Bitter disappointment.

Posted by stuart as adsense

After a reasonably succesful first month with Adsense (averaged over a dollar a day), this month so far has been a bitter disappointment.

After losing around five days at the start of the month due to hosting troubles, I’ve averaged well under a dollar a day for the month so far.

I’m not sure whether this has anything to do with the earlier hosting troubles, or what has happened. Traffic to a couple of sites has dropped off significantly. Even one site which has been around for a couple of years, and was getting a reasonable amount of natural SE traffic, has died off completely.

I have four “mini sites” waiting for a little bit of search engine love. Just five or six page sites, very specifically targeted, SEO’d up the wazoo, set and forget type stuff, so we’ll see what the future brings for them, but I would imagine that we’re a couple of months away from any kind of results with these sites.

I’m thinking I might concentrate on putting together a blog for one of my sites, it’s the kind of thing I can add content to quickly and easily, and hope that that brings some more traffic, and more clicks.

I know I’m on the right track with adsense optimisation etc. I get great CTR’s on all my sites, and the eCPM is more than acceptable, my traffic just seems to have died!

It’s getting harder and harder to justify to the missus the time spent in front of the computer, when you get one click worth $0.03 for a whole day!

I know this is not a get rich quick thing, but give me strength, I’m starting to think that Google have created some sort of slow, painful, psychological torture device here.

Another way of judging a sites success

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online, google adsense, adsense

I’m finding a good way of quickly working out how succesfully a site is performing is to calculate the income per page per day over a period of time, say a month.

For arguments sake, my most succesful site is only about 10 pages, and brings in between $0.50 to $1.50 a day.

So let’s say it averages $0.75 a day over a month for the 10 pages, the IPPPD (Income Per Page Per Day) would be $0.75/10 = $0.075, or 7.5cents per day per page. Multiply this by 365, and it works out that each page on that site will bring in, on average, just over $27 per day.

Of course this calculation doesn’t account for the fact that the home page on this site actually brings in over 70% of the income for the site, but it’s an interesting comparison none the less.

This is a good way of working out whether it’s worth adding more content to a site, or just moving on with other projects.

A step back in time

Posted by stuart as adsense

Nothing to do with making money online, just thought this was cool (and relevant, as my logs tell me a few readers are mac users)

I was cleaning through some junk yesterday, and came across a pile of “Australian Mac User” magazines from around 1994 to 1996.

Wow!

What a different world. All the talk was of Apple’s “E-World”, internet “starter kits” which sold for $99 (a TCP stack, Netscape Navigator 1.0, Eudora email client etc).

The memories came flooding back - 14.4kbps dialup at $7.95 an hour, text based BBS’es (then came Telefinder - WOW! A graphical BBS!), trying to get a SLIP internet connection to work.

I remember the thrill of unpacking my first (bought) mac - it was replacing a mac plus I inherited (ahhh, remember when you could actually get stuff done with ONE MEG OF RAM, and your programs AND files would sit on one floppy?). I bought a shiny new 25MHz LC475 ($2,500), with four Mb of RAM and a 160Mb HDD. I went to town on this baby, upgraded it with a ($450) 8Mb RAM stick, a ($500) 850Mb (that’s MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes) Hard drive, and a $2,300 300DPI HP LaserJet. This was the start of my DTP empire, which eventually led to my web pursuits.
So for around $6,000, I had a computer which would now be soudly thrashed in the performance stakes by my $300 HP IPAQ 1950 PDA.

I remember the first time I decided to have a crack at web development on this machine -  I trouped off and bought myself “SAMS tech yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2″ (I still refer to this from time to time!). I cranked out the most horrid, frame based, garish backgrounded, layout deprived sites imaginable. But shit did I think it was cool!

Aaahh memories……..

Adsense and the real world

Posted by stuart as make money online, online marketing, adwords, copy writing, google adsense, adsense

I read an interesting post today over at Wilcoblog, about offline marketing for Adsense sites.

I run a very small Adwords campaign, with a budget of a couple of bucks a day over a few different sites - nothing serious, just more as an experiment. I had never really considered offline marketing for any of my sites until I read this post.

I do some offline marketing on a fairly spasmodic basis for my web development business, more just when I’m looking for new clients, this has met with moderate success, but has not been what I would consider to be outrageously successful. I’ve always been a bit scared that if I advertise seriously, and bring in lots of work, I won’t be able to keep up with the workload.

This wouldn’t be an issue with advertising AIS sites, as all you’re really trying to do is bring visitors to a site, and you have processes (adsense, affiliate links etc) in place to take care of the visitors when they get there.

So I got to thinking about what sort of AIS sites would be most conducive to offline advertising. I’m thinking probably locality based sites, and probably sites with something to sell, such as in the above example - an employment or dating site.

I wonder what would happen if you went to the local shopping mall and placed flyers under car windscreens telling people about a site which was about online shopping, with the URL of a page which told people the benefits and pitfalls of online grocery shopping, and had adsense ads for online grocery shopping? Or even better, a nice simple URL such as buyyourgroceriescheaponline.com with a URL redirect to your online grocery affiliate partner?

I would imagine affiliate programs would probably work better in this scenario, as the payoff is better. I think that doing the above around mothers day or fathers day, using a giftware affiliate could be quite succesful.

Thinking along these lines gets the creative juices flowing as far as geurilla marketing goes. How can we get our message to the most people for the lowest cost? I like the idea floated at Wilcoblog, but I think that the transit cops here in Australia would be on top of you pretty quickly for trying this sort of thing. Maybe going to sporting events, or anywhere where there’s a lot of people wearing a bright coloured shirt with a catchy URL on it such as “yourjobsucks.com” or something similar would work?

….wanders off to do some brainstorming…..

Adsense and your crystal balls

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online, google adsense, adsense

As I’ve been merilly banging away at my adsense sites over the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to apply some criteria to the subjects I am developing sites around:

• I must be interested in the subject
• It must have reasonable search numbers
• It must be able to generate reasonable traffic
• It must have reasonable (but not high) paying keywords
• There mustn’t be too much competition

This is where I try to use some “non-tech” methods to try to discover niches where I think I can make a few bucks from adsense.

The trick is to pick subjects which don’t yet have high traffic, and therefore high competition, but may well pick up dramatically in the future.

We are trying to gain high search engine rankings for the subject before it takes off. A good tool to use for this research is the Google trend tool. For example, the graph of people looking for “porn” in Hungary would look like this. As you can see, the graph is on a slight upward trend, so it might be worth putting a porn site together targeting Hungarians (!)

The holy grail of this kind of niche site development is the site that, once developed and bedded down with the search engines, just takes off. I’m talking about subjects like “Bird Flu” and how it relates to your particular country.

Let’s say I live in Canada. There have been no confirmed cases of bird flu in my country yet, so the search traffic is reasonably low, but imagine what’s going to happen to the search numbers if there are a couple of (god forbid) cases of bird flu confirmed. There will be people looking up how to find what the symptoms are, how to protect themselves and their families etc.

Now imagine that you’d been smart enough six months earlier to set up a site that provided all this information, had had time to climb to a reasonable ranking in the search engines, and could bring you some good traffic.

The added benefit here is that advertisers will understand that people are now searching for bird flu information, and adwords bid prices will go through the roof for bird flu related subjects.
Now my subjuct might seem a little morbid, but the theory can be applied to any subject with the potential to “take off”, some ideas might include:

• Voice over IP
• Solar Power
• Hydrogen powered cars
• What to do in the event of a terrorist attack