Technology Reports

Today, I came across something that is new (to me) to maximise the revenue from all of your current websites.

Now, as a webmaster anything that can get you more returns from what you already have has to be a good thing now doesn’t it!

I can honestly say I have not heard of this method before now - and that is Audio Advertising on your website. It makes you money every time someone loads a page on your site! You simply sign up, insert a bit of JS code into your page and whenever the page is loaded a short 5 second audio advert is played. The Adverts are Contextually related to your web pages and can run concurrently with all other contextual ads -as there is nothing for the site visitor to do except listen.

One of the good things is the payout will be weekly whenever you exceed the minimum payout amount, and it is via paypal or cheque.

If I have not convinced you yet to take a look at this as an opportunity to increase your revenue, then you can read more here

The program is currently in Beta and if you get in before the 1st Feb 2008 then you will be invited to join the affiliate program for free and earn even more.

Holiday times always see a huge drop in traffic to your proxy websites. It is a fact of life. The biggest users of web proxies are of course students at school or college who want to get to sites such as myspace, facebook and even gmail.

Now, during holiday times you need to think of other ways of promoting your proxy and this is the time to think about SEO. Yes, with a little bit of time and effort (just like with any other website) you can gain valuable links and potentially traffic by thinking a little differently.

Firstly, everyone knows that content is king and all proxy webmasters know that most proxies have almost no content. Time to solve this one - set yourself a challenge and write 5-10 content pages and put them on your proxy website. Target each of these articles around a keyword of site that your proxy users.

Now your site actually has some content - get a few links pointing to each content page. Write a short blog post on your own myspace or facebook will help.

You have probably already done to death the whole submissions to topsites with mixed results - so think differently. What do you do with your other sites? do you not submit them to directories? Well, take the time and do the same with your proxy. Find some niche directories such as the proxyfindr proxy directory or even submit to general directories.

Directory submissions can be made much easier with the Website Submitter - it is a semi-automatic directory submission software package that has over 2000 directories in the database and provides reports to monitor your efforts.

So, when the “normal” traffic starts to drop off on your proxy, start treating it as a regular content website and build your brand so that the Search engines can provide you additional traffic all year round.

Now the whole idea of building content sites, putting up ads as I havew learnt is quite hard work. To get anywhere you need to devote a lot of time to build your content then build your traffic. It certainly works out OK in the end and the rewards do follow your efforts.

There are other ways - and I have been looking into affiliate marketing as an alternate (or another) income stream. The difference here is that a small investment can have a much better return for about the same effort as a content site.

I have been looking into various offers and I am making a little bit of a start. Of course, I am starting by trying offers where there is no or minimal outlay. One of the first offers looks like it has a huge potential - Sign up as a pre-launch partner and earn a % of the income once the Site launches. No outlay, no risk, and the chance to earn. While it is essentially a profit-sharing model where all pre-launch partners can earn a % of the profits, there is more to it than that. So, if you want to get in right now for a chance of earning some profits then simply sign up to receive the newsletter and you are on your way!

To sign up simply go to www.michaelbadger.com and complete the signup form.

The best part about this offer is that there is nothing to buy and no selling involved - simply sign up for part of the profits.

Stay tuned for more offers.

UPDATE: Well if you didn’t sign up it is now too late! the offer has closed.

Adsense, as most webmasters know is both a source of joy and Frustration. It is a joy when you reach the $100/mth and get paid, it is frustrating when you see your website income vary day to day and month to month. This is something that I wanted to write about after reading a thread at DP where someone mentioned their drop from $40+/day earnings down to $6!

Ok, lets look at some background. My main niche site has reached an Authority status and features strongly in it’s niche in the SERPs. Since Janurary, the number of page impressions has remaind fairly constant, the number of clicks has remaind fairly constant but my earnings have varied greatly! I have not seen a $40+ to $6 a day drop, but I have had some very different days.

I guess I keep a pretty close watch over my sites and monitor them fairly closely. I like to look and ensure that the site is up and working and also make a mental note of what adverts I see on the site.

Over the last 2 months I have been paying particular attention as last month I had a fairly big drop in revenue. Whenever I see a drop for more than a day I go and look at all my stats to make sure everything is up and working. What I noticed that on the days where the revenue was low there were different Ads showing on my site. Now, during the month I had several days where the revenue was down over 50% and the ads displayed were all the same or similar on those days. Towards the end of the month I had a couple of great days where daily revenue was very high.

On the High revenue days I noticed that the ads displayed were ones I had never seen before.

Now we moved onto the current month. For the first week or so I had some of the highest days I have ever had - and the number of clicks was down! The rest of the month was a bit up and down, but more up than down will see me end the month about normal.

Seeing the variotion in advertisers and earnings I decided to do a bit of research. Of course most Webmasters don’t really think about the other site of the equation and think about the individual advertisers who are using adwords - the actual ads appearing on your website. I set about learning a bit more about the other side of the business. The advertisers run their ads, and of course they experiment somewhat. They want to get visitors to their sites at the cheapest possible price. As such, all advertisers “bid” on the words they target to get their visitors. Now, when there is a lot of demand for a particular keyword, the price goes up, and when there is not many people bidding the price drops.

Does that sound a bit familiar? Am I not seeing the average earnings go up and down day to day? Do I not notice that there are different Ads on my sites at different times? The direct co-relation has been found between my income and the Ads displayed. When there are a lot of people bidding for keywords in my niche, the price goes up and I earn more. By the same token, if an advertiser finds that they are not getting a good return they stop bidding on those keywords leaving only lower priced bids, and therfore lower priced ads appearing on my sites.

There are a few “trends” I have noticed. Different days of the week can see different ads. Different times of the month sees different ads. I guess that any savvy advertiser is watching their spending and the ones who manage it best get the best returns for their advertising $$ - which means that they only run their ads at the times (days) when it is most profitable to them. Now the trend that towards the end of the month when revenue drops can be explained that an advertiser might simply have used all of their budget for the month - leaving you the publisher with lower paying ads.

Now, I don’t get to bogged down with the day to day revenue, instead I just keep an eye on things and monitor the daily, weekly and Monthly trends. I keep my site up to date to keep the visitors coming back and hope that there are at least a few advertisers competing for the keywords in my niche.

Making money online is also about finding a niche. When you have found your niche, you need to research the size of it and if it is worth the effort of promoting it. My Main niche site is very small - and reasonably profitable as well - it brings in between $5-15/day. Most of this income is from sub $0.10 clicks as well. (I just need to identify another small niche that pays better!)

There are several ways of determining the size of a niche and a couple of them include doing a google search for several terms relating to the niche and then also using something like Digitalpoint Keyword suggestion Tool

Now, in my sub-niche there is only around 20-30 sites that are direct competitors at the moment. When I started out there were only 4-5! The niche is SMALL! - keyword tools suggest that there are only a bit over 100 searches/day for the keywords involved.

Now, being part of a niche and dominating a niche are 2 different things! To dominate a niche you need to target literally hundreds of these 100/day search phrases and then rank in the top of the SERPS for them. I am one of the dominant playes in this niche and have over 20 keywords/phrases in the top postion on the SERPS. I feature in postions 2-10 for about another 50 keywords and fall into the 11-30 spot for a further 100+. My ongoing work involves identifying additional keywords that are relevent to the niche and working towards dominating them as well.

Don’t be afraid to add to your niche - I did exactly that. I added some relevent content that was related to my niche and it has proven to be quite succesful as well.

Getting to this point where you lead a niche is a long term and intensive process. I have been in my niche for 2 years and I have barely begun to really own the niche! Part of my success was to get into the nice when there was hardly any competition and to provide what people wanted - good content and resources!

Apart from providing what people want, I had to advertise to my market and feature high in the SERPS. To do this I made sure that my site was built correctly and paid aattention to the on-site optimisations. Once this was done, I started building links. I pretty much used the strategies in my previous articles.

What I have been doing over the last couple of months is to make sure that I am staying on top of my niche. To do this, I use various tools to track the SERPS for my keywords and any time I see any variation (drop) in any of my keywords I set about creating some additional content specifically around the keyword. Once I add some additional optomized content, I set about doing some additional link building. I build links to the specific content page making sure that the anchor text on the links is the keywords I am targetting. The Easiest way is to write a few blog posts myself about the new page. I may even outsource this work and get several blog posts written by other people as well - depending on how much of a boost is needed.

I make use of several tools to monitor my keywords and SERPS including the Google webmaster/sitemap tools, webCEO (the free version has a limit of 5 keywords only which is a bit of a problem), The Digitalpoint Keywords tool and some of the tools at check seo as well.

By regularly monitoring your keywords, making appropriate changes you can get to the top of your niche and stay there. Regardless of the niche, by doing a little bit over a long time you can do reasonably well. Once you do this and have some success, then you can generally maintain what you have acheived with a few hours effort/mth.

Work hard to create your niche, concentrate on 5-10 keywords to start with, expand this to at least 50 keywords over time, then monitor, maintain and grow.

We all know that in order to build visitors that you need links to your site. There are lots of ways to build links to your site. Not all link building strategies are as effective as others and some may in fact be harmful. Over the years I have done a lot of link building and some of it is downright hard work!

I have experimented with several methods of building links and have come up with a reasonable strategey that works for me. It may not work for everyone, but It takes the minimal effort for the best results.

I start my link-building strategey for a new website by doing the following as soon as possible after launching a new website.

Phase I

• Set up 1 or 2 links from my existing sites pointing to the new website
• Do 3-10 link exchanges with other sites with a similar theme
• Write a blog post about the site with some links to inner pages of the site

At this point, I sit back and do no further link building for the next few weeks. I keep a close eye on the site stats and try and identify when the site is getting crawled by the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Only once the site is being crawled and indexed do I move onto the next phase. Once A site has been crawled and I can find more than the home page in the Search engines it is time to do several more things to give it a kick-start.

Phase II

Write at least 5 different articles about the website and include 3 links in each article with different anchor text and pages. In the past I used to submit these articles to various article directories but it is time-consuming work. What I do now is to seek out people with small to medium blog networks and pay to have the articles published. By small to medium, I mean someone who has up to about 20 blogs. I usually pay between $5 and $10 to have each article published to a different blog network. I spread out the posting of the articles over a week or so.

Finding quality blog networks to get your articles on is not a problem - the B/S/T forums at Digitalpoint are a good place to start.

I sometimes also pay to have 2-3 blog posts written about my site by other people - once again the cost can be between $3-$15 depending on the blog the post will be on.

During this phase is when I also do/get a few stumbles/digg’s of various pages of the website.

Phase III (optional)

This is the optional phase and I only do it on sites that I can see I will get a decent return on. This phase involves spending money. I purchase highly relavent and high quality text links on Related websites. This may mean spending between $5 and $20 (or more) per month per link. This can get very expensive very quickly - but it is very effective. I purchase links for 2 reasons. The first one being traffic - you guess the 2nd one

Phase IV

The Last phase in building links is your long-term strategy. This phase is only ever done once a website has a proven track record and I have decided that I am in for the long-haul. A website is usually 6 months old before I even consider this phase. This is where I get it submitted to free web directories - I either do it myself or pay someone to do it for me. Sometimes it is worthwhile paying from between $20-50 to have your site submitted to several (hundred) directories ( see my post on outsourcing for details).

I also get my site into some of the higher ranking directories at this stage as well - this usually comes at a cost. As long as you can get into a good, high ranking directory it is worth spending $10-$20 per directory to make it happen.

At this stage, your site is getting to be reasonably established and it should not trigger too many alarms if you get a lot of links in a short amount of time. I go back and write some more articles about my site and get them out onto bigger blog networks - I specifically target blog networks with between 20 and 100 blogs. I use the web stats and the SERPS to do my research for these articles - and target anchor text and specific pages of my site.

Once again, I don’t get them all done on the 1 day, but get 1 article posted and then wait about a week or so and do another one. It is worthwhile for you to get several articles posted on at least 5 different blog networks to give you a nice diverse range of links.

This strategey (if you skip phase III) will cost between $100-500 per site to promote and will result in a decent amount of backlinks. If your site is decent, by this stage it will be attracting natural links to it and you will just need to do the occasional article for a large blog network to keep things ticking along.