I gave away free advertising last month to celebrate this blog’s one year anniversary. Now that the free advertisting for the winners has expired I finally have some space to sell. Alex has already picked up the first slot and as you can see by glancing to the right side of your browser there are still more slots available which you can purchase for $20 by clicking here.

My good friend Hyder who not only designed this blog, but happened to win the 468 x 60 ad during the last contest received enough traffic last month to warrant renewing the ad for another month. He also plans to renew it for another two months so that spot may not be available for a while. However, I have since added another option to promote your website by purchasing a link under the banner ads for $10 a month which you can do so by clicking here. Someone has already taken advantage of this offer and purchased the first link but there is still room for more in this new advertising space.

Another option for you to further promote your company, product, service, blog etc. is with a sponsored review of my honest opinion for $50. Here are some sample reviews I’ve done in the past: TNX Review and WP Auctions. You can purchase a review by clicking here. More details can be found on the advertising page of this blog and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Now help me break my $200 goal for this month by purchasing an ad today!

What criteria do you look at when deciding what type of forum you should start? I’m sure you’ve heard many other people recommend that you should start a forum based on a topic that interests you. The logic if obvious, if you don’t really care about the forum topic(s) than how can you set about creating a successful forum? I agree with this reasoning and even wrote about this a while ago. However, what can you do when the topic that interests you is not a profitable niche?

How I Chose My Niche

As some of you may already know by reading my story about getting started earning money on the internet, I run several video game related forums. I’ve always had a passion for video games and have even played Halo on the professional level. I also sell Halo lessons through my blog (in need of a serious redesign) over at thehalogod.com. In fact, I was even fortunate enough to use the success of my Halo videos to help launch a couple game related forums. However, as I look at the forums I’ve created I can’t help but think about the profitability of the niche I’ve chosen to target on the web.

The Low Profit Niche

I’ve focused most of my web properties around video games and in one circumstance - a single video game franchise i.e. Halo Boards. The question I now ask myself - that I should have done long ago - is how can I really make good money from these video game focused forums? Now I’m not just in it for the money and in fact if my revenue ever grew a substantial amount I would sponsor bigger events, provide giveaways, make improvements to the forum, and the list goes on. However, how can you really expect to make money off of advertising when nearly all of the active members and even the guests that find the site through search engines or other websites already own the video game system and games that most of the conversations center around (as in the case of Halo Boards)? The answer is simple - it’s extremely difficult. Even if the members of the website do click ads you have to remember these ads are still focused on video games which are frequently low paying.

Now the reason why these keywords don’t pay out well is because quite simply the ads that are displayed are for inexpensive items. When you see ads to buy third party game controllers, new video games and xbox live subscription cards you know that because these items hover around $50 there is not a lot of money to be earned with each sale. The advertiser can only make money if the cost of advertising is low enough that the conversions outweigh the cost of the ads. So to even make a decent sum of money you’ll need a lot of clicks.

The High Profit Niche

Now lets look at another example. Let’s say you run a forum focused on HDTV’s and the discussion of new HDTV’s, reviews and anything else related to this “new” technology. Immediately you know that a significant portion of the members on the forum are there to buy a new HDTV and are using your forum as a resource to help make an informed decision. And because of the nature of the forum members that are gathering more info to make a purchase, if they do click an advertisement they’re more likely to buy. This will help prevent your Adsense account from being smart priced but that’s a conversation for another day.

The cost of an HDTV can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. As you can see the products that will display in the advertisements on the HDTV forum example are much more expensive than those being displayed in the low paying niche. Naturally, because the products are so much more expensive advertisers have to pay much more for their ads ad clicks. With one low paying niche forum you could make a couple hundred dollars a month and on the other high paying niche forum you could make a couple thousand dollars a month with the same traffic level and activity. So before you launch your next forum make sure that you are not only interested in the topic but you also ask yourself, “How much money is there in this this niche?”

Lessons Learned

I’m not going to look back and view the decisions I made as a mistake, because starting those forums is what got me into earning money on the web in the first place. I also had a lot of fun doing it, but now that I’ve learned some lessons I’m certainly going to do more extensive research to determine how profitable the niche is.

Have you ever made this “mistake” before? What factors help you determine which new websites and forums to run with?

I logged into my blog’s control panel today to do a little work on some upcoming posts and the first thing I noticed was that my Feedburner count showed only 66 RSS readers which is about half of the normal count. Now I know that half of my readers did not decide they don’t like my blog anymore and unsubscribed to my feed so I set out to find the problem. I started with looking at other bloggers feedburner subscription counts and sure enough many were significantly lower than their previous numbers as well so I moved on and decided to log into my feedburner account.

After logging into my account the first thing I saw was the graph of my RSS stats where I took the massive hit losing nearly half of my subscribers (Ouch). I then moved on to the subscriber breakdown and sure enough the biggest piece of the pie was missing - Google RSS Reader count. So it looks as though for some reason the stats from Google’s RSS Reader are not being counted. I expect that this outage will be restored perhaps on Monday when everyone is back at work or it may be fixed sometime this weekend. The unlikely alternative is that Google doesn’t restore these figures and instead decides to go back to their original format of not releasing it’s Google RSS Reader count information (which I doubt they will do).

How far did your RSS count drop?

Update: Stats outage has been restored.

I wrote about the SEOBook Training program a few months ago and have been a member for 3 months now. The training program usually costs me $50 a month (it is now up to $100 a month) and I think it’s worth this price however, I don’t think it’s worth $167.63 a month. Let me explain:

The subscription to the training program automatically deducts $50 a month from my Paypal account every month on the same day. So when I did a withdrawl from my Paypal account for most of my balance I made a mistake and only left about $10 in the account. I thought the $50 had already been removed for the month, but unfortunately it wasn’t. I received an insufficient funds message from Paypal when they tried to remove the funds from my backup bank account.

The next day after I received that insufficient funds message from Paypal I received $50 from some Halo 3 Lessons I sold (I’ll save that for another post). So I assumed that because more money was put into my Paypal account they would just pull the funds from my Paypal balance and not my bank account. I even sent in a ticket requesting that they do that. So time went on and I thought nothing of it.

A few weeks passed by and my stack of mail continued to grow. I’ve never been a fan of receiving mail unless it is in electronic form. I understand that some things need to be physically mailed but why so much? Not only is it a waste of paper, but it’s so annoying to open envelopes when if it was an email you could simply delete it or better yet not even open it. In any case, last weekend I decided that it was time to pull out the paper shredder and go through my stack of mail. One of the first items I came upon what I thought to be my typical pointless Timberland Bank account statements that have shown the same balance for the past three years; however, I soon discovered these letters were much different. Instead, the first letter I opened was an overdraft statement and apparently the bank’s third attempt and getting me to deposit funds into my overdrawn bank account. After I finished going through my mail I counted a total of seven requests to put money into my bank account that dated back to early April. Each request was the same and mentioned that I was being charged $5 a day every day my account was overdrawn.

Now before you respond with, “You’re an idiot why didn’t you open your mail?” Well because of my distaste for opening mail and love for lazyness, I have set up every single bill, credit card, car payment and anything else you can think of to be done electronically except my Timberland Bank account statements. I previously made several requests to this bank to receive electronic bank statements instead of paper statements but they never bothered to do it for me. So when I take the time to go through my mail I know that everything is just pointless junk mail accompanied by several pointless Timberland Bank account statements.

So I called the bank on Monday morning and tried to explain the situation. I even told them, that if my bank account was overdrawn why didn’t you try an alternative form of communication? We’re not living in the Middle Ages so why didn’t you call me or send me an email? lol, I said if you mailed 7 letters and I did nothing in response to them than why not try and get in touch with me another way? First the employee said they do make one phone call (which I knew to be a lie unless they didn’t leave a message.) Then the employee let me know that it’s actually against the law to email someone that their account is overdrawn! I thought this was ridiculous. It seems like a pointless antiquated law that if I had the time I’d try to contact my legislators about the process of actually changing it lol. Anyway, after talking with the employee some more she told me that unfortunately earlier that morning my account was already put into collections and there was nothing that I could do except pay the collections agency $167.63. Now fortunately I paid off the bill before it affected my credit rating but needless to say overall it was a funny yet costly situation.

Now I do still recommend that you sign up for the SEOBook training program but I don’t recommend having a small balance in your paypal account when your backup funding source is a bank account created for you when you were five that you don’t use anymore lol.

This if the first full month that I’ve offered advertising on my blog and although I haven’t implemented all of the tactics I plan to use to maximize my earnings I did manage to make some money last month. Here is the earnings breakdown below:

Private Ad Sales: $75
Sponsored Reviews: $50
DealDotCom: $2.63

Total: $127.63

By no means is this a large sum and it’s humorous that I posted the $2.63 from DealDotCom, but it’s a start towards my $1,000 a month goal by the end of this year. As I mentioned earlier there are still several ways I plan to increase the money I earn on this blog. Here are a few:

Implement Kontera Content Link Ad Code
Sell links through OIOPublisher
Stop giving away free advertising lol

The free advertising that I gave away in my blog’s birthday contest took up most of the ad space on this blog, so when these spots free up I expect some of those will sell which should help to further improve my earnings. After those ads are done running I also plan to fully implement the OIOPublisher code on my site to make it easier to manage the ads so far I’m really impressed with the plugin though. I’m also interested to see how Kontera performs because the only experience I had with it before was from using it on video game related forums.

Next month my goal is to hit at least $200. I know I have a long way to travel to reach the $1,000 mark, but I still believe I can do it in 2008. For more ways to earn money on your website or to read about companies I work with check out my recommendations.

Subscribe to my RSS feed to track my progress and read more practical ideas for success online.

I’ve held this post as a draft for a couple days because I didn’t want to announce the page rank update too early, but the flucutations between page ranks seem to have steadied out finally so I think it’s safe to announce it now. I’ve seen page rank updates accross all of my websites and the flucuations have just been back and forth between the old rank and the new rank, so even if it’s not done fluctuating I believe it’s safe to say the new ranks I’ve seen will stick around.

The good news is that with this update my blog’s page rank moved up from a PR2 to a PR4 which will mean I should be able to sell links on this blog easily after I finish implementing the OIOpublisher text link code. Although there are many people that have tried to discredit the value of Page Rank because of Google’s recent adjustments to high profile bloggers that sell links and sponsored reviews, it’s important not to lose sight of the value of Page Rank. Some ad networks even require it in your application so having a higher page rank will help to improve your chances of getting in. Either way, I will sell links off this blog, but I haven’t decided if I’ll require the nofollow attribute or not.

In addition to my blog, several of my other websites improved their page ranks as well. In fact when I wrote about how Text Link Ads was finished back in March I mentioned that one of my forums, Xbox Live Arcade was hit and suffered a PR4 drop to PR0. At the time I believed this was due to the fact that I was running TLA code on the site and after seeing this month’s page rank update it looks like I’m right. The site has since gone up to a PR2 and I expect it will make a full recovery when the next page rank update occurs. So it’s nice to see that there hasn’t been any permanent damage. In fact, this just helps to prove that running TLA on your websites is a big risk and why I recommend that you only use it on websites that you don’t care lose their page rank.

How did your websites fare with this latest page rank update? Do you agree with my assessment of TLA?

For those of you working any significant amount of time on the web I urge you to purchase a second monitor. I’ve been doing most of the work for my blog on my laptop while I ride the train, but I have several other projects I’ve wanted to start that will take much more than the time I have on my daily commute. With that in mind, I finally purchased a second monitor that is basically the same as my old monitor (i.e. same screen size and max resolution) but a newer model number.

I never really bothered purchasing the second monitor before this because I wasn’t really focused on starting any new projects but I have several ideas lined up that I couldn’t put off any longer. So although I should have purchased the second monitor long ago I’m looking forward to the increased efficiency that it will bring to the table. In fact, part of what kept me lazy was the fact that at my 9-5 job I have two monitors and it’s frustrating to come home with only one to work on. Again, yes it’s that stupid that I never purchased this long ago but either way check out the new set up:

Before:

After:

By the way, they’re two 19 inch monitors. The next time I’ll upgrade is when I get a bigger desk. Then I’ll go with two 24 inch monitors.

Are you dual wielding?