You may have heard by now that Google has altered Adsense units to reduce the click area on your displayed ads. Instead of visitors being able to click anywhere in the ad unit (including the blank white space around around the link text), they can now only click the ad in the link title or description. What this means is that there will be fewer accidental clicks on your ad units. Good for advertisers, bad for publishers.

As an Adsense user, this will probably hurt my earnings. I’m not sure how much, but I can’t imagine it being much. Sure the area where people can click on your ad will be reduced by more then 50%, but seriously, who the hell clicks on white space anyways. Most people clicking your ads actually want to click on them. They won’t be clicking white space near the ad, they’ll click on the link title just like they click on everything else.

I think webmasters were over-reacting when they initially heard the news. Unless you’re tricking your visitors into clicking your ads (which is against Adsense TOS anyways), you shouldn’t be affected to the point where you’re earnings are ruined. If CTR drops to some ridiculous low on my websites, I always have YPN to fall back on. I haven’t run YPN on my websites in months. I have no idea if it’s gotten any better or worse since this summer when I dropped it.

The last major piece to the wedding planning puzzle was completed on Saturday. After months and months of going back and forth, my fiance and I finally decided on a honeymoon destination. We knew that we wanted to go somewhere tropic and wanted to stay at an All Inclusive (all food, drinks and activites are included in your rate) resort so we would have no worries once we got there. We officially decided on and booked a week long stay at the Sandals Grande St. Lucian Spa and Beach Resort.

I’ve heard only good things about Sandals Resorts. Neither of us have stayed at one, but by looking at the pictures and reading the reviews you really can’t go wrong. We decided on St. Lucia because of its pure tropical beauty. Not only do you have perfect beaches right outside the room, but there are mountains and rainforest excursions not far from the resort either. The only thing that could have kept us from picking St. Lucia is that it is about 7 hours away from where we live. It’s almost at the equater. We could have gone somewhere closer like the Bahamas or Jamaica, but we really felt St. Lucia offered us everything we could want in a honeymoon destination. And the rates weren’t too expensive. We were able to book a Honeymoon sweet.

So far we have already booked a half day jeep excursion through the rainforest and we booked a trip to one of those adventures where you go on rope lines overy the canopy. I’ve always seen people doing that on TV and it’s looks like so much fun. We’ll also take boat tours around the island and do a sunset cruise. In addition to hanging out at the beach and pool all day we’ll also make it to the spa and I might play a round of golf.

Our honeymoon will be a short one though…only 6 days. We would have liked to have a 10 day honeymoon, but my fiance is an elementary school teacher and she was only able to get off one week of school because of the lack of substitute teachers. To make up for that, we are planning another vacation for the summer of 2008 to California and/or Las Vegas.
We’re really excited about this trip. We went to the Bahamas about a year and a half ago, but this trip will totally blow that one away. Check out the pictures on the Sandals St. Lucian website if you get a minute. There is a ‘photo’ button on the right side just above the 45% off image. It truly looks like paradise.

One of my newer sites, Forum Business Blog, is about one month old now (or more, I can’t remember). I am very disappointed with the growth of FBB thus far. Since launch, I have posted 18 times and have 12 comments. I’ve put hours and hours into this site. The posts are not easy to make. Some of them require planning and research (something I don’t really do with this blog).

On average it only gets like 8-10 uniques/day and makes $0 in revenue (except for one private ad I sold for $5). I’m not quite sure what I’m doing wrong. The “if you build it, they will come” rule is not applying to this site. In my opinion the posts are very informational and beneficial to forum owners, and webmasters in general. The design of the site looks good to me, so that’s not what’s keeping people from coming back. Maybe there just aren’t enough forum owners?

What to do about it?

Starting posting more in webmaster and forum admin message boards with a link to FBB in my sig. This is something I meant to do from the get go, but haven’t yet. Paying for advertising at this point is not an option. Since my Google penalty, I am hurting for money and have not a dime to spare.

At times I feel it is hard for me to post on FBB. Not because I don’t want to, but because there is only so much to say when it comes to being a forum owner. I started posting daily, but have recently dropped to like 3 times a week. Perhaps if I bump back up to daily posting, traffic will increase?

All I know is this website needs to do something or I’ll start to get pissed and end up ignoring it. And that’s not good for anyone.

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For the first time in the 2 years I’ve been making money online, I have finally started earning money with Commission Junction. I have had a CJ account forever, just never really used it. Within the past month, I have made several sales for a total of $21.05. It’s not big money, but there is hope for more.

All my CJ success can be attributed to my Tim Tebow fan site. If you visit my Tebow fan page, you will notice a link at the top to “Tebow Gear”. On that page you will see my CJ offers. I am using CafePress affiliate offers for my t-shirt sales. I get about 15% per shirt I sell, and they have a 30 day return cookie so I earn commissions on all repeat sales for up to 30 days. Thank God Cafepress press charges like $23 for a t-shirt. I usually end up getting around $3.50-$4.00 per shirt I sell.

Below is a screenshot of my CJ income proof:

You will see the $21.05 in my account. According to CJ’s minimum payout policy, I will need $25 to receive a payment. I have direct deposit set up, so it should be quite easy to get my money. I probably won’t get my money for awhile though. I believe CJ payment days are determined by the individual advertiser. So Cafepress probably runs on a net-45 or net-60 because they have to deal with returns.

It will take over 30 sales in order for me to make $100/mo from this affiliate and this site. I’m not quite sure I can reach 30 sales a month based on the traffic I’m currently receiving. I need to search CJ for more related offers I can provide for the visitors of my Tim Tebow website. Ultimately, with CJ, VCM, Adsense, and Azoogle all on the Tebow site…it should be making me a nice monthly profit.

I’m trying to explore why my Google rankings were all removed for Pimp Myspace and I may have stumbled across something. I am no SEO expert, so I wanted to pose the question here to my readers. Hopefully someone out there has seen this before and knows what’s going on.

If you search in Google, site:layoutpimps.net/layouts you will see something like 500+ results all of which are my individual myspace layout index.php pages. Here is the results page link: Google Results for site:layoutpimps.net/layouts

Now this all looks OK. You will notice the 5th link down is layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php - Fashion Myspace Layouts.

By looking at that, you would assume that the layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php page is indexed in Google. Now check this out. If you search Google for, site:layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php you will get a “No results displayed” page.

Well, what’s going on? By looking at the first page you can see the fashion/index.php, but if you search that specific page in Google, it won’t show up. This same thing happens for nearly all of my layout pages.

UFC Layouts is another funny one. If you search in Google, layoutpimps.net/layouts/sports/ufc/index.php you will not see the index.php page, but you will see 5 preview.php pages.

However if you go back to that original search, layoutpimps.net/layouts/ you will see the layoutpimps.net/layouts/sports/ufc/index.php is listed at the bottom of page 4.

This whole thing just boggles my mind. I have no idea what’s going on. Is it an htaccess issue? robots.txt issue? The only thing in my robots.txt file is:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

If you think you know what’s going on, PLEASE leave a comment and help me out. I would greatly appreciate it.