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: Website Revenue Strategies BlogPost Level Text Link Ads
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of excited about Post Level Text Link Ads from Text Link Ads. TLA has been a great source of extra income on quite a few projects and I’m looking forward to this new way to make money with them.
Post Level Text Link Ads will add a small text ad/link at the end of your posts. It’s clean, easy on the eyes and doesn’t take up a traditional ad spot. That’s the appeal of text link / text ads for us. It also opens up thousands of pages for a possible ad placement.
According to TLA’s page:
- Be exclusive to one Advertiser.
- Allow Advertisers to have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.
- Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.
- Each ad will be on a single page only.
The “Be exclusive to one Advertiser” and “Each ad will be on a single page only” points are big selling points for me, both as an advertiser and a publisher.
To my knowledge this currently only works with Wordpress and I’ve heard that this may go live as early as Monday. What do you think of …
Make Money with Lead Generation
When people talk about leads or lead generation, many people start thinking about affiliate marketing or CPA (cost per action) programs. While it’s true there is a connection there, lead generation really is it’s own beast. A money making beast at that.
What exactly is lead generation? Many companies are starving for people who fit a certain profile and they’ll pay good money to get their hands on the information they need to try and sell to that person. For example, the online education industry is looking for candidates interested in attending school through one of their online campuses. While they do a great deal of marketing themselves they also turn to other sources to generate qualified leads for them, and they pay good money for it. A lead is simply a bit of information about a person, usually in a specific target demographic that you can sell to an interested party, in this case schools with online education programs. If you ran a site with an education theme or where people are of the age to be thinking about attending school you could be in a position to collect leads, or some basic level of information that these online …
Pick the Right Niche
Not all niches (topics) are created equal. One of the things we discovered when building our network of sites was how competitive some markets were.
Here’s the problem: Lets say you start up a gaming site. You get popular pretty quick, say up to 2000 unique visitors a day an about 20,000 page views a day. Not bad, right? Off to a great start. So you go to get into your favorite ad network and you get turned down. Their minimum is 2000 unique visitors so what’s the problem? The problem is there are so many gaming sites competing for these ads that there just aren’t enough to go around. The gaming industry spends a lot of money promoting online but there are way more sites than there are advertisers. Minimums for gaming sites suddenly become 10,000 unique visitors a day!
That’s not to say you can’t run a successful gaming site, you just have to be prepared to do serious battle with your competitors. You’ll need to have a better site, better content and more visitors. But if you can beat your competitors it is a niche that pays well. If you have a passion for a topic and …
Digg Users 3 Times Less Likely to Click Ads Than Google Users
Anyone who’s been on Digg can tell you that while the traffic can be amazing there isn’t a correlating increase in ad revenue, the bottom line being Digg users don’t click on ads like traditional visitors do and especially not as much as traffic from search engines. Chitika has stepped up and provided some facts to backup this claim.
Chitika grabbed 31 days of logs and compared traffic from Digg and Google and came to the obvious conclusion that Digg users are less likely to click on ads. The actual ratio is a little closer than I thought it would be. I suspected something like 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, but Chitika’s results put Digg users at 3 times less likely to click on ads. As we all know users are becoming more and more banner/ad blind and no one more so than the tech/geek crowd which is the primary audience of Digg.
What does this mean in terms of making money? Don’t rely on the Digg traffic as a direct method for making money. It’s a means to get exposure. If you do get on Digg try to capture the audience as much as possible. Direct them …
Making Money With Communities—Part 2, Ways To Make Money
Yesterday I talked about the problems facing communities when it comes to making money. Today we’ll talk about specific ways that you can turn the loyal following that communities naturally attract into opportunities.
As I mentioned in Part 1, CPM (banner ads, etc.) and CPC (Adsense, YPN) are not always the best fit for communities. While I do use them I always put them in low priority places and use them as filler or remnant inventory. We don’t want to leave any money on the table, right? That said, there are better ways to use the precious screen real estate.
Lets look at a few:
- Direct Ad Sales
- Sponsorships
- Text Ads & Text Links
- Member Support, Donations & Micro Sponsorships
- Affiliate Marketing
1. Direct Ad Sales
Direct Ad Sales may be the hardest of all ad types to get. You really need solid traffic numbers and a great niche topic, but mostly you’ll need to be a bulldog. The hardest part about getting direct ad sales is getting finding the person who’s handling ad buys for a given company. Lets say you run a sports site and you want Nike to buy an ad. You’ll have the daunting job of sending email after email and making call after …
Making Money With Communities - Part 1, Problems
As I mentioned in my bio snippet, I’m a big fan of user generated content. Before the Internet I read somewhere that the worlds content was created by 10% of the worlds population. I think it’s obvious that with the ease of publishing all kinds of content online along with the dropping price of tools to create content that the percentage of creators has greatly increased.
Communities and Forums have always been of particular interest to me as someone who comes from the BBS days of computers. My first site was a forum. In fact, one of my earliest sites started as a forum and evolved into Lit.Org. Ironically, I later launched a companion site for Lit.Org called WritingForums.com. I don’t own them now, but they taught me about all the pitfalls of running a community.
In part 1 of this series on Making Money With Communities lets talk about some of the problems facing communities.
The main issues communities and forums face are:
- Fear of User Generated Content.
- High page views per unique visitor (frequency capping).
- Broad range of topics, often very general so CPC (Adwords, YPN etc.) aren’t as effective.
- Banner Blindness (everyone has this problem).
Lets talk about how to overcome these.
1. Fear of …
Hi, my name is…
Let me introduce myself, My name is Chrispian Burks and yes, you can call me Chris. I’ve been a member here at SitePoint since November, 2001. I’ve also been a Mentor in the forums and contributed an article or two. I had the chance to meet some of the SitePoint gang at SXSW (2007) and they somehow roped me into blogging for them.
I started dabbling in web dev as a hobby back in 1996 when we called every page on the Internet a “web site”. I started early enough that I didn’t know anyone who could teach me what I needed to know so I ended up a jack of all trades. I’ve done everything from building ISPs and Web Hosting companies from the ground up to working as a designer or developer at various local firms, most recently started my own company, a blog network.
As a programmer and developer my skills are in PHP and MySQL, though I’m pretty good at Perl, Python, Shell Scripting, JavaScript and a few other odd bits as needed. I don’t pretend to be the best at any of these things, but I get the job done. I’m also decent with Photoshop, …
The Great Alexa Spike of 2006
It seems to have passed without much comment, but there seem to have been some significant changes at Alexa recently — most notably sites that appeal to a more tach-savvy audience are making huge leaps up the rankings. The phenomenon can be seen clearlyacross all major web development sites — from W3Schools.com to W3C.org to SitePoint.com — but also across a long list of sites with more general appeal to tech users, such as Flickr.com, Del.icio.us and Slashdot.org.
Meanwhile sites with no notable ‘tech-skew’ (i.e. CNN.com, EBAY.com, etc) have either held firm or been shuffled backwards by the sites bubbling up around them.
It raises some interesting questions:
- Have Alexa changed their statistical algorithms?
- Is this a temporary anomoly?
- Which sites lost out the worst?
It certainly seems that the Alexa ranking system has undergone a radical shift in it’s demographic in the past 18 months.
Alexa got their first big push in 1998 when they had their toolbar included in the Netscape 4 default install. A year later they pulled off a huge coup by getting it included in Internet Explorer 4.
At the time most users would have just assumed (as I did) that it was simply …
Making the Most out of the Amazon Affiliate Program
Here’s a company that has managed to create some real value, and at the same time, make some large Amazon commissions for themselves.
Pricenoia.com is a shopping comparison engine across all the International Amazon sites that allows savvy shoppers to exploit price differences on books, music, games and DVD’s across different countries.
Not only does it automatically calculate shipping to *any* country in the world for all amazon sites and automatically converts the prices, but it also shows price histories for any product on across all Amazon sites.
The revenue model? Amazon Affiliate Links (for each of the international Amazon sites) plus Google AdSense. Since the service is so damn useful, I’m sure they are doing well by providing real value to their users.
Think: How can you deliver real value to your users, while at the same time promoting affiliate programs that you’re a member of?
Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search
Chris recently raised the difficult issue of content theft and how to tackle it.
We’ve certainly had our share of rip-off artistes and generally we’ve found it to be a two-tiered problem.
- Becoming aware your content has been ripped in the first place
- Getting something done about it
Finding your ripped content fast is paramount. If Google or Yahoo spiders stumble across the ripped content first, the damage is done. If you’re not identified as the first known occurence of that content it may difficult to recover trust.
Common sense tells you Google is your first port of call to locate your ripped-off content, but one great tool not many people seem to know about is Copyscape — a free, purpose-built, anti-plagiarism search tool. Just give Copyscape the URL of your content and it will do the grunt work and report back to you.
Probably the coolest thing about Copyscape is it doesn’t require you to enter ‘keyword phrases’ (headings, paragraphs, etc) from your content in the hope of matching the rip-off, as Google would. Copyscape analyses entire pages similtaneously and can seemingly easily detect matched pages, passages, paragraphs and even matched sentences. Some of the …
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