Pursuit of Profit

In keeping with yesterday’s momentum, this blog got it’s adsense clicked a bit more and bumped me up to a 2 day whooping total of $4.28. I don’t think I should get too excited and declare this a huge victory yet! There are still 11 months ahead of me with each one increasing by 100%.

I knew the first month would be pretty easy to take care of, but I didn’t think I would almost be there in the first 36 hours. You are the ones who helped me making it to my first mini milestone, thanks!

I’m by no means a super elite web baller by any means, and anyone without experience can do what I am doing. To see this check out my google adsense check from the last 4 months. It’s $109.48 if you can’t read the amount, that’s just over $25 a month (and thats between 4 sites). So basically for the past 2 days of starting this blog and employing adsense and common sense I am already on track to beat my average of $25 a month by more than double. I thought a Shoemoneyesque adsense photo was appropriate.

I have put adsense up and talked about complimentary colors in ads, which I submitted to Digg (the king of social news sites, please Digg me!). Since doing this I went in and checked my Adsense account, I’ve made a whopping $0.67 (edit: scratch that I just checked and I’m up to $1.91 well I think I am going to get to the first goal of $5)! Just wanted to keep you posted on this journey.

Plus I have found another similar blog called the 31 day challenge, where a girl from London is putting herself to the test and trying to make as much money as possible in 31 days. Stop by and wish her luck.

One of the easiest things you can impliment on a site to make money online is Google Adsense. Basically what it does, once installed, is read the content of your pages and display relevent ads to your traffic.

Installing and displaying the ads is the easy part, but getting your traffic to click your ads is an art form. I’ve found from trial and error that complimentary colors work best for attracting attention and increasing your CTR (click through rate). When I switched from a blended ad layout to a complimentary layout my CTR increased from 3.5% to 5.8%, thats a 60% increase! They don’t blend right in to the background and they don’t look awkward.

My way to achieve a complimentary set of colors is by using a color wheel and colorzilla.

• I first select the background color with the colorzilla firefox extention and set it as the background color in my adsense.

• Next I find the main link color on the site, and open it in a color wheel
• When I have this opened I leave the main gradient of the color and change the hue to an opposite color (ie if it’s blue go red or yellow)

After I have the title and background set I just pick the main text color and use it as my ad text color
For the link I set it as a light grey on a dark background, and a dark grey if the background is light.

As you can see I have added a complimentary adsense banner in the top right corner of my blog using this technique. Another CTR booster is placing your ads high up on your site so your visitors do not have to scroll down to see them.

Hopefully this tip helps you out! Also if you don’t have adsense yet on your site you can sign up here. Let me know how this works for you.

Here’s the deal, this blog will track my progress on making money online and go in depth on what’s working and what isn’t.

So at the end of April I’ll need to make $5 and double that each month for a whole year. The only money I can use is the money from the previous months. Here’s the break down:

1. April $5
2. May $10
3. June $20
4. July $40
5. August $80
6. September $160
7. October $320
8. November $640 (this is where it starts to get interesting!)
9. December $1280
10. January $2560 (from here on is going to take wise investing as well as action)
11. February $5120
12. March $10240

Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need a lot of it!