It Feels Good To Be Spam-Free!

Success is mine! Thanks to my ever-so-lovely programmer, Maricela, the spammers have hit a wall. Do you know what that means? It means I don't have to delete mounds of spam postings on Mytutorlist.com every day! Hurraaaay! You have no idea the relief I feel over this. I was getting so annoyed. I would go into my database and carefully delete each spam posting and JUST as I logged out, a new spam post would appear! Nooooo!

But they're gone now. My students and tutors can browse in peace, uninterrupted by viagra ads. Phewf!

Thank you so much, Maricela! My life is better because of you!

I'm a Corporate Advertising Slave, Eeek!

I was browsing blogs today and I came across this icon on thedirtyground.com (who has amazing drawings, by the way):

I clicked on it out of curiosity and discovered that it is an icon used by blogs that refuse to post advertisements. Boy, did that make me feel lousy... I had JUST added a new block of 5 Project Wonderful ad spots to the bottom right of this blog and been promoting it to fellow Etsians and Craiglisters.

I began to wish somewhat wistfully that I wasn't such a slave to corporate advertising. I even reasoned with myself that I'm helping other Etsians and, duh, if I'm going to post my own Etsy store ad, why not other ads? But, secretly (well, not so secretly now) I rather wished that I didn't have a need to place any ads on my site. Wouldn't it be a fabulous world if NO ADS whatsoever appeared anywhere?

But then I remembered all the ads that I actually enjoy watching on TV, like the half-time ones for football and the Boom-de-yada ad from the Discovery Channel. I thought about the idea of corporate advertising, and I realized that none of the advertisers on my site are currently corporations. They're just artists trying to make a living from their work.

So I relaxed a little and didn't feel *quite* so bad anymore. Besides, I just post ads so I can keep Mytutorlist.com free for tutors and students to use. That's not so bad, is it?

I wiped the guilt-induced sweat from my brow and continued to persuade other small businesses to advertise on this blog. (Um... wanna advertise here? I don't bite...)

It's for the sake of struggling students, ambitious tutors, and starving artists! Those are good causes. *nods*

Business As Usual (For Me AND The Fishies)

I've been so busy lately, running helter-skelter, just trying to get all my various projects into order. Blue Pandemonium has been slow in February with no sales compared to 6 in January, and Mytutorlist.com has been driving me crazy because spammers have been posting 7-8 spam postings each day. That means that I have to go in and delete them daily. The last thing you want on a tutoring classifieds website are daily viagra and cialis ads, arrggh! My handy, dandy programmer, however has been working on a solution. I think she's succeeded because I don't see any spam posts today. I will be sooo happy if the spam posts go away. I have my fingers crossed that the spammers aren't just on a romantic vacation for the day.

Art-wise, I've had projects on and off, but I haven't had time to sit down for some watercolour painting yet. I think my most recent project is the paper doll, which reminds me that I have some new paper doll-ish ideas in progress. I'm always in need of birthday cards and it seems practical to design some. However, I don't want boring, normal cards so I'm considering jointed dolls/scenes as cards. For now, the ideas are just blue pen sketches on a pad of paper. They look pretty cool if you can tell what they are :P

My latest obsession (I rotate obsessions) are the fish at home , and do you know why? Because the mummy fish is going to be a mummy again! I guess that's no surprise to you, but this is a new mummy fish (not the killer one) and she has been playing hard-to-get for a long time. The husband fish chases her around the tank all day, and she runs away from him all day. However, she's been getting mightly plump as of late, and we know what's brewing.We moved her into a maternity ward compartment, thinking to spare her all the persistent chasing from her husband fish. Ironically, the husband fish and his wife missed each other. He hung around her compartment all day, staring longingly at her through the glass. She didn't seem to like the separation either. She magically jumped out of her compartment to reunite with her honey. There are big googly-eyed goldfish, however, that would love to snack on some baby fish, so we moved her back to the maternity ward and put a lid on top. She didn't like that one bit and husband fish returned to his post beside her on the other side of the glass. Poor guy! She's starting to square out though, and that's supposed to mean she'll give birth soon. Hang on, love birds! You'll be together again soon!

80,783 Visitors Strong

I ran some statistics on Mytutorlist.com traffic last night, and discovered that we had 80,783 unique visitors in 2008! I was impressed. That's a big jump in traffic from the previous year, which had about 27,800 unique visitors.

We had the most visitors in September and October, I guess because of school starting up, but it has been steady around the 7000-8000 unique visitors per month range since. Not bad at all.

We currently offer 2 types of advertising. We have ads by Project Wonderful on a per-bid basis, and we have annual ads that are offered directly through Mytutorlist.com. Our sponsors choose whether they wish to bid daily for ad spots, or whether they prefer to pre-pay for one year. The annual ads have the perk of being shown constantly (instead of disappearing every time someone outbids you), and it can be more affordable since Mytutorlist.com is flexible with the pricing to help new businesses out.

I'm not sure what 2009 is going to be like yet, but I'm optimistic. I know that we will keep growing, and I'm keeping an eye out for possible improvements to the site.

Cheers to 2009!

Mytutorlist.com Update

It's been a while since I've written an update on Mytutorlist.com so I thought I'd let you know how things are going. I ran some statistics on Mytutorlist.com and we are now up to 8125 unique visitors per month. That's over 1000 more users than 3 months ago! Yay! We're growing!

On top of that, I'd like to welcome a new business sponsor to our site, Paper2Play.com We're proud to have them on board as they have some great paper products, including some beautiful decoupage paper and supplies. They have a tutorial here, if you're interested in seeing how decoupage, or decopatch, is done. Of course, the decorative papers can also be used for greeting cards, wrapping, book binding, and more. Please check their website for details.

Paper2Play also has a great blog with lots of fun decorating ideas. Check it out!

If you'd like to become a business sponsor too, please visit our Business Sponsor page.

Project Wonderful Stats

Happy Friday!

So did some tallying up last night and I thought I'd share some Project Wonderful stats with you in case you're considering it. I'm at day 13 right now, so this what you can possibly expect in roughly two weeks with Project Wonderful.

Selling Ad Space
I have 15 ad spaces right now and after 13 days, I have made 76 cents. Not exactly a fortune...

However, it does make for some interesting new finds in terms of web comics, various products, blogs, etc. Compared to some other advertising programs, I actually like the advertisers that are posting on my site. Possibly because many of them are comic artists, their ads look nice! That is a big perk because some advertising programs have really ugly ads. Google Ads, for instance, were rather boring because they are all text-based.

And there's one more perk! Once you have the ads on your site, you can click on your ad statistics to see stats on your website! You can see how many page visits and unique visitors are viewing that particular page that your ad is on, and where they are coming from. In fact, you can click on the top referrer links available and see the exact search options that were entered into Google or other search engines to find you! How cool is that!?

Oh, and don't be discouraged if you have few advertisers during the day. For some odd reason, most of the advertisers come out at night. I can have empty ad spots during the day but, at night after 9pm, the ad spots magically fill up. It's like the 12 dancing princesses.

Buying Ad Space
I made 5 ads (2 for Blue Pandemonium, 2 for Mytutorlist.com) and spent a whopping ZERO cents. In return these ads did quite well.

The 2 Blue Pandemonium ads got 14105 page views (7964 of them unique). Of these numerous views, there were 18 clicks (16 of them unique). There was one button ad and one square ad. The button ad did better.

The 3 Mytutorlist.com ads got 26311 page views (13776 of them unique). Of these views, there were 91 clicks (88 unique). There was one button ad and two square ads. The button ad outperformed the 2 square ads combined at 58 clicks.

Summary
The online reviews were right. Selling ad space is not necessarily a great thing with Project Wonderful. Even if I sell all 15 ad spots every day for 365 days, I will only make $54.75. Considering the amount of effort I'm investing to monitor the ads and improve them, it's not worthwhile at all. If I was to try and improve this, I would have to increase my minimum bid from one cent to something higher. I will have to do some more experimenting with this in the future.

However, advertising your sites on Project Wonderful is actually pretty good. An extra 91 visitors at Mytutorlist.com over the past two weeks is a very good thing for getting the word out there. An extra 18 visitors at my Etsy store is also very good. And for what? Just time. No money necessary. That's pretty wonderful.

Is it Friday yet?

I thought for sure it was Friday today! I was counting on it, hoping for it, desperately reaching for it. Darn you, Thursday! That extra day before the last day of the work week!

Hehehe...

So the blog giveaway is over and I've packaged up the little white acorn for Chickenbells (Sadie). I'll make a stop at the post office after work and send it away.

My latest obsession- and I have a lot of them- is Project Wonderful. I've been dutifully watching those ads, seeing who bids, who doesn't bid, who disappears as soon as they have to start paying... it's quite fascinating. A few days in, I decided to give up on the free ad aspect and moved all the ads to one cent minimum bids.

At first, the advertisers all scattered. "One cent!?! Ridiculous! I'm outta here!" But they slowly returned and made peace with the penny. It's only one penny after all. Many of us don't even bother to pick up a lucky penny on the street anymore.

I made more room for the penny spots and now there are 15 in total. Some of them are very small button ads especially for web comics. I love reading web comics and would love to have more of them post on my site.

I made some nicer-looking "Your Ad Here" images too. The square ones overlap to tile the Mytutorlist logo (I'm quite proud of that :P), and the comic-only spots have a cute little, um, cloth-like banner design. I'm not sure how to describe it.

You can check it out here.

I'm going to keep watching those ads to see how they perform. The main complaint I read about online is that it's great for advertisers, but not so great for the publishers. You just can't make good money with them. I would have to agree with them so far since I'm still pluckin' at the one cent per day mark, but I will keep you posted and see if the scene improves.

Have a happy Thursday! Friday's a-comin' ("just around the riverbend!" Ah, I'm so cheesy...)!

Project Wonderful Ads

My friend told me about an advertising program called Project Wonderful the other day and I have decided to give it a try for Mytutorlist.com - my free tutoring classifieds website.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

If you're looking for some free advertising, head over there and get it now. Unless someone is bidding against you, it's free! There's lots of space right now so you might as well get the exposure now while the coast is clear. My tutoring website currently gets over 7071 unique visitors per month and has a page rank of 4.

Have a good weekend! I'm off to camping tomorrow.

Pagerank of 4!!!

Great news! Mytutorlist.com (my tutoring classifieds site) now has a page rank of 4! We were just recently at page rank 3. Not bad, not bad. We also had 6710 unique visitors in April last month. That works out to almost 224 unique visitors per day! In March, Mytutorlist.com had 5963 unique visitors, so that means an extra 747 visitors in April. Pretty darn good, huh?

So traffic to the site seems to be good and page rank is good too. The only catch now, is how to make the site support itself. I recently removed all the Google ads (which made the site look cleaner, actually) but that does mean that I've removed it's main source of income. I'm not too worried since Mytutorlist.com is something that I've been working on for years and I don't mind investing time and money into it. However, that's not the most practical approach.

I think that all my years of volunteering have made me just a little too open to the idea of working for free. People often say that I'm very generous because I bring cookies, candies, plants, treats, etc to work to share with them. For instance, today I brought a whole bunch of strawberry plants to work and gave them away. Some of them asked me curiously why I was giving them away, as though there was a catch, but my own plants had divided many times over and I don't need so many.

I think "real life" and "growing up" has been a hard task for me. Sharing and giving things away freely was such an integral part of what I was used to doing when I was little, but it is not possible to continue that way if I want to be smart and successful. Real life is so much more selfish, cut-throat, and dangerous.

Oh well, baby steps. Maybe I can find some kind of happy medium between paying bills, being a smart business person, and being a good person in general.

Captain, we have a blog!

Welcome to a new online tool for Mytutorlist.com to share our experiences in tutoring and in building a place online for tutors and students to meet!

It's not easy having a dream to build something to help others but it has been worthwhile... so far :P

Mytutorlist.com - Our History

So perhaps you're wondering, what is Mytutorlist.com, and why was it started? Well, the story begins with a small tutoring company called Honours Tutoring. Started as a flexible, part-time venture, Honours Tutoring offered private tutors in various subjects. Parents and students would contact me with their tutoring needs, and I would find a tutor for them. It was a small, but successful venture. I had a collection of great tutors, and parents were happy to refer more parents.

However, about 2 years ago, I closed up Honours Tutoring. I had finished my studies and found a great full-time job, and I didn't have the time to run a growing tutoring business. I was very sad to let it go, and especially to say good-bye to my own students. However, it seemed that I couldn't walk away from my tutoring past. With no ads posted that I was aware of, students and parents still called looking for tutors - and I had no where to send them.

My brain started ticking.

Mytutorlist.com - The Beginning

There were always students looking for tutors, and there were always tutors looking for students. I wanted to create a place for them to meet - a posting board of sorts. With what skills I had in web development, I whipped up Mytutorlist.com in a weekend and I have been modifying and improving it since.

Mytutorlist.com is here to give tutors some free or low-cost advertising space, and it is also a great place for students to find a tutor. The number of postings grows daily, and I am confident that they will multiply in number once school starts up again. To fund this project, we have Google Ads and sponsored ads, and soon we will have Featured Tutors and used textbook postings. I hope that this website will be able to sustain itself financially over time (it doesn't right now), but I am content that the site is being used already and that students have been able to connect with tutors. If Mytutorlist.com ever does turn a profit, our first goal will be to hire a programmer to revamp the site. Our next goal after that, will be to start a bursary. We are not-for-profit in nature, and hope that you will continue to help support our site by posting ads, browsing our postings, and telling your friends about us.

Thank you for being part of our beginning, we hope that we will have many success stories to share with you in the near future.