Chapter 5 - Forum II

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 3 - First monetisation of my forum

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

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

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!