Stop Milking Me! - Cow’s Journey To Financial Freedom

I am finally making some money with Google Adsense. I started experimenting with Adsense since this March. Everyday, I would check my report for about 15 times hoping that “Today’s Earning $0.00” can show me some non-zero numbers. Many days, I ended up with disappointment. On some lucky days when I made about a dollar, I would proudly announce my significant earnings. “I MADE A DOLLAR TODAY!”

I don’t know if you feel the same way, but this side gig income really excites me so I decide to boost my occastional one-dollar income to maybe.. one-dollar-everyday?
So I made the following changes with my friend Cyco Miko who’s a PHP expert:

1. Look through my stats and find out what pages are the highest hits from the search engine. I found out that my PhotoBlog is the most popuplar one. Especially this photo and this photo.
2. I decided to change the Ads location just on my PhotoBlog and Gallery to bring the Ads closer to the top of the pictures. According to Google Guide, that’s the “Hot Spot”.
3. I created channels to track the performances of each placement
4. I edited each photo in the hardest hit albums to include keywords and added poems to some photos to attract relevant Ads. This is hard work and I am no where near to be done. But the problem was that due to popularity of the photos, people started to leave lots and lots of comments. That sort of kind of distracted the converntration of the keywords and the relavant Ads always go away. But, as long as the readers are having fun, I am OK with less dollars.

I am making more than a dollar every day now. I sometimes bring in more than 3 dollars a day. Although it varies from day to day, but I am pretty happy that I can drink Starbucks for free and ocassionally buy my friends a few “FourBucks” coffee as well.

My goal right now is to increase the traffic to my blog sites, which are lot harder to do than images. But again, I believe in the “Turtle Theory”. As long as I make changes and improvements everyday, I will get there somehow.. But a project plan will help though… That’s next step after I am done with my house purchase in July.

Setting up a website is always the easy part. Putting the new website in front of the public eyes is seriously a pain-in-the-butt job. I have done it once and now I have to do it again for this Cow site.

In order to draw more readership, I spent probably 2 days worth of time to do the following:

1. register with feedburner.com and coded a list of the RSS options on the site. You can see these pretty pictures at the bottom of the right bar.
2. Setup email subscription service with Feedblitz.com and coded a form on this site. If you roll your eyeballs to the right, you’ll see it.
3. I went to www.mymoneyblog.com and went though it’s fairly complete list of the Personal Financing blog sites. I emailed 4 owners to swap links and 3 returned favors.
4. Setup a Link Swap program on this site too to encourage blog owners to swap links with me. It is located on the right hand side bar.
5. Networked with my former fellow bloggers from www.b5media.com to swap links. So far, two sites agreed to add me.
6. I restored my old personal site and redesigned it in the attempt to utilize its high Google PR. I have cross linked between these two sites.
7. I am viewing 2 – 3 new Personal Financing sites a week to participate in discussions and leaving comments on some interesting posts. This is always one of the best ways to establish network and attract more visitors.

Based on my past experiences, search engine is the most powerful source in generating traffic. Of course, if your site becomes famous and gets mention in any news media, that’s a different story. The search engines not only generate large volume of traffic, but also bring in the Ads friendly readers simply because most of the search engine readers are looking for specific information and they are more likely to click on something that is relevant to the materials they are searching for. That’s why I spent most of my time trying to generate links for this site. I know the magic won’t happen overnight. But as long as I keep producing quality contents on a regularly basis; as long as I keep marketing my site and networking with other blog sites, I will be able to get the traffic I need.