Discount Panda Updates? Not Me!
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 13, 2011
This is what happens when you don’t keep up on things. I’d almost missed that Google had put through another Panda update in October. The first time they did something like that most of my blogs took a tumble, but overall it wasn’t all that bad. However, this time it’s taken direct aim at my biggest money making site.
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I’ve talked about my site Medical Billing Answers before. It’s been generating close to $300 a month in Adsense revenue, and with the other money I’ve been earning from other sites, which isn’t much, I’d been feeling pretty good. I want it to be higher but I figured that time would help push it along.
In early October it’s earnings were right on pace and I went on to start dealing with other things. With a week to go in the month I went to look again and noticed that things had dropped off sharply, and that I might not even make $200 for the month. I did, but barely. Not only that, but I ended up not getting paid my September money, which was greatly irksome.
On that front Google did eventually send out a notice to everyone talking about their glitch and saying that most of us would get that money and our October money at the same time in November; I’m still holding my breath on that one. However, almost halfway through the month and I’ve barely passed the halfway point towards $100; what the hey?
This is the part I don’t understand. My site on medical billing issues was doing very well, and suddenly, after what I believe is its third alteration, Panda decides it has no real authority after all? And just like that it affects my income that drastically? Is that fair?
Actually, it has nothing to do with fair I suppose, but reality. I haven’t added much new to that site in about 3 months, and maybe that’s the issue with Panda; no new activity, it stops sending people your way. These days everything seems to be about activity, kind of like the topic I touched upon when I wrote about blogging frequency. I mean, while traffic on my medical billing site has fallen 32% over the last month, traffic on this site has increased 7%, on my business blog it’s up 9%, and my finance blog is also up 8%. These are sites that I’ve kept up consistently new content. The oddity is my SEO blog, which is showing a decrease of 13%, even though I have a new post every 3 days there.
I’m irked that my income stream has been interrupted, yet I also think there’s something that I should have been able to do to keep it coming in. Do I start another blog? Ugh! Nope, that’s not going to happen. I guess I just have to try to make sure to add something new there at least once a month to see if that helps get its steam back. It does prove the overall need to diversify income streams, even online. Still, I’m not happy about it overall.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Affiliate Programs I’m Connected With – Part Six, The Finale
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 5, 2011
Here we are at the end of this particular journey. Just so you know, there have been other programs I’ve been a part of that have either gone away or just aren’t worth mentioning for one reason or another. There could have been another 6 I might have talked about if I wanted to go in a different direction, but I don’t. Anyway, here’s the recap links first before we move on: part one, part two, part three, part four and part five.
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Paul Myers’ Talkbiz News is a internet marketing newsletter I’ve been reading for years. I love reading it, and some of his articles have really made an impact on my thinking, including tone that’s a part of the image on this post. Two years ago he came up with an affiliate program to market both his newsletter and many products he’s created, and I signed up immediately.
To date I’ve made no money on it, but that’s probably more my problem than his. I’ve talked about the newsletter often enough, but not talked about his products all that much. He’s been around for a good while, though, and he’s not one of those guys that just pounds you with newsletters if he doesn’t have something to say.
Being In Heaven is a motivational movie that talks about the Laws of Attraction in kind of a different way. I actually wrote a review about it earlier this year. Obviously I signed up for the program before buying the movie since it hadn’t been released yet, but I received one of the earliest copies. I’ve sold 2 movies through their affiliate program, one of those purchases being mine (that’s one of the beauties of being with affiliate programs; you’re allowed to buy from yourself and thus make money while you’re spending money), as I was running their banner ad on a sidebar of this blog for awhile. The best thing about them is there’s no minimum for receiving your payment; if you make a sale, you get paid for it the next money, and it’s a 40% commission.
The final affiliate program to talk about isn’t quite an affiliate program, but since you can potentially make money from it I’m counting it. I wrote a post in April about making your blog available for Kindle. If you look to the right you’ll see my little advertisement for it. If people subscribe to your blog you earn money. I wondered whether anyone would subscribe to read a blog through their Kindle, since I don’t have one, but signed up this blog and my business blog anyway. And someone has subscribed to my business blog, last month it seems, and thus I made a whopping 30 cents. That’s not much, but I felt honored that someone would think enough about any of my blogs to pay to read them. I got the idea from Allan Douglas, so I thank him for it and hope he’s made money from it as well.
And there you are, all the affiliate programs I’ve tried, reviewed, and have now put in one place. I may turn this into a page since it actually ends up being a series so others can see them all at once, although they can just read this post and follow all the links that way. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and even if you haven’t, I bet you’d still have to say you haven’t seen anyone else write something like this. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Affiliate Programs I’m Connected With – Part Five
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 3, 2011
Man, how long will this go on? Until I’m done, that’s how long. So let’s recap quickly by giving you the links to previous posts on the subject: part one, part two, part three and part four. Onward and upward to part five.
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Mailwasher is an actual program I use on my computer and one that I think is very powerful protection. Basically what it does is lets you view all your email while still sitting on the server. You can eliminate spam at that point or any other email you don’t want to download, then only download email you know is safe and what you want. Sure, every once in awhile timing will let one come through, but it’s really rare.
They have an affiliate program and so date I’ve been credited with 3 sales worth around $19, with one of those sales coming this week. If you follow the link you’ll see that the ads look kind of funny, but it was proof that if you write about something you like that you have the opportunity to make money from it, even if it’s not a ton of money. I have to say that I believe Mailwasher is one of my most valuable programs.
Pokerstars is the site where I was playing all my online poker, and of course that means they also had an affiliate program. I never really got to advertise this one all that much because, of course, online poker is illegal here in the states, and even when I signed up for it the sucker was illegal, though many people played on the site. Then the government started shutting things down for American players and that was pretty much that. I made no money off it, as I don’t think I have a lot of people visiting this blog that play poker, and basically, until the government relents and let’s people play online again, for money, I don’t think I’ll have enough people from other countries signing up through me.
SEO Book is a website that offers tools to help figure out how to make your website work better, gives some internet marketing training and other good stuff. I run one of their SEO programs through my browser, and back when I wanted to learn about affiliate marketing I purchased their ebook, which was pretty good. They offer an affiliate program for selling some of their products and they give you $20 to sign up. And for each sale you make you earn $50; that’s not bad.
Unfortunately, I’ve never made a sale, and I have to admit that I haven’t really pushed it all that much. I did have the book up on a sidebar for awhile, then they went through some changes and shut down the program for a short while and I removed it and never put it back. One of these days I need to get it back up somewhere because I believe in what I saw and it’s possible it can be used to help others and make some money along the way.
I’m stopping here as I only have 3 more to go, and that leaves me one more post, although it may end up being the shortest of the series.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Affiliate Programs I’m Connected With – Part Four
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 1, 2011
The best part of writing a series like this is that you have built in links to previous posts that you can take advantage of, and that others can go back to see what they might have missed. So, here’s part one, part two and part three, and now we push on to part four.
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Share-a-Sale is a program like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network and Linkshare in that they have multiple online programs you can advertise for. The main reason I joined was because I wanted to be able to highlight images like the one on this blog through the Imagekind site.
I thought I might make some money from it, but it just hasn’t ever happened. I’ve only ever signed up with a couple other programs there, but I have to admit that other than the images I haven’t really worked hard to market any of the others. So, no dollars, and just a few clicks over the years.
Chitika is a pay-per-click program like Adsense that offers ads that kind of look like Adsense. Something else they offer you is the opportunity to have them set up to only show to people who come to your site via search engines, where if people click on those ads you earn more money, but you supposedly won’t upset your normal visitors by seeing those ads.
I have made $6.16 through 3 years with the program. I finally discontinued using it because it just seemed like it wasn’t going to get the job done. I had it on 3 different websites over the years, and that’s all I’ve made; not impressive is it? I still have it on one of my websites, and in the last 30 days I made a penny; sigh…
Bidvertiser is also a pay per click program with ads that look like Adsense. As you’re noticing, there are programs that mimic the look of Adsense if you’re ever banned, and it’s possible that you might be able to make some money from it if you set it up that way. If I thought those ads would work on this blog, where I did run it once, I’d have it up since Google banned Adsense from it. However, over the years I’ve only made 85 cents total, and I’m presently running it on my finance blog.
The final program I’m going to talk about today is much different than the others. Voxant Newsroom is basically a video of whatever type of news stories you want to show on your blog or website. If someone clicks on it to watch the video, you earn money. I had thought this would be a great addition to my finance blog so I ran it there for about 6 months. I made 3 cents, and that was that. However, I want you to see what it looks like, so I created a news feed below, which is local Syracuse NY news from one of our local stations.
It’s possible that if it’s put in the right place you might be able to make some money from it. Though I haven’t used this in a very long time, it’s possible that I might add it to one of my other sites, even this one, one day.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Affiliate Programs I’m Connected With – Part Three
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 29, 2011
Hi Y’all. We’re talking affiliate programs that I’ve used and tried to make money with over the years in these last few posts. We’ve had part one and part two and now we move to part three; hold on to your seats.
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Clickbank is one affiliate programs I’ve never specifically written about, hence no link to an article I’ve written. Clickbank is a program that you see a lot of big time internet marketers talking about all the time. They say they create programs, then set it up with Clickbank to help them market their products by allowing us to find products on their site to market, as publishers with their landing pages. There are some nice products there, but a lot of junk as well I have to say. I did purchase one product from them that I liked, 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online, that I thought was pretty good and I marketed that thing for a long time on this blog.
And this is where things fall apart for me. According to them, I’ve never had any clicks on any of the products I’ve marketed from them, and I’ve never made a single dollar. I find that hard to believe, but it’s why I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to market anything else they offered except for the book I’ve given the link to above. A month ago I finally removed that product from my sidebar as well; I guess just having me think it was great didn’t translate to anyone else. But over 5 years I haven’t been credited with a single sale. Maybe others have had better success than me; can’t tell you.
Solutions Medical is an affiliate program that I hooked up with to market medical billing books through my medical billing site, which I talked about on the part one post. Unfortunately, it’s another affiliate I’ve never made a single dollar from, although they do show some clicks here and there.
TTZ Media is an interesting little affiliate program in that it can highlight certain types of ads that you can put wherever and the products will rotate. You can pick one product or many products and change colors as you want to. Below is an example of the types of ads you can create:
According to TTZ, I’ve had almost 2,000 clicks over the years, but I’ve never made a single sale. Once again, it’s a program that I didn’t use a lot, but did have it on some of my other sites here and there, as well as popping it into a blog post every once in awhile. So, once again, I can’t tell you how well they pay or what payments are like. I can see how this might work for some people, but it’s never worked for me.
J-V Network is a lot like Clickbank. What you do is look through the tons of offers they have and sign up to help promote and market that program. I actually did a test with something called Tweet My Blog, which I had on this blog as the first program I used to send my blog posts to Twitter, which was neat except I couldn’t get rid of its marketing on my blog itself. That is, if anyone clicked on the link in Twitter they came to the blog and had a large banner ad at the top of the blog that obscured even the title of this blog.
Anyway, I had that post above and I heard from 3 people who said they’d added it to their blogs as well. When I went to check my stats it didn’t show I’d had any clicks, which of course means it showed me as not making any money from those sales. That was disappointing and I wrote them, but never heard a single thing back. I’ve never gone back to try it again, and I’m not sure I will. I do still get email every once in awhile from someone that’s created a new product that they’d like help marketing, but I’m just not in the mood for now.
There you go, 4 more affiliate programs I’ve dealt with. And there’s still more coming; well, you asked.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011-2012 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
