Cash The Checks

Over the last week I sold off a few domains. These were sites that weren’t a great success. If I kept them I’m pretty sure they would have earned more than their registration fees every year if I just left them alone. But why would I keep a site that makes $15 a year and costs $10 a year to keep? It’s only $5 and it’s just noth worth it to keep checking stats every year and maintain the hosting and ads on the site.

So I decided to sell them - to thin the herd. I didn’t want to have a group of sites that did well, and another group that didn’t do well.Now, at least mentally, my network of sites are stronger because I’ve cut off the dying weeds growing on them and holding the rest back. It’s just a theory, but thinning the herd makes the remaining herd stronger.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

Recently Cash The Checks joined Forbes’ Blog and Financial Blog network. This network is comprised of a community of pre-screened, influential business and financial blogs. membership carries several benefits:

- More traffic: Some of my posts may be featured on http://bfn.forbes.com/
- Credibility: It comes with associating myself with a brand like Forbes.
- Ad revenue. Forbes will sell ads on member blogs & share revenues.

- Edwin, CashTheChecks.com

I’m considering creating a “How to Make Money Instruction Manual” or a “Step by Step Guide to Internet Riches”. I would charge a low monthly fee via PayPal for members to get access to this step-by-step training manual. I’ll update it once a month with a big article detailing the specific steps needed, one by one, explained thoroughly, to making money online. I’ve done this process hundreds of times the last 8 years and now it’s my time to share this knowledge.

Aside from the making money guide, I’ll give members my personal e-mail where I’ll respond to each question with specific information and instructions aimed for their particular need. All messages would be replied to within a couple of hours max. There’s many sites which offer eBooks, there might also be a few “how-to’s” out there, but they are often old and outdated. Mine will be updated and will be the first of its kind to offer personal training & tutoring of sorts.

Since I’ll only be charging a few bucks a month and I’ll be giving out industry secrets, what’s in it for me? First of all, there’s the joy involved in helping others, next there’s the monthly fees, but most importantly of all I’ll be earning referral revenue. If at some point in the lesson I give out a link to a particular sponsor which has performed well for me using my methods, members will join using my affiliate link. This is great because if I help them succeed and get rich, I’ll get paid more for referring them. Now it’s not only motivation for them to make money, but for me to help them make money.

I won’t get this project live until I have enough material and that will take some time. I won’t even think of setting a launch date right now because we’re most likely looking at this beginning sometime in 2008. So stay tuned.

Today Cash The Checks celebrates its’ 1 year anniversary. Here’s some quick stats about this blog.

There are currently 115 posts and 37 comments, contained within 15 categories.
Akismet has protected your site from 3,921 spam comments.
Google Pagerank: 3
Domain registered since: 10/21/2004
Cash The Checks Blog started: 05/31/2006
The next year itself will likely bring about the same amount of posts, more comments, more spam comments, and I predict a pagerank increase to 5 by the next update.

For a few hours Cash The Checks was hacked. Luckily I was able to see it within 5-10 hours. It happened in the middle of the night or else I would have caught it sooner. I was able to restore all of the posts and get everything back up and running within an hour. It’s a good reminder to always back up everything that is of importance to you.

Every few weeks I back up all the posts on my blogs and every few months I back up everything I own on an external hard drive. You never know when you might suffer a catastrophe and it would be awful to try and start over from scratch.

Below is a part of what the text said:

“We are as Turkish-muslims, for 1000 years following the way of Muhammad (peace be up on him). Our ancestors, Seljuks and Ottomans taugth the World what is humanity and tolarance, with their heart and sword. Don’t forget that we are 1.5 billion muslims and we are on the same way.

Come to Islam ! Come to being human!

Cartoons of Jyllands-Posten aren’t same with other paintings those of muslim artists. These cartoons are insulting our Prophet. It wouldn’t be approved in freedom of expression. This is just cursing? You’ll pay for it!”

Due to being hacked one too many times, I’ve switched this Cash The Checks blog to Dream Host. Their best feature is a one-click install of the latest wordpress version, plus over a hundred pre-installed blog themes. I’ll be installing all future blogs at Dream Host plus moving my old ones over ASAP.

I’ve dealt with another host (MidPhase) and their mysql server kept going down, so I’ll be keeping the blogs at DreamHost for now. The only downside I see is that I notice that sites load slowly at times. That’s a lot better than a site going down for days though.

In an effort to make some more money off of this site, Cash The Checks, I added a top banner, 720×90 in size, just under the title. It leads to ING Direct. If you sign up for free to their online savings account, which is currently earning 4.40% APY, then I’d get $20.

I’ve also added some Chitika eMinimalls ads on the left hand column featuring several products which may be relevant to readers of this site. The products are random things such as Poker chips, wallets, money clips and laptops. I still have a 160×600 google adsense ad unit on the sidebar which serves relevant ads based on the content of the blog posts.

I’m having trouble deciding what types of products to offer or ads to display, I’m not sure what readers of a personal finance blog would be interested in purchasing..

TheMoneyBlogs.com…Nothing But Money

SHERMAN OAKS, CA — (MARKET WIRE) — September 14, 2006 — “Nothing but money.” That’s the fitting slogan for the giant new blog aggregation site, www.TheMoneyBlogs.com.

Featuring over 130 high-profile bloggers, TheMoneyBlogs.com is one of the largest personal finance/investing blog aggregators on the Internet. Articles cover everything from stock investing to real estate; personal finance to venture capital, and are updated several times per day, so content remains fresh. Incoming articles are monitored and editors choose which blogs to highlight on the home page. Editors also choose “Today’s Best Money Blog” and “This Week’s Best Money Blog” and readers vote on what will be the “Highest Ranked Money Blog.”

The goal of TheMoneyBlogs is to house the best personal finance and investing blogs on the Internet — all under one roof. Bloggers include: venture capitalist Paul Allen, money managers Birinyi Associates (Ticker Sense), financial journalist Tom Foremski (Silicon Valley Watcher), investment manager and author Donald L. Luskin (The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid), and mutual fund expert Paul Merriman, among many others. All blogs are archived and there is a link back to each blogger’s home page.

“There’s fresh, new content on the site all the time. We showcase what we feel are the best, most interesting, entertaining and timely personal finance and investing blogs every day,” says TheMoneyBlogs.com editor Brice Wightman. “Being proactive in managing the content results in a better finished product.”

By year’s end, TradingMarkets will launch TheTechBlogs.com, an aggregation of the top technology blogs on the Web, and plans to do the same in sports, finance, and politics, among other major verticals.

The MoneyBlogs is located at www.TheMoneyBlogs.com and the RSS feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/themoneyblogs/feed

---

CONTACT:
Brice Wightman
TradingMarkets.com
15260 Ventura Blvd.  Suite 2200
Sherman Oaks CA 91403
brice@tradingmarkets.com
(818) 449-7461
(213) 955-5858, ext. 242

Speaking of The Money Blogs, I’m one of the “130 high-profile bloggers” and you can see my blog here: http://themoneyblogs.com/cashthechecks/

It’s just an RSS feed of this site, all it does for me is increase my exposure and it gives them more content. So it’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.

With more and more projects being built and re-vamped, I decided to get a new hosting account. I decided to go with Cyber Wurx. They have a real cheap blog hosting plan. You can host 5 domains, 5 blogs, for only $5 per month.

This wasn’t extremely necessary, but you can’t keep all your eggs in one basket. If one host goes down you don’t want to lose all your revenue so it’s best to spread things out a bit.

There’s also an SEO benefit to having several hosts. Seperating your different sites into different IP’s (class C IP’s to be specific) is crucial if you’re going to be cross-linking your domains or if your sites have a similar theme.

I haven’t been with them long enough to test the speed and downtime. In the few days I’ve been with them, there hasn’t been downtime but I know a few days isn’t enough to truly test the service. But the support is great, I was getting responses within minutes and there were at least 2 people available to answer questions and help getting me set up.

If you decide to go with them, tell them that username: “eddiecon” sent ya.

I almost forgot to add something to the previous post, the most important part. What’s the point of making that site? Of course it’s to make money off of it. I added Chitika and Adsense ads on it in the header and the sidebar.

What’s Chitika? It’s a pay-per-click sponsor that pays you for every visit you send them. Look at my sidebar on the left to see some of the ads I’m displaying. You choose which ad-size to place, what colors you want your ad to be, what item(s) you want to display, and Chitika eMinimalls does the rest. To join the program and make money from your blog, click below.

A few weeks ago I got an idea to create a gadget site compiling to the best gadget blogs out there into one centralized gadget site. I got out my notebook and wrote out the plan. Here’s what I did.

I got my hands on a copy of Auto Blogger Pro from Relink Software. This script is like Wordpress on steroids. You can add feeds and just like that it populates your blog with them. Lots of other nifty little add-ons in there too but I haven’t tinkered with it that much just yet.

I did a google search for the top gadget blogs (including my own gadget blog: I Review Electronics) and added the feeds. I only added feeds that showed the full post, not just an excerpt.

I chose a theme for the blog, I went to this blog posting that has over 980 blog themes free to download. I picked one I liked then I edited the header and did pretty much no other tweaking on it. I was shocked at how fast the whole process went. With my other blogs it would take me days of work to get everything perfect.

Alright without further ado… take a look at..

Hawt Gadgets

Due to lack of traffic and a low CTR (click-through rate) I’ve completely re-done and redesigned my Dating Services Guide site. The big change was that I’ve made it emphasize the title, a dating services guide. I took a few of the top dating services and gave some quick basic information on each one. It’s sort of a dating review site now, which is what it should be and will be from now on. I plan on adding more dating sites and more reviews in the next few months. If I see positive signs from the update/change, I’ll surely do more work on it. If I see no changes, why waste any more time on it.

Something interesting (disturbing, too) that I noticed was that the site has a Google PageRank of 2. But when I type the URL in google, I get the dreaded: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL …” message, meaning it is banned. I think I need to see a PR0 to see the site banned, so I’m confused at the moment. Now that I think about it, it might have something to do with that site being hosted as a subdomain of another site. I’m going to switch the hosting on it tonight and then see if that makes any difference when the googlebot comes by again.

First it was “the internets” and now it’s “the google”.

Check out the video: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/23/bush-says-he-uses-the-google/

The Free Auto Loans Guide website has been updated. Now, every article is a custom written article, detailing a step by step guide to getting the best auto loan. Also more link trades were added in the auto loans link exchange page.