Trying to Make Money

As I've had little enough response to my Help Stefan Campaign I'm having to consider alternate means of getting more money.

The condition of her father in Liberia has deteriorated considerably and next week Stefan is talking of taking the bus from Dakar to Guinea, from there she will change to Freetown in Sierra Leone and from there she has to work-out a way of getting to Liberia. If only I could afford the airfare, then things would be so much easier.

I've tried putting-up pages for eBooks including:

Celtent Guide to Spices and Spice recipes

Pictorial Guide to Building and Upgrading your PC

'Memories of Myth and Man' Poetry eBook

Each of which goes to helping the Help Stefan Campaign. I also have the One Dollar SEO links where webmasters can purchase non-reciprocal links for $1 which are guaranteed to be valid and remain live for the life of the website and which will never exceed 100 links in length so that all links on a given page will be indexed. Again, take-up is extremely slow with only a few links having been taken-up thus far.


So, this weekend, in desperation I'm trying every trick I can to make some money for this campaign. The latest approach is to try the 'Hubpages' site both to generate additional income and to drive more traffic to my main Celtnet site


Hay Fever Information

Celtnet Site Description

Information about Acne

Improve your Google Rankings with In-bound Links

Introduction to How Mobile Phones Work

In desperation I've even resorted to buying an internet course: Profit Lance which is reviewed in the site given here. Reviews are good and the course definitely looks comprehensive so I'm going ahead with it at the moment I'll report back at a later date so say whether it's worthwhile or not.

Amongst the various on-going projects I've also resurrected my Celtnet Information eZine and have begun posting to this weekly rather than fortnightly. I'll see if this starts to bring-in any more sign-ups.

Well, that's today's view from the trenches. I now need to go back to doing some serious marketing.

Don't Ignore your Website when Adding New Content

As you'll know from my most recent posts I've been working both on adding more content to my site and on re-jigging existing pages to improve ad layout and click-throughs for my AdSense ads. All of this, as I've said before, is based on having real content to pull visitors to this site and using AdSense to monetize the site itself.

I've been involved in a flurry of activity to add as much content as possible. Which means both adding original content written by myself, as in my Mobile Phone Information minisite and using others' articles to wrap around affiliate content, as in my Mobile Phone Ringtones page or my Recipe-based Amazon Book Search page.

All this, of course, is excellent and it follows exactly the behaviour in the Multiple Sources on Income programme. To this extent I've been adding some serious affiliate programmes to my portfolio, such as the Credit Card affiliate site.

But there's one thing I forgot to do and that was to keep an eye on the remainder of my website. After all, much of the other things I have to offer on my site is pretty niche: based on Celtic Deities and Celtic Texts. Basically I'd been ignoring this bit of my site (which, in terms of number of pages at least, is a significant portion of the site).

Here's the shock I had yesterday: From the Google AdSense stats I know that about 3000 people a day visit my AdSense monetized pages. Effectively 90000 people every month. But the thing is, when I looked at my overall weblogs I was getting 230000 visits every month. 140000 of my visitors weren't even seeing an ad!

Effectively I was squandering over half my website. This has led to some frenetic activity over yesterday and today to include AdSense ads on pages such as Celtic Gods Search page and on individual results pages such as the Mad Merlin information page. Basically, any page that didn't already have ads on them gained a header ad and a right sidebar ad.

It'll take me a few more hours today to cascade these changes through the site, but tomorrow I'm going to make a difference: which it should.

One other thing I noticed is now much my inbound traffic has increased over the past few months. The curve is nicely exponential at the moment and it's all because I practiced what I preached in actually using the techniques that you will find in my eBook on Maximizing your Web Traffic. Get the eBook and replicate exactly what I did today! And remember, unlike almost all other internet marketers and entrepreneurs I'm telling you what I've done and allowing you a peek into my web stratagems and processes right here on this blog!

The eBook mentioned above is yet another string to my marketing bow in that it's a real product being sold for a purpose. More than that it's not hype in the least, as the techniques are working for me right now! This is just the start of the eBooks for me as I will soon have a product based around spices using some of the information in my Spice Guide page along with recipes for each spice from my extensive collection. I'm also working on a book about male health, focussing primarily on the penis. But those are all projects in the pipeline (but it's important to keep goals focussed in this business!)

CletNet Info eZine Alive again

Now that I'm properly back on the internet marketing kick again, it's time to resurrect the CeltNet Info (CI) eZine which I started just over a year ago and then allowed to lapse as I first became ill and then got married. So, it's more than eight months since my last eZine publication date and the CI eZine is active again with the following posting: April 24 2007. The aim being to return to a posting every other Tuesday from now until I clear my debts.

The truth is that I've been at this game for a while now and it's taken me a long while to get to grips with the simple rules of making money on the internet. The simple truth is that to make money you need content. That content needs to be indexed by the search engines and the indexed pages need to be delivered to potential customers. Even if you're generating an information-based site this is still true. You need to do your homework and that involves investigating good-paying keywords and integrating those keywords into your text. Even if you're more into programs such as Google's AdWords or Yahoo/Overture's Sponsored Search maintaining that list of well-paying keywords is important as these are the keywords you don't want to bid on if you wish to make any money from your campaign.

With this in mind I've been adding a few more pages to my Mobile Phone Information minisite and this is to add information on the very lucrative Mobile Phone Ringtone niche. I've also dismantled an old phone today so the next page to be added to this minisite will show the dismantling process so that the various components of the phone can be labelled and analyzed. Admittedly, this page will be image-rich, but it's still good, novel, content for the website.

I'm also going to try a trick from my Auctions site by adding Amazon and ClickBank pages, articles and products and making these more attractive by using article abstracts as sidebars and content. This will take a little development based on the templates and site examples I already have but it will both flesh-out the site and add more potentially lucrative content.

Continuing on the Optimization Track

Since my last post about the new Mobile Phone Information section of my site and the way I'd used it as a model to alter the google adsense ad placements on my site I've been having a re-think of other sections of my site.

The latest to receive the adsense makeover is the how to build a PC from scratch section of my site. I've altered the page to give better usage of adsense ads, falling back on the classicc header ad, right sidebar ad and one ad within the text. But, as the page also deals with computers and computer components I've also added a fresh ad for Google's new Google Pack of free PC software (see ad on left). After all, if you're trying to upgrade or build your PC with components a nice suite of freee applications should appeal to you, right?

I certainly hope so as Google's lead payments for this can be up to $2. Which isn't bad at all!

Apart from this I've been adding more content to my recipe-based site and my mobile phone pages. I've even caught-up with the various submissions added to my Celtnet Links Page. Of the 440 submissions during the past three months all bar five were for either adult or pharmaceutical sites. Why do these people bother, I wonder? Now I'll have to write some software to week out these guys. But that should only take me a couple of hourse. Ah, the trials and tribulations of an internet marketer!

Well, that's all for today, folks. I now have to get back to actually doing things to the website to make money :-)

To your continued success!

A New Site Section

Admittedly it's been a few weeks since my last post to this site. Mostly as I've been away visiting my wife in Senegal, West Africa. As ever, though, I have not been entirely idle during this time. It's long been an ambition of mine to expand my list of minisites to add new revenue streams. This comes from AdSense analyses I've been doing on which regions of my site have been pulling-in the most revenue. This analysis clearly indicated that my Guide to Credit Cards was by far the most efficient region of my site in terms of overall revenue. As a result of this information I did some research on business and marketing areas that would provide revenue but which, in general, were not that well served in terms of information content.

After a few weeks' research I eventually came up with the whole area of mobile phone technology as an excellent topic for creating a new information-based minisite. Further research revealed a fair amount of information on mobile phones, none of which was properly integrated. So I printed the papers out and took them with me on my trip. The long flights allowed me time to read this material and re-arrange it for my purposes so that when I came back home I could begin writing and constructing my new minisite. The result of this was the Mobile Phone Information minisite. An adsense targeted site that still relies on proper, real, content to pull-in visitors.

It's interesting, but the creation of this latest minisite also allowed me to re-examine and alter the placement of AdSense advertisements on my various minisites. They were all updated last night and the strategy seems to have worked in that already today I have generated three times as much revenue as I did at this same point in time yesterday. Which just goes to prove that the task of adding new content to a website and of modifying and managing the placement of ads is never-ending. If you take a break from these tasks then you will lose out on overall income.

In truth, I suppose, I am more than a little obsessed with my website and whatever I do I don't completely rest from working on and thinking about the site. A good case in point is my trip to West Africa. Even whilst I was going round the markets with my wife I couldn't help but think about the recipe and spice section of my recipe-based sites and I ended-up buying small quantities of herbs and spices that are either unique to or which can be bought chealpy in West Africa. As a result, as well as my original Guide to Spices I have now added a new Guide to Herbs to my site. Again, whilst adding this page (which is continually being updated) I also had an opportunity to play around with and modify the advertisements on this and related pages. Which, again, I hope will bring me further increased revenue.