How's your holiday season coming along?

I'm curious how other people are doing during this holiday season. Personally, my adsense earnings are going through the roof. Which is great!

However, I spent a lot of time on incorporating affiliate links and I am not getting the returns I expected. Which is sad! ...I guess I have a bit of time left however.

In other news, my contest is going well! I let people enter by either commenting, signing up for my newsletter or linking to my blog (if they link to my blog, I quadruple their chances of winning) ...it has gotton me several non-reciprical back links out of the deal. (always helpful) Also, as people see the contest, other suppliers are getting on board, so it keeps getting extended and I am going to be giving things away every week through January. (originally it was going to end at xmas)

It is a bit of work, but fun and an interesting attempt to get some traffic!

Try Niche Rockets for $1.00

I have been a member of Niche Rockets for a couple of years. It used to be called Keyword Avalanche...but they have recently changed its name. It is a nice little community where lots of money making ideas are discussed quite openly. It is a good mix of occasional newbies and lots of old timers who really know their stuff. The volume of posts is not too overwhelming either, so once I got caught up with all the content, I feel like I can keep up with the the different threads and goings on....with out needing to spend a bazillion hours reading forums. In addition, they just started giving out 5 "businesses in a box" each month. Where they give you an ebook which you can rewrite, a website, a sales page, graphics ---the whole shebang if you are interested in creating your own products.

They are having a deal where you can sign up and try it for 7 days for $1.00 and then you can get in for $97.00 a month (rather than the $147.00 a month that the site advertises). I'd recommend trying it out for 7 days for $1.00 and if you don't like it, leave!!
Here's my affiliate link: Niche Rockets

Stats and more stats

From almost the beginning of my blogging career, I used mybloglog.com to keep an eye on real time stats. I liked it. It gave me a quick peek of how things were going and I could make adjustments if I was being hit hard by stumbleupon or if something screwed up and one of my sites was down for some reason. Recently, (and it is unfortunate because I just reupped 3 blogs for a total of $75.00) something has screwed up and I can't log in. It something to do with yahoo and mybloglog and the combination of passwords or something. I'm emailing support but I have my doubts...and since this is such a crucial time of year, I felt "naked" without my realtime stats. I use google analytics and awstats as well...but they aren't exactly realtime.

Anyway, I just signed up with mint at http://www.haveamint.com ...it is $30.00 for each domain but unlike mybloglog it installs on your server so you don't have to pay yearly. I only signed up 3 blogs to start, but I really like it! Great referrer info and great to see the search phrase activity ...a bajillion times better than mybloglog.

Another helpful stat program is crazy egg. http://www.crazyegg.com That program has taught me a few things as well ..and it is free ...can't argue with free!!

Google - do you think this is funny?

Above is the traffic from google for the past month or so for the blog that was stolen. As you can see on October 26th all traffic from google virtually stopped except for people typing in the name of my site. ...all long tails KAPUT!

This particular site went down because I ran out of bandwidth right around this same time (October 26th) and originally I thought the problem was somehow related. Now, I think it was just a coincidence.

As I mentioned before, this site doesn't get a ton of traffic nor is it a huge moneymaker for me but I have been working on it for two years and the traffic was finally getting to a respectable level.

I'm not sure what got it to pop back into google's search listings. It could have been one of the emails that I sent to google when I was reporting that a site stole all my content. I mentioned the traffic drop off starting on October 26th. I don't think that the site stealing my content was up and running all that long ...so I don't really believe it had something to do with kicking it out of the results.

Anyway, it looks like order has been restored. Just important to realize how vulnerable your income can be relying heavily on one search engine for traffic.

Someone stole my site

Never a dull moment here in Green Affiliate land!! Yesterday, I happened to notice that someone had stolen one of my sites. Basically they took all the content from one of my blogs and re-uploaded it on their own site in a different wordpress theme.

This blog gets about 5000 visitors a month ...like is this person stupid??? In other words, this is NOT my biggest money maker.

Anyway, just in case you would like to know what to do when someone steals your site, here is what I did.

1. I went to domaintools.com and looked him up. The brilliant man had been too cheap to pay for privacy protection so his name address and phone number and email for me to get in touch!! Lucky me!!

2. I called him and left a message and told him if he didn't take his site down in 24 hours I was going to report him to google adsense and my lawyer was going to show up at his home, after which I repeated his address!!

3. I waited 1 minute and then I reported him to google adsense. I clicked on "Ads by Google" on his site (oh no!! I mean my site!! but on his server) and then I clicked on "Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw" and I reported a violation.

4. I then went to google webmaster tools and clicked on "Report Spam in our Index"

5. Then I emailed the abuse address at godaddy where the domain name was purchased

6. Then I emailed the host who was hosting the site (I forget who is was, someplace in Canada)

Success!! Today the site is an apache generic host success page.

Oh, and since he was stealing not only every word I've written, he was also stealing all my images and the bandwidth to host them. This is the image I had him show on the top of his page:



If anyone cares: the site where he hosted MY site which is now taken down is: organicbabythings.com

Does anyone have a full membership to domaintools? Apparently he own another site and I'd love to continue to torture him.