Technology Reports

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.

There is a thread on DP that I have been following almost since it was started on March 11th 07.

The whole $48 concept is that if you create an adsense ready-website and do nothing other than get it indexed by the Search engines that the site will on average earn $48 a year. You set up several sites with several long-tail keywords in the same niche. You get it indexed and sit back and wait for the clicks. Once set up you never need to touch the sites again and your only ongoing expenses are domain renewal and hosting. Use .info domains and only pay $1 to register them and then about $9/year to renew them, set up several sites on the same hosting account - so hosting is less than $5/yr.

So, per site, on average you earn $48 for a $15 Outlay (plus the $3 per site once-off for creation - which is totally offset by the $1 domain registraion in the first year.) So, with 1 site you would earn $30/yr profit. It is all about the numbers so, 100 sites should see a return of around $3K year, 1000 sites = $30K year.

The thread is someone offering to create the adsense websites for only a few $ per site when purchased in bulk. I took a look at it and by the time I decided I would go ahead and order 100 sites and have them set up.

As luck would (or would not) have it, I was too late to take up the offer and the smallest package on offer was for 300 sites. Now the initial cost of setting up 300 sites would have been $300 for domain names, $600 for the websites and For the hosting, I would have just dumped them onto one of my existing servers.

I didn’t quite have the money to gamble on setting up 300 sites but I did have the money and inclination to set up a single site on what I knew to be a reasonably high paying niche.

I purchased a script and a domain name and set it up on the 1st of May to dabble. I spent a couple of days setting up the site:

Expenses:

• $30 Script to run the site (and as many other sites As I want to setup)
• $10 for a good .net domain name in the niche I am targetting
• $0 for hosting - I just put it on my server
• $25 for a custom Blog theme and some Free-to publish Articles on the niche
• $10 for promotion - paid for a blog posting package to have a short article posted in several Blogs

Out of my Expenses, the $30 script is licenced so I can use it to create an unlimite number of sites, so the more sites I create the cheaper (per site) it becomes.

I actually did a little more than simply get the site Indexed as I wanted it to happen fast! I did a few link exchanges and paid for some blog posts. I am going to actually add a blog to the site next month, and set it up to publish a new article every 3-4 days. So with the 100+ articles I have, I will have new content on the site for over a year.

At the end of the 1st month I have already made a little from this site - $4.53 to be precise. This works out to be around $55/year. Yes, with the time I have put in it means that I have not made a single penny this year, but it was more about proving the concept to see how it would work. I proved to myself that the concept works just fine, and I am hoping that the addition of the Blog will further improve the traffic and returns in the coming Months.

Month 1 was positive, so next month I’ll create another couple of sites, using similar promotion techniques and see where it leads me. The Idea of course is to eventually produce a few hundred sites that take no time to maintain and give me a nice residual income.

I guess that the whole webmaster concept is about diversfication and creating these sites are only a small part of my overall strategy.

Every webmaster will want to use pictures,photos and other graphics to make their site look better and who could blame them! In almost every webmaster forum you see threads that xxx has sent me a bill for $x,xxx for a photo I have used on my site.

The usual story here is that a website is using a picture or photo that they have no rights to use and the Stock agency is simply sending them a bill for usage of the image. The threads on these forums usually end up with a lot of people who don’t have a clue saying things like “don’t pay” “ignore the notice” and things like that.

Well lets look at the truth of the matter. In every instance where someone gets such a notice they actually ARE using an image that they don’t have the rights to use on their site - and the person getting the bill for usage never denies the usage.

The whole reason people get these bills is that they are either ignorant of the licencing requirments for the image or they are a theif who has stolen someone else’s images. As ignorance is no defence there is no excuse for anyone ever using images for which they don’t have the rights to use.

Now the solution to this problem is fairly easy - but it does mean that a little bit of “due diligence” is required. Firstly, when creating a website and you need images you should find out where and how you can legally obtain them and if you are purchasing an established website that has images/graphics and photos on it you should also ensure that you protect yourself from possible future large bills.

There are several places where you can legally get images/photos from for use on your website and the most obvious one is to go out and take the photo’s yourself. While this is not possible for everyone in every situation there are of course a lot of other places to look.

The safest place to obtain images is from one of the several Stock photo sites. Read their terms of use, purchase the rights you need and get on with it. There are of course 2 type of stock sites - the Traditional and Micro’s. A traditional stock site may charge as much as $500 for usage of a single photo and this is out of the reach of the average webmaster. This is where the micro stock agencies come into play.

At the microstock websites you can purchase royalty free rights to use a photo for less than $5 - In some cases you can purchase the rights for as low as $1 per photo. These Microstock sites have anywhere upwards of 1 Million Photos that you can look thru to find what you need. In most cases you will find several photos that meet your requirements that cost less than your lunch!

When it comes to purchasing a website that has photos on it the easiest way to protect yourself is to ensure you have a statement that grants you rights to the images on the site. If the seller is not willing to give a statement to you then it is time to steer clear of the seller because the “bargain” you thought you were getting might just cost you a small fortune!

Resources:

Download Stock Photos from Shutterstock
Chosse from over 1,000,000 photos from Big Stock Photo
$1 Photos for high resolution Photos from Dreamstime

I wrote a bit about how I managed to monetise a blog a little while ago. I came across another site that has actually put together a bit of a review of paid blogging programs I thought that the review was pretty good and talks about 9 different programs.

With 9 programs to choose from, anyone with an active PR3 Blog should be able to make a tidy sum each month. Even though most people tend to ignore the PR of a website - it seems that most programs put a fair bit of emphasis on it - so if you don’t have at least a PR3, then it is time to get to work and start building links to your blog.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little about Auction Ads - I had only been using it for a few days at the time. I checked, and it has now been 1 month since I put up some Auction Ads on a couple of my sites and I am pretty pleased.

For a Recap - see my initial post on the subject.

Well, after exactly 1 month AA has earnt me around $100. I am displaying Ads across 3 sites and have had 481,000 ad impressions, with 4,693 clicks on them that has made me the money.

I very carefully chose the pages/sites where I implemented the ads and have been fairly impressed with the results. I have had a look over my other revenue streams for these sites and they have not sufferred at all and have remained steady.

A look at my AA stats show that for the first 2 weeks I made next to nothing - but that is in part to how this all works. This is one of the easiest affiliate programs to join and it is very, very easy to set up and get it working on your site. A look at my stats indicates that you need a reasonable amount of traffic for it to be worthwhile.

I have done no tweaking after the initial first few days as to the type of ads that are displayed so there is probably a lot more that I could do in order to better target the Ads to my sites.

If your site has at least 1000 visits/day then Auction Ads is certainly worth checking out and trying for a month or 2.