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call HART crazy .. but
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to make money from blogging and other online activities .. because I do.
I don’t expect to quit my day job though – but I do hope that by XMas 2006 I was able to earn enough money to finance a nice vacation for myself, and my wife. Her second cousin (I believe) is getting married in Cuba either shortly before New Year’s Eve or Shortly thereafter. There will be a second ceremony or gathering sometime in the summer of 2007, but you lose the excitement after 7 months of them ALREADY being married .. I mean – what, are we supposed to bring gifts? Just invite us over sometime! We can alternate cooking meals or something.
It’s just too costly to go to Cuba for a wedding. Geesh. Why would someone even THINK of that? When we got married, we paid for everything ourselves. We had a medieval themed wedding and about 170 people. It was all nice and good … but we didn’t make money from the wedding. Thank goodness we didn’t lose money. Now, relatives come and send you an invitation to ‘celebrate’ with them in a foreign country .. and include quotations about 1-week stays, or 2-week stays, where to get your passport photos, etc etc …
Yup.
Anyway .. May 31, 2005 is my official day that I started blogging. I have grown considerably with respect to the sheer number of blogs that I host and the amount of space that I am using. For instance, in my wedding site I have almost a thousand pictures and about 500 MB of videos of our wedding. These are the just the blogsites that I have so far:
(I also have numerous pages/sites that are not blogs and a few forums – but I am not listing it in here)
I was using the Miva Merchant v.4.13 and still am – but, in the summer of 2006 I plan to stop using the online store and work with a free version of some storefront. You see, I have two hosting plans currently. The main one, hosts most of my main sites and space and has the mega bandwidth, because it’s also the plan with the Miva Merchant store. They toss it in for free at that level of hosting. I want to reduce my hosting costs for 2006/2007.
Currently, I pay roughly about $900 CDN for my main host provider per year, annually. It’s a mega corporate media account. Besides the Miva Merchant storefront, and the space (I’m about 2 gigs now), I also have many domain aliases involved.
I also have a Reseller domain account – and have upped it to the “Pro” version. I do not sell domains, but when I have a new blog or website I just set it up myself. I was paying $29.99 USD per month but when I went to a “Pro” version it is now $49.99 USD per month. Before you get on a high horse – yes I know that’s expensive! I choose to pay that on a monthly basis until the summer when it comes time to renew my other account, I will be either expanding or reorganizing. The $49.99 USD per month, I should note, would average down to $34.95 USD per month if I pay for a year or maybe lower if I pay for two years in advance. I am considering that.
Needless to say, before I can afford any vacation .. I need to afford these blog hostings! That’s why you see ads everywhere – that’s called Monetization
This is currently what sponsorship advertising I use
(1) Standard ads you see everywhere else .. I pretty much have them on all my blogs, and I occassionally try to optimize them at times. I am conscious however, in trying to NOT Make it look toooo obvious .. well, maybe a little obvious – but nothing that irritates the reader (I hope) like putting fake ads to look like something else, or near sliders or other menu buttons, etc etc.
My highest month earning to day was February 2006 when I reached $91.76 USD. Because of “Tax Season” and my slowdown in blogging in March and April, it is much less. In March I earned about $42 USD and in April 2006 about $30 USD. If that’s a lesson in itself, is that consistency in posting and continual posting is important, because some readers just have too many RSS feeds to follow and are not loyal at all and will delete your feed.
(2) As a benefit of running “HART-Empire Network“, I was approached directly by an advertiser who wished to advertise on our blogs for 1-year in advance. It was quite exciting to negotiate that – however, towards the end it was based on budgets and page ranks. I did manage to receive two text link ads on three of my blogs and network member Ruth was able to receive two text link ads on one of her blogs. It was nice receiving the 4-digit amount into my Paypal account, but it quickly went to pay for tax software, new printer, and supplies for Tax Season. They are paid up until March 15, 2007 .. and their ads appear on Corydon Clock blog, PapillonLvr blog and 1-800-HART’s Picks blog
* Privately negotiated Ads!
(3) I just signed up for this yesterday, for both my PetLvr blog and 1800HART blog. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, although never got around to it. After I signed up, I was instantly accepted and they even estimated a rough value that placing text links on each of the blogs would amount to .. up to 8 text links. Currently, the 1-800-HART blog seems to be worth double than the PetLvr blog. I have yet to receive anything though, and I will wait and see what advertisers think those sites are worth!
Future Sponsorship?
I do have other affiliations everywhere, although mostly I just place them in my 1-800-HART’s Pick’s blog .. but they have NEVER paid me anything. Even my Amazon.com affiliation has been holding around the $98.67 USD mark and doesn’t get paid unless is hits over $100.00 USD. I am pissed off at them, because when I post a product on Amazon.com .. and a visitor from Canada comes and buys that product, it defaults to Amazon.ca – and I get no commission – even though I referred them, and also affiliation with Amazon.ca. It’s the same both ways if I use my Amazon.ca referral codes. Not Fair.
I still have many other blogs that I have available for stuff like text links .. (like this one?) but I have no intention to add anymore myself until AT LEAST the next google pagerank dance .. as we try to increase the PR of our Battling Series blogs.
Okay.
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