Adsense Earnings

I had a recent comment asking me about adsense earnings and whether I thought it was worth setting up a blog like this one, so I thought it might be useful to post about them. I have a lot of different blogs and websites and all of them have adsense adverts on them. I tend to earn about $100 every 3-6 months from these sites all added up together. The best earner is my this blog and in August I earned $15 from it. This is less than it has earned in the past, which I think is because I am not promoting the site as much as I used to. When I was more active on forums and spent time commenting on others sites, I did get more traffic and earn more. I also did better when I had page rank. I think I have had this site for 2.5 years and I have earned $500 from it altogether just from adsense and additional money form the blogroll advertising and paid blog articles. Therefore, if you are considering setting up this sort of blog then I would definitely recommend it. Make sure that you promote it well, link exchanges are good as well as commenting on others blogs and forums. Buy your own domain if you want to make money from advertising before advertisers prefer that. Have fun and be honest and you should earn some regular readers. Also let me know as I will be happy to write a short piece advertising it for you. Good luck!

Writing Work

I now earn most of my money freelance writing. The book sales have pretty much stopped now and so I am having to work much harder for everything I earn! I end up writing all sorts of things from colon cleanse reviews to articles about gardening. It is interesting writing about all sorts of different things and most of the articles are short from 100 to 400 words so they are quick to write. Things are picking up a bit, just from my regular customers which is good. Once the boys start school I will be putting the feelers out for more work and I have a few ideas so hopefully will be able to increase my income coming up towards Christmas.

Update

I promosed to keep you posted about my new money making ideas. Unfortunately, it was a busy weekend when I went away and I got no thinking time with regards to money making. I am still trying to think of things but at the moment have not come up with anything. I have about three weeks until the children start school and I will have some time on my own to work on things better and hopefully will be able to make a fresh start where I can earn more money and get more done generally.

Saving Money on Insurance

I had a very expensive insurance quote through the post today from a company that we no longer use.It made me wonder how many people just stick with the company they have always used. I always look around to make sure that I am getting a competitive deal. It might be worth going with a specialist for example, such as www.goodsamvip.com who just insure RV's or a company that just do motorcycles if they are applicable to you. These might save money or provide a better service or even both. I also make sure that I use a cashback site such as Quidco to save me even more money. I recommended one to my parents and not only did they save early £100 on their insurance but they should also get £50 cashback too.

Christmas is Coming........ish

I couldn't believe it when I saw some holiday invitations and cards in a shop last week. But then I remembered that when I was selling books that September was the time when I started thinking about getting my stock built up for Christmas sales. I am still in two minds as to whether to get some books in stock for Christmas. It would be great if they sold well and I made a good profit but if they didn't it would be an enormous problem. We have windows to pay for over the next year and with the rumours that the UK economy is starting to recover it is likely that interest rates will start to go up again soon and then I will need to concentrate hard on getting the mortgage paid off. At the moment the mortgage is not too expensive but it wasn't long ago that we were paying over £500 in interest alone and so I do not want to take any financial risks at the moment.

Online Storage

I have been considering using some online storage for some of my data. I have lost a lot of data in the past because of various computers breaking and not having enough space to back it up anywhere. I try to protect my photographs by putting the best ones of facebook and then I can at least see them there. I have loads of pictures of the children as babies and since my memory card was wiped I have not had time to get them off. The data was retrieved from the card but each file has been renamed so I will have to go through every one renaming and refiling it. Having online storage would have saved me all of that work.

Followers

Google have recently introduced a new widget where people can follow your blog. This means that if visitors like the blog they can follow it so that they can easily find it again - it is rather like bookmarking. I have now added a widget to show who is following my blog but also so that my readers can easily follow my blog should they wish to. It is in the side bar so please take a look and have a go!

New Goals

I have been giving some thought to setting new earning goals to motivate me. I really would love to earn £30k a year before tax, which I know is a lot of money, but could help me to pay off the mortgage in two years, which would be fantastic. I think that I will need to come up with a lot of new money making ideas in order to earn this much as it is £150 a day which I have hardly ever achieved.I do the following things at the moment:

Write articles
Sell waterproof memo boards
Sell blog posts on my blogs
Sell links on my websites & blogs
Sell blogposts on someone elses blog
sell links and posts on a clients blogs
I find that selling links is the best way to make money because there is very little work involved in doing the job. However, you do need a good site to sell the links on, which is where the hard work comes in. Selling links on clients sites is good as I get commission but do hardly anything. Perhaps this should be a place that I should start to work on. I think I also need to think of some ideas of new things to do and this is what I will concentrate on thinking about over the weekend.

Improve Your Career

Improving your job prospects is an important thing to do at the moment. I think that no job is safe at the moment and it is very wise to be aware of what is going on in the job market in your career area. I also think that if you have the money available then it might be a good idea to do a course. This will not only help your chances of keeping your current job but will also improve your chances of getting a new one. Whether it is some basic computer training or some GMAT prep it doesn't matter as long as it has some relevance to your job. I am very against people getting into debt but if you need some qualifications to get a job and have to go into debt for it then it is probably worth a gamble as you will be likely to get into debt if you cannot get a job anyway. It is a risk but one well worth considering.

Becoming More Competitive

I can be a very competitive person and in one aspect of my life at the moment I am being extremely competitive and putting my money making aside as a result of it. This is not good and I need a way to get more competitive in my money making. I will be giving it some thought and trying to get slef motivated, setting myself some goals and challenging myself to surpass them and hopefully that will be enough to sort me out! I have a busy few days so I will be able to think about it and plan over the weekend with a new battle plan to carry out on Monday! I will keep you posted!

New Ideas on Saving Money

People are becoming more and more resourceful these days in order to save money. I couldn't believe that I found myself decorating my own house after vowing that I would never paint again, but if I wanted the work done there was no choice because I could not afford a decorator. There are many ways to do things for yourself which can save you money and it is amazing how satisfying it can be to do these things and know that if you need to do them again, you will not have to rely on someone else to do it for you. I have even seen some dash kits where people can do all of the work themselves and even for people who do not take joy in repairing their own vehicles it could be a great way to save some money.

August Earnings

Pay to Blog - £69.48
PayU2Blog - £29.35
Private Reviews - £35.87
Blogsvertise - £4.26
Writing - £221.97
Article Writing - £221.97
Other - £33.16
Link Sales - £0.53
Quidco - £6.18
Pure Profile - £26.45
Making a grand total of £324.61

This is pretty low this month but somehow my business still managed to make £750 profit and I am not really sure how! I think there were some payments which came over from last month as they had not transferred over to the bank from Paypal and there were a few book sales. I think I will have to work hard this month to make that sort of profit again and I am not yet that motivated so only time will tell as to whether I will be able to do it.