Top Commented Posts for March:

8 People That Student Entrepreneurs Should Follow on Twitter

Video: Launch Your Business Already!

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Interviews/Videos with Young Entrepreneurs

Interview with Tatango Founder Derek Johnson

You Need To Follow Michael Dunlop

Meeting Ryan Allis of iContact and Zero Million

Now, lets do a very quick run down of income for the month of March.

Private Ad Sales: $40.00

Reviews and Text Links: $44.76

Affiliates: $10.00

AdSense: $9.26

TOTAL: $104.02

This past month was slightly lower for two reasons: one of our advertisers paid for two full months at once so that was accounted for in the February round up and then I also had one advertiser not renew a couple text link ads. However, I still cracked the $100 mark again, so I am happy about that!

Now, a special thanks to our current advertisers.

Sporting an image advertisement, Greener Billing is a great service you need to check out. With free accounts and more features than other online billing websites, Greener Billing is a great way to save paper, save the environment from wasting resources, and also still get a bill to your clients. I’ve started using the service and will have a review of it out soon! With text link ads, again this month, we have Cheap Auto Insurance Quotes and Student Credit Cards. Also with a top spot in the header area is the Thousand Dollar Profits program!

Coming soon to Dorm Room Biz

The new theme for the site is about 95% of the way complete. I’m tweaking a couple images and getting everything finished up. I have the issue that many entrepreneurs have – I want it to be perfect before launching it. So, I’m going to be taking my own advance and launch it already, and then tweak it more as we go along.

Other Crazy Things Happening

I’m still in Florida! I know, its been like a month already! I’ll be back in Maryland on April 11th for “good”. May 1st my Fiance and I will be moving into a townhouse, so those couple weeks after I get back are going to be busy packing and trying to get everything ready for that. Once the office is set back up in the new place, I’ll be sure to share some pictures and a quick tour of the place! We’re both really excited about it, so it’s going to be fun. Tomorrow, we [my finance is flying down tonight] are heading to Universal Studies in Orlando since I have the day off work, so I should have some neat pictures and videos from that next week. Also, as a side note, I’ve started adding more pictures to my Flickr account, so you can always check that out to see what I’ve been up to.

Even at just 28 days long, February was a good month for me and Dorm Room Biz. Here are some of the updates and what is to come over the next month.

Moved my RSS feeds from Feedburner to Google – this was an automatic thing that happened the last time that I went to log in to Feedburner. I was asked to move them and went for it. Now, I’ll be able to manage my RSS feeds, Analytics, AdSense, AdWords, Analytics, and Gmail all from the same account. Sounds pretty nice to me! I haven’t been using it long enough to tell if the transition really has any effect on anything. If you are not subscribed via RSS, do so! Have any of you guys experienced problems with the transition or even good things come from it?

New Dorm Room Biz Theme – I know I’ve mentioned it before and eluded that something new was coming. Well, the time is finally here and in the next couple weeks it will be launched. I have a programmer assisting me with the WordPress customization and everything is going well. For an idea of what the site will look like, it will be based off of the Open Air theme from WooThemes. Look out for this exciting change coming soon!

More Videos! As you have probably noticed, I have started making and posting more videos. I love the way that the video blogging or “vlogging” arena is headed and definitely want to be involved in it. For this reason I have been utilizing my Flip video camera more than ever shooting different videos for blogging tips, business tips, and interviews. Keep coming back or subscribe to the RSS feed (or email updates) to catch them all. You can also follow me on Twitter for updates of posts.

New Advertisers on Dorm Room Biz – I’m happy to welcome GreenerBilling.com as a new advertiser on Dorm Room Biz. If you are looking for a “green” way to do your businesses billing and invoicing online, then I suggest you check out GreenerBilling. They have some great updates coming to their site soon and we will be putting together a full in depth review of the site shortly. Also, back with us for another month are the great guys over at Uprinting with some links in the sidebar. If you need printing services, check them out. I recently got some postcards printed with them and they turned out great!

Chance to Meet other Young Entrepreneurs – With February came Yanik Silver’s Underground 5 held in Washington D.C.. Although I didn’t attend the actual conference I did head down to D.C. to meet Michael Dunlop who was over from the U.K., as well as Ryan Allis, and some other young entrepreneurs. I love networking and meeting new people, and try to take advantage of it any time I can, so if you are ever in the Washington D.C. or Baltimore, MD areas for a conference, event, or whatever, feel free to drop me an email or tweet and we can try to get together!

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Now, on to the blog income. This will be a little skewed because I had an advertiser pay for 2 months up front but everything else should be pretty solid amounts. This detail is also a rough estimate and a combination of Dorm Room Biz as well as a couple other sites of mine.

Private Advertisers: $100.00
Product Commissions: $22.50
CashCrate: $26.61
Text Link Ads: $12.76
Adsense: $7.25
TOTAL: $169.12

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I think that’s pretty much all I have for this update. I do have some exciting news that I’ll be sharing in a separate post but just know that it should affect the blogging that happens here on Dorm Room Biz for the better!

If you’d be interested in writing a guest post, I’m always open to them! Drop me a line.

Market Leverage – $27.55
CashCrate – $7.88
Sponsored Reviews – $9.75
Text Link Ads – $25.48
Google Adsense – $15.71
ReviewMe – $5.00
Blogrolled – $11.00
Totaling: $102.37

Very close to the $100/month mark again this past month. I had a few different opportunities to make some more money this past month through Dorm Room Biz by doing more paid reviews and sponsored posts, but with being really busy at work, taking a few days off to go to the beach, and now with my desktop computer messed up, I haven’t had the motivation to blog when I get home from work. However, I want to get that changed back around to continue to increase the earnings during August. My goal is to reach $150 for the month if not more.

This past month also saw 20 posts with about 25 comments. The most popular post for the month being Should you show your Categories and Archives within your sidebar?

In other news…

The hard drive in my desktop computer is completely fried and dead. I had to buy a new one last night and will be installing tonight. Hopefully I will have an operational desktop computer by Monday with programs reinstalled. Luckily, as things started to get screwed up, I moved all of my files that was stored on my computer to my external hard drive. However, I did not get a chance to make backup and archive files of my emails – so I have lost pretty much all of my client emails for my website design business and all of my emails related to eBay. My eBay emails aren’t a big deal too much because most of that stuff is backed up through eBay yet loosing all my client emails is a big problem! So…lesson learned…constantly back up your files AND email!

LOOKING FOR SPONSORS! I am compiling sponsors for the upcoming contest here at Dorm Room Biz. If you have any ideas or would like to sponsor something of your own (EntreCard credits, books, money, gift cards, anything) please get at me – chris @ dorm-room-biz.com.

Other big news is that I earlier this week I became a PowerSeller on eBay. That basically means that for 3 consecutive months I had sales over $3000 total. I am happy about this because it opens up more opportunities for me such as better search placement with eBay searches, access to the PowerSellers product sourcing area, and more! Now I just need to keep it up and grow my sales each month!

Finally, I have my new business bank account set up! I am excited about this because I can start to keep better track of my expenses and income. All of my blogging, eBay, and web design related money will flow into this account. I am also waiting on my sales and use tax number and certificate to arrive. This will help me secure products for eBay at discounted prices and tax free; which is nice!

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More posts to come soon. However, keep a little more up to date with me by following me on Twitter. I try to use Twitter while at work and interact with people, so follow me and start talking!

• ReviewMe: $15.00
• AdSense: $15.69
• Private Ads/Posts: $20.00
• Text Link Ads: $5.51
• CashCrate: $22.79

Total: $78.99

ReviewMe – ReviewMe is a great way to make some extra money from your blog by writing sponsored posts. Even though I did not have any high paying offers from ReviewMe to be posted on Dorm Room Biz, I utilized a couple of the different campaigns that came across my RSS feed reader. Had I jumped on more of them and spent time to write more posts on different websites and topics, this could have amounted to at least $50 for the month. However, when I consider different reviews to take on through ReviewMe’s campaigns, I try to keep the content relevant to Dorm Room Biz and the topics that you all are interested in reading about. This helps the paid posts to not be as obvious and to not be obtrusive to you all.

Google AdSense: Although it is not a major earner for me, it does bring in a few bucks here and there. I am going to be working on better optimizing the site to utilize AdSense in a couple different ways which will hopefully result in a higher CTR and a higher payout to me!

Private Ads/Private Posts: This is usually the category that is the biggest earner just because different businesses and bloggers are more interested in working directly with another blogger as opposed to working through a third party service. It also allows the blogger writing a sponsored post or putting up a private ad to make a higher amount rather than totally relying on a service like Text Link Ads. With the installation of OIOPublisher, I hope that I will be able to increase my private ad sales by offering other areas throughout the site that you can advertise in. For the current rates, please email me, but you can get an idea of where they are at right now by visiting the Advertising page. If you are not using OIOPublisher to manage your private ad sales, I definitely suggest you check it out!

Text Link Ads – I didn’t even realize that I had sold any for the month! I got my TLA integrated with my regular links sections and for some reason didn’t receive notification that I had sold one and never noticed it. Anyway, its nothing to quit a job over or even get paid for the month, but will eventually get paid out as more sell. I already had $25 worth of TLAs sell on another site of mine, so the end of June I should receive a combined payment.

CashCrate – I know I have said it before, but I really do love the way CashCrate works and the great system they have set up. CashCrate is a constant money maker for me and I can always rely on it to generate some extra money. If you haven’t already, take a look at the different reviews that I have done on CashCrate here and here and then sign up for the program so that you too can start making money! Once you get your account established and you make your money from completing surveys, get referrals signed up underneath of you so that your earning power continues to grow.

Besides these money makers, I have also joined up with Market Leverage to bring my readers different offers that will hopefully benefit you all, so look at for these different offers around the site. If you are looking to get into affiliate marketing and more serious advertising revenues, I strongly suggest you take a look at ML and sign up. Bloggers such as Zac Johnson, Ian Fernando, John Chow, and Shoemoney have had great success with them and they are a great group of people willing to help you out!

There are just so many ways out there to make money online from blogging that it is hard to test them all out. I am interested in any experiences that you all, my readers, have had from working with any of the companies that I have mentioned above or any others. Now that I am getting into putting more advertising on the Dorm Room Biz site, I am contemplating ANOTHER redesign (I know, I know – I just had it redesigned not too long ago). But, I would like to change up the side bar some and make it into a 2 column sidebar to utilize the space better as well as make for less scrolling just to see the sidebar items. We shall see!

I also have some other cool ideas planned for Dorm Room Biz over the next couple months, so be on the look out for some new releases of different items in the near future!

Here’s to blogging success!
Chris