I'm writing this one today because I am leaving for Christmas holidays on Friday. So my week isn't over, but it is definitely more positive than last week in which I recorded $0 in earnings.

So far this week I have earned $2.56. Also, I have trackers on my ads to see how well they do. Similar to what I have read on other sites, my large 300X250 ads that are inline with the article summaries are where all my money came from.

From the advice of a friend, I started using a free web tracker service. This is a must if you are trying to develop your site. It gives me an analysis on page views, unique visitors, returning visitors, and information on how people are surfing my site. I didn't have a clue who was going to it (if anybody), but I was able to see a few different people that had read my articles (and which ones).

I can officially say that my revenue did not come from friends and family, but legitimate internet traffic.

I also started to add more pictures to my blogs. I didn't want pictures to be chewing up my bandwidth, but I wanted my content to be the best it can be and pictures help that.

I am also still concerned about Google's indexing. They still have only listed my homepage in the index. I know longer have dynamic links and I have a regularly updated sitemap, which they have redownloaded. If you understand why they have not listed my other links, post a comment.

I have found several sites discussing techniques to build links, google rankings, and ultimately more traffic. I am going to continue building content and in January, my goal will be to try each one of these techniques (if they are suitable) and see where I can take my traffic levels to.

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If you haven't read John Chow's blog yet, you should check it out. This site is very informative for those of you looking to make a buck off your website or just increase traffic.

He is from Vancouver and his blog has been up for a little over a year. He actually prints some of his statistics and has documented what has worked for him in creating his website. He is one of the few people I actually believe when they give advice about developing a website for revenue purposes. I really find a lot of these "how to make money on the internet" sites annoying and lacking credibility, but so far I have to say he comes across as genuine.

When I started reading it he had made ad revenue in the hundreds a month for that month. I think last month he cleared 2000 bucks. Pretty impressive. There are lots of other interesting personal articles, which being a fellow Canadian, are quite interesting.

I have used his advice on adsense and actually verified it for myself. The 300 X 250 ads make way more money than the other ones.

To not be to one-sided, I would like to say the his site doesn't offer much in the way of how to generate traffic. He mentions in one post that he emailed around 200 other sites with similar content and asked if they would do a post for him, but he never clarified which of his sites it was for. I would really like to know how he got his traffic for his personal blog site (I know he did have articles hit up by digg, but he must have had readers before that point).

Make sure to check out his top posts section and do a search for adsense or recap articles. They will definitely have something useful in them for you.

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Well. Week 4 is over and I have had a bit more success. My earnings over the past seven days are $5.33. This is almost entirely due to a link exchange with johnchow.com. It brought over around 40 new visitors over a few days which boosted my google adsense revenue.

I know this still doesn't sound like much, but I officially have made more than double what my cash flow out is. This is still peanut compared to how many hours I have put into this thing, but it is still encouraging. I will have to achieve $100 total before I get a cheque as well, but I'm sure I can do it.

With the Christmas holidays almost over, I have not posted near as much as I thought I would. That will be the first order of business when I get back in the groove. Good content. Interesting enough, I have seen a StumbleUpon member who has listed my mod_rewrite tutoriral in one of his favorite sites. This has me thinking about some more technical tutorials. Do these pay though? I don't know.

Also of note, Google has finally indexed my other pages as individual links. Now my siteh as more than one search result which it didn't before. This happened before johnchow.com linked to me by the way.

So my recommendation after week 4 is to exchange links with another site. Preferably one with a higher page rank than yourself.

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