Staska.Net

I have always been strongly against partial feeds on the blogs I read.

Actually one of the main reasons I unsubscribe from many blogs is because they do not offer full feed, so I have to click through to their site to read every post. What’s the point of feeds then?

And I made sure to offer full feed to the readers of staska.net from the beginning. Or so I thought

Yesterday I finally got to subscribing to my blog feed and saw that for the most of the posts on staska.net, only partial feed is available.

I always enable “Full Text” option in my blog administration panel. And it always was enough… Until WordPress 2.1 came out.

Turns out that one nasty feature was introduced with the latest release of WordPress. It now started truncating your feeds after the “more” tag. And since I often use this tag on my blog, all my longer posts were cut-off.

I know, WP 2.1 has a warning about this in their admin panel. But who reads these warnings after using software for more then a year?

Read the rest of this entry »

Every personal improvement expert will tell you that setting and achieving goals is a key to success. And if you are just getting in to blogging for money, or any other online money making venture, realistic and ambitious goal setting is a must.

But if you are just starting and haven’t done anything yet, how do you know what goals to set yourself? Saying that I want to be earning $10 a day, have 1000 daily visitors and 500 subscribers in a month is all good and well. But is it a goal or just a wish?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bit later then some predicted but it’s here. Yesterday I have received an e-mail from Text Link Ads announcing their new program that will allow you to sell text links on your individual blog posts.

So far Text Link Ads have been great and reliable earner for me. And they are really good at selling my text links even on the blogs I did not update for more then 6 months. One such blog has had 2 links sold for $11 a month for the last 3 months (about $60 in profits by now). And it’s only PR4 site with 7 posts and 2-3 pageviews a day.

The only problem I had with Text Link Ads – my inventory on a best performing blog has sold out last month. And they do not give a lot of options to add additional inventory from the same site.

E.g. I have quite a few category pages with PR4 that might be interesting for advertisers. I have a few posts that have been Dugg and received tons of backlinks from lots of trusted sites, as a result. And I have a lot of posts that were linked by Engadget, Gizmodo and some other PR8 or PR7 sites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Really. Don’t obsess about spelling too much. An odd spelling mistake here and there won’t lose you a lot of readers. Dull content will.

Use spell checker, double check your writing before posting, correct mistakes that readers will show you. But don’t let the thought that you are a bad speller interfere with you blogging.

Ranking for important keywords in search engines is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your blog. And ranking for many of them, that are not too competitive, is not as hard as you think. It’s even easier then I thought.

I was just checking my rankings in Google for some phrases and was really surprised. I am in the top spot (No.1) in Google for “Chitika RPU” and “double blog income” (at least from where I’m checking it).

And I’m on the first page (No.9) for “Chitika“.

Granted, “Chitika RPU” is not a popular term yet, but “Chitika” brings over 2M results in Google and “double blog income” brings over 1 million.

So how did I get there with my brand new blog that should be sitting in “Google sandbox” and ranking for nothing at all?

Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like Google Pagerank export is starting.

I just checked Livepagerank service for some of my blogs and there’s lots of Google datacenters showing PR0 for those sites that gained quite a few links since January. Some of the abandoned ones dropped from PR4 to PR1

Now if this theory is correct (lot’s of DCs with PR0 means that your PR will change. If you gained links then it’s going up) I’m in for some good news in April. Looks like John Chow‘s in for good news too

March 2007 was a great month for small online earners/publishers, if we are talking about blog monetization opportunities.

5 new blog monetization programs opened for them and they are not from some third tier ad networks offering to test some shady monetization schemes. All of them come from well known players in the industry and look really promising:

Chitika RPU ad units came out of limited beta and are now available to all Chitika publishers. I have been using Chitika RPU since January and it almost doubled my blog income overnight. If you look at my earnings results for Chitika this year, I would say that 70-80% of income was generated by just this one ad unit.

Auction ads is a program owned by ShoeMoney and MediaWhiz Holdings, the company behind Text Link Ads and ReviewMe. Auction ads is a CPA program that serves the ads for various eBay auctions to your blog. You enter the keywords for which you want to have auctions displayed, or even make ads contextual and get paid when someone registers for EBay service or completes an auction.

Read the rest of this entry »

January was the first month that I resumed my active blogging and moved into online money making activities fulltime. Although my online earnings remained more or less constant at $300/month through second half of 2006, with my blogs lying dormant the traffic was dropping fast and Christmas out of the way, earnings were heading that way too.

I dusted off two of my main blogs and started posting there, averaging 4-6 posts a day. In the beginning things moved rather slowly and during the first two weeks of January I made $110.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the fourth big tech show week (CES, MacWorld, 3GSM, Cebit, CTIA) is behind us, I came to a conclusion. I hate these big tech show weeks!

I run a few (2 updated almost daily and 2 updated when I feel like it) tech “newsy” blogs. They are about ayear old and are real “newsy”. I don’t have special access to hardware to do a reviews, I do not even have a deep knowledge of PCs or Cell Phones (topics of my blogs). I consider myself an advanced user. What I do, is find new things that others missed and report them.

Every major and minor company is timing their PR stunts for one of the big tech shows. And prior to the show there’s a  lot of leaks, rumors and hints about new products. A nirvana for a guy like me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s been almost a week since I started regularly posting on this blog. It took off nicely and I think a little introduction is in order.

My full name is Stanislovas, but friends usually call me Staska (it’s like William and Bill in English). The staska.com was taken, so I had to settle for staska.net here.

I was hooked on (pro) blogging in 2005 and started my first blog on Dec 31, 2005. It was a joke site and I did it more as a test and to get my feet wet. It worked.

In February I was ready to launch my first tech blog. It was newsy, computer related blog, writing about laptops, desktops and other PC things. It started quite well and by June was doing 2000 pageviews a day, mainly through search engines.

Read the rest of this entry »