Some Milestones

...so I reached a milestone this past week. I had my first person randomly purchase a book from one of my sites. That was a pleaseant surprise and hopefully a good sign for future earnings.

Additionally, I switched from using free hosting at godaddy.com to using economy hosting. I can finally get rid of that banner. BTW, it was the banner that was prevent my blog feed from working properly. As soon as the banner was removed, feedburner recognized the banner just fine.

Here is a link to GoDaddy. In my opionion, they are a great resource.

Using Other Ads besides Adsense

One other thing that I've been working on lately is using ads in addition to Google Adsense. Many vendors have what's called an affiliate program and when you sign up with a centrally managed site, you can access to various ads. The incentives vary but a t-shirt company, for example, may offer 15% of the sale. The main sites that could find [that provide the management of the affiliate program] are Commission Junction, Performics, and ShareASale. Some of the commissions are quite significant. I've tried to target my ads to the type of website or blog that I have but honeslty, I have had little luck thus far.

Golf Site Update

I'm still working on the golf site webpages. It's a tremendous amount of work but I reached a milestone. I finally finished all of the "county" pages. I've also been able to get a map of the course location to work on each course page. That's great but now I have to get back and retrofit all the pages that I had previously completed. If it helps generate traffic and keeps people coming back, it will be worth it. I'm hoping I noticed a change in trending. I actually made $0.48 on Saturday and I didn't even send out any links to my blog pages. Also, I've noticed that my golf site comes up fourth on a pretty generic google search for golf information.

Things I've Learned in 3 Months of Blogging

Here is a list of things that I've learned over my brief 3 months of trying to make money with adsense, blogging and web site development:

1. DO have fresh and releveant content on whatever you are posting.

2. Do NOT just copy another story completely. It's okay to reference other stories or blogs and talk about them but don't just take the entire story and paste it into your blog.

3. Keep you site updated and make sure it's accurate.

4. Don't overwhelm your site with ads.

5. Create a visually appealing layout. How often have you gone to a site and just got lost in the content or been turned off by the layout? Create a site where people like to come and they will keep coming back.

6. Don't make too many changes. I've been through at least 4 iterations of my blog and 2 iterations of my golf site. It's hard to keep loyal readers when you keep changing so much. I'm hoping that my content has found a home for good now. I think the next 3 months will be far different than the first 3 months.

7. Do read other blogs and leave comments and see what's going on "out there". I think this is related to staying relevant.

8. Do put the Snorg Tees girl on your site. If anything, it's just some visual relief from all the words! LOL!

Grand Tally as of August 22, 2007

So, I've been blogging now for over 3 months and the grand total of what I have made is just under $70. Here is the breakdown:

Adsense (all time from May 6, 2007 to August 22, 2007): $54.45
Amazon Affiliate: $14.81

As I move forward on this blog, I hope to create some sort of spreadsheet showing my progress. Most likely, I create some sort of monthly tabulation of my various incomes.

As far as current work, I've been putting a lot of focus on the golf website page as I think it will be the most useful things of all of the sites that I'm working on. Despite my hard work, I'm sorry to report that I still have a long way to go. I have to clean up all of the "by county" pages and finish at least 50 individual course pages. If I had a little more expertise in coding, I'm sure I'd come up with a better way of developing these pages. Currently, I use Dreamweaver to make static pages for all of my content. After I get this phase 2 of the site up and running, I'll look at some sort of database backend.

Wordpress

For most of my blog "career", I had hosted my blog at blogger.com but as I got more and more into things, I realized that it would probably be better to have my blog on my domain. I had read quite a bit about wordpress and decided to give it a try. Initially, I only created a new blog at www.wordpress.com but it didn't really stack up to www.blogger.com because you could NOT put up adsense ads (or any ads for that matter). You really have to use the wordpress software (found at www.wordpress.org). Typically, with your own domain name, you can use the worpress software in two ways: install it yourself or team up with your hosting service and see if they already provide it. At, godaddy.com, where I have www.tylercorlen.com hosted, wordpress is available free so I just used their install. It was very easy to set up. During my test and startup, I had my blog hosted at www.tylercorlen.com/wordpress (the default installation site) but after a short time, realized that it was better to host my blog in the root of my domain. There are very simple instructions for moving the blog to the root of the domain included in the wordpress admin pages once you set up your wordpress software. There you have it.. It's August 20, 2007 and that's where I'm at today.

More Ideas that I Had

So, at this point, I created a blog and a website and I wasn't really getting that much traffic. As I read other blogs about "how to blog" or how to be successful, I realized that you have to have quality content to attract readers. As I write it, it sounds pretty obvious. But, initially, most of the stuff on my blog was "ok" content, most likely only my friends and family would have been interested. So, decided to create a new web site. Since I'm really into golf, I create a golf site. The great thing about that site is that the domain only cost $1.99 and right now I have it hosted free at godaddy.com. Although the site is only about 75% complete, it's already on it's second iteration (in terms of format). This is all well and good but honestly, it hasn't made a whole of money either. But, the great thing is that I know it's attracting visitors so I plan on continuing to update the pages and make the site better.

During the same time, I also signed up for a number of "affiliate" programs. These are simply companies that you have an agreement with to post their ads and you usually make some sort of commission off of your advertising when a reader of your site clicks on one of the ads and actually buys some product. So far, I've used amazon, nike, snorg tees, buy.com, newegg, to name a few. Amazon has been the most profitable so far.

So, I think that pretty much summarizes all of the background so far. As of this moment. I have two websites (http://www.tylercorlen.com/ & the golf site). I host my wordpress blog and the tylercorlen site and I of couse, have a golf resource page at the other site. Additionally, I also have a golf blog at golfnotes.blogspot.com. That's about it for today...

A Litte More Background

I realize that my first post wasn't all that informative. Six months or so ago when I ran across adsense, my first thought was to create a web site. Even though I'm a technical person (I work in the IT field), I had very little experience developing web sites. So, my first thought was to create a website about HTML coding. I figured I could simply apply what I wanted (NEEDED) to learn and use that as the subject of my site. Anyway, I bought my first domain (tylercorlen.com) and put the various pages up. If you go to the site now, you'll just get my regular blog so I moved the original site to www.tylercorlen.com/htmlcoding. Most of the links don't work anymore on the old site. Anyway, I spent a few months building that up (never really "finishing" it). I learned a lot along the way but I never really made much money with adsense.

What to do next?

This is when I decided I'd also start a blog. However, I didn't really want to pay for another domain so I went to blogger.com and started a blog called armolet.blogspot.com (it's a long story on how I came up with armolet). This blog was mainly about random crap that was cool to me. I had a little more fun with the blog because I was able to but up a little of funny stuff and send out links to friends. The blog was only slightly more lucrative than my original site. I mean I only made pennies a week.

To keep consistent with my naming style, I ended up switching the blog's name to tcorlen.blogspot.com. It still exists today but without new posts and I've now moved by blog to the root of my www.tylercorlen.com/ site and that is where I find myself today. I'll talk about that site in another post because it involves moving to wordpress and I'll also discuss other ad types (in additon to adsense) that I've used and what affiliate programs I like to use.

Where to start..

A few months ago, I ran across Google Adsense and I thought, "Man, this would be a cool way to make a little extra money." I started a blog and put up some ads but I haven't really made much money. So, the purpose of this blog is to discuss progress that I make and talk about the struggles and successes that I have had.

Interestingly enough, I've also created a couple of websites (I'll discuss in later posts) as well. So, that's it for the first post!