I've had one of our AIS sites sitting on Text Link Ads for a couple of months now, waiting for advertisers to choose our site. I was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get any advertisers through the system! However last night I checked my email before climbing into bed and had my first Ad approval email from them. A couple of semi relevant links so I approved them. I then checked to see how much we were earning and saw just 75 cents per link. 75 cents for a link for the month? Ah no, looked again and realised that was for the last 3 days of this month!! So that works out to $7.50 per link for a month, pretty cool for a simple link.nnI then woke up this morning to find another ad to approve! This time it's a much more relevant subject, and leaves just 1 spot left. So 3 links in the space of 24 hours off 2 advertisers, after about 2-3 months of silence! For anyone wondering about the site it's a PR4 which possibly confirms what burt was writing on his post about Text Link Ads, as his PR4 site also has links at $7.50 a month.nnHowever, is the PR of a site a good enough reason to determine the worth of a link? Surely these people are advertising because they want the visitors, or is it because they want the backlink? The site in question gets 250-300 visitors daily, yet my business site, which is PR5, gets perhaps 20 odd visitors a day! So in theory if an advertiser is clever on this system they can pay less and get far more exposure for their site.nnAnyhow, $22.50 a month extra is quite nice for 3 simple text links, so fingers crossed they stay. Wonder what happens if more come along when the block is full? Do they start bidding for spots? I really should read the site more! Shame visitor figures aren't taken into consideration (or maybe they are and I've not found that bit!!).

Yesterday I awoke to the first template sale off a site I bought back in January. The site's had a few affiliate sales on eBooks and the adsense is pretty good (albeit a low CTR) however I've not succeeded in selling any templates until now. A quick and easy purchase from the original template owner and the template was sent off to the buyer nice and easily. This brings my highest sale for one item up to just under £24 from £18 which I had earlier this month, and possibly the highest earning day yet, but I'll have the check the figures for that. However this does mean that this month is working out quite nicely considering we've had a drop in AdSense these past two months.nnThe site that sold the template is also undergoing work as I'm adding a blog (yes another!) to document my work and personal opinions in the subject which I'm hoping may pull a few more visitors in and then channel them to the products on sale.nnOkay so it's not much by the seasoned AISers usual intake, but in the past 2 months I've surpassed the highest sale twice, from $29 to $30 (that was in the same day and what I believe is the highest day yet including adsense), to £18 at the start of this month and now the sale from yesterday. Plus the good thing about this sale is that the money is already in my Paypal account and not lying in an affiliate account.nnAll in all a good day to help with the motivation

I don't seem to be having much luck with getting affiliate payouts at present. I've been trying to find out where my 123-Reg payment has gone. Apparently made on 26th July but they won't reply to my emails.nnNow I'm not getting much joy with Template Monster either. A couple of weeks ago I withdrew $160 into a Money Bookers account and the withdrawal just says being processed on the TM website. Okay a couple of weeks isn't long for payments so I guess I'm just being impatient. I know a few people reading this (or hopefully still reading this!) have had TM payouts – remember how long they took?

A short while ago I wrote about a business that I'd been working on for almost 3 years was starting to liven up again after the delivery of a product sample from the supplier. Today I had an email with some of the prices too. About 2.5 years ago we first met with this supplier and he gave us prices. They were pretty encouraging until he mentioned a few months later that they excluded VAT. We (interpret that as I!) managed to tweak the prices so that they were still pretty competitive and good value whilst still giving us a reasonable profit.nnHowever times have changed and so I had to ask for a new price list, especially as they use a new, better method of producing the products. However the prices that came through on the email work out to a considerable drop for most of them apart from one. Admittedly I haven't had the whole list of prices that I've asked for yet, unfortunately the supplier is over worked and seems to not be able to get the right staff to help him out. That's the downside as this email was due a week ago – it concerns me as I still don't feel comfortable relying on someone to fulfill the orders when they take forever to get back to me.nnThat said, I think that for the first 3-6 months at least, if not more, the site will still be slow moving so if we have to suspend the site then at least it shouldn't be a major issue as I'm only expecting a handful of visitors at first, nothing major until I get the next part of the site completed. I'm also hoping that at least once the site is up and running we can go to other suppliers and show them a working version of the site and they will take us more seriously, as to date I don't feel any of them have and haven't treated us too well – probably because of the idea and the lack of understanding surrounding running a business directly off a website without a bricks and mortar business to back it. However we have virtually no outgoings as all products are prepaid for and all products will of course make a profit. The only outgoings are domains and we all know they're hardly expensive (bear in mind having 3 reseller accounts available to me means I have hosting space and bandwidth galore!).nnWe still have some prices to sort out as the prices given for postage are completely wrong due to the new Postage pricing. I also need a sample of every product we'll sell to get photos for the website, however I'm hoping it will start to come together again and perhaps early next year we can 'open' for business. I'm starting to get motivated with this business again and after this week of clearing up several sites I'm hoping to start devoting at least one day a week to working on the site, securing it more with what I've learnt since I last opened the files, and getting Dave to fix my shabby CSS

I read a post last week on SEOmoz about Increasing Blog traffic. Some good points about what to consider especially for a new blog. One thing that stuck out to me was the comment about advertisingnn

low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't.n.n.nAds, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link

nnThis stuck out for two reasons:n1. I have a couple of small one ad blocks on my internal pages of my tech blog which is the busiest part of my blog network, and to be honest whilst the Google Adsense referral link has gotten a few signups, the ads have had very few clicks.n2. I have adsense on my Food Blog which was originally set up to be an AIS.nnAfter reading this and having a think I removed the more obtrusive ad that was embedded in my posts in my Tech blog, and just left one at the bottom of the post which I may or may not keep. And then after redoing the template on my food blog I altered the single post pages to just have one ad instead of the usual 4 after the post.nnI then picked up on a post by Stu about monetising blogs and essentially annoying readers by doing so (full post). Reading through the comments it seems that good readers can take to heart a blogger's intent to monetise a blog. However Stu still raised the question, how to make money from his blog.nnAfter reading the comments and the posts surrounding the subject I realised that to be honest I'd rather drop any adverts than lose a worthy reader. I think that trying to monetise a passion is possibly not a good idea. Why? Because you want to make a really good go of that passion, be it blogging or a site built around a subject that's close to your heart you want the best for the site and if that involves worthy readers or visitors then you want to keep them. Introducing advertising which then pushes these readers/visitors away knocks your site down a notch or two.nnI can understand people wanting to monetise their blog, especially as their blog is probably one of the busiest sites on their portfolio, however I think a popular blog can be worth a lot more from regular visitors and inbound links for future projects than the few dollars (or cents) that the monetising may make.nnJust for the record, I don't have a concern over paid posts or advertising. I subscribe to feeds so most on page advertising doesn't get seen and sponsored posts tend to get ignored. I just like giving my opinion in the most confusing manor going