Watch cable TV on your PC for free!

Posted by stuart as Cool tech

Welcome to the first of the “Cool Tech” posts at pimpmypagerank.com. This is the start of the diversification of this blog.

I discovered this little gem yesterday. It is a way to watch cable TV stations via peer to peer on your PC. I’m not sure how legal it is, but seems to work quite well on my 1.5Mbit connection, so you people in countries with “real” broadband should see excellent performance.

You can download the client from http://www.tvunetworks.com/downloads/index.htm (it’s a slow download, but worth the wait.

Those of you on download limits with your internet connection will want to be careful, some of the higher quantity channels will chew through your quota quite quickly.

Because the channels are served via a peer to peer network, the stream of a particular channel can take while to settle down, but it appears that the longer you watch, the better the quality gets (less buffering / jittering etc.)

This is a great way for those of us without cable TV to get our fix of US sports and world news

More on Click Through Rates

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

I’ve been doing a bit of pruning since writing this post about click through rates.

Specifically, removing the adsense ads from this blog and some other reasonably high traffc, low performing AdSense pages.

The results are interesting - it would appear that Mark’s desire for a 10% CTR is eminently acheivable, you just have to be prepared to forego the chance for a little bit of income to get it! (Only run Adsense on pages which you know you can get clicks)

My best performing page for this month looks like accounting for about 50% of my income for the month, unfortunately there’s not much I can do in the way of duplicating what I did there - it was an accident!

Things have picked up appreciably in the last few days as well, not enough to salvage the month, but enough to make me think that we’re slowly heading in the right direction. I’ve got my average back up over a dollar a day for the last five days, which might sound like small fry, but believe me, with eight days where I earned less than $0.10, that’s some sort of acheivement!

Obviously there’s been a serious re-assessment of goals around here. A couple of months ago, I was talking about aiming for $3.33 this month (for a $100 cheque). I’m actually going to be somewhere around $0.50 a day, but there are extenuating circumstances which have come into play (My health’s been not too good, I had a son in hospital for some time etc).

I’m thinking about adding a “wish-list” to this blog. I’m a geek (albeit a technically challenged one!), I love my “tech toys”, so I’d like to write a bit more about that sort of stuff, and rather than start a new blog, I think that most of the readers here have more than a passing interest in this sort of thing, so I thought I’d assimilate it into this site.
Cheers

And don’t forget to add a comment to this post if you want to run your banner on this site for free for a month!

Want to advertise your site for free?

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

Given I can’t get AdSense to show anything other than PSA’s here on this blog, and I really can’t be bothered applying to all the text-link brokers to see if I can get accepted, I’ve decided to give something back to the people I’ve learned so much from over the last few months.

If you want to run a 468×80 ad in the same position as the above ad on every page on this site for a month, simply post a comment here telling me which site you’d like to advertise here.

I’m not really fussed what site you want to advertise, although nothing dodgy obviously.

The ad can be a GIF (animated is OK) or JPEG, but no flash please, and I reserve the right to reject the ad. Hell, I’m in such a good mood, I’ll even throw together an ad for you if you don’t want to do it! (Although I can’t guarantee how good it will be! :-))
This site is up to 12,000 page views so far this month, and has been increasing by over 20% per month for the last 3 months.

I’m not sure where else you can get 12,000 page views for your banner for free, so you have nothing to lose!

Keep in mind though, that I’d like a decent link back to the site from the winner, and I am completely open to bribes of all kinds. I also reserve the right to use any criteria I damned well please to choose the winner.

Thanks again to all the people who have helped me learn about online marketing and adsense over the last few months, here is your chance to get something back!

Cheers

Stu

Freakin text link bastards

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

12,000 page views per month and increasing by 20% per month
Alexa ranking of around 200,000

Apparently these numbers are not enough for this blog to qualify for text-link-ads.

I took the AdSense ads off this site the other day, as I was sick of seeing PSA’s, and thought I’d try my luck with text-link-ads. Their calculator suggested that I could sell four sitewide links for somewhere in the vicinity of $14/month each. “$56 a month”, I thought. “Cool!”
Apparently not.

I thought it sounded too good to be true. It’s frustrating not to be able to monetise my most trafficked site. With AdSense not pulling its weight, I thought text links would give me some chance.

If anybody else knows of any ways to try to pull a buck from this traffic, please let me know!

Cheers

What do I need to do?

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

Over the last couple of months, I’ve averaged somewhere in the vicinity of a 3% click through rate, and an eCPM (Income per 1,000 impressions) of around $7 over all my sites.

Obviously this varies greatly from site to site (I have about six or seven sites), but if these numbers are an indication of what I’m going to average in the long term, I think my dreams of untold wealth from AdSense are a bit of a pipe-dream.

As a statistical analyst in another life, I can’t help but start to crunch the numbers. To make any sort of difference to my lifestyle, the numbers are scary!

To bring in a $100 cheque a month, I’d need around 14,000 page views, or around 500 a day

To bring in $10 a day, or $300 a month, I’d need  42,000 page views a month, or around 1500 a day

I have decided to remove the AdSense ad from the sidebar of this blog, as this accounts for by far the most ad impressions I get, but I just don’t seem to be able to get rid of the damned PSA’s. This blog, like most other sites devoted to AdSense, received virtually no clicks anyway. I can’t be bothered re-calculating my CTR and eCPM with the stats from pimpmypagerank removed, but it will be interesting to see what happens to my numbers after a week or two without serving a few hundred PSA ads a day here. (This blog has received over 10,000 page views a month for the last three months, with negligible income)

Mark’s been talking about how much you can earn per page of content. He’s suggesting that if you can get $0.15 per page per day, you’d be doing very nicely. I agree, but think that over a lot of pages, it’s probably wishful thinking.

Conventional wisdom suggest that good, indexed content can net you $10/year/page. This works out to be around $0.03 per page per day. I think that this is more realistic. I have one page which has brought me $0.22 a day over the last few weeks. I’m hoping that this keeps up, but there’s no real magic formula to the page - it’s just a blog post that happens to be about something that a certain group of users are searching for (I didn’t even realise at the time that the phrase they are searching for existed!). I also have plenty of indexed pages which bring me approximately $0.00 per day!

I would guess that, excluding this blog, I would be making something in the vicinity of one to two cents per page per day.

Which brings me back to the truth I seem to be unable to escape - I need to spend more time writing content for my “money” sites, and less time hanging around other people’s money making blogs or posting here!

Cheers!