Make A Living From Your Computer Blog

Courtesy of Athlyn Green, here is a great blog for beginner freelance writers and others looking for more ways to increase earnings. Learn from the best at how to bookmark, set realistic income goals, make sense of AdSense and much much more! Anything you ever wanted to know about how to make your living online is here in Athlyn's blog. She has helped me so much in my quest to become a great online freelancer and I know her articles will help you too. Thank you Athlyn!

Link To Athlyn's Blog

6 Ways To NOT Increase Your Traffic

Learn 6 ways to NOT increase traffic to your website. Common mistakes new writers make.

6 Ways NOT To Increase Your Traffic

Hein Marais

Hein Marais is a talented freelancer who writes for Triond and at Blogger. He specializes in health and exercise, technology and "Wow" pieces. Check him out here.

Hein Marais at Blogger

Arrows Linking My HubPages

Sweet! There are little arrows at the bottom of most of my HubPages that send the reader to the next Hub...How did I do that? I don't know. I will figure it out and let you know.
Athlyn Green said...
When you put your Hubs into categories or groups, these arrows will direct readers to the next article. You hit "edit" and then create a group and give it a name. By grouping your Hubs, you can direct readers to similar Hubs they may be interested in.

DUH! Set up your affiliates.

Okay. After a week or so of wondering why my earnings on AdSense were 27 cents (When I have 9 Hubs, 20 Triond articles and 5 PrintNPost articles that seem to be doing well) I FIGURED IT OUT. .. just 5 minutes ago...I came straight here to post.
On HubPages, and I am going to check out PrintNPost too, you have to "link" your EBay, Amazon and Google to your HubPages account. I think I knew this and forgot. I was just browsing around tonight and I thought "what's this? Affiliate settings?" So I click out of curiosity and realize the Ebay and Amazon are filled in with numbers but my Google is not. Then I read the fine print.. "blah,blah,blah...you cannot get paid until blah...blah..blah."
So. I clicked on the button next to the Google area and it asked me if I had already an account with Google Adsense. Clicked yes. Filled out the info and replied immediately to the email Google sent to me saying "Hubpages is requesting access to your Google account" I said "For sure!" and I am on my way. So. At Hubpages, and check your other accounts, add Google to get paid. They need your publisher Id #. I wanna cry right now.

Highest Paying Ads

It is in the wee hours here in the Chicago 'burbs. 3am and I am up contemplating my next move. I wanted to share some information I found on a website with you. I am not a hack nor do I want to take credit for someone else's information. If you are the original writer of the following content please, let me know and I will credit you. I stumbled upon the site holding this information and have not been able to find it again. The writer suggests the top paying GoogleAds per Click. These are under the "AdSense" setup and under "Referrals".

Keyword and Pay

1) adverse credit remortgage $31.10 per click
2) att call conference $29.34 per click
3) angeles drug loss rehab $28.51 per click
4) att go $28.32 per click
5) att wireless $27.11 per click
6) benchmark landing $40.36 per click
7) domain yahoo $97.44 per click

Insurance medical temporary, hair removal, Washington D.C. and american single were also keywords the author had mentioned to have great earning ability.

Google's help page names the folowing ad sizes and pixels as the most successful ads.

1) 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
2) 330 x 250 Medium Rectangle
3) 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper (vertical)

I hope this was helpful to you. Have a great night.

Update: Here you go, it's not the original author but a site that has an alphabetical listing of the TOP PAYING ADS to get codes for and put on your site. Rumler.com

I am having a problem finding the area within the "manage ads" area of Google Adsense where one could do a keyword search for the ads and copy/paste the html code. I was able to do it a few months ago, but now cannot find it.

Please comment here and let me know if you know how to do this. =) Help a sister out?

Sorting Through AdSense and Feeds

Good morning and Happy Saturday to everyone. After almost a month of freelancing now, I thought I had a handle on all things "AdSense". Nope. I finally realized that I could pick out the exact ad and size of the ad. Sweet! I received 27 cents my first day but none since then. It's been only a few days. The wheels in my head are turning as I try to figure out how exactly these great freelancers do it! I read a lot of different articles on HubPages and Triond to get a feel for what the successful writers are doing and to be frank, it doesn't seem like much. But I am sure there s a lot of "behind the scenes" action I am not seeing. Links, feeds etc... The articles are on interesting topics but are usually quite short. I am concentrating on building my reputation so I have deleted some article I think would not lend themselves to increasing a solid reputation. Am I being too critical of myself? I don't know, but I will continue to write what I love to write about and keep them coming, placing ads and figure out how to link everything up. I am also concentrating on Keyword placement in my articles. No pain, no gain!

The "Triondy" Awards

Triond.com supplies members and visitors with a Hot List of Popular Writers and a list of Popular Stories. Naturally, these are the first articles I browse through when I sign in. I was thinking, "How do I get my name up in lights too?". I realized that I would need to publish more, receive more comments and 'likes'. Then I thought about all of the other 'no-name' freelancers that are asking themselves the same thing. The hours that I spend per day on the website, reading articles, commenting, and managing my own articles, I should put the great websites that I find up on a page. I was finding some great work that I just happened to stumble onto. Maybe the site needed more visibility or bookmarks to be more successful. In any event, I thought that these articles should be recognized by a peer. Some came The "Triondys".
The Triondy Awards were a success right off the bat with the winning writers submittin their comments and acceptance speeches. Everyone seemed really grateful to be recognized for their great work. I really don't think that these writers should have been so surprised. The pieces written were unique, very well put together, and carried an interesting voice.
One Regret.
There is a Subgroup Award called "The Best Con-Artist". I will be taking this award down for week ending June 21st. It was meant to be funny and 'call-out' someone who published that article for clicks. I was really sort of mean to one writer that won this award last week. I was frustrated by some of the garbage articles I had to read to get to some great ones. Not all of the good articles win and it is often a toss-up between 2 or three articles for the winner. I should start given runner up mentions/awards. Yes. I think I will do that. Writers should know that their articles were up for the award and so should the readers.

(Update: The Triondy Awards no longer exist. Thank you for your participation.)

HubPages and Google AdSense

I found out about HubPages from reading about it on many a freelancer profile. Everyone had boasted how 'user friendly' HubPages was. (??) I didn't find it so easy. I could not figure out how to use the capsules and move them around. I used an article that had been published on Triond so that I would be able to cut and paste to make my first Hub and easy go, being a learneer and all. After 2 hours I was frustrated. I couldn't get my caspules lined up to look the way I wanted them to. I went to sleep that night feeling like it would take 8 hours just to finish one Hub,
The next day, I completed my first Hub and received a Hub Score of 62 on that one. Yey! I published my next Hub that day, in 30 minutes, and received a score of 65. =). I gained Prodigy status and was stoked. 22 hits within an hour and I thought everything was going great, but I could not figure out how I made money off of the Google ads that were posted on the site.
A few days later, I came across Google AdSense and learned, through trial and error, that I would not be able to choose the ads that I wanted on my HubPages. Google pickes them out for you and you earn the revenue when they are clicked on, but you need to SIGN UP with Google AdSense in order to get paid. I was using generic ads on my Blogger pages, You Tube etc... I figured out that I could actually pick out the ads that I wanted and found a site that told me the best 'keywords' to enter for searching for ads, the best click average ad sizes and shapes. I added them to my skinny blogger pages by going to the HTML/Java tab after clicking on "Add to this Page" under the 'Customize' tab. (So do this sequence backwards, Customize", then "Add to this Page" then "HTML/Java".) I was able to copy/paste the Ad Code from the 'manage ads' tab on my Google AdSense Dashboard. Sweet! Customize ads on my pages. I cannot figure out how to put customized add on my PrintNPo$t pages yet.

Looking For A Hobby, Triond and Athlyn.

All work and no play gets tiresome. I was looking for a hobby that could make me some extra money. Freelancing was the perfect idea.
I came across Triond.com in a Google search for 'freelance jobs'. The sign up was very easy and I was able to publish right away, make friends and add comments to other articles I liked.
I was a little disappointed by my initial earnings. For 4 articles, I earned 15 cents, over a 5 day span. I was sad that after a lot of research and time put in I wasn't making a dollar yet.
I began to bookmark my sites under the 'Content' tab to the little icons under 'Share'. (Google, Furl, StumbleUpon, Digg etc...) I saw a few more hits per articles/day. Yey!
I made a friend named Athlyn. She is a successful freelance writer who has many blogs and writes for a number of different pay per click and revenue share sites. She has won writing awards on the exclusive Suite 101 site, for published writers. I began to read her articles on how to make the most out of freelance efforts. She has been very helpful to me. I also began to read whatever articles I could find of hers and continue to update my schema about freelancing.