You know, I may just be eternally in love with Pawan Agrawal, the guy who runs MaxBlogPress. The guy is constantly coming out with new, amazingly cool/useful WordPress plugins. The other day I raved about his newly-launched Psychic Search plugin; you can see my ravings about it in this blog post.
Anyhow, he recently created a new plugin that’s targeted specifically towards those of us who don’t have the know-how to make our own themes & aren’t particularly well-versed in much more than just tweaking pre-coded layouts. You can actually see it in action on this site already; notice the little star icon by my url/title? That’s courtesy of installing the new MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin.
Not only does having a “favicon” brand your results in web searches (if the surfer is using a certain Firefox extension like Google Icon) and thusly draw more notice to it; it also helps attract your bookmarker’s attention. If you’re like me and have a huge, long list of bookmarks, anything with a unique (or any at all, really) icon tends to get checked more frequently than the others, solely because it immediately grabs my attention more than the plain, icon-less sites surrounding it in the bookmark menu. Maybe once more people have caught on to favicons, this will change, but it still seems like most websites neglect that aspect of their site’s design. Favicons can also show up & be effective on your RSS feeds, tabbed browsing, and even some blogs’ comment sections. So, yeah - it’s just generally an all-around good idea, especially at this point where it’s not everyone uses them, to have your sites sporting their own favicons.
The MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin allows you to pick from a batch of pre-loaded icons, or upload your own - and all you have to do is activate the plugin in your WordPress dashboard; no code insertions or anything. Definitely another hit from MaxBlogPress.
Nice. I made the AWE top webmasters list again last period - this time for having the second highest average purchase ($141.42) - of course, I only had seven sales, but still… I love seeing my name on that list, makes me feel like I can actually succeed at this whole game. The person under me had an average of $124.67 with 77 sales. Can you IMAGINE. Some of these people make bring in a quarter of a million in sales every 15 days (top sales amount for last period: $254,133) - it’s just so hard to wrap my mind around that much income in such a small period of time.
The month’s just about half-way over and I’ve already beaten January’s income. My overall conversion ratio isn’t too bad - 1:491 for February. Really, the only discouraging thing this month is the eerily low rate of CCBill sales this month - I’ve had only ONE new signup for any CCBill website, and last month I was averaging at least one new CCBill signup each day. I’ve been pushing CCBill sponsors just as much, so it’s kind of strange. Good thing other sponsors have been converting in their place, I guess.
I’ve got a few goals for the next day or so: I need to think of a domain name for either a black girl or interracial niche blog. I already have Latina and Asian niche sites, but for some reason I’m just drawing a blank when I come to domain names for these two niches… and I have so many gorgeous black chicks I want to promote! Interracial has always converted well for me when I put it on LLO, too, and according to Psychic Search, my readers REALLY want more.
Also been working on another mainstream website - it’s not yet live, so no links just now. But it’s on a topic that I’m quite adept at rambling about, so hopefully that helps with prompting me to update it more frequently than a few of my other mainstream websites.
A friend of mine posted about my situation with Cash Uncovered on a webmaster message board that I don’t usually frequent. I didn’t ask him to make the post, he made it because he thought that it would expedite the process of getting the missing check situation resolved. Apparently, Steve overestimated the maturity levels of the guys at CU, and the thread turned into some wannabe drama-bomb clusterfuck.
I’ll just summarize the retarded ass shit that the CU guys pulled in that thread (and here, even, one of them decicded to showcase his absolutely ASTOUNDING reading comprehension by leaving a comment here that I’d already said was irrelevant to the missing checks). Now, I’ll be honest - I haven’t bothered to check the thread again after my last post in it over a day ago, because the responses they’ve given already made it pretty clear that they’re more interested in trolling/internet tough guy-ing than actually reading & processing what I responded with, so there’s no point in even putting forth effort towards that forum.
I’m on the MaxBlogPress mailing list, and a few days ago Pawan released a new plugin for WordPress that I am having way too much fun with. It’s all sneaky & snoopy, but I foresee it as being very useful, especially for my adult websites.
The plugin in question is called Psychic Search, and it essentially tracks what people search for on your website. I installed it last night and, looking at the records it’s pulling up for this website… um, I see that someone searched for… “poop”. Okay, that’s rather strange, but you get the picture.
Not only is this going to be pretty amusing for me (I’m the kind of weird person who gets a kick out of watching those live search engine feeds where you can see all the stuff random people are looking for on Google and the like), it’s also going to be a good kind of “secret weapon” for finding out what my audience wants to see. For example: I have the plugin installed on liquidLOVEonline & I noticed that my top search was for Sandee Westgate… the only problem was, I had no galleries of her for my surfers to find. So I remedied that this morning by creating a new gallery featuring the lovely Ms. Westgate.
I’m hoping that this gives me an edge, knowing what my readers are looking for and being able to deliver it so that I can hopefully maximize my conversions. Even if it doesn’t impact my sales at all, though… it’s still pretty fun to see what people are looking for!
Well, after Phil from Cash Uncovered promised to hit me up when he was in the office on Monday, we’re easing into Thursday morning without a peep from him or any of the other CU guys. It’s shaping up to be an exact repeat of last time: he promised to look into it and vanished into the ether. So I guess I should start crafting my GFY drama llama post, huh?
That whole mess aside, I have been having some seriously ADD days lately. I was diagnosed with it a few years back, and I usually take Adderall for it, but with how yucky I’ve been feeling lately (my stomach’s been going nuts every time I take pills all of a sudden), I’ve been skimping on my dosage a bit and it’s REALLY starting to show. Focusing on anything (even non-work like conversations and video games) is just kind of overwhelming and challenging, and getting work done has been like pulling teeth… I know I should go pop my pills, but I’m just SO sick of throwing up. At first I thought it was solely Vicodin, but now each and every pill I take (even friggin’ OTC aspirin) has been wreaking havoc on my insides. And no, there’s no chance that I’m pregnant. So a hearty WTF to my body.
I’m pretty much owing all my income to some big spender on the webcams front, not any hard work and elbow grease on my part. Thank you, random man who’s dropped $650 on adult webcams this past week. Without you, I’d be making like $3 a day.
I don’t really have anything specific to talk about today, so this will be kind of a ramble. Fair warning.
I got a response from Cash Uncovered that somewhat irked me, they came at me with an attitude like a) I was silly for complaining about only $210 (way to not think long-term and realize that it might’ve been more had I not pulled all your links from my sites) and b) they never “ignored” me, even though in the same breath he acknowledged that he never followed up on his “checking with the bank” promise. I’m just getting a slightly condescending vibe from these guys, and it’s bothersome. I haven’t done anything wrong here, is it really so awful of me to expect to be paid the money you owed me, and for you to not drop contact in the middle of supposedly investigating why I haven’t received anything from you? Ugh.
Net Audio Ads supposedly went live on February 1st, but it seems they’ve hit a few speedbumps and there’s a statement in their affiliate area saying that ads will begin playing at 6:00 PM EST this Monday… so, tomorrow, I guess. It should be interesting to see how this does.
My earnings have dropped off hugely all of a sudden - they’re back to the sporadic randomness of previous months (ie, I made $75 on February 1st, but then only $5 on the 2nd). I’m kind of bumming about this… I was really enjoying the at-least-$20-day streak I was on, it made me feel a little more secure about all of this… but now I haven’t made a CCBill sale in almost a week. Boo.