for Entrecard? For the same reason why we log into our BlogCatalog account, our MyBlogLog account and our Stumble account before we head out to leave comments on the road. We’re going to socialize anyways, and it doesn’t take that much effort to click on the widget to leave our entrecard.

Does leaving a trail of crumbs work? It does for me. I’ve seen Caroline MiddleBrook around on the other blogs just from seeing her picture in the recent visitors of other blogs. Does she have an entrecard? I couldn’t see it on her site. But she still got my traffic today because I saw her icon in a different social networking widget.

Sometimes, it’s quite comical because I’ll follow a lead from a completely different source and see familiar names and faces. It’s a small world.

Bottom-Line: We’re trying to build traffic to this site by socializing with other bloggers. Plus, we want to leave a trail of cookie crumbs leading back to WebDiggin.com. (Plus, we like to see our little monkey logo get around.) So experimenting with Entrecard is part of the adventure.

Question: Have you tried Entrecard? Does it work for you? Have you ever had anyone advertise on your site or have you ever advertised on someone’s blog?

A lot of my friends are skeptical that you can make money online. I agree. It’s the 20/80 principle in effect here. 80% of the money is made by 20% of the people. Still, every now and then I find stories to motivate me. Today, I’ve found another teen blogger who proves that it is possible…

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Our April We’ll pay you to be our friend contest is ending in 3 days.

We wanted to get 100 subscribers by the end of the month. It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. When we started the contest, we had 7 subscribers. Today we have 25 subscribers.

We’ve posted all of the contest ballots that we’ve received so far.

• Check that your post with your backlink is in there (25 ballots each),
• See how many comments you’ve made (1 ballot each).
• (For privacy reasons, we’ve only listed how many email subscribers we have and not the actual emails. As long as you’re receiving our feed via email, you know that you’ve got 2 ballots)

Your current chances of winning are 2 in 339. (It used to be 2 in 146 a week ago on April 21)

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Is your RSS feed set up correctly for your website? If not, you might be losing potential repeat visitors. Sure, you’ve got that link for feedburner in your sidebar, but do you have autodiscovery turned on correctly? Do you have the RSS symbol showing up in your web browser? And, even if the RSS symbol is there, is it working properly?

Take two seconds to check your website with both internet explorer and firefox. Does the RSS button light up? Good. Now click on it and see if you go to your feed. If you go to your feed, great, you can skip this post. If there’s an error, you need to read on.

Internet Explorer:

Firefox:

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