As for being a scam, well, no one is asking you for money. Certainly we need to remember that “your mileage may vary,” but I’ve found Darren’s posts and the reader comments to be balanced in pointing out where eMiniMalls have worked well, and where they haven’t. Every blog is different, and only testing and tracking will show what works for you.

Posts like this, your tips and your earnings statement REALLY inspire me to learn more and optimise, optimise, optimise as much as I can in my free time.

The comain name from my email address on this comment is a blog about a particular, non-product related subject. It’s basically the only highly niche subject that I could say I have an interest in and personal expeience with.

I had a look at the eMiniMalls sample keywords and categories and most of them seem to relate heavily to products. Could you please advise if they would have suitable ads for the topic on which I am blogging?

You’re doing the wider web community a fantastic service – even someone with over 8 years experience as a web developer (like myself) can learn new tricks!

Cheers
Bridget

Looks like your page was heavily hit by spam…

rob

Anyway, I just don’t know. I write very well, in Portuguese and English and provide interesting content. My posts on a gadget blog are some of the most commented, the bog is very popular but the only one who makes money there is the owner.

But I just cannot seem to earn money from blogs. Not with adsense, chitika, even finding niches (playstation 2 blog in Brazil, which appears first on brazilian google, an english blog about obscure mac freewares, both with good traffic for beginning sites) while I see people with really, really stupid sites, poor language skills, content (lame tests, emoticon repositories, etcetera) and ugly themes living off their websites.

I am not condemning these people, I just think it has become a very competitive market and sometimes it feels you are just not ‘born’ for it.

Not that living off a blog has ever been my objective (I write blogs since 2000, but only last year I began with niche sites, before it was only personal and very varied stuff), since I am a doctor. But I have been obliged to move back to my parents’ house and I barely get out of home since 2005 due to a disease. So this is my objective for now.

I’m not moaning – I’ve gone past that stage after 3 months of my current ‘useless’ lifestyle – just wanna say that there must be a thousand people, talented or not, who work hard on blogging and fail for each succesful story like Rachel’s.

BTW I love this blog, not for the tips because I’ve read most of them invarious sources, but I like the way you write. Congrats!

I know of numerous bloggers who started their blogs on free internet connections via libraries, neighbourhood/community houses/centres and friends/families etc. I’m not sure how Rachel does it to be honest but these days many people have net access – I’ve even seen a few blogs run by homeless people.

Rachel didn’t want the attention because she was worried about privacy issues and a little scared of people copying her site which would mean extra competition.

You’ll find that some bloggers are very concerned that people don’t find out how much they earn from their blogs because no sooner than they do than many others start up the same sorts of blog and make it harder to do well with due to the competition.

As a skeptic, the above and the fact that Rachel doesn’t want her blog known, makes me wonder about the legitimacy of your site. How can I be sure this is not a scam?

How do we know what genres their advertisers cover?

Andrew Goodman posts about how inefficiently offline marketing is sold.

Thanks.

I am going to give them a few more days, and we’ll see. I’m just puzzled because to me, these look like they SHOULD be doing much better than they are.

On my main site I rotate ads on a percentage basis between google, yahoo and the minimalls. I was gave them 2,868 out of 16,712 page views over the past two days or about 17%, and they generated only 7% of the total income. So they performed at about 40% of Google and Yahoo combined, which isn’t too good. I gave Yahoo 23% of those page views, and it made 19% of the money – so while Adsense is still better than Yahoo, it isn’t by a lot, and every now and then Yahoo has a big spike that makes it better.

I’ll give them some more pages over the next few days and we’ll see how they do.