Beginner’s Blog

Oh how a time flies by. It’s been 22 days since my last update. Not much to report though.

Main focus is still on www.coreduonews.com and it is growing nicely. Now it has about 1800 hits on a weekdays and about 1100 on weekends. AdSense earnings also seem to increase, although CPC is rather low and seems getting lower. Right now it’s about $.20-25 per click. Still during last 7 days got 3 with earnings of above $10. Also started working on better navigation on the side. Adeed new categories and will try to expand them.

Unwired View is doing rather slow. Last week still had about 50 hits a day mainly from referrals to two articles  and miniscule google traffic. But last Friday I got afirst real break with this blog. Was browsing through patent database and found Samsung’s patent for cellphones with perfumes. Published it and submitted to digg and reddit. Seems that people liked it, got 5 comments and about 10 links from some lowtraffic blogs and some foreign  high traffic blogs and forums.  Seeng an intersted  submitted  my story to some mobile dedicated forums myself and also tipped Engadget, Gizmodo and Ubergizmos. Engadget picked up my story on their mobile blog - Engadget mobile andSpanish version. Others ignored it. Although Gizmodo ran a story about the same patent but refernced another blog. Darn!

After thinking over the weekend of how to proceed with Unwired view, I came up with a decision. There will be two types of posts:

1. for Search engine traffic generation, where I will cite and point to the stories, news and reviews about cellphones written by others. These won’t appear on the front page and in main feed and will be accesible through the categories.
2. My own content for the front page. But it won’t be updated daily.

I already started working on it. Finally found a good theme - Liquid Summer. Installed it, added opt infrontpage plugin and tried some referencing posts. Looks doable.
I also started a new blog - www.umpcnews.com. It is dedicated for the new UMPC/Origami devices, released during Cebit and I hope to grow this blog together with the UMPC category. Not much content to write about now but I hope it will increase. Today also got my first break for this blog. One of todays posts was picked up by Gizmodo - on their front page! I was not expecting it at all. A number of other blogs have written  about new UMPC  from Daewoo before my post. And I didn’t even reference original source - I cited Korean website post (written in English). Still, I submitted the post to digg and it seems that that’s where Gizmodo writes saw it and picked it up.

I didn’t even have any ads on this blog yet, so I rushed toput some adsense on it as soon asI saw spike in traffic. So far, in 3 hours Igot about 350 hits on umpcnews.com. We’ll see how it develops later.

Looks like I really abandoned my diary. And I just realized that it’s no good. It seems that I tend forget a lot and udjust my expectations upwards as time goes by. I started a new blog www.unwiredview.com. It’s about everything wireless. Felt really frustrated with the slow start. Not as many promotion opportunities, so not as many vistors. Still I can get about 150 clicks if I try to promote thisblog. If not, I now get between 20 ans 50 cliks a day.  Today was first click from google. That reminded me to check the diary  and that  helped a lot.  Seems that  Unwired View progresses in similar manner to Core Duo, adjusted to less promotion efforts. Just have to keep working on content and fix the design.

Been using ProBlogger Clean WP theme, but really didn’t like the ad layout. And then it stopped working, so Iswitched now to default WP theme for a whileuntil I find replacement.

Core Duo News blog is doing very nicely so far. At the end of the month made a post about Apple mac mini just after it’s announcement. Managed to get out within half hour from announcement (just watched real time coverage from some blogs and made an article with mac mini specs and prices). Submitted to Digg and Reddit and the post made first page on Reddit. That made me about 3500 pageviews in a couple of days. Pretty nice way to end the month.

Core Duo News  total tally for the first moth of operation: 19 423 pageloads, 11 075 unique visitors  and  $88.75 in adSense earnings. Quite an improvement from January. CDN now has PR2 and averages about 1000 pageviews on a working day and about 700 on weekends, without any promotions. Traffic is mainly from google, although I get somelinks to some of the articles. Mostly linked are the ones from confidential Dell file. Also dug up some unnounced Lenovo ThinkPad tablet and it got some links from other blogs. Computer reviews or other similar articles do not get linked at all. I guess I should look harder for these original tidbit.

Just checked Google sitemaps and it seems that CDN has about 20 diffrent queries mostly related tocore duo notebooks on the first page of search. For queries “inspirion 6400″ and “dell inspirion 6400″ CDN is even No.1 on google.  Guess that also comes from these incoming links.Google shows 79 incoming links total and 12 unique links on result pages for CDN.

Some of them are from articles I submitted e.g from TailRank and Gabbr, but others are real links from some external sites.

So it seems that I am not very good in writing diaries. This week worked mainly on what I now consider to be my main blog - Core Duo News. The blog is growing nicely, this week had 500 pageviews a day on average. AdSense income started trickling in and now I feel dissapointed if I didn’t earn $3 per day.

Got accepted to Chitika for Core Duo News, although that took some effort. I aplied for it last week and got a rejection letter on Tuesday. But the rejection seemed automatic, based solely on my home address wich is outside of the countries that they serve.

Wrote letter explaining why they are wrong and next day got invitation to join. What’s interesting couple of hours later got a letter from another CSR saying that they can not include my site, because it has adult content. Which sounded kinda funny fora Computer products related site. Anyway was able to login to Chitika placed ads on my site and they seem to be working.

What I like about Chitika is that they update their stats only once a day. Still can’t resist checking adSense account every hour or so when I’m at my computer.

Well, so much with daily postings to the diary. Real life interfered. ‘been on a business trip, then some office work. Still managed to keep posting to two of my content blogs almost daily, or at least a post a day. If I miss a day, I do 2 post the nex day.

It appears that ads on CoreDuoNews started working, without any effort from my side. Must be googles servers. Found out about some glitch in WP2 - displaying ads in a prview form. Corrected that.

This weekend did not do anything in promotion field, but Core Duo now is getting 200+ hits, mainly from google. Adsense earnings fluctuate a lot. I usually get about 6 clicks a day. Sometimes earn $.50 sometemise over $2.

Installed Ecto and writing this post on it. Doesn’t seem to add much to my current setup, so I’ll probably abandon it after free trial expires.

My current posting process:

Start writing post with performacing. That helps with research I can do it in a browser and then write in the same window. AFter the draft is ready I copy paste it to Word, for spell checking and more editing. After I’m ready I copy/paste it to WP2 rich text editor on my blog. Add missing links, pictures. Save and look at the preview. More editing. When I’m satisfied, I turn Rich Text editor off and add more tag and adsense in text with “adsense deluxe” plugin. Then add post slug, select categories and post.

Seems complicated, but I did not find any single tool that will satisfy me.

Now I need to find some pagination plugin for my longer posts. Did one very long post and it really not good from monetization point of view.

Find two promising themes: “Tricolumn” and Problogger clean. Should have to check them out. Tricolmn seems very simple, even primitive, but appears to be highly cutomizable. Problogger looks quite optimized for adsense, but not sure about customizability.

Thinking on starting another blog, similar to Core Duo. It will be Intel Viiv related, so pretty close to the one I do. Should be easy to find topics to write about - already lots of topics overlap with core duo.

CoreDuoNews. Nothing much to report. In total got about 1400 hits from yesterday’s slashdot article. Today noticed that Intel has another number - L2400 for low power Core Duo chips. Got my hopes up, searched the Dell pricelist, but nothing juicy came out. Oh well, beck to boring business searching the net for Core Duo stories to report on the blog.

Yesterday earned $1.42 from 8 clicks on approx. 1400 hits. Today earned $1.62 for the first hundred of hits. Wrote a story - review of available 14″ notebooks in the market.
Submitted the article to Digg and Reddit, got about 400 hits. Total tally for today - 567 pageviews. Didn’t earn a cent more for next 400 hits. Seems that he crowd from slashdot, Reddit and Digg are not adclickers.
Main adblock on a single post page started showing up. But after few hours it dissapeared from the main page. I think it might be Google. Should look into alternate url options.

Google traffic is increasing, today got more then ten hits for different queries. Now I can find my new site on the first three pages for some of them. Search people, search! There lots of Core Duo news coming and we will be here toreport them!

WRote an article for Core Duo News, which was accepted to Slashdot. Didn’t make to the first page, but still it’s in IT and Hardware section. I evensaw a link to my site through slashdot on Yahoo news! Seems that today I’l get somewhere between 1500 and 2000 hits. Well, not that impressive, despite it all.
Anyway it really  doesn’t feel like the first time. Or maybe it’s fatique or something.

Todays post was probably the last one I will do based on the data from dell’s file. Can’t find any interesting things anymore.

Goobye sensationalistic headlines and easy content. Back to slowly and steadily building the site.

Ok. I promised to announce my new blog on Sunday. Here it is: Core Duo News.  This blog will focus on everything related to this new Intel chip. Since a lot of products will use it, I think I will have a lot of monetization capabilities. And PPCs in this field are great. I’m getting anywhere between $.25 to $1.70 per click. So it has rather good earnings potential.
This weekend I continued the work on the new blog. Fridays total earnings were  $9.43. Yesterday had some residual traffic from slahdot, so there were total of 597 pageviews. But CTR for this blog is terrible - 0.4%. I think  there  are  several  reasons  for this , the main one  -  problem with the main ad unit on single post page. It usually doesn’t show up. Other reason is that the visitors I get from Digg and Slashdot are rather technincal and they do not click much on the ads.

On Saturday I started getting some traffic from Google. Interesting thing about this is, that when I try the queries that these visitors used to get to my page, I can not find a link to Core Duo News anywhere in the first 20 pages of Google.

Nevertheless, I am now getting about 10 hits per day from google, which is not bad for a 6 day old blog with only 6 posts on it.

I wasn’t doing any promotion for the new blog this weekend. And today my slashdot traffic practically dried  out. But someone quoted the prices for new Dell laptops on couple of forums: forums.somethingawful.com and pokerforum.nu so my traffic for the day was 209 pageviews, without any considerable effort from me. 209 pageviews would have seemd huge for me on Thursday, and I would probably jumping from  joy about it.

But now, after being slashdotted and 3000 pageview day, it doesn’t seem so big, at least on emotional level. I still think that this is great, but it just doesn’t feel that way.

Had a problem with my hosting company yesterday - for some reasons could not login into  to my account. Have to say they have a great customer service. Got a reply within a few hours on saturday evening. Turns out, the culprit was Firefox 1.5.01 upgrade, which somehow messed up their login process. Deleted the cookies and now everything works fine.

Been working on the new blog mostly. Tried to solve, adds not showing on the post page problem. No luck. But now I think it may be the post slug problem. We’ll see tomorrow.

Wrote another article from the internal Dell document today, and continued with promotion. It worked beyond my wildet dreams. Submitted to digg and some other places. Tried to submit article to slahdot, but was rejected. Was getting rather good traffic it seemed that for a day I might reach 200 -250 hits.

Wrote a letter to one of C-net’s reporters, who did the article on Dell being Googled. Pointed some important things that he missed in his article with a link to my blog. Probably nothing will come from this, but you never know.

And then I was slashdotted! Kind of. Someone, probably through digg spotted my article, liked it and linked to it in one of the posts to another slashdot article.

So I have 3100 hits and 2200 unique visitors today. It feels great. AdSense earnings not the impressivethough. With the main ad unit not working, CTR is only 0.4%. Still, I earned $6.19 today so far. And about 600 page impressions not accounted yet by adSense.

Found another interesting tidbit of info on Dell laptops, but probably will withold posting until Monday, when there’s a bigger target audience. Do some other posts during the weekend.

It’s interesting how quickly your expectations can adjust. Only 60 hits in half an hour !? Come on!!! I earned ONLY $6 so far today!! What the hell, that’s unacceptable!!!

Oh, AdSense doesn’t  update in realtime?!!! WHAT’s UP WITH THAT!!! ‘been checking it only every five minutes or so, since I got slashdotted.

Only yesterday I was enormously happy with a 100 visitors a DAY. And I earned $10 during whole last month. It seems like addiction. I wonder what happens when my slashdot traffic dries out…

Worked mainly on my new blog. It’s computer related. On Tuesday was lucky and got hold of confidential Dell file shortly exposed on Google. Today did some analysis and wrote an article about some upcoming Dell notebooks, which they did not announce yet. I think this file should provide good info for articles for the next few days.

After writing an article concentrated on promoting my new blog. Submitted the link to the article to a number of services and sites, with varying response. So far got about 170 hits for today. I guess quite ok for 3 day old blog. And I didn’t pay a penny.

While looking for the ways to promote my blog found some interesting tools for researching and collecting information. Seems that they might make research and even writing part for the new blog much easier.
Yesterday opened adwords account, just to see what’s that all about, maybe check the keyword prices. HAven’t figured how that works yet.  They charged me $10 deposit, but it’s in my account there. I guess I will use it eventualy.

Yesterday earned 28 cents from Blogdotes (7 cliks) and 23 cents from a new blog (1 click). Today earned $.046 for 3 cliks. Seems that not every click is equal, that first $1 click on tuesday was nice.

Even if I’m quite happy with PPC from the new blog, CTR seems unnaceptable. Yesterday it was 0.6%, today it’s…. Wow! Someone clicked 2 times for a total of $1.70 on a new blog, while I was writing this! So, todays earnings - $2.06 so far. I wish there was something like Fun Page Exchange in computing field. Would definetely use that. With these PPC  I might earn more then I’m spending.

Well, these click’s cheered me up some, but I’m still not satisfied with CTR’s. And Semiologic CMS is driving me crazy. It’s great if you use it, as it is. Or, probably, if you buy a professional edition. But it’s a nightmare to customize it yourself. Espacially if barely know PHP and don’t really understand WP loop.

Today of the main block of ads stopped showing up on the main post that visitors are comng to. They work just fine, in all other palces, posts and positions. But not WHERE I NEED THEM!  The reaon should be the tables, I guess. I copy pasted some from Word to WP2 WYSIWYG editor and it had some difficulty publishing it. So these tables must be messing up the ads, I think. To late to change that now. Will have to find some better  way to format my post  tomorrow.

Well, it’s a full month that I started blogging.

My stats: Pageloads: 6340, Unique visitors: 4495, First time visitors: 3896, Returning visitors: 599. Of them - 3000 paid for during various services (FunPage Exchange, blogexplosion).

Adsense earnings 10.30.

Today worked on my new project. Wrote a story, submitted to Digg. Got 7 diggs and about 60 visitors already. Yesterdays submission was 4 diggs and about 100 visitors, that brought me $1 in AdSense earnings. JUST FOR 1 CLICK! Well, today also got 1 click for $.025. Not $1, but on Blogdotes it took me at least 4 clicks to get that. Seems that I got quite good topic.

Have to do something about my writing style. Seems that I tend to gravitate to long winded posts that take’s hours to write. That’s unsustainable.
Tried to experiment with adsense placement.  Tweaked template. Looks like I like it much less. Yesterday Iwas thinking of converting all of my blogs to Semiologic CMS. Too many things outside php files and in function files. Very hard to customize. E.g. have no idea how to place AdSense ad link units after the first post excerpt on main page, and at the end of the post on single post page. Pretty straightforward task for other templates I used.

Starting to hate WYSIWIG editors on the Wordpress 2 and Performacing. They don’t seem to work well. Always have to do manual html editing.