Make Money Online

I got hacked.  A few of my wordpress sites with out of date versions were broken into and it somehow lead to malicious code being embedded in all of my blogs on that host – Hostmonster.  Then I found out the same thing happened with some of my newer older versions of wordpress over at Downtownhost.  Mind you I am no programming guy so this was a big obstacle for me and it took me about 3-4 hours before I could attack the problem.  Talk about a setback in the make money online game.

The reason I discovered I was hacked was because the hacker put a restriction on my ability to login and edit the files within my template.  I thought this was my host’s fault (never been hacked before that I know of).  So I chatted twice with Hostmonster and got lackluster responses both times.  Neither helped at all and tried to put the ball in my court, encouraging me to export the files or reinstall wordpress (which would take out all of my aged content).  I had roughly 65 wordpress sites on Hostmonster so I was not exporting all of these sites (I couldn’t edit any of the blogs on Hostmonster).  I took the next step and submitted a ticket and with great return speed Hostmonster alerted me the root of my problem was the malicious hack.

I read up on similar happenings and discovered that other wordpress users had their site’s search engine traffic (the most valuable kind of traffic) stolen by the hacker.  In effect, the site turned into a redirect to a psuedo parked page.  I almost never click on my websites through searches because I want to keep the Analytics pure so I was completely clueless.  Sure enough the first blog I went to from a search sent me to some on-topic links to click on.  I was enraged.  Whoever this did this was making money online on my dime and my bead of sweat and that thought got under my skin.  To top it off, not only did they steal my money but they also may have hurt me in Google’s eyes.  Google will drop you fast for a page redirect.

I don’t know to what extent this had been happening but I’m thinking this was a 2 week or less thing because that’s about when I first noticed I couldn’t edit one of my side bars.  After about 10 hours or quite possibly more of educating myself on removing the code and then manually doing so from every wordpress database in myphpadmin, I think I’ve finally remedied the problem though I cannot be 100% certain.  Currently my Adsense for the day has 136 impressions and 0 clicks.  Yesterday was 144 impressions with only 1 clicks.  As I’ve mentioned before, I did take Adsense out of a lot of my sites (to avoid smart pricing and bad search engine position) but still this unusually low CTR has me wondering if something is afoot.

I know one reason it is significantly lower is because I removed Adsense from one of my star sites.  I was making about $20 month on a “money” themed sited.  Then all of a sudden the CTR and the CPC plummeted.  I was averaging clicks in the upper $0.50 area and then dropped to 5 and 7 cent clicks.  I don’t know why this happened.  The site is aged since 2007 with plenty of content and I don’t think the code was taking effect here as the impressions were still coming in at 20-40 per day.  You know, maybe I was getting credit for the impression but visitors were being redirected before ever getting to my site.  The clicks I did have may have been social traffic or some other place Google doesn’t like.  Is the Adsense code even my own Adsense code?  That’s it, I’m putting new Adsense on some of my sites – hold on.  Ok there I just updated 5 of my top sites so we’ll see if that changes anything.

It could very well be that I’m just not getting clicks right now but that’s one aspect of being hacked that is extremely frustrating – uncertainty and paranoia.  Still, I’ve got several sites I’ve cleared so let’s see if I can’t improve upon them.  As if it isn’t hard enough to make money online without being hacked – this incident has cost me time, money, and development on my sites.  Another distraction is whether my top “money” site that I mentioned before is being sandboxed as a result of some of this.  I had climbed all the way up to #3, but I’ve now been delisted for the keyword search term unless you enter in the words together with no spaces.  It is a sweet niche because there is so little competition.  I did very little link building and got to where I did through age and on site optimization.  About a month ago I upgraded the theme to the same one you’re seeing here and it got over the 4 marker to #3.  It was still #3 but yo-yoing back and forth between being listed and not being listed when I added an affiliate banner.  A day after I did this, it dropped and hasn’t come back since.  I put a no follow tag in the html code so now I’m not sure what’s going on with that site.  Maybe it was my time to get sandboxed?  I have no idea and right now I can’t experiment with it because when I removed some of the malicious code, I also deleted some needed code.  I installed 2.71 over to replace those files, but I still can’t login.  Now I have to figure out that.

So all-in-all a bad week for my money making operations.  One positive that did come of this was I cleared out a lot of unnecessary blogs, updated the existing wordpress versions, and became more organized so there is that.  And it also could have been a lot worse – a guy on Warrior Forum had 300 of his sites wiped clean and Hostgator says they don’t have the files backed up.  That hurts especially because it sounds like he had a lot more money on the line than I do.

One thing I was happy about accomplishing was yesterday I downloaded Gimp 2.6, read some tutorials, and made a pretty nice looking minisite out of my custom made banner and a nice, plain premade template.  I’m going to replicate this and try making money online with the affiliate program I talked about last week.  I believe I’ve found a soft, but very profitable niche so I’m going to start attacking that niche as well.

I’m headed off to the gym now, but once I get back, I’ll be focused again, trying to win the make money online game.