Ok so I haven’t made many posts lately mainly because I’m so busy with my other sites but this one I couldn’t resist and I’m sorry, but it has nothing to do with making money online, unless that is, you are a record company executive.

For most of my life I have bought records/albums. In fact I have over 1,000 on vinyl and cd. During that time most of what I like was never played on radio and I had to make buying choices based on the opinions of music journalists. It took a certain blind faith.

To cut a long story short I spent a lot of money on crappy albums that didn’t merit purchasing because it was the only way to ever hear the songs that had been written.

Fast forward to the last few years of the current century and things have changed. Everybody is into downloads and you can pretty much get a 30 second preview of anything to see if you like it. However, this simply isn’t enough for me to make a buying decision.

The fact is I got tired of never being able to hear what I was buying before I bought. Well finally the new Slash album is available in its entirety to listen to prior to it’s release on CD. Imagine that – you can listen to the whole thing and decide if it is worth your money.

This is fantastic news for music lovers. If all artists do the same in future (offer a full album preview) if it is good/great then I believe people will be queuing up to buy. If we think it is poor we can keep our cash in our pockets and find something more deserving of our money. It doesn’t get any better than that and if record execs follow Slash’s lead they’ll sell way more music – but the big difference is it will be quality music deserving of recognition rather than music sold only because it has been subject to undeserving levels of self promotion.

What’s more it is possible to embed Slash’s album on your own website so you’ll find it below in all it’s streaming glory – oh, and if you like it buy it. Don’t download it illegally when you’ve been given the chance of a full preview. Reward the guy for having the courage to let us judge before we buy.

Nice one Slash.

With so much change constantly ocurring in the online world keeping up to date is nigh on impossible.  One frustration that I have always had with Wordpress is that a page title is always reflected in full in the navigation menus.  I had looked for ages for a way to shorten this without manual coding and pretty much abadoned hope of finding a solution.

Then today whilst developing a new site I noticed some new options in the All in One SEO plugin.  I don’t know how long they’ve been there – in fact they could have been there from the beginning but I’ve only just realized what one of these features does.

Yes it enables you to give a bespoke “Menu” title to a page that is displayed in the navbar or sidebar.  Brilliant now I can still have an SEO page title but make it more friendly for the user by shortening it as appropriate for navigation purposes.

Update

Well, I left the original post below so you could see my initial thoughts on this matter but I realized whilst swimming laps that my conclusions were probably incorrect.  I had not taken account of Clicks (Duh!) and on looking these up I found this month is running at 6,000 clicks less than last month which was a real surprise as traffic is usually on the up tick my now.  This did get me thinking though about EPNs desire to eliminate bot clicks etc.  Anyone ever wonder if they’re taking out genuine clicks as a result of their system filters?  I’m beginning to.

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Here’s an interesting piece of information.  Too early yet to draw any conclusions but nevertheless a trend is starting to emerge.  Checking over my EPN stats today and comparing the period Oct 1 – Oct 23 to Nov 1 – Nov 23 shows a difference in eBay fee revenue of just £150 in favor of October but a difference in ACRUS of 3 in favor of November.  One would therefore expect earnings to be pretty similar but already November is £250 down on October and worryingly they are trending lower still as I write this.

To me this clearly demonstrates the ability that the new algo gives eBay to manipulate payments to affiliates.  A similar level of sales to previous month being judged of lower value despite an increase in ACRUS.

Hopefully this is just a blip and I’ll see an increase in earnings over the next week, however, if things remain as they trending I am currently forecasting earnings to fall more than 30% this month compared to the last.

It’s also interesting to compare earnings to November of last year when despite 80% less traffic my earnings for the whole month were approximately the same as they are today for this month.   Not sure I can conclude anything from that as it can go either way i.e. a lot of browsers v buyers (recession effect) – I feel this is most likely.  Or, my traffic is a lot less targeted than last year – seems unlikely but you never know.

I’d love to hear about your experiences so please take time to add a comment.  How are your earnings trending compared to last month?  If we can put together more data we can draw more accurate conclusions.

Ok, so the test site is done.  I will add one more post once the site is indexed add it to Traffic Bug and Link Juicer and thats it.  I’ll do no more promotion at all accept maybe one article to ezinearticles.com but honestly, that shouldn’t be necessary.  Subscribe to the RSS to keep appraised of updates and progress.

Update 23 November – Somewhat amazingly the site has been indexed by BING and occupies position 4 for it’s primary keyword.  I never saw that coming.  The site has been indexed by Google but is not currently ranking which has also surprised me given the minimal level of competition.  Still early days yet.

I’m writing this post to put a bit of pressure on myself.  I  can generally get a site indexed and ranked in Google in 3 days now.  This got me thinking could I build a site and make $1,000 between now and the end of January.  Well, I’ve bought the domain and started to configure Wordpress and now need create the  content.  It will be an interesting experiment and will be either a great success or a spectacular failure.  The keyword is in the domain name and it gets 8,000 searches per month.  It’s a fiercely competitive niche but the competition for the long tail phrase I’m targeting is very low.

I hope to get the content finished by Tuesday and the site indexed by the end of the week.  Now I’ve told you about it I need to get the work done!