I finally got an invite to Google Voice.  So far I'm liking it although I haven't really had a chance to put it through its paces.  Feel free to leave me a voice mail via the link below:

Also new for me this week was a beta invite to Notable.  Again, haven't played around with it much yet but the concept is pretty sweet.  I'm hoping to test it out with the new KindeZine site to get some feedback before I go live.

Amazon dropped the price of their Kindle to $299.  Still a little pricey for the average Joe but if you're an avid reader or do any kind of traveling I think it's well worth it.  I love my original series and find it helps me to read much more often than I did before I got it, although I can't justify upgrading to the newer models until mine stops working.  This week I read Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow on my kindle and absolutely loved it (high on my recommend list!)  I would never have picked this up in a book store and probably never would have read it had it not been for the kindle.

And while I'm on the subject, big shout out to Cory for fighting the good fight by releasing his works under Creative Commons.  Some people talk about the future and some people help create it... Cory is in the later group.  Thanks.

TTFN

I switched hosting providers this week.  After four years with WebHost4Life I've moved to Arvixe.  It's not that WH4L was bad or anything but I've gone from a "promotional" $120/yr to $175/yr and that's just unacceptable.  In addition they wanted to charge me a $10 renewal fee!  I have a fundamental problem with any company that tries to reward repeat business by levying a surcharge.  Add to that the fact that Arvixe charged me < $60/yr and that's all the excuse I needed to move.

The move went fairly smoothly.  I had to first transfer the PalmerEk.com domain since I first set it up through WH4L, so I moved it to GoDaddy which took a day or two.  I then signed up for my new hosting account and transferred the files I needed, setup my blog site and MX/CNAME records.  The only problem I ran into was adding a "." to the end of my CNAME records.  The Domain Zone Editor at Arvixe does that automatically so the actual record ended up with two ".." which effectively bounced all emails to the PalmerEk.com domain for the last day and a half ;-{  On the plus side their tech support was very helpful and responded quickly once I asked them for help.

I feel all clean now that I've moved since I dropped a lot of the sites I had setup over the years but rarely use anymore.... I've ditched my SharePoint, Wiki, Bug Tracking etc... sites and I'm left with only my blog for now.  I'm sure I'll accumulate more crap again but for now I'm pretty bare bones and quite happy about it.

The Can of Change effort has stalled a bit this week in the wake of the move but I hope to get it up and going again with a fairly functional KindleZine.com site very soon.

TTFN

Progress continues albeit slowly.  I've created some tools to help me with the article marketing aspect of things.  In doing so I cam across a nice little library on CodePlex called the HTML Agility Pack which has proven very helpful when it comes to working with HTML on the server side.  I've also picked up a few more clicks but still haven't generated a single penny in revenues.

I haven't done much else this week on the project because I've been balancing out family life.  Spent the whole day at Idlewild with the wife and kids and now I'm too tired to do much... think I'm going to call it a day pretty soon.

Just a note on an idea I came up with that I think may be worth exploring; keyword index and trend analysis.  In a nutshell I'm thinking that it would be interesting to create a set of keyword indexes which would contain the CPM, CPC and impressions of a set of keywords over time (I think I could get the info needed via Google's API).  The idea is to use this data in the same way day traders use game theory to determine buy/sell recommendations.  For example, when the Cost per Click of the "Flowers" keyword index drops below a certain value the system would automatically issue a buy order on "Flowers" ads.  The inverse would be to suspend the ads when the CPC exceeded a particular value.  The goal would be to play in a particular market only when it is statistically probable that you will make money.  Of course this same data could be used by publishers as well to help decide what content currently holds the highest value.

One other side note, I've just started reading Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe and so far I'm finding it very enjoyable.  I'm only a few dozen pages into it so I'll let you know if it's worth the time once I'm done but so far so good.

TTFN

Thought I'd pick up a few bucks with the death of the worlds most famous pedophile but still no dice.  I've cut back the campaigns to a very low burn rate until I get some time to iron out the issues with conversion rates.  This isn't just for fun anymore, it's personal.  That's right Google, it's on now, bitch!

I've begun work on a new site in hopes of picking up some AdScense money.  I started by using a soon to expire domain name I had laying around.  You can check out a very incomplete working copy at KindleZine.com.  (There are only 2 pages right now and neither is complete but I think it demonstrates the concept) 

In an effort to keep things low cost I started to get a bit creative.  To avoid the need for a server, I'm designing the site to be pure HTML.  I'm planning on generating all the pages based on creative commons content.  To make things even cheaper still I decided to host the entire thing on a free DropBox account.  I plan on using Disqus to enable comments as well as a few other tools to handle social networks etc... 

Once I iron out the look and feel of the site I'll write a couple of small apps to handle importing new content, generating pages and building site maps.  The plan is to build it large enough and with enough quality SEO to pick up a million or so hits / day, at least that's the plan ;-}

If nothing else I should end up with some pretty decent content for a book "The Internet on $0.04 / Day" ;-}

TTFN

I'm still poor.  In fact poorer than I was a week ago but sooo much wiser.  Here are the numbers for my first week (please don't laugh too loudly as I am a sensitive guy)

Impressions: 17,076
Clicks: 105
Cost: $5.14
Conversions: 1
Revenue: $0

Nothing to write home about that's for sure.  As I started to wrap my head around how the whole adSense thing works I realized that my initial approach was very wrong.  I was going way to broad on all 3 levels: campaign, keywords and ad groups.  I paused that campaign and began a new one with a specific target and a number of different ad groups, fewer keywords, higher CPC bids and more ads.  The idea is to compare the performance of various ads within a group to try and determine the kinds of things that trigger clicks/conversions.  So far that hasn't yielded diddly since some of the ads are still under review (haven't figured out why yet).  To date I am $15 off of my starting point but still have more than that available from promos so I'm not worried but I realize I have a lot to learn still before I can make this portion of my venture profitable. 

Another realization that I came to was that this coin has two sides.  All of these ads that people are buying need to show on sites and the owners of those sites make a few bones every time someone clicks.  This is of course not news to anyone, especially me, but I sometimes get stuck with blinders on.  I get stuck thinking that in order to drive enough traffic to a site I need to create compelling content and a great user experience which requires a lot of effort, hardware, software, time and the like.  My recent epiphany was that all I really need is a cheap way to serve up HTML files (S3), access to some reasonably relevant content (WWW), a way to merge the two (Codegen) and a good site map.  Once I get a handle on the affiliate angle (it's personal now!), I think I'll try my hand at the other side.

I still have a number of things to try.  I'm no where close to done yet.  My first goal is to get a CTR north of 2% and to convert another 2% of those which should put me somewhere around $8 in revenue per 100 clicks and my break even around $.08 per click, which is pretty low but would at least put me at a  level where I think I could make adjustments and identify patterns quicker.

TTFN