Monetize Pro

Finally it is here, the TNT guys were late on this one! Ordered this mobile phone 2 weeks ago and since yesterday its mine The Sony Ericsson W910i is a nice stylish mobile phone with a lot of options. It has a 240 x 320 pixel screen (262.144 color TFT), which I like very much! I can also add RSS feeds to it and all that kind of stuff. (full specifications here).

Unfortunately I was not looking to buy a new phone, but my old phone suddenly died so I had no choice! Also looked for the iPhone, but here in the Netherlands it is not available yet. So this is my new phone:

And I love it! Alexa recently updated their rankings algorithm and now they finally updated the statistics again. Before this algorithm update alexa was only accurate to websites that had a tech savvy audience, people with the alexa toolbar installed. But now it is getting info out of more sources, which makes the rankings more accurate and more trustful!

Check out this image from Alexa explaining it in an image:

Personally I like Alexa way more than pagerank! But in the end it comes all down to traffic. With this new alexa algorithm you won’t find a site with a good alexa and low traffic (at least, that’s what I hope, otherwise the algorithm change was not that useful). Give me your shouts about this!

This was something I was doing for the last 2-4 weeks. Making up excuses why I was not making any decent money and was not working on my sites. Currently the money that is made on the net is at a low point and I was making excuses for it. Why am I not making money? Because I don’t work at my websites! This is the only excuse that is true!

That made me decide to get a new theme for new energy! Recently I also bought a fairly large xbox 360 forum which is not monetized at all (yet). This forum is good but does not have many good search engine rankings nor traffic. It needs more backlinks (relevant links), that is why I bought a halo 3 blog! It was up for sale for a very cheap price, holding a pagerank 3 and currently making $10 a month on adsense. I will update this blog like 5 times a month and link to sections at the xbox forum.

But for now: no more excuses for me!

Yesterday I noticed an interesting post from Shoemoney about the future of SEO. He got interviewed about this subject and one of the questions he got asked about was what he thought about the future of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Shoemoney is pretty clear about this question, he thinks SEO has no future. SEO will die because of the voting on toolbars, analytics reports, geo statistics, social bookmarking etc. which is affecting the rankings more and more these days.

My point of view is a little bit different though. There will always be room for SEO, it will not die completely! I agree with shoemoney that other factors are becoming more and more important, but I cannot agree on this line: “So in my opinion there just is no future in current SEO for Google anyway.” It is good that he mentions “in my opinion” because I think there will be always room for good proper SEO and it is all about relevant links. But who am I?

Anyway, if you think SEO will not helping anything anymore in the future, please stop optimize your pages so my pages will have a better change on ranking higher

Over the past year I got into trading stocks, holding mutual funds and I even started forex this week. As you can see on the title I am quitting all this trading as of today! I am losing money on this! Better invest my money into the web business than taking it into the stock market or any other form of trading.

Yesterday I put in $300 on the Euro to rise against the Dollar. Euro made a huge fall in value and it was at its lowest point in the last 30 days, so I expected to go back up! Left it run for the night and when I woke up, everything was closed due to stop loss (that means I lost all). This made me decide I would leave this market alone for a long time!

At least it was a nice experience!

Today there is a new theme installed at Monetize Pro. I am very satisfied with this theme but there are some things that still have to be changed, which will be done this week (hopefully). Motivation was at a low point lately and I hope this new theme and my current pagerank 2 will help me working harder online! Why am I talking about the pagerank? I don’t know either, pagerank sucks! But I guess it still works as a motivator for me, hehe.

On this theme I will use OIO publisher for selling advertising space. Other blogs like Cow’s work with this and it is looking very smooth!

Hope you like the theme!

We I started this blog in the “we” vorm, like there were more people blogging on this blog. This is not the case, there are a few persons that can post blogs on monetize pro, but they have own accounts on here with own names, so if they post something, you will notice that fast enough!

Now I decided that my blog posts are 100% from me and not from someone else, so that is why I decide to type in the “I” vorm. Ofcourse posts are becoming ugly if you use to many “I, I, I”, hope this will not happen

Some other people will also blog here like I already mentioned above (about the accounts). Stay tuned!

To give you guys an update! Currently we are working on a new small blog network with 4 blogs in different niche’s. This will be some kind of gamble because running 4 blogs and get them active will be a hard task.

The xbox 360 forum is just sitting there collecting more posts from its users, which is not bad. The plan is to make an additional blog were we place reviews of all the new games etc. with affiliate links if that’s possible

Today we sold our technology forum which we had for around 1 month now. It was bought for $150 and flipped for $350. We also bought a unique design for $30 and installed it on the forum, so that makes our total costs at $180, which is almost a ROI of 100%!

We also started a new site today, it is a gadget blog and will be posted on once a day! We will review laptops, cameras, desktops, iphones and all other cool gadgets everyone wants to have! This website will also be monetized with affiliates which we will discuss here ofcourse! Currently it only runs some adsense ads which I am not a fan of, but what the hell

We bought a new website this week! It is a quite big xbox 360 forum! The forum has more than 110,000 posts and over 1,500 members. We don’t own a xbox 360 yet, but maybe we will buy one now we got this forum, that way we can participate on it easier

Maybe we are lucky and can even win a brand new xbox 360 elite from the contest john cow is running! He is giving this xbox 360 away through a lottery he will hold on the end of April! The contest is proudly sponsored by Top Hosting Center “webhosting solutions for you and your business”. GTA 4 will come with the xbox if you win it.

The forum is not monetized at the moment! This is something we are going to change, but not that it will be irritating the forum members! We will update you here how we are going to monetize this xbox 360 community! The first goal is to make $1500 a month from it at the end of 2008!