I haven’t posted in a few weeks. It’s already August! Time is flying by, but it doesn’t feel like summer because of all the sweet rain we have been having in Boston.

I gave moneyanswertree.com a new theme and it looks awesome. More professional looking.

I’ve been testing out click through rates on twitter with some of my ads. I’ve posted links to a few products on twitter, and tracked the links CTR on my affiliate sites. The numbers were good. 14-25% CTR. Only 1 conversion though. But thats ok for the small amount of clicks I got.

I’m still building up my twitter followers, I am over 1100 now. It was up to 1200 a week ago before twitter did some user maintenance and deleted all those spam accounts. So my follower count dropped a lot and I guess its a good thing. Shows how many followers of mine were spam.

Other updates, I will be making a new iphone app soon, and I will be changing this sites theme to another wootheme – Busy Bee. I should probably apply for the iphone dev program now because it might take a month or so before I am accepted. That will give me a good time frame to do the development in.

Thats all for now

This is a famous picture of Shoemoney’s monthly adsense check. Not mine but I am consistently making more money in Google Adsense revenue than I am on my Allybank account in interest each month. Not really sure what this means, its just an observation.

Bank interest rates have not stop falling since late 2007, meanwhile my random websites have been gaining small pennies in click ads over the past 2 years.

One of my sites, which is a host to funny pictures and video¹, I plan to try and outsource the search for new content to India. An idea from the latest book I am reading called The 4-hour Workweek. I am blowing through this book faster than I’ve ever read a book before in my life. It’s that interesting. Keep in mind that I am NOT a very fast reader, and I haven’t completed a book in over 5 years. Most of my daily reading is through social media websites, and AIM. I am more than half way through the book, and I plan to finish it this weekend.

Reading the book, I’ve already thought of some great business ideas which I will try to implement. One quote from the book, that I find myself using as a pep phrase is tomorrow means never. If you think you are going to put something off until tomorrow, its never going to happen. Do something right now.

¹. SEO tip: I used Funny Pictures and Video as my hyperlink to funny4me.com instead of using the text funny4me, as a way to target search engines to my site through keywords and not the title of my site.

Its pretty simple, they were made for it. Watch out, I’m gonna start blogging about the ecconomy and what I hate about it over at moneyanswertree.com. I just have so much to say(at the moment) about how I feel about wallstreet and the people there. Some can agree or disagree but I hope its entertaining.

I need to also redo the look of that side and just make it blog style or Q&A style. I would like to make it Q&A style that would be cool, but maybe the focus there is wrong and I need to go in a different direction, we’ll see.

Just posted a new video link on funny4me. First posts in a long time. Its pretty funny. It’s the video of the numa numa guy singing the whos watching me song from the Geico commercials. I love the little gecko in the background.

Got my new snowboard boots today and wore them all night. Pretty sweet. Okay I need to start getting more sleep.

Bored.

I downloaded Rob and Big seasons 1, 2 and 3. I have started with season 1 obvi, and I’ve been loving them. Helps that I skateboard, and they have a fair amount of skateboarding in them. I will probably blow threw these show in a few days this weekend. They are really short with out having to see commercials.

Funny4me.com update: I am going to change the site so that its all automatic. I am going to RSS feed content from other sites, and be the middle man. It’s like work to sit on the net and search for videos, then post them. Even though I have a friend that helps with content. Still hard to keep motivated to do that. We’ll see how it goes.

Looking at mortgage rates…

For a few years now I’ve been coming up with different ideas for websites. Im getting the feeling that I am just a step behind. Some of the sites I have implemented and some I haven’t wet through with the idea.

I’ve spent countless hours on a couple of them and they are ok. Nothing to brag about. I think I just have a lack of motivation to actually follow through with it. I get into working on a site for a little while then I lose interest or switch my interest to something else, like my car. wha wha

My friend and I have been thinking of ideas recently. We know we want to do something web based and easy for us to keep up to date.

My first website project was funny4me.com. It is currently on its second version and has been doing well so far. It gets a decent amount of hits. My co-workers are now visiting the site without my telling them. Thats a good sign. The website is a place to post funny videos and funny pictures found on the net. These types of sites are a dime a dozen. Yet the successful ones are big money making sites. I need to be able to get there.

The second site I made was much more successful and has far less visitors so far. Moneyanswertree.com is a financial advice Q&A website I made because I became very interested in personal finance. I made the site for as a place for young professionals like me to post their questions and get feedback from other readers in the same boat. Getting people to go to the site and ask questions is the hard part. When anyone emails me or posts questions we get back to them in less than 24 hours(usually). Still needs a lot of work before the site is easy to manage and starts paying dividends.

I’ll stop there because I feel like this is a long post which provides no useful information

We have been working on the new design and cleaning up all the old content for a relaunch of the site. We hope that with a fresh design and some new content the site will pick up again.

Check out the site for some old laughs and be ready for some new stuff to come. The site is under construction so you may see the design change over the next 2 weeks. Let us know what you think.

Funny4me.com

Just what the title reads. I got my first google adsense pay out yesterday. Not much, but better than no 100 dollars right? I got most of the money off my first site www.funny4me.com which I started in late 2006. I haven’t done anything recently to the site and its still been getting random hits and clicks.

Mysteriously all the categories are blank, I think something got messed up when upgrading to a new version of wordpress. I have to work on fixing that.

I recently had a big spike when that Justin Timberlake clip with Beyonce came out. Over 2500 hits in 4 days, and I didn’t even have the correct video on my site. People found my site from the keyword: ‘justin timberlake snl’.

My other site which is responsible for about half the income, is www.moneyanswertree.com. A financial advice, question/answer site for young professionals. The site started in Nov. 2007, and has been doing well since. Although recently its lots a lot of readers, because we are too busy to post stuff everyday. We need to hire a writer.

The past couple days I have came across a few sites that have inspired me to get back on track and make something cool again. The last cool thing I made on my own was smalpster.com. It was a small social networking site built entirely in flash/php. Flash was the front end and php/mySql were the data drivers.

That project has ended a while back, and I no longer have a link to the project. I still have all the code somewhere, but will probably never look at it again. I look towards the future! I “completed” that project in summer of 2004. So social networks were pretty new, and just brewing then. I missed the facebook boat by only a few months. First month I had about 50 registered/active users. When flash wasn’t up to par with what I needed it to do, the project died.

Moving on, the site that has been driving me in my career has always been. 2advanced.com. They have always come out with the best looking, most advanced sites. I’ve always loved their style. Recently my co-worker sent me her brothers company’s page. barbariangroup.com. They have come up with a lot of cool sites that made its way around the internet a few times. Check out their portfolio, I am sure you have heard of the Subservient Chicken. My co-workers brother, is the co-founder of the company, and was the one that made the Subservient Chicken. (to my Needham peeps, He’s from need’s)

The other two sites I saw made me want to work on my other site moneyanswertree.com. I haven’t had much time to improve it or change the looks of the site, but it needs work. The two sites are:
filife.com, and yankodesign.com. filife.com is a site similar to moneyanswertree, and is doing a good job. The site looks very nice and is organized well. yankodesign is another cool site that looks pretty. I wish I could do that.

MoneyAnswerTree is a site I started focused on personal finance for young professionals. The site has been slowly getting recognition and more and more hits each day. It’s been quite a bit of a roller coaster as far as hits go, but yesterday it reached a high of 111. That was the first day the site reached over 100 hits in a day. 93 of those visits were Absolute Unique hits. That is impressive for us and we are really happy about it.

We’ve recently added the feedburner counter on the site which displays the number of readers subscribed to our news feed. We currently have 27 readers, and it’s nice to know when we post something that we are actually talking to someone other than ourselves and our friends.

Revenue from the site has seen a large increase the past 2 months due to a post about the IRS rebate check. This post alone is responsible for 43% of all the page views on the site.

I just found out what this means. PR3 is a google page rank of 3 out of 10. Google.com, funny enough, has a page rank of 10. I looked up my other sites and they all have a page rank of 1. funny4me.com, moneyanswertree.com, and turboawds.com. I want to make these pages have a higher page rank. My most dominant site is moneyanswertree.com. To get this page rank up I need to get other web sites to link to me. For this to happen I need to be posting more quality post for people to track back and link back to me. The majority of the posts are a little off focus and are links to other posts. My one article that has been getting the most hits is one I posted about the IRS rebate check When I first published that post it didn’t seem to get lots of hits right away, but over the past few months its been climbing in hits. I’ve tried to used this entrance page as a way to get users to stay and signup. We’ve got a couple more users, and a couple new comments on that link. The sites also made an average of $80 per month in commissions.

In an effort to provide better content and increase my page rank, I will have to go around the net and start getting other sites in my niche and social networking sites to link back to me. I’ll have to do a little more research on this to find out the best ways to do this.

I opened up funny4me to the public to add anything they want because I have no time. I’ve been slacking.