Mike’s Blog - My Internet Life

Well last night I removed all the images next to any Google ads from all my sites, which sorta felt like I was sabotaging myself. Then this morning I woke up and as part of my morning ritual I checked my earnings from yesterday and today and as expected everything went down. CTR fell about 1.5% and earnings are down about 33%. This was expected, but I was still kinda hoping everything would be ok.

So now comes the long journey of reoptimizing all my ads again, which is never fun and takes way to long. I am definitely not breaking $3,000 this month. I’ll let you know if I stumble onto anything good.

Source: http://adsense.blogspot.com

Yesterday Google updated its Adsense guidelines and it is now against TOS to put images next to Adsense ads.  This change in policy affects just about every site I own and Im sure affects the majority of webmasters out there.  I will be editing all my sites today once I get home from work since I don’t want to get banned from Google.  This will probably have a negative affect to my earnings, but hopefully not terribly as I have plent of ads that never had any images next to them.  Looks like I’ll need to get a bit creative and figure out how I want to layout my ads now.

I finally got my replacement motherboard yesterday. I was a little nervous about putting it together, cause I really didn’t want anything to go wrong and have to wait another week to replace something. I first just put in the mobo and powered it up to see if I’d get beeps, I didn’t. I was starting to think that maybe my comp speaker wasn’t working, cause theres no way I got 2 bad mobos in a row. So i put in the CPU, memory and graphics card and gave it another try. 5 seconds passed without a beep, nooo, it must be the speaker, but a few more seconds passed and I got 2 beeps. WOOOHOO! Finally! I striped my old comp of its hard drives and DVD burners and stuck them in. Everything loaded. YES! I then proceeded to format my smaller of the 2 HDs and reinstall XP on it. Today I’ve basically be installing software all day and setting things up. For those of you interested in the specs here they are.

$199 - Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe nForce4 SLI Intel Edition P4/ Pentium Processor Extreme Edition/ Pentium D/Celeron 1066FSB LGA775 DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, Dual Gigabit LAN, RAID/Serial ATA Retail
$310 - Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe Processor 2.4GHz
$126 - 2 GB DDR2 PC2-6400 Gold GX XTC Dual Channel Memory
$164 - GeForce 7600 GT PCI Express 256MB DDR3 Video Card w/TV-Out & DVI Retail
$95 - Cooler Master Case
——–
$895 Total

Lots of people want to have nice large active forums, unfortunetly for most people they never get them and end up putting their forum up for sale. Now aside from the people who actually gave a real go at starting a forum and failed, there are a bunch of people who just make forums to sell them. Its actually funny to see some of these post, most of them go something like this.

Hi, I have a awesome forum, www.someforum.com, that I just started a month ago. It doesn’t have many members and only a few posts, but the domain name is great. I am asking for $200. The reason Im selling is because I just don’t have the time to put into it anymore and need the money to make 10 other forums and sell them to you guys.

Ok, maybe not that last sentence, but I’m sure you’ve seen these posts. I’ve seen these types of sites going for sale between $100-300 dollars. Now if you stop to think about it, what are you really getting? A domain, a skin, and a dead/empty forum (most of the time not including the licence).

Domain: $6
Forum: If you don’t get a licence then you basically paid for them to install it for you. If you did get the licience then subtract that cost from the Skin price.
Skin: $94-294

So your basically paying for a skin. Is it really worth it to buy these forums? Not in my opinion, I can do it myself in an 5 mins, then 1-2 hrs skinning. This is in fact a nice little business some people have, create forum, quickly skin it, hire a posting service to get 50-100 post in it, which cost about $20, then selling for $100-300 to someone who thinks he can get the forum going. It really comes down to whether or not your think the skin is worth the price, because thats basically all your getting.

I’ve thought about doing this myself, making an extra few hundred/week just from installing and skinning forums sure would be nice.

Well last Sunday I decided it was time to upgrade and get a new computer.  This wasn’t a spure of the moment decision, I had been researching what I was going to get the week before.  Anyway, I went to Zipzoomfly and orders my motherboard, CPU, graphics card, and RAM, then went to Newegg and ordered my case cause it was sold out at Zipzoomfly.  I got my stuff the following Friday and started assembling the PC.  This was my first time starting from scratch, the only thing I never installed before was the motherboard and CPU.   But  the instructions were clear and I had no problem hooking everything up.  I double checked everything to make sure it was all hooked up and then crossed my finders and powered up.  At first everything seems fine, lights came on, fans started spinning, I could hear the hard drives, but my monitors showed nothing.  To make things worse the motherboard did not post (no beeps).  So I didn’t know what was wrong.  I decided to unplug everything except the motherboard, chip and RAM and start up again.  Again no video, no beeps.  At this point I decided to just wait for a friend of mine who has built a bunch of computers before to help me out.

The next day my friend stops by to check up on my PC and he said everything was connected correctly.  But just to make sure we took everything out and redid everything, but to no avail.  Still no video or beeps.  Since this was a new PC and not compatible with anythign from my old PC we could not test individual parts and we were stuck.  I decided to be a noob and take it to BestBuy’s Geek Squad hoping that they could test individual parts, but not so, at least not for less then $180, which I could just buy a new motherboard for that amount.  I was told that Geek Squad has no PCs setup to test motherboards, chips, memory or graphics cards.  Seems like unless I need spyware removed your out of luck.  Although the guy did look through my PC and again assured me everything was setup correctly.  He said mostly likely is a crapy montherboard.

So today I went and sent back the motherboard which cost me $30 to ship cause Zipzoomfly does not cover shipping.  But I still do not know if my graphics cards, CPU or memory work.  Im going to get really pissed if I get my new mother board and I find out something else isnt working.  Zipzoomfly also has a 15 day only return period from SHIPPING DATE, so that mean Im already 6 days in even though I only received my stuff 3 days ago.  Im going to fill out another RMA form on the 14th day just in case I have to return other parts.  The RMA #s are good for 10 days, so that gives me 24 days instead of 15.  But hopefully I won’t need to use them.

Its that time of the month again.

Earnings
- - - - - - - - - - -
Google: $1,174.84
Yahoo: $235.67
Intelli: $56.76
Tribal Fusion: $275.83
Misc Earning: $1161.06

Total Earning: $2904.16
Advertising Spent: $256.66

Total Profit: $2647.23 (0.2% Decrease)

Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Total Growth - 6.20% Increase (11,408 uniques)

It was a pretty good month, but there were some ups and down. Google and Yahoo had about the same payout as last month, but Tribal Fusion and Intelli both went down a pretty good chunk. Intelli pretty much crashed and burned for me, about 80% down from last month. Traffic was also mixed, some sites gained while others lost. If it wasnt’ for my 3D tutorial site I would have had a decease in overall traffic this month. WiiCheats is doing good, but its still to early, not enough people have a Wii yet and there aren’t a ton of games. After Xmas I think things will take off.

So it looks like barring a catastrophe I’ll hit my goal of $20,000 for the year. Im at $19,044.96 right now, so only $955.04 left. I’m aiming to break the $3000 mark this month. Then I’ll have to set a new goal for next year. Right now Im thinking $75,000, but we’ll see.