Chabrenas

So we've reached 2013 and I haven't earned one cent yet - but I'm enjoying myself and several things are coming together in an encouraging way. I put monetisation on the back burner while I worked on finding out what the site's readers responded to.

- Race reports are small beer, and this is the off season. Since these are intended as longish-lived articles for people who are not close followers in real time (most viewers are not really interested in the races themselves), I'm restricting ...

Here's a summary of what I've been through so far.

I went back to OpenX after my employer sent me a copy of the installation file, and answered a couple of n00b questions.

As he says "OpenX is (often needlessly) complex, but it does a good job."

The original confusion happened because I assumed 'OpenX Fast Facts' would give a full summary of the product. Instead, it talks only about their hosted version, which is free below a certain number of impressions ...

Item 22 in Clinton's list of 101 Ways to Make Money Online is to write, with the advice that a contract will pay a little better than the peanuts you get for hourly paid work. Actually, most writers get peanuts for piecework - payment by the word - rather than by the hour.

I've just landed a job with an interesting payment scheme. Do it Yourself: here's a 300W x 250H ad block for each article or report you write, just keep out of the site owner's advertising categories.

...

Although I've been running web sites for more than a decade, none has ever done any more than pay for its hosting (if you discount an e-commerce site, whose success is down to the man who runs the business). A bit belatedly, I'm trying to learn to do nothing without an eye on its effect on the traffic I get.

Now, when an idea for a blog post enters my head, I check for high-paying, low-competition keywords and adjust the subject and its title accordingly.

Yesterday, ...

I created the site 101medicine.org to target keyphrases in the US Health niche. It consists of a WP Page for each of the primary keywords, WP Posts on the same site for longer tail phrases, and a Facebook Page to attract visitors via that social network.

Since I had neither sites nor existing forum memberships in the niche, I decided to try buying an initial burst of traffic in the hope that some of it would stick. I found a site offering 10,000 UVs over a period of 30 days for US$12, ...