I often talk about why you should be writing new content for your website as a way to get more visitors to you site through search engines and links from other sites. It turns out that you can also make money from these endeavors directly.
Wordpreneur has printed a post called “71 Ways for a Writer to Make Money” and they detail many ways that you can make money directly from your writings. Wordpreneur was a site that I used to read that gave very good advise to writers and wannabe writers. I thought that they went away, but I recently received an e-mail from them letting me know that they are back with a new format. I recommend that you read their current stuff and their “Classic Wordpreneur” also.
Before I put the Google Adsense ads on my pages I wondered if there was any chance that I could make any money with it. So many questions ran through my mind. Am I too late for this? Will my traffic support this? Will the ads actually be relevant to my content? Will people click on my ads? Anything else that I haven’t thought of?
After a while I can tell you that, 1) Yes, it does work and 2) Yes, you can do pretty well with these.
Of course it didn’t start out great guns, I tweaked my ads for quite a while and continue to do so, but if you find a combination of colors that match your site pretty well and don’t stand out too much as ads, people will click on your ads.
I’m not making a huge amount of money, but it keeps going up every month and I will continue to experiment with colors and placement and as long as my traffic continues to improve every month I expect my Adsense revenue to increase as well, but that’s for another post.
What should you do if you’re considering Adsense on your pages or if you already have them, but want to improve your revenue? First I would start with Google. There are many great tools to help you. Who better to start with than Google themselves? The first stops being the Adsense blog and the Adsense support center. They both offer some great tips to optimize your ads.
Next I search for blogs and posts from others that are related to the subject. These are usually from other designers with personal experience to share. There are several good sources for this like searchenginewatch.com. Here’s one to get you started.
Here?s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Here are many more custom signs generators. Each one is more fun than the last.
You can make FREE logos, parody photos, buttons, banners, email sigs, comics, signs, blinkies/glitters, avatars, support ribbons, wallpapers, labels, celeb spoofs, animations, MySpace clipart, userbars, barcodes, 3D pics, title bars, taggers, fake ads, e-cards, etc.
Here’s a very good free program that I have been trying out for several weeks now.
Free avast! 4 Home Edition is a free anti-virus software for home noncommercial use. This free virus scanner protects against viruses, worms and Trojans on disk, CDs, in E-mail and during browsing. Incremental updates of virus database (twice a week) are small, fast and reliable.
So far so good and I’m going to recommend it. Now there is no reason to not have a good up-to-date anti-virus program running on your machine. Have a look.
With Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9 all being released in such a short period of time I was wondering which is really the best. I do like Firefox and I have since I first installed it. At the time I wondered what took me so long to switch, but I have been looking for good reviews of all three.
I have heard a couple of horror stories about IE7, but I am still going to have to install it, if for no other reason than to see what my work looks like in it. I will use my old computer for that so if there any major problems it won’t affect my work too much.
ExtremeTech has a very good post on the subject as well as a lively discussion going on
When I first started my site I thought I would put some photos on my site to fill some space and to give people an idea of my varied talents. What I found was that people were visiting my pages who, for the most part, had no interest in designing websites or SEO, but were still interested in something I had. I soon realized that this could be a very good way to get traffic to my site. It wasn’t traffic targeted to most of my content, but still I believe that all traffic is good.
I first thought about what I could use to best bring me more traffic. The Pittsburgh Zoo is building a new exhibit for polar bears, walruses and sea otters which was just beginning. I thought when this is completed quite a few people will be searching for this so I started to take pictures of the construction as it went along. I noticed that the more pictures that I put up the more searchers would find me for this. I am hoping that one of the local popular sites (TV or newspaper) will link to me once the exhibit opens. It could be huge.
All of this brings me to a post I found recently by Tony Hill called “How to dominate image searches”. It contains more good advise that I’m going to use.
Well, it’s almost Halloween and if you’re like me you have tried without much success to capture the event with your camera. Over the years I have been getting better and better at taking photos at night with the help of some photography tips websites.
Photojojo has put up a very good page this year with links to even more great tips.
Comments Off
Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through this. Working for myself is sometimes more than rewarding, but sometimes it’s as aggravating as hell. I’ve run into people who couldn’t be nicer and always willing to help you out and also people who want everything for nothing.
Since I’m still relatively new at this I am always looking for information on how to be successful at running my own business and more specifically how to be a successful web designer. I ran into this post by Andy Budd called 7 Habits of a Highly Successful Freelance Web Designer. I liked what I read and I would like to pass on his post to you.
From Smashing Magazine a modern magazine for web-designers and developers comes a very extensive List of CSS Tools.
I have tried many of these tools and find them to work well and to be very useful. It never hurts to simplify your work if you can.
Here?s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Just in time for Halloween, Christopher Knight posts ” The Top Ten Best GHOST PHOTOGRAPHS Ever Taken”. You can tell he did some work finding these.
It doesn’t really matter if they are real or not they are great fun to look at and to read the attached stories.
Happy Halloween.
