In order to make money blogging, it’s important to diversify your revenue streams. Many bloggers make the mistake of putting 100% of their faith into just Google AdSense. I recently added Kontera in-text links for a new revenue source, and you can do the same. Just signing up and putting their default code isn’t enough to maximize your earnings though.

Kontera provides a few different things you can do to customize your advertising to help juice every penny into your revenue. This is what your default ad tag will look like:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var dc_UnitID = 14;
var dc_PublisherID = XXXXX;
var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue’;
var dc_adprod=’ADL’;
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://kona.kontera.com/javascript/lib/KonaLibInline.js”></script>

This just makes your links the default blue, which most sites with a real design shouldn’t have. On top of this, it can also make things like your sidebar and your headlines links. This is no good, and we need to do something about it.

Change The Kontera Link Color

To change the link color simply change this line:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue‘;

You can switch blue to any hex color code. For example this would make the links black:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘#000000‘;

Most people will normally make the color of the Kontera links the same color as their regular links. The main difference is that Kontera links are double underlined, but it’s still a little iffy in terms of users being tricked into clicking a link. I personally decided to make the links green when my links are blue.

Target A Specific Area

You can target a specific area of your page, for example if you just want a specific paragraph to get linked. Simply add a class=”KonaBody” to a section of your code, and everything in it can get linked by Kontera. For example:

<div class=”KonaBody”>This text can possible get linked by Kontera!</div>

Restrict Areas From Getting Linked

If you don’t want an area to get linked simply add a class=”KonaFilter” to a section of your code. For example if you don’t want the sidebar linked you can do something like:

<div id=”sidebar” class=”KonaFilter”>This code will note get linked by Kontera</div>

Easiest Thing To Do In WordPress

All I did in WordPress was add a class=”KonaBody” to the div=”content” section. This will cover all of the content you write, but filter out the side bar, footer, and header.

All of the buzz on the internet lately has been all about blogging and making money through advertising. That’s not the only way to make money, eCommerce is still alive and kicking! One of my companies, ActiveTuning, sells aftermarket parts for Nissan and Infiniti that we manufacture. Practically 100% of our sales are done online through our eCommerce platform. It’s a part-time gig for both my partner and I, yet we still manage to pull in 6-figures for gross sales. I designed and developed the website on my own, so there was no cost to building it. The eCommerce platform used is an open-source solution called osCommerce. I have heavily modified it to fit our needs, and even still there are many things I would like to change to make things better and more efficient…but it works. It has handled thousands of customers and thousands of orders without a hitch.

osCommerce has been in development for a very long time, especially the upcoming version 3.0…a drastic improvement over todays outdated version. The developers just recently released a public alpha version (version 3.0 alpha 4), which allows us to get a sneak peak at what the final version 3 will look like. I installed it on a local test server to see what some of the changes are, and I was very impressed. The usability of the administration interface is so much better, but there are still many improvements needed. Many of the improvements that I can think of, are on the roadmap for future alpha releases before the final version is announced. Among the “must-need” features that need to be added in my opinion:

• Product Attributes Implementation
• Purchase Without An Account
• Gift Vouchers And Coupons
• Can’t edit a shipping or billing address
• Weight to attributes

These are all features that are listed to be implemented before the final release. There are still some major features I feel are not included but need to be:

• Needs support for tracking #’s in a customers order status
• Better support/customization for your standard shipping modules (USPS, UPS FedEx, DHL)
• Better support/customization for your standard payment modules (Google Checkout, PayPal Pro, etc)
• Ability to edit orders in the administration interface
• Ability do add new orders in the administration interface
• Option for customer to agree to statement when ordering certain products (for example a liability agreement)
• Better methods for supporting products that offer free shipping
• Better support for customizing products weight. For example many shipping companies deal with dimensional weight, not just regular weight. Also some sort of per-product override for weight classes.
• Better reports
• One click access to orders. Currently you click a line item, it then reloads the page and highlights it, then you can click into it.

Although there is a lot left to do in my opinion, they are on the right track. Here are some screenshots of some of the new improvements so far:

The new installation interface. This is a huge improvement over the old interface, and makes installation much simpler.

This is your standard product page

The administration now supports user access levels. This is a major feature that should been added in the first version! We’ll see in another screenshot that we can now create users and give them access to certain areas of the administration.

This is the new “welcome screen” for the administration. Also a huge improvement over the old version. It provides easy access to commonly accessed information.

The new menu system provides a clean and easy to use dropdown. This is a 200% improvement in usability.

Here is the feature that allows you to provide certain levels of access to specific users.

You can now enter a new customer into the system manually. In the old version you would have to register somebody through the actual frontend of the eCommerce site. Not very professional.

Here is the new order page. It is now nicely organized through the use of tabs which don’t require a refresh on the page…so it’s fast.

A new template system will allow for much easier customizations to your store. Frontend code is also being updated to be XHTML compliant, rather than an outdated table layout.

A new services section lets you turn on and off various features with ease. This is huge for me, because I had to literally take off all features manually on the version I use.

Here is the new add product page. Like viewing an order, everything is organized through tabs. An HTML editor is now an option.

I’m very excited as we get closer and closer to a final version. I hope that more of the features which I feel need to be added will be.

If you use osCommerce for your eCommerce solution, how do you feel about it? If you use something else, tell us about it, and any downfalls you’ve had.

From time to time I will be linking to posts I find interesting from readers that comments on posts at my blog. Want to possibly get a link in a future post here? Consider posting more comments, and I may just find something of interest at your site/blog!

Knupnet - Do You Twitter? And Why? – I’ve heard about all the Twitter buzz, but I really can’t get into it. I would rather spend my time in other, more valuable ways. See what “Knup” thought.

OfZenAndComputing – Clean Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher, or in the Sink – I go through keyboards way too often…and mainly because they get pretty nasty, and I don’t want to deal with popping all the keys out and cleaning it all up. Check out this washable keyboard solution.

Financial Imbalance - How do I know if I am in a position to buy a new home? – If you’re thinking about buying a house, Thomas brings up some excellent questions to ask yourself before talking with the bank or mortgage broker.

Luke 16.10 – How to save money on groceries – Luke provides tips on how he saved 25% on his monthly grocery bill. With a family of 3, little savings here and there can make a drastic difference in the amount of total money that can be saved. Start with one that can add up to a lot.

Green Llama – Blogging Mistakes Group Project Results – If you are starting a blog, the best thing you can do is learn from other people’s mistakes first, so you don’t make them yourself. The all-mighty Green Llama has compiled a list of other peoples posts where they talked about the mistakes they made.

Community Spark – Improving your website – Martin speaks about the fact that just designing and launching your step is not the final step. He reiterates the importance that constant tweaking and changes are necessary to make your site the most optimal and efficient.

Rehuel punt kom – From fulltime webdesigner to fulltime blogger in 7 steps – Rehuel talks about how he is making the transition from a web designer to a full-time blogger. Find out what steps he is taking to make the transition.

HarpzOn – Predicting PageRank For New Blogs – Mitch came across a neat tool that predicts what your Google PageRank will be on their next update. Mitch just launched his blog in March and is already predicted to be a PR4, exciting stuff!

Buying something on the internet with a credit card? Don't get stuck with high interest rates! Use new Visa cards to keep your rate low and look at all of the low interest credit cards when choosing a credit card. The best credit card services are the ones that reward you for using them.'

Real estate over the past 7 years has gotten absolutely crazy. While it has come down some, it still seems as if prices are still at ridiculous prices. A condo should not cost well over $300,000! Richard Hodge from SpeculativeBubble.com created a rollercoaster simulation based on percentages of pricing that US housing has gone up or down since 1890. It’s an excellent simulation, but the chart after the video really shows how drastic this pricing has been. It makes you think that prices have to come down…and come down hard. Whatever goes up, must come down, right?? How have prices been in your area?

Here is the chart that shows the actual pricing:

Instead of checking your basic stats like Alexa, Technorati, backlinks, etc by going to each source individually, you can save time with popuri.us. You simply enter your URL, and the tool will list:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Complete Rank
• Google, Yahoo, and Live backlinks
• Technorati Links
• Bloglines Subscribers

It’s a nice, easy to use interface, that shows all your stats in one place. If they continue to add more dynamic stats, it will get even better. I did notice that for some sites it doesn’t give you all of the stats, for example my blog didn’t show Technorati links (kept trying to load).

For anybody interested, it looks like the site is for sale.

Just a note to all of you folks running WordPress. There is a new update that mainly is a security patch. The WordPress people are being a lot more careful about the download files so there is no security issues as there was in the past.

I am a huge car buff, and since before I could drive I had a timeline of cars that I had to have in my lifetime. They were:

1. BMW M3
2. Dodge Viper
3. Ferrari
4. Lamborghini

I have already had Dodge Viper, but I would like to get a GTS at some point…so I keep that on the list. I could have easily had an M3 by now, but my ActiveTuning company specializes in Nissan and Infiniti. This means that by me buying and driving a Nissan or Infiniti, I am promoting my business, and also using the expenses as a write-off for tax purposes…drastically reducing my overall cost in automotive expenses. I am thinking that in the next year or so I will be switching out my Infiniti G35 Coupe with something else…and an M3 is at the top of my list right now.

The version of the M3 (the E92) is set to be released in the US mid-next year, and all we got so far were concept pictures. Autoweek finally got a hold of a few production picture, which gives us a look at exactly how the car will look in real life. The new M3 will now have a V8 with 420hp at 8,300 rpm. There are many other new technologies which make the car very exciting, read more about it in the Autoweek article if you want to know more.

I think the car looks great, and very agressive…which is how an M3 should look. I personally think from an exterior-standpoint, the older E46 looks better (but maybe that will change when I see it in person). Here’s a picture of the current E46 M3:

I think the interior on the new one definitely looks much more refined though. As of right now, I’m leaning more towards getting a used E46. For those of you that want similar E92 looks, but for a better price, consider the 335i coupe. It’s not as aggressive, but does feature twin turbos and an underrated 300hp starting at $40,000.

Update 4/7/2007: A new batch of official pictures has been posted at Autoblog.

Introduction

I officially launched this blog on March 9th, which gave it 22 days to show some results for the month. Overall it did fairly well for the amount of time I have to spend on it. This blog is not my very top priority as I have other businesses that I run, which do require a lot of my time. I’ll take you through the various parts of the blog to show how they did. You can learn from some of the things that I did, and compare to see how the results actually looked. We’ll start off with traffic:

Traffic

March generated 6,323 unique visitors, 10,1272 pageviews, averaging 1.61 pageviews per visitor.

One of the most important statistics you can look at is your new visitor vs. returning visitor report. This will show you if you are able to retain your readers or not. The only thing you need to make sure to account for is spikes in traffic on days where something may have been linked on a bunch of other sites. More than likely most of that traffic is new, and will bring down the monthly average. A good thing to do is look at a few days where your traffic is pretty stable. Your returning visitor rate should be more accurate in terms of average traffic flow.

Monetization

My purpose of this blog is not to subsidize any sort of income really, but anything extra is always nice. At this time, I’m more worried about generating traffic then actually making money. With traffic comes money, so worry about the first before worrying about the latter. During March I was running just Google AdSense. I did a few things to better optimize the ads, and still plan on doing some more obvious things in the near future. March brought in $5.28 on 15,360 impressions for just a $0.34 eCPM. There is much room for improvement on this, so it will be interesting to watch and see as this hopefully grows.

I have also added Kontera in-text links for April, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that does at the end of the month.

RSS Subscribers

My RSS subscriber count is averaging close to 50 by the end of the month. That’s not bad considering it was 0 less than a month ago. A huge help was the site of the month article John Chow had written about. Since many of his readers have similar interests, they seemed to show a liking over here as well. My goal for April is to have my RSS subscribers averaging over 100 by the end of the month.

The one trend that is noticeable, and will continue to be noticeable, is the drop in subscribers on Saturday and Sunday’s. I purposely try not to post content on these days, so there will obviously be a drop in traffic and subscriptions.

Search Engine Goodness

I was seeing search engine results very early on in this blog, so it’s interesting to see what people are searching for to get here. This can also drastically help with the direction that you can write your content to maximize the amount of traffic that comes in. Search engine traffic is very valuable because it’s targeted traffic. Readers searched for something specifically, and the hope is that they came to your site looking for just that. I had 176 visits from organic search engines (Google, MSN, search, and AOL). The top 10 keywords that were searched to get to my blog in March are as follows:

1. 2008 infiniti g37 coupe
2. 2008 g37 coupe
3. www.nevblog.com
4. david pitlyuk
5. 2008 infiniti g37
6. infiniti g37
7. powercast ipo
8. mercedes mansions
9. heli expo
10. www.davidpitlyuk.com

We can obviously see here that the keyword which brought the most traffic was in regards to my post about the new 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe. I wrote this post early on when the car was just released and before many other sites had written about it. This gave me an advantage in the Google SERP, and put me on the top of results for some time before some of the bigger sites were able to get their content in. Just doing a preliminary look at April stats, I can see that not as much traffic is coming in from the same article, but I’m seeing a ton of traffic coming from my post on the next multi-BILLION dollar idea. In that post I talked about a company called Powercast, and how I would love to invest in them. While many other articles have been written about Powercast, not many have written about investing in it. This gave me a powerful advantage in search results, as it is a company which many people are seeing the potential for making some money on. In fact the top 5 keyword referrals in April so far all have to do with investing in Powercast. Just some food for thought.

Popular Pages/Content

It’s important to look at the most popular pages, as it can give you a few clues to make your blog better. It can tell you what articles people are most interested in reading and what articles are getting the most linkbacks. This way when you sit down and think about what you should write about, you should have a general direction to lead you in. This can also help you create a niche for your site if you do not already have one. Here’s a list of the top 10 most popular pages on this site for March:

1. Lamborghini As A Piece Of Art
2. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter
3. An Ugly Lamborghini?
4. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
5. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
6. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia
7. How I Got Over 2,000 Visitors In The First Week With $0
8. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
9. Who Is David Pitlyuk?
10. Cars (Category)

The top 3 posts were fairly popular on a few of the automotive forums that I am a part of, and therefore generated a good amount of traffic. Take a look at the top referrals analysis below to get more of an idea where my traffic came from.

I had 38 posts in the Month of March averaging 1.7 posts per day. According to my article on the number of optimal posts per day, I’m right in line! Keep in mind that I try not to post content on the weekends as I believe that’s time to try and do some relaxing.

Top Referrals

1. StumbleUpon
2. My350Z
3. Autoblog
4. G35Drive
5. JohnChow
6. Maxima.org
7. NissanClub
8. ViperClub
9. Digg
10. Google Reader

StumbleUpon brought 1,067 visitors that averaged 1.91 pages per visit. The majority of the traffic came from two articles that were “stumbled”. I didn’t learn about StumbleUpon until this month, but it’s a great concept…look for a post specifically about this in the near future. My350Z, G35Drive, Maxima.org, NissanClub, and ViperClub are all forum communities that I’m a part of. You can read more about generating traffic from forums in my post How I got over 2,000 visitors in the first week with $0.

If you don’t already know, in-text advertising are those links that display an ad when you hover over them with your mouse. I’m not a huge fan of this type of advertising, but I’d like to see how they perform on my blog. You will notice that my real links are blue, and sponsored links are green with a double underline.

Kontera used to only accept publishers that generated at least 500,000 pageviews a month. This blog is new, and not doing anywhere near that, but Kontera decided to let smaller sites into their network. Their main concern is accepting sites with quality content, which mine passed their test.

John Chow has Kontera implemented on his site and generated over $300 in 12 days. Keep in mind his blog generated 313,000 pageviews in the same month. I’ll recap how it does on here for the April review in early May. Stay tuned.

If you have been running Kontera, or even IntelliTXT, how has it worked out?

Have you ever gone to a sports game or the beach, but not had a way to bring a drink with you? Never fear, just pick up some Reef Dram sandals. Doesn’t make sense to you yet? The sandals have a built-in flask that can fit 3 ounces (or 3 shots) of whatever liquid your heart desires.

The sandals feature a canteen with a screw that can be opened up using an included key, a mini-funnel, and measuring bar to see how much liquid you have left. You can pick a pair of these up for about $45.

These are in succession to the Fanning’s which feature a bottle opener on the bottom of the sandals. My roommate has these, and loves them.

This is a great example of a company thinking outside of the box. While the products aren’t the most intuitive thing in the world, it’s enough to create a buzz and generate a ton of sales that otherwise would not have had any attention.