Archive for September, 2011

What do you do when you have to wait for a long time in a waiting room…… of a doctor’s office, clinic, dentist, government office, airport, work interview, to pick up your child after school or any other place where you have to wait for a long time. Do you..

• play with all the available apps and games in your tablet computer
• send countless sms, tweet and update your fb
• read
• have a catnap
• eat
• continually sigh while tapping your fingers and striding up and down

I have added a new page to this blog. It is on my sidebar under ‘Resources’ and ‘Pages’ beneath it. The page is called “My Articles on the Web“.

Recently I have started to write on other sites other than my blogs. I thought it would be  useful to organize them all together here by creating a special page for it. Otherwise, soon I will find that I can’t keep track of my articles on the web. Hopefully I have time to write and create more articles.

As a start, I have created this page My Articles on the Web because it is always good to start keeping track of things early and do maintenance work later rather than to start keeping track later which will be a bigger headache.

It is payday on Squidoo on the 15th of every month. It is fun because Squidoo will put out a note on your Squidoo dashboard to remind you that it is payday and give you links to check your earnings. Squidoo pays 2 months later that means what you earn in July will be paid in September. I joined Squidoo at the end of June so naturally I didn’t earn anything. So my first payday at Squidoo is for my earnings in July.

There are several ways to get paid at Squidoo. One is from a share of a pool of Adsense and other ads. The other is through affiliate sales. The higher tier you are, the higher your share of the ad pool. How high you go depend on your traffic, your clickouts, your sales, your likes etc.

In July, 8 of my lenses qualified for a share of the royalties. The amounts are really small but it is a start. I made $2.68 in royalties for 8 lenses in July. I didn’t make any sales till September so I will have to wait another 2 months for payment for those. You are allowed to either use your own affiliate code or Squidoo’s for Amazon sales so I used both. There is not much difference either way even though the commissions are different. I got 2 sales for the Squidoo ones and 4 under my own Amazon Affiliate Account in September.

To date, I now have 36 lenses. Hopefully they move up the tier or make more sales in future months. Apart from sales, I enjoy writing the lenses. I get to put lots of pictures and stuff easily unlike my blogs. I also get to tweak them over and over again. I have also started to write in areas that I don’t normally write and will continue to challenge myself  in new areas of writing and in coming up with new topics and stuff to write about. You can read more about my Squidoo experience in My Squidoo Diary.

Want to Join Squidoo and give making lenses a try? Its free and its fun but be warned, its addictive, like a game. However, this game can help you make money if you ‘play’ hard enough.

Join Squidoo

Several years ago, back in 2006, I joined the Amazon Affiliate Program. I put up some banner ads on the sidebar of my blog and that was it. I think I made 2 sales from the Amazon Affiliate Program back then. It was over a long period of time too. In the Amazon Affiliate Program, you can choose to cash out at $100 or turn it into an Amazon certificate to buy stuff from Amazon. Of course, I was never going to reach $100 with my 2 sales so I opted to get Amazon Gift certificates once you reach $10. Even then, I was never going to get any Amazon Gift Certificates with my miserable two sales.

I took down all my banners from the Amazon Affiliate Program.

Since my Amazon ads were doing so badly, there was no point in putting them in and making my blog ugly with so many ads. I was very busy then because my kids were growing and I didn’t have time to learn new things or look into it seriously.

Then recently, I joined Squidoo. Squidoo makes it easy for you to incorporate Amazon modules into your lenses which are really sort of like a cross between a webpage and a blog. Not too long ago, Google’s Blogger also made it easier for bloggers to include Amazon products into their blog posts with user friendly built-in tools. I also have more free time now that my children are in school. So I took a relook at my Amazon ads. I built another Amazon Quotes A-Store but that is miserable and a waste of my time.

I studied my stats and started placing my Amazon Affiliate Program Ads in my pages that were performing well on Google (those that ranked in the top two pages for example).

What a difference that made! Last night I made 4 sales and the night before another 4 sales! Woohoo! If you make 7 sales and above in a month, your commission from the Amazon Affiliate Program goes up from 4% to 6%. Yay! Ok. Ok. It is really nothing to shout about since they are for small items like books and toys (I wonder when someone will buy something bigger like the Kindle 3G. Still, I can’t help feeling a small sense of achievement. Not monetary achievement but personal satisfaction in trying out and making something work. Amazon also works well on Squidoo and I’ve had some sales coming in from there. Just 2 actually but I hope to have more when I make more lenses. Right, I’m off now to make more lenses. My latest lens that I am working on is The Top Ten Gifts for Women in their 40s. Thats me and my wish list.

Oh yes, one can make money online in your pyjamas (after all the sales came in while I was asleep), however, be warned. You’ve got to work really, really hard!

Lately I’ve taken to stats watching. I used to monitor my blogging stats frequently when I first started blogging. Then the novelty of it wore off. However, nowadays I watch stats for a different reason. It is important to monitor stats to improve on your pages and decide where and how to monetize it. It really makes a difference.

Watching stats is also fascinating. For example, last month, my Parents Blog had a spike in visitors from about 800 plus a day to 1400 on a Sunday which is usually a quiet day. I saw that most of the visitors came from Google India and all of them landed on my How to make a homemade Teacher’s Day card page. A quick check on the internet showed that the following day was Teacher’s Day for India.

I am using StatCounter and Google Analytics. Both of them give very detailed to the second stats with graphs. I love them. I especially love Statcounter. I love clicking on the Recent Came From and Recent Keyword Activity Tabs. I am quite amused that this blog keeps on getting visitors looking for roti canai and dim sum and I am not even a food blogger.

Besides these, I watch my Squidoo stats go up and down and tweak each lens to make sure it goes back up. Then there is my Amazon Affiliate Program stats and Feedburner stats which I have forgotten till now at this time of writing. Watching stats is a very important part of blogging. If you haven’t got Statcounter, go and install it now, it is fantastic. Blogger provides stats but it isn’t anything as good or detailed as Statcounter.