Pursuit of Profit

After posting that I was considering purchasing my own domain with my first months earnings, I recieved a donation from fellow blogger Dylan who’s also talking about making money online over at WMHaven.com, to purchase a domain name. There are some good tips on monetization, and are definitely worth the time it takes to read them.

Okay so I am pumped that I don’t have to spend my current earnings on the purchase of a domain name, now I can invest them in another way! After realizing that my previous choice of caseysquest.com just got snatched up this week, by what appears to be domain tasters, I had to put my thinking cap on and began searching for domain names.

With a little bit of luck and inspiration from the recent big Willy Smith movie “the pursuit of happiness” I came up with pursuitofprofit.com . I’m just waiting for the domain to go through, so I can get wordpress on there and get to blogging hard on my own domain! It won’t be too long before it’s all loaded and ready for your eyes, I’m thinking Wednesday or Thursday of next week (It’s final exam time for me, that’s why it won’t be up as quick as it could be).

Thanks again Dylan!

Readers don’t forget to update your bookmarks and feedreaders when the big switch to pursuitofprofit.com does happen!

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.