After publishing my review of Adjix, the service which pays users to shorten URLs, I received a bit of a backlash from Performancing readers. According to a few commenter's, by writing a review of Adjix, I was promoting spamming and scamming. Taking your feedback to heart, I took the criticisms of the service and emailed them to Joe Moreno, the Founder of Adjix hoping he would respond. He did, and this is what he had to say.

Read the rest of this entry

Raj's article entitled Hitting $100/mth in AdSense: 7 Things I've Learned prompted me to write this article with the slightly more provocative title.

My first goal was to make $100/month. Then $10/day. Then $20/day. Then $50/day.

Then $100. That was the last goal I reached. Now I'm closing in on four figures in AdSense alone (well, not that close, but close enough;-) ...

1. Pick the Right Niche: I can't overstate this. Traffic=Money. Your niche should be capable of driving a lot of traffic.
2. Bait Like Hell: SERPS drive traffic and bait drives the SERPS.
3. Be A Freak of Nature: Get up at 3am, start working and don't stop until 10pm. If you don't have enough to do, then either you're not in the right niche, you're lazy, or you need to educate yourself on how to...
4. Build Your Footprint: Interact, interact, interact. With people and social media systems. Comment. Vote. You know the drill. Just don't stop.
5. Target Powerful Eyeballs: You know your niche and you know the important people in your niche. Make sure they know you. And don't stop there. Make sure Fox News knows about you too.
6. Link-Out Like A Loose Lemon: Just keep linking to other sites in your niche. They might or might not link back to you, but they can't ignore you...12 months later...
7. 12 Months Baby, 12 Months: Work like a horse for 12 months. If you make it, you can start to relax...cuz everyone's coming to you now.

Bonus: Make a friend every day.

Those are the 7 things I've learned. Pick the right niche and put all your energy into it for 12 months. There are other important factors like outsourcing to free you up to do what you do best...but at the end of the day, it's focused, freak of nature exertions of energy in the right direction that win the day....

...at least that's how it's worked for me.

Ok. Let's keep this simple. Over the next month, I'm going to be heading up an effort to monetize Performancing. I'd love your help, especially if you can think of creative ways that both Performancing *and* our community members can jointly profit without crapping the site up with junky ads.

While you brainstorm in the comments section, keep in mind our 2 main services right now, pMetrics and WordPress Themes. There may be ways to monetize them *in addition to* the main Performancing site.

So without further ramblings:

If you ran Performancing, how would you monetize it?

Here's a PR 8 page: http://www.corante.com/loom/. That page has been dead since June 9. 2006 when the author started writing for a different company, on a new domain.

According to Google, this outdated, non-updated page is more important than The Drudge Report which has a PR 7.

We all know that PageRank is easy to manipulate and a poor reflection of a site's value. We also know that Google has moved on from PageRank to include things like TrustRank, traffic data, etc.

Despite it's low-resolution, ease of manipulation, and inaccurate indication of a site's worth, PageRank continues to capture people's imagination. It drives the economy of Text Link Ads.

Admittedly, I buy and sell PageRank. Less so now then when I first got into the game. But I've always used discretion and have tried to hedge my bets towards sites that are poised for growth, rather than those that are in the process of decline.

In other words, for the savvy text link ad buyer, market pressure actually encourages investment in quality, growing sites, as opposed to sites with artificial PR injection or sites on the decline. That's a virtue of the TLA market in my opinion. The savvy buyers go after legit, growing sites.

Which brings me to another point. There's very little market pressure from AdSense to make quality websites. Not all quality sites translate into high AdSense earnings (many spammy sites make lots of AdSense revenue). On the other hand, any site that is growing and making progress has a product to sell in the TLA market.

But alas, I digress from the main point of this post: we really need a solid, diversified metric to measure a balance between site strength and site momentum. PageRank measures brute link strength. Alexa gives us a rough indication of a site's growth over time, but it's an easily manipulated, one-dimensional metric.

Wouldn't it be great to have a single metric that gave us a realistic picture of the health of any given website? Not just brute link strength(PageRank), and not just an indication of relative traffic (Alexa), but a measure of a site's overall presence, growth and significance *at this moment*?

Community is important to us at Performancing. Over the next few months we plan to roll out a number of new programs that enhance and give back to the Performancing community.

Earn $10 For Front Page Blog Posts

If we like your blog post enough to move it to the front page, you'll earn $10. Each day, we'll scour the entire set of Performancing blog posts and when we find posts that contain useful information, we'll promote them to the front page. On the 1st of each month, we'll pay users for the previous month.

AdSense Revenue Share

This is exciting. We're sharing 70% of all AdSense revenue generated by your own content. This gives you a chance to utilize and leverage the strong Performancing platform to add an additional revenue stream for your online endeavors. Additionally, you earn 10% of all AdSense revenue generated by users that you refer to Performancing.

To setup AdSense sharing, go to "my account" in the right navigation menu. Then click "edit" followed by AdSense ID. Here you can enter your own AdSense ID.

To refer users to Performancing, go to "my account" and scroll down to "Your referral link" - if a new user uses this link to sign-up at Performancing, you'll receive 10% of AdSense Revenue generated by the user's own content.

Theme Contests

Details are forthcoming, but we will be holding regular WordPress and Drupal theme contests with substantial cash prizes. Stay tuned!

Plugin/Module Contests

As with our theme contests, we'll be offering substantial cash prizes for plugins developed for Firefox and WordPess, as well modules developed for Drupal. Contest winners will include not only the developers, but also those who provide the concepts/ideas which we get implemented.