Learning about Bandwidth

One of my sites ran out of bandwidth last week. It was only for a few hours before I noticed it, but since it happened, my traffic has taken a serious dive. This is so frustrating, since I've been working really hard on this site to get it more traffic. Previously, hostgator would send me an email at hitting the 80% mark....but no emails this time until it was too late. Grrrrrrrrr

Shaking things up and Having Some Fun!!

I've been trying to get my groove back. I was just reading Jenn's blog and that girl is rocking! It is a blast when each month you are making more money than the last ...it can be a real kick! Her hard work is paying off! It is great to see.

Me, however, my earnings have been pretty flat and steady since April. Some streams of income go up!! some go down!! but all in all it has stayed around the same amount of money for the past six months. Previous to April, I experienced exponential growth!

So, I thought I'd have me a little fun and try some new things and get things rocking again! Soooooooo, I started a contest on one of my blogs ...my first step was to email 12 companies and ask for donations. I promised primo real estate promoting their product for 1 week with photo and links back to their site. I've heard back from 7 in the positive and the donations are piling in by postal mail. Each week, I will giveaway one of the donated presents to someone who comments on a post or signs up for my newsletter. (kind of win win for everyone!) I figure I'll get enough loot to give away one a week during the holiday months of November and December.

We'll see how it goes, it hasn't been too much work yet, and the donations have been freaking amazing!! People are sending 2 or 3 items when I only asked for one. Each item goes for about $20.00. Anyway, it seems fun and hopefully it will bring a bit of a buzz to this particular blog and get some energy flowing. I'll keep you posted!

If any of you out there have ever held a contest and you have any advice, please leave them in the comments! I'd love to hear if there are any pitfalls I should avoid.

Terrifying!!

BJ over at Adventures in Net Marketing had this to say:

I don't know about you, but I've been feeling really frustrated with my Adsense earnings lately. My sites that carry Adsense ads have been going up in traffic - most of them get double the amount of traffic they did last year at this time. And my CTR has been improving, so I've been getting a lot of clicks.

And yet my Adsense revenue is only at about 30% of what it used to be.

I find that TERRIFYING!!!

I just looked at some of my stats and this is completely unscientific cause I am taking adsense across several sites and visitors across one site and I am not even considering CTR. but here goes:

sept 2005 414 unique visitors $ 13.00 adsense earnings
sept 2006 16000 unique visitors $260.00 adsense earnings
sept 2007 26000 unique visitors $920.00 adsense earnings

Anyway, we all know that adsense can't be relied upon and we all need to diversify.

My problem is that I am continually researching and developing and not enough action. I'm a sucker for new software and not enough action. I love to read forums and not enough action. I love to read the exploits of other online marketers but not enough action.

I'm off to work on my sites.