April was a big improvement for me over the past few months. In March, I realized I was killing my earnings by trying to upgrade all my sites to be way above spamminess. I don’t consider any of my sites “spam” per se - I don’t just optimize them for search engines. But the fact [...]

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A few months ago, I announced I was rebranding this site as Blue Mushrooms, and moving away from journaling and more toward actually providing good information to people who want to market online.
Since then my traffic has dropped a little. I thought long and hard this weekend and realized the following.

Going back to the domain [...]

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I’ve talked a lot recently about negative reactions to video blogging. This post is more neutral, and addresses a couple of distinctions my other posts didn’t make.
Reaching new visitors
Will video blogging introduce new visitors to your site? It sure can! If you post the videos in the right place for the audience you’re seeking, and [...]

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March earnings sucked, but I have a plan. My sites brought in about $190. Pitiful.
I took a good hard look at my sites this month and realized something: some of them are destined for great things, others not so much. I don’t see myself running 20 blogs with 10k feed subs each a few years [...]

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From the start of my self-education in search engine optimization, I was told your ads need to be relevant to your content. It never made sense to me, and I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t all part of the myth building process that made AdSense so huge. Consider this from Affiliate Marketing and Appealing [...]

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I want to start updating this site more, but lately I’ve been so hard at work on my others. Mostly, I’m writing a lot of articles.
I’m also experimenting with pushing a specific product through a blog. I picked the product based on some search terms the site ranks for and - I believe - wrote [...]

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This month sucked with earnings of $218. That’s the lowest I’ve had in a while, and that’s despite increased traffic to most of my sites. This forces me to take a look at where I’m going wrong. You’re going to laugh so hard at the first item - I did!

Blocking your aff pages from the [...]

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I was checking all my earnings one day a month ago, like I do almost every day, when it hit me: why am I checking to see if someone’s bought something from my sites? Why would someone buy something from my sites?
It was an epiphany. See, all this time I’ve been so busy studying site [...]

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Mark at 45n5 wrote about establishing a metric for what blog advertising is worth. I think this is really important - so much so that my comment turned short story length and I decided to bring it over here. Mark talked about pageviews and other stats, wondering which numbers to crunch, and how.
In traditional advertising, [...]

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This month, I got rid of a lot of text link ads, so I expected a drop in income. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared: $285.
BlogHer earnings dropped sharply this month, so most of my income actually still came from text link ads, which is scary. I definitely need to diversify fast. Which I’ve [...]

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