Amazon Affilliate?

It has been about four months now since Amazon returned to California.

I am now pleased to report my first sale since I re-opened my account. Yes one sale in four months.

Why just one?

Well I did place some Amazon ads on my HubPages hubs again, and I have just begun adding them to my blogs. It was actually a blog Amazon ad which gained the sale.

At just 40  cents it is a start. I won't sneer at it. Sadly I cannot frame those exact four dimes, or a quarter, dime and nickel. But I wish that I could. Like the businessmen of old who kept their first dollar just to remind them where they started.

So my first tip to success with Amazon is have patience.

Again patience is the key with all things online. A year ago I was selling several items a day on Amazon, it was almost steady income, until the day the account was closed in retaliation at California law.  When the law went away Amazon came back but the customers didn't. Now Maybe :) Just maybe :)

Another tip when applying Amazon affiliate adverttising to your hubs or blogs is to try something out. Don't let your page become set in stone. If an ad doesn't work after a few months change the style, Amazon have lots of links and widgets available, learn to use as many as you can. See what they do. Some of the cloud ones do slow down load times quite a bit so beware if your analysis program tells you a lot of your readers are using old operating systems or are in low bandwidth regions. They may click away before your page loads on their screen.

Another famous tip is to use the area at the top right below your header to place your main ad. This is an old idea and has been around since the first banner ads, and D'ya know what? It has been around for that long because it works.  Bear that in mind next time your eyes wander over a webpage.

Should You Monetize?

Whether to monetize any blog or page is always a difficult question to answer.

It depends on what you want to do.

For instance if you see your page as a personal diary then there are possibly few reasons to monetize.

Plus you don't want to go crazy and post so many ads that your readers cannot find the content. I am sure you have come across those sites which blind you with ads. Acck a turn-off if ever there was one.

If you produce a site to share information, then there seems no harm in adding a few links to trusted advertisers.

Since the return of Amazon to California, I have re-opened my associate account and offer items from their catalog.

I would suggest keeping only two or three blocks of ads on a page.

ALWAYS make your content the major portion. Readers come for your content NOT the advertisements, unless they are the paying advertisers looking up where their ads are.

Use reputable sources for you ad providers, Google, Amazon and EBay for example.  They will not go out of business tomorrow and even if they set their limits high, Google payout at over $100 you will get paid, eventually.

Follow the rules, don't cheat on ads, don't click, use someone else to click on them, it is just not worth trying to push things. They will catch you and you will be blocked for life for cheating, and it can mean your family is blocked too. Google will apply the rule of guilty until proved innocent, and innocence is nigh on impossible to prove in Google's court.

So bear in mind what you want from your pages, keep advertising limited compared to content and follow the rules.

Monetization can be thrilling, watching you cash build and then receiving a check or PayPal payment is wonderful.

Yahoo! Voices - Why Have my CPM Numbers fallen to Zero?

Don't Panic.  Your viewing figures have not really fallen to zero.

When Yahoo! Voices sends your contributor payment to you following your payout, over 1,000 views on the second Tuesday of the month.

Yahoo! then resets the counter to zero for the content which it has already paid you for.

So your all time viewing figures continue to rise per view.

If you have 20 views in All-Time Views on a payout day and 20 contributory views in the next column.

This will read All-time 20 and 0 immediately after apayout.

As new viewers come in, the All-Time views will rise 21, 22, 23 ... etc. and the contribution figure will begin 1, 2, 3, ... and so on.

So this allows you to sort out your really good money making posts and the areas which produce less revenue.

List My Five Update

Recently my List My Five postings have seen a marked increase in traffic. This may now be due to a growing maturity in the site and my postings.

November proved to be my best month for revenue from the site. Pay Per Click payments reached $1.57.

Not a vast amount of revenue if you want to be a millionaire, but you should bear in mind this was income from just twenty postings.

To gain more revenue, I still think the more postings on a variety of subjects is vital.

My biggest income source for that month was from travel tips for visiting the United States, where to go etc. Many people look for summer holiday vacations in the winter months ( for the Northern hemisphere) so it is reasonable to guess that this was one of the reasons that list proved so popular. Also a good reason to consider making a list in the off season for that subject.

e.g. Write a list of Football supply stores in the off-season, when people come to look for items at the start of the season you will have a site which has matured on a search engine list and you'll leave the post last minute guys way behind in terms of views and possible income.

A Short Story of the Apocolypse

Popalotl is a mason of the highest order. He is commissioned to create five calendars for the High Priest of the Sun. The calendars will take pride of place on the stairway of the great Mayan Temple of the Sun.

That is the plan anyway.

To find out more read Popalotl's story Click HERE

Google Searches or Links? Which bring You MORE Views?

We have all heard the cry "How do I get top ranking on Google searches?" Maybe you have even asked that very question yourself?

Well I know I used to ask that very question. I bought the books advising on Search Engine Optimization and How to promote your sites.

They were useful in that they talked about building links and creating an RSS Feed etc. But over the last year I have come to realise that Google search engine page location is not all it is made up to be.

I regulary look up my stats on my blog, they show some very interesting figures. Of all views only 3% come from Google searches.

1% come drom other search engines but a massive 96% come from posting links to places such as HubPages and Yahoo! Voices, The largest source at 70% of all traffic comes from HubPages and my RSS feeds there.

So that tells me that people who have read my content on HubPages are clicking through my RSS feed to come here.

OK So I don't get any revenue because I don't advertise on my blog. I don't mind that, this blog is to share information with you.

But in that there is opportunity for you. If you have a monetized blog, link it to your hubpage hubs on related subjects and you will gain traffic from people who already enjoy your style of writing.

Also link back to other hubs to drive traffic back there so you can benefit from your HubPages CPM revenue.

Remember. Google ranking is not the only way to gain traffic. But once you have your reader keep them reading your pages by linking to your own work when you can.

Be patient though. building a network takes time. You won't see a difference overnight, it has taken me one year so far, unless you hit a hot topic. The idea is to plan for the  long term. Then over time you will see a marked improvement in traffic.

Yahoo! I reach the Millenium!

Well here we are on the first day of the New Year, five months after joining Yahoo! Contributor Network, it has changed it's name now to Yahoo! Voices. I have fifty posts there and I have had 1,003 views.

!,003 views means I actually should get a payout soon, $1.50.

OK not a lot of cash and had to wait five months for it, but it is cash I would not have had and it also beats the amount of interest I gained on a couple of bank accounts by a long way.

What will I do with the payout, well maybe just let it roll on a bit.

It is not the first payout that I have received from Yahoo! I did write an article which got an upfront payment back at the end of July 2011 but this will be my first performance payment.

I don't know which is best, over 1,000 views or the cash!

New Post of Hub, Late but Complete

It has been a few weeks now since I actually posted a hub.

The main reason has been that I have been working on my Master's Degree a very intensive course which took up all of late November and Early December. Well classes ended on the 17th December and here twelve days later I found myself at a loose end and decided to fininsh off a hub which has been waotong since September for finalizing.

The beauty of HubPages is that you can work at your own pace on several projects at one time coming and going as you please.

This hub was about the Gunfight at the OK Coral in Tombstone AZ on October 26, 1881. It seemed fitting to have it posted by the 130th anniversary, but sadly I missed that with school work looming. So late, but non the less complete here is my take on the iconic western gunfight.


Read the Hub HERE