I am back at the office after my 4 day vacation to Ohio. I had a great time, I really could have used a few more days of great food, relaxation, and fun times. I didn’t get home from my flight until about 12:00 a.m. and by the time I made it to bed it was a little after 1:00 a.m. I was not looking forward to hearing that alarm clark buzz at 7:00 in the morning. I can function on a few hours of sleep as long as I get some morning coffee. I have a couple of developments to mention that happened over the weekend while I was away:

  • Increased Adsense Earnings
  • Social Networking
  • Fortune Magazine
  • Traffic is Going Up

Increased Adsense Earnings
When I left for vacaiton early Friday morning, I was expecting to see a decrease in my adsense earnings for the 4 days I was gone, do to my inactivity and being unable to do any promotions at all. It was tough being without a computer for 4 days. I was constantly wondering how everything was going. I came back last night and logged in to check my adsense earnings for the 4 days I was gone. $6.14 on Friday, $9.54 on Saturday, $8.09 on Sunday, and $2.76 on Monday. I was shocked at how high my earnings were. Saturday’s $9.54 marked my highest earning Adsense day since I started.

I can attribute the increase in earnings to the start of college football. My Fight Song Lyrics site was responsible for over $6 of the earnings on Saturday and over $5 of the earnings on Sunday. I was expecting earnings to go up for football season, but not this much. By the looks of it, I can probably surpass $10 on Saturday and Sunday during the football season. The worst part about it is that once the season is over, my earnings will drop.

Social Networking
A few posts back, I mentioned a special project I am going to be working on with my friend who is not in the internet moneymaking business. It could be a BIG money maker if we can come up with the time to make it successful. As you can tell by the title, we will be building a social networking type site. It will not be exactly like myspace or facebook, but it will have elements of those sites mixed with some fresh ideas. We have purchased an amazing domain (I have no idea how it wasn’t taken) for the site. We are looking to get the rough draft/beta version of our site up by the end of this week. I will keep you posted.

Fortune Magazine
While at the airport I picked up a copy of Fortune Magazine to read on the airplane. I used to buy sports magazines or men’s magazines, like Maxim, but now I am focusing all my reading towards Money. The cover article caught my attention. It is title “MySpace Cowboys” and has a picture of Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe (the lesser known MySpace co-founder). It was a great read and very insightful as to how the whole phenomenon got started. The magazine also has many other articles about internet entrepreneurs, but I have not had a chance to read them. Insane amounts of turbulance on the plane forced me to put down my magazine, and grab the arm rests on my chair for dear life.

Traffic is Going Up!
As I mentioned above, it is college football season! That means a lot of people are searching for college football fight song lyrics. My site ranks ok for the search term. It is generally on the first page for “fight song lyric” searches. On game day (Saturday) I saw my traffic increase nearly 200%. Sunday remained high as well. By Monday, it was back to normal. I expect to see an increase in traffic as the football season moves forward. This spells good things for my earnings!

Traffic is also going up on Layout Pimps and MySpace Directory. Layout Pimps is now averaging over 400 uniques a day consistently, and could reach 500/day by mid month with a few more link exchanges. MySpace Directory is also getting more search results from Google as the number of links in the directory increases. MySpace Directory is averaging between 100-120 uniques a day now.

Unfortunately, traffic for this blog has remained steady. I am getting around 30-40 uniques a day. Not bad I guess for being a relatively new blog on the block. But I would like to see my readership double or triple to above 100/day. Any ideas on how to make my posts more interesting? Maybe if I made more money people would read :-)

Look out tomorrow for a post on my recalculated daily/monthly earning calculation.