November is over now and I´m happy to show you my second month report on my progress with the Making Money Experiment. Unfortunately I haven´t earned as much as in October, but I hope I managed to get my blog working better for me in the future, because I´ve done some promotion like building backlinks or advertising that´ll keep me getting more visitors and therefore more money.

My Novembers progress was more characterized by promoting my blog than making money from it (nevertheless, I´ve earned some bucks . I felt it was more import to actual make my blog a bit more popular than focusing only on my earnings. I also wanted to give my readers some more “eye-candy”, so I ´ve developed a new blog design some days ago, because the old one was too ugly (yes, I really hated it

Compared to my earnings in October, which were 18 Dollars, the November earnings are somewhat lower, I´ve only earned 13 Dollars. Now here comes the earnings statistic:

The top money makers this month were Subvert and Profit, Bux, Blogsvertise, Wordlinx and Triond. These programs actual bring me some nice bucks each month, you can also check out my article on my best paying programs, there you can find more information if you want to.

Let me explain 2 new additions to this list that I didn´t have mentioned in one of my posts so far. The first money making opportunity I´ve found was Take the Internet Back. This program pays you for simply reading some advertiser emails (if you´ll join you´ll also get a $10 signup bonus). You´ll also get a share of the evolving company that stands behind TTIB while collecting points for each email you read. The whole process for making money with them is somewhat stupid in my opinion, usually you get around 5 to 10 emails each day in your inbox, which you have to confirm by clicking a link at the end of the mails text. There´s no timer, so you can simply click every link and you´re done, it takes only a minute or so. But as long as they pay you for doing this, it wouldn´t be a problem

The second addition was Fair Ads Network, a program like Google Adsense that let you show some ads on your blog. When anybody clicks on those ads, you´ll get paid. I won´t go too deep into the details here because I´ll write a review of FAN within the next days, for now all I can say is, that they offer a great service and it´s very unlikely that you´ll getted banned from this program like say from Google Adsense (I´ll explain later in one of my posts).

This month I got around 800 unique visitors to my blog, including around 150 returning visitors. My visitors come from all around the world like the USA, UK, Romania, Australia, Israel, Brazil… I really like how wide-spread my blog is visible around the world (I think this will keep me reaching my goals).

Unfortunately my Google Pagerank is still at zero (I´m waiting for the next update), but my Alexa rating keeps increasing (it´s now around 1,100,000). I also see a slowly increase in my daily traffic rates from search engines, it seems my blog got indexed better since I released my new blog design, because I´ve also done some search engine optimization to get higher ranking in the search results.

All in all I think I can reach my goal in getting $100, there are 4 month left and I´ve already earned around $30. Even if I only get around 15 Dollars for each of the next months, I´ll can pay for one year webhosting with my own domain.

This is the end of my second month report and I want to thank all my readers for visiting my blog and leaving some valuable comments on my posts. Special thanks go to my friend Midwest from My PPC Advertising, who helped me alot with his great posts on his blog, feel free to have a look at it.

Have some nice days!
Querblogger

Today I´ll give you some information about a nice service called rssHugger that´ll help you in promoting your RSS feed for getting more visitors to your blog.

Yesterday my friend Midwest has already written a nice article about rssHugger, which remembered me to have a deeper look on this free service, because I´ve already heard about it some weeks ago but so far not realized how much it may help me in getting more visitors to my blog.

Basically rssHugger will help you getting more exposure to your blog or website. The whole thing works like a viral marketing campaign, everybody can submit their blog to a huge Feed directory, which is actively promoted from even those people that submit their blogs there. Sounds a bit confusing? No problem, I´ll tell you more.

You have to ways to submit your blog to the listings on rssHugger. The first one is the paid method, you pay $20 and your blog will stay in their directory for ten years (I think an affordable price). The second one is the free method, you write a short review on this service (like I do here and you won´t have to pay a single fee. If you consider that most people will choose the free method for getting their Feed listed, there will be a huge promotion for this feed directory from all those reviews posted on different blogs worldwide. And this is what I mean with “viral marketing”, there´s an overall positive feedback, the more reviews rssHugger gets, the more exposure your very own blog gets, because of increasing traffic rates and popularity of this site.

There are also some other benfits for adding your blog to this directory are. For example you can build better deep-links to your articles which will help you in getting better rankings in search results. You also have the possibilty to get a ranking in their Top 100 page (which resets to zero every month for you to have better chances). You can increase your ranking by sending visitors to your personal profile page on rssHugger, so it would be a good idea to place a link to it somewhere on your blog.

All in all, I can definitely recommend rssHuger, especially because it´s free (if you post a review on your blog) and your blog will be listed for at least ten years. So, hug your feed and submit it!

Best Regards,
Querblogger

Today I´ll speak about 2 online services that enable you to manage your different ad networks on your site or blog. Both services are free and will help you to maximize your ad revenues.

If you want to make money from your blog, it would be a good idea to place some advertisements on it. If one of your readers clicks on one of those ads, you´ll get revenues from some cents to even some dollars if you show profitable keywords. Besides Goolge Adsense, there are many different networks you can use to monetize your blog, be it Adbrite, AuctionAds, Yahoo Advertising etc…

You could place a whole bunch of different ads on your blog to make some money from it. But the time will come where you´ll get into trouble managing all those networks. You´ll also want to know what performs best on your site or blog and brings you the highest earnings. So here come 2 nice and free services that´ll do most of the (maybe) hard work involved with it.

1. ClickAider

Although ClickAider is still in its beta phase, it seems like a really good service to manage your ads. This service will track your visitors behavior while clicking different ads on your page. All you have to do to get started is creating a free acount and placing some lines of Javascript in your site/blog template, which is easy (even for for non-coders). From now on, their servers create statistics about the click behavior on your site, including informations from where the user who clicked came from or what the actual link/keyword was.

By far the best feature is that you can track more than just a single advertisement network at the same time. With help of the usage statistics you can really optimize your different ads. For example if you see that a particular ad block doesn´t work because it only generates some clicks per month, you could drop that block or exchange it with another block from a different ad networks that performs better, you´ll find all the information for the best performing ads in the statistics provided by ClickAider. You can also use those statistics in the case of a ban because of a supposed click fraud, you can see who actually clicked on your ads to make prove that it wasn´t your fault.

ClickAider is still in a beta phase, therefore it is also free for the moment. If they come out of the test phase, they may want you to pay for some of their services (although they promise to still offer some free services furthermore) , so join know as long as you can use the program for free. You can even have a look at a demo account they provide you to test all the features.

2. PubMatic

PubMatic is like ClickAider, but it goes a step further. Besides providing statistics on your ad clicks, the system also manages your ad layouts like color combinations or banner sizes. You have to place special ad tags in your site or blog that enables this service to track your ads. After placing these tags, the system begins to automatically optimize your advertisements (size, color…). They also offer you a single management interface to keep track on all your different networks like Google Adsense, ValueClick or Komli, you can also use a widget to show your statistics.

But it also has some drawbacks. The first thing is the amount of ad networks you can choose from, they offer much less networks than ClickAider for example and most of these networks are for websites or blogs that meet high quality guidlines (I won´t say we all have ugly and boring blogs, but most of us are far from the “perfect” page). The second thing is the ad layout management, so far a nice feature because the system “learns” what ad layout performs best on your site, but it´s more the time actually involved in this “learning” phase. For a well known blog with huge daily traffic it won´t be a problem, but as a “normal” blogger you would have to wait a long time, because the system needs some thousand pageviews to generate (or guess) the best ad layout.

PubMatic is in beta testing too, so they are free for the moment and may want you to pay for their service when they go live. If you want more information, have a look at this video, that shows you how PubMatic works.

In my opinion ClickAider would be the better choice from these two programs. It offers more ad networks (and especially those mainly used on blogs) and they also promise to keep some free services after coming out of their beta testing phase. Because I´m currently searching for nice ad networks to include in my blog, I´ll test out those programs more deeper soon. I´ll keep you informed!

So long!
Querblogger

Today I´ve finally changed my blog´s template (as you may have seen from the old cluttered design to this one. I must admit, it took me more time than I first thought, but I hope you´ll like it anyway.

Let me explain you some of the steps involved in doing this makeover. Maybe it will help you doing a redesign too, if you´re feeling your own blog doesn´t look too good (as my old design was).

The first thing I´ve done was changing the template from a fluid width to a static width, optimized for screen resolutions from 1024×768 and above (notice, you can even watch this blog on lower resolutions, you only have to scroll a bit Therefore I´ve chosen the “Thisaway” template provided from Blogger. But this template was only a 2 column one, but I wanted to have 3 columns to have more room for my links etc., so I asked Google how to change it. I found a nice blog that deals entirely with customizing Blogger blogs. With their help I managed it within minutes to have a nice 3 column layout.

The next big thing was changing some background graphics (you notice that green test tube in my header?). For this task I used an open-source program called Inkscape, a free vector drawing program with loads of features. I thought it would be better to draw with vectors, because so it was easier to make changes to my graphics (as I´m not a painter After creating those images (the test tube, the date and sidebar icons…) I exported them as image files.

Now I had to find a free service to host these images and my friend Midwest indirectly gave me some advice in one of his blog posts dealing about changing your RSS feed button. I used Photobucket, because it even allows hotlinking to your uploaded images. I could even have hosted those images on my blogger account, but I felt using a free service is better, because you have more control over your files (thanks Midwest .

So, the images were ready. The next step was including those images in my blog design, which was a sometimes tricky part, because I had to dive into my template code. I made my changes to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and everything seemed to work fine until I tested my blog with Internet Explorer 6 (the old one). My blog looked different while viewing it with this browser and it took me some time to discover the “bug” that was behind it. It was because I used a transparent PNG image, but IE6 can´t deal with those images correctly. So I changed my graphics to GIF and all worked good. You may ask why I´ve spent the time to optimize my blog for old browser? It´s because around 13% of my visitors still use such browsers and I don´t want them to watch an “ugly” blog while others see it correctly (but I would definitely recommend you using Firefox instead, it´s MUCH better in my opinion).

Shortly after including these background and icon graphics (and the IE6 bug), I thought it would be better to check my blog on different browsers and systems to see if all looks correct. But how should I do this while only having 2 browser installed on my own PC? The short answer was Browsershots. With this site you can check your blog on different browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera with all their different versions. After submitting your site, you´ll get screenshots that show you how your site will look on different browsers (it usually takes up to 30 minutes).

The next steps involved in changing my blog design were filling the sidebars with content and links. You see, I´ve integrated a “Recent Posts” block in my left sidebar that´ll show you my 5 last posts. I´ve done this with integrating my blog feed (Bloggers provides this feature). I´ve also changed my archives, it´s now an drop-down list that saves a lot of space for other (more useful) things. I´ve also written some words about me in the right sidebar (ahh, now you know where I come from and sorted the links to my money makers. Take a look at it by yourself.

The last things I´ve done before finishing my work on the new design where adding social bookmarks to each of my blog posts (I followed this tutorial). I also added my tag cloud to the left sidebar (with help of this tutorial) and a nice little favicon. After this I took some minor tweaks on my template code like changing some meta tags and “compressing” the code for faster loading.

You see, there were lots of steps involved in changing this design (this also explains the lack on fresh content because I was busy). But I hope this all was worth the effort?!

I´ve a a big request to all my readers, please tell me your opinions about the new design! Please point out things you like and dislike about it. If you have any problems with it, let me know, I´ll do my best to fix those problems (if I can…).

Thank you and best regards,
Querblogger

Because I´m currently working on a new blog design (you can see my work-in-progress here), I´ll also have to keep an eye on some search engine optimisations (SEO).

Basically SEO can be divided into two categories, on-page optimisations and off-page ones. On-page optimisations for example include all work done at your blog´s Html code, e.g. setting right keywords an meta tags, validating Html and CSS code or tweaks to let your site content appear at the topmost position in your source code. Off-page optimisations for example include managing backlinks to your blog, choosing the right link texts and deep- and crosslinking your posts to get higher search engine rankings. The main goal for doing some SEO, is to increase your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERP) from well-know search engines like Google (let´s see how long they will be…) or Yahoo and MSN.

So I thought to take a look especially on my off-page optimisations, including rankings in different search engines and backlinks from other blogs and websites. And so I found a nice website called iWebTool with a big amount of services to check all those things. It´s really a great site (especially because most of there services are free) and you´ll find lot of information about your blog or website. There you can check your backlinks to your blog, your Google PageRank, broken links,your sites keyword density and many other things you´re interested in.

I think iWebTool will be helpful to all my readers trying to start or already maintaining a blog or website. They also offer a paid directory listing, you can place your site/blog there for just $9.95 (if I´ll have those bucks, I´ll definitely add my blog there).

Until next time,
Querblogger