Making money with Text Link Ads
First off, I have to admit that in most of my online ventures, I haven’t really succeeded. Adsense has not yet yielded me a dime in actual payouts. Affiliate programs have never really worked for me. Referral programs haven’t worked. Paid to email and paid to play games or surf the net seem to take too much time and not give enough back in return.
The one success that I’ve had was with .
One day, I googled “How to make money with your blog” and I found a list of ten things one guy had tried. I signed up for them all using my blog “Poor Vago’s Almanack” and then I waited to see the results. A few ads sold in the first month and I got a payment for $22 from TLA. Then they just kept selling. At one point, I was getting around $240 a month but then back in February, my payouts started to decrease. This came from a combination of things, 1st, TLA had stopped taking ads from gambling sites and casinos. 2nd, my content had shifted from fairly racey stuff to tales of my travels and adventures and as a result my pagerank had decreased. At least that is what I think happened. At the moment, I am making about $130 a month.
I don’t remember any of the other programs I signed up for, but definitely works and it does so in a way that doesn’t leave big ugly ads all over your site. In fact, I’ve never found a TLA ad on my front page.
So sign up for TLA today and see if you too can start making some money. It really works.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Smoke rings and Swine Flu and Missing Authors
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle.
Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole
one and prayed for forgiveness. – Emo Philips
Okay, here are a couple of interesting things I found on the web this morning. This first one is a video of colored smoke rings colliding to create a vortex, it’s what physicists do when they smoke weed:
Then, since we all know that the Swine Flu is going to be hitting again in the fall, why not see what you can do about it by playing this new online game in which you try to control the spread of a pandemic.
In an effort to further raise awareness, Dutch researchers have created a game that challenges players to control a new?pandemic.
“It is actually what is happening now, what is happening in the real world,” said Albert Osterhaus, head of virology at the Erasmus Medical Center, who designed “The Great Flu” game with colleagues.
The game can only be played online at http://www.thegreatflu.com and it is free. A World Health Organization spokesman said Monday the agency was not familiar with the game and had not had time to play it.
Finally, there is this interesting concept from Wired writer Evan Ratcliff. This caught my eye because I’ve been considering doing something similar, but since I don’t have $5000 or a magazine publisher to promote the fact that I am missing, I figured no one would actually care.
I’m going missing. I’m leaving behind friends, family, and everything familiar, and I’m challenging you to find me. If you do, you’ll win $5,000
Read the rest at Wired
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A message from JayPee Morgan
this comes from JayPeeMorgan.com The World’s Least Trusted Financial Advice.
Well, it’s the start of a new week and we are telling our clients to buy, buy, buy and to hold, hold, hold. The reason for this is that it looks like another meltdown is getting ready to begin. There’s only so many cards that a table of smoke and mirrors can support and we figure it’s all about to go up in smoke again.As Rick Perlstein writes, “the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
I couldn’t agree more. For instance, we keep hearing how the economy is set to rebound, but look at the data and you see something quite different:
More than 15.2 million U.S. mortgages, or 32.2 percent of all mortgaged properties, were in negative equity position as of June 30, 2009 according to newly released data from First American CoreLogic. As of June 2009, there were an additional 2.5 million mortgaged properties that were approaching negative equity. Negative equity and near negative equity mortgages combined account for nearly 38 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage nationwide.
To me, this looks like Katrina is ready to strike again.
You didn’t really believe it could be that easy for everyone to own their own home did you? Even my crack dealer knew that was a lie.
The Obama administration, in a major shift on housing policy, is abandoning George W. Bush’s vision of creating an “ownership society’’ and instead plans to pump $4.25 billion of economic stimulus money into creating tens of thousands of federally subsidized rental units in American cities.
Based on our economic data and the opinion of my crack dealer, “Mojo”, I am fairly certain that the bottom of the housing market is still nearly five years ahead of us. Real unemployment sits at nearly 25% (because remember, the figures you hear elsewhere are only those collecting benefits, which run out, so when it seems that the numbers are getting better, just the opposite is true. Now they are unemployed and incomeless too.)
All of that is why we recommend that you buy and hold. No one else is going to.
Stocks are plunging and Treasury prices are soaring in the early moments of trading Monday as investors around the world fear that consumers are too skittish to help lift the economy into recovery.
U.S. stocks are down sharply after overseas markets extended the heavy selling that began Friday. That pullback followed a weaker-than-expected reading on consumer confidence.
After sending stocks higher for five months on expectations of an economic recovery, investors are now worried that they have been too optimistic given consumers’ continuing reluctance to spend.
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August is a difficult month
this comes from Existensis.com, a blog of spirituality and existence
I don’t know why this is, but it does seem that August is always a difficult time for me physically, mentally, and existentially. Knowing this is more than half the battle. I also know that things invariably improve dramatically for me as the year winds down. So, there it is.
At the moment, I am (obviously) figuring some things out. Getting some catharsis and looking at a generalized direction to go with career, life, and more. I’m in a good place to do that. The small ranch I am on is quiet and gives me the space to think, explore, and write. Not to mention, I like waking up and doing the chores.
I usually wake up around dawn, make coffee, then go feed the horses, feed the chickens, water the gardens, and maybe ride around the place on one of the quad wheelers. Not bad for a homeless guy, right? It’s one of those situations that just came up and I happened to be able to say yes to. That’s one of the reasons prefer to keep my options open, because when something like this comes up, I can say yes to it.
Don’t get me wrong, this is very temporary, probably two weeks at the longest and more likely a week or so. I’m just thankful to have it. Especially in August. It’s so funny, most of the truly traumatic experiences of my life have taken place during the 8th month. The universe sometimes seems to stack things up like that.
And so it goes. I’ve got several challenges ahead of me. Personal, professional, and spiritual. On the personal level, I’ve put on some weight since getting to the U.S., I want to shed those pounds. On the professional level, I really want this job in Indonesia and I need to figure out how to make my blogging more than just a hobby, and on the spiritual level, Ramadan starts very soon and I will be taking the Feeding the Spirit journey. The nice part is that I can see how these three goals line up and work together.
So yes, August is a difficult month, but in truth, the only times we ever actually learn anything are when we are suffering. I’m grateful to suffer so that I can learn not to suffer.
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Long days online
I’m spending way too much time online. I’m really trying to figure out how folks make money on the internet and what I’m finding is that everything is for sale. It all revolves around pagerank, a ranking system that google came up with. The higher the pagerank, the better your chances of making any money. There are people selling everything online:
Want traffic to your site? You can buy 10K unique U.S. visitors for $10
Want links on pageranked sites? You can buy them.
Want comments on your blog? You can pay for them.
Want content? That’s for sale too.
Want site reviews? For sale.
Essentially it all comes down to me asking, what is real on the internet? The answer? Nothing. It’s just like everything else. A big illusion hidden behind a mask that pretends to be real but isn’t. Crazy stuff. Wow.
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