I like to have some transparency in a website so that others can see how things are done. This page is about how I earn revenue with this site. Basically a history of who I am using or have used for making a bit of money on this site.

I will also update the total amount I have made from each since I started Thoughts From My Life. I will still do the monthly recaps like I have always done, but this is a better summary.

Revenue Sources

Sorted by greatest to smallest for last month's revenue. The date I started with them is in brackets.

Link Worth (September 2007)

Total So Far: $40.19

I just signed up. They offer a variety of ad services and other tools. Their website is very, very impressive actually. Tools to help set up your meta tags and they have been very prompt with their reviewing of sites and such. Check them out.

Google Adsense (November 2006)

Total So Far: $305.70

Good old Google. The one everyone signs up for and uses (until the get banned for click fraud). You have seen it on a lot of sites, the banners and "Ads by Google" line written in the corner.

You only get paid when you have an account balance greater than $100 so this isn't a steady stream unless you can clear a hundred every month. They mail you a check the following month.

Kontera ContentLink (February 2007)

Total So Far: $155.22

I like these guys. You put a snippet of code into each page and it searches for keywords in the article and double underlines them. If a user hovers their mouse pointer over the keywords, a little ad pops up. They click, you get paid. Simple.

There are the same rules as Adsense. You need $100 in your account before they will pay you out. They have some simple features you can use to make sure some text does not have the keywords highlighted (like menus and titles).

Chitika (March 2007)

July 2007: $0.15

Total So Far: $2.00

This hasn't done very well, but I think it is my site. It is geared towards selling products and I don't write a lot about consumer items. Anyways, I leave it at the bottom of each article and if it collects a few cents then that is fine.

PayU2Blog (March 2007)

Total So Far: $663.23

The first paid posting company I started with. They were just getting started. I get an email every week or two with a list of links and keywords. I have to write a posting 60 words in length including the link and that is it. $5 a posting. A good way to pay your hosting bills when you first get started.

They pay you every 2 weeks through paypal as well, so you don't have to wait for a certain account balance.

PayPerPost (March 2007)

Total So Far: $43.45

Same thing as PayU2Blog except these are the mainstream guys. You write a post, it gets reviewed to make sure it is acceptable, it stays up for 30 days, they check it again, and you get paid through paypal. The posts vary from $5 and up depending on the credentials of your site. I have had postings that paid me $12.50 and qualified for a $15 one once.

AuctionAds (February 2007)

No longer using

Total So Far: $1.00

This is similar to Chitika, except they are affiliated with eBay. I didn't earn a single penny from them after a month so I just dropped them. They display current eBay items related to the posting. The user can click them and go view the item. If they place a bid, you get paid. My site isn't geared towards products so I think that is why it didn't work very good.

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Well, another month has gone by. April was officially my 5th full month having this blog running. I have good news to report again this month.

Absolutely everything was up. I am getting more traffic from Google then ever. I am just shy of 6000 page loads this month and over 3500 unique visitors. I just learned the other day that my site is now a PageRank of 2 going up from the previous 1. Here area few stats.

Thoughts From My Life Traffic Stats for April

I am still getting most of my traffic from Google, but my traffic is steadily increasing so that is good. Check out my traffic chart below.

I have come a long ways in terms of my traffic growth. A lot of other blogs have gone the Digg route are been aggressively pushing for links. I should have been doing more of this myself, but I am happy with my content too. My traffic growth has been primarily from Google. I posted articles with linkbacks on Ezine and have taken part in some linkback contests on Chow's site and a few others. Here is my traffic from the middle of December when I started tracking. It broke and stayed out last month.

Thoughts From My Life Revenue

My best month again. I cleared over $100 in profit this month! Here is the breakdown.

I still have a lot of my income from the bottom two which are paid postings. I am going to try and keep these at their current levels however, because these take more work. I only get paid when I write a posting for them. The first 3 sources are more passive, however. Most of the money comes from past articles I have written that show up in Google searches. Those 3 combined more than cover my hosting expenses ($7/month).

I wrote an article about passive and active blog income if you want to know more about it.

To see my all time stats and breakdown of revenue sources I have tried, check out Revenue Sources for Thoughts From My Life.

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I just posted my third batch of PayU2Blog paid postings. This company has worked out very well for me. They don't send me to many at any given time, I don't have to put them on the front page, and they are fairly decent topics to talk about. Some things I already know a bit about and have an opinion while others are new and I can read up on them a bit.

Needless to say, it gives me a bit of income to pay the hosting for this site and add to my little blogging experiment.

Here is a recap of this batch's articles:

• Golf Season Has Arrived - Titleist golf
• Drug Rehab Facilities - Drug rehab
• Get Tickets for the Game - red sox tickets
• Furnishing the House - home furniture
• Pens, Pens, and More Pens - writing pens
• Electronic Checks - electronic check processing
• Going On Vacation in Orlando? - Orlando vacation home

If you are looking to supplement your blog with a bit of income, check out PayU2Blog's website and apply.

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After trying DSQuake out the other day, I decided to give QuakeDS a shot as well. These are two completely different projects working on porting the original Quake for the PC over to the NDS. Since this guide deals specifically with QuakeDS you can read about how I got DSQuake to work as well.

Note: I am using the Pre-Release QuakeDS version that is marked 180207.

This is a discussion of my experience and how I got it working on my hardware. You can check out the homepage for QuakeDS at the Official QuakeDS Homepage.

How Well Does QuakeDS Work?

Reasonably well. The graphics look good, the frame rates are high, and the sounds are working too. The game has never crashed or frozen on me either. I can load it up and have an enjoyable playing experience for an hour if I want.

What can be fixed or improved on it? Not much. It used to be missing textures on the enemies and such, but not anymore. As of October 27, 2007 this game is fully playable all the way through. Only one downside to it right now.

• No music.

Differences Between DSQuake and QuakeDS

Both games work very well and I'm sure will get even better, but if you are looking to make a choice between the two for now, here is the pros for each one. If I list a point for one project, it means it isn't in the other or I didn't get it working. These are both from a standard installation without tweaking.

DSQuake

• Easier setup. One file, no patching, just rename it and copy it onto your memory card.
• You can pick your starting level.
• Controls feel better (technically same layout though).
• Multiplayer is available (apparently).

QuakeDS

• Really fast frame rates (DSQuake is still really good though)
• Sound effects are a lot clearer.
• There is a menu system.
• There is a config file to customize the controls.
• You can play the shareware or the full version of the game. DSQuake only comes with the shareware version.
• Explosion effects are implemented.

QuakeDS definitely delivers more right now on the all around experience and it is very simple to get running if aren't technically savvy. However, DSQuake is a bit easier to setup and includes everything you need in one download. QuakeDS is definitely worth if you want to play the original game in its entirety and with nothing lacking (except music).

Getting QuakeDS Working

I have a Nintendo DS Lite, SuperKey, and SuperCard DS Lite with a Kingston 1GB microSD card.

There are a few steps involved compared to its DSQuake counterpart.

1. Download the quakeds_271007_r3.zip file and save it to your computer.
2. Unzip the file and you will have the QuakeDS.nds file.
3. Download the DLDI patch file and patcher if you don't already have them at the DLDI site.

   I personally downloaded the SuperCard Lite DLDI and Win32 GUI DLDI Patcher.

4. Patch the Quake.nds file with DLDI.
   • I started the Win32 Gui by unzipping the Win32 zip file I downloaded and double clicking the dlditool32.exe file inside. It opens a window.
   • I clicked the ... button to the right of the DLDI File field and selected the folder I saved my SuperCard Lite DLDI file from above. The picklist then shows the available DLDI's.
   • Select the SuperCard Lite(TransFlash MicroSD) option.
   • Click the ... button to the right of the Binaries field. Select the file QuakeDS.nds from the zip file you downloaded earlier and click Open.
   • Click the Patch button. The existing QuakeDS.nds file will be overwritten with a new one.
   The file should now be patched.

5. Copy the patched QuakeDS.nds file onto your flash memory card.
6. Download the config.cfg file the author uses for settings.
7. Create a folder on your flash memory card called id1 off the root folder. Copy the config.cfg file into id1.
8. You need the original game file(s).
   1. If you do not have a version of Quake, download the shareware DOS version from id Software at the id Quake page. Install it.
   2. If you already have the full version installed you are good to go.
9. From your Quake installation, go into the ID1 folder and copy all of the .PAK files to the id1 folder of your flash card.
10. You should be ready to go. Try loading your QuakeDS.nds file.

After it loads, it shows a few errors for me on the bottom screen and that is it. It will shoot into the demo at startup. Press A to bring up the menu. You won't be able to read the Options or Help screens so don't even bother, you will just end up screwing up your settings. Press A to select single player and go from there.

Controls are basic. Use the stylus on the bottom touchscreen to aim and look around. Up for forward, back to walk backwards, and the left trigger fires your weapon. There is a config file and you can edit your controls while in the game. The only downside is that I cannot seem to map the double tap to be jump (like Metroid Prime Hunters).

Seriously download it and load it up. An awesome game.

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I discovered this trick the other day. I was creating my "Related Posts" feature on my postings and realized I could use this to do implement a search engine on my own site.

The trick is to use the Match...Against syntax implemented in MySQL 4.x and higher. MySQL document is on their site page Fulltext Search.

Create Indexes

You need to have FullText indexes on the columns that will be included in your search. If you are using a web hosting company then they will most likely have a web interface to easily do this. Otherwise you will need to use SQL commands to add it.

Once indexes are created, then you will be able to search these columns quickly.

Syntax

Here is a basic query. This is for my blog. I want to search the columns title, keywords, and postcontent for the given [searchstring].

The result returned will be all the articles that correlate according to the MySQL algorithm sorted with the most correlated rows at the top.

You will notice I have a search field at the top of my left menu. The search string you enter goes to a page that executes the above query and returns the results sorted with the most strongly correlated at the top. From their I create links, summaries, and whatever else to make the page look nice.

Try it out and see if you like the results.

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Crazy Weed Kitchen is one of the more neat little restaurants in Canmore, Alberta, Canada. Right on main street, it is probably the smallest restaurant I have ever been in. What it lacks in size it definitely makes up for in taste.

I have been there twice now. The first time I had ordered the Woody Allen pizza. I know, just pizza. However, this one had a variety of toppings including pickled artichokes that gave it an awesome taste. This past weekend, my wife and I had the Seafood Thai Red Curry and the Goan Shrimp Curry. Two excellent curry dishes with plenty of spice.

Anyhow, not much else too say. If you are in Canmore, go eat there. Be warned, you have to make a reservation otherwise you cannot get in.

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My site's traffic just up and died on Friday. I don't know what happened but I have dropped from 150 uniques a day to around 30. Most of my traffic comes from Google and this is who isn't sending me traffic anymore. Google does not have me very high in any of the search results now. I used to be in the top 10 for a of Nintendo DS articles and Airmiles or Aeroplan points articles.

How can this happen all of a sudden? I'm not really sure, but I have some assumptions. A number of things have happened recently that might have caused it. Here we go...

1. The new PageRank came out. I went from a 1 to 2. This should mean more traffic I would think.
2. I was part of a RSS readership signup posting that increased by RSS readers from 20 to 41 as of today. I think this would have absolutely no effect with Google, unless the see all the links and figure my site is about something else.
3. I neglected to update my sitemap.xml file, which Google uses, for a week and a half. I'm assuming this is it. They also haven't indexed the site since April 28th. Maybe my site has lots authority because it does not look like it was updated, even though there were new articles every business day.
4. I notice the look and feel of the Google Webmaster pages have changed. Perhaps there were some major algorithm changes that affect my site. I have not read anything on other sites about traffic changes though.

Updating My Sitemap

My sitemap does not get updated regularly because I haven't automated it yet. I wrote my own simple blogging system as part of my project to learn PHP so some things are not automated like Wordpress is.

So my next little project is to automate the creation of the sitemap.xml file. Look for a post in the near future that provides a brief tutorial on how to do it for yourself.

Where To Go From Here

I will just keep doing the same thing. Writing content and reading other blogs. Hopefully things straighten out. It was interesting to see how much traffic I actually get from Google though. I knew I was getting 85% of it from there, but it doesn't really hit home until the source of my traffic decides to cut me off. My blog feels like it did 3 months ago.

I think I will look at developing some more traffic sources. I do get traffic from some of the other search engines, but only a little. My readership is way up, so hopefully that continues. I think it is time to go back and submit a few free articles to the article directions and receive the free linkbacks as well.

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Well I'm trying to get back in the good books with Google now. I have an automated sitemap generator now. Whenever the front page is accessed and there is a new, post-dated entry, the RSS feed will be rewritten, the xml sitemap, and the html sitemaps.

If you want to see what a sitemap looks like, check out Thoughts From My Life's sitemap.

The basic structure of a sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-05-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>


My traffic dropped like a rock on Friday as Google is no longer sending much traffic my way. I don't really know what happened, but I didn't update my sitemap very regularly before that (once a week). This was because it was a manual procedure. Anyhow, now it updates whenever there is a new article out, and it sets the last modification dates for the home page and archive pages.

I'm going to start posting some more article to article submission directories and do the same stuff I did before.

At least my readers are up to 40 now.

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I fixed my sitemap.xml file to update automatically now and I am back to my original plan. Write content and see what happens.

Interesting enough, my loss in traffic does not correlate exactly to the lost revenue from less traffic. My traffic has dropped 76% from its usual quantity. This was effective Friday when I lost all Google search traffic, except for searches using my site's name explicitly. I don't know why I have been shuffled to the back pages of their search results.

Earnings With the Low Traffic?

My earnings are still pretty good, which pays tribute to John Chow's many articles on having multiple revenue sources. In particular, check out his article "Google Is Not My Biggest Income Source". I am still making around $2/day on PayU2Blog, $1/day on PayPerPost, over a $1/day on Adsense, but my Kontera has really taken a hit.

You can read about my revenue sources in "Revenue Sources For Thoughts From My Life". I outline each one I use and how much I have made so far. It is updated monthly.

What does this mean though? My revenue has only dropped around 15% to 20% at this point. Pretty good. The paid articles are based on ranking and prior performance so they will continue to pay out. My Adsense revenue has only dipped slightly, which might lead me to believe that the search engine traffic from the other sites might be more likely to "click" on my ads than the traffic I was getting from Google.

Time For More Analysis

I am going to do more of an analysis on this. I am going to collect some better statistics to look for a correlation. Traffic per day by source graphed along with the ads clicks. This should tell the story.

If anyone has any clue as to why I would suddenly stop showing on search results, please let me know.

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Well, I posted my fourth batch of PayU2Blog postings. This is my stable, "sell my soul" income that is the most consistent.

This weeks were vacation rentals again. This is hugely popular. I guess the owners of PayU2Blog must have a real tap on this market. I have done the vacation rental postings for North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida.

If you are looking to make some extra money, make sure to check them out. Very simple process, not too strict on the guidelines, and they are consistent.

Here are the articles for this week.

• Cabin Rentals in Tennessee - Pigeon Forge cabine rental
• Outer Banks Vacation Rentals - Outer Banks
• Need a Speed Improvement - Upgrade Your RAM - computer memory

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