Earlier this month, if you recall, there was a bit of a scuffle between the owners of Private Label Montly and Joel Comm about his Instant Adsense Templates.

The resolution involved giving a copy of the $200 adsense package to every PLM member. So, I decided to bite the bullet and renew my defunct membership in PLM for two months to get the template packs for sixty some odd bucks.

On Thursday I uploaded 23 of the adsense sites, completely unedited, to an unused PR4 domain, and worked some tag and ping magic, and roughly 48 hours later I’ve made $30 and change from those sites.

Not at all bad. It looks like I’ll easily make back my investment.

What I was wrong about, though was this:

I didn’t buy Instant Adsense Templates because I read that they use tables instead of CSS, making their claims of being perfectly optimized false

While this may just be an anomoly, my CTR for those sites is well over 30%, which makes them pretty darn well optimized for Adsense.

And I don’t know how much better I’d be doing for SEO with a pure CSS site, but I do know, thanks to my existing PR4 domain, I’m already ranking in the first page of Google’s SERPS for several work at home type terms, which is also bringing me traffic.

I’ve been having fantastic results with a bookmarking tool I’ve had my programmer build.

Fantastic isn’t the right word for it. Superlative. Awesome. Really cool?

Anyway, my original plan was to sell it, but it seems that the social bookmarking websites change their registration and posting information a little too regularly, and selling it would mean keeping up on a much tighter schedule than I had hoped.

For my use alone, it really doesn’t bother me if one or two of the 22 services are not working for a week. But I’m quite sure people who have paid me for the software wouldnt be so care-free.

So, either I scrap plans to release it, or consider releasing it as a subscription, cuz I’ve got to keep my programmer in style. I hate it when this stuff happens.
 

I got an email today with the headline:

Wendy, Could You Use 1,000 PLR Articles?

And without even opening it to see what it was promoting, my brain said,

“mmmm, nope”

and I hit the delete button.

Yesterday I bought 1000 visitors from TrafficZap … mostly because it was cheap, and I thought I’d experiment with a few more traffic exchanges than I did last year.

With most of the traffic delivered, I was surprised to check my stats to find that I actually converted some of that traffic. 1.4% of it, in fact.

While that doesn’t seem like a spectacular number, it is the best I’ve gotten so far from any non-targeted traffic purchase.

I’ve got a few more results left to come in from text links and AdBrite, but when I start over again with the best of the cheap traffic, I have a feeling TrafficZap is going to be included in the mix.

Gosh, I love being surprised.

I’ve been promoting a new site for the last week, and because it’s in a very broad area, I thought I’d once again experiment with traffic exchanges and purchased traffic.

And again, I’ve found that traffic from sites like TrafficSwarm convert poorly, traffic from purchased packages that come from expired domains and popups convert dismally (which is two steps downhill from poorly), and traffic from InstantBuzz, while harder to get, converts a little better than both put together.

And once again, traffic from signature files in forums has all those other methods beat by a mile, or ten, or more.

Forums are great. As long as what you post is helpful, and as long as your sig link looks interesting, you’ve gone half the distance to getting a lead or a customer as soon as they click.

And as a result, the new site is off to a great start.

Now, if someone wanted to start a service, offering a forum posting service where they researched answers to particular questions and responded intelligently to posts with their customer’s link in the sig line would be a neat thing to try.