Thursday, April 23, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Taking Your Teen to Amsterdam
A couple years ago, Sophie and I spent a few days in Amsterdam. We had a great time but I wasn't planning on returning just because I want to experience as many European cities as possible while I have such easy access since I currently live in France.
Last summer, four of Sophie's teenage friends rode their bicycles from Strasbourg to Amsterdam. Ever since, Sophie had been saying how she wanted to take a trip to Amsterdam with her friends. I really didn't want my teenage daughter running off to Amsterdam unescorted by an adult.
Recently, she has been talking more and more about how much she wants to go to Amsterdam before returning to the States for college. The more she talked about it the more concerned I become about it. French parents see to be a lot more free and easy with their children than American parents... or maybe I'm just stricter than 99.99999% of French parents. Nonetheless, I don't want my teenager in Amsterdam with only her teen friends. I just sounds like trouble waiting to happen.
Therefore, I asked Sophie how she felt about going to Amsterdam with me for a week. I said that it would be our trip before she went back to the States. I told her that she could pick the city, that it didn't have to be Amsterdam but it could be up to her. She was excited and wanted to go!
This choice meant that she could revisit Amsterdam which her heart had been craving while I could have the mother's comfort of knowing where my child was, who she was with in a strange city, and not needing to worry about what she might encounter while traveling to this city which can probably get rather wild at times. Basically, it worked out well for both of us.
Our week long trip to Amsterdam was the best trip we've taken together in years.
Wanna read Sophie's take on Amsterdam? Read here!
Last summer, four of Sophie's teenage friends rode their bicycles from Strasbourg to Amsterdam. Ever since, Sophie had been saying how she wanted to take a trip to Amsterdam with her friends. I really didn't want my teenage daughter running off to Amsterdam unescorted by an adult.
Recently, she has been talking more and more about how much she wants to go to Amsterdam before returning to the States for college. The more she talked about it the more concerned I become about it. French parents see to be a lot more free and easy with their children than American parents... or maybe I'm just stricter than 99.99999% of French parents. Nonetheless, I don't want my teenager in Amsterdam with only her teen friends. I just sounds like trouble waiting to happen.
Therefore, I asked Sophie how she felt about going to Amsterdam with me for a week. I said that it would be our trip before she went back to the States. I told her that she could pick the city, that it didn't have to be Amsterdam but it could be up to her. She was excited and wanted to go!
This choice meant that she could revisit Amsterdam which her heart had been craving while I could have the mother's comfort of knowing where my child was, who she was with in a strange city, and not needing to worry about what she might encounter while traveling to this city which can probably get rather wild at times. Basically, it worked out well for both of us.
Our week long trip to Amsterdam was the best trip we've taken together in years.
Wanna read Sophie's take on Amsterdam? Read here!
Blogging a Scrapbook
Last night, Sophie was talking to a family friend who suggested that Sophie keep an scrapbook and wished she had better kept on for herself as she now has few photos of her childhood and teen years.I told Sophie that she can keep a virtual scrapbook with her blog. You don't have to lug online scrapbooks around like you do physical scrapbooks and considering we live in France and she plans on attending college in the US the logistics of carting your belongs around can be a real issue.
My website, MeMyKidandLife, is an online scrapbook of my thoughts, family, activities, hopes and dreams all wrapped into one space... well, one space with a few branches (my WordPress Blog and my Blogspot Blogs. As long as your online scrapbook, diary, or memoirs, blog! aren't going to be shut down the next time you change service providers or something like that, your life can be well documented online and preserved for later while shared with others while your life happens.
Sophie wasn't too crazy about documenting her life online although she already does it. Check out her blog, read her poetry, watch her films, buy her dreadlocks!
Earning With Adsense
I just found a website, CubeStat, that sums up website activity and will give you a guess at how much any particular website is earning with Adsense.Simply enter in the data on the website you wish to learn about and fairly accurate data for website worth, daily page views, and daily ads revenues, as well as a slew of additional website information such as the age of the site and the sites ranking.
If you want to see how your site is doing compared to other sites, or if you are just a stats junkie like myself, you might enjoy this site.
It can be difficult to get a good handle on how much can be made from Adsense. CubeStat seems to offer fairly accurate data within a range of statistical averages. So take a look and see how much ad revenue your favorite sites are earning from ad revenue. It will help take out some of the mystery, or smoke and mirror stories you can hear online and replace it with more tangible and realistic earnings revenue.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
My Blogger Profile
I just created a public Blogger Profile. If you are interested in keeping up-to-date with all my new blogspots as well as my website, My My Kid and Life, and my blog it is just that much easier. Enjoy!
Adsense Monetizing Options
I started my website, Me My Kid and Life, in October of 2007. The goal was to encourage and empower other single moms to live the life they want while creating an additional stream of income for my family.
I'm not sure I've achieved either of those goals to my satisfaction. Although my site is the life and times of a single mom I do not gear the majority of my articles specifically for the single mom. Rather my articles are about making money online, travel, family, or other things that interest me such as film. Perhaps it is safe to say that the life of a single mom isn't about being a single mom it's about living life... just like anyone else's life. So, it is life that my website has been about.
I have received many emails from single moms (and dads) who have appreciated what the site has to offer. Perhaps that means that I'm going about the site in the right way. I want people to follow their dreams - not just single moms but all people. The more people who are living a life which they are inspired to live the happier our world will be and the less strife our world will encounter.
The second goal of MeMyKidAndLife was to create an additional (or an alternative) source of income. At the time, I had an online business which (while it afforded me a decent living) ate up an awful lot of my time. I was looking for balance between earning an income and spending time with my family/having free time.
I started the website about a year-and-a-half ago. Honestly, the website is not making much more than it was a year ago... and I'm feeling a little frustrated, agitated and concerned... but mostly, I just want to figure out if I'm doing something wrong and how I can fix it and get back on the right track.
There are a couple things I might be doing wrong...
First, my website is hosted by Yahoo. Is possible that Google might not like a website being hosted by the competition? Could that hurt me with Google Adsense? If anyone knows anything about this please comment and let me know. Adsense does not allow for competitors ads to be on the same pages as the Adsense ads, but would that extend to a site which is hosted by Yahoo? Would Adsense penalize a website that was hosted by Yahoo?
Second, I had a Yahoo RSS Feed button on all of the pages on my website. I have taken the button off about half of the website's pages and will finish taking them down as time allows. (It is quite a timely process as I have so many webpages and each webpage must have the Yahoo Feed Button manually removed.) Again, the concern is that Google's Adsense might penalize the website for promoting the competition.
Third, I visited a search engine optimization site in hopes of learning how to improve my pages and therefore traffic. I followed the instructions but feel that instead of improving some of my pages by focusing on keywords I have word stuffed which would trigger Adsense to penalize my pages, hence my site resulting in less Adsense traffic.
All that being said, I'm not sure any of the above are relevent. But in effect, this is in part why you now find me with so many new blogs sprouting up. It is a test. My blog is part of my Yahoo hosted site. Does that affect the hits it gets or how it is listed in Google? To try to see if my site is negatively impacted by the 'Yahoo' factor, I have started to use this blog - a blogspot owned by Google. In time, I suppose if all other things are equal I will notice an increase in traffic and or Adsense revenue on the blogspot blog if the Yahoo hosted website is actually penalized by Adsense for its competitive nature.
Therefore, if you are wondering why my website is sprouting so many new branches, the answer lies, in part, in the above paragraphs.
Many people say that it is necessary to have different blogs or websites for different topics if you want to build traffic. I have only had one website for all of my topics. Although, I have broken down the different sections and placed like articles together. Many people say that I am doing the exact opposite of what should be done if you want to make money online. I'm not sure I agree. Although, I'm not sure I don't agree.
From my understanding Adsense delivers ads based on the content of a particular website, not based on the overall content of the website. Google search is based on the content of a webpage, not the content of an entire site. Based on that logic, it wouldn't matter what the entire site consisted of. Rather, it would matter what a particular page's content consisted of.
This article is probably a perfect example of what I tend to do wrong when I write articles. Basically, this article covers too many topics. Therefore it might be more difficult for Google Search to place it high in its ranking. This would not work to my favor. Quite likely, this is the main problem with my website. It might not be that my total content is too varied, rather that the content within specific pages is too varied. That would mean that I need to become more disciplined and write in a more focused manner.
I have recently started several new blogs which are focused on particular topics which interest me. I do not full-heartedly believe in this method, nor do I feel it is necessarily necessary. Nonetheless, it is time for me to experiement. Therefore, if you see my work spread out all over the place it is intentional to see if it helps with traffic and Adsense revenue.
The problem I'm having with both the website's traffic and revenue might simply be that I'm not adding enough content and I'm not adding enough focused content that Google is interested in picking up. Although... I don't think that's it. I used to have a page rank of 4 and now it is 0. Truly, I think there is a problem I need to fix... but what is it? As far as adding new content, I do it when I can. I have been quite busy with other things that make me very happy.
Life is about balance.
I'm not sure I've achieved either of those goals to my satisfaction. Although my site is the life and times of a single mom I do not gear the majority of my articles specifically for the single mom. Rather my articles are about making money online, travel, family, or other things that interest me such as film. Perhaps it is safe to say that the life of a single mom isn't about being a single mom it's about living life... just like anyone else's life. So, it is life that my website has been about.
I have received many emails from single moms (and dads) who have appreciated what the site has to offer. Perhaps that means that I'm going about the site in the right way. I want people to follow their dreams - not just single moms but all people. The more people who are living a life which they are inspired to live the happier our world will be and the less strife our world will encounter.
The second goal of MeMyKidAndLife was to create an additional (or an alternative) source of income. At the time, I had an online business which (while it afforded me a decent living) ate up an awful lot of my time. I was looking for balance between earning an income and spending time with my family/having free time.
I started the website about a year-and-a-half ago. Honestly, the website is not making much more than it was a year ago... and I'm feeling a little frustrated, agitated and concerned... but mostly, I just want to figure out if I'm doing something wrong and how I can fix it and get back on the right track.
There are a couple things I might be doing wrong...
First, my website is hosted by Yahoo. Is possible that Google might not like a website being hosted by the competition? Could that hurt me with Google Adsense? If anyone knows anything about this please comment and let me know. Adsense does not allow for competitors ads to be on the same pages as the Adsense ads, but would that extend to a site which is hosted by Yahoo? Would Adsense penalize a website that was hosted by Yahoo?
Second, I had a Yahoo RSS Feed button on all of the pages on my website. I have taken the button off about half of the website's pages and will finish taking them down as time allows. (It is quite a timely process as I have so many webpages and each webpage must have the Yahoo Feed Button manually removed.) Again, the concern is that Google's Adsense might penalize the website for promoting the competition.
Third, I visited a search engine optimization site in hopes of learning how to improve my pages and therefore traffic. I followed the instructions but feel that instead of improving some of my pages by focusing on keywords I have word stuffed which would trigger Adsense to penalize my pages, hence my site resulting in less Adsense traffic.
All that being said, I'm not sure any of the above are relevent. But in effect, this is in part why you now find me with so many new blogs sprouting up. It is a test. My blog is part of my Yahoo hosted site. Does that affect the hits it gets or how it is listed in Google? To try to see if my site is negatively impacted by the 'Yahoo' factor, I have started to use this blog - a blogspot owned by Google. In time, I suppose if all other things are equal I will notice an increase in traffic and or Adsense revenue on the blogspot blog if the Yahoo hosted website is actually penalized by Adsense for its competitive nature.
Therefore, if you are wondering why my website is sprouting so many new branches, the answer lies, in part, in the above paragraphs.
Many people say that it is necessary to have different blogs or websites for different topics if you want to build traffic. I have only had one website for all of my topics. Although, I have broken down the different sections and placed like articles together. Many people say that I am doing the exact opposite of what should be done if you want to make money online. I'm not sure I agree. Although, I'm not sure I don't agree.
From my understanding Adsense delivers ads based on the content of a particular website, not based on the overall content of the website. Google search is based on the content of a webpage, not the content of an entire site. Based on that logic, it wouldn't matter what the entire site consisted of. Rather, it would matter what a particular page's content consisted of.
This article is probably a perfect example of what I tend to do wrong when I write articles. Basically, this article covers too many topics. Therefore it might be more difficult for Google Search to place it high in its ranking. This would not work to my favor. Quite likely, this is the main problem with my website. It might not be that my total content is too varied, rather that the content within specific pages is too varied. That would mean that I need to become more disciplined and write in a more focused manner.
I have recently started several new blogs which are focused on particular topics which interest me. I do not full-heartedly believe in this method, nor do I feel it is necessarily necessary. Nonetheless, it is time for me to experiement. Therefore, if you see my work spread out all over the place it is intentional to see if it helps with traffic and Adsense revenue.
The problem I'm having with both the website's traffic and revenue might simply be that I'm not adding enough content and I'm not adding enough focused content that Google is interested in picking up. Although... I don't think that's it. I used to have a page rank of 4 and now it is 0. Truly, I think there is a problem I need to fix... but what is it? As far as adding new content, I do it when I can. I have been quite busy with other things that make me very happy.
Life is about balance.
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