The idea is that by enabling each new third-party advertising network manually, and then watching my AdSense reports to see if my earnings go up or down, I should be able to tell which networks hurt my earnings by either lowering the click-through-rate or by lowering the average cost-per-click. The catch is that my AdSense earnings naturally increase and decrease even without making any changes. Some times the end of the month generates higher CPC and sometimes lower CPC. In some cases, the click thru rate goes up on Fridays and sometimes it goes down.

I noticed recently that I had a couple of dozen third-party ad networks still blocked on my Google AdSense account. Some I determined to have a potentially negative effect, but many others had never been tried at all, let alone for more than a day or two.

So, today I enabled all ad networks, including the Google AdSense third-party networks lowering earnings in my previous tests about how well the 3rd party ads perform for my websites. We’ll see if there is a major impact, or if there is no impact at all.

Read this: Is Credit Karma a scam or not?

Hopefully, Google knows what they are doing and using all of those additional third-party ads makes my AdSense income double! Actually, I solid increase of AdSense income would be nice, but I suspect that for all my efforts manually adding and removing the new ad networks, that everything stabilizes pretty much the way it was before.

How have you handled your third-party ad networks on AdSense? Do you enable them all or only a handful? Have you tested how the 3rd party ads hurt your earnings or boost your AdSense profits?

Time will tell how things work for my small network of websites.

Allow All Third-Party AdSense Networks is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

However, as anyone who earns money working from home as an entrepreneur will tell you, sooner or later you need to get out of the “office” no matter how great your setup is. I love my little basement home office, but there are no other people there but me, and sometimes I look up and realize that I haven’t seen the sun from a different angle in days. This is especially true in the fall and winter when the days get shorter and my workday can go from before the sun comes up to after the sun goes down. That means working from Starbucks or another coffee place.

For many people accessing the Internet from an insecure wireless hotspot like the ones they have at Starbucks, bookstores, and coffee shops is no big deal. Most banks and financial institutions use encryption on anything important, and certainly when logging on with a username and password. Even online email accounts like Google Gmail or Microsoft Hotmail use SSL when you are logging in. But, when you are talking about a full work day and accessing client-provided information, networks, data banks, or archives you can’t always be sure that the encryption is already there. And, when you are a freelance writer working on a deadline, you can’t always remember to check before you type away at the keyboard, potentially exposing sensitive data or giving away usernames or passwords in the clear.

Recent news about attorneys mass subpoena names and address from IP addresses also makes me nervous. I don’t do a lot of P2P type stuff, and almost none of it would attract a copyright attorney’s attention, but if they can do it for that, they can do it for anything. More to the point, current U.S. case law seems to suggest that a law firm can subpoena user data from ISPs and Internet providers based upon suspicion that something may or may not have been done by the IP address in question and, by extension, whoever was using it. I’m not interested in getting caught up in any “widely cast nets.”

Paid VPN Service Versus Free VPN Service

There are some free VPN services out there. The most popular one is HotShield. It offers free encrypted VPN connections, but it comes at the cost of having advertising. Ads are not a big deal when they are kept out of the user experience on a full-size monitor, but try working on your 10-inch ultra-portable netbook with an ad banner across the top. In some cases, it can take up a quarter of the screen.

Most free VPN services are also slower thanks both to the need to keep costs for a free service offering down, and in order to entice some users to upgrade to their faster paid VPN service.

Add it all up and it makes using free VPN a hassle for serious networking and Internet connectivity. I find myself weighing the burden of firing up the VPN client versus the odds that I can keep myself safe without it. That’s not a good way to run a railroad, so to speak.

Premium VPN Services

I did some preliminary research and it appears that getting unlimited secure VPN access with encrypted network connections to the Internet and beyond is realatively innexpensive.

I’ll be looking into various VPN providers over the next couple of weeks and trying several of them out. There are reviews out there, but it so hard to distinguish fake reviews from real reviews that I don’t know which ones to trust. The only reviews to speak of from respected publications review VPN services as they pertain to the computing or IT industry and not how they work for the entrepreneur trying to keep his small business safe while working remotely from the road or the local coffee shop. Hopefully, I can help fill this gap by reviewing VPN connection providers from the viewpoint of a small business owner networking on the go.

Grab the Best Hubris RSS feed so you don’t miss any of the upcoming VPN provider reviews here on BestHubris.com. While you are at it, you can check out my recent review of WiFi Guardian hotspot security software.

If you offer a premium VPN service and want me to include your product in my review, please contact me and I will test out your product. Please let me know whether I will need to download and install software or not, and let me know how to access the reviewer’s account username and password.

Network Security VPN Internet Services is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

The commenter essentially posted a rebuttal about some comments I made regarding RescueTime.  He was partly right

At the time, I simply assumed that whoever it was that had dropped by to make a comment was one of the marketing guys, or a PR guy, or maybe even a programmer.  When I had some more time, I did some clicking around, and it turns out it was the guy who founded the company.  His name is Tony Wright, and he has a blog.  (Actually, he has a couple.)

I started reading his blog at www.TonyWright.com.  I like it.  It’s like some of the other “bigger name” blogs from so-called serial entrepreneurs who start-up multiple companies, only it actually makes sense.  And it isn’t all about venture capital, which unless you are starting up a web-service business, you will almost certainly never need or use.

Two really great things about it are that it both has interesting stories and events to relate, and that he drops the names of a lot of cool services, companies, or people that I haven’t really come across before.

I’m always looking for new sources of business, start-up, and entrepreneur information that I can actually stomach reading.  (Sorry, but most of those guys are so self promotional that I can’t help but wonder if they’re one quiet month away from dumpster diving.)  So, it was nice to come across his blog.

New Start-Up Entrepreneur Insight Source is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

I frequently finish writing up a great article or other project and look up the clock and wonder, “How long did that take me to write?”

The issue is that as a freelance writer, entrepreneur, and business owner, I multi-task, a lot.  Whenever I read some time management guru give advice about focusing on one thing I laugh out loud.  Anyone who has ever run their own start-up knows that breaking your day out into inviolable blocks of scheduled time during which you ignore other tasks and activities is a fantasy.

That means that sometimes, I start an article, and then get a phone call from an important client (Let it go to voicemail the “experts” say. Yeah, right.  The reason I’m their first phone call is because I not only answer the phone, I answer on the first ring.  You don’t get the high paying, emergency, super-short deadline project when it takes you 30 minutes or an hour to get back to them.  By then, they’ve already called six other firms.)

That phone call may lead to six other tasks I have to do, some quickly, and others later.  Some of those tasks may require waiting (like having a call returned) during which time I might work on the article.  The extra tasks may cause the time I am spending writing the article to run into an appointment that I have scheduled, so there is a pause while I go to the meeting, and so on and so forth.

In other words, an article that took from 1:30 PM until 4:20 PM in total, may have only taken me 45 minutes to write all together.  There is no way I would ever be able to find that out without an automated time tracker.

What I like about RescueTime is that it only counts the active application as using my time.  This means I don’t get fake counts because I have Word open in the background.  Also, it stops counting automatically when I stop using my computer so that those 4 minute phone calls don’t end up falsely adding an extra 16 minutes.

But there has always been one thing that really bugs me about RescueTime.  It’s a web enabled Internet application for no reason.  (After reading Tony’s comment below, I am retracting the no reason thing.  There are good reasons.  They just aren’t the ones I have use for.) Sure, if you are collaborating with a team, or if your boss is reviewing how you spend your time, the online thing is great, but if you are a single freelancer working out of your basement office, there is no reason to be sending all that data out into cyberspace.

Sure, they have a privacy policy, and yes, they have security, but as the recent Twitter thing reminded everyone, that isn’t enough.  Besides, it is yet another, no profit, tiny revenues, free-version with a pay-version, company that could go out of business at anytime or get bought out by someone else.  If that happens, all that data may just well be the most valuable asset the company has, and investors and founders looking to get the money back could sell it easily.

Unfortunately, there is no offline, no network, local install version of RescueTime.

Today, I found ManicTime, which is, for my purposes anyway, everything that RescueTime is without the online web-based part.  ManicTime installs locally, doesn’t make me register (and give out my email address), and doesn’t make me log in so that someone, somewhere could find out exactly what I was doing every day for a week, a month, a year, or longer.

I’m still testing, but so far, so good.  It looks like RescueTime will be out and ManicTime will be in.

RescueTime Time Tracker Offline Version ManicTime is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Mind you, I haven’t built that first business up all the way yet. In my mind it still can be more than it is today and I’m going to get it there. However, I can’t wait on these other ideas. They rattle around in my brain begging for my attention. These are flights of fancy that fade with time, they are ideas that won’t go away, and as I start to work on them, the potential just seems bigger and better, and I want to pursue them more. So, what is the problem? Well, frankly, I’m out of hours in the day. Some day the answer will be to bring on partners or employees or whatever, but right now, it’s just me. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. The passion and energy is something that I’ve been missing during my “9 to 5″ years, and I am glad to have it. It’s just that I’m starting to think that Serial Entrepreneurs are wimps. No offense.

Long live the Explosive Entrepreneur. (Mental note, register explosiveentrepreneur.com and outline book for same…here we go again.)

Explosive Entrepreneur is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC