The Return of WidgetBucks.

So I logged into my email today and was pleasantly greeted with this:

Valued Publisher,



We have recently identified a reporting issue on your account relating specifically to those widget(s) configured to use the MerchSense products option (to identify which product set to display on your site). The reporting issue resulted in a loss of click data for specific widgets between November 16, 2007 and November 20, 2007. The issue has been corrected today and in the interest of ensuring you are properly credited for the missing click activity, we are crediting your account this evening to reflect a volume of click activity equal to the average CTR that each widget has received to date in November. This credit should appear in your account by tomorrow morning, 11/21.



Credit summary: For November 16, 2007 through November 20, 2007, you will see a click count credit based on the CTR average between November 1, 2007 and November 15, 2007 multiplied by your daily impression volume. For example, if your affected widget(s) averaged a 1% CTR between 11/1 and 11/15, and a credit day received 1000 impressions, your account will be credited a total of 10 clicks.



We apologize for the inconvenience!



WidgetBucks Team

There's both good and bad to this. The good is that I managed to rack up about $6 due to this from my other blog. The bad is that since I had only just started this blog I received 0 clicks from it for the whole span. Basically it was in my bar for absolutely no reason.
I knew something had to be going wrong because I wasn't getting any clicks at all, but I figured it had something to do with the changes that they were implementing at the time. Anyway, it was a pretty mixed bag occasion. Did anyone else receive an email like this, or was it just my code that was malfunctioning?

My new proxy and it's earnings

My proxy was slammed with traffic on its first day of release (yesterday), mostly due to StumbleUpon which generated way more traffic than I expected. At one point I was receiving 770 visitors an hour, and I was starting to worry that my bandwidth would run out on the first day of my sites release. It slowed down after about an hour and a half of that and I ended the day with around 1800 UV's (unique visitors).
With the surge of traffic to the site my adsense showed significant improvement. It actually out performed my previous weeks profit three-fold. That's right, I made over a dollar. Ha. But to me it was an exciting experience and I hope that it keeps up like this. I'll keep you posted with further developments and feel free to add me to your RSS feeds.

New method

I decided to try another method besides the typical blog. I've really went all out on this idea, bought a domain, hosting and some advertising already. I'll keep those of you reading up to date on what happens with it, and in the mean time you can visit and tell me what you think.

SlipAround Proxy

WidgetBucks a possible scam?

A lot of fuss is being thrown in WidgetBucks direction the past few days. As many of you probably know, they recently stopped counting clicks from outside of the United States and Canada. Instead any clicks from outside these regions are sent to mpire.com with you getting no credit for the transfer. Since the change on the 15th I haven't seen a single cent from WidgetBucks despite having them located on two of my blogs. My traffic has remained the same over this period, and after looking at my stat tracker, my target audience is still mostly US based. I really am finding myself distrusting WidgetBucks each day that this continues.

I know that I'm not alone in the presumption, there are several key factors to this:

No one has received payment thus far. The first payments are not expected until the beginning of December.

The $25 bonus sign-up reward seems a bit much for me to believe. If 1,000 members sign up and each of them reaches the $50 necessary to check out they would lose $50,000. I'm sure not everyone will reach payout but I'm sure they already have more than 1,000 affiliates aboard.

A large amount of people have reported their accounts banned/suspended with no justification. While I'm sure a large group of these are justified, I can't in good conscious believe that everyone was in the wrong.

With us directing traffic to mpire.com I really believe that we should earn something for the re-direction.

"MerchSense" their "contextual algorithmis" is as accurate as a magic 8-ball.

I can't justify using it if my clicks don't improve drastically soon, otherwise I'll be dumping it after I hit the $50 increment. Has anyone else's WidgetBucks accounts seen a dramatic decrease in profit over the last few days?

Why adsense is worthless

I just started to put advertisements on my blogs and one thing has made itself VERY clear. Adsense is worthless.

Here are my statistics for the last 3 days:

My CTR is obviously low, but I've also moved adsense further down the page due to it's lack of performance over the last two days. I think it has something to do with them making the "click-able" area smaller so that it only counts as a click when it's directly on top of the link. I can't convince myself to use their awful image ad's.

Mission: Start-Up

The goal of this site is to document the progression of my blogs from start-up forward. I'll be sharing my successes, my failures, my plans, my accomplishments, my ideas, my statistics, what works for me and what doesn't. I'll talk about content, links, advertisements, and anything else that I feel is important to discuss. Hop on board from the beginning! I want to make this a community effort, I'm looking for contributors and commenter's. So here's to a beginning for Productive Blog.