So for the past two days my Feedburner RSS feed has been dead, which means I am missing my 1000 per day hits there for Google (so a very bad thing). I only realized that this was dead at the end of the first day, and then madly tried to figure out why there were no hits.

At first I thought it was due to me cleaning up my Google accounts, and maybe I had turned off my Feedburner access, but that turned out to be only a Red Herring. Feedburner was working fine, however, it did lead me to their Feed verification program.

I ran the feed verification and it BARFED at a specific line in Here Comes 2011 a post I did on Thursday (on my Mac). The error output was a little cryptic, but it seemed there was a character it didn’t like, so after I had backed up the HTML for the post in Notepad, I started removing characters, but nothing seemed to fix the issue. I finally lost my patience and deleted the entire post contents, and then the Feed went back to normal.

From this I figured that something in the post was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. This morning I remembered that I was experimenting with an Old Mac a friend had given me and tried to write a post on it, and for some reason this may well have inserted an odd character, and sure enough I found it, after looking closely at the Notepad backup that I had. I have no idea what keystroke combinations on the mac created this, but after removing the bad character, I ran the Feedburner Feed Tester and it passed no problem, so my RSS feed is now back up and alive.

Ypromogroup

So I have joined into another Social Media promotion group that will hopefully help with the Social Media work I am doing for THE Canadian Personal Finance web site. This is a keyword group on Twitter that is supposed to help out Yakezie members to promote their posts, doesn’t seem to be doing too much right now, but I’ll keep trying it out for now, and see if it helps.

Social Media

Other than that, I am finding Social media stuff helping, but it is a slow process. My Twitter and Digg readership slowly increases and I have not posted my own stuff onto Stumbleupon for over a week, so those goals are being met, but there does not seem to be a magic bullet for increasing readership (and thus revenues) just yet. Maybe there is a Tipping Point here that once I cross things will get better, who knows?

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The readership at Canadian Personal Finance Opinions is up sharply this past week, which may well be due to the current black economic world we are living in, but if it makes me money, I guess it is ok by me. Lost 1 more advertiser on my Text Link Ads list, which means less income there, but I had another inquiry about advertising directly on my site, which hopefully might pan out too.

Much more traffic coming from Google these days and their bots have been traversing my site like mad, which is interesting too. I have been pinging more regularly and I have increased the number of sites pinged when postings are done from dreamhost as well, so that might be helping too.

OK, when does the cash truck roll up to the front of my house and I start really rolling in the dough? Yeh, I am kidding.

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian Readers, to my American friends, happy Columbus Day.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Adsense
• How much can you make running Google AdSense profitable? — by …
• AdSense on Maps, API Next?
• Google Adds AdSense to Maps

• Related Blogs on Google
• Byline 2.0: The iPhone App For Google Reader Freaks
• Flash Games

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Page Rank Up

Canadian Financial and Consumer Opinions page rank seems to have raised up to a 2/10 in Google’s eyes, which is a start given it was at 0/10 for a very long time (due to unknown reasons). What caused this? I have no idea, I have been cleaning up the mess of cross-links (over 300) that was left from when I moved from Blogspot to Dreamhost and WordPress, so that might be a contributing factor, but if anyone else has a guess, I am open to suggestions as well.

WordPress Clean Up Algorithm

To clean up the mess that I left (without thinking) moving a mature blog from Blogspot, I have come up with the following algorithm.

Find all articles with canajunfinances.blogspot.com mention in it

For Every Article in list DO
    Find Every entry in article to canajunfinances.blogspot.com DO
         Find corresponding article in canajunfinances.com
         Replace original article link with canajunfinances.com entry
    DONE
DONE

This clean up was pretty darn painful with this web site, but it only had 150 entries and not a lot of cross links, however, with the Financial Blog, there are thousands of cross links I have been fixing by hand, and it is a slow and very painful process.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Got this book out of the Ottawa Public Library just to see what I might learn from it, in terms of making money with my sites.

“Make easy money with Google : using the AdSense advertising program” by Eric Giguere (the link is to the Ottawa Public Library) is a good book if you are just getting started in the business of trying to make money on the web.

Eric Giguere, walks the reader through how to start and gives a good initial description of Adsense. He also spends time pointing out to the reader that Content is King, and if you want to make any money, you had better write about stuff that someone gives a darn about (a continuing theme on this blog as well). His Design section runs through the importance of a good Web Page design and gives some examples using NVU.  Finally he gets down to brass tacks and outlines how to use Adsense to design eye catching ads and how to put them into your web site.

I got this book just to see if there was anything that I have missed in my years of attempting to make a buck on the Web, and I was pleasantly surprised to see confirmation that I was doing some of the right things and there was a good section where the Author explains how to submit your web site to the major search engines (and then I realized I hadn’t submitted this site to MSN search, so that was a good thing).

Lots of affirmation of the important points for making money the old fashioned way (earning it):

• Good content should bring traffic if you advertise it correctly
• Adsense needs to be tuned no matter what you are doing
• Write about something you care about, it will show

Interesting way of writing with a “conversation” going on through the entire book between folks who are trying to make money on line, and asking Eric questions.

Overall Rating: Good book for a beginner, worth a glance for others, just to fill in some blanks

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Back to trying to build traffic to both of the sites by submitting articles to Carnivals to see if we can build up readership and pass through rates here and at Canadian Financial Opinions. Mentioned at Business On Line and on Canadian Capitalist’s This and That #100 posts and both of those should help send more traffic through the finance site as well.

This site’s development continues as well, with experiments being done with community work and publishing posts in Facebook and such. My guess is my Facebook community is not large enough to add much extra traffic, but it’s a place to think about getting more traffic from.

Still no crawl of the site by any of the major search engines Yahoo, Google and MSN even though the site was added to their indexes, but this might take time as well.  My comment on John Chow drove a fair amount of traffic to this site, but still no search engine traffic at all.

Will post traffic pattern graphs later today or tomorrow. Have a great weekend all.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Went poking around to research more ways to make money on line and tripped over Joel Comm‘s Videos about how to make money with Adsense and such. I have not watched all the videos, but they are interesting, I am not sure I am learning anything that I have not already read, but if you are trying to learn how to make money with Adsense it is worthwhile having a look at some of these that is for sure.

Shameless self promotion and ads for E-books on how to make money, but then again, isn’t that what he is supposed to be doing? Some ideas that I have heard before:

• Blending your Adsense ads so that they look like they are part of your content
• Framing your content with ads
• Content is King, original content especially, I think that is very true.

I like the ideas, don’t think I agree with all of them, but with all books and ideas if I take away 3 new concepts or ideas, then it is a success, and I think this bit of research was a success.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I am attempting to banish my blogspot version of Canadian Financial Opinions from the Google Index.

First I added the all important META tag into the header for the site

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”

That should stop the Googlebot from wandering through the site and getting any data on the content that is in there. How long stuff festers in the Google search indexes I have no idea, but this is a start.

I also submitted a “Remove URL” request for the old site as well, that might help speed things up too. Right now my old site has a Page Rank of 3 whereas the new site has a Page Rank of ZERO (still or again).

Thanks to “Google Advertising Tools” by Harold Davis (O’Reilly) for ideas!

Hope this finally works!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Fricking Google strikes again and Canadian Financial Opinions is back to Zero page ranking, yet Text Link Ads has sold 7 ads on the page and I keep getting nutty Pay Day Loan Ad requests as well. I have sent yet another request to be reconsidered, but that is a futile attempt.

Traffic continues to be ok, but nothing great either. The RSS feeds continue to hover around 300 or so which is ok, but I still am not monetizing them, so it doesn’t really matter either.

Pepper Jam Ads now pepper my web page as well, we shall see if this helps with income.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So I guess my appeal to Google worked out, because now Canadian Financial Opinions Page Rank has returned to 3/10 (which is actually higher than it was before I moved the site to Dreamhost, so that is kind of cool too). With my current Alexa ranking this puts the web site back to where it was before I moved it in January, so now it is time to try to start building the business a bit more.

Text Link Ads still is my major source of income, well ahead of what I make on Adsense, and so far I do not have any direct advertising income for the site, which I think is where the money really starts coming in, so I have to look into those points this weekend as well.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I am bewildered and confused by Google’s alleged Page Ranking System. My family blog which is not known has a page rank of 1, yet my finance blog which is all over the search engines, has a page rank of Zero (0/10), I just do not get it. I continue to get more links and more comments, yet my page’s alleged rank does not increase ever.

Any hints from anyone?

Text Link Ads is my biggest money making advertising site too.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.