Day 7 – Wednesday

Well, apparently yesterday's work paid off, at least in clicks, because when I looked at my Amazing Counters web counter, I'd gotten as many hits since yesterday's forum postings as I had since I started my blog. Amazing Counters provides a free counter in exchange for showing one product ad on your site. My product ad was for an Overstock.com coupon site – not a good match for a site on dog body language. So while I was in the Amazing Counters site, I poked around and discovered that I can change my advertiser to one that matches my site content, so I did.

Today's step in the Challenge is a two part task. The first is to use Google or Technorati to find 3 blogs in our niche and post comments about their blog and ours. The Challenge recommends doing this daily for 2 weeks. I'm not sure if that is cheating from the point of view of the Challenge as it goes beyond the 10 days (or rather the remaining 4 days) of the Challenge, but it is good advice if done well. I was impressed that they warned against spamming other blogs, because this is definitely something that can be misused or good for everyone involved. I actually did 2 comment postings and one post with a trackback to a blog that displays trackbacks, because I found a great post related to my posting topic from yesterday (and after all, I do believe that content really is the key to success on the Internet.) Blogger doesn't have a trackback mechanism, but via Google, I found several trackback services that will send a trackback from any blog. I used Adam Kalsey's Simple Trackbacks, which is a very nice service and definitely going to be part of my toolbox in the future.

The second part involves signing up with two different advertising sellers. Unfortunately, one of them now only takes new applicants who have a referral code from an existing advertiser, which the Challenge does not provide. The second advertising site (AdBrite) is still available and was very easy to setup. They also will include AdSense or other advertising as a fail-over if they don't have any ads to provide you at or above your minimum rate. It was all very easy to setup and they are already providing ads on my site.
I got 2 AdSense clicks today for a grand total of $.25 of income! I put in 3 more hours today.
I also adjusted my projected return from my affiliate purchase/sale to the current correct amount. So, thus far I've put in 25.75 hours at a total of -$.73 cents an hour.