Internet Gangsters

In all honesty I never really understood RSS feeds. I always just saw them as a lame way to read a webpage without going to it. I mean why would I want to read some poorly formatted text version of a site when I can just goto the site itself and read it the way it was meant to be read… Well I still kind of feel this way, but even if I don’t really use RSS feeds that doesn’t mean that the people reading my sites don’t use them. And as I’ve found out, a lot of my readers do use my RSS feed to get the content from my site.

So here is what I’ve figured out, and it’s basically common sense but not everyone may think it will help, but trust me it does. Gather email addresses anyway you can. The easiest way I’ve found to do it for blogs is Feedburner.com they handle everything. They will take the url to your RSS feeds, give you a piece of code to put on your site, confirm email addresses and send out emails daily based on your updates to all of your subscribers. You can even tell them at what time you want the email to go out, it’s that simple and it will help you push your posts to people that may not come back to the site everyday to check for new posts.

I didn’t even think of doing this on one of my main sites, not really sure why, but as soon as I did it my conversions have gone up, I get more visitors every day and after about 3 months of allowing people to subscribe I’ve now got over 150 subscribers that get my emails every morning! If you read my previous post about my record days, this is the site I’m talking about, so it helps. You can also push affiliate links to all your subscribers and maybe get a bite or two, who knows, you’re not doing anymore work than you were doing previously with updating the site, so there’s absolutely no reason not to do this.

You can see an example of the feedburner subscription box in the upper right hand corner of this page and while you’re checking it out, why don’t you subscribe! It only takes a second and you will only get emails if we’ve updated the site here. So if you’re interested in what we’re doing here you might as well sign up, it doesn’t cost anything and you don’t have to remember to keep checking the site! Plus we’d appreciate it.

My previous record for a single day was back in February and it was around $185 or so over 2-3 sites (I can’t remember for sure). I was extremely happy when this happened, I’ve only been doing this stuff since last Fall and to hit almost $200 in one day already I was amazed.  This was achieved through a combination of affiliate programs over a few sites. I can’t give away all of my secrets/niches so I won’t tell you which ones, but most of the programs came from Commission Junction, Linkshare and one other affiliate network.

So after that day I figured I would drop back down to my normal daily range which is usually between $10-50 per day, but I was pleasantly surprised when the next couple days all averaged over $100 per day. So things were going well for a while and then, as I knew they would, things dropped back down to around the normal range.

So fast forward to last week while I’m on vacation. I had internet access and was updating my other sites while I was gone and it turns out one of those updates hit big! I made over $200 in one day, a new record for me! The actual number was around $203.xx and it was all from 1 of my sites!  I was ecstatic, especially since I wasn’t even doing “full”updates since I was on vacation, but either way it paid off. So now I had a new goal to reach, breaking $203 in a day, and it only took a week to do.

Yesterday currently stands as my most profitable day yet. I pulled in $215.xx in a single day on a single site! And it could even be more since Commission Junctions reporting is a little delayed I still don’t have the numbers from them. So overall, yesterday was a good day and when I have a good day it always makes me wonder how much I could be making if I spent more than an hour or so every morning updating the sites.

So with that in mind, I plan to try to update this site a lot more in the future and hopefully the things we write here will help you make some money on the internet as well. It’s not as hard as everyone thinks, but it’s also not a get rich quick scheme. It takes time to start building up money and figuring out what is working and what isn’t, which is why we’re here. We’ll try things out and let you know how they work so you don’t have to waste the time.

I know it’s been a long time since either of us have posted on this blog, but I wanted to get some decent results before posting and I’ve been working on building up what I currently have going instead of diving into anything else.

Text-link-ads is a website that sells links for you. You submit a site, they approve it, and then they add it to their directory and people can buy links based on the price that the site sets for you. Since I added it back in February I have had 2 advertisers that have bought links on one of my sites for the past 3 months (Feb., April, May) and as of right now I just had another link sold on that same site as well as a link sold on one of my other sites. I have been paid at the end of every month via paypal for the links that were purchased on my sites and never had any problems.

So basically what I’m telling you is that if you have a successful website or blog, definitely put text-link-ads somewhere on your site. If you don’t sell any links nothing will appear on your site, no advertisements, nothing, so nobody will even know.

So last month eBay announced that they were dropping their affiliate program through Commission Junction and starting their own. I just wanted to give you a first hand look at what I’ve noticed after moving my sites from Commission Junction over to the eBay Publishers Network (EPN).

A drop off in sales is exactly what I’ve noticed. I know it could to due to many different things and not just the switch, but ever since I moved to the EPN I don’t get nearly has many conversions. I used to make at least something every single day, but now I’m lucky if I see something once a week! I don’t know what’s going on, if it’s a cookie issue, site issue, eBay issue or what, but I don’t like it. What I do like, however, is the interface and the reporting. Lots of good detailed reporting that is easy to go through and analyze. Obviously it’s tailored to eBay and not a million different affiliates like CJ, but it’s definitely a great tool.

So my recommendation to anyone that uses eBay through Commission Junction right now is to wait as long as you possibly can to move your sites over. They extended the deadline to June 1st so you have a little bit of time still to maximize your profits. And like I said, the drop off in sales could be due to a number of issues and not just the switch to EPN, but I didn’t really change anything on my sites so who knows.