B0ne’s Home

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been following the advice of every crackpot “Hey-I’m-Not-A-Guru” Guru in the Make Money Online Blogosphere for a while now. Most of them espouse the keeping track of your blog traffic through analyzing clicks and visits and what not. I have statistics from a FireStats plugin on most of my blogs. I also have built-in stats from my web host, LUNARPAGES.

The thing is: I can’t believe a single number from any of them because they are all telling me different things! MyBlogLog tells me I get 2 MyBlogLog users per day. FireStats says 20 per day. BlogRush says I have upwards of 3000 impressions. Ebay Partner Network says the same thing for the last 3 weeks 13 clicks for one of my campaigns, no sales while Google Adwords says I’m getting 2-5 clicks every day for that site. Adsense is telling me I’m getting 78 impressions today for all my “channels.”

It’s a damn shell game people! It all ads up to me not getting any cash in my pockets. I’m dipping my feet into the AdWords PPC game now and I just don’t understand how they can blatantly disregard my daily budget day after day! They have some kind of thing called “over-delivery” where they will exceed my budget by 20% as a favor to me to drive more traffic. Yeah right. Their 20% turned out to be about 2000% a few days ago.

I guess, like everything else on the Web, a basic truth still exists. It held true in 1994 when I started building websites with html and FrontPage and it holds true today: Don’t believe everything you read! Keep an eye on your stats but don’t be a slave to them like me. The only true stat that you can probably bet on is your bank account balance. Mine’s a bit sad now. Maybe it’ll make me happy in a few days when Pay day and Mista BOOSH’s rebates start flowing in.

So watch out, the numbers lie. This blog won’t. I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Now, your driveway looks a little worn out. You need me to resurface it? I can give you a fair price. How ’bout you just GIMMIEAQUARTAH!!!

It’s time to get off our aiishes and get to work on our BANS stores if you haven’t already. The EBAY Partner Network is up and ready to go. That means that if you haven’t done your updating on your BANS now, you’ll be screwed once the switchover takes place in two weeks. If you were using the Ebay Flexible Destination Tool, then it’s high time you redid all your links with the new EBay Partner Network stuff. Like any new doodad, it will pay to RTFM when you start out. Making the campaigns is the key step that you must master if you are going to plug Ebay crap in all over the web.
I had quite a few BANS sites sitting around doing nothing and also misconfigured for the new version of BANS. Version 3.0 is a pretty hefty upgrade. From all appearances, it looks like the bugs and misfires that accompanied this thing in its first outing are gone. There’s some meta-tagging and better looking templates in the update. If you search around, you can find some pretty cool looking free templates for the new version as well. So get ready for war. Let this be the hour that we draw our BANS together. Fell deeds awake. Now for Wrath, now for Ruin, and a Bunch Of Money in Our Pockets!