It's already everywhere so I'm not going to go into details! BlogRush is simply a way to potentially get more exposure on your posts for your blog. I was invited in by another blogger and have added the widget in on the sidebar just above the footer. It displays a few posts from other blogs, could be of interest to people (I'm guessing most posts will be technology based initially). In return I get my latest posts displayed on other people's blogs as well (it comes down to page views). I have read a few concerns over whether it could violate AdSense TOS however this specific blog doesn't run adverts (there's no point, you're all already members of Google AdSense!). I'll give it a try and see if it's worth it. I'll let you know how it goes.nnIf anyone fancies signing up under my Blog Rush account, feel free to use my link – http://www.blogrush.com/r18636165

Not quite AIS but it is about making money. With having to move house we've started to look at stuff to dump. I've got an old P90 Computer (90 MHz Pentium Processor) in the kitchen waiting to be taken to the dump, afterall who wants a P90 these days? I've got around 50 videos that are never watched and take up far too much space. Books read and probably won't be read again, various other computer parts such as old keyboards, mice, RAM etc. After chatting to a friend the other night she told me how she'd made around £100 ($200) on selling what she considered old rubbish at a car boot sale.nnNot sure if non UKers would know what a car boot sale is so to quickly explain, you gather in a field on an early sunday morning, lay out your various stuff to sell and people will visit the sale and maybe pay X amount for a few items. The idea is that it all comes out of your car boot (or trunk for the US visitors among us!).nnSo I've taken stock of what we have and will be sorting out a box or two of 'rubbish' and am hoping to sell a load of it one weekend before we move. I may not make a great deal but for a few hours of sitting down, drinking coffee and eating bacon sandwiches, it could be worth it! Considering I was going to dump the P90, anything made on that would be great!nnJust a sidenote. Today is the first day I've been home all day. We're still property viewing and trying to cover all our work too, so spare time is spent asleep pretty much. Posting will be a little thin until I've packed and moved. But hopefully it won't take too much longer. Have a good weekend

I have a small problem with earning money online. I'm not really that motivated by money. Sure we all like to have money and we all need money to live, put food on the table and buy things we want, but I'm not really overly fussed on whether I earn extra cash or not. Up until now the income we've made has just gone into a savings account and was going to be used to cover a decent holiday or two each year. Sure as more money is potentially made then maybe that would change and become the money to go into savings towards a deposit on a house. As the money we earn from AIS is additional sideline income, and is simply over and above what our day jobs earn us, then it's been treated like that, money which we just wouldn't have had otherwise and money which is there to be enjoyed.nnHowever that's changed. Yesterday evening we had the news that we were about to be given notice of eviction from our rented home. After a chat with the Landlady last week and being told everything was fine, this of course was a bit of a shock. Whilst nothing came about (domestic between her and her boyfriend) we realised that we weren't so secure living here, and that next week it could just happen again. I for one can't live like that so I spent last night looking for somewhere else to live. The downside to all this (besides moving which I'm fairly used to) is the additional cost. Where we live is dirt cheap for what we have so to get something of a reasonably similar quality we'll be paying out more in rent. Not a major amount more but £100-200 a month more. I can afford it (just) however…nnThis is where AIS will hopefully come into its own and whilst a nice holiday motivates me, paying my monthly rent motivates me a lot more! We've got unfinished work on existing AIS sites, cleaning up of other sites, and a couple of domains with nothing on! I have a domain bought in 2000 that still doesn't have the website on it! So the plan is, once we've moved of course, to start getting these sites completed. With moving I'll probably lose any real garden besides a few pots, so I'll have a bit more spare time, also I think the idea of making your sites help pay your rent is just the little extra I need to actually move me to get things done. Plus, since the AdSense Warning we had, our daily average has dropped by around 33%, so this means our income will already be reduced by up to $100 each month.nnSo despite this being a bit of a stressful week (it's not the moving it's finding somewhere to move to that's stressful!), something good is hopefully coming out of it, the motivation to work. What motivates you? And more importantly, what do you spend your earnings on.

So we've all heard about Social Networking. Even the news is reporting about the likes of Facebook. However with the social networking becoming more and more saturated with new sites, which are the ones that are worth while to use? Everyone has their favourites, some for just being sociable, some for personal use and maybe one or two for marketing purposes.nnThe Social Networking sites I use arenn

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MyBlogLog

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I quite like MyBlogLog. It's quite fun to go to a site you've never been on and see your own face or icon sitting on that site. Okay so the novelty does wear off after a while, but I always like seeing new faces on MyBlogLog widget in my sidebar. It makes me realise that I do have a few visitors from day to day! Plus it's a great way to spot new visitors and look at their site. Afterall you don't go to a new blog and sign the 'new reader' book (although a Readers page has crossed my mind, a bit like a guestbook). Definitely one for being sociable and for a little marketing, afterall, if I click on new visitor's faces and go look at their sites, who's to say the owner of the site you just visited won't do the same. A bit like a calling card.

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Del.icio.us

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A good bookmarking service, handy to allow you to keep your bookmarks online and share with others. However recently I've also discovered that tagging your own blog posts can bring in new visitors and perhaps convert them to regular readers.

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Flickr

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A free photo gallery site (free until you take too many photos!), but it's pretty sociable too. You can comment on other people's photos and will find people commenting on yours. I use Flickr for the exposure of my own photos, however I have had a handful of visitors to my site from Flickr. When you add a new photo it's immediately shown on the front page. Sure, it rolls off as new ones are added but if you can catch the visitors on the front page at that moment, grab their attention, and drop a few links into the photo description, you never know

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StumbleUpon

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Great for a quick burst of traffic. My Learn PHP category got 'stumbled' a couple of weeks back which I wrote about the Effects of StumbleUpon. In total I had around 1000 visitors, a few bookmarked the site and hopefully a few are returning (although I've not written any PHP posts since!). I've used it on other new sites in the past or got someone else to Stumble it for me. If you have the right subject then the effects can be pretty great, just don't count on it for continued traffic.

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nnI do have accounts on other sites such as Digg, but I'm not a fan of Digg really. I tend to find a lot of the comments made on articles submitted are pretty pathetic, made by people that don't know what they're talking about or clearly haven't read what they're commenting on. People like that frustrate and wind me up so I steer clear of it.nnIf you want to find me on any of the networks then here are my direct links:nn

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• MyBlogLog

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• Del.icio.us

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• Flickr

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• StumbleUpon

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nnSo the question is, what social networking sites have you found useful, either for personal/business use or for marketing purposes?

We had this through from Google last weeknn

Hello,nnWhile reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a way that does not comply with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as *****.nn?Publishers may not implement Google ads in a manner that disguises the ads in any way, for instance, by formatting neighboring content to look similar to the ads, or by making ads look like games or forum threads. Additionally, publishers may not attempt to associate specific images with the individual ads appearing on their sites. Such an implementation may confuse users who assume that the image is directly related to the advertiser's offerings.nnPlease make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our programme policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all your other pages comply with these policies.nnOnce you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.nnThank you for your cooperation.

nnThis is about our busiest site which runs contextual ads and a link unit in the sidebar. Not fully knowing which ads they were exactly referring to, and knowing that all of them blended in, I simply added a faint grey border around all the contextual ads on the site and gave the link unit a background on the 'Ads by Google' header. We emailed Google back and they responded and seemed happy with the changes.nnIt's a bit of a grey area about how much you can blend your ads in to the site now. I know you can't display images too close to the adverts, or make it seem like the image is part of the ad. Our ads were of the same link colour and text colour as the site, on the same background and without a border. Without the 'Ads by Google' by the ads I guess you'd never know that they weren't part of the site. At least with Google's curved corners options the borders don't look so strict and boring.nnSo how has our income been? Well this happened last Wednesday and for the rest of the week our click through ratio dropped from around 16% to 13%. Not exceptionally bad, and the earnings themselves didn't seem overly affected. However the past 3 days have not been good. We're now down to 11% CTR and earnings are almost halved. Hopefully it may just be a lull. I've written in the past about earnings seeming to be lower at the start of the month (but never got any real proof) and we do sometimes have the occasional dip. So it's too early to say but I'll revisit this at the end of the month and see how much the earnings have been affected if at all.nnStill, at least they emailed us and didn't just ban the account