One of the main goals of the Booming Business of Blogging Experiment is to test, for myself, if I can really make a business of running a blog. To meet these goals, the blog needs to be self sufficient by the end of month one (ie cover the cost of the domain name registration and the monthly hosting fees). By the end of six months the blog needs to be generating an income of $200 or more per month, with the twelve month goal of $1000 per month.

So, no time to rest. In my research I had read both opinions – there are some blog authors say that you should wait until your site has picked up a reasonable volume of regular traffic before monetizing your blog and then there are other blog authors that started generating an income almost from day one. On Day3 of the experiment Google approved the blog to host Adsense advertising and this has been mildly successful to date. But it’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket and so I have also looked at the Amazon Affiliate program, Azoogleads and Text Link Ads.

My experience with Text Link Ads (TLA) so far …

Day 4 (18/01/2008)

Signed up for Text Link Ads on their site (http://www.text-link-ads.com/) . Received a nice email welcoming me to membership with Text Link Ads and a link to activate my membership. After activation I then received another email “Congratulations on becoming a publisher! Please make sure you have submitted a site for us to put ads on.”

Day 14 (28/01/2008)

I had been focussing on WordPress Plugins and the amazing world of stats that I didn’t submit my site to Text Link Ads until today. After declining a ‘special offer’ I chose to be a standard publisher and place an ad block on my home page only. I still wanted to learn more first and thought I would start small. Well, the irony of that statement! The following email came through: “Your inventory was declined

Hello kdays.com,

We are sorry but the inventory you have suggested http://www.kdays.com has been declined at this time. The main reasons inventory is declined is:

Site rejected due to limited link popularity.
-The website does not have enough link popularity.
-The website does not have enough traffic.
-The website is currently selling text link ads.

*Please note that our algorithm that accepts or rejects inventory submissions can make mistakes and if you feel the above criteria does not accurately describe your website, please reply to this email asking for further review by our editorial staff.”

Well I know I’m not already selling text link ads so it’s obvious I’m not yet popular enough for text link ads! I’m too small to even start small! I think I’ll have to give it another month or so before submitting kdays.com again.

Popularity: 1% [?]