I'm trying Text Link Ads

I feel like this blog is a text link ads commercial sometimes. I'll show you!! I won't even link to TLA in this post. TLA has been running a "sale" forever where you can purchase $125.00 of ads for $25.00. I finally took advantage of this offer and I now have an ad on 5 blogs. I am using variations of a keyword phrase and I am linking to the home page for most of the ads and on one of the ads I am linking to a category ...it probably would have been smart to do more internal linking rather than the home page. Oh well, we'll see if I get anything from it. One or two of the blogs were very good deals in that I was paying $25.00 or $30.00 a month before the discount for a high traffic site. However, I was not able to order multiple months using this coupon. So I had to spread out my $125.00 to other less desirable sites. In other news, things are poking along. Revenue keeps going up.....slowly... and my dog went in swimming today for the first time this year.

Rest and relax

I have today off from my day job because of Patriot's day and the Boston Marathon. I feel extremely drained and needing rest. I want to do some work on my sites, however. And, of course I have freelance web work as well. (not in the mood for that today!) I just finished uploading the new text link ad plugin on six sites that allows advertisers to purchase ads on a particular post. I'm not exactly sure how it works but my text link ads inventory is pretty much sold out every month so this is an opportunity to increase earnings with Text Link Ads. ...just a side note...I do quite well with Text Link Ads, so if you are not signed up with them ...get on over there!
In related news, I am still trying to push my sites into new levels of traffic. I also believe I need to continue to build brand new sites as well. In order to increase my traffic (by increasing my links which will in turn increase my SEO) I contemplated purchasing a package for $50.00 to get one site submitted to 300 directories. Does anyone think this is worth it to increase traffic? I know I need to outsource braindead tasks like directory submissions, if I listen to the big players. I guess I am just cheap sometimes and want to do it all myself.

I also plan to start playing the article writing game. This weekend, I purchased Article Post Robot to assist me in that endeavor.

I can tell from this post that I am all over the map and not really focused. ...time to make a plan. I will research article writing tonight and start a push to do one month of article writing on one site. ...I'll start this article writing blast next weekend. In the meantime, I will keep on posting to all my blogs, to increase the content ...which will increase the traffic.

Selling ads directly - Synchronicity

Just met someone online this week. We're in a similar niche and we traded a bunch of link love ...but the cool thing that she is doing is selling a lot of advertising directly...rather than go through a middle man. It really woke me up a bit since up to this point I have sold all my advertising through text-link-ads and blogads. ...and trying a few other things with minimal success. Anyway, two days after meeting her, I got an email from a big shopping site wanting to buy advertising directly on my site. I'm just making up numbers here!! I figured I'd split the cut that TLA takes for the text link ads. (I think I under priced them!) Anyway, the person came back with no comment on my text link prices that I pulled out of thin air and wanted pricing on a 120x120 banner. I tripled the price from text link ad to 120 banner. Does that sound right? ....we'll see how it all goes. To keep things in perspective, I've made more money so far this year than I made all of last year....let's be thankful for what we got.
I love the version of "Be Thankful for What You've Got" from Massive Attack.
Happy Easter!

Update

well....I wasn't as successful with the travel blog this month as I had hoped. I posted to it 9 times. and submitted it to some directories. I got a few less visitors this month (492)...than last month (510). I am going to keep at it and keep submitting good content. I found a forum that discusses this particular niche and I will try to read and participate in the forum in order to get content (by learning what folks are talking about and what is important to them) and also to drive traffic to my site.

In other news, I hit my goal of $20.00 a day average from adsense (collected across all my sites combined). It is mostly from one site, however. Next goal ...$35.00 a day!!

I signed up with linkworth.com to try to sell more text links. I also signed up one of my sites with AuctionAds.com ...I'm not getting very targeted ads. It is a fashion site and the ads are playstation and things like that ...but I just looked and it is a wallet ...so it might work. Just trying to experiment here!!

Generally, I am very psyched how my online earnings are progressing. It really takes time day after day for things to pay off...no quick riches here in Internet land.