Use proxies to check you Adsense ads.

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

I had (another) little problem with my web host today. I couldn’t access any of my sites (again), so I placed a support ticket, and got a response that my sites were working fine from their end, and it must be a problem at my end.

So I toodled off to an anonymous proxy, and checked one of my sites: lo and behold, it worked fine!

So I fired off another email to my host, suggesting that my IP may have been inadvertantly blocked from their server - which turned out to be the case, and proceeded to surf some of my sites through the proxy.

What I saw was interesting. Completely different ads to those that I was used to seeing. It was a real eye opener to see your sites the way someone in another country would see them.

This would be the result of Adwords geo-targeting. Now when I’ve set up my Adwords campaigns, I usually just select “All countries and territories” without thinking about it too much. Obviously, not everybody does the same.

It’s quite obvious that a lot of advertisers don’t think it’s worth advertising to those of us on the bottom end of the world (I’m in Australia - just hang on, there’s a koala on the roof which knocked off the tin-can I use to get my wi-fi signal - SHOO!).

This is a shame, as although Australia only has a small population (around 20 million), Australians are amongst the most tech-savvy people on the planet, and I would imagine have some of the highest discretionery spending levels in the world.

The interesting thing is that just over half of my traffic comes from the USA, the majority of the rest from Europe. Are these advertisers missing out on this market as well.

If you live outside the continental USA, it might be well worth your time to have a look at your sites through a US proxy, as it appears that this is the only market which a lot of advertisers are interested in.

Marketing 101

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Fair bit of talk around at the moment about Markus Frind and his claims that his free dating site “plentyoffish.com” (sorry - no link love from me - already a PR5 with 700,000 odd backlinks - don’t think you need mine!) was making $10,000 a day.
A couple of people are calling his claims as bullshit. Now I’m in no position to judge one way or the other, but I must say that if he is yanking our chains, he’s done a damned good job of it.

I would guess that after the next round of PR updates, he’s gonna have a site with a 7 or 8, close to a million backlinks, and whether he’s pulling in ten large a day or not,he’s certainly never going to go without a feed again.

This raises some interesting issues in the world of marketing. I’ll bet there are a few executives in the worlds big advertising agencies who wish that they could get the kind of exposure that Markus has got, with close to zero outlay.

This story goes to prove, along with Alex Tew and his million dollar home page, that a good idea, a well thought out strategy, and a little luck can take you a long way in this new digital world.

Adsense v Paid web development - he works (damn) hard for the money

Posted by stuart as , , ,

After the recent debacle with my web host (down for four days), my Adsense earnings have really been suffering for the last couple of days. I assume it’s because a few regular readers of my sites have come along - seen the site’s down, and wandered off, maybe never to return. Who knows? Sure not going to click my Adsense ads if they don’t come to the site.

This got me thinking a bit though about how much I earn, and how much I hope to earn from adsense.

If you actually sit down and do the numbers (which, as you’ve probably guessed already, I like to do - I was actually a statistical analyst in another life), the ROI up to this point is frightening - I would guess that I’m working for something in the vicinity of $0.50 per hour.

We all hope to hit the jackpot - come up with the killer site which is going to generate masses of adsense income, and we know that if we create ever-green content, Adsense can provide us with passive income well into the future, but do the numbers stack up?

I have a client who’s website I developed, host, and maintain. This is a small client, their annual turnover would be somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000 per year. I developed the site for free (a friend was working there at the time, so I thought I’d do him a favour), and for the first year, I did weekly updates and hosting for $10/month.

Now, since the first year is up, and my friend has moved on, I am being paid $50 per month for hosting, and uploading one PDF a week. Their site uses about 200Mb on my reseller account (A negligible cost). I literally take a PDF attachment from an email, FTP it to the server, open up a page in Dreamweaver, create a link to the PDF, and upload the page. This takes me in total, about 5 minutes (and most of that is twiddling my thumbs waiting for Dreamweaver to load).

So I’m getting $50 for 20 minutes work a month, or $150 per hour. Now I know I did the hard yards and developed the site for free, which took maybe 30 hours, but I’m certainly reaping the rewards now from the work I did over a year ago. If I could get 100 or so clients who pay me like this, I’d be making a comfortable living!
I’m trying to apply this theory to the work I’m doing now on my Adsense sites. It’s frustrating as hell getting up in the morning and seeing one seven cent click overnight, and anybody who enjoys spending hours poring over code to get the SEO just right, or sitting at the PC bleary eyed at 3am building backlinks need a quick and painless death. But I’ll just keep ploughing away, trying to build my sites with quality content, and hopefull one day my sites will see some sort of decent returns.

Adsense millionaire - really??

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Interesting fuss being made over Jason Calacanis and his blog post telling everyone that Weblogs Inc is on target to pull in a million dollars from Adsense over 12 months.

Great - good to see someone making money from Adsense and blogs. Or is it?

Calacanis has nine staffers and 103 bloggers on the payroll, plus himself, for a grand total of 113 people.

Let’s say that Calacanis is keeping a conservative 25% of Adsense the income for himself, and distributing the other 75% to his “staff” - he gets $250,000, staff get $750,000
Now divide this Adsense million by the 112 people he has to pay, and you get $6,696.43. Wow.
Now let’s say his bloggers are posting five entries a day into these blogs, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that’s 1,250 blog posts a year, which means that these “staff members” are earning $5.35 per blog post per year.
I earn more than that with my crappy little personal interest Adsense sites.
In summary, you need to look a lot closer at the numbers before sprouting how succesful an Adsense  business is. Me-thinks either Calacanis is taking his “staff” for a ride, or he needs to look a little more closely at his business model.
All the numbers except for the million dollars, and staff levels in this post are pure guesses, so don’t take them too seriously, eh?

Adsense and regurgitated content.

Posted by stuart as , , , , ,

I’m a regular user of Technorati. It gives me the chance to keep up with what’s being written in the blogosphere (hate that word!)

One thing I’m finding really interesting at the moment is the number of people who are blogging with anything but their own creations. Do a teachnorati tag search on “Adsense”, and have a look at the first page of results. Generally, you will find sites chock full of adsense ads, quoting the first paragraph of someone else’s blog post, with a link to the rest of the article.

There’s one certain “blogger” (and I use the term loosely) who’s posts have just hit the “automatic skip” filter in my brain, as his/her posts are so full of other people’s content with their own affiliate links and adsense ads, there’s actually nothing of value there.

I’m not sure I see the point of this. Have you nothing interesting or original to say? Do you think that you should be rewarded with adsense clicks and affiliate sales because you managed to squeeze an RSS feed into your page, or provide a link to someone else’s work?

Have a look at all the adsense forums, the people who are making money are the ones who came up with original ideas, or who are producing original, quality content.

If you can’t come up with quality content, maybe you need to look for another idea to make money.