zerotomed.com

Today, I won’t be around because I will be doing something I have thought about since I started working on the web. I speak heavily on the importance of creating relationships and networking and all of that fun stuff. Well, I am finally getting out there and networking and forming relationships. Today I get to go into Manhattan and meet with an Ad Company that I run on my sites. Not only do I get to meet with them, but I get paid to meet with them and all of that. I really love the idea of getting paid (since I could use the cash), but just going down there is awesome enough.

Since I don’t know what I will be asked or what we’re going to talk about, I won’t go into too much detail about it today. However, on tomorrow’s blog post, I’ll tell you all what happens when meeting with an ad company. They want me to meet with their project manager, so I guess it’s exciting. All I know is this…I feel like I am finally moving up in this business. I’m in the beta program for this company and now I get to go meet with them in New York City. I love the city anyways, so this is is a real treat. Anyways…Let’s hope for the best!

Well, I thought about it tonight and I figured that since I am probably getting new readers all the time, why not show them what is making me my money. I thought I’d give a link to all of my top sites (which really aren’t all that many) and show you what my interests are (since I only do things that interest me) and what really works and doesn’t work for me. So, this is going to be a relatively short post just to talk about my top four sites.

• Science Chats: This is a science forum. And since profits have increased on the site, I have begun to appreciate more and more because of how much is beginning to show from it. I’m not making much, but I can say that with time and with more traffic, that’ll change quickly.
• Zero to Med: This is my personal blog. I mean, I’ve been writing on this since November and I really have to say, I love it. I love writing about what’s going on and I love writing about different news articles that are interesting. It gives me a little profit thanks to that TLA ad and I am pleased with it. Now, if only I could get the PR up so I could make more per TLA ad.
• Dorm Earning: This is my other blog all about how to make money online. I’m no expert. I know that. However, what I provide is information to steer the reader in the right direction. I don’t go into much detail, but I do provide the push to get them asking more questions. And when I learn something, I pass it on to them. Another fun site of mine.
• Debateful: This is my debate forum. It is my newest site and yet it is doing wonderfully. It is getting a lot of posts, a lot of heated arguments, but things aren’t getting out of control. I love the fact that people are just going on and posting their hearts out. If I was building a house, these members would be my foundation without a doubt. Next step? The floors.

So there you have it. Those are my four top sites currently. Now, I intend on writing another blog post about my top SIX sites if I ever get them up and running. In that post, I’ll talk about the work that needs to be done for each of them. But for now, I just wanted to show you what I do every day. What sites do I work on. What makes my day go by when I am working. Welcome to my life. Welcome to my sites.

WEEKENDS! The worst days of the week are weekends. I feel the laziest, my sites are the laziest, and visitors are the laziest. I was finally showing some progress with the new CPM company I was using and bam, the weekend hits, posts on my forums slow to a damn near halt, and profits dwindle. This blows and I say that in the meanest of ways. I guess when you don’t make any money, a bad day and a good day, there really is no difference. But when you’re finally starting to see some consistency and some constant days of profit, you begin to get angry at those days when that profit dwindles.

Now, tomorrow is Monday…Because of that and because I am getting excited about the money I am earning, I want to try and set up a check list of my weekly plans. It won’t be rigid because I could go over it. However, it will give me a base to ensure that I don’t go under. I think that’s something that I need to learn. I sometimes do the bare minimum and I have to wonder, is the bare minimum REALLY the minimum I should be doing. So, I figure if I can set up this check list, I might be able to increase my productability as well as my profits. We will see, I suppose.

I didn’t know if it would really work, but I have to say one thing…Since starting to heavily use Stumble Upon on my sites, specifically my science forum, I have seen a tremendous increase in profit and traffic to the sites. For those that don’t know, Stumble Upon is another one of those social networking sites. Basically, people decide what kind of sites they are looking for and click a little button that says “Stumble!” and then they are sent to a random site. For some, they do it just for fun, but for others, they do it to genuinely find sites of interest to expand their horizons.

Now, I got as many people as I could to stumble all four of my big sites. My debate forum, make money online blog, and this site got stumbled. All of them have shown an increase in traffic since getting stumbled simply because so many people use the site. Now, I am very pleased with this growth and I can honestly say it is showing in my earnings, so obviously the use of social sites like this are really quite good tools for getting a nice consistent amount of traffic.

Now all that really matters is getting individual blog posts and individual threads stumbled as well. This will just increase traffic even more and that’ll make more money. Since adding ads after the first thread on science chats, every impression now counts since I am using a new CPM company. So, I’m looking to hopefully get more stumbles as well as potentially get a digg going. If I could get a digg on any of my four big sites, it would really mean some nice profits since I run this CPM on all of them. And since I get to choose how much I get for CPM, it really is great. Anyways…I just wanted to say that I am confident now in Stumble Upon and their ability to offer growth.

One of the things that I talked about was creating another forum with a friend of mine. A lot of people think that creating too many forums and blogs is a tough thing, especially with me going back to college; however, I think that this is the right move. I have been disciplining myself quite a bit since school ended and I have been preparing myself for the work load. You may be asking how I am doing that, but it’s my little secret. But, I have been ensuring that I get my work done and that I also don’t get screwed with school. School is number one!

With the help of my friend, we created a forum that allows for all sorts of debate. I really love to argue with people and my friends were saying that I’d make a great lawyer because I argue so much. Well, I chose medicine, but that doesn’t change the fact that I love to argue. On the forum, you can debate whatever you want and if you ever feel like debating with me, you’re welcome to join and we can debate. I like to debate, so I am willing to debate both sides, even if I don’t believe what I am arguing. And I think that’s what’ll allow the site to grow.

Now, I would’ve loved to use vBulletin, but I didn’t have the money for it. However, we decided that we would use phpbb3. I have to say, this program is really nicely made and it does rival vBulletin. It was difficult at first to deal with, but I really think that it is a great program and if you are looking to create a forum on free software, go with phpbb3. It is the fourth release of phpbb3 and it is pretty much bug free; but there are always going to be more releases, the same as for any other forum software. I am excited to get this forum big, but I know it’ll rely heavily on word of mouth advertising. We’ll see.

About a month ago, I had talked about how I was going to get pens made for Dorm Earning. A month later, they arrived and I have to say, I am very pleased with them except for one small problem. Because of a fault made by myself, I accidentally slipped and hit s on the end of DormEarning so I wound up with DormEarnings.com. It’s alright, though, because I was able to buy the domain DormEarnings.com. I figured that it was cheaper to just buy a new domain name and then forward it to the original than to get all new pens, especially since it was my fault in the first place.

I was very pleased, though, with how fast the pens came and also how easy it was to do business with the promotional marketing company. Everything was done real smooth. Now, all I need to do is hand the pens out to people. If this works out, I might very well move on to getting pens made for my science forum. Since I am a science major, I could hand the pens out ONLY to those that are in the science department. It might work and it might not. We will see how this does for Dorm Earning. And if nothing else, I got some very cool pens. We’ll see, though.

I have been using Kontera for a few months now and one simple thing has come to my mind when I go and take a look at my earnings: is Kontera only for big sites? The reason I ask this is because I have made very little money when it has come to running Kontera on my site and I often wonder if it is because I don’t use the correct keywords or if, perhaps, the program really is for those kinds of websites that get a lot of traffic. I wonder if anyone can make a lot of money with Kontera, or if you actually want to make ANYTHING on it, you need to have ungodly amounts of traffic.

My friends ask me sometimes why I still use it. They know that I am not making much money and from time to time, I have to say that the ads are ugly. I tell them the same thing every single time. I am hoping that one day, it’ll start to pick up and it’ll start making money. Perhaps that’s not the case and perhaps it’ll never pick up, but for right now, every click I get is closer to the $100.00 mark and since I don’t want to put all of my eggs into one basket, I will continue to use it.

However, I have lost a lot of faith in it. When I signed up, I was under the impression that it was an amazing earner. Yet, my traffic has stayed consistent, if not increased nicely, and yet my earnings have not followed when it comes to Kontera. We will have to wait and see how it works out in the end. What has been your success or failure when it comes to Kontera? Am I looking at a good possibility of making some nice money or is it going to be a failure? Just curious, that’s all.

For a very long time, I have been working hard on trying to get my Alexa rank better. I don’t know whether I should say increase my rank or decrease my rank, since the smaller your number is, the better; yet, increasing just sounds better. Either way, my rank is getting lower and lower, so that is something that is good. I was surprised to see that it had dropped 30K in a few days, but then I realized why it had gone down. There was now a FireFox Alexa toolbar and since there was one of those, everyone that viewed my site that had it installed, would therefore help me with my rank. Sure, it’s biased, but so what?

Now that I see it going lower and lower, I can start to see things getting better and better. Perhaps it’ll take time, but maybe as it grows, more and more opportunities will hit me. Because of this, I have begun thinking about forgetting all these review companies and just doing it all on my own. Perhaps that would work best. This is the first time any of my sites has gone lower than 600K for Alexa, so I am pretty excited. I know that I will have to continue working hard to get it even lower, but I really think this could be the start of something.

If you want to install the viewbar, please go download it. It really isn’t all that invasive.

One thing that people know who have read this site is that after a while, I get bored of a site and I sell it. I always somehow make a profit, but I get rid of the site so that I can do something else. Don’t worry, I’m not selling any of my sites. But, this brought about an interesting question in my mind when I was sitting thinking about selling one of my sites. I recently bought that local movie theater times website and I realized that I bought it for the sole purpose of flipping it. I bought it so that I could, in return, sell it. Now, why would I do that?

I realized that my passion does not lay in my content sites or my arcade or any of that. I realized that my passion is in three websites. They are the only three websites that are on my quick tabs for firefox and they are the ones that I check on a regular basis. There’s this blog, there’s my science forum and there’s my make money online blog. Other than these three sites, the other sites are just cushion sites. And even though my arcade site currently makes the most of my money, it is still not one of my most important sites.

The reason I write about this is because I realized that I could easily sell any of my sites if it came down to it. If I wanted to, I could sell my women of rock site without a problem. I could sell my arthritis site. I could sell the movie site. The point is that I could sell these because they aren’t overly important to me. I’ve come to a realization that my flipping of sites has been always used to grow my main sites. I have used the money I made from selling one site to try and expand another. And perhaps that is the business that I should focus on. Buy small content sites, build them up a bit, and then sell them for a profit so that I can devote more money to my main sites. It’s something I have to think about, but what does everyone think about it? I love three of my seven sites. Those are the three that I want to keep for good. So, is it a good idea to buy sites just to sell them a month or two later for profit?

One thing that I have not used very much are social bookmarking sites. Sites like Digg and Stumble Upon are two that I have just not used very much. I use Digg a little, but I have a small fear that if I actually DO get dugg, my hosting will go crazy and my sites will go down. It’s a small fear, but it is a fear none the less. Now, I decided that I would start to use it a bit more to try and bring more people to my site. I figure that if I could get more people to my science forum, I may be able to increase the number of members.

The site that I am going to use is not digg, but Stumble Upon. My friends have said that this is a great way to get people to the site and that is what I am going to try. I don’t like how my firefox is getting more and more cluttered, but I suppose that is something I can tolerate. I am going to use it a lot, try and increase the people to my site, and if it works well, I may use it for my other sites. For now, my science forum will be the tool that I experiment with. And if that works out well, I might just start using it for other sites.