Mid-Year Status & Earnings Report
Most of the Make Money On The Internet blogs post their earnings and bragging-rights each month so everyone knows that their blog is still worth reading. Up thru the end of 2007 I also posted earnings monthly, but since my blog isn’t really a “make money online” type blog, I decided to stop publishing our monthly earnings reports.
Based on a few comments posted here in the blog, and several email/contacts that i’ve received, it seems that many readers are still interested in our success and progress at the site - so I’ve decided to post a quick status report for the first part of 2008 (January 1 through July 31):
Traffic Jan 1 2008 - July 31 2008:
Traffic has remained mostly on a slight upward trend - despite the GoogleSlap we had to deal with back in June.
- Total Visitors: 2,260,483
- Total PageViews: 5,728,988
Earnings:
Earnings have remained steady and ahead of 2007. And even though we ran into problems with PayPal, that turned out to be a blessing is disguise - resulting in April 2008 being our best earning-month ever, breaking $14k. Adsense earnings have been slightly down from 2007 because we aren’t generating the kind of revenue from Firefox Referrals that we were in 2006 and 2007 - and with the upcoming retirement of Firefox referrals Adsense earnings will drop even more for the second-half of the year. My long-term plan is to shift a greater percentage of earnings away from Premium Memberships and into PPC earnings, which are generated by anonymous visitors at the site. Premium Membership income is too volatile and I would like to get back to rewarding members with more “free” Premium Membership based on contributing content to the site. Increasing PPC income will require increasing overall traffic, optimizing existing PPC systems like Adsense and Kontera, exploring new PPC programs such as Microsoft’s upcoming PPC competitor to Adsense and more ‘work’ in general..
Expenses for 2008 have been low: Still no advertising expenses, a few server-issues that required expert (paid) help, regular monthly server/bandwidth bills and a server upgrade - all totaling just under $4k so far this year.
Earnings Breakdown Jan - July 2008:
- Premium Memberships: $37k
- Adsense: $13k
- Kontera: $9k
- Affiliate Sales: $3k
In 2007 total earnings came in at just under $80k, and we’ll probably surpass that by the end of Sept 2008 - we’re shooting to break $100k by the end of 2008.
But I still haven’t quit my day-job..
How To Tell Someone You’ve Banned Them
Every day we manually ban 4 or 5 users from the site. Usually these are spammer or scraper IP’s, sometimes they are actual members or visitors that have gone out of their way to break our rules.
We use the Drupal Troll module to ban members & IP’s which allows you to redirect banned members to a static HTML page that you create. Of course you can make this static page say anything you want, like “fug off, you’re banned“, but that just gives someone reason to get even more pissed-off. I usually keep our ‘banned’ page disguised as some sort of error message, and when I get bored I change it. Last night I was bored so I updated the page again, this time in a more creative way than usual. You can see our current “you are banned” page here: -> You are banned! That should throw them off..
Drupal Instant Messenger
A few months ago we installed the Instant Message module. It allowed our Premium 
Members to send PMs (private instant messages) to each other via the website. The IM module is very basic and allows members to send short (254 characters) plain-text messages to each other. The instant-messages appear at the top of the next page the recipient views. The Instant Message module is very lightweight, but also very simple and limited - For example, you can only send a message to a member that is currently online.
Last week I stumbled across the Drupal Private Message module (I don’t know how I missed it all this time). The Private Message module allows members to send WYSIWYG messages, with no size limit, to any member (although we limit it to Premium Members) online or offline. It also has an “inbox”, a sent-items folder, it allows for creation of new storage folders, and even lets you know if your recipient has read your message or not. You can read about all the features and planned upcoming features on the Privatemsg page.
The users absolutely love this new instant messenger - we have received more comments and feeback on this feature than any upgrade we’ve ever done.
If you’re looking to add some socialization to your Drupal social website, give it a try.
Drupal PrivateMSG Module for V4-5
Anatomy Of A Logo
Image and “branding” are important for any big-business, and just as important for even the smallest of websites. If your visitors can’t remember your domain name you need to do your best to ‘burn’ the image of the website into their memory (think Coca Cola or McDonalds). Ideally, you would plaster that image or ‘brand’ of your website all over the internet with advertising and all over the real-world with T-shirts, mousepads and whatever else you can slap your logo on.
When I first started GrownUpGeek.com, I had zero budget, so I used my mad Photoshop skillz to throw together this logo:
This logo served it’s purpose for a few months but once the website was generating some income we figured it was time to invest in something better.
After some Googling we found George Coghill. George had a unique style that we liked so we commissioned him to come up with some ideas. We only specified to him that we wanted a sexy yet geeky female character based on my wife (aka “The Geek”). I sent him some photos and he came up with this draft:
We then used the final of that draft for our logo which we’ve been using for about the last 2 years:
Using George’s original artwork I was also able to hack this ‘haircut’ version that we’ve used in various places:
We’ve been using George’s logo for a while now and decided that we wanted a new look. We wanted the same character, but something with a “Web 2.0″ look to it. I had seen John Cow’s new logo that he had done last year and Tyler Cruz’s - both which were done by SOSFactory.com, and decided to see what they could come up with. A few hundred dollars later and Sergio sent me this first draft:
We liked the new look and told Sergio to press the “colorize” button and we got this:
He then added our text and tagline:
SOSFactory will provide layered PSD’s so we will be able to move things around as we see fit. Our finalized header will probably look something like this:
We will do the finalizing of the logo and put it live on the website (hopefully) in the next few days.
If you have not already “branded” your site you should consider doing so. Even with no money at all you can come with something on your own like we did, or you can find a struggling new artist to do something very inexpensive (like $10 or $20) over at the Digital Point Forums. If you’ve got a few hundred $ that you’re willing to invest you can’t go wrong with George Coghill, and if you want to take it to the next level (and spend even more), I highly recommend SOSFactory.
