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After this blog fell in Page Rank from 2 to 0, I was really hurt in my abilities to make money blogging. Some of my sites — like No Debt Plan — I am trying not to clutter with advertisements. I would rather continue with high quality content and lose some advertising dollars by not doing Sponsored Reviews on that blog.

Others, I don’t mind so much.

As I mentioned in the past, I recently spent $110 to buy a PR4 and PR3 blog. I’ve got the PR4 cookin’ with gas now and today was the first day of real money making. In fact I earned $42! Based on my $110 investment, that’s more than a 38% return. Let’s keep that up!

A 38% return over what was at most a two week time period annualized would be … well, let’s just say a very healthy amount. If I could maintain $40/day for 30 days, that’s $1,200! Woohoo!

That’s a big if though.

The real estate industry is in turmoil. Home values are plummeting in some areas, and “gently” dropping in others. Thankfully in my area home values have not decreased anywhere near the 5, 10, or 15% reported in other areas. I guess people in my part of the country buy homes to live in, not to invest in! I’m really glad I don’t have to try to refinance California mortgage.

We have two mortgages. One is 80% of the value, the second mortgage is for 15% of the value. The second of course is at a higher rate, but at least it is fixed. I’ve seen the rates drop and drop and drop, and have thought about learning more about how to refinance second mortgage.

Refinancing can be a pain though. You need someone you can trust. Someone that will charge you reasonable closing costs and get you the best rate possible.

As I mentioned before, I earned $136.25 in April. Actually, for two weeks in April. Some nice side cash, right?

Well my drop in Page Rank for this blog has killed my ability to make money with this blog. It will take quite a while to rebuild my ranking, and even then who knows when Google will update again.

So, I took my $136 and bought two different domains. One is a PR4, one is a PR3. I plan to build them up into real blogs, but also put Sponsored Reviews, Pay Per Post, and LinkWorth advertisements on them. I hope to pay for my investment within a month.

It’s the start of a new experiment. I don’t want to reveal the PR4, but the PR3 is SwopeParkway.org. It used to belong to a church and had some backlinks. I think it was a good purchase. Together, the pair cost me $110.

I’d pay good money for a winning lottery number. If I had my winning lottery numbers, I would laugh all the way to the bank.

I’d take my millions of dollars and write about it over on my personal finance blog. I wouldn’t be one of those guys who blows the money in five years. You could bet we’d have some fun, but we would set ourselves up for the rest of our lives.

Ah, lottery numbers. Gotta love it.

I did a stupid thing. When I decided I wanted to change this blog to focus on how to make money blogging, I deleted a bunch of old posts.

Those old posts had a lot of trackbacks from other sites. I had maintained a PR2 for quite some time. Now, I’m guessing, since I deleted those posts my PR has dropped to 0.

Do I care?

Heck yea, I care. It limits my ability to make money from Sponsored Reviews or PayPerPost. I’ll have to switch gears into somtehing more unique. In the end, it may be a good move for me. I’ve considered “reposting” those old links (with the handy feature in WP that lets you change the permalink), but not sure if it would work.

What do you think? Rebuild from scratch or bring back the old stuff as much as I can in an attempt to recover?

Once I’ve made my millions from blogging, I plan to travel. A lot. We’d love to spend three or six months running around Europe, seeing the sites, acting like we don’t have a care in the world. I’d love to go back and visit Ireland, the chocolate shops in Belgium, and explore Italy for the first time.

Hey, a guy can dream, right?

The only problem with going overseas for any length of time — vacation, business, missionary work, whatever — is staying in contact with those at home. This is getting easier with e-mail and the like, but if I took my cell phone overseas the per minute rate is going to be very, very high.

Of course there are other options like phone cards. Buy your friends and family some phone cards, setup a contact number overseas, and you’re set.

It’s the last day of the month and I haven’t totaled everything just yet… and I can still make more money today… but thus far I’m up to $131.25 for the month of April.

Again, I started an earnest effort in making money blogging back on April 15th of this month. If I could keep up the pace I have had for this past 1/2 month, then I’m looking at $260 or so per month side income.

I keep emphasizing this, but that isn’t a ton of money. It’s nice pocket change. But it helps me get to the next level. So I’m going to keep pressing on, and we’ll see what happens.