My earnings for October jumped because suddenly people bought ads directly from me on a couple of sites. This was totally unexpected, given the way the economy’s going and all the reports on Wall Street that the only ad broker doing well online is Google. But I can’t rely on it to happen again this month or the next. Sales are really uncertain right now. Instead of reporting what I earned last month, I’ve decided to take a look at what I can actually rely on each site to bring in monthly, and some of each site’s relative merits and problems - because I’ve got too much going on. There is just no way I can continue doing what I’ve been doing.

• B-2 Bomber: $80
• Mai Tai: $27
• My various article sites: $10, collectively
• Blue Mushrooms: $0
• ChillyCool: $0
• Thin affiliate sites: $0
• B-2 Bomber’s Little Friend: $0
• Total: $117

That’s just not cutting it. And I have a number of sites I want to launch that have been sitting around for months, waiting for me to find time. Where’s my time going?

• The people I love. If I was willing to give up time with them, I’d have gone into law and be seriously rich.
• B-2 Bomber: it is the most time-consuming thing in my life, despite a ton of volunteers. Every single post takes hours, and then there are a million other things to do. Six months ago, it looked like I was within a month of reaching the tipping point where I can step back, the site can run itself a bit more, the volunteers can do a bit more… and then the economy shifted and everyone’s day jobs decided they could do twice the work for the same money and be grateful for it. So I’m still locked in that miserable point where I’m working my ass off and can’t quite shift the site into cruise mode. But cruise mode will come. Eventually. I just have to avoid losing my mind until that point, and maybe then I can focus more on other sites.
• I’ve completely stopped updating ChillyCool (months ago) and yet it still gets visits. Weird. I keep thinking I ought to sell that site or this one, or something, but I have no time to think about it.
• As you may have noticed, I’ve really stopped posting regularly here - again, purely a time consideration. And a lack of anything to say. What would I describe? All the things I’m doing on B-2 Bomber that have nothing to do with affiliate marketing and wouldn’t work on your sites because B-2 Bomber is a whole different kettle of fish?
• Mai Tai isn’t getting regular updates. It’s not months behind or anything, but I’m no longer willing to force out a post when I’m not remotely inspired.

So here’s my plan:

• B-2 Bomber is still my best hope of a full-fledged business based on one website. There’s so much it could do offline as well. So I’m not setting any ultimatums for it.
• Mai Tai has got to start bringing in at least $50/month reliably by the end of March 2009. If not, I’m going to look at selling it. To achieve this, I’m going to try marketing it more. I’m happy to say posting irregularly hasn’t hurt the traffic any, so I’m going to reduce the number of times I post per week.
• I’m putting no further money nor effort into my article sites. They bring in a decent amount of Adsense, but they’re not terribly dependable, and it’s not worth trying to guess what Google wants this month.

In short, I’m letting go of everything that doesn’t demonstrate to me it can be of value, and trying new things in their stead. I also intend to cut back the time I spend on all this. I’ve been spending about 60 hours a week - unbelievable, for $117 a month - so now I’m going to try to track my time and cut it down to 21 hours a week, or three hours a day. Maybe this will force me to work smarter instead of harder, which is really key in entrepreneurship.

I put their code on my pages and it just generated errors. I remembered that this had happened a while back, and another host had provided me with a snippet of “curl code” which runs the included file without requiring the host to open the whole server up to hackers. I decided I could DIY this one, and went search for curl code. It was so easy to implement:

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘http://www.example.com‘);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// display file
echo $file_contents;
?>

The only thing you need to change here is the bolded bit, “http://www.example.com.” That should be the URL of the file you’re including. LinkWorth provided this in their simple code, so I popped it in and that was that.

Last year, I was within site of making $400/month, and then text link ads tanked and so did my earnings. It wasn’t that I was relying on text link ads - I actually knew better than to rely on any one thing like that - but I hadn’t managed to get anything else to take off like they did.

This year, I’ve finally managed to get my earnings back up to a steady $250+ that’s not reliant on traffic spikes or anything unpredictable. I think I just did something that will bring that up closer to $300. Which is still nowhere near my goals, of course, but hopefully I’m building on a more solid foundation this time. I’ll be in trouble if BlogHer folds, but I guess somebody’s got to be your biggest earner.

Here’s what I’ve learned recently:

• I did a side by side test of AdSense and BlogHer on one of my fairly popular blogs. BlogHer won hands down, earning me about three times what AdSense did.
• I’m suddenly earning a little bit with AdBrite again, and if only I could see which ad units are generating the income, I’d have a better idea where to replace AdSense with them for a test there. Unfortunately, their tracking is so lousy that when I go into the view that shows you which zones are earning what, the total earned in that screen never comes anywhere near your actual monthly total. So you can’t tell where the clicks are coming from. That’s ridiculous.
• I make money with CrispAds by not running it. For some reason, they keep sending me checks for about $11 worth of earnings every three months, and their tracking stats indicate the earnings are coming from places where I haven’t run CrispAds in years.
• I still haven’t got a clue about monetizing or marketing sites. This sucks. I can build good sites and eventually get them some decent traffic. But I don’t know how to build on that traffic through advertising, and I don’t know how to turn the kind of money they should be turning with the traffic they have. I still feel so stupid about this.

And that’s where I’m at. Gosh, I hope the Treasury gives me some free money to prop up my failing business!*

*Little joke not intended to start political debate. I just figure if other people are getting hundreds of million, surely they can give me a little chunk.

Then B2’s traffic tripled inside a month, and the PW earnings did not. People weren’t bidding each other up, like you’d expect. They were just enjoying the insane amounts of traffic at insanely low prices. And they were pulling ads right and left because they couldn’t afford to pay for the impressions/clicks I was sending them. So I hunted around, couldn’t find anything great, and ended up slapping an AdBrite space in where PW had been. The AdBrite performed really badly - they could only seem to scrounge up one highly irrelevant advertiser for me. So I went back to PW and doubled my minimum bid price.

That’s when people started bidding each other up. A whole different “class” of advertisers who had money to pay for lots of impressions and saw the value of my site.

So, kids, if you have remotely significant traffic, ignore PW’s advice to leave your minimum price at $0 and let the marketplace establish a value through bidding. Minimum prices of $0 attract people who can’t afford to pay more than a few cents. You need to charge what you’re worth in the PW marketplace. To set your price:

• Check your site to see get the number of pageviews PW is recording.
• Go into their market place by clicking “Place a new bid“
• Search for sites like yours. I specified a range of pageviews that would include my site. Then I decided to narrow it further by including tags. That showed me that doubling my price had, coincidentally, been the right move. NOTE: also narrow it down to the size of your banner! I just realized I’m giving away a skyscraper when I could be selling three 125 spots instead, each at the price of the skyscraper.
• Make sure you’ve used every tag, especially the juicy ones, that searchers could possibly apply to your site.

I still have some work to do to figure out how to make PW earn more. If I come up with more tips, I’ll write another post and include a link here.

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.

But no. It’s crap. And my favorite part? One of my sites keeps gaining and losing the same 70 subscribers to the - wait for it - Google Feedreader service. Yes! According to Google’s Feedburner, there are 70 people who sign up via Google Feedreader every day for a few days, then unsub. It’s always 70. Amazing coincidence, yeah?

On top of all this, there’s a couple of hours most every morning when I get logged out 6-8 times before I can actually get to my Analysis page and see what services it managed to catch today, so as to make my own estimate based on the assumption that these 70 people who keep dropping in and out probably in fact are actually subscribed.

If someone programmed a service that worked reliably - especially if you could actually, you know, log in and navigate more often than not - I would pay at least $5/month to track 5 feeds with it. I might be willing to pay more. What would you be willing to pay? Are there enough of us willing to pay a few bucks for reliable stats to make this worthwhile for some programmer to create?

I think you could have a tiered version of it, too, with some kind of freebie option. Like, it’s free if you link back to the site, but you have to pay to drop that link.

I know I’m only reaching a few people with this blog, so if this is interesting to you at all, post about it on your site too! Let’s see how much interest there is in this idea, and maybe someone will actually do it.

The main problem with most themes is a left-side sidebar. I think I can learn how to doctor them so they load after the content, but it’s tricky because you have to absolutely position several other elements. For now, I use themes that don’t have left sidebars, or that were programmed by someone who knows how to load a left sidebar after the content.

But last week I decided that, damn it, I could figure out how to create a space at the top for leaderboards or recent posts or whatever that would load visually at the top, but after the content in the source code. And I did figure it out. It’s impossible to write a tutorial that’ll work on every theme, but here’s a basic guide I hope will help you. The order of the steps doesn’t really matter.

You need to create a space at the top for your leaderboard (or whatever).  Start by creating a CSS ID like this one:

#top_ad {
width: 728px;
position:absolute;
text-align: center;
top:0px;
left: 86px;}

The “position:absolute;” line is the big trick here. That tells it that no matter when it loads the #top_ad ID, that stuff should go where the CSS tells it, which is “top:0px; left: 86px;.” You can put some space at the top if you prefer. I got “86″ by subtracting my leaderboard width from my theme width and dividing that in two (for center positioning). You can also adjust your measurements to throw in some padding for a nice border around the ad.

I chose instead to change my graphics, because if you have something at the top loading after everything else, it’s going to push the other stuff down when it loads - which annoys me when I’m reading someone’s site. I took my logo graphic and added 100 pixels of blank height to it, making it 250 pixels high with the logo at the bottom. In the top 100 pixels, I designed an attractive box to hold the ad and make it look good with my theme. Now the logo loads first, then the main content, then the leaderboard, and then the sidebar.

But I’ve skipped a step here. How do you tell the theme when to load the leaderboard? In Wordpress, you need to create a new page in your theme folder called “top_ad.php.” Into that page, you insert your code wrapped in div code for the id “leaderboard”:

<div id=”top_ad”>

[insert your ad code or php calls for recent posts or whatever in here]

</div>

Now look in your main theme template, wherever that is - in Wordpress it would be “index.php” (and you’d also need to do this on singlepost.php). Toward the bottom you should have some lines that load your sidebar(s) and footer:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarRight.php’); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarleft.php’); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Just add in a call for the leaderboard:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarRight.php’); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarleft.php’); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/leaderboard.php’); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

That’s it! I was so excited by how easy it was, I created a couple of other spaces like this near the top, using some whitespace that was eating screen real estate without paying the rent. Just remember: every space you create is another php call which can contribute to overloading a server if you get Dugg. I find reducing PHP calls to be at least as valuable as caching, so don’t go crazy with this. But if you’re concerned, change all your categories from a php call to straight HTML (how often do you create new categories, after all?) and follow the other tips in this post, and you’ll more than offset the gain of a couple of php calls.

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.

I know I’ve neglected you guys lately, but you’re not actively boycotting me, are you? Even bots register as 3-5 users on a site that sits untouched for years.

(All my sites are showing zeros, so there’s no way this is right. I’m miffed, too, because I had some big traffic yesterday and was hoping to see big feed numbers.)

Methinks we could use a more reliable service for tracking our feeds. What was that one we had years ago that was so good? Oh, right - Feedburner: The Pre-Google buyout.

I’m just sayin’.

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?