Working Hard On The Internet

Holy Cow RSS Readers

Big Cajun Man — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:30:01 +0000

So my Adsense data has been showing a declining readership directly, but an exploding RSS readership, but this seems a little fishy to me.

Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Content top channels	164	1	0.61%	$6.70	$1.10

	Queries	Clicks	CTR	eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Search top channels	1	0	0.00%	$0.00	$0.00


	Ad Impressions	Clicks	Ad CTR	Ad eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Feeds top channels	895	1	0.11%	$1.00	$0.89

Total Earnings					$1.99

Yes, I am not making much, but that is not the point, right now I am getting HUGE RSS readership and I think I need to find out exactly what this is.

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iPhone and iPod Theme Added

Big Cajun Man — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:31:22 +0000

So I stumbled across a new plug in for Wordpress which creates a Theme for iPhone, iPod and other handheld devices, and it seems pretty cute.

WPTouch by Brave New Code is quite the plug in and I am testing it out on this site, with an eye towards putting it on Canadian Personal Finance in the future (after all one of the functions of this site is as a test site for new ideas and concepts). The theme is Adsense ready so that is mighty cool as well, but right now I haven’t tried to customize it very much either, so I have much to read and learn about using this cool new plug in.

So far, I rate it as a Must Get if you are using Wordpress and you want more iPod and iPhone readers. Not sure how I advertise this capability yet, but we shall see, stay tuned.

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Carnival Whining an Epilogue

Big Cajun Man — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:22:56 +0000

After the fiasco that was my attempt at hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance (although that post is one of the most popular I have ever had), I ran into yet another interesting whine from one of the many posters who I included in the overly long post (this was found in Stumbleupon):

Host left out a large number of articles from a large number of excellent personal finance bloggers for no apparent reason. Not good carnival etiquette.

This is what I really have problems with in the whole Carnival world, just because you send in a post, why do you think it should be included? Especially if there are over 100 posts to choose from? Most of the larger carnivals I have seen (and stopped reading) are just so bloody long, I gave up reading them (unless they had an “editors choice” at the starting, where I read those 5 and ignored the rest). Witness this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance #202, at least it has an Editor’s choice box so I can ignore the rest of the over 100 entries.

This is why writers ridicule bloggers so much, the whole “… we should be inclusive…” mentality of, just because I wrote it someone must want to read it (this post included) is lazy, and will never make you a better writer.

I had 1 or two queries which were by normal writers who simply asked why, so that they could hone their skills, but the deluge of whining and complaining drowned out these writers. Why anyone wants to host a Carnival these days is beyond me.

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Test of Adsense Video Player

Big Cajun Man — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:33:27 +0000

So I am really not sure what this will actually do, but here is an adsense video player test to see how it might work on my web site.
The important part of all of this would be to make sure that the video player appears stand a lone on the page.

I wonder what kind of content I might get from it?

Interesting.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

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Creepy Crawlers

Big Cajun Man — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:39:09 +0000

So my Canadian Personal Finance site continues to be crawled by many different bots and such and it is making for some very interesting statistics.

That's a lot of Crawling

What the heck is causing all this crawling around, I have no idea, but holy cow that is a lot of crawling that is for sure.

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March Income Numbers

Big Cajun Man — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:50:32 +0000

An update on my attempt to carve out a meager income with my blogging so here is an update for March from Canadian Personal Financial Opinions :

Adsense income $60.44 with about 16000 impressions (including RSS)
Kontera income $3.78 on 7,528 page impressions
TextLinkAds income $56.61 earn with 8 ads running out of a possible 8 (text link ads)
Performancing Ads $00.00 from 0 advertiser
Pepper Jam Ads income $0.00
NeverBlueAds income $0.00
TTZ Media income $0.00
Marketleverage income $0.00
ReviewMe review income $0.00
Pay Per Post income $0.00
Privately arranged ads income $20.00

Total income for the month of February 2009: $140 (up a little)

Page rank for the site from Google: 3/10

Page rank for site from Alexa #677381 (down)

Number of RSSReaders from Feedburner: 470 (avg) (same) but this number is complete fiction as well, since I can see more readers, yet my numbers remain down.

Text Link Ads return as pretty much my major income earner, my guess is this month I will revamp the web site and I will be remedying some of these situations.

Still working for slave wages.

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February Income Numbers

Big Cajun Man — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:46:32 +0000

An update on my attempt to carve out a meager income with my blogging so here is an update for December from Canadian Personal Financial Opinions :

Adsense income $66.17 with about 14000 impressions (including RSS)
Kontera income $5.90 on 7843 page impressions
TextLinkAds income $38.85 earn with 6 ads running out of a possible 8 (text link ads)
Performancing Ads $00.00 from 0 advertiser
Pepper Jam Ads income $0.00
NeverBlueAds income $0.00
TTZ Media income $0.00
Marketleverage income $0.00
ReviewMe review income $0.00
Pay Per Post income $0.00
Privately arranged ads income $20.00

Total income for the month of February 2009: $111 (down)

Page rank for the site from Google: 3/10

Page rank for site from Alexa #588840 (down)

Number of RSSReaders from Feedburner: 470 (avg) (same)

Given I hosted a Carnival this month it is interesting to see how little effect it had on any numbers. February was a slower month and a shorter month and March seems to be going fine, so we shall see.

Still working for slave wages.

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Carnival Hosting a commentary

Big Cajun Man — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:10:35 +0000

I had forgotten that I had volunteered to host the Carnival of Personal Finance, this past weekend, so when I got the e-mail from the Carnival owner I was surprised and a little panic’ed as well.

I had written a posting already for Monday talking about Family Day in Ontario, and after taking a few minutes to think I came up with the concept of writing this week’s CPF in a Family Advice format. Thus was born:

Carnival Of Personal Finance #192: The Family Day Edition

I always valued advice from my family and from what I had heard from other folks there was always an inherent value in advice from different members of your family, so I went with that.

I looked at how many entries had been submitted for the Carnival (it is a weekly Carnival) and there was almost 100 of them, which again made me go Holy Crap (just reading all of this was going to take a while).

The Carnival itself has a set of rules for posting to the Carnival which helped trim out some of the entries up front (I’d say about 10-20%). Some posts you would tell were simply “factory” posts from sites that pump out content with very little personal input.

I started trimming and was looking for specific personal finance/family type posts which started knocking out a lot of entries, and finally I ended up with about 30 entries that I was going to use. I managed to write it in a reasonable (if rushed) format and managed to add a few pictures from the Ontario Government’s Family Day web site as well.

Backlash

Normally when I have submitted to Carnivals and not been included, I have simply gone, “Oh well…”, and moved on, but evidently that is not the “norm” when it comes to other Financial Bloggers.

One sent me a “short” note asking why I didn’t include the post, and I have been receiving “snippy” comments as well from other bloggers about my edit’ing techniques.

I didn’t want to simply publish a “here is a list of interesting posts” Carnival (I do that enough on Fridays, and frankly it is a very lazy blogging trick), I wanted it to make sense and be concise (so that someone might actually go through all the posts, not just the first few).

The Day After

Not sure what hosting this Carnival will do for my site. It didn’t really increase my traffic that much (it was a good day, but not the best day). Hopefully I have picked up a few more readers and maybe picked up a few more incoming links, we shall see.

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New Advertisers and 2.7.1

Big Cajun Man — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:06:58 +0000

Wordpress 2.7.1 is installed on both sites now although the automatic upgrade in Wordpress seems to have failed. I used Dreamhost’s 1 click upgrade instead, which seems to have worked no problem (which is a nice change too). The 1 click upgrade may be the way to go in the future, we shall see.

Advertising seems to be hunting me down these days given the site seems to have a higher readership these days, and I am attempting to monetize my RSS feed a bit more. The RSS feed seems to be a bit of a dead leader when it comes to making money, so I am now inserting ads by hand into the feed just to see if that might help out. Have added Chapters Indigo, Quicktax, and BBC Canada to the list of advertisers.

I actually had a commenter mention how odd it was that I had Playboy on my list of ads, I thought it was interesting that someone actually even noticed, since I didn’t think anyone actually looked there. Good feedback to know.

The content continues to grow, with Video content on the weekend, and the occasional link by larger sites helping to keep the readership up.

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January Income Numbers

Big Cajun Man — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:44:43 +0000

An update on my attempt to carve out a meager income with my blogging so here is an update for December from Canadian Personal Financial Opinions :

Adsense income $77.92 with about 13000 impressions (including RSS)
Kontera income $8.46 on 8735 page impressions
TextLinkAds income $37.06 earn with 5 ads running out of a possible 8 (text link ads)
Performancing Ads $39.00 from 2 advertiser
Pepper Jam Ads income $0.00
NeverBlueAds income $0.00
TTZ Media income $0.00
Marketleverage income $0.00
ReviewMe review income $0.00
Pay Per Post income $0.00
Privately arranged ads income $20.00

Total income for the month of July 2008: $182.44 (up 40%)

Page rank for the site from Google: 3/10

Page rank for site from Alexa #588840 (up)

Number of RSSReaders from Feedburner: 420 (avg) (same)

So both Performancing and Kontera on my watch, since I have not seen dime 1 from them, even with their claims of income, and they may fall off the roof if I don’t see moneys from them soon.

Overall a very good month with readership up a great deal and income levels up very nicely as well, not sure what exactly is causing this, but hopefully this will continue.

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