Since I have more than one site, I created 2 accounts. One for this website and another for CatPuppy. I created my little 125×125 icons and hit the ground.

The first thing I noticed on both accounts was that the same 7 or so people immediately asked to advertise on my widget. The same exact people! And I created these accounts a couple days apart. Do they just sit by their little computers and refresh their Entrecard page every couple of minutes in search of fresh meat?

I began to notice that my traffic suddenly had a nice little spike. This was with barely dropping my card on anyone’s site. I did a little research and found that this may be a good tool to drive up my traffic.

I discovered that some people make it their daily goal to drop the magic 300 (this is what Entrecard allows you to drop a day).

Here’s how they do it:
- You have to have the FireFox browser.
- Go to the category that your blog is in. Once you’re in that section, take your mouse and hover it over the first icon. Click onto the CTRL button and that will open it into a new tab. Go through all 15 of the icons till you have 16 tabs open.
- You’ll have to individually go through each tab and open up the sites.
- Once all 15 are open, go to the top of the browser and click onto Bookmarks. Then Bookmark all tabs. A box will pop-up and you can now create a folder where all the new bookmarks have been placed. (Pretty cool, huh?)

They do this for up to 300 sites. I guess some people have nothing better to do? Any who…

- Once this is finished, you can now right click onto each separate folder and hit Open All In Tabs. Every bookmark in that folder will pop open.

Now, you can drop your card on each site. Its a pretty quick process but still.. it seems like a little much to me.

I did this yesterday for CatPuppy. I bookmarked all 91 sites that catered to Pets. This morning, I woke up and did the first 30…then I got bored. I think I’d like to generate traffic from people who actually ENJOY my sites rather than have people who just to use it as a marketing tool for a few seconds.

But like I said, this seems like a great way to move traffic to your site. Meaningless traffic, but traffic nonetheless.

One thing I did notice was that the bounce rate is pretty high. I’m not exactly sure what this could mean for any sort of ad revenue. Anyone have thoughts on this?

I noticed a couple weeks ago that my Alexa rankings were skyrocketing. This happened in less than 2 months.

Take a look:

Catpuppy
(2/17) 12,946,832
(3/24) 946,131

Ultimate Redskins
(2/17) 12,969,408
(3/24) 887, 251

Bloggintown
(2/17) 12,956,347
(3/24) 619,887

Is this normal? I’d love to hear your experiences with your Alexa rankings.

If you have the traffic of Yahoo, YouTube or MySpace this makes perfect sense. For people like me who still have a relatively small audience, this is bordering on stupidity.

How did I finally find this out? I logged onto Adbrite wondering why I had only made .11 cents in 2 months. Then I saw it: CPM.

I was using Adbrite just on CatPuppy and that’s only on the single post portion (as I wrote here) but still, .11 cents?? I had almost 400 visitors in the past month!

Why would anyone want to waste valuable space on their site using this type of ad?

I tried to change them around on CatPuppy but I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with that site adwise. I’ll address that in a later post.

I found some great info on ad placements and decided to move things around. I havent been making a lot of money from my sites (I’m cool with that, it’s just frustrating hearing about the amount of money I could be making if you have the proper placements) so doing this was a no brainer. Google has a nice page about where the best placements are. Problogger has one also.

First, I removed the banners that were at the top of the pages. I then placed ad units between the 1st and 2nd posts of the site. Once you click onto a post, I kept the inline ad unit (the one inside of the actual post). Lastly, I added an ad unit at the bottom of the individual posts right before the comments section.

I’m actively looking for another ad program where I can integrate them in between posts. Anyone have any thoughts or comments on this?

I did this a couple days ago so we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, after Text Link Ads (click here for the post) denied me because I didn’t have a high enough ranking, I realized: I gotta get recognized.

So, I started my research.

Originally, I was just trying to get a Google Page Rank but then this Alexa thing kept coming up in my searches. If you’re reading this, you’ve read all the ways to get a high rank so I won’t go into it but just so you know I tried everything for about about 2 weeks. I did StumbleUpon, Technoratti, MyBlogLog, etc. I downloaded the Alexa toolbar on my laptop and my girlfriends. I still didn’t get a bump.

Then, I wrote this post on How to Hack the Verizon Voyager. I submitted it to Digg, Technoratti and StumbleUpon and then went about my usual day.

I woke up the next morning and saw that I had over 200 unique visitors. Holy Crap! I then looked at my ranking and I was listed. Already?? I was at 12, 956, 347. Ok, it wasnt the highest ranking but at least I was on the board. (Update: Since I started writing this post, I’ve since been Alexa ranked on my other two sites, UltimateRedskins & Catpuppy).

I still havent had any success at a Google Page Rank… but I’m trying. Anyone have any suggestions?

I told them I wanted to put it on UltimateRedskins but since it’s only like a week old, I doubt they will let me be a publisher. But…it’s worth a shot!

Also, I still havent seen Adbrite pop up on CatPuppy yet. It’s been almost 36 hours – 48 past the 24 hours they said it would take. Did I do something wrong? It seemed easy enough. I’ll have to check it out.

I’m not sure how I’m going to like it. The dashboard isn’t as informative as Adsense and the way you actually make the ads isn’t as good as Adsense. I’ll look into it more when later.

I added it to CatPuppy and I plan to just use it as an under image banner on individual posts – not on the front page of the site.

I found a plug-in called Google Adsense Under Image. We’ll see how it works because adbrite takes 24 hours for it to activate.

[youtube C7Bs_mQPDak http://www.catpuppy.net]

I had a lot of trouble with the theme I decided on. I really like the look but the code was awful. This was the one where the creator encoded the footer file so no one could remove their name. I understand why they did it but it stinks on my end. Once I removed it removed parts of the css so I had no choice to restore the footer.

I’ll have a ton of videos like CatPuppy but more commentary and opinions. I’m thinking I might even recruit some friends to write articles for it. At least that’s the idea.

I also put adsense on that site and on this one also. I need to figure out what else I can do to ad wise. I’ve read a bunch of articles on what ad programs one should use but I’m still waffeling on them. I did sign up for Adbrite and put that one a test site I’ve been using. So far, I just havent liked it.

So, 2 sites down, 3 to go.

I’m an actor. I’ve been in some tv shows, movies and commercials. Stuff you’ve probably seen or heard of.  I was going along doing auditions, taking classes and going to casting director workshops.

Then, on November 6th, the writers strike happened. 

I continued to take the workshops but after that first month, I couldn’t justify paying money for something that I wasn’t sure would benefit me anything. I take casting director workshops all the time and usually get called in for an audition. But since this strike was getting worse and worse by the day, I had no idea when it would be over so I just stopped everything.

So what was I going to do in the mean time?

A couple months earlier I had created my own personal website with Dreamweaver. With the learning curve it took me about a month I would guess. It was just something basic with my photos, resume and demo reel.  I had some friends who were making money on the web through Google’s AdSense. I was still new to this whole idea of making money through advertising on your website.

The more I hung out with them and did my own research, the more I felt, “I could do that.” Now let me state that they weren’t backing up the brinks truck. One friend was making about $200 a month (he’d been doing it for a while) and my other friend hasnt made his first $100 as of this writing.

So I decided to give it a try. I had nothing better to do. 

I signed up for Adsense and put it onto my site. I liked the way it looked and started to get addicted to logging onto the AdSense website seeing if I had made any money.  My brain started working overtime and I was hooked.

I wanted to do more. I bought my first domain catpuppy.net and tried my hand at WordPress. It’s taken me a while to learn about code and all the plug-ins and themes associated with WordPress – and I’m still learning.

Thats basically it. Since then, I’ve bought a total of 7 domains. One is totally up and running (catpuppy.net) and I’m a couple of days away from my second site being done. I’ll let you know what that is when it’s finished.

Please keep coming back for my updates, trials and thoughts on everything.

I hope you enjoy this site!