I will be going through all the steps to creating a new blog and then promoting it and monetizing it. Let’s see if I can make a good amount of money with this new blog idea in a niche market: amateur film making.

Site: Click here

Description: Free film school and filmmaker resources.

Monetization strategy: Affiliate marketing, Google Adsense

For this project I am going to be using a mix of both affiliate marketing and google adsense to try and earn some money. Right now though, I am just focusing on getting the content up. Here’s a schedule of what I plan to do with this blog.

Step 1: Add atleast 10 blog posts.

A good blog needs content before it should start promoting itself. I am going to start off with about 10-15 blog posts.

Step 2: Promote with social networks while ADDING MORE CONTENT

I will be actively trying to get Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and RSS subscribers, and during this time I will also be adding more content.

Step 3: Implementing monetization strategies

Now after I get the content and the fanbase, I will be starting to try and monetize the website.

More updates on the specifics coming later!

A lot of people probably just stick their adsense on their website and hope to make some money. A lot of people don’t even realize that one simple change here and there can drastically increase the amount of money you make with Adsense. Here are five ways you can increase your adsense earnings, and you probably aren’t doing any of them.

1) Rotating Color Schemes – Rotating color schemes is one way to reduce “ad blindness” which has plagued a lot of internet users. Basically, internet users are no longer even seeing ads, especially not traditional ad sizes like 728×90. Due to this, publishers need to do whatever possible to reduce ad blindness. One of the ways you can do this is to create rotating color schemes. To do this all you need to do is go into Adsense, click on manage ads, and use multiple color schemes and Google will automatically rotate the colors for you.

2) Rotating Ad Placements – Again this is done to reduce ad blindness. You can increase your CTR by making your ad appear in different areas. Of course this is difficult to achieve if you’re using WordPress, but for my custom-coded CMS I was able to randomly place ads all over my content. The result was higher CTR.

3) Experimenting with new sizes and formats with channels – Experiment experiment experiment! You must be always checking out new placements, new colors, new sizes, etc, and testing all of this with channels. So basically you do this. When you start a new experiment you make a new ad on adsense and also a new CHANNEL. Compare each channel’s revenue and then choose to show the channels making the most revenue.

4) Using an ad-friendly design - Sometimes the design is something that matters. One main thing that is important is that the ad looks good with the design, meaning it blends in nicely with the surrounding page. Actually I made a huge mistake on my website, AmpedAsia.com for the latest version 4. I widened my content area. What happened was after I widened the content area the best ad size (336×280) was no longer the best ad size. The CTR plummeted, and I’m not 100% sure why, but it did. I then experimented more and realized that the 728×90 ad size was the best fit for my design.

My tip to you is to optimize your page for the 336×280 ad size because this is the ad size with the highest CTR in MOST cases. So that means your content area shouldn’t be much wider than about 400 px.

5) Choosing adsense-friendly niches – This is something that I definitely did not do! Choose a niche with high competition so you’re going to get high paying clicks on your ads. A good general rule of thumb is that if the industry you’re targeting is expensive offline, then it’s also expensive online. For example, real estate and travel.

Hey guys, well if you don’t know already, I own the website, AmpedAsia.com, one of the top destinations for Asian entertainment and lifestyle. However, in recent time I’ve had trouble properly monetizing the site. One of the main reasons is that half our traffic comes from our forum, and I’ve had little to no success monetizing the forum. That is until now.

I was privileged with some knowledge a few weeks ago about the site AdFly. This site allows you to shorten URLs while at the same time making some money. What it does is that it displays an ad whenever your users click on the shortened URL and credits you with a little bit of money.

I installed a mod called AdFly on my Mybboard, and this mod automatically converted all my outbound links on my forum to AdFly links, and it also gave me choice on who I wanted to display the links to (for example, only guests, only registered members, guests and registered members, etc). I decided I would hide the links from admins and moderators and only display them to guests. (I’m not sure if other forum softwares have a similar mod, but you can definitely try and code one manually, hire someone to do it, or request the mod at your forum software’s development page).

So far the results have been outstanding. Because my forums get a good number of guest members coming in to leech off our information, we are getting a lot of revenue in the realm of $4-$5.00 a day. This isn’t TOO much, but it’s an extra $150 a month that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Anyways, check out AdFly and see if they can help you make a little bit of extra income.

So if you don’t know already, 99Designs is the creation of SitePoint creator, Matt Mickiewicz. The basic premise of the site is that it allows designers to compete against other designers for cash prizes. Alternatively, it allows publishers to create contests and get thousands of designers competing to make the best design. I wanted to see if it was possible for me to make any money on 99Designs.

Read the rest…

Been super busy these past couple weeks doing work on my main online project, Amped Asia. This weekend one of my staff in Los Angeles, Takashi, was able to sit down with none other than Charmane Star and interview her. You guys can watch the interview below

Had to brush up on my video producing skills with Final Cut Pro. Also my iMac came in and I’ve been playing on that nonstop. So that’s why I haven’t updated my blog in a while.

There’s going to be tons more stuff coming up. Stay tuned!