Tag: Website

200,000 Views and Making My First $10

Bags of $
With all the concentration on getting my blog, which will from now on always be referred to as my “website” set up with ads from Google and having made the switch from wordpress.com to Bluehost as my server, it came as a surprise when I finally hit the 200,000 views and on the same day, I realized that I had made my first $10.

Excitement levels soared, but not too far as, let’s face it, 10 bucks doesn’t go as far as it used to and I’ve been hovering around the 200,000 mark for a while now. Still, it proves that in this world, whether blogging or not, you have to prime the pump a little to get more exposure.

I’ll explain.

I made the decision this year to go outside my comfort zone and leave WP dot com and head over to dot org. The main reason was that I could put Google Adsense on my site. While I may never make enough to buy more than the occasional latte, this move puts me more firmly where I want to be. Self employed working mainly on my site and heading (very slowly) to Bing and Google News land.

After two years, or so, of folks telling me that I have “mad writing skills” (sorry that was not actually what they said, but merely my translation) and that I was being foolish by not concentrating on my own site. Since I’ve been blogging since 2011 and worked as a journalist for nearly two years, and an editor for the same amount of time, it seemed to be good suggestion.

Part of the reason for this move is to get rid of the nasty taste in my mouth from working for a con artist and the remainder of the rationale has to do with not having to write for any content mills. As I mentioned in my Inquistr article, there are plenty out there and while they seem to pay better than most, these…clowns, idiots people cannot seem to read a simple email.

*Sidenote* After telling me that my “sample” was not good enough and to write another one, I responded saying that with no specific feedback, I would not be writing any further “articles.” I got two more emails asking me to rewrite my sample article but neither one offered any feedback specific to the first one, as requested. My final email, which they obviously finally read, said bluntly “Stop wasting my time” and “read my previous emails.” *Long sidenote over*

Admittedly, I was not too upset about not being asked to write real, versus, sample articles as their requirements are 100 stories per month. Can we say Content Mill? With no proper Internet (I’m sure that Burger King pray for a day when I will have my own service to use and will no longer darken their towels.) I am in no position to work for any other publications that have that sort of workload requirement.

I have noticed that my recaps and reviews for TV shows and films are growing in terms of view counts and that a lot of show’s writers and creators are interacting in a positive fashion. On top of all this great news, I have also made money. My cup runneth over or at least it will when I have verified my address to get paid.

200,000 views on my blog (website) is a milestone. Back when I first started all this blogging stuff, it was a hobby meant to see if I could still write. It had been years since my journalism course and while writing classes were taken at University and as part of the courses offered via the USAF I did not submit much in the way of news articles and as for creative writing…

Time will tell whether this milestone will mean anything or not in terms of site growth. Regardless of just where this all ends up, I will continue my Bing and Google journey and keep doing the reviews and recaps while fitting in the odd film review. The only thing that will slow me down will be lack of funds or food, which really amounts to the same thing.

Life is interesting, although not always in a good way, and if I can just survive riding a schwinn bike 12 miles plus seven days a week at (almost) 57 in high temperatures or storms and not be hit by some octogenarian driver I may just start to make some real money…like $20.

I would carry on about this exciting event but there is research to be done about whether or not a “donate” button can be added to a page with Adsense ads on it…

What is so Great about Reddit?

When I first started blogging on WordPress, I found to my delight that they had widgets that allowed you to share things to reddit. I was aware of this website through my daughter’s work on Video Games Blogger.

It is used by quite a few games channels and websites as a means to publicize their articles. I had never used it before and was eager to give it a go. The first ever post I uploaded to reddit was a post about the film Stake Land the referrals I got from reddit alone helped to push my view count up to 1051 views. In one day. For one post.

I was, in a word, ecstatic.

I started sharing all my posts with reddit and I also interacted with the folks who had commented on my upload. Everything went swimmingly for a while, then…zilch, nada, and zero, “zip-ah.”

Now, I don’t have a full understanding of how reddit works. I am not the guru of networking and my rudimentary knowledge of the site could fill a matchbox, maybe. I do know that each category and sub-category is watched over by a sort of “mediator.” This man or woman tries to insure that the submitter abides by the rules of the site.

They also “weed out” the spam.

I’ve got a suspicion that as I used reddit a lot that I’ve been put on the naughty list.

I splurged and bought a “Gold” reddit account and I wished that I’d saved my money. So, okay, maybe I was spamming the site. I did create a little group of accounts so that I could keep submitting to the site. In my defence though, reddit is sort of wacky when it comes to submissions. You can take a day or two break from submitting and when you get back on the site to submit, they tell you, “You’ve been doing that too much lately, wait for 125 minutes and re-submit.”

What?

Due to this “apparent”  banning of my website I had to chuckle when Tyson over at Head In A Vice mentioned it in a blog post. Because he’d mentioned it, I decided to give the reddit another shot.

The end result?

Zilch, nada, zero…zip.

In essence, no change at all; my website is obviously still on the naughty list. I don’t mind (like hell I don’t) but I’ve never gotten one word of why or how I got put on the list; if such a list even exists. It would be nice. I went through a short time period of getting thousands of views per day. I was so excited that it’s a real wonder that I did not have my heart attack sooner.

I am trying, though, to comply with Tyson’s Call to Arms to help publicize other folks’ blog posts, but, reddit is not one avenue that works for me. I have even tried “sharing” other blogs’ posts with the site and again, gotten no response.

So I’ll wait to see if I get taken off the naughty list, it has been about six months, and hopefully I’ll start getting more views again. If not? Well, I’ll continue to write, rant, and ridicule where I see fit. Despite my obvious preoccupation with them, numbers don’t really matter. Only the writing does and I’ll never stop doing that.

So there, reddit; put that in your metaphorical pipe and smoke it.

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