Anyway. I’ve obviously decided to give them a whirl at some point, so, now that I’ve relocated them, I thought I might as well follow it up.

First, a thorough look at their website. The layout is pleasing, and fairly new (they updated it in December), and the site is easy to figure out. They have a blog as well, and it’s actually an interesting read. There are great tips on paid and unpaid blogging there, articles on the economy from a blogger/advertiser viewpoint, an extensive “how to” section, and more.

I blog because I enjoy it, and i also enjoy earning a buck or 5 on paid posts. English being my second language, I find it challenging to write product reviews, website reviews and other paid postings in English. It keeps my brain active… The fact that it also lines my Paypal account can only be seen as a bonus.

Blog marketing gets up some people’s noses, I know. It’s never irritated me, and I think it’s here to stay. If a blog post interests me, I’ll read it, whether it promotes and links to a site that sells garden gnomes or not. If it’s interesting enough, I might even click on the garden gnome. We bloggers have our little bits of real estate on the ‘net, and as long as advertisers think they get their money’s worth, they’ll be willing to hire our “spots”. I’m quite willing to promote Paying Post, as a new blog marketing site that may be good to me. I hope it will.

There’s room for more bloggers over there, if you’re interested. There’s room for advertisers too.

Tradedoubler is a company that lets you display affiliate links and banners for the UK market. They partner with well known brand names. I use it on my Norwegian blog (they cater to the Norwegian market too, go figure), and I’ve done quite well there. They give you real-time stats, and getting started is easy.
Maybe your blog is based in the US, but you get a lot of traffic from the UK? Then Tradedoubler might be for you too…

Wonderful prospects. Maybe I’ll save up my other blog income, buy a trip to las vegas nevada, and just go crazy. You know, spend it all at once…

I did get a cheque the other day though. If you’ve noticed the Savvy Source widget/quiz thing in my sidebar – it paid off, and I got my first ever bona fide US dollar cheque for $44,16. The widget has been up for 3 months or so. The campaign is over now, but they’re working on finding a new sponsor, so I’m hopeful…

Do I give up on Adsense? No way. I’ll stick it out – don’t want to lose my 50 bucks. They will turn into 100 bucks – eventually. I hope.

As some of you may have managed to tweak out of my scribbles, I’ve now got 3 WAH jobs, not including blogging, which I’ll continue to call a hobby.
The jobs include Mystery Shopping (I’ve joined a second MS company too, that are quite big on Mystery Calling and service checks by email, so make that 4 jobs soon!), proof reading and translation.
Although WAH is a big market in Norway too, it’s also full of scammers and spammers, and people are getting quite sick of that – as well they should.
Add to that the MLM companies that many feel are ripping them off because let’s face it – we’re not all the great salesperson one needs to be to make it in MLM – and you’ve got a lot of people who just need to find out if there are genuine possibilities out there.

They also need to be told that a $5 “miracle e-book” just isn’t going to do it for them in 15 minutes. If that gravy-train ever existed (which I doubt), it’s long gone now.

Anyway – my ramblings with a purpose have hit a nerve, albeit a very small nerve (Norway is, at best, a niche market…), and I’ve had some search engine (Google) traffic for some related keywords.
This is where I’m going to be totally honest with you. Have I targeted those keywords, or even researched them? No. They emerged all by themselves, as the topics in the posts startet to take shape.

Another side effect is that the Adsense-ads have geared themselves towards the same keywords, and I guess it’s a fact of life that people will click on what interests them. So if I can interest you in a mini-statistics from Adsense:
I’ve earned 5 times as much so far in November on Adsense as I did in the whole of October, which means 5 times as many clicks on ads. That is in the whole of my “network” of blogs (how presumtuous is that…). The difference is the new blog, and the fact that it’s finding its voice.

Oh, and my October earnings were all of 51 cents. You do the maths for November. So it’s not as if I’ve found myself a genuine gravy-train or anything…

Part of the reason why they’re not fully active yet is that they want to get rid of p.o.r.n , hate and crime sites in their system before serving ads full scale. So – their spider is scouring member sites, getting rid of the non-serious and dubious ones. 51 000 p.o.r.n sites were removed during the last spider run… I don’t know about you, but I don’t mind waiting a week or so to get rid of those.

Pay Per Play is easily set up (just a snippet of code in your template), it pays in 3 tiers, and the audio ads are only 5 seconds, which should be bearable for most people. I’m amazed that no one has thought of this before, and I’m excited about being part of it.

Getting paid on 100% of my website traffic, no clicks necessary, that’ll do for me!

It’s free, of course, and there’s still room for you – so go there, read up, and get your code installed today!

During a particularily tenacious bout of blogger’s block today, I found myself dropping Entrecards, visiting blogs, on a quest for something interesting… (Commenting on some too, I might add). As I passed 200, I thought – Ok, then. Let’s go for the full 300 today, and see if I can do it before my eyes start flickering in a square sort of way.

The last 100 didn’t fly as easily as the first 200 – even though I was chaindropping by then. (Sorry, folks, but there’s a time for everything!) I got there, though – and now, I can’t drop any more cards today. I’ll just have to bookmark anyone interesting that I come across… I need some lunch now, and perhaps a nice, non – radiating newspaper to get my eyes used to real life again.

Yesterday, I put a Feedburner counter chicklet up on my sidebar. The day before, I figured out how to put up the orange RSS button thingy. And (sort of) understood what it’s for.

I’ve been blogging for a year (Today! Do go to my # 1 blog and congratulate me…) Still, I’ve never really realized the importance of feeds. I’ve not subscribed myself, and not seen the practical side of doing so. I’ve bookmarked sites, and gone back to the ones I like on a regular basis.
So, good people, have your whatnots ready, cos’ you’ll be getting another reader as I do my rounds… I’m about to fuel a new addiction – to my reader!

As I put the counter up yesterday, there were 14 readers. Now, there are 21. I guess people are up for a barn dance!

That’s 50% up… and it calls for a math experiment:
50% increase every day for the rest of January (9days) means there’ll be just over 800 readers there on January 31st!
Wow… at that rate, I’ll be a megamogul by mid-February.

Pay Per Play gives your visitors a 5 second audio ad as they enter your site. This means that for every visitor that stays on your site for more than 2 seconds, you get paid.
Being paid for every visitor, without requiring any actions (clicks) from my visitors, is the kind of passive income that appeals to me…
I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. They also have a referral program, that pays in 3 tiers:

25% of what the advertiser spends on airing their ad on your site, goes to you
5% of what advertisers spend on ads on you referrals’ websites goes to you
5% of what advertisers spend on ads on your referrals’ referrals’ websites goes to you.

You’re paid for 100% of your traffic, and for 100% of your referrals’ traffic!

The official launch date is February 1st – that’s when the ads start airing, and that’s when we start earning.

At some point, they may well close the opportunity to earn from referrals, which is why getting in there before February 1st is probably a very good idea.

I’d like to know what you think.

I don’t mind 5 seconds of audio as I enter a blog or site, but I know that audio irritates a lot of people. Please take a minute to tell me how you feel about it in comments!

I’ve got this post up as a page in my sidebar – I’ll assess the whole adventure around the end of March. I might get a poll from somewhere to post there too. Why I’ve gone into this? It doesn’t cost me anything, I might earn from it, and as long as the ads stay as short as 5 seconds, I believe it’s something most visitors will take in their stride.

If you want in, there are links galore in this post for Pay Per Play <— or you can use this one!

A few days later, I had a mail from Google Adsense. Their whatnotbot had detected activity on my site that was against their policies, and they wanted to make me aware of that fact. The activity was likely to have been paid for, and they just wanted to remind me of their rules, as well as point me to tools that would enable me to stop such activity, should it have been induced by a third party.
Woops!

I quite easily worked out the activity in question… It won’t happen again. Not because of the email from Adsense, but because the added traffic just wasn’t worthwhile.

Now, to the warning: If you’re relying on Adsense on your blog, don’t use sites like this to pay for traffic. I never thought of it (I don’t have the Adsense rules pasted above my screen), but it was detected very quickly. Sites like bux.to may well be good for driving traffic if your budget is such that it can be done on a regular/consistent basis, and you don’t use Adsense. (The traffic I got seemed very unlikely to click ads or even read blog entries. They stayed their allotted 30 seconds, and off they went to the next ad… Statistically though, if you get 1000s of visitors per day, some are bound to click or read something, I guess).

I won’t put Bux.to down altogether – you can earn some extra cash by clicking ads, and if you refer people, you can earn more. I won’t be paying for traffic again, though!

Here endeth the final post on this experiment…

I’ve tried this out for a little over 2 weeks now, and it works!
Since joining, I’ve had an average of 15 referred visits to this blog per day, and that’s counting the days when I’ve not been active on the site. Now that may not sound like much to some of you, but it is to me.
Some of these visitors have stayed a while, too, having a read here and there, some have even taken the trouble to review my site, which is very nice!
As for me, I’ve come across some very interesting blogs, many of which I will go back and investigate further.

How it works? Well, it’s fairly simple, and your in-site ranking is more or less up to you. Being “active” is what earns your site a more featured spot in your category. “Active” means visiting other sites, participating in the forums, reviewing other sites – even adding sites to your favourites. The more sociable you are, the more traffic you’ll get – both random and intentional.

Those 25-odd extra visitors on an active day do wonders for my morale – I try to do “my bit” as often as I can. if you need a visitor boost – I warmly recommend this one!