Well this Valentines Day was quite interesting for me. First of all I went outside and was greeted with something that looked like the picture above. This picture was taken today, yesterday it was much worse. So Ashley and I were going to go out for dinner for Valentines Day and I go outside and see my car is completely covered, in not just snow…ICE! The night before it was snowing, but I guess it got warm enough that there was freezing rain, so my car was completely covered in the sheet of ice! It took me 20 minutes just to get into my car, the doors were iced shut! Then I had to clear the rest of the ice off my car and try to get it out. This was a pain because it still was snowing and the ground was ice. Anyways we finally made it out and got to the restaurant, which was packed so we had to wait. We had a great dinner and tried to enjoy the rest of the evening. On the way home the roads were horrible, luckily nothing bad happened. Times like this I was I had a garage! Ashley and I are looking into a townhouse that has 2 garages, but that’s another story.
Anyways besides that I have been busy, you might have noticed I haven’t been keeping up with posting. I have been working on a lot and I will have a lot of business related posts coming up!
Well a while ago I talked about Agloco. If you were not reading my blog then I will explain Agloco to you again. I’m sure you have heard of the services that pay you money to surf the web, the most popular of them was AllAdvantage. Well AllAdvantage is back under a new name, Agloco. It will work the same as before you will install a viewbar at the bottom of your browser and it will display ads.
The reason I think it is going to be a big success is that when AllAdvantage was out there not as many people were surfing the web and on the computer as much. Now it is a common thing to be on your computer for hours at a time, and a few ads at the bottom of your page are not as obtrusive as they once were.
The way to make a lot of money off Agloco is to build up a network. Basically there is a referral process. Once you signup you can refer people to Agloco with your referral ID. Agloco then keeps track of your referrals. If your surfing equals one of your referrals or more you make 0.25% of what they make. Now this may not sound like a lot, but if you have 1000 or more referrals then you will be making a good hunk of change for just surfing the web!
So most of you already know all this so what I am talking about Agloco now? Well the viewbar is slated to be released in March, which is less than a month away. So now is the time to really get your network going if you have not already. This is not a scam, this is a real way to make money for just surfing the web. AllAdvantage was real and so is this! So make sure to signup ASAP!
On each of my sites I always wonder how an ad will perform if I put it here instead of the normal placement, or if I change the colors of my Google ads, etc. Well the only way to tell is to test. It is really hard to test these things with a content based site because you know you are going to get better traffic if you post a well known product compared to a no-name product. So to test things out on my content based sites I usually have to test different ads for at least 2 weeks. Over the 2 weeks there is a good mix of no-name and well known products being reviewed so it evens out. After the 2 weeks are over I would compare them to the 2 previous weeks. If I see a significant change in CTR and revenue then I will keep the ads the same. If I don’t really see much of a change then I keep the ads the same.
If you are really dependent on your income then it is a bit risky to test out new ads. They could totally bomb and you could loose a lot of money. The best thing to do is test one set of ads at a time. You don’t want to change all of your ads at once. One thing that might be a pain is changing all of your ad codes. The easy way to make sure you won’t have to change all your codes on each page of your site is to use an IFRAME. You just point the iframe to an .html file that has the Google or other advertiser code in it. So when you want to change the ad code you just edit that .html page and it changes on all of your pages where you have the IFRAME point to the page. I use IFRAME’s on all of my sites, they make it really easy to add and change ads without having to edit each individual page.
Right now I am testing out my 336 Google placement on ThinkComputers, hopefully it will perform better than the old ad colors.
If you read Jon’s blog you probably have heard of BuzzBums. If you have not it is basically a blog of blogs. There are various types of categories on BuzzBums like business, sports, technology etc. As I always say every link counts so ThinkComputers and ThinkGaming have joined BuzzBums. What BuzzBums does is read the RSS feed from the site and posts a blurb about each post on the site as sort of a headline. Jon has always done a good job with his sites so I think BuzzBums will do well. It is cool because it gives you an idea of what’s going on all the blogs all over the net.
Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on ThinkGaming. It is now running 100% on WordPress! Instead of using a WordPress template and trying to edit it to how I would like it, I actually took ThinkGaming’s original layout and made it fit into WordPress. This took some time, but I think it looks great! So what have I made this change to WordPress? Well ThinkGaming is more based on news than content. I would say there are only 5 reviews a month on the site, but each day there is daily news. I wanted something where users could easily comment on news and which also had good SEO and RSS integration. So my answer was WordPress. Also WordPress has a ton of addons and it is very easy to find information on problems you are having. In my Goals for 2007 post I said that I really wanted to get ThinkGaming going and I think this is a step in that direction. Check out ThinkGaming and let me know what you think.
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