Got bored last weekend, so I’ve been making some tweaks here and there to improve the speed and performance of my site.  The biggest change was dropping the ad server that’s been serving my ads, and hard coding it into my blog instead.  No matter what, I could never get it to execute fast enough, which I’m guessing is partly a limitation of using a shared hosting account.  If I ever go dedicated though, I’ll probably give it another shot, but that might be a while (a dedicated account would cost me almost $200 a month!)

If you’re wondering what the flip I’m talking about, using an ad server basically allows me carte blanche control over how ads are served, so if someone outside my current ad networks wanted to book an ad, I could easily set up an account for them and then temporarily disable the ads that were already running.  Unfortunately now I won’t be able to do this, but I don’t think it will be an issue until I get far more traffic to my site, at which point I should have enough of a budget to get an ad server running again.

And what’s a dedicated account you ask?  Well right now I’m using a shared account at $10 a month, which means I’m sharing a server with a bazillion other users, and thus am only alloted a fraction of the server’s power.  If I get a dedicated account however, I’ll have a server all to myself to do as I please, which means a LOT more computing power and significantly better performance for my site as well.  It may be another year though before I can afford such a solution, if ever.  If you want to help me achieve this goal though, spread the word and link to my blog, dangit.  Bunch of stingy freeloaders, y’all. 

Anyhoo, I also darkened the background a little and dropped the MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog widgets.  Seriously, I’m fed up with both services.  It’s like I’m advertising their networks on my blog and in return I’m getting, well, nothing.  It’s nice that my blog is registered in their directories so people can find me, but I could count on one hand how much traffic I’ve gotten from either network as a result.  Not enough to justify the 1-2 second lag they were adding to my blog’s load times.   And besides, both networks are getting bogged down in spam too.  I can’t tell you how many contacts I have now that live in China.  Evidently I’m a pretty popular guy over there. 

But most disappointedly, I was hoping surfing these networks would help me find like-minded hot babes that I could play love snuggles with.  Sad to say though, I find that I am such a unique individual that it is yea nigh impossible to find someone who thinks just like me. 

But anyways, do me a favor and let me know if you’ve noticed any improvement in load times and performance.  I’ve definitely noticed a difference, but I want to make sure others are seeing it as well. 

For the first time ever, my blog has made over $100 in one month! 

Fitting that I should announce this on Labor Day too.    A few mild traffic spikes and a $10 commission from Clicky helped put me over the top, giving me a total profit of $114.63 for the month of August.

Breaking the $100 ceiling was a significant accomplishment for me, as I read a long time ago that this was the benchmark amount for determining whether your blog has the capacity to bring in a respectable income.  I have a relatively good setup going here to help me achieve that now, so the only thing I need is the traffic to help scale those profits until my goal of making $1,000 a month is finally realized.  If that day ever comes, who knows, from there I might eventually arrive at a time when I can make an actual living just from blogging/writing.  Do I dare to dream?

In the end, I have to believe that with God on my side and a little imagination, all things are possible:

One thing I can’t stand about the effort to drive more traffic to a site is the almost mandatory need to play suck ass to some high traffic megablog in the hopes that maybe, someday, somehow, they might acknowledge your puny existence for one microsecond and throw a fraction of their gazillion readers and visitors your way.

If I write a post I think is particularly funny, charming and relevant, I email a link to it to a couple of high profile bloggers, then pray, beg, sacrifice chickens and hope hope hopey o’ change hope that it doesn’t disappear into the darkest catacombs of that blogger’s inbox, never to be seen again.

Except that of course it does, because I am a speck of dust who can never evolve to the point that I could successfully grab their attention, though mostly I think it’s because I’m not a hot babe who blogs in her underwear (and leaves up a webcam to prove that she does in fact, blog in her underwear.)

Makes me feel like I’m in high school all over again, trying to get into an exclusive, elitist club that nobody wants me to be in, partly because they weren’t even aware of my existence, and if the time should ever come that they did become aware, then they’d rue the day I was born.  It seems that I can only inspire either indifference or sheer, unadulterated hatred.

All I can really do then is watch from the sidelines while these successful bloggers happily fondle each other and share links and traffic and readers, and yet I myself can only but trudge endlessly in the mud of Google irrelevancy.  It all seems so unfair, because really, all I’m asking for is a microcosm of acknowledgment, just a F*%&ING link or two from your millions-of-hits-a-month blog that takes all of two seconds to post, which would at least give me a fighting chance to succeed.  And I’m not even doing it for me, I’m doing it to help my sick, sick Mommy, who I can’t fully care for unless I can find a way to supplement my already heavily taxed salary.  A link for a life.  That’s all it takes, but noooooo, I’m not in your “speeeeeecial” club see, and worse yet, I’m not a half-naked chick prancing around my blog and uploading sultry looking photos of myself to Flickr either, so therefore I’m not worth the poopie poo on your shoe.

Well screw you big boy, and screw this ridiculous internet caste system we’ve made for ourselves.  A-list blogs and B-List blogs and C-list blogs and whatnot?  F&^% that.  I got my own label: the One-of-a-kind, All-night-long, I-am-your-Daddy’s-Master Blog.

And this club can only fit one member, baby:  Me. 

Got accepted into the humor category of alltop.com, an up and coming aggregator that allows you to screen through a mass of metadata of some of the most popular sites around the web.  Don’t know how much traffic it’ll be able to bring in, but couldn’t hurt to have them add my feed.  Love their badges though:

Heh. 

The question for the ages.

Actually I’ve been working behind the scenes trying to boost my traffic levels (with less than stellar success I might add), and also working to get another ad network going to fill my ad spaces. I’m actually amazed by the income ratio I’m seeing so far. If it continues to hold, my eCPM would be around $10, meaning for every 1000 pageviews this blog gets I would earn $10. It’s not earth shattering by any means, but considering the typical eCPM for those who use Google Adsense is around $1 to $2, it’s not bad either. My goal is to eventually net around $40 a day (or $1250 a month), so I’ll have to continue my efforts to boost my eCPM and bring more traffic in.

Speaking of which, there is one more thing I can try, sort of like a last ditch effort to bring in the level of traffic I want, but it’s EXPENSIVE, and it still requires a lot of work. The good news is I can use my previous blog earnings to pay for the first month (it’s done on a subscription basis), and if the results are effective, the higher ad revenues that result should be enough to front the costs and still net me a profit.

Maybe. If it fails, I’ll pretty much will have lost all the money I’ve ever made via blogging up to this point. Ah well, I’ll just have to believe that fortune will continue to favor the brave.

And the reckless.

Been busy having fun with an advertising network called Project Wonderful, the first time I came across an auction-based network where you bid for advertising space on websites.

What I really liked about it was the fact that you can bid to place your ad on a site for as little as a few hours to however long you wish. It’s a great way to test participating websites to see which ones bring you the most traffic without having to spend a lot of money to do so. Usually you’d have to pay for an ad on a monthly basis, but even if an ad typically cost say, $250 a month, that only comes out to about $8 a day. Suddenly it’s not so obscenely expensive anymore to get your ad on a high traffic website, even if it’s just for a day. In fact I was able to successfully bid for space on such a site (which typically drew over 5000 unique visitors a day), all for just 70 cents. Sure it’ll only show for 24 hours, but that’s over 10,000 eyeballs that will see the banner ad to my blog, something that never would have happened otherwise. For 70 cents too, you can’t beat it.

Since I’ve become a publisher as well, you can also bid to have a 125×125 banner ad displayed here (located near the top left sidebar). Currently the price is 30 cents a day (or $9 a month). Go ahead and place a bid! You know you want to…

The only few things I didn’t like about Project Wonderful was that the interface was a little cumbersome to use, and there’s a somewhat steep learning curve to figure out how the system works. Another thing to consider is that if you’re currently running an ad and somebody outbids you, your ad gets slapped away and the new top bidder’s ad takes your place. You can of course try to outbid the bastard who took your spot though, if you’re so inclined.

Once you get the hang of it all, it’s actually pretty fun to use. Hopefully it’ll bring me a nice and steady chunk of change, money I can use to continue promoting my blog.