Thanks for the heads up on the feed Mike, looking into that!

The math anti spam plugin is a great little plugin, well worth having.

Hey before I go pass out for the day (yes, I sleep like a vampire) I wanted to mention I tried to subscribe to your feed but I was confronted by a parsing error. Here’s the gist of it:

“XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/YackYack
–^”

BTW, that math question of yours is tricky. I came here twice thinking I can use the same answer, but it keeps changing on me. Very nice ;P

I think the article thing is a great idea too. Sounds corny, but build a great resource and people will come and bookmark you and read what you have to say. Drawing tips and things like that are great ways of drawing some attention (pardon the awful pun) to your site.

Good luck with it, may your dreams be full of marketing ideas

The click ratio was definitely something that I thought about a lot with AdSense and figured with my small reader base right now it probably wasn’t worth messing with, but I totally see your point about just putting it on there and maybe eventually it will pay off, maybe not, but you’re right…it certainly wouldn’t hurt, would it?

I’ve definitely been thinking about putting together some articles showing some tips how I go about creating my characters and so on. Perhaps something like “learn to draw a lovable alien”. Well okay, that sounds corny, but yeh something like that

You’ve really supplied me with a lot to think about here. I’m going to be saving your article and follow up so I can read it all over again (at a more reasonable time than 5 am..lol) and hopefully start to put together a plan.

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. I was a little worried ya might reply and say there’s no hope for a site like mine

Thanks for stopping by, I prefer long comments to short ones

Adsense can be a great revenue stream. If integrated in the right way. Provided you have the right sort of traffic, it can be a great passive income stream.

As you can see, I do use adsense here, the people who read my blog regularly are invariably ‘adsense blind’, that is, they seldom click ads. They are here to read about an opinion or a viewpoint. My CTR (click thru ratio) on this site is very, very low, what I earn in a monetary sense from adsense for this site here, would probably cover the average hosting bill for a site and is nothing to write home about! That said, it cost me 2 minutes of my time to implement the code and I get some useful insights as to what kind of content gets clicks and what doesn’t,what types of integration work best, I can test ad formats and layouts and colouration and all sorts, which i can then apply and play around with elsewhere.

In terms of your own site (loved those characters) Perhaps you have a readership that is a little arty, or interested in learning about what it takes to draw great stuff. Blogs and articles using adsense might show ads to sites that sell art equipment, a reader might be inclined to click one, and you’d get paid if they did.Maybe they love your music, ads outputted, might link to sites selling music software or hifi equipment, again youd get paid if they clicked. A page about teddy bears, might show ads that sell kids toys or speciality related stuff. You can gain an idea of what type of ads your site would show by using the adsense preview tool It really does depend on your niche Mike, it also depends on ad placement and the type of reader you have. Provided you look on it as an experimental thing that might earn you some bucks, then its all good, it costs you nothing but your time!

Merchandise on other sites, yes absolutely. Ive ran a number of sites which I supplemented with various affiliate theme related products. The key is to think in terms of what your readership would be looking for and showing them products or options that are related. For example, one site I run deals with specific areas and towns relative to various countries. Amazon.com run an associate program that enables you to specify keywords within a script. You can then output stuff related to that keyword.I supplemented my area content with a feed that displayed related books and travel guides and dvd’s.

The great thing about these programs is that once the code is there thats it, I needn’t do anything more – as a result I gain another passive income stream.

Check out affiliate programs like commission junction for some related themes and topics too.Lots of vendors use programs like this to sell their products via publisher websites.

WordPress have some great affiliate plugins that can help you integrate such stuff.

Hope that helps

There’s a lot here to take to heart and consider, though I wonder if a program like Adsense would really be profitable for a site like mine? Do you have any insight you could share?

Also have you ever had any experience/success with selling merchandise based on any of your site’s topics?

Sorry if I’ve gone a little crazy here writing a novel. I’m just one of the little guys hoping to learn what he can from others

They will do the publishing, the SEO work and everything else. Users get monthly royalties without having to do anything else. Writingup.com is a similar service although a little less convenient than Triond.

Just a general, I started out here and got to here and did it by doing this.

I might well do one myself, maybe a “How I got to 10k a month on adsense, only to get kicked in the balls by a minus 31 penalty”