I’ve just cancelled my monthly subscription to the site creation service that I’ve been using since last October. In preparation for this I’ve been moving the 9 sites provided so far over to my own hosting with Midphase. This means I can sever all links with them and not have to pay any ongoing fees.

I’ve been unhappy with the service for a couple of months now but hadn’t really looked into what was happening. I was relying on their promises and claims of expertise. Not a good move.

Just to confirm how poorly they were doing for me, my Adsense earnings for June, across all 9 sites, amounted to just $3. I would have expected at least one or two sites to be approaching a dollar a day by now.

I was working last night on transferring one of my subscription sites to my own hosting, more on that in a moment.  Anyway, in the process I accidentally clicked on one of my own Adsense ads. It is so easy to do with the Dell ‘mousepads’ which are pressure sensitive. Moving the cursor around can be risky as it is so easy to press just a little harder and generate a click in error.

I mentioned a moment ago the subscription sites.  The news is worse than I realised. I checked two of the sites which use the same template, though on different subjects. It turns out that their html coding is really poor. For example, there are extra head and body tags in the page, along with over 50 other errors reported by theW3.org validator.

Buyer beware seems to apply here, for sure.

I’ve decided to end my subscription to a website creation service I’ve been using since last October. So far it has not produced any worthwhile returns and it is difficult to see when it might do so in the future.

What I get is a new website created each month with domain name, hosting and content provided. Each site is promoted for me and new content added on a regular basis. It is a complete package and costs a couple of hundred dollars a month.

The sites contain Google Adsense adverts with the intention of providing a regular and growing income.

Now, to be fair, no income guarantees were made but here is their statement:

“Let me get into the math behind this. If you spend $2400 over the course of the next year - and end up with a network of let’s just say 12 sites (you will get more with us). If each of those sites just earns $1 dollar a day - you make almost $4400 dollars. Now add in affiliate commissions, the ability to plug in mailing list’s, and the fact that most of those sites would actually be earning quite a bit more than a dollar a day and imagine where you would be.”

The reality has been a bit more down to earth: over the last 9 months, total expenditure is $2043, total income $12.85. For the last calendar month I’ve earned $4.35 in total from all 9 sites. The most successful site earned just 9 cents a day.

The limited growth in  visitor numbers does not bode well for the future. In addition, only one of the sites has been updated since April, several are untouched from when they were created.

I think they’ve taken their eye off the ball because they are involved with other projects.

My challenge now, before cancelling my subscription, is to move all of those sites  to my own hosting. I can host them at no additional cost, thanks to Midphase, so I’ve no need to pay for ongoing hosting.

Another (expensive)  lesson learned, but at least I’ll have the 9 sites to keep and may be able to develop their earnings myself.

Some purists in the blogging world would have us believe that those of us who display advertising on our blogs have gone over to the dark side. You’ll have gathered from the way I phrased it, that I don’t agree with that proposition. Yes, spam blogs (splogs) are not very attractive but whose fault is it that they exist?

When you create a highly successful form of advertising, as Google has done, that rewards people hugely for producing and promoting useless sites then you can’t really blame them for taking advantage. It is up to Google to find ways not to reward splogs and websites of no value. And to be fair to them, Google is fighting back. Unfortunately if some innocent bystanders suffer in the process, their attitude seems to be tough luck. They are producing automatic rules for identifying spam sites and their methods are not perfect.

Back to my main argument. If you are writing a personal blog that becomes listed in the search engines and they begin to send you traffic, why not make a little money from that? And if the accusation is raised that people are writing blogs for money, isn’t that what journalists do?

Just as journalists range from guttersnipes and hacks to high-minded analysts, so do bloggers. You choose which to read.

Graham

I said I’d explain about my writing project. I’m trying to make money online (along with several million other people, I know). One of the proven techniques to make money is to write and publish articles, with the aim of bringing traffic, i.e. people to your site. Once there, they might buy something or click on a link which will earn you money. Of course, you also need to write content to put on your website.

The difficult part for me is to apply myself consistently to the task. There are so many other things to do that sitting down to write just never seemed to happen.

Now I’ve taken a leaf from the the psychologists book on self-management of behaviour. I’ve implemented a program of regular writing, followed by giving myself a reward. I’ve arranged that I complete a spell of writing in the morning, then have breakfast (the reward). So far it seems to be working. I’ve now written on 27 days out of the last 35 and that includes 4 days when I was away on holiday in Ireland.