In brief, I now have a real job. I began working at Allstate as a temp, and was hired on last October. I’ll provide more details in another post.

As I stated earlier, I’ll post a review in the next couple of days.

You shouldn’t notice any differences on your end once the site is fully transfered over. However, there may be a few minutes that the site is unavailable tomorrow.

Once the upgrade is complete, and I’m confortable with the setup, I’ll post a review of WordPress.

1. Make enough money each month to pay for hosting
2. Increase traffic on all sites by 200%
3. Add another blog (Details in the works)
4. Get more involved in the community surround my blog topics

Simple but necessary.

JeffreyFetting.com

Surprisingly, this site brought in nearly as much money as my other site even though I’ve never actually considered this site to have much earning potential. Alone, this site brought in 31.5% of hosting fees.

As I said, this is surprising. I’ll assume this is an anomaly, but hope for similar results this month.

My Other Site

My other site suffered some dissappointing results in December. The earnings fell from 39.8% to 37.2%. Part of this drop can be tied to the holiday. With my other site not being a product related blog, I didn’t expect the holiday to help.

Perhaps more importantly, the earnings suffered from displaying PSAs instead of paying ads for the first 10 days of the month. It appears I was temporarily dropped in Google rankings due to one of their updates. Once the problem resolved itself, earnings went at a quicker pace than previous months. In other words, I was earning more per day than I have in the past.

On a positive, traffic meet my goal and increased by slightly more than my 50% goal. Even with the drop-off I experienced during Christmas, I was happy with the progress, but not satisfied.

By design, I’m the only registered user on any of my blogs. That means, if I hide the ads from all registered users, I will be hiding the ads from myself, but allowing everyone else to see them and hopefully click on them.

Hide from All Registered Users


< ?php if (!($user_ID > 0)) { ?>
Insert AdSense code here
< ?php } ?>


After you remove the space between the left bracket (<) and question mark (?) on each php line, you’ll be set. It’s a surprisingly simply solution but completely effective.

In the next few days, I’ll post a few similar php snippets that I’ve used to get the most of my AdSense channels.

Update 9:15 pm: I ran into an issue while updating this site with the above technique. After adding the code above to the sidebar.php page, I was still seeing the ads. If you are running into a similar problem, try using the following code.


< ?php global $user_ID;
if (!($user_ID > 0)) { ?>
AdSense code here
< ?php } ?>


Publishers now have a new search box design that is more compact and generally more visually appealing. I’ve implemented it on my other site and am considering using it on this site.

Also, publishers can now have their reports emailed to them. This means you no longer have to login constantly to check your earnings. Just sit back and wait for them to email you the stats. I’ve set up a daily, weekly, monthly, and all time reports that are emailed to me as appropriate. It is a nice touch, though I still prefer my Adsense Notifier Firefox extension.

The Goals

1. Increase traffic, as calculated by SiteMeter and Google, by 50%. Considering the month of December has two major holidays (Christmas and New Years), this won’t be the easiest of tasks. To accomplish this, I will be posting more often and networking more with other bloggers in my niche. For example, I’ve been invited to participate in a blog with some of the best known bloggers in the topic. My postings there will hopefully bring more traffic to my site.
2. Increase earnings. I won’t give an percent increase I’m targeting due to goal 1 being my primary focus. However, anything less than an 15% increase will be a disappointment, especially if goal 1 is met.

The Change

Recently, the web development community has been discussing (1,2) the possible ways to help the reader by better using the page’s footer. Agreeing with this thinking, I decided to add this functionality to my site and, hopefully, make some money doing it.

Instead of the page footer, I decided to place more links at the end of each individual post (not on the main page). I’ve included a list of previous posts, related posts, and Google’s Ad Unit.

The Results

By itself, this addition brought in 65% of October’s revenues. Not bad considering it actually provides the reader with something they desire, a place to find more information. With the success I’ve experienced implementing this on one site, I will be similarly updating my others.

Future Improvements

Though the changes helped, there is room for improvement. Ideally, the text in the footer section should be the same. Since Google doesn’t give that information away, I have to do some research to find the correct font-family, font-size, line-spacing, and word-spacing.

Also, though not an Adsense issue, the footer looks cluttered/crowded. I may have to modify the WordPress plug-ins used for the Recent Links and Related Links columns to allow for unordered lists. That should clean everything up.