My current goal is $10 in 7 days; my thinking is that I’d go from one buck in one night of passive income to over a buck a night for a week running.
However, some mysterious force has convinced eleven people to order something from Amazon.Com
So, with that, I’m going to have to change my goal to “more than one dollar a night for a week straight.”
After convincing myself that I personally crashed the shared server that the portallane.com site lives on (well, the mysql crashed, anyway ), I turned off some of the logging and the stats programs that I had installed. It was probably for the best, but I’m definately a stats junkie. 
So I’ve been updating the Thanksgiving Recipes site and the Justice League America Movie site and letting the rest of the portallane.com sites just go their automatic ways. I did learn how to embed youtube videos, and I used this plugin to make it easier. But now I have a lovely video of “how to make a pumpkin pie.”
Focus, lad, focus.
Somehow I managed to turn off the adsense deluxe panel, so even with the 200-300 unique visitors, nobody has given my adsense account any movement toward the “buck a night” goal of ten bucks in seven days.
However, I do want to thank the three of you who found something of use over at the Dollar Deals page. 
Thanks!
So, my focus is currently on, letting the autoblogs run and not bothering with more or less, making good posts to my several blogs, and trying to find uses for those dollar deals myself. I did find one source that might prove interesting if I were to use the “cheap content” generation idea on that page. In fact, I’m going to sell that idea too. It’s one of those “if I had more time in the day” ideas that I never really got around to.
ps
I discovered that my otherwise awesome host ( site5 ) limits a site to 15 concurrent mysql connections, so it’s probably not feasible to run a large autoblog site on a site5 hosting account. )
There’s a fascinating tool at google called “Google Trends.” Using it, you can see trending through the weeks or years for random topics.
As you sit and punch keywords into this tool, you can probably find some with cyclical patterns. For instance, the blue line to the right is more cyclical than the red line.
So, I’m seeing us on the cusp of a “Thanksgiving” Spike and the best keyword for thanksgiving is probably “recipe.” Because that’s what people do on Thanksgiving; they eat. So check out “thanksgiving recipes” at this new Thanksgiving Recipes blog.
Jon Leger sent me another exciting email with tips on how to earn my dollar a day ( or a buck a night ).
He sent some horrible, horrible untargeted traffic to a landing page and made over an 8.85% conversion rate. He made over 300 dollars from this one idea. The program is easy to convert and very popular. Want to know more? Check out this link!
He’s selling the idea for one dollar. I spend more than that on coffee, even if I don’t go to Starbucks!
The “Adsense Deluxe” Plugin doesn’t have to be just adsense.
You can use it to substitute other ads in ( or probably whatever; an image, a header, whatever ) into your text. So I’m currently using it on Tila Tequila Fan Site to present an allposters ad. Because in the template I’m using, other sites on that domain are also using the same one; so I can just swap in different all posters ads for different fan sites.
Seven day earnings have dipped a little; a few days in a row, I made absolutely no money. However, I’ve applied to a new affiliate program and have started up two new websites that are aimed at making some good money.
First, I’ve got some blogs going on over at Portal Lane, which is a domain I originally purchased thinking I would write a portal framework but I’m actually using a multi-user wordpress installation. Second, I have a more active hand in the blog happening at justiceleagueamericamovie.com, which is a love of mine ( superhero movies, even the bad ones like the Hulk ). Third, I got roped into buying “your shitty site.com” which will be an aff site for … website tips. So we’re hanging in there and moving along.
I scrapped the Ebay RSS site for a couple of reasons.
First and foremost, I’ve been uncomfortable with just taking the ebay output and sticking it onto the blog. Secondly, it just wasn’t earning enough money. And third, it’s kind of “black hattish,” and I don’t want to threaten my adsense account.
So it’s down, and I’ll come up with something else. On the plus side, I’ve learned that the subdomain is considered as important as the main domain name in the search engines.
I made a buck tonight.
I made forty cents at commission junction ( my first ever commission junction commission, I might add ) and managed to hit over sixty cents in adsense!
I’m jazzed. One night, One buck.
Ok, now my new goal is Ten Dollars in Seven Days. I’m on track, more or less, for that, because I have just over five dollars in the last seven days on Adsense. So I’ll need to keep that momentum and also double it somehow. Awesome.
Awesome!
We can only go up from here, pals!
Here’s some simple math to help you determine how much you should cap the payment for links.
First, you’ll need to just let your campaign run for a few days to determine a conversion factor. Conversion factors depend on a lot of things, and are beyond the scope of this post. But for this math, you just need to know “100 people came to my site and 3 people bought my product.” That’s a three percent conversion. Just take the number of people that bought, divide by the number of people who came, and multiply by 100. So if 75 people come through and 25 people bought it, ( 25/75 )x100 = about 33 percent conversion (that’s excellent, most average around 4 to 8, more or less.
This means that if your adwords CPC says you’ll be paying $1.00 per click, divide 100 by the amount you’ll be made per sale. That’s the conversion rate you;ll need to aim at. 100/25=4, great! 100/4=25; you’ll need an amazing conversion rate.
So let’s say 4 people bought your affiliate’s product. For each sale, you earn 12 dollars. You can think that you had 48 dollars worth of income for 100 people ( 4×12). On the other hand, you’ll want to check your CPC (cost per click). If your CPC is $0.23, then those 100 people cost you $23. 48-23=25; you’re 25 in the black. Great! If your CPC is $1.02, that $48 bucks cost $102; you;re 54 bucks in the red. Too bad. Try again; you need to either get your conversion rates up or your CPC down. Unless you like losing money.
So basically, your conversion percentage multiplied by your income per sale needs to be more than the cost for 100 clicks. I find it easier to consider without that pesky decimal place, so I just do the math in pennies.
We have a couple of affiliate sites that are also not making any money. A buck a night? Never seen one. Looking at the sites, they both have zero pagerank on all the pages. And if I try to pay for some link loving through google adwords, then the links come in at about a dollar apiece.
Obviously the quality score isn’t good enough.
Something will trigger though, something will happen. I’m sure of it. I think I need to work on the “landing pages” - the pages that encourage the reader to go buy the affiliate product, and I need to cloak the links somehow. We’ll get the QS up there.
I also paid someone for 100 links per site; that’ll get me a little more traffic / pagerank. More than one would be nice. Not paying for the links directly but paying for 100 directory submissions, which should be worth something.
