Blue Mushrooms Affiliate Marketing » Affiliate Marketing

Domain Rehabilitation: Monetization

Sapphire — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:47:36 +0000

The second item on my list of problems to clear up for this domain was the fact that because I hadn’t bothered trying to monetize it in a long time, I couldn’t tell potential buyers it would bring in any particular amount of money. To monetize a domain, you need to know these things:

What ad network you’re going to use.
Where you’re going to put the ads, and which sizes perform best.
Whether your site layout or theme will accommodate those ad placements, and if not, how to find a theme that does.

Adsense

The easiest ad network to make money from is Google Adsense. Others used to outperform it, but not anymore. If you can use Adsense, it’s the best choice. Don’t like the text ads? You can choose image ads only. But if your point is to show what the domain can earn, this is the quickest way to do it. Plus, most domain buyers have Adsense accounts. Knowing what the domain can earn with Adsense will build their interest more than numbers from another network.

Be sure you’re not using AdSense on a site they consider inappropriate. Do that on one site, and you could get your whole account terminated.

What if you can’t use Adsense? AdBrite is another favorite of mine – the ads are pretty decent and the revenue’s okay, and they don’t have traffic requirements. If you have enough traffic to meet their requirements, ValueClick is often nearly as good as AdSense for revenue (depends on your niche).

Remember, you don’t want ads that are going to offend your visitors. You have to know who your visitors are to know what that means. I’m talking ads that are visually ugly or on topics your visitors don’t like. I avoid ads for gambling of any sort because Google has something against them, and there’s some confusing US laws regarding just what gambling sites are legal – I don’t want to be on the wrong side if they decide to “make an example” of people who make money off these sites. I also avoid ads for screwing your kids out of child support payments, ads with nearly-naked women on them, etc., because I don’t want to alienate women and teenagers at any of my sites. But you know, if the only visitors you care about are male assholes with no sense of personal responsibility, those might be just the sort of ads you need. I also avoid ads for supplements promising weight loss, hair restoration and other bodily miracles because I don’t want to be associated with something that later tragically kills some teenager in a highly publicized case, you know? You need to put some thought into what your visitors will tolerate. And hey, if you have personal morals about what you can make money off of and still sleep at night, that’s cool, too. You get a better class of visitors, I swear.

Never, ever do popups. Most browsers block them now anyway.

Ad Placement and Sizes

Generally speaking, leaderboard and rectangles in the first fold outperform everything else. Wide skyscrapers (160 x 600) do well, too. Other sizes can do okay, but I’m never thrilled with the results. As you can see, I’ve got a leaderboard and rectangle on this site, along with a wide skyscraper, and four slots for 125 x 125 ads to be sold through Show Your Ad Here.

Nofollow text links are another option you have for monetization. If your site is unknown or in need of rehabilitation, it’s very unlikely you’ll sell any – most link brokers won’t offer nofollow links, and most people who shop at link brokers are just after pagerank. Your best option is to sell them yourself, using something like the WP Text Ads plugin.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 8, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Domain Rehabilitation project

Sapphire — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:00:20 +0000

I changed my mind – I’m not selling the site yet. I was going to post about this the other day, then I discovered this site had been totally splogged, and that made me even more certain about getting the site into better shape and then selling it for a decent price eventually. Then I thought, “That could be cool to write about – my adventures in getting this domain to where it’s worth selling.” That’s what I’m doing.

If you want to rehabilitate a domain, the first thing you need to do is figure out what’s wrong with it. This is not always so easy, and as I work on this domain, I may find I’ve missed some steps and/or are working on stuff that’s not that big a deal. But here’s my initial assessment.

Google zeroed the pagerank some time ago.
I haven’t made any effort to monetize it (until last week) so I can’t tell potential buyers it makes any money.
My inbounds suck both in terms of quality and quantity.
Hmm, I’m ranking #1 for “affiliate marketing journal”, but a year or two ago I started trying to rank for “Blue Mushrooms” instead. Google never took the bait.
More traffic wouldn’t hurt.

Over the next few days, I’ll discuss what I’m doing about these problems.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 2, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

So, who wants to buy this website?

Sapphire — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:16:13 +0000

I’ve pretty much decided to sell this website, and possibly ChillyCool, too, and probably some others. Selling domains is new to me, so I’m still doing my research to figure out what they’re worth and how to go about it. Any advice would be welcome.

This might also be a good time for you to make an offer if you’re interested. I think these sites have tremendous potential for someone willing to do the work (unlike me), whether you preserve the original blog and add to it or take things in a slightly different but still affiliate marketing/SEO-related direction. These websites should be a real bargain for somebody.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on August 14, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

March 2009 earnings, my new site, and my new venture

Sapphire — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:28:17 +0000

My earnings this month weren’t bad. But for once, I think I’m actually onto something good. I started a new site a couple of months ago – let’s call it Project Grassfed – at the urging of a friend (whose instincts turned out to be wicked smart). The site started out okay, then my friend suggested submitting it to a sort of “cool site of the day” site, and then it suddenly wound up on the front page of Digg. This did not immediately insure that I would get a million visitors a month or anything, but I did have well over 300,000 the first month, and a Diggless March still ended with a very healthy number of over 75,000. Even better, it looks like if I just keep doing what I’m doing, that number will stay steady or improve. And that’s not a bad number.

I had been monetizing it with AdSense, but midway through the month I switched to ValueClick. I earned about $150 on the site altogether. That’s not much for 75,000 visitors and nearly 120,000 pageviews, is it? I think I’ll actually do a little better than that with ValueClick for the entire month. And it’s a new site, so it has pagerank of zero and isn’t scoring too highly with Alexa yet. Hopefully the earnings will improve. But I would think an established site with that kind of traffic should make more than $150/month. Or am I wrong?

This site isn’t hard to keep up with, thank goodness. No constant posting, and a lot of what I do with it, I’m actually enjoying. But it’s been a bit of a distraction from my new business venture. Then again, so has offline life. I’ve been deeply overwhelmed with stuff to do lately. And at least the new site is rewarding. This week, I’m slowly getting back into writing up the business plan for my new venture. Once that’s written, I’ll have a better idea what comes next.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on April 1, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Changes in direction

Sapphire — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:35:44 +0000

It’s been way too long since I posted here, and it’s a long story why. Here’s that story.

My earnings in December were very decent. My earnings in January seem to have plummeted, as usual for January. I still have hope for my websites, but about a month ago, I had a better idea. An idea for a bona fide online business. Not just a website, but a website in place of an offline store, selling original products. To my surprise, people around me reacted with strong interest in the idea.

Then a friend offered to give me seed capital to get it started. My websites never got me results like that!

Since then I’ve been spending a lot of time networking with people offline and working on composing a business plan. I’m going to approach this like an offline business. A friend is putting me in touch with a consultant who specializes in both internet and start-ups in general. Another friend has recommended a good lawyer of exactly the type I need. I also have a recommendation for someone to do the accounting.

It’s a big undertaking, but honestly? I don’t think it’s going to be as much work as these damn websites have been. I’m not giving up the websites – far from it. I just launched a new one with the help of a friend and her very popular site, and I’m excited and hopeful. But when I look at the amount of work I’ve done in the past three years, and the fact that it’s averaging about $2-300 a month for me, it’s clear I’ve got to do something else.

The business I’m starting is something close to my heart, something I’m passionate about. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to blog about my experiences with starting it. I think that could be very interesting, though, and maybe I should. But I’m not sure I want this venture, which bears my real name, connected with this site and the (unfair) stigma of affiliate marketing. I think I will probably separate the two. If you’re interested in reading my story, let me know and I’ll tell you where I’m blogging it once I’ve decided.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on January 22, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Free, virtual affiliate marketing conference

Sapphire — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:32:21 +0000

Ever wanted to attend an affiliate marketing conference without the expense and hassle of traveling to it? eComXpo‘s got your number – a virtual conference. Oh, but what of the expense of the conference itself, you ask? There, eComXpo‘s got your favorite number – $0. It’s totally free.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 15, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Google gets over the paid link thing

Sapphire — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:21:02 +0000

Quite some time ago, Google went on a rampage and announced it was evil to sell paid links if they passed on pagerank. They zeroed out several of my websites that sold links while missing the others. I wrote a lot about how this all sucked. Eventually, I removed paid links from two of the zeroed sites and asked Google to reinclude them – which they did, within days. But I left one site alone, to see what happened. And now I can tell you the whole story:

People kept right on buying links, even though I had no PR to pass them.
In the most recent PR update, Google finally gave up and restored a PR of 1, despite the paid links.

I’m guessing Google figured that if a year of PR0 hadn’t stopped people buying links from my site, PR might not be what they were after with those links? Or maybe it really was just all about making sure Text Link Ads didn’t run AdSense out of town, and now that AdSense’s future is assured they don’t care?

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 5, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Question the marketing theory you were taught by SEO

Sapphire — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:07:31 +0000

I’ve recently become too busy to write for this site much because several of my other sites have taken off recently, and when you suddenly get busy running popular sites, it’s a bit difficult to find time to update your less popular sites.

But there’s one thing you should know, and that is the reason my sites have taken off: I exorcised internet marketing theory from my brain and went back to offline advertising basics. Here’s what I learned.

Consider how various types of offline businesses – from sole proprietors like doctors to international corporations – have promoted themselves successfully for decades:

Doctors refer patients to specialists who handle different stuff, not to other doctors who do exactly what they do (competitors). It would be absurd for one podiatrist to send business to another podiatrist.
Businesses buy ads from any place their desired customers are likely to be watching/reading/listening.
Businesses buy ads from places that are good to associate with their brand image.
Businesses create other brands and small companies within their corporate structure, and they all promote each other. Sometimes they do precisely the same sort of business (two women’s clothing boutiques, for example), but more often they cover a spectrum (one corp might have a woman’s clothing boutique, a man’s, a children’s, and a bath & body chain).

Now, consider the various things we’re being advised to do as internet marketers, because a lot of SEO proponents convinced us optimizing for search engines was all there was to internet marketing:

SEO (in general) taught us to link to our competitors instead of to people who attract our desired audience but don’t provide them what we want to provide them. SEO convinced people early on that networking our blogs together in a logical fashion that appealed to visitors was something Google would punish you for just on principle. And SEO is partly responsible for destroying text link advertising, a perfectly ethical (when done ethically) practice that pre-dates Google’s existence, and might still exist if SEO hadn’t convinced everyone text links were for building pagerank, not attracting visitors.

See the absurdity? Internet marketing has never separated itself from “search engine optimization.” SEO is about scoring with search engines (mainly Google) and, I really think in most cases, making money off AdSense. Internet marketing should be about “how to make your site big.” How to make your various sites into a business. But it’s not, and now we have a handicap: even if we change our practices, there are a lot of people who won’t play ball with us unless we follow SEO rules, which they think equate to “good marketing.”

SEO proponents who make money on AdSense have done this for the purpose of promoting and protect their own interests, not yours. If AdSense is the best way to make money because it’s all Google will allow without penalty, so much the better for them: they’ve already got that market cornered. Now, I’ve tried to make it clear I’m not saying “all SEO people/advice = evil” but I feel the need to state that just in case. When you can optimize your site for Google without doing something that runs counter to the goal of getting more visitors who translate into more dollars, that’s a good thing. A few SEO experts (like Aaron Wall) are damn smart people who don’t encourage you to think SEO is all you need. And those SEO proponents who did mislead us certainly didn’t force us to stupidly abandon such common sense basic marketing practices as not sending business to a competitor. That’s a no-brainer, folks, and we were stupid to miss it.

So now people are complaining that big sites won’t link to them – “I’m a small widget maker who linked to a big widget maker, and they didn’t link back!” – and I’m thinking hallelujah! Finally, someone is being logical. The net is growing up and acting like a business.

Of the offline business models I listed, there are three most of us can immediately make use of: networking with complementary sites rather than competitors, improving our brands through affiliation with complementary sites, and building sites to send traffic to other sites (the last two are essentially the same practice, just with different goals). Advertising is… well, it certainly can work and I’m not discouraging anyone from using it, but it’s very unpredictable as yet, so you can’t expect to get a consistent rate of return from one ad to the next. What we’re absolutely in a position to do right now is:

Stop linking to/seeking links from people who do exactly what you do. Think about what sort of other topics would interest your desired readers, and advertise/sell ads to sites featuring those topics. Aim for your audience, not for your topic.
Build networks. I see no evidence that Google will punish you from building perfectly sensible networks. Build sites that complement your other sites, and link ‘em. Make friends with complementary sites and set up links between them, too. If Google does go insane and ban all those sites, I swear you will still end up with more traffic from the network than you were ever going to get from Google*. Just make sure the sites are all of the same quality and none of them will tarnish your “brand” in your desired audience’s eyes. (I’ve lost tons of Google traffic a couple of times temporarily due to such things as changing a domain name – every time I end up gaining traffic because it pushes me to seek traffic through other means, which is always much easier and more effective than trying to guess what Google wants.)
Remember what print magazines and newspapers learned eons ago: if the copy (content) is too good, no one looks at the ads. Don’t expect to sell a lot of adspace on your most brilliant site: great content can make big money, too, but not necessarily by selling ad space for the purpose of converting to dollars. You may need to seek advertisers who want to enhance their brand by affiliating with your brilliant site instead.
Don’t always measure your advertising ROI by how many converting visitors you got. Sometimes branding is more valuable in the long run. And it works the other way around, too: don’t buy advertising with a great ROI if it’s with a site that could damage your brand.

I have a lot more to learn. I’m hardly an expert on offline marketing. It’s something I’ve studied a bit, and a lot of it is obvious if you just observe TV commercials and print ads and billboards and ask yourself, “Why did they pick that?” And find out which companies are related to which others and so on. The patterns emerge, and we can learn from them.

This change in my approach is the single biggest event I’ve experienced since I started internet marketing in 2004. It’s revolutionized everything for me. Expect to hear more about it.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on August 31, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Surprise site earnings

Sapphire — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:51:18 +0000

After my recent surges of traffic to Project B-2 Bomber, Project Mai Tai got a delicious inbound that sent thousands of new visitors. A month ago, I had only one site that was above 10k and struggling to hit the 15k mark. Now I have Mai Tai over the 15k mark (up from around 8k) and B-2 closing in on… drumroll please… 50k uniques per month. These are not AwStats numbers, either. These are Quantcast’s more conservative numbers (which are really close to another stats package I’m now using on a few sites – Mint.) The AwStats numbers are even higher.

I’m slowly putting monetization back onto Mai Tai. I removed most of the monetization a few months ago, to see if that helped with traffic. I don’t think it did. I think ads make no difference except when they annoy the hell out of visitors – and also when their code loads above your content code. Having content as close to the top of your source page seems to really boost sites with Google. More on this in a future article.

Suddenly, Mai Tai is able to make a few cents a day from nothing but AdBrite ads that show only on the single post page, below articles. Not much, I know, but (A) it’s AdBrite, which is solid but never a huge earner and (B) it’s not like it’s a leaderboard ad on the front page. So what’s my next step? You guessed it! A leaderboard at the top, tucked nicely into a little space I’ve carved out in the theme. And some other tasteful ads – no flashing graphics, no ads that fly in and land on top of the content. Just stuff visitors don’t mind.

B-2′s earnings haven’t increased as dramatically as one might hope with the traffic increase, considering its only ads are CPM. So I’m going to try monetizing products mentioned on it via Amazon again, now that Sean has fixed whatever was causing Alinks to dump all that code above the content on my source pages. I still think the future of this site lies in becoming a real, genuine business unto itself, not in just selling ad space and affiliate marketing. But people tell us they’re buying stuff on our recommendation, so why not?

I got another nice earnings surprise this month – one of my rinky dinky “magazine” sites where I post PLR articles is suddenly earning about $1 a day on AdSense since I last updated the articles on it a couple of weeks ago. Which is surprising considering it gets under 1k visitors per month. This tells me I can stop dividing my attention among all my article reprint sites and start focusing on this one a bit. Two of the others continue to bring in decent amounts from text link ads (and a tiny bit of AdSense), and another one just does nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Which brings me back to what I was saying last week about considering selling ChillyCool, or even this site. I don’t think any of my sites are worth selling right now, and last week my feeling was that I lack the time/interest to work on them to get them to where they’re worth selling. But that was in the throes of the great traffic storm, and now that it’s settled down, I’m thinking maybe I can find time to update around here more often. Keep stocking that magazine site with new articles at all times. Maybe in time, some of these sites would be worth selling.

Don’t worry: if I ever sell this one or Chilly, I’ll merge all the articles onto the domain I keep so they’re still around. In fact, what I think would most likely happen is, I’d sell this one and move things over to Chilly because that’s a cooler domain name. And because that domain is pulling in 4k per month when I haven’t touched it in months. I don’t even see where the traffic is coming from in my stats – it’s just little inbounds all over the place, mostly going to the directory. Whatever! This one would not do that well if I stopped updating for a few months.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on August 13, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

When to sell a site

Sapphire — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:13:48 +0000

I’m thinking about selling this site and/or ChillyCool. No, seriously.

The traffic for B-2 Bomber quadrupled last month, and it took up every minute I had, because suddenly there were such opportunities for striking while the iron was hot, and every one of those opportunities I took paid off. The traffic gains doubled the site’s monthly income – which is not much, but then that site isn’t destined to make money by selling ad space. It’ll make money by becoming a real business, and we’re a big step closer to having the traffic I think we need to make the site into what I believe it will be someday.

Did I have a spare minute to detail any of that here? Nope. Do I have time now, as I type this? No, I have at least 30 things this time would be better spent on. I haven’t even had time to read your sites lately. The unfortunate reality is: if you have stuff to do because your marketing is working out, you don’t have time to journal your marketing. Especially on a site that doesn’t reach that many people and doesn’t earn the bulk of your income.

Someone else could make a lot of money on this site if they took it over, kept it within this niche, and put some time into it. For me to upgrade it and make it worth my while, I’d have to spend so much time writing posts that my other sites – which are already outperforming it – would suffer.

Anyone else dealt with this catch-22? Is it worth forcing myself to squeeze out an article a week and see what this site can generate in income? Worth trying different monetizing schemes in front of an audience that is so wise to monetization they only look at your ads to see if yours are better than theirs? I can’t even think up a product I could sell from this site – that you would want – to boost the value of the site, because it’s not where my mind is. My mind is on other sites in other niches that are doing better.

The one thing holding me back from selling is the fact that the sites wouldn’t go for much now. I have to admit, considering how rarely I update, it’s surprising how well they hold their traffic. ChillyCool hasn’t been updated in months, yet its traffic remains steady. Growing, even. That’s weird.

So maybe I should hold onto them, see if I can do something with them. If it was any other niche, I’d consider bringing on other writers and making it a group blog for shared income, but internet marketing is everyone for herself so I know that wouldn’t work. I can’t think of a way to change the focus so that it exploits better aspects of this niche because… well, wait? What are the better aspects of this niche? Are there any? Marketers marketing market talk to one another. See the problem?

Any thoughts?

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on August 5, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.