Seeking Revenue » sharing experience

Are you making revenue online?

Ken — Mon, 04 May 2009 06:22:47 +0000

With the recent economic situation I was wondering how the situation has affected making revenue online.

If you are earning revenue online, do you experience an increase/decrease or other changes? What are you main revenue methods? Adsense, per-per-click (PPC), affiliate marketing, selling product/services, investing?

For myself, I’m glad to have some revenue from from online sources, mainly Adsense. Since starting 4 years ago, I never got independence from online revenue alone. However the little extra was helpful in covering for the running cost. After that there was still some leftover for little indulgences, like buying a MacMini.

As you can see, I’m picking up the pace again with my online revenue seeking. I’m back updating this blog after a long hiatus.

This blog’s main focus will be sharing online revenue information, resoruces and my own personal experiences in seeking revenue.

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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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Sharing Text Link Ads referral revenue – Update

Ken — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:41:28 +0000

Not too long ago I came up with an idea to share my referral revenue from Text Link Ads with anyone that sign up with my affiliate links.

A few took up the offer (thanks! you know who you are). But until now the referral had not appear on my account. I want to post this update so that no one thinks that I’m cheating them.

Support email was sent from their contact page and so far nothing was heard from them for weeks now.

If you know any contacts in TLA that could help clarify, please let me know.

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Keeping track of those Famous Marketers

Ken — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 02:48:55 +0000

Have you always wonder who are those people that claimed to be some famous marketer? What did they do to become famous? Who are those people that they referenced to? Are they a pack of lies or is there some truth in it?

To help solve that I’m starting a project that everyone can contribute – ProNetizen.

Based on the Wikipedia concept, the objective of this project to collect together information about a particular online Marketer, an online Product, an online Service and Websites.

Through these information, it is hoped that newcomers to online marketing will be better equiped to make a better, well informed decision.

Do you have any information to share? Drop by and share your knowledge.

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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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StumbleUpon – source of good traffic

Ken — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:23:00 +0000

Many had pointed to tried and tested method of using Digg and del.icio.us as source of traffic.

In this article I’m introducing another source – StumbleUpon, as a good source of traffic.

For the past few months I notice StumbleUpon appearing as referrer on one of my site. I didn’t take notice because the figure wasn’t significant.

A few days ago though, I submitted Free Biz Ware to StumbleUpon and was duly blown away by the result.

Take a look at these traffic charts.

From an average of 20-40 visitors, I suddenly received close to 2000 visitors within the day.

If you look at the source you can see that most of the traffic originated from StumbleUpon.

I am sure many internet marketers are already aware of this effect and quietly using it. Hopefully as more people become aware of the StumbleUpon effect, the quality of stumble will not be degraded.

Try it but use with responsibility of a good netizen.

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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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Keyword Research Tools

Ken — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 17:24:36 +0000

What are Keywords?

Keywords are the cornerstone of the successful revenue seeker. Having the right keywords can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Whether you are targeting search engine keywords or using keywords in your Adword or Overture campaigns.

There are some great keyword research tools for finding massive keyword lists and gain insights from them. Here are some research tools:

Once you have a list of keywords, you take it a huge step further with variations. Keyword variation generators can help you generate different variation of keywords:

Keyword Toolbox
GoodKeywords

What keyword research tools do you use?

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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?