Swollen Pickles

In case you are looking to make a little extra money, WidgetBucks are offering a $25 sign up bonus for all new publishers.

According to their blog, this promotion is to celebrate the first birthday of WidgetBucks and will run until the end of October.

Here's what they have to say:

"They say that time flies when you're having fun -- and in a flash, WidgetBucks has just completed its first year. To celebrate our first anniversary, we're reinstating our sign-up bonus that we offered during the first three months for all new publishers: $25 bonus when your account reaches $50."

Initially I did quite well out of WidgetBucks, but things tailed off after a while. They have introduced a range of new widgets though, which look a lot more interesting than the old ones, so they may be worth another look.

If you want the $25 sign up bonus, go join now!

Even if you don't want to join, go take a look at the pretty picture of the cup cake on their front page. It's nice.

I've made a bit of cash from ClickBooth, and they have a butt load of pay per lead offers which seem to convert quite well. So today, I logged into my Clickbooth account and searched for all offers available that were also happy to take Australian traffic. A long list was generated. Too long for me to look through, because I was feeling lazy, as is my right. So I decided to sort the list of offers by conversion rate to look at those programs that converted at the highest rate.

This is when things got a little weird. Somehow this offer (see banner below) appeared in the list, even though it's marked as UK only.

The strange thing is the conversion rate, which is listed as 110%!!

How is that even possible? A conversion rate of 100% is theoretically possible, although extremely unlikely, but how can you end up with a conversion rate of more than 100%? Maybe I'm missing something?

Anyway, if you want access to affiliate programs that can convert at 110% then join ClickBooth right now! If I can convert at 110% it won't be long before I'm driving around in my Aston Martin James Bond car.

Here's one for all the Aussies. It can be a pain in the butt trying to find affiliate programs that are ok with Australian traffic. It's even harder to find those that offer the good stuff.

Commission Monster have taken on Windows Live Hotmail with Hotmail currently paying $0.30 per Australian click.

If you get a lot of Australian traffic, this could be a nice option for you. It takes about 20 seconds to register with Commission Monster, and once you're in, find the Hotmail offer, and grab the banner code. Whack it up on your site and you are good to go. Simple. Easy.

The banner ads themselves aren't too bad looking either. Here's an example of one of the 300 x 250 banner ads.

Once users click on the banner ad, they are taken to a groovy looking landing page.

Monetize your traffic with Commission Monster`s affiliate network

Turn on the TV and you’ll be lucky if you don’t see a story on the big Global Financial Crisis. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that there are a lot of people out there interested in what is happening globally, and how the financial crisis is directly going to affect them. A quick review of Google Trends shows that the number of people searching for information relating to the ‘financial crisis’ or ‘global financial crisis’ has increased dramatically in the last month.

So, we know this crisis stuff is big news, but how can you turn the global financial crisis business to your advantage? Here are some simple steps you can use to turn the financial crisis to your advantage.
(more...)

Apparently the world is in financial crisis. Banking fat cats have paid themselves billions in bonuses while running organizations into the ground, the cheesiest banking jokes known to human kind have done the rounds, yet still Swollen Pickles managed to pick up the ball that it'd dropped in July/August... well almost.

1. Develop Swollen Pickles into a website that can generate $350 per month.

August sucked, $129.98 for the month, made August 2008 my worst month in a long time. Fortunately September was an improvement, with Swollen Pickles making an even $225. Still $125 short of the target though.

The revenue mix was spread relatively evenly between Adsense, LinkWorth, ClickBooth and MoreNiche all bringing in some cash.

New affiliate programs I joined in September in an effort to find the perfect mix were Ads4Dough and COPEAC. I've still got a lot to learn.

In September I officially gave up on PerformancingAds because they just weren't performing for me. The reporting is a little underdone as well, currently I have 3 referrals and I can't see if I've made anything from them which isn't ideal.

2. Develop Swollen Pickles to the point where it receives 30,000 unique visits per month.

Bizarrely, although dollars earned in September went up, the number of visitors went down to 17,767 unique visits in September, from 18,211 in August. Looking at the analytics, it appears the drop off is largely due to a decrease in 'Stumbles'.

3. Develop Digital Burn into a website that can generate $150 per month.

Well it seems I stuffed up my reporting for this one last month. I had said I made $81.23 for August, but the final figure was actually $120.85. I hadn't accounted for the delay in reporting from the eBay partner network. I guess if the auction process makes it difficult to report directly at the end of the month. Anyway, I guess I should add the caveat that these figures are subject to change depending on whether or not the eBay figure ends up increasing. With that all said, Digital Burn made $158.10 in September, which was a good effort. phpBay Pro has paid for itself a few more times over.

4. Develop Digital Burn to the point where it receives 15,000 unique visits per month.

It seems that on the 13 September I did something to the Digital Burn WordPress theme and stuffed up the Google analytics reporting. On only just realised today, so all I can report on is that there were 5,014 unique visits between 1-13 September. Based on that, it's probably safe to say that it would have hit the 11,000 visit mark for the month which would be inline with the previous month.

5. Develop Motor Dude into a website that can generate $50 per month.

September was a good month for Motor Dude, with that site bringing in a grand total of $151.92. A big effort considering at the start of this calendar year, $50 per month was looking optimistic.

6. Develop Motor Dude to the point where it receives 7,500 unique visits per month.

There were 1,168 unique visitors to Motor Dude in September, down a nudge from 1,250 in August was still well below the target which is disappointing.

7. Achieve my goal weight of 85kgs.

Zero change.

In other news...

I finally whacked WordPress up on a domain I've had sitting there for a while doing nothing. Viking Idiot dot com isn't ground breaking, but I thought it was about time I did something with it, and got it to earn it's keep. Since the 12 September it's had 2,841 unique visitors. Hasn't made a fortune yet, but at the rate it's travelling it'll have paid for itself in another few weeks.

I also just finished up reading Batman: The Long Halloween which I would highly recommend, especially to you Blankshooting.

In my experience, any email you receive that begins with the words "Due to prevailing conditions..." is not going to end well.

If, like me, you've joined Freebies4Webmasters then the chances are that you'll have received an email that begins that way in the past 24-48 hours.

In case you don't check your inbox, here it is.

Dear Webmaster,

Due to prevailing conditions for our advertisers, it has been decided we can no longer accept new applications to Freebies4webmasters, and that some existing accounts will be closed.

Some or all of your domains accepted in your publisher account may be removed in the following days due to our advertiser requirements.

Please note that all removed domains that were due payment up to the 1st of October have already been paid.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you in your participation of Freebies4Webmasters and give our best wishes to the further success of your website. Publishers who will remain in our network will continue to be paid as normal.

Best Regards,
Freebies4Webmasters Team

Now the way I interpret that message is that due to the recent page rank update, Freebies4Webmasters will be reviewing publisher accounts, and removing those accounts that don't meet "advertiser requirements". I'd suggest that if your site has taken a page rank hit since the last update then you'll likely find that you no longer meet "advertiser requirements" and will receive a follow up email. How long the process takes is anyone's guess, but I'm wondering if they'll pay out pro-rata if you get booted from their system halfway through the month?

In short, good luck to anyone wanting to stick with them, I hope you don't get booted. For everyone else, I hope you cashed in while you had the chance.

When I registered with Predictify a while back, I was a little sceptical, I mean to say, their tag line was "Make Money By Predicting Future Events". Were they for real?

Well, as it turns out, they are for real, and they continue to pay out. Don't kid yourself, you're not going to make a fortune with Predictify, but you will make some additional coin, and more than enough to buy a domain name and start your online empire from scratch. What's more, Predictify is actually quite fun. It's like a social networking site with a twist. Get a few friends on board and you could run your own little sports tipping competition. See who can pick the most winners. Bragging rights and bucks.

Here's a screen shot of the payments I've received in the last couple of weeks.

Note the payouts for correctly predicting the outcome for a couple of NFL games. I made $5.37 for predicting the correct outcome in the Patriots vs. Jets game alone. What do I know about NFL? Sweet bugger all. I can name a handful of teams, with one of them being the Dallas Cowboys, and I only know them because of their cheerleaders, so that shows you don't have to actually be an expert in anything to win, you just need to make a few lucky guesses.

Predictify pay via PayPal at the end of every month.

Click here to learn more about Predictify.