Can I Cash In

  Even though I have let this site languish due to personal medical issues, today it gained it's first earnings.  This site earned $0.52 when a visitor clicked a link on one of the Google Ads.  Google does not send any payments until you reach $100 in earnings but it's a start!

  Recently, I upgraded the Movabletype blog software used to run this site from 4.01 to 4.1. 
  BlogExplosion still has this site as "waiting admin approval".  I guess their idea of 48 hours is vastly different than mine.
  So far, this site has been visited 31 times.  26 times from the United States, 2 times from Canada, 1 time from Australia, 1 time from the UK and one time from india.  Google AdSense reports 110 page impressions of adds.  This site has earned a grand total of $0.00 so far.
  In order to earn anything, traffic will need to increase greatly.  So far, 25 visits were referred from my personal blog.  Three were direct visits (those were probably me) and 3 were referred from Google searches.

  This blog received it's first traffic from a source other than my personal blog.  This traffic came through a google search of "how to gain blog visibility".  I ran this search and found that this site is the second link.  On my personal blog, Google is the number 1 referrer.  That's why businesses are constantly trying to ensure that their websites show up at the top of the search results on Google.

  Traffic is still very low.  The little bit of traffic making it to this site is actually coming from a link I put on my personal blog.  It will be interesting to see what brings in the next bit of traffic.

  When you first sign up for Google Analytics, it gives you some javascript code that you need to put on the pages that you wish to see statistics for.  I put that code in the footer template that goes on all of the pages.  Google Analytics verified the code and then said "Collecting Data".  This went on for days when it says it should only take about 24 hours.  I finally found that there was apparently a copy and paste error.  I recopied the data into my template and it almost immediately changed to "Receiving Data".  I guess I shouldn't have waited so long to check and see why it wasn't working.  But, at least now, it is.

  I found this article on ways to drive traffic to your blog.  That led me to http://pingomatic.com.  I submitted this site to pingomatic and let it ping all of the sites.  Then I followed a link off of pingomatic to BlogShares.  BlogShares seems to be a site for fantasy stock trading over blogs.  So I submitted this site to BlogShares as well.

  At this point, it has been a while since I added the code for Google Analytics but it has yet to show me ANY data.  I believe this is due to the extremely low volume of traffic so far.  Hopefully, once traffic picks up a little it will start to show statistics.

  I have successfully claimed this blog on Technorati.  It seems they fixed their back end issues that was preventing the claiming of new blogs.

  I am still waiting for the admin approval over at BlogExplosion.

   I added this blog to my profiles on BlogExplosion and Technorati on 1/8/2008 to try and gain more exposure.  Blog Explosion says they take about 48 hours to review and accept that submission.  Technorati appears to be having issues and can't accept a new blog registration right now.  I will have to go back and add it in later.
  This blog has now been indexed by Google.  You can see what is in google by searching on site:www.canicashin.com.  Oddly enough, when I checked yesterday, it returned about 6 documents.  Today, it's only returning 2 documents.  Hopefully, over time, all of the articles will get in there and STAY in there.

  I went through the site today and replaced the links to GoDaddy.com with the affiliate links.

  I visited Google's webmaster tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.  I told it that I own the domain www.canicashin.com.  In order to verify that I own the site, they required me to either place a specific file at the root of my website or add a meta-data tag to the index page of the website.  I chose to put the file in the root of my web space.  They have now verified that I own the domain and given me access to data they collect.
  I then did the same thing for the beta of the Live Search webmaster tools at webmaster.live.com.
  I also created a site map which is an XML file that tells the search engines about the pages on your site.  This helps ensure that all of the pages get indexed.  In order to create the site map, I used sitemapdotnet from http://sitemap.chinookwebs.com/.  There may be others but this one is one I already had.  This obviously on works on windows servers.  I then submitted the sitemap.xml file to the search engines using the webmaster tools sites.