I wasn’t too surprised to find out that Text Link Ads rejected my blog. They cited a few reasons in the email they sent it. Unfortunately I deleted the email so I can’t quote what they said, but I remember it being just a generic rejected letter saying I already had too many links, or I didn’t get enough traffic. I’m not exactly sure what the requirements are to be accepted into TLA. I have one site in there, Fight Song Lyrics, but I have yet to use it. O-well for now. There are plenty of other ways to monetize a blog. John Chow wrote a great article about all the other advertising networks out there.

On a more personal note, I got to sleep in this morning. No I’m not taking the day off from work. I actually have a dentist appointment this morning at 10:00 AM, so it was pointless for me to drive 20 minutes to work at 8:30, then leave at 9:30 and drive 25 minutes to the dentists, then drive all the way back to work afterwards. My work rewards sick hours, and I have well over 100 sick hours saved up. So I am allowed to use them medical appointments. I’ll probably be at work around 11:30 or so.

Bought Some Advertising

My Gaming Videos site has kind of been ignored as of late. I still update it daily, but I have done very little to promote it. No link exchanges, no directory submissions.. nothing really. So after reading Jon Waraas blog about buying some cheap advertising for his test project Tookle, I decided to try it for In Game Flix. I’m starting out small, reall small actually. I bought 1 weeks worth of advertising on a pr5 arcade site. My link rotates with others at the very top of the website in what would be a network toolbar. They estimated I would get 29 clicks in 1 week’s worth of advertising. My ad was placed at 1:00 AM this morning and as of 9:00 AM, I have had 2 clicks come to my site. So far neither of them translated into Adsense profits, but I’m not doing this one for profit. I’m doing it more for exposure. The cost of this week long campaign? $1 via paypal

I uploaded a new theme for my blog like I said I was going to. I personally like it 100 times better than the old one. The previous theme was just too bland and boring. This one is clean and edgy. I put a picture of a shark at the top. Now people will remember my blog is the shark one!

Let me know what you think? Did I upgrade or downgrade?

I think it’s time that I take the first step to monetizing my blog. I didn’t think I would ever really do this, mostly because I only have about 60 uniques a day, and most of you are loyal readers that probably won’t click on the ads anyways… but I thought what the hell, let’s give it a shot.

As of right now, I don’t plan on putting Adsense, or ValueClick Media, or any annoying pop-ups. I’m going to keep it as clean as possible. Currently I submitted my site to Text Link Ads. If my blog is accepted, I will try to sell 6 text link ads to be displayed on the right sidebar. If all 6 links are sold, I’m guessing it will bring me around $40/mo. It’s nothing special, but it’s almost enough to pay for my $50/mo hosting charges for all my sites.

I also signed up for the Text Link Ads affiliate program, so if any of you are looking to monetize your websites and want to keep it clean at the same time, then sign up for them. Use this banner below so I get the hook up

Finding a new Wordpress Theme

This theme just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. I’m on a search for a new one… a free one of course. Finding a solid free template isn’t that hard, it’s just I’m so picky it usually takes me awhile. I’ll probably end up settling on the same theme I used for my new fan sites, I’ll just mod it up a bit.

Philip Rivers

My Philip Rivers fan site is looking to be like a huge success. It’s only been launched a week or so and is already on the 1st page in Google for the search “philip rivers”. That’s great. I added a statcounter last night around 9 PM, and by midnight it already had 14 uniques. It also had 2 clicks yesterday and made me like 25 cents LOL. It’s not much, but a good sign for the future!

It’s nice going 4 days without thinking about a website or stats or anything. I took my holiday vacation and relaxed, ate a lot of good food, played some golf, watched a lot of football and hung out with friends and family. I wasn’t worried at all about how much Adsense I was earnings or whether or not people were posting on my forums. I didn’t update any of my sites over the 4 days and still managed to earn money!

I made $63.81 over the last 7 days. Not bad, but not good either. It’s below the $10/day I needed to be at.

Today I’m going to spend just getting back into things and updating a lot of my sites. I uploaded MVP Flix and In Game Flix this morning with about 5 new videos each. I need to update all my fan sites with new blog posts. Eventually I need to finish the webpage for my Ebook.

In other news… Historum is definetly dying. I really don’t know what else I can do to keep it alive. I’m getting bored with that site as it is. Forums are just so hard to run. I’ve put a lot of time into it, I just can’t seem to get anyone to post! Unless I start a thread then no one will post anything. The weird thing is the site still gets about 250 uniques/day. But I’m starting to believe a lot of that traffic is from spam people. As much as I want to hang onto that site for the long term, I feel like it’s losing value everyday because of the lack of activity. I really either need to pump it up or just let it go.

I won’t be posting much today or probably until Monday. I’m going on a nice little vacation away from my websites. I hope everyone has a great holiday week!

Don’t you hate it when you make a blog post and click publish only to find out your server went down? I ended up losing my post and now I’m so mad that I don’t feel like writing it all over again. So I’m just going to cut to chase here and keep it simple.

Adsense earnings for yesterday were a little over $9. Not bad for a Monday. I expect my earnings to take a slight drop over the holidays coming up because not as many people will be surfing the web. It’s family time and turkey time and football time!

Ryan Howard, one of my fan site guys, won the NL MVP award yesterday. I saw a nice spike in traffic as a result. Joe Mauer, one of my other fan site guys, almost won the AL MVP today. Wouldn’t that have been cool to have two of my guys win MVP awards in the same season. Both of these guys will be superstars for the next 7-10 years. If I can manage to keep these sites up and running and upload fresh content when the season starts, there’s no doubt I can turn them into small money makers ($1-3/day sites)

I also posted on Tracy McGrady and Philip Rivers. I amde some unique content on my own. I haven’t decided yet whether or not I am going to keep them. Marc made some nice comments in my previous post about building a more general site. I think he’s right. My next blog won’t be a fan site. I want to make it more general so it attracts a wider crowd. If I make any more fan sites it will be the sole purpose of flipping them for a quick $50-75.

Well that’s it for today. Sorry this post didn’t flow well. I just don’t have the time to redo an entire post.