MySiteProfile

I found MySiteProfile on MyBlogLog. I read Aaron's profile on MyBlogLog, and decided to give it a try. MySiteProfile is a new social community site for bloggers, web site developers, programmers or artists. MySiteProfile has many functions, almost as much as MySpace.com. Not only users can create his/her own profile, he/she can publish a blog, start a group, create a poll, upload image to the gallery, or asks readers to rate a picture.

MySiteProfile is relatively new. It has 141 members at the point of writing. In MySiteProfile, you will not get the kind of exposure as in MyBlogLog, but since it is a smaller community, you also get more attention, and is easier to distinguish yourself. It could be a good channel for bloggers who want to promote their blogs.
If I have to start my own web 2.0 site, I would do something similar to MySiteProfile, although I will target a smaller niche than Aaron did.

You can check my member profile in here: http://mysiteprofile.com/Johnny_Cash

Google This!

Try the following:

1. Go to google.
2. Type "AdSense MyBlogLog CafePress"
3. Click Search.

Guess which site is at the top? Yes, it is "Making money on the web".

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon's mechanicl turk has been arounded since 2005. Its purpose is "to enable computer co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do". In reality, it is a marketplace where many companies have solicited workers to do micro task for a small amount of money.

I have browsed through the HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks). I saw a post for "Write 2 NHL Hockey trivia questions for $0.12". I try to sign up for it but it asked me to fill out a form to prove my qualification. I decide it is not worth the effort for $0.12.

I think MTurk is great for web site developer who wants to outsource its work. For example, if you are a Japanese blogger, you may want to use the service to get someone to translate your blog to English.

Let me try the service again, and post you my finding later. By the way, Salon has a great article about Amazon Mechanical Turk.

MyLot

I signed up to MyLot about three days ago. MyLot have been around for a while, but I have been very skeptical about it. However, after I read some posts about MyLot from some established blogs, like Mike's Money Making Mission, I decide to give it a try.

Signing up is easy. Just link to MyLot, and register as a new user. It will ask you question about your name, email and date of birth. After you complete the form, you will get a confirmation email. Login again and you are done.

After you Login, it will ask you questions about your interest. MyLot is using this information to publish differnt types of ad to your browser.

MyLot will pay you for starting a discussion or answering a discussion. I make $0.2 in 3 days with 20 posts. Here is the break down:

Day	Number of Posts	Earning
1	3	0.09
2	8	0.02
3	9	0.09

Some thoughts:

1. Get a new free email account before you sign up for MyLot. You will receive tons of emails from it. Everytime when someone posts to your discussion topic, you will get an email.


2. MyLot seems to be an eBay affiliate as a lot of its ads are linked to eBay.


3. I am very interested to know how MyLot calculates your earning. I will do some experiment and post my finding in this blog later.


4. The quickest way to money in MyLot is not by answering discussion, but by referral. If you are interested to join, you can use my link (Click here) as your referrer.

Sitemeter

I have been using mybloglog to keep track of this blog's traffic, until I come across this post from "The Million Dollar Experiment heads down under". Rob recommends sitemeter highly. So, I give it a try. I found it is incredibly easy to install.

Here is a step to step guide:

1. Click "Sign up" here to sign up for a free account.
2. Read the agreement and click "Next".
3. You will come across a page that asks for your blog's URL and the title of your blog. Enter your blog's information and click 'Next'.
4. Then, you will be asked for your personal information. You need a valid email address, your zip code, and the year of birth. You will also need to provide your title (e.g. CEO of Johnny_Cash enterprise), country, gender and your email preference. Click 'Next' when you are done.
5. Then, sitemeter will ask you if you are interested in subscribing any of its newsletter. Click 'Next' after you have finished with your selection.
6. You will come to the confirmation page. Click 'Next' and an email will be sent to your mailbox.
7. Check your mailbox and use the codename and password to log into your account.
8. Click "Manager" tab, and in the "Adding Site Meter to your site" section, click the "HTML" link.
9. Copy the javascript and add this into your blog.

You are done!

I have used ExtremeTracker before. Sitemeter is a lot easier to install and the user interface is much better than ExtremeTracker.

Social Bookmarking

I add three buttons to the footnote of my posting. The left most button is for adding my post to digg.com. The next button is for del.ic.ious, and the last button is for you to add my post as your technorati's favorite.

I will add link to Furl, Reddit and Linkagogo soon. If you have any other suggestions, please email me, or post your comment on this post. Thanks.

Customize this page

If you are using blogger, you may realize that this blog is different from the standard templates in Blogger. All Blogger's template has two columns, but this blog has three. I learned the trick to add another columns from Kumiko's Cash Quest. She posted a "How to" guide on January 23, 2007, but I have learned her trick earlier by viewing her page source.

Kumiko has over 1,500 page views in the first two weeks. She has tried out many different online services and has documented her experiences on her blog. One of the affiliate service that she uses is AsianFriendFinder, and she has earned some money with it in less than two weeks. However, for anyone who dares to duplicate her success, please keep in mind that she is a cute Japanese girl, and anyone who looks at her picture will be interested in Asian girls immediately!

You can post your comment now!

Thanks Mark for letting me know that I forgot to change my default Blogger setting.
By default, only members of blogger can leave comment.
I have changed my settings now, and anyone can post his comment on this blog!

Enjoy!

MyBlogLog

I havn't updated my blog for more than a week, but traffic has kept on coming.
Indeed, I have over 300 page impressions during the week. The secret -- MyBlogLog!

MyBlogLog is a social network for blog readers. It let bloggers or readers to create a profile, upload a picture and join community of his favorite blog. Its purpose is to let bloggers to know its readers even if the reader has never leave any comment on the post.

MyBlogLog is launched at May, 2006 and is brought by Yahoo at January 19, 2007 for more than $10 million. Even by the dot-com bubble's standard, MyBlogLog is a tremendous success story!

I think the success of MyBlogLog has a lot of similarity to MySpace. MySpace is launched by Tom Anderson, and is orginally targeted for struggling new artists. The site let artists to post his/her own music, photos, profiles and movies, which gives a lesser known artist a chance to showcase his/her talent. MyBlogLog is like MySpace for bloggers. It is a site for less known bloggers (like me) to get recognized, and provide a place to know other bloggers.

I have added the MyBlogLog avantar on the right side of the blog.

CafePress shop

Here is a link to my shop at CafePress.com:

http://www.cafepress.com/techmaster

My first T-shirt is up for sale now!

First Mistake

This site has over 100 page impressions now, but still zero clicks. Although I am not planning to make money online by talking about how to make money online, I would like to generate some income from this site.

I may have made my first mistake in my quest to make money on the web. Google Adsense publishes your average click rate for potential advertisers. Since it is likely that I won't get much traffic at first, it may be better to join Adsense when I have more traffic.

I found this site: http://www.checkpagerank.com which will give me my page rank. From some site I read, you can charge about $20 - $50 monthly for each ad., if your site has a page rank of 4.

It is a long journey for me.

Ning.com

Ning.com is a web site that is found by Netscape's founder, Marc Andressen. It is a unique web site that let anyone to make his own social web sites by simply copying an existing web site. The site offers a group website, a photo website and a video web sites.

The site service is mostly free, except for a few premium services. The site has been run for almost a year.

The premium service of Ning.com includes: running your own ads, hide source code, map your own domain name, and increases service and bandwidth. I guess this site wants to attract people who is interested in testing the Web 2.0 market before commiting a lot of resources into it.

Research....

My Adsense has finally started to show some real ads. My site has about 11 page impressions per day. Not bad for a site that barely has any content.

Time to get real.... After some research, I found out that there are four ways to generate revenue on the web.

1. Selling products on the web.

You can use an established auction site, like eBay to make money by selling your products. Sellers can even setup its own store in eBay. There are thousands of books covering different strategies on how to sell in eBay.

If you don't have any products in hand, you can create your own product lines through CafePress. CafePress let you create your own unique T-shirts, cards, or gifts to sell. Jennifer Laycock, an editor of the Search Engine Guide, claimed she is able to use the site to make money in 30 days with zero cash.

2. Join an affiliate program

Another common way to make money on the web is to join an affiliate program. Affiliate program is an arrangement that let affiliate web sites to get a certain percents of commission, based on the number of people that the affiliate sent to the merchant's site. Amazon.com popularized this idea as an Internet marketing strategy, and it still has one of the best affiliate program on the web. (Click here)

3. Advertising

A web site can make money by placing advertisements on the page. Nowadays, many bloggers use Google Adsense to place advertisement on their web sites. Adsense has become a popular method of placing advertisement for bloggers because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

4. Subscription based service

Last but not least, you can create a membership web site that charges members for a subscription fee. This has become more and more difficult to do, as most web sites are free. Some web sites offer free service for most users, but charge a fee for premium services.

5. Others.....

There is a site called, Prosper.com, that let you lend money to people who have poor credit rating and charge high interest rate on the loan.


I will formulate a strategy later this week.

Google AdSense

My first step is to setup Google AdSense. Google AdSense is a terrific service for bloggers, especially for blogs that target a particular niche. It frees the blogger from all the hassles in dealing with the advertisers. The service is launched in 2005, and has already generated millions of revenue for Google.

I applied for my account yesterday, and has already been approved. So far, it is showing only public service ad. This site is about "making money on the web", which is a very higly sought after keyword. I can expect a lot of competitions.

I've been thinking about joinning the Google Referral service.

New Year's Resolution

The World Wide Web started to take off right when I was in college. Me and several of my classmates have talked about starting our own money making web site. Through many nights in bar, we have come up with many brilliant ideas. Most of our ideas have been implemented since -- by somebody else. It is almost 10 years now, and our web site hasn't even get off the ground. It is about time to get it done for real.

Rather than figuring out the right solution, I decide I should just dive into the market and look for my niche. This blog is intended to show you my journey.