Wednesday, August 08, 2007

w00t! Free money from Google!

There actually is a grain of truth to those Google related spam traps. Big G just sent me a check for a little over $100. This is the amount that I've earned in the past 14 months since I signed up for Adsense - Google's text based ads appear on a few of my pages and if anyone clicks them I get paid!

I hooked up with the free service StatCounter a bunch of years ago. They let me know which of my pages are the most popular as well as a slew of other stats regarding who's visited, how many times, etc. What I learned was that 95% of my hits were to pages inside my Ego-Surfing cache. Once upon a time I used to collect references to myself that popped up on the net. It's called "ego-surfing". I created a page of all the funniest/most impressive links that reference someone named "Eric Dalton". Years later I went back and noticed that many of the links had gone down and were gone forever so when I redid the page I saved the pages & put them in my Ego Link Cache.

As years went by the original pages vanished and MY version of the page became the only reference on the internet to a sometimes quite obscure topic (Sonoluminescence for example). At one point if you searched Yahoo for "gospel stage plays" I was the #1 link! Someone sharing my name had posted a message in a forum regarding "Madea's Family Reunion" and other gospel stage plays by Tyler Perry. When the original forum went down my page became a top source of information on the topic. Cool! I never thought of using the cache that way, but I'm happy to provide a service, albeit a tiny one, to the www at large. The nice part is that if I put an ad on that page with links to related information the searchers have even more options. Even better - I get a few cents for every link clicked.

Over the months I included ads on 7 pages. The Tyler Perry information is my top draw and biggest earner but the quickest way to earn me a buck is to download one of Google's software offerings from my referrals page. Thanks for reading, and thanks Adsense for giving something back to the little guy!


Links:
Google's Adsense Program
Eric's Referral Page

Orignal From: w00t! Free money from Google!

1 comment:

R said...

If you are looking to track your stats in greater depth, you might want to try out GoStats. You will likely find fewer limits on your data.