Today, as I was trying to impress upon my son that it’s irresponsible for him to just expect his mom to replace every toy he loses or disassembles, I realized that my kid has everything. I mean everything.

And that made me feel a little guilty for not helping those with nothing.

So, I decided that the proceeds of this blog will go to sponsoring children who have far less than my very fortunate son.

I went to World Vision’s site, and saw Milton from Bolivia.

Bolivia is the poorest south american country, and one with a very corrupt bureaucracy and a government enamoured with socialism, which means it’s a really lousy place to be poor.

If $35 bucks each month will make his life better, I am glad. And if sponsoring Milton helps me teach my son how very fortunate he is, that’s good too.

Milton is the first Child of the Surf.

And if I start squeaking more revenue from this site, I’ll just sponsor more. And more.

I’m looking forward to this…

(Incidentally, I’m only about $10 shy of another child of the surf this month… anyone care to pick up a copy of GoTryThis or WP Themerator before you go?)

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.