My Make Money Online Project - Follow my progress

chapter 13 - New branding

2009-03-05T21:26:00.004Z

I have decided on a name for my network of websites. It is to be called "the you-cube network." I will link back to the you-cube blog from every other blog, website and forum that I have - to build up the Google Pagerank of my new HQ. It is under construction currently, but you can check out the blog below...

http://the-you-cube-network.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, February's earnings were pleasing - especially as January's were so poor.

Chapter 12 - updates

2009-02-14T19:15:00.002Z

I still haven't thought of a name or made any progress with the branding, but my change of ad placement on my forum appears to be doing better. However, January's revenue has easily been the lowest so far.

I haven't had much time for my online projects of late, but now I'm back and ready to increase my part of the web. I am working on a new forum, details will be available soon. I have also been printing posters and adding them to notice boards

Chapter 11A - Change of ad placement

2009-01-19T17:16:00.002Z

I've decided to change the placement & layout of my ads on my latest free advertising forum. Here is my new ad layout.....

http://free-advertising.forum3.info

index_body
728 x 90 Leaderboard
{forum content}
336 x 250 Large Rectangle (image) 336 x 250 Large Rectangle (text/image)

viewforum_body & viewtopic_body
336 x 250 Large Rectangle (image) 336 x 250 Large Rectangle (text/image)
{forum content}
728 x 90 Leaderboard

------------------------------------------------------------

If you have any comments or ideas about my ad placement, please feel free to leave a comment.

On the index page, I've kept the large rectangle ads near the bottom. Guests may be put off from registering if they see too many ads at first glance. However, I'm looking forward to trying two Large Rectangles together - this is a strategy I've seen employed on other websites. So, I've decided that viewforum_body & viewtopic_body will have these double ads at the top of the page.

Chapter 11 - New Branding

2009-01-07T19:14:00.006Z

Hi,

January has proven to be slow, so far, but my concern this month is to come up with a brand - which I could use to network all of my websites, blogs & forums together.

I am trying to find a completely unique name for my network, so that at anytime, I can see all of my network at a glance - by searching for this unique term in a search engine.

If you have any ideas, please leave me a comment :)

Chapter 10 - Highest Earnings in a month

2009-01-01T12:33:00.003Z

December has been the best month I've had so far! Earnings of 196%, edging out previous best of 195% in August.

My latest free advertising forum now has 18 members and traffic is slowly starting to flow. A lot of clicks have come from this forum already, so when it grows, I will consider paying for a proper domain and hosting package.

Chapter 9A - Great 2 days earnings

2008-12-22T18:53:00.004Z

My new forum is up and running and I'm hoping this will send traffic to some of my other sites. One of which is below..

http://my-shopping-vouchers.blogspot.com/

This has done very well for me over the last two days getting me 8 good value clicks - pushing my earnings for December up to 140%. I may even beat my highest ever month! (August 195%)

My forum has 9 members - I will only be promoting my new forum from now. It has search engine friendly pages and a lot more features than any I've created so far!!

Chapter 9 - Latest News

2008-12-21T12:13:00.002Z

People have had trouble registering at my forum & sending PM's, so over the last 2 day I've been constructing a new forum!

http://free-advertising.forum3.info/

It's a free forum, so I didn't think I was gonna be able to get Adsense on it, but eventually I figured it out!!

Hopefully, this forum will be more reliable. December's earning's (55%) are still on track to beat November's (65%)

Chapter 8 - My latest forum

2008-12-18T18:41:00.004Z

http://seo-helpdesk.110mb.com/free-advertising-forum/

I am now going to concentrate mainly on this forum. It only has 31 members currently & is not even listed in Google yet! However, I'm hoping it will be integral part of my web network eventually.

I'm already at 50% earnings for December, so I'm on track to beat November and maybe October. It has been two very poor months, but i'm confident I am turning a corner now.

Chapter 7 - New forums

2008-12-17T19:45:00.002Z

http://premier-league.110mb.com/forum/
http://seo-helpdesk.110mb.com/free-advertising-forum/
http://noregistrationadvertising.netboards.org/

I have these forums to concentrate on now. I promote these on other forums and I'm hoping that Google will find these soon.

I also have these recent blogs.

http://my-shopping-vouchers.blogspot.com/
http://www.seo-helpdesk.co.cc/
http://football-manager-2009-guide.blogspot.com/

If you have any comments about these blogs, please feel free to comment below. Comments, good or bad, will be welcomed.

We are now at the present day. I'm not really too sure where to go next. Before I invest in proper web hosting, I need to know that it will bring in more money than cost.

Chapter 6 - Gaining knowledge of blogging

2008-12-17T19:20:00.003Z

After a littlle break from being online, I returned to spend time on making blogs.

http://guess-the-catchphrases.blogspot.com/
http://time-for-puzzles.blogspot.com/
http://free-seo-helpdesk.blogspot.com/

Take a look at a small selection of my blogs from this time period. I was gaining more knowledge and my blogs were looking slightly better than my first attempts! However, I needed traffic to make any money. I opened a free forum at netboards & advertised it as 100% no registration advertising! I couldn't put my own advertising on, as it was a free forum, but I only opened it to send traffic to my blogs.

Then I discovered 110mb. Again a free web hosting service, but I had the opportunity to open up a forum with my own advertising without a monthly subscription. I had to pay a one-off fee of $9.95 to have access to SQL databases, but I hoped it would soon pay for itself from Adsense earnings!

Chapter 5 - Forum II

2008-12-17T19:05:00.002Z

In the meantime, I was creating new blogs and free websites at Synthasite - but I lost my supply of traffic for them. This also cost me financially, as traffic = adsense revenue.

I had to start the forum again. I faced the same issues as last time - it's hard to get a forum going from scratch, but I used the same tactics as last time. I offered no registration advertising to build up content & slowly got members again. Regaining my PR2 & Alexa rank was pretty easy once I built up traffic again. It took aroung 3 weeks.

Unbelievably, through no fault of my own this time, SQL errors occured again! I emailed Yahoo! customer service every day for around 10 days, just to be told Yahoo! does not offer support for third party software.

I cancelled my plan! I felt like giving up...

Chapter 4 - Things started to go wrong!

2008-12-17T17:43:00.005Z

Things were going really well - the forum continued to get sign-ups daily & more content was added by its members. Even if I didn't do any promotion, I was still get traffic from Google, meaning my forum was growing on it's own now!

Until I read, on Digital Point, that it was against the tos for me to have adsense ads on login & profile pages. At this time, my Ads were inserted into the overall_header.tpl & overall_footer.tpl templates files - meaning they showed up on every page of the forum!

I had to find out which of the .tpl files to add adsense to without it violating the tos. At the same time, i wanted to monetise my forum further, so I looked into integrating the ads into forum posts. At this time, I still didn't know an awful lot about forum management, but I attempted to make these updates - without researching the topic in full!

After uploading the new files, I began to get major SQL errors - still don't know how or why. Stupidly, I had never backed up the database, the forum, the files or anything! Yahoo! customer care said they do not offer support for third party software, so I had no option to start the forum from scratch.

Chapter 3 - First monetisation of my forum

2008-12-17T17:23:00.003Z

I signed up to Adsense and got accepted on my second attempt. I added two adsense blocks to the top of my forum & a leaderboard ad unit near the bottom. I got my first click on 5th July - it was a very pleasing $0.94! The ads themed around making money on the internet, so I was pleased with my first click & I had high hopes for my Adsense future.

Things were going pretty well - I was getting 1 or 2 clicks a day as I continued to promote my forum on other free advertising forums & directories. Google started to send traffic my way, helping my domain to reach an Alexa Rank of 800,000 & a Google PR 2 quite quickly!

I was delighted with the progress - especially as, in June, I didn't even know what Pagerank was! However, things were about to change! Read Chapter 4!

Chapter 2 - My First Forum

2008-12-16T20:31:00.000Z

Now I had some content on my website, I was ready to get traffic! I started by posting messages at free advertising forums with little success. So I decided to get my own free advertising forum!

Offering people something in return, got a far greater response from my messages posted at other forums. So, people were now visiting my forum. By using the Announcements & the Sticky posts, I kept my forum ads at the top. This was now getting small amounts of traffic to my website & blogs.

Kick-starting a forum is hard to do. I was able to generate content by offering a no registration advertising forum. Therefore, if people didn't sign-up, they have still given me content!

Slowly, sign-ups increased and I limited the no-registration element to just one section. Then, I discovered Google Adsense!

Chapter 1 - My experiment begins

2008-12-16T20:15:00.000Z

My experiment will focus on whether the average person can make money on the internet. It began in June of this year. I signed up to Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting Plan, with the domain name of

http://www.make-money-online-uk.net/

This domain no longer exists - but you'll read more about this in later chapters! On this website, I focused on building content around making money on the internet - reviewing a wide range of opportunities. Meanwhile, I discovered blogger and started to make a blog or two. My first ever blog is below.

http://shopping-rewards-uk.blogspot.com/

I have not updated it since mid-June. You can see how poor it is! Remember though, this was my first attempt at blogger!