Seeking Revenue » learning process

80-20 rules applied to online revenue

Ken — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:26:27 +0000

The 80-20 rule as applied to online revenue:

80% of revenue come from 20% of your sites
80% of revenue come from 20% of revenue sources
80% of time were spent on 20% of activities
20% of pages receives 80% of traffic
80% of revenue seeker gave up before making 20% of their investment
80% of online marketers are only making 20% of what they can potentially make
20% of online marketers are making money off 80% of “willing spender”
80% of websites you see daily are trying some way to make money online.

How are any of these to you?

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Tracking and Analyzing your revenue

Ken — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:17:21 +0000

If you are earning income online, do you track your revenue and income? How do you do it?

If you have multiple sites and have use a number of revenue sources, do you know exactly which sites are doing well and what programs are contributing to your revenue?

I was trying to answer those same questions as well and did a Site Revenue Performance spreadsheet.

It is published and shared on Google Spreadsheets (I’m starting to discover the usfulness of online office applications). Just go to the spreadsheet, click on “Edit this page” to edit it and save it to your account. (You need a Google account.)

Let me know if you find it useful and how it can be improved.

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Too Many Programs too Little Time

Ken — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:11:45 +0000

You wanted to start making money online, earn some side revenue online. What do you do?

You did some re-search and found a few programs (often promoted by some self-proclaimed famous marketer). You decided to hold on buying and so signed up for their free information.

Very soon you had signed up for a handful newsletter and you started to receive recommendation almost daily. You sign up for more programs, affiliates, income sources and received more recommendation newsletters.

Now you have an inbox choked full of newsletters you have no time to read.

Sounded familiar?

You are not alone. I had just tagged and archived hundreds of such email and this got me thinking. I doubt I will ever read me, but hey, GMail says archive, don’t delete.

The real challenge of earning revenue online is not that there are no opportunities. It is too many opportunities!

How do you find the right program? What works for me may not work for you.

More importantly, what marketers recommeded to you definitely did not work for them. (Think about it, what make the marketers more money? Using the program or receommending the program to you?)

Often the first criteria I use is this, if someone is describing good result from a program and at the same time recommending the program, I would discount the recommendation.

This is not fool proof because I fell into the same pattern, like for enMarketing.

So I use this next criteria. If there is no sign of how they are using the program, they probably make more money recommending it then using it.

Finally, there is experience and judgement. How can someone tells it is going to rain by smelling the air? Just by doing it often and long enough. There is not subsititute for trying and finding, which leads us back to the original challenge. Too many programs ,too little time.

And this goes round and round.

You may think all these amount to saying nothing. Well you may be right. It is mostly common sense which paradoxically isn’t that common.

You need to try something, learn, try more, eliminate useless programs, try again, learn, find more programs, work on existing programs, learn… and on and on…

You can’t possibily try everything.

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Poor converting sites can hurt you

Ken — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:14:30 +0000

I am taking down Adsense on a few sites as a test after reading how one poorly converting site can “smart price” an entire AdSense account.

This was pretty old news (posted Oct 2005, a year ago) and it is a surprise that I had not ran across it all these while.

How much truth this piece of information still holds? Maybe my test and some research will show some results.

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Making sense of Adsense click through rate

Ken — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:15:31 +0000

I have neglected this blog for a while because I could come up with solid content to fill it. Doing analytics is inherently time consuming, my plan is to post at least 1 to 2 analysis a month. The analysis will be based on what I am doing online and my own blogs.

In this article I want to look at Adsense click through rate (CTR) and how you can use this insight to change your ad layout and improve conversion.

Take a look at this report for August todate. The channels, all belonging to the same site, had been masked (We don’t really need that for this discussion anyway).

Some Basics

Before we move on, let’s take a look at some basic. A good source of information is the AdSense Help Center.

In order to obtain the CTR data, we first have to create Channels for each of the ad position.

You might also want to get familiar with some of the terms: Clickthrough rate, Click, Page Impression.

Making Sense of the data

Here, the clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most important figure to look at.

Due to the ads different position and impression on different pages, absolute figure like click and impression does not give a complete picture.

CTR on the other hand tells us how effective is the position, ad format and style.

To compare, take a look at this data from July. Not all the channel corresponds as I had created more channels in August.

The page impression are almost equivalent. We are not at the end of the month yet, so in fact this month’s traffic has slightly increased.

The CTR though has some good news (and so does the number of clicks).

For one channel the rate has increased substantially from 6.46% to 11.52%. This I attribute a creative format change that I had done.

Not shown here is the page Effective CPM, this has also been increased by filtering Low Paying Ads.

The Next Step

In the next month, I am going to remove the low CTR channels and reposition them. Then I’m going to monitor and result.

I hope this helps you as much this exercise had help me. Please share your thoughts and any comment you have.

This article is written by Ken of 59Ideas and first published on Analytic Insight. You may copy and use this article if you retain this message.

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How good is your Adsense Referral conversion?

Ken — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:05:00 +0000

Last week I finally made my first conversion for Adsense Referral. It was for downloading Picasa so that’s $1.

I have another Picasa referral for $0.10 yesterday.

Over the months that I ran referral, there were a handful of sign up for Adsense, but I guess no one made it past $100 in 180 days.

Overall my conversion for referral is not good at all.

It would be interesting to see and learn from what others are doing to increase referral conversion.

How is your referral conversion?

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The end of AdSense sweatshop?

Ken — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:12:41 +0000

Increasingly publishers are turning away from what they feel is the “Google’s AdSense Sweatshop“.

And it is not that they are not making money. They are making as much as $10,000 a month. A figure many of us revenue seekers wouldn’t even dream of making.

What is happening? I hate to see the bubble burst, since I myself had just jumped on the bandwagon. But is this really the end?

The arguments are centered around 3 major points

Publishers can make more money with the visitors then sending them away.
Publishers are at the mercy of companies like Google.
Publishers has to do lot of work and even resort to trickery. Even then they cannot control factors like search engine ranking.

Join the conversation.

Do you think it is wrong to make money from Adsense?
Are there more money to be made elsewhere?
How do you decide to use Adsense or create products?

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Am I banned by Google search?

Ken — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 03:31:38 +0000

Lately I had been researching about Google search ban (dropped from the index), how to identify and get unbanned.

One of my site, Analytic Insight had not appear in Google’s index. In the beginning, I thought it was just a delay. Then I think something must be wrong.

(UPDATE: After writing this, I checked again, it is now appearing in the index. False alarm but a good learning experience.)

Another of my site, Free Biz Ware already appears in the index and it was launched later.

I actually did not do much SEO for both sites. Google sitemap was submitted for both.

Looking at Google’s official webmaster Help Center did not yield much information

What went wrong?

How to identify a Google Search ban?

There isn’t a fail proof way to be sure. However the following will tell you that a site is indeed not included in the search index.

Search for you domain name example.com returns
Sorry, no information is available for the URL
Search for site:example.com returns
Your search – site:example.com – did not match any documents.
Search for link:example.com returns no result
If you use Google Sitemaps, you will see the following in the Indexing summary
No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index.
If you use Google Toolbar, you will see a gray bar where it usually shows the PageRank

So what are the common reason that a site does not appear in Google’s index? This was what I found out

Server was down when googlebot visits to index the site.
Faulty robots.txt file.
robots.txt file written or set up incorrectly could inadvertently block googlebot from the site site altogether.
Technical issues prevented googlebot from indexing the site. These include
- improper server redirect
- faulty URL structure, site navigation, cross linking
- password protection
Violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Know what you can and cannot do. Be sure that ‘EO experts’ you hire are doing the right thing.
Finally it could can simply be due to hiccup of the Google spider. Sometimes things go wrong.

What to do?

What can you do if you think you are banned?

Remember that Google “usually doesn’t confirm or deny whether a company has been removed from our index“

Matt Cutts has guidelines on how to request a reinclusion.

A lot of information floating around suggest emailing to help@google.com. However Matt suggested that you should go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

In any case, it appears that you have nothing to fear if you do nothing wrong.

References:

Banned By Google? Dealing With A Google Ban
Confirming a penalty, the closest to official word one might get.
How To Determine If Your Site Is Banned In Google

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The biggest lie about Making Money Online

Ken — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 09:32:09 +0000

The biggest lie floating around Making Money Online goes like this

If I can do it so can you.

This is what some “famous marketers” are using to get to you to buy their “ebook”. It is an outright lie.

Why?

Simply because the fact that someone can do it does not mean that you can. This is a logical fallacy.

Liu Xiang can run the 110m hurdle in 12.88s, can you do it even if he coaches you?
Steve Pavlina made over $200/day from his blog. Notice he is not offering to sell you an ebook to show you how. He tells you how for free. Even then, can you do it?

So think about it when you see sites or advertisements with message like this:

“I make $99,999 with Adsense, so can you.“
“I make $88,888 with Affiliates, you can too.“

In the end who is making more money? You or the guy selling you the information?

If they are already making so much with Adsense, why are they spending so much time and trying so hard to sell you the information?

There are enough free resources that give you the same thing. The next time you pull out your credit card to buy one of those, think again. Do not be the next fool.

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More or Less Ads?

Ken — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:17:29 +0000

Have you ever struggle with these questions?

How many ads should you show?
Should you add more ads or remove some?
Should the ads be above or below the fold?

Allow me to use some example that I’m familar with.

I had been visiting LiewCF.com occassionally for some time. What struck me was the amount of ads simply increases each time I visit. Now on a 1024×768 screen, you will not find content above the first fold.

Problogger is a well-known site covering making revenue online. Its first fold is comparative cleaner and uncluttered. I found that over time, Darren has blend the ads with the content very well.

To be fair, I have my fair amount of ads, so this is not to judge or whistle-blow in any sense. From the revenue perspective both the examples are making much more than me.

The question, which only each blogger can answer, is how low would you sink?

What other good (or bad) example of ads plastered websites you have come across?