I have updated the Highest Paying Keywords page again with the top 500 highest paying keywords and have pasted the top 25 below. It seems that not much has changed since the last update – keywords for legal & loan services are still the most expensive, and somewhat disturbingly “Austin DWI” is the most expensive keyword @ $82.95/click.
Looking back, I still clearly remember the cold day in January when I wrote the very first entry on this site. CyberWyre has been online for nearly six months now and has grown to something that I had never imagined it could.
Although I have always avoided, and actually never really felt a need to post anything about my personal life on this site, this blog entry is the exception. A lot has changed in my life in the past six months. In January, I had only started to apply for grad school, and the initial goal of this site was to find a way to support myself throughout school without a steady 9-to-5 job. In the past six months I have fought battles in my mind should I go back to school or not, back and forth constantly weighing my options. Whenever this would happen though, I would usually refer back to my very first post on this site where I clearly stated my goals and why I was doing what I was — this usually set me back on track.
Looking Forward…
Now nearly at the end of June, I have been accepted into a two-year Masters of Applied Science (Electrical and Computer Engineering) program here in Toronto where I will be studying precicely what I initially set out to — VLSI design & optimization, CMOS logic and hopefully will have time to better understand the design of current FPGA systems as well.
So how does school affect CyberWyre? A lot more than it ever has before. With only a little more than eight weeks of full time employment left for the next two years, I need to find that steady source of income more than I ever have before. CyberWyre started off slow in January and February receiving anywhere from 50-100 unique visitors a day, and generally making me enough money to cover my morning coffee, sometimes not even that.
Things changed completely near the end of February and through March with the introduction of the Highest Paying AdSense Keywords page which was an instant success, bringing in close to half a million visitors and drawing the attention of magazines such as Red Herring and Forbes. I still swear my heart stopped when I received voicemail from the senior editor at Forbes wanting to interview me about the site.
CyberWyre is now attracting anywhere from 2000-4500 unique visitors a day, and at times has hit peaks of 50,000/day. Monthly, this has translated into approximately $600-800/month in affiliate earnings, banner clicks, and private advertisement arrangements and is still increasing.
Lessons Learned…
CyberWyre has been a great learning tool for me, and I hope that it has been for you too. As I progressed, I always tried to document all of my experiments, my successes and also my failures so that others could benefit from them. The biggest lesson learnt is that nothing comes easy and nothing happens overnight. The #1 reason why blogs aren’t successful financially is because the author expected too much too fast. In the first few months you will receive only a handful of visitors and be working essentially for free. Be patient — it will take time to build your reader base but if you are persistent at it, you will succeed. This site started off with no visitors at all in January to now with hundreds of thousands and more coming every day…if I could do it, why can’t you?
What’s Next…
As I mentioned earlier, I only have about eight weeks of full time employment left before I’m leaving for school and I will be working harder on this site than ever before. By next January, my goal is to be completely supported financially through my online ventures.
I have started work on a second blog which I will provide more details on in the coming days. The site will be completely new with no reader base whatsoever and will be a true experiment in blogging for profit. I will be applying all of the lessons learned so far and will document the entire process.
Thank you to everyone who has visited this site, contributed an article or posted a comment. It wouldn’t be where it is today without your support.
Stay tuned for the latest in making a living 100% online!
With the popularity of the Data Mining on the Internet with Google page, I thought that there may be some people out there who might find it useful if the more advanced searches were pre-written for them. I have now created a tool to directly search Google for MP3s and also use the Translate feature as a web proxy to load pages. Anyone have eBay blocked at work?
Kontera is an advertising firm based out of San Francisco offering contextual, in-text ads to publishers looking to earn additional revenue from their site. Their in-text ads differ from more standard AdSense-type ad blocks, as they are actually embedded into your own text, linked to words which match the context of your entire article to an ad.
I recently began inserting Kontera in-text contextual ads into my blog articles and am testing the results. First off, I should say that Kontera has by far the best customer support I have ever experienced. Less than ten minutes after completing their online publisher application form, my phone rang — it was Lainne from Kontera confirming my application and welcoming me into the program. Not expecting to hear back so soon, let alone by phone, I was completely shocked.
After registering, I was assigned a personal account assistant who has guided me through the entire process of configuring my account and inserting the ads into my site. He also thoroughly tested my site under various platforms to reassure me that adding their Javascript tag would not break any part of my site.
So what does Kontera provide? Well in this very article, you should see certain words highlighted and double-underlined — these are sponsored links. When you move your mouse over these words, a small balloon with an advertisement appears; When you move your mouse off the link, the balloon quickly goes away. These links are automatically inserted by the Kontera Javascript code which you need to insert, similar to how AdSense is set up. They are selected by analyzing the context of your article and finding the best fit for you. That is, this is a contextual system. From the discussions with my personal account assistants, I have been told that although linked words are performed automatically, as a publisher you have the ability to block certain words from being chosen, and also can block certain sections of your page from being activated, such as a nav bar, etc.
Whether these in-text ads will produce a high CTR and eCPM, I have yet to find out. I will test them out for a few weeks and write another followup article later in the summer — hopefully with some solid results on how well in-text ads perform vs. more standard text ad-blocks. I will also closely be watching the relevancy of these ads to the articles they appear in. Google’s AdWords is so popular (and also so profitable to publishers) because nearly 100% of the time the ad displayed is right along the same lines as the page it is displayed on. This to me is the most important part of a contextual ad system, even more so than CTR and eCPM. Your readers don’t want to see non-relevant ads, and without an audience, your site is nothing. Don’t ever forget that.
For now though I’ll give Kontera a shot and we’ll see how it goes…
It has been just over five months since I have written about the autosurf Ponzi-scheme 12DailyPro which took over the Internet by storm in 2005. Just as I had predicted, all came crumbling down around February 2006 when the operator Charis Johnson took her money and ran.
It is estimated that between $350 and $500 million was taken in the process, emptying the pockets of thousands and causing enormous headaches for credit card companies across the globe handling tens of thousands of chargebacks. Since 12DailyPro closed its doors, the FBI, SEC and IRS have been extensively investigating the site, and there have even been talks that you may be able to declare your 12DailyPro losses in your next-years tax return.
I find it funny that when one site like this goes down, ten more pop up the next day, mostly operating from offshore islands where laws for this type of scheme either aren’t well defined, or aren’t well enforced. Sites like TalkGold simply fuel the fire and hype up these get rich quick schemes.
Making money takes effort — as the saying goes, nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight. Please, take this advice to your blogging too. I have received many emails from people asking how to make money quick from starting a blog. Blogging for profit, like any other activity for profit takes time, patience, knowledge and hard work. Keep at it and you will succeed.
For people like us, looking to make a few extra dollars on the side through the Net, Ether is something you definitely don’t want to miss.
Ether, currently in beta, offers users the ability to sell any kind of digital content imaginable, easily, safely, anonymously and securely — all for a flat charge of 15%. After registering, you are given an Ether telephone number and access code and are now able to sell whatever content you wish. The most exciting and original product you can sell though is yourself. Sell what you say. You set the rate, you set your hours. When the phone rings, you’re on the clock.
Are you good at debugging computer troubles? Place your Ether 1-888 number on your computer troubleshooting website, or better yet, use one of the pre-made Ether “Call Me” buttons. How does $1.25/minute sound, or perhaps a flat rate of $50/call? All credit card processing and long distance fees are included in the 15% charge and your profits are deposited directly to your bank account.
Registering with Ether was a breeze and the user configuration menus are very clear and well laid out. Setting your account availability status is as simple as hitting a drop down on the top of the page, in a style very similar to any IM app.
To ensure that you don’t receive calls at 4AM, Ether automatically assigns a blackout time from 10PM to 8AM where your status is set to “Arrange Calls via Email” instead of “Taking Calls”. This schedule can be easily modified using their schedule editor. I have set mine to be available during the hours which are most convenient to me. I like to sleep in on the weekends, and don’t want to be called during the day on weekdays as I am at work.
Ether is currently in beta and is invite-only at the moment, however if you register your email you may receive an invite in a few weeks. I will be testing out their service thoroughly and will offer “blogging 4 profit” and SEO consulting services through their site and will report on my results.
In my opinion this is one of the most exciting start-ups since eBay. Be sure not to miss this one!
Registering with Ether was a breeze and the user configuration menus are very clear and well laid out. Setting your account availability status is as simple as hitting a drop down on the top of the page, in a style very similar to any IM app.
from 10PM to 8AM where your status is set to “Arrange Calls via Email” instead of “Taking Calls”. This schedule can be easily modified using their schedule editor. I have set mine to be available during the hours which are most convenient to me. I like to sleep in on the weekends, and don’t want to be called during the day on weekdays as I am at work.
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