The Blog According to Buzz

DONATED: $1 180
GOAL: $10 000
REMAINING: $8 820

I have committed to donating all my freelance income to the Team Diabetes Easter Island effort. So far that includes a voice over session ($1000 payment pending), an iTunes endorsement ($600) and any monies I make from this website.

See those little links on the right hand side? The ones that say “Links for a Cause”? Those are TextLink Ads and I’ve been running them for a couple months, enough to get a little bit of a cheque.

Toss $44.76 into the Team Diabetes coffers. Actually, I’ll round it up to $50 to keep the accounting easy.

Are you trying to find a way to scratch up some money to donate? Why not serve up some of your site’s traffic money to the cause? Or maybe break off a piece of your tax refund?

Or, you could just hire me to do your media work. You’ll get a professional product, a mention on the blog and a tax receipt for supporting Team Diabetes.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

It’s tax season. I know. I just got a letter from Revenue Canada asking for my 2006 return. And while I’m at it, could I give them 2004, 2005 and 2007?

Yeah, I’m lazy. But I don’t think you are. You do it every year. You save every receipt and you get a big fat refund every spring.

I’ve been rolling around in my head different ways for you to pitch in and help out with Team Diabetes without really asking you to dig deep into your pockets.

Then I saw a posting by Airdrie on the weekend. She got her tax refund and immediately broke off a piece for the Balding For Dollars campaign.

While I know I should put all the money into my credit card debt, I decided to donate part of it to the Children’s Hospital ‘Balding for Dollars‘ fund-raiser, taking place next week. A team of teachers and students at my school are shaving their heads on Wednesday as part of a Province-wide event to raise money for children with cancer and blood disorders. [source]

Brilliant.

It was free money to Airdrie, it’s now free money for the charity and Airdrie gets a tax receipt to get a head start on next year’s return.

That’s what I call paying it forward.

So now comes my turn to ask.. you’re going to get your refund soon, if you haven’t gotten it already. When you do, break off a piece for Team Diabetes. My personal goal is to raise $10 000 and you (and the Finance Minister) can be a part of it.

Please?

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Over the Christmas holidays I took this blog writing thing up again. For about 2 years I wrote one on MySpace, got sick of the spam and pulled it. I worked on getting a new site and design and then decided to try my hat at monetizing.

John Chow made nearly $200 000 last year just by running little ads on his website, I thought it would be fun to try.

Month 1 is done and here is the Google AdSense earnings report for the cyberbuzz media network (including The Blog According to Buzz and cyberbuzz):

Google doesnt like me to give too much traffic detail from AdSense, so really all I can tell you is I made $18.81.

Using Google Analytics, here’s a better look at the traffic on this site:

I had over 4000 visits to the blog last month, more than 100 a day - not bad. Most of my traffic is from referrers. I’m working with my pal Meg on boosting my Google Juice, but for now it’s word of mouth getting the people to the page.

Because of the way the blog is structured, with the latest posts fully written on the front page, there’s not a lot of drill down traffic - people get what they need up front without having to check out other pages.

The most popular pages are:

The Front Page - 36% of traffic
Have You Accepted Tom Cruise as Your Personal Saviour - 3.1%
Pages Tagged “Britney” - (and y’all thought nobody really cared?) - 1.7%

I do have other monetization on the network, including Kontera, TTZ Media, aLinks and others, but revenue from them was negligible.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Does anyone have a list of signs of the Apocalypse?

Is Britney back dating her paparazzo, Heath Ledger burning in hell and a stock market crash on that list?

It’s all happening. Let’s go through them back to front.

STOCKS

The stock market is taking a HUGE header this morning. Unless you’re near retirement, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re at least 10 years away from retiring, don’t sweat it. Just treat everything as if it’s on sale. It’s a chance to dollar cost average.

I get caught up in micromanaging my retirement portfolio, especially the 6 shares of AAPL I bought back in September for $138. I thought I was a Mad Money Man in December when it 200 and analysts were forecasting 300 for a high. “w00t!” Today, the stock is trading at under $137.

What happened? America just woke up and realized George Bush has been writing war checks his country can’t cash for the past 8 years. It has nothing to do with the turtlenecked one, and everything to do with crazy paranoia. But I’ve got 25 years left of clock punching, so I will BUY, not SELL, and look forward to the future.

HEATH in HELL

I admit it. I do not like organized religion. It may work for you, that’s great, I think a sense of spirituality is an important thing to have, but the blind trust that many put into the doctrines of religion really bothers me. Especially when those who do wave the flag of their belief in bold faced hate against others. Angry, nasty hatred.

Christopher Hitchens has a great read, God is Not Great, it deconstructs most religions for contradictory beliefs, perpetual corruption and the solitary source of all that is wrong in the world. Religion is supposed to be the great unifying force of peace, yet it is under a mandate from ‘god’ that most wars are waged.

Heath Ledger died yesterday. Allegedly of an overdose of drugs. While I may not be a fan of those who abuse drugs - I am not going to issue a press release condemning him to hell because he starred in Brokeback Mountain.

The Westboro Baptist Church issued a press release today, filled with crap like this:

WBC will picket this pervert’s funeral, in religious protest and warning. Heath Ledger is now in Hell and will begin serving his eternal sentence there. [source]

Yes, this is a rogue organization that routinely pulls these stunts, but they do it with Biblical quotes, on the letterhead of a “Church.”

BRIT BRIT

Oh, and Britney is back dating her papi, Adnan Ghalib. They broke up, he “sold” his story to ET for a series of weeklong interviews, and now they’re already back together and tearing things up.

Last night they sideswiped a motorcycle.

The end is near friends, the horesemen cometh.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.

I am a John Chow disciple. I subscribe to his RSS feed, and while his blog trumpets how to make money by creating a blog, often it’s an excuse to blog about a restaurant he’s eating at so it becomes a tax deduction.

Regardless, John offers up many great tips on ads, affiliate networks and other sorts of things you can throw up on your site to make some cake.

Earlier this week I made a post about Google Ads and how I think they’ve become invisible to many blog readers. I was eagerly messaged by many friends, including John, urging me to remove the post since, according to Miss 604, “the first rule of AdSense is you don’t blog about AdSense.”

Maybe my point wasn’t made properly, today I’ve run into 2 separate posts basically saying the same thing I was saying: ads on the internet are becoming invisible.

My readers made it clear via their clicks that they were totally uninterested in Google AdSense sidebar ads. After a few short, unprofitable months with AdSense, I switched my strategy to targeted, in-context advertorial content. [Electrolicious]

John trumpets Kontera as a solution to advertising within a blog post. My cyberbuzz site has Kontera added to it. Links that are double underlined are paid external links. They look a little bit different, but still blend in with the flow of the site and don’t stand out.

In a way, there’s already a trend against ads not working as well as they used to on blogs. PR agencies have been trying to get positive reviews and posts on their products almost from day one, but with PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and whatnot, there are more organized ways to get recognition. You can make a decent amount of money by selling your content this way, and several hotshot bloggers are for sale. [The Blog Herald]

I even read another example of how radio ads and endorsements are starting to fall on deaf ears as well.

I use the example in the book where I listen to Daily Source Code with Adam Curry, and he kept talking about his great experience flying Virgin Atlantic. He was talking about Virgin because, you know, he’s a human being and he loved the experience. Well, guess what? When I was flying to the UK and thinking about which airline I wanted to fly, I ended up flying Virgin - all because of one person - one person’s not even overt recommendation, but endorsement. I’ve never met this person before, but I trusted him. I just felt like I trusted him. I trusted them because I listen to him regularly. Gee, that sounds pretty familiar. [Hear 2.0]

So the blog as personal advisor works far better than the blog as advertiser. Local blogstar, Miss 604 is running into what can only be described as a “tech ceiling.”

… when a Vancouver blogger wants to promote restaurants and businesses in the city, what does it take to get a company to hop on board? For example, I’ve personally been told by at least thirty people that my (unsolicited) blog post recommendation to visit a certain butcher shop/deli turned them into faithful regulars of the establishment - score! Blogging equals links equals customers.[Miss 604]

Endorsements work, but they have to subtle endorsements. The Electrolicious example fully details how she went about monetizing her site, and if you’re thinking about working the money magic, it’s a good read.

John can tell you all about how he makes $450 for a ReviewMe posting, and that might be another option for you to chase down.

Me? This blog is about me bitching about things I find interesting and think you might find interesting as well, I don’t know if selling myself is quite the right way to go about things (yet).

So my original post, which I won’t repost because of the advice of my Google-Fu friends, was basically correct - ads are invisible.

The ones you don’t see aren’t working, the ones you don’t even know were there, are.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?.

John Chow makes money online by telling people how much money he makes online. Last month he made over $25 000 from his blog. In 2007, he made over $180 000 and his estimates have that nearly doubling to $300 000 for 2008.

I’m reading John’s e-Book, I’m using some of his methods and I’m trying to make money off this blog.

It’s early, and I’m micro analyzing stats, traffic and results. After a couple weeks of monetizing the blog, here are the totals:

w00t!

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Back in September, I interviewed John Chow for 24hrs newspaper. John is one of the people I pay attention to on the internet to see how things get done.

John took his blog and monetized it - you know, just for fun.

In a year he took monthly revenue from $300ish to over $25,000.

Not bad.

Want to know how John Chow makes money online? Read my exclusive interview with him.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?