Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

It’s that time again for me to dump a few of my bookmarked sites for your viewing pleasure. These links are pretty old, and you might already be familiar with all, if not most, of these sites.

• Girafa: Similar to Snap It, you can use their service to provide thumbnail views of sites that you link to. In other words, when your visitor mouses over a link, they’ll see a small pop-up of the web site that the link refers to. Girafa also has a toolbar you can install in your browser, which allows you to see a web site’s thumbnail before you decide if you want to visit it.
• Fauxto: This is a online photo editing site that does a lot of the things that Photoshop can. JohnTP.com calls it the online Photoshop alternative. If you’re used to Photoshop, you’ll find that the interface is very intuitive of PS as well. Great if you have a stable and fast Internet connection. For now, I’m fine with my (licensed!) PS CS2.
• Torrent Scan: Absolutely love this torrent search engine. I like the fact that I can do the same search to multiple torrent search engines with just a click.

Hm. Weird. That’s all the useful online tool links I have. The other links in my bookmark are actually references on how to make money online. I’ll share that one later.

A fellow Giuk.net member Joan gave a heads-up on a simple but nifty online Japanese game that attempts to guess the age of your brain. You don’t really need to read its Japanese-written instructions to know how to play it.

Mm… maybe you do.

1. Once the Flash game loads, click Start.
2. It will count down from 3 to 1.
3. In just one second, you’ll see a set of number placed randomly, and you need to memorize it.
4. Once it’s blanked out, you need to click the number in sequence, from the smallest number to the largest number.
5. When you get 3 incorrect attempts, it will finally give you your score, i.e. the age of your brain.

I was scored 4 years younger than my actual age, woohoo!

Nah, don’t take it too serious, it’s just a game. Even if you scored 44 when you’re actually 25, so what? *runs away and guffaws*

I’ve just finished having fun after a friend in Facebook shared with me a site called YearbookYourself.com. The Flash-enabled app takes your uploaded photo and transforms it into a yearbook-like pose that you can select, ranging from the 1950s up to the year 2000.

I downloaded the snapshot of every one of the photos I generated through the site.

Original photo for YearbookYourself.com

Here are a few of the yearbook photos generated which in my opinion are as hot as real ol’ me (in other words, laugh your head off):

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1998

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1996

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1994

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1982

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1978

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1976

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1972

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1966

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1960

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1952

And if I were a dude in 1956, I’d be a damn fine looking one:

Have a look at my Flickr to see the whole set, or see some scary photos of countless of other people who have used YearbookYourself.com.

No one really bothers reading a product’s EULA until it’s too late, and that includes me. A good thing that Wil Wheaton gave a head’s up on a particular term of service on Google Chrome, which read as follows:

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Matt Cutts has clarified this with their legal team, and pretty recently retracted the few lines I have bolded out, citing that those lines were taken from their standard TOS. Wait, really?! I should be checking the TOS at Google Docs and GMail in that case!

Here’s another good related post I found highlighted at WWdN: In Exile.

Beware the Google God.