How to save on gas

Here are 7 quick tips that will help you save on gas. With the price of gas rising once again it is important to take advantage of every money saving opportunity we can when it comes to buying fuel.

Tips to help you save on gas

1. Walk more to save on gas. Sometimes we overlook the obvious
2. Car pool to save on gas. Don’t think this needs much explanation
3. Get an oil change to save on gas. Your engine will run more efficiently
4. Turn off the air conditioner to save on gas. Most cars will gain at least 2 to 3 miles per gallon if the A/C is turned off
5. Properly inflate your tires to save on gas. Tires that aren’t inflated properly cause poor gas mileage
6. Fill your car in the morning to save on gas. Gas expands as it gets warm so less fits in the tank in the warmer parts of the day
7. Coast to save on gas. Old technique that still works. When you can coast instead of using the accelerator

Does anyone else have any tips to pass along about saving on gas?

You can also learn more about saving on fuel costs at this other blog.

Tags: save on gas

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Social networking is a sign of retardation

Do you want to know the truth? Only idiots bother with social networking. Before you get your knickers all bunched up I want you to hear me out for a moment. Go log into your Myspace or Facebook profile real quick and have a quick look around. Ok, done?

…

Great! Notice anything different? Of course not! And that’s the whole point. Nothing changes. Aside from adding a few more meaningless faces and names to your “friends” list what have you accomplished? The truth of the matter is a bitter pill, but it’s time to swallow it. So called “social networking” is neither social, nor is it networking. But wait, there’s more good news!

Social networking can actually be more detrimental to your long term online health than you might realize. The problem is that we start developing content as if our social networks are our primary audience all the while forgetting the other 1.3 trillion people out there who aren’t in our friends list. If they were just part of the audience that would be fine, but we have a tendency to start dancing like clowns for our networks.

Now excuse me while I log into Reptile Geeks. I’m expecting a couple of more friend requests!

Tags: social networking

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Why do you still use Adsense?

Today I asked myself why I am still using Adsense to monetize my blogs and my websites with. After all I’m not the biggest Google fan out there and to be honest my space could probably be used more efficiently. But as I was thinking of reasons I shouldn’t be using Adsense something funny occurred to me. I want to use Adsense.

Why the hell would I want to do that?

First of all I’m lazy. I don’t want to spend hours researching and optimizing my sites to attract advertisers. I’d prefer to spend that time on content. Or sleeping. It is so easy to just throw a block or two of Adsense code up and let it generate revenue. That’s right, it still generates revenue. How much? Not enough, but not only am I lazy I’m also aware that just like hard work paying off being lazy pays off in its own way.

Beyond being lazy I’m also busy. Too busy for properly monetizing my sites? Apparently so. But here’s the bottom line - I use Adsense because it works for me. Because while I’m not getting rich I’m getting enough to pay for hosting each month plus a little extra. Which when you consider my hosting bill is $7.95 per months isn’t all that impressive. Would I like to make more? Of course I would. Would I consider dropping Adsense from my sites? At this point, no.

Is there any advantage to using Adsense?

For sites like mine that get less than 150 visitors a day each on average I’d have to say there is no monetary advantage except the fact that it makes me work even harder to try and get the sites ranking higher and higher for the keyword searches on the various search engines. I do know this as I work to rank the sites higher and I manage to do so my Adsense revenue increases. Magic? Hardly, just good old fashioned math. The more people see an ad the more likely they are to click on it. Simple as that.

As my sites gain readership however I will begin to notice an advantage to using Adsense which will be reflected in the numbers.

Should I use Adsense?

Only you can answer that question. Before you decide for or against using it you should take a good look at what your goals are in terms of monetization. Adsense isn’t a quick road to riches by any means and if you expect it to be you’ll just be wasting your time. There are several things you should think about when it comes to deciding if Adsense is right for you.

How well optimized are your sites for search engines?

The vast majority of people who click on Adsense ads come from search engines. Specifically from Google. If you have a very well optimized site that ranks high for your keywords you’ll do much better using Adsense than if you don’t. For example my site about snakes tends to rank within the first 1-15 results per article on Google. My click through rate is great (over 2.75% when I checked a little bit ago). At least it’s great compared to this site. On the other hand I get about 25-30 visitors a day there while well over 100 stop by here (despite not updating in what seems like months). That’s the power of keyword optimization when it comes to Adsense.

Is your website designed to maximize clicks?

Just throwing a few ads up isn’t going to get you clicks. They need to be presented in a certain way. If you’ve never taken a moment to look at Google’s Heatmap you should. One thing that has struck me is the fact that it doesn’t ever seem to change. Why not? Because it works. Google knows it works, and other Adsense publishers know it works. It makes money and that’s what Google is in business to do.

But it goes further than setting up your websites heatmap to emulate Google’s recommendations. You can have everything laid out perfectly, but if you don’t have good content you’ll get ads that don’t fit it. For example I’ve seen Adsense throw out ads about off shore oil drilling in an article I wrote on another blog about computers. I was at a loss for how that was happening until I read the article through a few times. I talked a lot about “drilling down to get to the problem”, “sometimes the cause of the issues are right below the surface”, “when you do this or that it’s like a geyser of power is released”… You get the idea. Adsense was doing its job and targeting perfectly for what I gave it. Now if Adsense was that far off track of what I was trying to accomplish I can only image how bad a search engine would have been thrown for a loop.

Do you ask people for clicks?

We all know it is against the rules to ask people to click on your ad spots whether Adsense or another, but you can encourage it without overtly asking. How? Write good content that is relevant to what the person reading the article wants to find. How do you do that? Good Great search engine optimization. How do you go about doing that? Write good content. What is good content? Content that gives the reader what they are looking for. How do you give the reader what they are looking for? Proper search engine optimi… Is it just me, or is this starting sound familiar? Do you understand?

If you want people to click on your ads give them reason to do so. Present good content and Adsense will 99.9999% of the time present good ads which will lead people to click. The very act of creating good content is the act of asking for clicks. Don’t create good content and see how many clicks you get. Produce good content and see how many clicks you get. Try it out and see if I lie!

Are you willing to use up valuable real estate for Adsense?

Sounds kind of odd, but will you willingly give your website real estate to Adsense when someone else might come in and perform better either at a flat rate or on a per click basis? Because that’s what you have to do during the duration while adsense is being shown on your site. I know for a fact that some potential advertisers won’t touch you with a 10 foot pole if you have adsense on your sites. So not only are you losing out on the space where Adsense appears, but also where it doesn’t in some cases.

Why do you still use Adsense?

Tags: adsense optimization, why do you use adsense, why you should use adsense

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Getting started with niche blogging

Last July when I bought the domain name www.ablogaboutnothing.com I didn’t really have any ideas or expectations when it came to blogging. I only knew I had things I wanted to say and a blog seemed like a great platform to use to say them. For several months I posted daily sometimes even 2 or 3 articles a day. Needless to say I started to feel a little burned out after a while and slowed down. That slowing down process has been going on since January (2008) on this blog, but I’ve been picking up the pace on two other blogs I own. The first one pet-snakes.com is targeted at the snake owners niche. My other blog is an addition to my business website that I recently added.

Obviously two entirely different niches are represented by both blogs (snakes, and computers) and I decided to give everyone who might be reading this an idea of how powerful niche blogging really can be. I’m not going to get into boring details about traffic numbers or click through rates. While all of that data makes for good coffee table talk it doesn’t tell you what you need to know to get a niche blog off the ground. In this article we will take a look at three things in niche blogging that can either make you or break you. The topic you choose, who finds your topic useful, and your traffic.

Choose your topic carefully

The cliche that we hear all the time about blogging is to choose a topic you “love”. While that sounds great and even makes a great deal of sense it isn’t that simple. You need to choose a blogging topic you can stick with. It’s not enough to simply love the topic you need to be able to continually learn and grow in the topic. It is a daily endeavor. For example you might love woodworking, but you may not be inclined to learn much more about it. That wouldn’t be a good topic for you to blog about if you are trying to target a niche.

When I first decided to try out niche blogging after reading many articles from Maki at DoshDosh on niche blogging to pick up tips I sat down and created a list of possible topics I could blog about and asked myself some questions:

• What interests me?
• What do I know about?
• What am I willing to continue learning about?
• What will help me further my goals?
• What am I passionate about?

Once I answered those questions my once substantial list of possible topics was narrowed way down. I don’t remember the exact number but it went down from around 50 to about 6 or 7. Out of those 6 or 7 I narrowed it down to two to start with. Yes, I do plan on adding more from the list in the future but decided those two (snakes, and computers) would be the best investment in my time.

Make your blog useful

My two niche blogs serve two separate purposes but the point is that they both serve a purpose. The one attached to the business website is just easy computer tips. There’s nothing spectacular about it. In fact any of the tips I’ve put on there you can find in 10,000 different places on the internet. That doesn’t stop people from visiting it. And they come back because the tips are useful. More importantly it is a sales and marketing vehicle for my IT consulting business.

One the other hand is the blog about snakes which is a passion of mine. It allows me to share with others things that I have learned over the years. According to my Google Analytics stats I am around 76.xxx% of my traffic coming from search engines for Pet-Snakes. So you better believe every article I write for that blog is keyed towards ranking and converting search engine traffic. My Google Adsense CTR reflects this effort. I can’t give exact numbers but it is slightly over 2% which is great. Now if only the payout rate was a little better… On the other hand my search engine traffic to the business blog is virtually zero. But I make more money from it both in terms of Google Adsense and in terms of work it brings in.

Getting the traffic

For any niche blog the immediate challenge after getting it started is to generate the needed traffic. I say needed traffic because without traffic you’re writing to yourself and you will not continue doing that for long. There are a lot of traffic sources out there. My main two for the business blog are Yahoo! Answers and Craig’s List. In fact those two sites account for well over 95% of the traffic it generates. Fact of the matter is that trying to rank on a search engine was much more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted for the easy way. For the snake blog I rely on forums that I am a member of, search engine traffic, and reciprical links from other websites for the traffic.

The point isn’t to tell you that you need to use any particular method to generate traffic it is to show you that there is more than one way to skin a cat. The important thing, particularly for a niche blog, is that you get traffic to your site that will find content they can make use of and pertains to their needs. For example I answer a lot of questions on Yahoo! Answers, but I don’t tag my answers with my domain name(s) unless the question relates to my blog. Why not? Wouldn’t it get me more traffic? Probably would, but it would almost certainly be useless traffic to me.

Tags: niche blogging

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Earning a living on Craig’s List

I’ve done some experimenting lately with Craig’s List. Most of you are no doubt very familiar with using Craig’s List to unload (or find) a variety of unwanted items, pets, and services. What most people don’t realize is that a guy or gal can actually earn a decent living from Craig’s List. But, it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination and many people who try will fail.

What does it take to earn a living using Craig’s List?

In a word, perseverance. I know, you were probably expecting some great insight or revelation, but truly it is that simple. It just takes perseverance to earn a living with Craig’s List. Now unless you’re stupid you’re probably wondering how is that different that any other method of earning a living. Well, it’s not and that’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to learn something entirely new you simply need to adjust your thinking!

First things first

Before you do anything else you should familiarize yourself with Craig’s List. It is a very simple website yet can quickly overwhelm you if you aren’t prepared for it. Probably the first thing you should do is go to the localized version of the site that is dedicated to your area. It’s a huge waste of time if you aren’t targeting the right areas. As you can see by the picture over to the right the main page has been divided up into sections to help you better find your way into a local area.

Once you’ve found the name of your city, state, or country click on it and it will take you to either a subdomain dedicated to your area or another page where you can drill down further to a more localized area. If need be keep narrowing it down until you are right in your local area. If you living in or around a larger city this won’t be hard to do, but if you live in the middle of nowhere you’ll need some extra effort.

Your next step is to figure out what category you will most likely have success in. For the most part they should be fairly self-explanatory with just a little bit of reading. Once you’ve figured out your category spend a few hours browsing through the ads in your area over the past few weeks. Give a few of them calls or send emails. You will quickly learn there are two types of people who advertise on services and sales on Craig’s List. Honest folks who are just trying to make a living and scoundrels. You don’t need a lot of insight to figure them out. The reason for calling these people is simply to learn a little bit about your competition. Would you hire them? If not chances are not many other people will either. Lesson 1: Don’t be like one of these people that others don’t want to hire. It will quickly ruin any chances you have of earning a living on Craig’s list.

Setting up an account

You don’t have to set up an account in order to advertise, but it makes it much easier. In order to get one set up look in the upper left side of the page and you’ll see a link that says “My Account”, click on it and you’ll be taken to a login page. Directly under the login you’ll see a link that says “Don’t have an account? Click here to sign up.” On the final page you’ll be asked for your email address and then to confirm the captcha code. After you click the “Create Account” button you’ll get an activation email. Click the link in it, create a password and you’re on your way!

Creating your ad

There are two schools of thought when it comes to advertising on Craig’s List. The first one subscribes to the thought that it should retain a classified ad, small community feel. The other view is that your ad should be as high class and as professional as possible. Let’s take a look at both kinds of ads and compare them.

Comparison point	Professional	Classified
Cost to produce	A few dollars to several hundred.	Free, except for the time it takes
Time to produce	A few days to a few weeks for a very well done ad	A few minutes to a few hours
Reactions from customers	More inclined to pay higher prices	Expect you to work well below market value

There are a lot more points we could use for comparison, such as cost vs return, but I just wanted to give you an idea of some things to look at. The next step is to actually create your ad. It can be a daunting task when you first start, but with a little effort and organization it isn’t actually too bad. Remember earlier I suggested you should read some ads on the site? Assuming that you did hopefully you’ve come up with some ideas for your own ads. Of course you can always hire a professional ad company, but in my experience it is just as well to take a little extra time to make your own. Especially when you consider cost.

The first thing you should do is familiarize yourself with how to write good ad copy, because no matter where the ad appears or who reads it if it isn’t good you’ve already lost the battle. Your next step is to actually figure out what you want your ad to say and who you would like to say it to. This is the part where you really need to figure out who exactly you are targeting with your ad

If you aren’t using one already I recommend finding some image editing software. If like most of us you’re not keen on paying hundreds of dollars for software you’ll hardly ever use I suggest looking into paint.net or the Gimp. Both work well and both are free. It really comes down to a matter of choice.

Placing your ads

The next step is figuring out where and when to place your ads. The where shouldn’t be too hard (in the local area, in the proper category), but the when can take a little bit of experimentation. I’ve found the absolute worst time for any ads on Craig’s List is early in the morning, before about 8am and late at night after around 9pm. Best time seems to be sometime between 11am and 2pm. Which makes sense if you think about it. It is the middle of the workday, people have likely finished up a good part of their duties and are just there because they have to be. Surfing Craig’s List seems to be a fairly popular pasttime for a lot of people during that part of the day. Of course you’ll need to experiment on your own when it comes time to placing the ad, but that’s jus what I’ve found to work best.

Keep on top of things

So you’ve finally placed your ad and now you’re ready to have a nice cold beer, kick back, relax and wait for the calls to come in? Unless you’re advertising “erotic services” give that idea up! Now is the time to keep on top of things. About 15 minutes after you place your ad it will very likely be pushed out of sight and out of mind. Just like anything else, keeping your name at the forefront will give you a great amount of leverage when it comes to your ads. It is a violation of Craig’s List rules to post the same thing more than once in a 48 hour period. Unfortunately no one pays any attention to that rule and if you want to be competitive you can’t either.

There are two ways to get around the posting limitations. The first is to simply change what your ad copy says and post the new ad, and deleting the old one. I don’t recall what percentage of the ad needs to be changed but I find if I change around 40% of it the spam check system seems to let it go through. The other way, if you use an image is simply to repost the image link. As long as you don’t use text outside of the image you won’t need to worry about being blocked.

Since Craig’s List is community moderated it helps to stay on their good graces. For the most part short of illegal, or spam postings no one will bother you. To avoid being labeled a spammer be sure to always delete your old ad once the new one is live on the site. Also try not to publish the same thing more than 5 or 6 times in a day to the same area. People will start to remember who you are.

How much money can I make?

I’ve found it really depends on what you are advertising. For example when I advertise computer repair I might get 2 or 3 jobs a week from Craig’s List. On the other hand when I advertise menial labor work I usually have 30 to 50 hours of work within a day of posting the ad. I’ve come to the conclusion that certain ads are expected, while others aren’t on the site. After all what kind of a professional computer tech would ever stoop so low as to post on Craig’s List? At least that seems to be what many people think.

Regardless you’ll only make money using Craig’s List if you treat it like a real business. That means being honest, doing the work you promise, showing up on time, following up, and all that other good stuff. I personally know of lots of people who make a few hundred extra dollars a week with it, and then there are 5 people I know of who make livings this way. The earning potential is huge it is just a matter of you being able to work the system.

A few things to keep in mind

When you start using Craig’s List to advertise there are a few things you should always be wary of.

• People go to Craig’s List looking for a deal. In other words they are frugal cheap and will always go for cheapest, and most convient. Whatever you normally charge your customers consider cutting it at least in half, if not three quarters for Craig’s List customers.
• Try out various ads and times of day to see what combination works best for you.
• It will take some time. Most people adversise for a few days before they get any return from it. Stick to it.
• Be careful! Craig’s List seems to attract some weird people looking for “services”. If you’re a lady keep this in mind because the service some of them are expecting might be more than you are expecting to provide.

Good luck with your money making efforts on Craig’s List!

Tags: craigslist, make money

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