Day 47: Remember Me? – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
(Thursday August, 6th)
Hey guys! I got back into town Monday. Camping was fun. It was nice to get away from work, the Internet, cell phones, etc. for a few days and just relax.
I started my new job Tuesday. So far it’s been good. I’m obviously just starting to learn the ropes, but I think I’ll enjoy it. It involves helping build websites. 
I think the things I am learning with The Keyword Academy will help me in my new job.
My boss from my old job has still been bugging me, which is starting to get on my nerves. I offered to work for him for another week while he finds someone to replace me, but he said “no” because things are slow. So I went ahead and started my new job. But now he is calling me every day, trying to get me to take jobs and call customers! You had your chance man, now leave me alone!
I know none of that is in any way related to The Keyword Academy or making money online, but I needed to vent.
So, amidst all this chaos, I have still managed to work on my niche websites a little. I finished writing all 5 of my article distribution articles for site #2. I tried to submit them all to the distribution site, but apparently I have to wait till 10 of my articles (total) get approved, before I can submit any others. Oh well, at least they are written and ready to go when the time comes. Now I need to focus on link exchanges for that site.
I have been thinking more about my site revisions and I think I am getting close to final decisions about what I want to change. Aside from the other things I have mentioned before (not tracking time as a cost, changing my tag line, etc.) I think I am going to stop trying to update this site every day, and aim for once or twice a week instead. It takes a lot of time to update this site every day, and that comes out of time I could be working on my niche sites (or sleeping 
). I think now that I have detailed the building of my first couple sites, there is going to be a lot of “rinse and repeat”. Nothing that would need to be reported on every day.
Also, I am trying to think of a better way to represent the progress I’ve made on my sites. Referring to them by names like “the first one”, “the other one”, and “my wife’s site” is starting to confuse even me. But I don’t want to give away my niche keywords by telling you the names of the sites. What’s a make money online blogger to do?
I have been thinking about using a table of some kind. Like having an Excel sheet with a column for each of my sites. And rows for each task I need to complete for them, like writing content, or link exchanges, etc. Taking and uploading a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet seems kind of cumbersome though. However I recently read about how you can make tables on webpages using HTML. Like so:
| Row 1, cell 1 | Row 1, cell 2 | Row 1, cell 3 |
I’ll play with it and see what I can do. Anyway, time to go to bed.
Oh, and let me know what you think of these ideas, please. I haven’t received many comments on this site yet. I have Stat Counter installed, so I know somebody out there is reading this! 
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 1.5 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $225.76
Time costs – 58.75 hours @ $8.40 = $493.50
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $30.08
GRAND TOTAL:
-($689.18)
(Thursday August, 6th)
Hey guys! I got back into town Monday. Camping was fun. It was nice to get away from work, the Internet, cell phones, etc. for a few days and just relax.
I started my new job Tuesday. So far it’s been good. I’m obviously just starting to learn the ropes, but I think I’ll enjoy it. It involves helping build websites. I think the things I am learning with The Keyword Academy will help me in my new job.
My boss from my old job has still been bugging me, which is starting to get on my nerves. I offered to work for him for another week while he finds someone to replace me, but he said “no” because things are slow. So I went ahead and started my new job. But now he is calling me every day, trying to get me to take jobs and call customers! You had your chance man, now leave me alone!
I know none of that is in any way related to The Keyword Academy or making money online, but I needed to vent.
So, amidst all this chaos, I have still managed to work on my niche websites a little. I finished writing all 5 of my article distribution articles for site #2. I tried to submit them all to the distribution site, but apparently I have to wait till 10 of my articles (total) get approved, before I can submit any others. Oh well, at least they are written and ready to go when the time comes. Now I need to focus on link exchanges for that site.
I have been thinking more about my site revisions and I think I am getting close to final decisions about what I want to change. Aside from the other things I have mentioned before (not tracking time as a cost, changing my tag line, etc.) I think I am going to stop trying to update this site every day, and aim for once or twice a week instead. It takes a lot of time to update this site every day, and that comes out of time I could be working on my niche sites (or sleeping ). I think now that I have detailed the building of my first couple sites, there is going to be a lot of “rinse and repeat”. Nothing that would need to be reported on every day.
Also, I am trying to think of a better way to represent the progress I’ve made on my sites. Referring to them by names like “the first one”, “the other one”, and “my wife’s site” is starting to confuse even me. But I don’t want to give away my niche keywords by telling you the names of the sites. What’s a make money online blogger to do?
I have been thinking about using a table of some kind. Like having an Excel sheet with a column for each of my sites. And rows for each task I need to complete for them, like writing content, or link exchanges, etc. Taking and uploading a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet seems kind of cumbersome though. However I recently read about how you can make tables on webpages using HTML. Like so:
<table>
<tr>
<td>Row 1, cell 1</td>
<td>Row 1, cell 2</td>
<td>Row 1, cell 3</td>
</tr>
</table>
I’ll play with it and see what I can do. Anyway, time to go to bed.
Oh, and let me know what you think of these ideas, please. I haven’t received many comments on this site yet. I have Stat Counter installed, so I know somebody out there is reading this!
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 1.5 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $225.76
Time costs – 58.75 hours @ $8.40 = $493.50
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $30.08
GRAND TOTAL:
-($689.18)
Day 25: They Were Right About StatCounter – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
(Wednesday July, 15th)
Curiosity got the best of me today and I decided to install StatCounter on my site. Remember how on Day 22 I said that I thought Google Analytics and StatCounter were the same? Yeah, I was wrong.
The biggest difference I see is that StatCounter is virtually instant, which is very, very nice. Google Analytics seems like it takes days to refresh it’s data.
I’m not really sure about any other differences, but that one is a big enaough deal to convince me to switch to StatCounter.
My wife wrote 2 more articles for her site. One more and she’s ready for Adsense, then link building.
One more thing. I was thinking that this site really needs an RSS feed. So I started Googling around, trying to find out how to add an RSS feed to WordPress. Guess what? It does it automatically. All I needed to do was add a link to it. So, if you want to subscribe to this site, just click the “RSS Feed” link in the sidebar, under “Meta”.
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 1.75 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 45.5 hours @ $8.40 = $382.20
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $7.06
GRAND TOTAL:
-($567.90)
Day 22: Finished videos and more article distribution – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
(Sunday July, 12th)
The last 2 days have been really busy so I didn’t have time to work on the experiment. Today wasn’t really a great day for it either, but I was feeling guilty about it, so I forced myself to work a little before bed.
I watched the last two videos (technically, the adsense video is last, but I’ve already watched it). The first was about a tool for article distribution. Basically, if I understood correctly, you give it 3 revisions of the same article and it will mix and match those revisions and submit them to tons of article sites. Each article of course contains links back to your site, so it helps your site rank better in search engines.
It seems like a really good idea. It stinks that you have to rewrite each article 3 times, but if you think about the alternative (rewriting it and submitting it to all those sites yourself), it’s a no-brainer. It also cost $67 a month which is uncool. I’m not sure how I’m going to squeeze that out of my very tight budget. However, according to the link building videos, I don’t want to use it until month 2 of site promotion anyway. Maybe by then my site(s) will be bringing in Adsense revenue to offset the cost a little.
The second video talks about tracking statistics on your sites. They used statcounter.com instead of Google Analytics, but I didn’t really see anything that it did that Google doesn’t. Since I’ve already installed Google Analytics on my site, I’ll use it for now. I’ll test Stat Counter on my next site and if I like it better, I’ll switch.
Hooray! I’ve now finished watching all the core videos. Now to see how good I am at implementing them.
I also wrote one more article and submitted it to the article site. 3 down, 2-7 more to go.
Bed time!
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 1.5 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 42 hours @ $8.40 = $352.80
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $7.06
GRAND TOTAL:
-($538.50)