Blog reboot
There are times when life gets in the way of fun projects. That has been the fate of Scraping Pennies as well, as the past two months made me put this fun project on hold. I had too many things going on simultaneously that needed my attention. And if you divide your attention between too many things, none of them get the attention they deserve. So I decided to choose. Some projects get all attention, others get none.
Scraping Pennies was one of the projects that got no attention at all. Well…I did check the stats every now and then. And it amazes me that there are 40 something subscribers that stuck around. A would like to give you a big THANK YOU, I appreciate your loyalty! The wait was not for nothing, because I’m rebooting the blog.
Some changes
First of all, I moved hosts. I consolidated all my hosting to one company, Dreamhost. All my hosting is still in the range of the regular shared hosting plans, and Dreamhost offers a great value solution. Their shared hosting plan allows you to host unlimited sites. So I could host How to be an Original and Scraping Pennies on the same hosting plan (and a bunch of other sites as well), instead of having a hosting plan specifically for either one of them. So this move saves me money.
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Weekly Income Report - 8
Every week on Sunday I will report on the performance of this blog. Target is to give full transparency on money and hours spent and money earned. DO ask questions if things are not clear.
It’s been six weeks since I updated Scraping Pennies. I wrote about what I did in these Six Weeks on my personal blog How to be an Original. In part it had to do with making money online, because I wrote an e-book and published it. It’s for sale now through the E-Junkie interface. I’ll post about my experiences and the results of the e-book on Scraping Pennies in a couple of weeks.
If you’re interested in reselling my e-book, there’s an affiliate program available that pays 50% of revenue. The book sells for $14, so you’ll earn $7 for each sale. Check out the e-book announcement here, and the sign up for the affiliate program here.
I paused my Google Adwords campaign at the beginning of the six weeks period. I’m going to restart it this week, there’s plenty of credit left for a lot of impressions!
For now, here are the numbers for Scraping Pennies. The numbers are cumulated over six weeks:
Key Performance Indicators
| No hours spent, so this cannot be calculated. | |
| $1.72 / hour | |
| Cumulative hours spent: | 52.75 hours |
| Cumulative result: | - $90.47 |
Money spent
Monthly payment for hosting ($8.32) is deducted from the budget, for July and August.
Total cash-out: $16.64
Money earned
None.
Hours spent
No hours spent
Budget status (this week)
| Balance (start): | $ 126.17 |
| Cash In: | $ 0 |
| Cash Out: | $ 16.64 |
| Balance (end): | $ 109.53 |
Weekly Income Report - 7
Every week on Sunday I will report on the performance of this blog. Target is to give full transparency on money and hours spent and money earned. DO ask questions if things are not clear.
This week I had virtually zero activity online. Not on my personal blog How to be an Original, not on Scraping Pennies and not even on Twitter. The biggest reason is because I started to write an e-book, related to How to be an Original. I’m going to use E-Junkie to sell it. When I set it up, I’ll post my experiences here.
My Google Adwords campaign is interesting. Massive numbers of views for the advertisement, but not that many clicks. Somehow I’m not too unhappy about it, because the blog is shown to a lot of people. I know that there’s a lot of people that don’t even see Adsense ads, but still the name is out there and helping to build the brand.
Key Performance Indicators
| $ 0.00 / hour | |
| $ 1.40 / hour | |
| Cumulative hours spent: | 52.75 hours |
| Cumulative result: | - $73.83 |
Money spent
No cash out.
Money earned
No cash in.
Hours spent
- Creating Content: 0.25 hours
- Monetization: 0
- Design: 0
- Technical: 0
- Marketing: 0
Total hours: 0.25 hours
Budget status (this week)
| Balance (start): | $ 126.17 |
| Cash In: | $ 0 |
| Cash Out: | $ 0 |
| Balance (end): | $ 126.17 |
Weekly Income Report - 6
Every week on Sunday I will report on the performance of this blog. Target is to give full transparency on money and hours spent and money earned. DO ask questions if things are not clear.
This week I spent most of my time creating content. The OIO Publisher tutorial took a lot of time to create, but I learned some more about the plugin while writing it.
I also started experimenting with advertising using Google Adwords. I had $25 worth of credits, because GoDaddy offered that with the sign-up of this account. I have set it up, but it ended up costing me $10 nevertheless, because you can’t start without paying. That was unexpected, but I decided to go ahead with it anyway. I’ll report on it later.
Key Performance Indicators
| $ 0.93 / hour | |
| $ 1.41 / hour | |
| Cumulative hours spent: | 52.50 hours |
| Cumulative result: | - $73.83 |
Money spent
$10 payment for signing up with Google Adwords.
Money earned
No cash in.
Hours spent
- Creating Content: 9.25 hours
- Monetization: 0
- Design: 0
- Technical: 0
- Marketing: 1.50
Total hours: 10.75 hours
Budget status (this week)
| Balance (start): | $ 136.17 |
| Cash In: | $ 0 |
| Cash Out: | $ 10.00 |
| Balance (end): | $ 126.17 |
Tutorial: Basic Installation OIO Publisher
This tutorial will guide you through the process of installing OIO Publisher Direct. At the end of this tutorial you will have:
- successfully registered an account
- downloaded and installed the plugin
- configured basic and advanced settings
- implemented an ad zone on your blog
- tested the purchase and payment procedure
- applied for a listing in the marketplace
OIO Publisher currently only supports self-hosted WordPress as a blogging platform. Other platforms are in the development roadmap, but are not released yet.
Registering an account
First hop on over to the website of OIO Publisher Direct. When you’re there, click on the register button.
After clicking that button you get a straightforward form to register your account. I recommend you start using the Pro (full feature) plugin, but as you can see there’s an option to register for a free account. In this tutorial I’m going to assume you’re working with the paid Pro version.
After this you’re ready to go to the next step.
Click to continue »
