Internet Business Daily

I just finished this site’s redesign a few days ago, and figured now would be a good time to throw up a quick post about it. I had been looking for a new theme for IBD for a few weeks now, and I finally came across one that I liked. There were a few common elements that I wanted to keep from the old design, and some new elements which I really wanted for the new design.

• Header Image - One element from the previous design that I wanted to keep was the header image. I absolutely loved displaying a beautiful picture of Santa Cruz, Ca at the top of my blog, sort of as a goal for myself (and others) to want to live in a place like that through making money online. The new design allows for a header image, but I decided to use a different image I took a few years ago. The picture is still of Santa Cruz, but it is one of the beautiful valleys rather than the beach. Do you like the image?
• 125×125 Buttons - One of the main reasons for wanting to change my blog design was that I desperately wanted to accommodate for 125×125 ad buttons. You see these buttons on most business/money making blogs, and there’s a simple reason for that: they work! When someone clicks on one of my buttons and signs up, I get a referral commission. Now I get to display these buttons to everyone who comes to my site.
  

• Easier to Contact Me - Something I really appreciate when visiting other people’s blogs is the ability to easily find/contact the webmaster. With the new design it is now very easy (and obvious) where and how to contact me. I have used visuals to draw reader’s eyes towards that section, so hopefully more people will feel free to contact me. I listed Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn.
  

• RSS Readership - Another thing I wanted to improve with this blog is the RSS readership. On the old design I only had a small RSS button, that no one seemed to see. Now I have a great big RSS button that probably everyone will see:).
  

• Wider Margins - Lastly, I wanted my blog to have wider margins to allow for more content. I really think the new blog design looks much better, and is easier to use.

These are all very important features to me to have on my blog. Although it took me weeks to find a decent theme to hack up and make my own, it was definitely worth the wait. When you decide to redesign your own blog, you should make a list of features that are most important to you before you start looking for a theme. There are enough Wordpress themes out there where you don’t have to sacrifice any feature for another. If you need help finding the right theme for your needs, feel free to contact me.

A little over a month ago I was contacted by a Kontera rep who referenced a blog post I wrote a while back comparing Kontera vs. Vibrant ads. Both of these networks provide in-text advertising for both large and small sites.

My first comparison determined Vibrant Media to be the winner, because they paid more and were more of a well known brand. Since switching back to Kontera a month ago, my revenue has stayed pretty much the same. My eCPM is around $1.25, which is actually decent. Assuming Vibrant and Kontera were making me the same amount of money, the question now becomes what other factors play into choosing an ad network.

My account manager, Katherine, has been very helpful. This is one of my most sought after features of any company, not just on the Internet. Customer service and quick response time I value more than making slightly more money with an ad network. Any question I have had she responded to in the same day. For this reason, I am going to continue with Kontera until I get more data to review. Hopefully I can get my eCPM up to $2 through optimization. More updates to come.

You can sign up with Kontera here.

Lately, I have been writing about things that were a little off topic for this blog. My original plan was to have a blog that displayed all the ways I have learned to make money on the Internet, and to help other people discover ways to make money.

That being said, I wanted to give an update as to what was making me money lately. I do not want to give exact figures (you can email me if you really want to know), but I will give an idea as to what is really working and what is not.

Right now, the eBay affiliate program through CJ.com is still making me the most money. This accounts for about 90% of my Internet income (not including my day job at an Internet company). eBay has recently decided to drop CJ.com and go with their own in-house affiliate program, and I have not had much luck with it yet. If this does not change soon, I will need to look for other methods to monetize my traffic. Next in line is Adsense, Kontera, and other direct deals I have made. These are usually insignificant amounts, or one-offs. Also, I have been doing consulting, but again these are usually one-offs and not a steady source of income.

My goal for 2008 is to double my earnings per month from the Internet. Right now, this source accounts for about 15-20% of my yearly income (including my day job). One thing that I have learned is that you cannot give up. I have hit a plateau with my earnings and traffic for about 3 months now, and I have wanted to give up many times. I just need to keep plugging away and hope for the best. My ultimate goal is to be able to work full time on my web sites and money making ideas, like many of my friends already do. Hopefully, this happens sooner than later. Wish me luck!

**UPDATE: (8/20/2007) - Here’s another linkback, thanks! Google Blog

(6/21/2007) - I received another review shortly after this so I figured I would just include the linkback in this post: Tax Rebate. Thanks for the review!

First Blog Review
I received my first blog review for a linkback. I started this program about 3 weeks ago and finally someone has noticed. I have received many linkbacks from sites listing all the sites that run programs like this, but unfortunately those are not my rules and will not receive a reciprocal link.

Free Link Back
Someone finally took advantage of this great program and easy way to get a free link. Since they are the first, I will dedicate this entire post to linking back to them so maybe other people will see how easy this really is. The review of my blog can be found at chemstudioweb.com, specifically at this location. I would like to thank chemstudioWEB for writing the review of my blog, it seems like he both enjoys and learns from my posts. He also listed some of my mini niche stores, which was not necessary but welcomed anyway…thanks again.

How to do a Blog Review for a Free Link Back
The rules are very simple and can be found at: Review My Blog for a Free Linkback. The basics are you have to write a review of my blog, and link to it at least once using anchor text from the following choices: Make Money Online, Learn Internet Business, Blogging for Money, and now SEO Tips. Use any one of those to link back to my site and you will receive a link back to your site. If the reviews keep coming in slow, ill give anyone who does it a dedicated post. Thanks again Chemstudioweb.

**UPDATE: I switched back to my old theme, the web2.0 theme did not match the topic of IBD…oh and I miss the picture of Santa Cruz.

As I am sure most frequent readers have noticed, I have installed a new Wordpress theme last night. I wanted to go in a totally different direction with this look, and I think I accomplished it. I went very Web2.0′ish with this theme so I hope people like it and don’t think it is not business-like enough.

Changes to Come
I’m still doing more custom coding and design on it to fit all my needs, but so far I think it looks great. I am going to have a logo designed for the top left, and either a picture or an ad in the 468×60 spot at the top center. I also need to add in my Feedburner plugin and a few other little things.

Sweet Link-Lovin
On a separate note, a couple people have been helping me accomplish my goal of getting the #1 spot in Google for Matthew Berman. I thought since they were giving me link love, why not share the love back. StuntDubl, and SEOMumbai are among the first to help me get #1 SERPS for Matthew Berman, and I will list more as they come. Thanks so much!

I am a huge Meebo user and first thing this morning I noticed a significant addition to the main screen. A new feature called “rooms” has been implemented. Basically what a room is, is a place where people can come and chat about a particular subject. Anyone can create a room. Not more than 5 minutes after noticing this new feature, my boss emailed the marketing team asking them to build a room for our company to promote our websites. This is a great idea to get in early, because Meebo is the first and only web-based chat application that I know of. Here is what it looks like:

It is just a small visual addition at the bottom of the meebo browser window. I am not sure how well chat rooms will do in general because not a whole lot of people use them. It kind of reminds me of old school AOL chat rooms. Anyways check it out and let me know what everyone thinks.

Introduction
So I decided to do what many other bloggers have been doing in creating a link back opportunity for my readers. This idea originally started with Johnchow.com, but many others have successfully been using this marketing technique. It gives smaller blogs an easy way to get a free link (without the “no-follow” tag, which makes it useless for Google) on a site with a better PageRank.

How to Get a Free LinkBack
The rules are very simple. All you have to do is write a review of my blog, it doesn’t even have to be a good one! The requirements are as follows: 1) the review must be at least 175 words (thats not much)…2) you must link to my homepage using the anchor text “make money online” or “blogging for money” or “seo tips.” Any of these will do. And that’s it, that’s all you have to do to get a free link on internetbusinessdaily.net. I currently have a PR4 site so it is worth it for most people to enter this program. You will also get to choose what anchor text you want me to use, so all you SEO nuts out there need to choose wisely.

I can’t wait to read all the reviews, and have fun with it!

Looks like today has been a record traffic day for Internet Business Daily. With 20 more minutes left in the day, the site has received almost 400 uniques. This is double the number of uniques from last Monday. Here’s a graph (from statcounter.com) that shows my traffic over the past week. Let’s hope this trend continues!

Cause?
So what caused this record traffic day? There are a few things I believe played a part in this. First of all I received a large amount of traffic from Stumble Upon. This is a service that sends people to random websites of a specific genre. It is a way to find new sites one would have never known about.

The Digg Effect Continues
There is also another random event I believe had a part in my record traffic day. Because of all the media that digg.com has received due to the HD-DVD scandle, they have almost doubled their traffic over night. Since a few of my articles have hit the digg homepage (including how to hack a windows xp password and YouTube loses speed) those links have been getting more traffic now.

In-text advertising is basically ads that are targeted to the keywords on your web page. Each ad company highlights specific words on your web site in their own way and when a user hovers over the word, an ad appears. You can see examples of this on my website.

I had been using Vibrant Media for months, and it was doing well for a while. Then one day I had no revenue for about two weeks straight. This was very discouraging. I then noticed that many sites were using a new in-text advertiser called Kontera. At first glance I didn’t think that Kontera’s ads looked as good as Vibrant’s, but they were popping up everywhere so I decided to give them a try.

Comparison
The first difference I noticed was that you can have many more highlighted words on each web page. I think I had something like 15 ads on a page with Kontera and the limit for Vibrant is 7. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. Users might think you are being too spammy with the ads, and there is a fine line between quality content and just writing for advertisements. Some other differences obviously include the color of the underlined word, and the look of the ad. Personally I think Vibrant Media’s ads look much better than Kontera’s. Both companies I must admit have excellent customer service. They both receive my highest approval for their customer service.

Vibrant Media Ad:

Kontera Ad:

Revenue
So now the most important difference, revenue! When I started using Kontera, I was only getting a couple cents per click. I was getting many more clicks than I was with Vibrant, but they just weren’t paying as much. Let’s take a random sample of days as an example. One day I had over 30 clicks with Kontera, which made me about .40 cents. Yesterday with Vibrant I had 5 clicks, which made me over $2.50.

Winner: Vibrant Media
The obvious winner for a smaller blog such as my own is Vibrant. Kontera may be able to optimize for a bigger site much better, but I was not able to get the numbers I was looking for from Kontera. I have permanently switched back to Vibrant Media.

What Is PageRank?
I was just looking through all the stories I have been digging lately and noticed that my profile page has a PageRank! What does that mean exactly you ask? Well PageRank (PR) is the ranking system Google uses to determine how “important” a web page is. Every page that Google spiders get a PR, whether it is 0/10 (most pages) or 8/10 like Digg’s homepage. The higher the PR, basically the more traffic Google sends you.

Since I’ve been a digg user for quite some time, my profile page as been assigned a PR4. Granted this isn’t great, but it’s something. I can absolutely use this to my advantage.

How Can I Use This?
Since I control every single link that appears on my profile page, I can submit my own stories and they will all appear on my page. Without going too much into how Google ranks pages by linking, having my links on my PR4 profile page looks good in the eyes of Google. All I need to do now is create links to my article pages with the keywords I want. Even if the stories don’t hit homepage, at least they are on a PR4 page.

Downside?
There are a few downsides I see. First of all, you need to leave a link up long enough so that Google can come around and spider it. This means that if you digg a bunch of other people’s stories, your links will disappear quickly. Another possible problem is that Digg assigns a no-follow tag to the links and Google won’t count them. As far as I can see, they do not do this currently.

So without being too spammy, which is pretty much an oxymoron using this method, try it out!