I’ve been spending the weekend exploring ways to bring more traffic to my site, which took me into the brave new world of domains.  There’s an industry out there built on the notion that if you purchase enough old domains that once amassed a ton of backlinks and redirect these domains back to your website, it will give your site enough juice to bring in serious traffic.

The problem is, this whole domain business smacks of the stock market and gives me a bloody serious headache.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of domains that expire (or are about to expire) every day, and sometimes you have to bid on them if they’re in high demand.  Theoretically though, if you invest enough money into enough valuable domains, the dividends will make it worthwhile over the long run.  So say I spend $1,000 on domains.  If (and that’s a big IF) it brings in enough traffic that I end up making $500 a month in revenues as a result, I will have eventually gotten back what I invested after two months, and then some.

Here’s the thing though: every investment I have ever made in life has been a monumental failure with a capital F.  Whether it was school or life or internet projects or relationships or whatnot, whatever I have purported to do in life has always resulted in ultimate FAIL.

So with that kind of batting average, do I really want to spend thousands of dollars grabbing up all kinds of domain names in the hopes that they will collectively bring me the kind of traffic I’ve been looking for?

See, that would work for other people, but not for me.  Somehow, the laws of physics and economics all stop at my doorstep.  You ever seen the show Lost?  Well consider me the island.  Once you’re on my shores, you can just forget about everything you’ve ever thought you knew about how the universe worked, because it’s all been rendered moot here.  I am a walking wormhole of anomalies, a glitch in the system. 

That’s why I’m kind of hesitant in blowing thousands of bucks on this new experiment, especially when I’m so close to paying off my debts too.  I just want this blog to work out so badly, and the more I think about things and about finding another job or another career, the more I’d rather be out of the workforce altogether and be self-sufficient and self-employed, that way I can live anywhere and go anywhere.  I don’t want to be stuck at one job in one place forever and ever.  I need to MOVE, baby. 

So, I don’t know.  I think I’m just gonna leave this alone for now, and once all my debts have been squared off, I’ll come back to this and maybe think about making smaller investments instead of going all out, and see if it goes anywhere.  I’m just so sick and tired of my 5 visits a day traffic that I’m just chomping at the bit to get SOMETHING going.  Gaaaah. 

Tags: backlinks, blog, debt, domain, domain names, domains, experiment, FAIL, failure, internet, investment, job, life, money, traffic, website, workforce
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Just experiencing some brain fog, probably because I have a tumor eating out my cerebrals so I should be put out of my misery soon enough.    I keed, I keed… I hope. 

Ok, seriously, I was getting ready to write a catch-all post about the financial crisis, the presidential election and why Christians are morons (somehow I can always manage to work that theme into every post I write  ), but I got caught up working on the backend of my blog to fix and install a few plugin upgrades, and I’ve also been experimenting with a few new ad networks too.  The in-text advertising has been working out pretty well so far (these are the ads that popup when you hover your cursor over a link), though I had to keep an eye on the kind of ads showing up so I could email support a comprehensive list of advertisers I wanted blocked.  I think I did a good enough job for now, but if you see any ads for improving *ahem* bedroom performance and pictures of boinkie doinkies illustrating said performance, do be a dear and let me know, mmmk? 

Regardless, it might end up being replaced by an entirely different network anyway, one that would FINALLY allow me to block advertisers on my own (instead of begging support to do it for me), and it utilizes a different approach by indexing my entire site and analyzing my content to see what ads would best suit me.  Can’t wait to try it out and see how it compares.

In the meantime I’ve also been looking for a third tier network to clean up the rest of my inventory.  I have two networks now and basically what happens is, if there’s no available ad to deliver to my site on the first network, it then defaults to the second network, and if the second network doesn’t have an ad to serve, it defaults as well and delivers a public service announcement instead (which I don’t get paid for).  In order to maximize my earnings I’d need to make sure I’m paid for every visitor hit to my site.  So far I’m making money off of approximately 80% of my traffic, so I just need to find one more network that can monetize the remaining 20%.  I’ve been testing out one possibility and… *ugh*    It virtually made my site look like a teenybopper’s MySpace page.  Seriously, the ads were just flat out embarrassing, and for this humility I was being paid maybe 6 cents for every 1000 hits I logged. 

Ummm, no.  Out you go sucky underpaying network, and please, never pollute my precious blog with your existence again.  Yeesh.

I’ll just have to keep looking around, and if and once I do find a solution, that’s pretty much it as far as monetization goes.  The only major project left would be to get enough traffic in to reach my goals, but that’s up to God now. 

Tags: ads, advertisers, advertising, backend, blog, christian, Christians, earnings, experiment, God, making money, monetization, monetize, money, network, plugin, testing, traffic, upgrade
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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It’s hard to decide what direction I’d like to take this blog in, which might have something to do with the fact that my life currently has no direction either.

The best I can do now is simply blog my thoughts, and see where it goes from there. I enjoy blogging, but my writing can suck hairy monkey’s smelly butt if I don’t keep at it on a regular basis. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to explore how I can use social networking sites to publicize my blog, so as an experiment, I submitted a few law school related posts of mine to a variety of sites. After watching my traffic for the past 24 hours, I noticed StumbleUpon and Reddit appeared to draw the biggest crowds. In fact I was floored by the amount of traffic I was getting from them. Getting my posts Digged though only resulted in a handful of visits, but then again, Digg only appears to be news, politics and technology oriented, and I simply don’t have much to contribute in those areas right now. My blog is more personally oriented, and my interests usually lie in topics relating to Society, Crime and Punishment, Offbeat News, Dating and Religion/Spirituality. It’s not likely then that I’ll be using Digg often, if at all.

Reddit was awesome though, with a continuous stream of links that I actually found myself interested in reading. One of the things I didn’t like about voting oriented sites like Digg was that the content you found was almost always something everybody on the planet already knew about. Big deal. Personally, I got my fix from reading newsworthy items that for some reason or other never seems to make the news (or even a mention on some of the more popular blogs out there). Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I feel better informed this way (not to mention that it provides a more unique depth to my site by blogging about news items not covered elsewhere).

It’s nice to know now that if I blog a particularly good post, there exists a few outlets from which I could legitimately promote the articles I write. Not that I’m going to submit every inane piece of writing I ever put up here mind you (up to and including my latest bathroom experience), but certainly on those occasions where I experience a random moment of clarity and blog something that might actually prove useful (or entertaining) to outside visitors. I can’t get people who game the system though. I heard of one guy using a script for automatically submitting his pages to StumbleUpon and I can only wonder, why? These shameless asshats completely ruin it for the rest of us.

Anyhow, now that I’ve gotten hooked on StumbleUpon and Reddit, I’ve been exploring other social networking sites as well (excluding of course MySpace and its copycat clones). Some seem to revolve around a specific theme that I found little use for (like researching networks tailored for members of academia), while others were merely less popular clones of some of the more prominent networks out there. There were a significant number of bookmarking sites as well, but for now I decided to limit my membership to Yahoo’s My Web and Del.icio.us. I’ve also known about blogging communities like Xanga before, but I’ve only recently discovered that the makers of MovableType had also created a similar community called Vox, which seems at first glance more tightly designed and aesthetically pleasing than Xanga. Xanga had been the place I would have gone to in the event that I could no longer stomach the anguish of maintaining the backend of my own blog, but who knows, Vox might actually prove to be a better choice if it comes to that.

Other sites were unfortunately so cryptic as to their purpose that I’ll have to give them a harder look before deciding whether they’re worth joining or not. And finally, I think it’s become obvious that I don’t much care for the more generally oriented sites like Facebook, Bebo (and that Space that shall not be named). They’re like online ghettos offering little more than juicy tidbits that prospective stalkers would just love to know. No thanks.

I’m kinda hoping that by jumping around all these social networking spots (and settling into the ones I like), it will all in some way help me find my niche, streamline my blogging style and give it some actual direction, so I can at least refrain from merely cluttering it up with the meandering thoughts of my completely useless and boring life.

But until then, I’ll just have to stumble along.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, bookmarking, bookmarks, boring, butt, clones, crime and punishment, crowds, dating, digg, direction, experiment, exploring, handful, law school, life, movabletype, myspace, niche, offbeat news, people oriented, personal, politics, post, publicize, reddit, religion, sites, social networking sites, social networks, spirituality, stalkers, stalking, stumble, stumbler, stumbleupon, stumbling, technology, traffic, travels, vanity, visitors, Vox, writing, xanga
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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