I’ve always enjoyed meeting and talking to others who earn a living online. However, most of that networking takes place online, not in person. I’ve decided to get a group of folks in the Albuquerque area together every month or so to discuss earning online. Meetup.com has a great system if you want to put together a group. You can check out the new Albuquerque Online Earners group here. Our first meeting will be June 29th at a soon to be announced location (probably Flying Star or IHOP)

It would be great to meet some more earners in the Albuquerque area, so if you know anyone, please pass the link along!

A few folks from EarnersForum.com finally convinced me to go to a conference this year. I’ll be attending Affiliate Summit in July and making a little vacation out of it. Never been to Florida, so looking forward to checking out the beaches. Most of all though, I’m looking forward to meeting some folks who have been very influential in recent years and doing a lot of networking.

Drop me a line if you’re going and we’ll meet up!

For the past several months, I’ve been trying to find a descent second tier ad network. And by descent I mean one that will serve semi-relevant ads at a CPM above $0.50. They also need to fill about 90%+ of my second tier inventory. I tried several companies including CPX Interactive, RightMedia, and Casale. Here is a quick run down of each:

• CPX Interactive: Served mostly semi-naked girls even though I had “Adult” blocked. CPM was ridiculously low (<$0.10)
• RightMedia: Never did get them to approve any networks for me. Ran over 30,000 PSAs before dropping them like a phat beat
• Casale: Account rep was less than accommodating. Insisted I run them first tier with frequency capping. I realize Casale is more of a first tier, but they weren’t about to beat TribalFusion.

So after spending a month or 2 experimenting, I decided to contact a company I found late last year. LakeQuincy is an ad agency that was originally the ASPAlliance network of sites. Now they represent several sites with a focus on programming and ASP.NET. I’ve only run them for a few days but I’ve been very happy with the results. If they can keep this up and payout on time, I think I’ll keep them in my second tier and even send them a little first tier traffic.

After running a 2-week trial with IntelliTxt. Kontera has given me several reasons to go with them:

• Ability to change link color to increase CTR
• Higher payouts
• A great account rep (Emily)
• Better reporting

I realize IntelliTxt could probably have beat Kontera when it comes to payout, but IntelliTxt treated me like “the little guy” and Kontera has really gone out of their way to make sure I’m happy. Keep up the awesome work!

Took the AdWords Advertising Professional exam today. Passed it with no problems. So now I guess I’m a “Google Advertising Professional”. What does that mean? Well, not a lot cause I don’t do much PPC marketing for anyone other than myself, but it does give me a few benefits. I get some coupons to give out for anyone interested in starting an AdWords account. I also get my name in one of their databases of ad professionals.

If nothing else, it may look good on a resume.

I know it’s been over 2 months since my last blog entry. I’ve been busy with several new ventures and work has been hectic to put it politely.

I did want to share with you a new tool I’m using to keep organized. I like keeping a to-do list that I can update quickly and get reminded via text message, aim, email, etc. Remember The Milk let’s me do that from the comfort of my Google homepage or their mobile interface.

I’ve also got my tasks linked to my Google Calendar which makes it easy to see what’s going on this week.

So now, let me add “Update Ackfoo” as a weekly task and maybe I’ll remember to write more!

I’ve been very busy at my day job as well as working on a new design for Dream.In.Code. I rolled it out this weekend and it’s coming along nicely but still has a lot of bugs to fix. Forrest Morgan did the design which came out really nice. Unfortunately, my CSS abilities and number of templates and pages that have to be recoded don’t do his design justice.

I’m hoping the new design will make the site more “sticky” and encourage users to register and ask their questions. I’ve gotten great feedback so far, but realize it’s no where near perfect. Lots of work ahead tweaking stylesheets and templates.

The Webmaster Central team at Google announced the new “Links” tab in webmaster tools. This is a big deal because the “link:” operator only returned a sampling of links so you never really knew who was linking to you. Now you can see all the external links and the pages they link to as well as all of your internal links.

Judging from the numbers, Google’s “sampling” is about 1/10th of the actual links pointing at your site. So they are either discounting a lot of links, or the sampling is just that, a sampling.

Google has changed their payout scheme for AdSense referrals. If you refer someone to AdSense and they earn $5 within 180 days, you get $5. When they reach $100, you earn $250. That’s up to $255 you can make from just one AdSense referral. That’s one hellova payout, especially if you’ve got a good stream of referrals coming in!

I tried Miva’s new Monetization Center out last week. After hassling with the code and never really getting it to work properly, I gave up and just let it run for a few days. Here are my results:

• Their code shifts elements on my pages around messing up the design.
• For 5 days I haven’t been able to login to their reporting tool from any computer even though they say it works fine from their end.
• I set the CSS to display orange, but they would only show in black. They did send me a revised CSS that I never tried, but it should have worked out of the box.
• Their default CSS gets rid of the formatting on the links. (i.e. bold links become non-bold)
• In FireFox the page lags for several seconds while rendering the links.
• And the #1 reason I decided to stop my trial with Miva: Terrible earnings

Sorry Miva, you promised me a lot and I got very little in return. My account rep did a good job, but the technology just wasn’t up the par and the earnings were dismal to put it politely.