*Yawn* 

Can’t believe I woke up at one today.  12 hours of sleep and I’m still tired, and on top of that I had to wake up with a neck cramp too.    Now I can’t turn all the way to the left without pain shooting into my eyeballs and screaming like a wild animal.

Ah well, at least I finished my latest blogging errands, including signing up for the Pepperjam network, which will probably mark my last attempt to see if I can garner any kind of success with an affiliate network.  Yeah yeah I know I said I’ll never be an affiliate marketer, but like I also said, I’m willing to make exceptions for products I actually use myself or are of high quality.  And since a lot people have reported great success with Pepperjam, I decided to give it a try as well and signed up for a few programs.  Right now I have them rotating in a 125×125 banner on the top left sidebar, so feel free to check them out.  A few of them are for sites offering camping, military and law enforcement gear as well.  Things like backpacks, pepper spray, Kevlar vests, scopes for snipe rifles, etc.  You know, fuzzy wuzzy stuff. 

I’ll probably wean out these programs over time if I don’t see any results with them, but I suspect the best performing one may turn out to be Whitesmoke, an All-in-One Writing Solution that might be the perfect complement for blogging.  It will correct grammar, spelling and even suggest better adjectives to help enrich your writing experience.  If I wasn’t such a superb writer already, I might actually spring for the software myself. 

I also signed up for two new advertising networks to fill my ad vacancies, since Project Wonderful has done a really poor job of filling my spots lately, and most of the requests I’ve gotten were always for craptastic webcomics that only start making sense to you after you’ve had about 5 beers.

As soon as I set up my site to receive the new ads, WOW what a difference.  I was now getting my ad spots filled from major, high quality advertisers, most of whose products I was already using too.  It was perfect.  Not only that, I could set the rates at whatever prices I wanted, though obviously I can’t set it too high or my spots would never get filled.  Still, where before I was only making 15 to 20 cents a day with Project Wonderful, I’m now making around $1 a day with these networks. 

Probably won’t last though. I know my luck. 

Tags: advertising, advertising networks, affiliate marketing, blogging, cramps, monetizing, pepperjam, project wonderful, sleep, whitesmoke
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I’ve been dabbling in the world of affiliate programs as a way to make some extra money lately, and so far I’ve already made 10 bucks by getting an affiliate sale for the folks at Clicky. I decided the easiest way to break into this field though was to just sign up for affiliate programs advertising products and services that I actually use. So far I’m using Hostgator for my web hosting, Go Daddy for domain registration, and Clicky Web Analytics for tracking my site stats. I’m pretty happy with all of them, so I can feel comfortable enough whoring for all of them without feeling too guilty.

I wouldn’t use Go Daddy for web hosting though. I’ve heard too many complaints from people using their hosting packages, and for the most part it’s too basic for those of you who are truly serious about building a good website, especially one that might be PHP-SQL driven. Still, I signed up for their affiliate program since I’ve had a good experience registering my domains with them.

But, in order to do that I had to first apply to become a member of Commission Junction, one of the largest affiliate networks in the world. When I got accepted I went to access my account page and almost went insane. CTRs and EPMs and EPCs and what the F___ is everyone talking about here??? There was so much information jam packed into one page I had no clue where to begin. I finally managed to figure out how to generate an affiliate link after tearing my hair out for an hour, which wasn’t easy considering Go Daddy apparently felt the need to provide 3 million different types of affiliate links and banners that I could use to promote their goodies. Ugh. All this business crap gives me a headache.

Eventually I’ll post review articles relaying my experience with these companies, which should serve as decent landing pages for all those interested in using the same services. I also added their banners at the footer of my blog now, so feel free to click on them and gimme some lovin’.

Seriously though, if you want to try out a service for free, Clicky is your best bet. You can use their premium service for three weeks without paying or providing any payment info, a smart move because they even hooked me in after my premium trial expired. The stats they track is not as exhaustive as Google Analytics, but the design is done so well that you can find out just about everything that’s going on (real-time) at your blog/website with just a quick glance. They have a basic version that’s free, while the premium version is less than $2 a month (if you sign up anually). Again, I’ll write a more extensive review in the future when I have more time.

Ok, I think I’m done whoring for now.

Tags: affiliate networks, affiliate programs, affiliates, clicky, clue, commission junction, ctrs, domain registration, epcs, footer, go daddy, goodies, hostgator, monetizing, problogging, web analytics
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Today marks the one year anniversary of the Habitation of Justice. I should say something profound, so here it is:

The chocolate moose is not in season.

If you can figure that out, let me know. On a more serious note, as far as blogs go, this has been a pretty quiet year for me. There were times when I literally would get only one visitor a day, and sometimes I’d let weeks go by before blogging another post. I had been focused on other things, (like going to law school), but as soon as it became clear that my life wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon, I started to pay more attention to my blog. The last few months were all about promoting my site and optimizing it for search engines so I could bring in more traffic. Now I’m getting upwards of about 100 visits a day, which is still nowhere close to my goal, but at least it’s much better than what it used to be.

Sooooo, now that it’s been a year, where do I go from here? What direction should I take this blog in? Ever since my law school dream bombed out, I’ve been entertaining fantasies on how I could make a living out of blogging instead, quitting my dead end job and hitting the road, living the life of a nomad as I moved from place to place, finding ways to help people I encountered in my travels, and experiencing exciting new adventures that would endlessly provide great writing fodder for my blog.

Could it happen? Not unless I can find a way to monetize my blog so that it brings in a full time income, a feat that only one half of one percent of all bloggers on the Internet have been able to accomplish. And usually those types of blogs have the kind of niches where they tell everyone else how THEY can make money off their sites. Either that, or it’s rife with affiliate marketing and other business related themes that I simply can’t get into. I just don’t have the mentality for it. I can only tell a story, and telling stories through this particularly venue has not proven to be an especially profitable one for most people.

But…. it’s all I got. After racking my brain trying to come up with a niche suitable for me, I decided that it had to be something that I could always love doing, rather than delving into a niche only because it might prove to be more of a money maker. I loved to write, but not about products and marketing and technology and business and whatnot, but about life in general. About what’s real. About my deepest emotions, hopes, and despairs. About my life experiences, and how readers could relate to it. But I realized in order to blog about life, I had to first HAVE a life.

So I guess that’s what will define my second year: finding a life worthy of blogging about, and telling a story that could immerse the reader in my riveting world. Well… at least as riveting as I can possibly make it.

Only time will tell if this will be my breakout year (both online and offline), and whether I’ll be able to generate the kind of readership that I’ve been looking for.

So stay tuned, it’s going to get very interesting from here on out.

Tags: affiliate marketing, anniversary, blog, bloggers, blogging, fantasies, fodder, full time, habitation, job, law school, life, mentality, monetizing, niche, niches, nomad, search engines, story telling, time income, traffic, travels, writing, year anniversary
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion!

Tags: album, assimilation, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, content, facebook, fervor, flickr, garageband, God, good grief, monetization, monetizing, network, Photos, platform, plugins, resources, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, stealing, stumbleupon, third party, time, traffic, trends, tumblr, twitter, Vox, web 2.0, whole lotta, widgets, YouTube
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I don’t know who first introduced the idea of using “10 tips to fill-in-the-blank” posts to draw traffic to your blog, but obviously it was authoritative enough that almost every blogger on the planet started taking that advice to heart. Now all you ever SEE are posts that tell you how to do everything from monetizing your blog, to bringing in tons of new readers in 10, 20, 25, 27, 33, 101 easy steps.

Not one to lose out on the fun, I decided to join in by contributing my own advice to successful blogging, but in just ONE easy step. Are you ready for it? Here it is:

Step One: Be Original.

Tags: advice, blog, blogger, blogging, heart, list, monetizing, problogging, readers, tips, traffic
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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